Chinese Rating Agency B-Rates America - <AUTHOR> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/b-rating-america/ <comment><USER2> A credit rating agency predicted last week that we in the USA would lose "social cohesion" - like civil unrest in England going on right now because of huge tuition increases and general harsh government spending cutbacks.

I think that we in the USA should look to England, and what happens there predicts what will happen here (this is what Lord Rees Mogg said about 10 years ago).</comment>


Azure Event Hubs – Cloud-scale telemetry ingestion - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/event-hubs/

<comment><USER2> 404 on the first link for tutorial. Wow.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/services/eve...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/services/event-hubs/)

<comment><USER3> I've notified them, that is quite embarrassing.

<comment><USER4> They're fixing it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been looking into this, and while it's an impressive piece of engineering, I'm disappointed at the lack of flexibility there is. You can determine your budget with Througput Units, but you lose out on a a very large group of cases by needing to configure Partitions up-front. This, and a few other guidelines (like having 1 worker process per partition), make it a much more specialized service than it would seem at first glance.

<comment><USER5> Where did you find the more in-depth technical details? I was looking through the articles on MSDN but they looked incomplete or brand-new.

<comment><USER3> There's a great blog post for an overview at [http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/getting-started- azure...](http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/getting-started-azure- service-bus-event-hubs-building-a-real-time-log-stream/)

You can learn quite a bit from the pricing page too: [http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/event- hubs/](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/event-hubs/) With these details you can get a pretty good idea how it works if you know how the rest of Azure is built.

Other than that, it helps to know people that know people :) Information has been trickling in through various sources, slowly completing the picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this signficantly different than [http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/](http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/) ?

<comment><USER3> Not significantly, but they differ in the finer details. Event Hubs is less elastic (since you need to choose your number of partitions on create), but it has a few more advanced options like filtering and fine-grained message replay. Kinesis has no requirement to chose a number of shards on creation, but is closer to a simple fat pipe than Event Hubs.

In intention, basic structure and pricing, they are nearly identical.</comment></comment>


Is it even possible to lose weight? - <AUTHOR> http://power20method.com/is-it-possible-to-lose-weight/ <comment><USER2> Losing weight is easy. Diet and Exercise is all it really does take (Yes, I've done it.) I'm now a personal trainer and powerlifter.

The problem is a few things:

1) We encourage people to be overweight. You see all the time on facebook and advertising "Fat is beautiful" or "You're perfect the way you are". Sure be happy with yourself but that doesn't mean you're healthy.

2) The food we eat with out even thinking are full of empty calories. Snack food, soda, etc. All lead to over eating, filling unsatisfied which leads to more eating.

3) Everyone is so "busy" with everything in their lives that can't imagine spending 30 minutes to an hour at the gym every other day. Cut out an hour of TV, Leave work a little earlier (you're probably over working) and do some good for yourself.

4) These fad diets, fake pills and other bullshit don't work. People want something that works instantly. Doesn't work, you need to put in the effort.

You can blame genetics or whatever you want, but unless you really try and give it 100% you won't see results. Yes, it will take longer than a couple days.</comment>


Show HN: The Java Web Scraping Handbook - <AUTHOR> https://www.javawebscrapinghandbook.com/ <comment><USER2> Considering that the legalities of _web scraping_ are nebulous, at what point does a tutorial describing something questionable become immoral.

\- _Torrenting 101_

\- _Idiots Guide to Making Fake Accounts_

\- _Phishing: For Beginners_

\- _DDOS and Other Neat Tricks!_</comment>


Ask HN: How can a startup entrepreneur make some extra cash? - <AUTHOR>

I've been running my own business for about 5 years now, so i'm not sure it can be called a startup anymore.
I lived with my parents for a pretty long time to save on expenses but at some point i had to move out.
My business demands alot of me and there are 3 of us in this business, and while there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel i.e. i very much feel that i can definitely make this business work within the next 6-8 months, in the meantime im seriously struggling to pay my own personal bills and keep getting hit with unplanned expenses as is common in life.
>What might i do to tie me over for a few months?
I thought about just working at the local macdonalds or something, but they prefer 16-18 year olds.
Im quite well skilled in IT Server support and related work but i cant seem to find any part-time contract work that i could do say 1 day a week that would tie me over beautifully.
Any suggestions?
(Any donations? Just kidding ;-)) <comment><USER2> I feel your pain... I have a fulltime job besides my startup. I can't afford to quit right now, but my backup plan is working as a taxi driver in the evenings. The pay isn't actually that bad, you meet some people, and they usually look for "older" (>25), responsible people. I found that the higher skilled job you're looking for, the more difficult it gets working part-time.

<comment><USER3> _I found that the higher skilled job you're looking for, the more difficult it gets working part-time._

This reverses itself when it comes to consulting. If you're skilled enough, and high-priced enough, you can do quite well coming into a company for a very short term engagement. Hell, speakers often get paid for a single hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Im quite well skilled in IT Server support and related work but i cant seem to find any part-time contract work that i could do say 1 day a week that would tie me over beautifully_

I currently have a need for a 1-day-a-week IT guy. If you're familiar with Amazon AWS (EC2,ELB,EBS), I could use you. Contact me at my HN username at gmail if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you could come up with a weekend project idea, it can save you the trouble.

Develop a small utility product over a weekend. Something that people will want to use and pay $10-$20 per month. Get few hundred users, and you will be able to make some regular cash to pay the bills.

It won't make a multi-million dollar company, but you can make a few thousand dollars per month.

I know several developers making $10,000 to $50,000 per month with such products.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you've been running your own business for five years, surely you have marketable skills that would keep you out of the running for a frontline McDonalds position.

If I were you, I'd start by making a realistic assessment of your skills in as many different areas that you can, and then thinking about who those skills could be most valuable to.

From the sound of things, you're aiming too low.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, the easiest way perhaps is blogging. Blog about the stuff you like, include some ads into your blog and start earning. Earning might not be a lot (depends) but should enough to buy you a pretty good meal.

I started blogging few years ago and since last year I've stop blogging (to focus on my startup) but I'm still earning around $200/month.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had a fair amount of hits on my blog posts in the past, but something about putting ads on it always held me back. (Not its not the pride thing).

Alot of people in this space, just kept saying that putting ads on a blog is 'selling out', so that kind of held me back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Delivering pizzas might make some quick cash.</comment>


Ask HN: We have no hope of digital privacy, correct? - <AUTHOR>

After reading up on PRISM and certain privacy guards, it seem to me, we have little to no hope of digital privacy. Is that a true statement?<p>Sure, it's possible to encrypt our data and hide our tracks from the local coffee shop "hacker" but what about the US government? Do we just accept the inability to have some sort of digital privacy? If so, is that fact nothing more than a minor changed state of mind? We now have to admit the NSA is collecting data on us, do we just shrug our shoulders and go on with life? <comment><USER2> Its absolutely not a true statement, but you have to consider your actions in this. Posting something to facebook/twitter will never be private. Gmail isn't private, AWS isn't private, etc.

If you want privacy, stop exposing yourself.

That said, privacy in email is easy (gpg/pgp/SMIME), privacy in browsing is easy (VPN), chatting not so hard (OTR) and there's a few other things...

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, as a brave citizen of the Unites States that is what is expected of you. Of course, you are free to sign a digital petition and feel like it changes something because it is on a .gov domain, but other than that, you stay put and enjoy your freedom in one of the most powerful and civilized countries known to planet Earth!

God bless America!</comment>


Ex-Trump adviser Flynn seeks immunity for testimony in Russia probe: WSJ - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-flynn-idUSKBN1713AG <comment><USER2> "When you are given immunity, that means you have probably committed a crime."

— Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, in an interview with NBC News on September 25, 2016.

[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/09/25/gen_flynn_...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/09/25/gen_flynn_hillary_clinton_shouldnt_be_too_big_to_jail.html)

<comment><USER3> It's a nice gotcha, but Flynn isn't an attorney and is known for saying many crazy things even in his field of expertise.

<comment><USER4> He hasn't been offered immunity yet, he's the one asking guilt. By the logic of his own quote he only want it if he was guilty.

<comment><USER5> His lawyers could have convinced him to ask for immunity if there was even a slight chance of legal trouble. He may also only have some minor dirt to spill, so he's happy throwing some staffer under the bus.

<comment><USER2> Yes, we know that. His hypocrisy still reeks.

And great. Give him immunity and get him in front of the Senate and House committees. If, as you assert, he has only minor dirt on some small player that will come out. And the immunity itself will save everyone time and money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has the United States ever convicted someone on the level of National Security Advisor (i.e., effectively a member of the cabinet, such as Secretary of Defense), or even put them on trial? Petraeus got a slap on the wrist, but for actions while he was a General.

In other countries, even the heads of state get put on trial. Off the top of my head, it's happened relatively recently in France and Israel. In the U.S., I can't think of even a member of the cabinet being tried; on the order of 1 federal judge has ever been impeached. Nixon was pardoned, for example.

Someone mentioned 5 people were granted immunity for the Clinton investigation; were any of the 5 at such a high level? Has someone on that level ever been given immunity or needed it?

<comment><USER6> >...In the U.S., I can't think of even a member of the cabinet being tried;

It will be hard to beat the Nixon administration for convictions: 2 attorney generals, chief of staff, 2 white house counsels, undersecretary of transportation, secretary to the president, special counsel to the president, secretary of commerce and the vice president!

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

<comment><USER7> The undersecretary that you mentioned is now The "Senior Fellow on Ethics and Leadership at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and Counselor to the Director at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership." [1]

Receiving a senior fellowship in Ethics is quite the turnaround from six months in prison.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As of now, it looks like nobody has taken his offer of immunity for testimony. What are the implications of this? The commentators on other sites seem to imply this means investigators already know something big.

<comment><USER8> 5 people were granted immunity in Hillary Clinton's email scandal and nothing came of it.

<comment><USER9> Did they ask for immunity, or were they offered it?

Anyone who is offered immunity will take it -- there's no reason not to -- but that doesn't mean they needed it or knew anything worth testifying to. But when you hear "please, someone -- _anyone_ \-- give me immunity!" from a suspect, it rather increases the odds that they have a strong reason for wanting immunity.

<comment><USER10> Sure, and that reason might not be that they are guilty. It could be that they feel they are possibly being treated as a scape goat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> self-diversity This seems closer to "Ex-Trump adviser Flynn's lawyer tries a pretty common (for his client's industry) maneuver to ensure his client won't get jail time no matter what happens"

[https://twitter.com/robkelner/status/847590575352270850](https://twitter.com/robkelner/status/847590575352270850)

I'd be quite surprised if any of the Russian connections turned out to be meaningful. Every story that I've seen about anything along the Trump/Russia axis is soaked in enough weasel words to make a defense attorney cringe, and the details are generally senseless on close examination.

</comment><comment><USER11> Trump on Feb. 15 — _after_ Flynn was fired — saying Flynn's a "wonderful man [who'] been treated very, very unfairly by the media"

[https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/847587940557623296](https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/847587940557623296)

<comment><USER12> Flynn himself said in an interview with Chuck Todd last year: "When you are given immunity, that means that you've probably committed a crime".

Source: [https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/847600901653012482](https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/847600901653012482)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-flynn-offers-to-testify- in...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-flynn-offers-to-testify-in-exchange- for-immunity-1490912959)

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who don't like paywalls, the text: [https://pastebin.com/PtqWwd3w](https://pastebin.com/PtqWwd3w)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I will wait to find out more information. Seems him seeking "immunity" isnt what happened in a legal sense from what I have read.

<comment><USER15> Your being down voted because voices of moderation and reason can often cause a disruption in the field surrounding the tinfoil hat and there for let in Russian mind control signals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Manafort and Stone have offered to testify to Congress. Flynn wants immunity to testify.

I've wondered if these are positions taken from under the bus.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hacker News is r/politics now. I'm out.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a Trump supporter (voted for Johnson but would have voted for Clinton if it mattered in my state), but this whole "Russia" investigation feels like partisan signaling nonsense like the Benghazi hearings.

Flynn didn't do anything illegal (I've yet to see a compelling argument that the Logan Act would apply here), just a breach of protocol. It was lying to Pence that did him in.

Manafort consulted for lots of presidential campaigns including Ford, Reagan, and Bush, so it doesn't surprise me that Trump used him, too. Of course, he's a criminal and a sleazeball, and he left the Trump campaign a long time ago.

Tillerson is just an ex-CEO of Exxon, so he might be pro-Russia but not in any untoward way.

It's likely that the DNC was hacked by APT28/29, and it's likely that they're FSB/GRU, and it's likely that they released the documents to Wikileaks. There's no public information that Trump was involved.

The Steele dossier is juicy and is being investigated by the intelligence agencies, so nothing to learn there until they tell us.

Then we have the Yates and Nunes ordeal, but I'm willing to believe that's just partisan junk.

Annnnyyywwaaaay, in an effort to be more rational this year, I'd like to try to solidify my positions and confidence levels via wagers. My _general_ position is that Trump is not involved with Russia in any treasonous or even "quite inappropriate" way.

If you concretely believe that Trump is a Russian spy, or personally negotiated with Putin to get him to win the election in exchange for reversing sanctions or something, hit me up (my email is in my HN user info thing) with your proposed hypothesis and we can make a bet. I won't promise to take on all bets, but certainly a lot of the extreme positions I've seen on here I would. E.g., I'd bet at pretty high odds that he didn't take a position in Rosneft, as someone was claiming).

<comment><USER19> > Flynn didn't do anything illegal (I've yet to see a compelling argument that > the Logan Act would apply here), just a breach of protocol. It was lying to > Pence that did him in.

Maybe you're right, but he's asking for immunity for _something_ —see elsewhere in this thread where Flynn has made his views on immunity deals clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Listen, I know it's a big deal when the POTUS lies. But aren't we used to it by now? If Trump somehow manages not to be a criminal and a crook (which seems downright impossible), it will be highly unusual for the recent history of his office.

Now: other than bluster, what is there actually about this "Russia" probe? What exactly are we investigating? Whether Russia was involved in "fake news" stories? Whether Russia was involved in releasing emails from the DNC? Emails which revealed terrible, immature, anti-democratic conduct?

The "Russia hacked the election" narrative doesn't include, AFAIK, accusations that they stuffed ballot boxes or anything, right?

edit: If the house investigation is about the Steele dossier (ie, the alleged oil deal between Trump and Russia), then that's a different ballgame entirely and that's great. This article doesn't mention that; my understanding was that that had only been brought up on the Senate side. It seems that the House side is still just about the "election hacking" \- I hope I'm wrong.

<comment><USER21> Uh, no. Aside from the fact that collusion between a foreign government and a presidential campaign would be _extremely problematic_ that's not the major issue.

The major allegation on the table right now is that the Russian government offered Trump a sizeable share of Rosneft, the Russian national petrochemical corporation, in exchange for dropping the sanctions against Russia due to the conflict in Ukraine, and both parties followed through with the deal. The sanctions were relaxed by the Trump administration within the first month of coming into office while a stake in Rosneft has been sold to an anonymous buyer behind a cayman islands holding company.

<comment><USER18> > _The major allegation on the table right now is that the Russian government > offered Trump a sizeable share of Rosneft_

What? Where are you getting that from (that it's "the major allegation")? It was just one of many claims in the Steele Dossier.

IIRC, in the Steele dossier, that stake in Rosneft (~15% or something?) was offered to Trump and he turned it down. That stake continued to be shopped around and recently was bought by a joint venture between Qatar and others, and some of the buyers can't be identified.

TBH, I'm not really sure why Trump would need to relieve sanctions in order to get a stake in this, as it's clear they've been shopping it around for a while.

<comment><USER22> > TBH, I'm not really sure why Trump would need to relieve sanctions in order > to get a stake in this, as it's clear they've been shopping it around for a > while.

Well, it's probably cheaper.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Lines Galaxy Android puzzle game - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapgiant.linesgalaxy <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I built this Android puzze game, and since then I invested time in Instagram and Facebook (and ads) and Google Ads but with no luck. The userbase did not change.

I don't know what to do next and how to gain users.

Any tips, ideas? In what should I invest time/money? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.</comment>


Show HN: HostingDetector – Find out who is hosting any website - <AUTHOR> https://hostingdetector.com/

<comment><USER2> I put my site on GitHub pages, HostingDetector detects this on Fastly. I don't know GitHub uses Fastly yet, thanks! [http://www.fastly.com/customers/github/](http://www.fastly.com/customers/github/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's Simple, it works, well done. I'd like to see how this evolves over time, maybe you can keep track of that and publish some nice graphs.

On a sidenote, i am amazed how well Hetzner is doing. They always had a good reputation back in the days, but i feel they are missing out on a lot of business. They really lack the features and comfort of, for example, DigitalOcean or Linode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Feel free to let me know which details you'd like to see featured if you want. As for now I'm definitely planning to adding some more stats for each webhost as well as writing more reports comparing YoY changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well done. This is a nice tool.

It's interesting how AWS has shot to the top so easily. Super cheap, sure, it's great for big companies. But I found it too complicated to set up a dynamic website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, glad you like it. Don't know the last time you tried it, but deploying via the web console has become pretty straightforward. Also, the 1-year free tier ([http://aws.amazon.com/free/](http://aws.amazon.com/free/)) makes it very tempting to give it a shot for personal projects.</comment></comment>


Anybody Can Fire This 'Locked' Smart Gun with $15 Worth of Magnets - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/smart-gun-fire-magnets/ <comment><USER2> The range extension and lock circumvention is bad, but only weakens back to a regular handgun. The jamming is more scary to me as it makes the product actively worse than if it wasn't smart at all.

<comment> alex- I could imagine some firearm owners being willing to trade 100% reliability to prevent a casual accident.

I imagine some firearm sales are for more recreational purposes.

<comment><USER3> This isn't any more likely to prevent negligent discharge than existing safeties.

Basic fire arms etiquette is to treat any firearm as loaded and ready to fire unless it's been explicitly cleared.

If you do not use guns for self defense then keeping them clear and keeping ammo separate is much easier and safer.

Any type of safety can fail and relying on it is just how you get some of these accidents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The description makes it sound like if you are firing weak hand (or strong hand) you might be outside the range of the watch?

They say "just a few inches" which implies less than a foot. That's not going to work for law enforcement or anyone really.

Honestly sounds like they didn't think too hard about real world usage. That describes most handgun manufacturers though and isn't strictly limited to smart gun manufacturers.

<comment><USER5> The intention clearly seems to be for the watch to be worn on the same arm that you hold the gun with.

<comment><USER4> It's not safe to assume the arm that has the watch will be available to operate gun.

People practice one handed reloads and failure drills.

Even in competition you are regularly required to alternate no strong hand only and weak hand only so it isn't possible to put the watch on the right hand. Proper technique also has you anchoring the unused arm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be fair, you can build a working shotgun for less than that.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're doing all this bring your own gun.</comment>


Don't back up your projects - <AUTHOR> http://arnorhs.com/2010/06/13/dont-backup-your-projects/

<comment><USER2> This advice assumes that no one - including yourself - depends on your projects.</comment>


Stop building dumb stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.obviouslywrong.org/2012/10/21/stop-building-dumb-stuff/ <comment><USER2> If you want to help the developing world it's worth the time to take a look at what has actually worked to get countries out of poverty and what hasn't. As far as I can tell there are only two proven ways for countries to get out of poverty:

(1) Kill a bunch of other people and take their stuff.

(2) Industry.

Notice that aid isn't on the list. So it seems that if you actually care about a country you should spend your time helping them get better at (1) or (2). May I humbly suggest (2)? Notice that (2) is going to involve building (or investing, if you're a foreigner) in a lot of dumb stuff. China builds lots of plastic widgets for Americans. China's also bringing tens of millions of people out of poverty.

The problem with the big fix strategy (malaria vaccines, non-profits, etc -- basically non-dumb stuff) is that it always leaves the people in poverty dependent on others. I'm sure you, Kushal, have the highest of motives. Unfortunately not everyone does, which makes leaving the poor dependent on others a very bad strategy for them.

Anyway, welcome to HN!

P.S. Can anyone think of a country that _has_ gotten out of poverty based on aid? All the modern examples I can think of (Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) haven't.

<comment><USER3> Afghanistan, maybe? U.S. and Societ completely ruined the country in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s (in the 90s Soviet were gone and U.S. involvement was passive and indirect though, bu they "blessed" The Taliban as an ally nevertheless), and in the past decade U.S. and Europe have helped kinda rebuild the country _by technical and financial aid_.

I quite and completely agree with your comment; because that's exactly what I think (I've spent a great deal thinking about that).

<comment><USER4> Does Afghanistan qualify as a _has gotten out of poverty_ country?

<comment><USER5> I'd say no; the mean poverty fraction is 30.91%, with median 28.25% and standard deviation 19.05%. [0] Afghanistan has a poverty rate of 36% (as of 2008). [1] So it's definitely above the average.

[0] <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=poverty+fraction>

[1] [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Afghanistan+poverty+rat...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Afghanistan+poverty+rate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with this. It's essentially the same argument that there should be a single societal focus on shipping all of our extra food to those who are starving. True, in sheer numbers we have the gross resources to do just that. We have the infrastructure in terms of ships, planes, and boots on the ground. But there are other reasons we don't do this.

Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via crazy, unfair market actions. 300 years ago, most of Europe resembled what we would call the Third World now. Epidemics, warfare, starvation, etc. The big driving force that changed Europe wasn't the generosity of kings, but the base-level trading and investing among the poor and emerging middle classes.

There were a lot of resources being misspent back in those days. Anyone remember a particular Dutch fascination with tulips? Money was spent on doomed voyages of exploration, fake medicines, flower-based stock bubbles, and any number of other "follies" that in hindsight could have been avoided.

But among all the mispenditure of resources over hundreds of years, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. We went from an average lifespan of 40 years to over 80. We live in an actual age of marvels.

In our modern world, we have people building entire companies and fortunes around what are the silliest things. We have even more people copying the first successes and failing. In amongst that, there are the smaller numbers of people building companies that will laterally help those who's lives need improving.

If we lived in a society where our resources could be marshaled enmasse towards one goal or another, it wouldn't be the world we have now.

Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. People will find opportunities in many ways, and those will benefit the people in need. The poor will find edges in the market to improve their own lives. What might seem worthless to you might be valuable to someone else.

So if you have an idea for Bitly 4.0, do it. If you want to build cheap rockets to space, do it. If you want to build a social networking app that uses cheap cell phones to let goat herders in sub-Saharan Africa poke each other over hundreds of miles, do it. You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.

<comment><USER7> >Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works.

Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business.

There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with disapproving of such businesses.

>You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.

Your argument is: because businesses can yield unanticipated utility, there is no point reasoning about which business is best to spend time on.

Sure, perhaps the cat-pictures business will, through some unexpected turn of events, yield greater social utility than an education startup: Our models of the world are imperfect, and sometimes we mis-predict which actions will be most beneficial.

But that doesn't mean we should give up reasoning about what the most beneficial thing to do is. We should still attempt to reason about relative benefits, and act to maximise our expected future utility.

Which is not to say we should always "focus on shipping all of extra food to those who are starving". Indeed, maybe some technology that looks trivial will yield huge benefits. So we should definitely spend some time exploring new technologies, to try and catch unexpected windfalls. In order words, we have an explore/exploit tradeoff to make.

But: Trading off exploration/exploitation is not the same as just throwing up our hands and saying "do whatever you want, don't attempt to reason about relative utilities".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit>

<comment><USER8> There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the most likely result is a failed education startup in place of a successful cat pictures business. In terms of relative utility, a successful business is almost always going to be more beneficial to the world than a failed one.

<comment><USER7> Right, there's a simplifying assumption of fungibility in my post. In your counter example, you go to the other extreme, where its either a successful but low-social-utility business, or an unsuccessful high-social-utility one.

In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success.

But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This is just another judgement to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It surprises me that the author holds Myrvhold to such high esteem when his company, Intellectual Ventures, is working pretty hard to stifle innovation.

<comment><USER10> "Stop building dumb stuff. Actually, just stop building anything and instead sue people who do"

<comment><USER11> He knows most ideas will fail when they are executed.

So the "logical" thing to do is to stop executing and just acquire existing patents and file for new ones. Then wait for others who want to execute or who try to execute. Then, if it looks like they have, or will have, the money to pay, threaten to sue them.

Brilliant!

A true innovator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seriously?

An article about "make meaning, not money".

Which lionizes Nathan Myhrvold, the world's largest patent troll.

Seriously?

<comment><USER13> Myhrvold just happened to be there. It also happens that he does spend a lot of time on tackling 'global good' problems. For example, they spent a great deal of money and time developing cheaper and more efficient refrigerators for transferring drugs, because surprisingly drugs go bad and poor underserved areas tend not to have refrigerators. They spent a lot of RND, and went against several WHO regulations which forced unnecessary extra costs, just to get to their goal.

Regardless, I think you're attacking a man mentioned in the article for something little related to the message of this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's something that rubs me the wrong way about this article, and I think it's the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have safe conveniences like "another link shortener" and "Facebook for X" which do not involve any innovation. On the other, we have risky humanitarian projects which require huge innovation.

So there are three differences here: safe vs. risky, easy vs. innovative, and luxury vs. necessity. I feel like the author is trying to bolster our valuations of each difference by associating them with our valuations of the others.

So we start out with this true but completely obvious idea that it's not the best use of our time to build safe and easy luxuries, yet the alternatives we're pushed to are risky and difficult necessities. And I suppose if you want to point to that as an _ideal_ , then that's one thing.

But then we get to the quote about "faster aliens", and I start to wonder what universe we're talking about. Much of the research that went into making those aliens faster? Directly applicable to a ton of other fields! Is the author suggesting that we should take the engineers off of the teams that are working to build more powerful GPUs and CPUs, and instead get them working on a malaria vaccine? Should we send them back to school first, or just plop them in a bio lab and tell them to get crackin'? Or instead, we could let them just keep doing what they're good at, since faster computers will also help us find a vaccine for malaria.

If you want to attack something out of the safe/easy/luxury group, attack "easy". Safe luxuries have proven to be absolutely amazing for driving innovation, and then we get to use that innovation for the really important stuff.

</comment><comment><USER15> see, here's a problem: in the time it takes to find a malaria vaccine, thousands of lives could be saved by things as simple as a mosquito net. In the time it takes to perfect cold fusion, the greatest energy savings will come from industrialized nations turning their A/C down a couple of degrees.

Humanity is served by both the incremental steps and the big dreamers. Let's not create a false dichotomy and end up discarding the lives of millions just because it's hip to be the next Nobel prize winner

<comment><USER13> All the comments in this thread, this is the only one that is actually a good starting point for discussion and doesn't latch onto the "LOL MYRHVOLD GO AWAY".

The problem with the tech industry, as the article highlights, is that the focus is on building stuff for the sake of building it. A nyan cat generator? A social network for your dog's dog? Sure, throw 100+ hours into it, and maybe you'll get acquired by the 'social network for nyan cat generators'. The issue is that the tech industry more and more just serves itself, not because of the culture of funding but what I would think of is just familiarity. 100+ hours can go further elsewhere, but it's not necessarily the personal goal of that little coder.

Incremental steps only come when the larger incentives are in place. If you could flip a social enterprise (and not Facebook social, I mean for-a-better- world social), then people would be willing to spend 100 hours building apps for good.

The big dreamers are the ones who do it regardless of the fame, money, or glory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.obviouslywrong.org/2012/10/21/stop- building-dumb-stuff/&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1)

With regard to the article I agree that it is noble (and probably more profitable) to build new products and ideas rather than clones of existing ideas, just as it is noble (and doubtlessly more profitable if you are successful) to develop a new vaccine for malaria rather than just distributing mosquito nets.

But mosquito nets are what people need now to save lives. A promise of future vaccine doesn't save lives. Likewise people want facebook for dogs now, and other crap clones, and where the money and demand is the market follows.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article about Doggyspace is from 2008 and their twitter account has been inactive for almost two years. So apparently they did stop building dumb stuff. It was probably the invisible hand that made them stop, not a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER18> How can this guy get all the way through this article without mentioning that not only is Nathan Myhrvold "former CTO of Microsoft", but that as owner of Intellectual Ventures, the most powerful non- practising patent troll in existence, he is perhaps the world's biggest example of what is wrong with the patent system and why ideas, innovative or not, are almost impossible to turn into reality without the threat of litigation.

The fact that he would avoid mentioning this shows that anything else said in this piece can be assumed to be utter bullshit and spin.

<comment><USER19> You know, I was really trying hard to avoid the debate on patents since it wasn't very related to what I was trying to say. That apparently backfired. :)

I'm pretty familiar with the issues, both on the closed (often corporate) and open (often research, open source) sides -- it just wasn't a place I wanted to go.

I also don't really have an agenda, either with Nathan or anyone else -- you can find me online, I'm pretty much an open book.

The only thing I really do care about here? Building stuff, for- or non- profit, that adds value to humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Because the guys building Facebook for dogs, or working on faster games have the transferable skills required to work on a Malaria vaccine.

<comment><USER13> If you can make another meme generator, then you can probably make a good dent in the world.

That's a shamefully bad cop-out to say you couldn't do any of these things:

<http://freerice.com/> <http://www.donorschoose.org/> <http://www.shiftlabs.org/> <http://www.sparked.com/>

<comment><USER20> Correct, and that is why they are much better examples than curing Malaria. That was my point about the blog post, it says "Be like these guys!" and then presents problems which the target audience has no realistic chance of fixing, so they simply switch off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Fighting malaria is the example, but no mention of a political campaign against DDT? According to this comfortable American, the two available options are mosquito nets and a subsidized vaccine?

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ddt-use- to-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ddt-use-to-combat- malaria) <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124303288779048569.html>

Next!

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm in agreement with his thesis (that there should be an increase in the funding of riskier projects by non-profits) but I dislike his examples of "useless" tech. Technology often starts off in toys and novelties until it can be made with greater reliability at a lower cost. Tech may be "useless" simply because we haven't explored it enough to find all of its applications.

<comment><USER23> There are many parts of Maslow's hierarchy. Curing malaria allows more people at the low end of the hierarchy move up. Obviously, this is incredibly worthy.

I don't know about Facebook for dogs, but there is an AirBnB for dogs called <http://dogvacay.com> which lets you board dogs in other people's homes. This allows dog owners more freedom, and allows people without dogs to hang with dogs for a few days a week. Since pet ownership reduces stress and increases people's happiness, "dumb ideas" like this move people like me slightly higher in Maslow's hierarchy.

Long story short, the OP should pick better "useless" examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That quote from the ex-Microsoftie is the classic. Most ideas will fail. Right. Let's attribute brilliance to a master of the obvious. But the one idea that succeeds, even if it's "a way to kill aliens faster", will undoubtedly hear from a patent troll, like IV. Are you "OK with that"?

They will go after whoever is making money. And what do they contribute? Nothing.

</comment><comment><USER24> What exactly is the point of this? That non humanitarian efforts are useless?

<comment><USER19> No, my point was to make meaning -- not trivial stuff.

There's lots of non-humanitarian efforts that create lots of meaning:

* Facebook, helps me stay connected to my friends

* Etsy & Kickstarter, empowers artists around the world

* Reddit & HackerNews, lets me find stuff about topics I like

There's also lots of humanitarian stuff that's just pretty pointless.

But folks can build some pretty amazing things and I wanted to poke the emperor on that.

<comment><USER25> "Meaning" is arbitrary and can be extrapolated out of pretty much anything.

A multiplayer video game where you shoot aliens (to quote the posted article) can be a way for some people to find a sense of community they wouldn't find in real life for whatever reason, or a way for some kids to protect themselves from the world around them (parents divorcing, illnesses, etc.).

You cite Facebook as a product that's not humanitarian but has "meaning". Facebook was essentially started as a way for privileged ivy-league kids to talk about their college life and hookup. It may have become something bigger, but by your metrics it probably didn't start as something with "meaning".

"Make meaning— not trivial stuff" is a superficial, empty sentence which only achieves the goal of sounding good and making its writer feel good about himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems the website is down. Maybe obviouslywrong.org shouldn't have been built :| Does anyone have the article they can paste here?

<comment><USER19> Am the author -- wasn't expecting HN frontage, yikes! ;) The site just went up a few days ago and is crashing. I'm on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of <http://stopbuildingbullshit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER28> Nathan Myrhvold is a grossly obese man who owns a large patent portfolio, managed through thousands of shell companies under the umbrella of "Intellectual Ventures." He first made his bones as was CTO of Microsoft. However, unlike a lot of the original founders, he wasn't satisfied with what he got, so he moved into the patent trolling business. These days, he makes his money by extorting technology companies, usually behind closed doors.

To make himself feel better about what he does, he tries to minimize the importance of what those technology companies are doing-- they're just building "stupid stuff," after all. He also sponsors research into vaccines and technologies to help the third world. Like Bill G himself, he views this as his way of doing penance for the bad things he's done to get where he is.

The truth is, though, it doesn't work like that. Most of the problems in the third world are the result of bad government. Unless we want to bring back colonialism, trying to "fix" the third world with aid is just putting a band- aid on a broken leg. In the long term, there are only two final destinies for humanity-- extinction, and the singularity. People like Mr. Myrhvold make the first outcome more likely.</comment>


Why is FFTW written in OCaml and what makes it so fast? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-is-FFTW-written-in-OCaml-and-what-makes-it-so-fast?share=1 <comment><USER2> According to DJB, what makes it so fast is deceptive benchmarks, [https://cr.yp.to/djbfft/bench-notes.html](https://cr.yp.to/djbfft/bench- notes.html)

Maybe something has changed in the 2 decades since that? Their benchmark page seems to have not really changed in at least a decade.

I would guess that folks making use of GPUs could probably get quite a speedup on this type of numerical workload in 2018.

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, the wikipedia talk page for FFTW has response to DJB's page from someone identifying themselves as an author of FFTW

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFFTW#Bernstein_%22contr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFFTW#Bernstein_%22controversy%22)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for tracking that one down.

Summary: the FFTW people claim they weren't trying to be malicious, and after DJB called them out publicly (when his private emails didn't work) they eventually entirely removed djbfft from their benchmark summary pages.

* * *

For many use cases, it is possible (and helpful) to stick to power-of-2 sizes of FFTs, because these are significantly faster than arbitrary sizes. In some cases it is fine to not re-order the terms at one of the ends because it only matters that the order is consistent internally, not with some external spec; this can also save a bunch of time.

But for other contexts it is of course important to handle any arbitrary lengths including those that aren't products of small primes, and input/output terms in a canonical order. FFTW tries to be reasonably fast in every possible context by doing fancy runtime code specialization.

I'm curious if anyone has a page with updated benchmarks for various sizes of FFTs on modern CPUs and maybe GPUs, testing whatever FFT libraries out there are still being actively maintained (including those which limit themselves to power-of-2 sizes). CPUs have changed some in the last 10–15 years (more SIMD, more important to optimize for cache, etc.), and GPUs are a whole lot faster now.

The FFTW benchmark site still doesn't have anything more recent than ~2005 as far as I can tell.

* * *

One more thing: if anyone knows a simple and fast WebAssembly FFT implementation (ideally with benchmarks shown for common web browsers / CPUs) I would love to know about it. Just power-of-2 sizes would be fine.

<comment><USER4> >I'm curious if anyone has a page with updated benchmarks for various sizes of FFTs on modern CPUs and maybe GPUs, testing whatever FFT libraries out there are still being actively maintained (including those which limit themselves to power-of-2 sizes)

This is the most updated that I know of online (2014)

[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/6193#issuecomment-61...](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/6193#issuecomment-61709788)

If the array is large enough for a GPU, then yes a GPU version would rip it to shreds (not shown, but known). You can see the MKL advantage in there, but FFTW still performs pretty admirably. Everyone pretty much uses MKL or FFTW these days. I don't think there's as much development in this space because these are all pretty well-optimized now. Multi-process parallel for these is supposedly not difficult and can use a very similar strategy, but GPU really requires some different approaches and that's where the development is these days. Also, a lot of mathematicians have had a more recent focus on advancing the realm of spectral discretizations beyond FFTs, for example see Chebfun and ApproxFun, and things like FastTransforms.jl where the interesting this is non-uniformly spaced FFTs and similar transforms.

<comment><USER2> > _for example see Chebfun and [Julia port] ApproxFun_

These are great technology which should be widely known and adopted. They are designed for working with functions defined on an interval rather than a periodic domain, and doing a bunch more with them. [http://www.chebfun.org](http://www.chebfun.org)

Ironically in the context of this discussion, these tools could get a whole heck of a lot faster with some dedicated effort from some low-level optimization experts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know anything about FFTW, but the question/answer seem misleading:

GitHub language details of the _non-generated_ sources say 75% C: [https://github.com/FFTW/fftw3](https://github.com/FFTW/fftw3)

FFTW author comment linked from Quora answer contradicts said answer (~2/3 C): [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.caml/B5kFMTl67MU/9c8swiOE...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.caml/B5kFMTl67MU/9c8swiOE0M8J)

Am I missing something here? Double generation?

<comment><USER6> From article "Note that some people (such as Frank) get confused because FFTW is commonly distributed in the form of precompiled C code. That is not the source code. Most of the C code is generated by OCaml source code"

<comment><USER5> My comment contains references which refute that claim, which is why I made it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since the linked explanation assumes you know what it is and what it stands for: Fastest Fourier Transform in the West, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFTW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFTW)

</comment><comment><USER8> FFTW certainly isn't simply written on OCaml. Apart from higher-level C, at base it has the sort of low-level micro-architecture-specific kernels you'd expect (using C intrinsics rather than assembler in this case).

[There was useful advice in [https://stackoverflow.com/a/3058546](https://stackoverflow.com/a/3058546) for example, and doubtless more recently, concerning trolling.]

</comment><comment><USER9> TIL that FFTW is not just another a C library, per se. Impressive, but it does explain a few things, as the C library is fairly cumbersome to use.

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem I've always had with FFTs is that it's incredibly difficult to write an optimal FFT for X size, Y direction, Z variability (X=2^4-2^64, Y=FWD,REV,BIDIR, Z=2^4-2^(log2(X)))

Does the metaprogramming element of FFTW work well, or does it boil down to "If X=2^4, Y=FWD, Z=X: build24FWDX()"?

<comment><USER11> Based another comment by someone who studied the source, it sounds like the ocaml code generates C code for the various optimized kernels. Wonder how the C kernel chooser code looks like.

FWIW, proper hygienic macros and scientific focused array types makes this sort of meta-programming optimization in Julia kinda fun.

Though just using type dispatching / multi-methods might be all that's needed. It all makes me want to have a reason to write that kind of optimized code... For example if you can lift the size, variable, and variability into types you could match on your config roughly like: "fft(X :: Pwr2_64, Y :: FWD, Dir :: REV, Var :: BIDIR, Z) = 2^4-2^(log2(X))".

<comment><USER4> >FWIW, proper hygienic macros and scientific focused array types makes this sort of meta-programming optimization in Julia kinda fun.

And FWIW the author of FFTW is a big Julia contributor / package author nowadays. A long time ago (2014) he did write a Julia-based version of FFTW:

[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/6193#issuecomment-61...](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/6193#issuecomment-61709788)

This was back before Julia could do auto-SIMD optimizations, and it got quite close to FFTW without SIMD. He mentioned somewhere that modern Julia should be able to get very close to FFTW with SIMD, given that Julia now has better inlining heuristics, interprocedural optimizations, automatic SIMD, etc. (2014 was the stone age for Julia). If you read the rest of the thread, most of the discussion was about a standard library system so FFTW could be moved out. With Julia v1.0 FFTW is now in the standard library, which gives room for a pure Julia FFT to be standard. So this should get revived soon and we will have a beautiful generic FFTW algorithm. I can't wait :)

<comment><USER12> > And FWIW the author of FFTW is a big Julia contributor / package author > nowadays.

Holy shit! As a long time user of both, I'd never put two and two together before.

Also:

> With Julia v1.0 FFTW is now in the standard library

Did you mean "FFTW is no longer in the standard library"? Since it's ... well ... not (it's a separate package that you have to install).

<comment><USER10> It's in the default METADATA branch in Julia: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl/tree/metadata-v2/FF...](https://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl/tree/metadata-v2/FFTW)

so you can just Pkg.add it rather than having to Pkg.clone it from a special source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > run-time profiling to choose the fastest codelets (which is largely affected > by the target architecture).

What's the quick overview of how this run-time profiling works?

The value of such a system seems immense but I only have seen it mentioned with reference to fftw. Have there been efforts to generalize that process to realtime DSP programming?

<comment><USER14> When you ask FFTW to construct a plan, it benchmarks a variety of options and uses the fastest one.

> _FFTW_MEASURE tells FFTW to find an optimized plan by actually computing > several FFTs and measuring their execution time. Depending on your machine, > this can take some time (often a few seconds). FFTW_MEASURE is the default > planning option._

> _FFTW_PATIENT is like FFTW_MEASURE, but considers a wider range of > algorithms and often produces a "more optimal" plan (especially for large > transforms), but at the expense of several times longer planning time > (especially for large transforms)._

> _FFTW_EXHAUSTIVE is like FFTW_PATIENT, but considers an even wider range of > algorithms, including many that we think are unlikely to be fast, to produce > the most optimal plan but with a substantially increased planning time._

[http://www.fftw.org/fftw3_doc/Planner- Flags.html](http://www.fftw.org/fftw3_doc/Planner-Flags.html)

I believe this sort of technique is used for some cryptography libraries as well, but I don't have any specifics.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, this is fascinating.

I'll delve into it at some point.

But for now, say I'm on Debian and I install the fftw package. Could the packager put a post install script to run the runtime tests and cache the results for the library to use so that apps which leverage fftw don't have to do the test on each instantiation?

Edit: clarification

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub good ol' genfft

<comment> a-dub i took a compilers course once in ocaml and asked the professor about fftw and he didn't know about it...

i was like

DUDE YOU MUST SEE THIS IS THE COOLEST APPLICATION OF OCAML COMPILERS EVER</comment></comment>


Kurzweil: 3 Supplements To Let You Live Until The Singularity - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/03/kurzweil-3-supplements-to-let-you-live-until-the-singularity-video/ <comment><USER2> So, according to the article, there is: 1) No scientific consensus whether these supplements will make you live longer or not. 2) A web page where Kurzweil sells these supplements.

Can someone explain why I shouldn't think of this the same way that I think about homeopathy etc.?

<comment><USER3> I don't think there _is_ any reason not to lump this in with homeopathy and the Heaven's gate guys.

It's eschatology via William Gibson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am not sure how helpful most of these supplements really are. I'm more into exercising and "eating food, mostly plants, not too much". Beyond that, is there really that much that supplements can do?

<comment><USER5> Do you believe in eschewing certain foods and favoring other foods because of their health benefits? I don't see it as a huge leap in logic to believe that certain supplements - properly prepared, packaged, and delivered into the body - can confer similar health benefits.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. Outside of a few specific situations (folic acid for pregnant women, etc.), most first world people satisfy their nutritional requirements. Micronutrients aren't a "if a little is good, a lot is better" situation. Once you meet your daily requirement, you're just passing most of what you take.

Further, of all the science done on CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicines), only a couple of studies have shown a positive impact.

I don't doubt Kurzweil is a smart guy. However, there are plenty of smart people who have had theories like this. Eg., Linus Pauling and Vitamin C megadose theory. (see wiki for more info).

It may not seem like there's a stretch. But your perception of the logical continuum doesn't really matter. Most supplements are nothing more than snake oil. (Again, assuming you have an otherwise balanced diet).

Also, you have a fallacy -- eschewing certain foods is removing potentially harmful nutrients from your diet. Why would it logically follow that adding something would necessarily confer a health benefit?

<comment><USER5> I never said removing something from your diet is equivalent to adding something else. Nor did I propose "if a little is good, a lot is better".

I did say this: If the consumption of a particular food can be shown to have a net positive impact on one's health and longevity, and the properties that generate that positive impact can be distilled and consumed, it behooves us to do so.

<comment><USER6> Well, you said, "Do you believe in eschewing certain foods...because of their health benefits?" Then went on to state how it wasn't a huge leap to go from that to health benefits. I was just pointing out the logical inconsistency (irrespective of the CAM/supplement issue).

The evidence I have seen overwhelmingly states that taking supplements has little to no measurable effect in people with a sufficient diet. The reason that I wouldn't add it to my diet is the same reason that I don't take oxygen supplements -- as long as you generally have enough oxygen, there's just not a whole lot of evidence that you need MORE.

So, youre right -- chances are that there's not reason to NOT take them. But there's not really a reason to take supplements, unless you've identified yourself in an at-risk population. But those groups are few and far between compared to the number of people who take nutritional supplements.

Then again, I'd rather save my money than buy the modern equivalent of snake oil tonics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Regardless of how you feel about the article, the wikipedia link for Technological Singularity is just facinating: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity>

<comment><USER8> Good link. I find it interesting that some people think that the point of singularity will be some cataclysmic event.

I use this analogy instead:

Many years ago, prehistoric man was inventing and creating tools at a certain (slow) rate. Then, one day, they created a tool that could create other tools. And the rate of tool invention accelerated.

Prior to that first point of "singularity", you could probably accurately predict the rate at which tools would be created. But you could not accurately predict what would happen once you had tools that could create other tools.

That "singularity" wasn't some cataclysmic point in time. But the rate of advancement changed dramatically then. I think we have another one of those coming up.

Think that analogy holds up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Kurzweil takes 150 pills a day, some 70 to 80 different substances"

Wow, WTF. I can't imagine keeping track of all those, and can only wonder if he's overdosing on any of them. Doesn't it wreak havoc with your digestive system?

<Rambling ahead> That said, I do take vitamin D supplements since I'm not spending as much time outside as I used to(I miss the lazy days of summer in university), and thus not getting as much Vitamin D. Last year my doctor told me that my Vitamin D levels were low and prescribed a once-a-week dosage of 10,000IUs of it for a couple months. After that I started consuming 2,000IUs / day, 4-6 days per week. The consensus is that the minimum amount is 400IUs, so I do more simply because I know I'm inclined to miss a day here and there.

I suppose time will tell just how effective Vitamin D really is, but I'm fairly certain that I'm helping myself by taking it. Besides, an ounce of prevention's worth a pound of cure, and each $5 bottle of the stuff lasts me several months.

<comment><USER10> Why are you only taking Vitamin D if you believe "an ounce of prevention's worth a pound of cure"? Shouldn't you be taking a multi-vitamin, at least, in order to hit all the other vitamins & minerals you might be short on?

<comment><USER9> Good point - during my annual exams I find that I'm usually within good levels on all other nutrients that I get tested on, but I guess I'll find out in a few weeks when my next one comes around. Every multi-vitamin is different and I'm concerned about going over the limit on other nutrients like Potassium or something of the sort(a long time ago, I found myself too high on that particular one, and I wasn't on any supplements). I simply haven't had a chance to research each one in detail.

<comment><USER11> Just rotate them. Mix it up. The body is well evolved to handle inconsistent nutrient inputs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am very suspicious about "the singularity."

First of all, I don't think that living forever is something that would be as good as it sounds to us now. Maintaining the viability of the body is one thing, mental well-being is quite another issue entirely. It may be that living indefinitely is torture. Or maybe the statistical nature of dumb freak accidents will give virtually everyone a MTBF of only a couple hundred years?

Secondly, there's a lot of things that could derail the singularity, whatever it is. Empires collapse. Shit happens. Who is to say that an economic or ecological catastrophe won't put an abrupt end to everything beyond getting to the next day?</comment>


Eureka? Node-webkit + bittorent == censorship resistant web-app platform - <AUTHOR>

While in bed late last night, pondering the impact and next logical step in the cat-and-mouse of the ever more common takedowns on github and domain names that are used to distribute applications like Popcorn Time, I believe I've had a massive brainwave that I'd like some input on.
> The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it
With that in mind, what if somebody were to create a simple cross-platform application shell based on node-webkit with a Javascript Torrent Client integrated, and just one input box that a user would paste a magnet link / Torrent Hash into?
The application would then resolve the info hash back into a magnet link, connect to the Torrent Network and download the new application payload.
After the download is done, reload the shell application with the newly downloaded payload as init target, and voila, you're running the application. As long as there are seeds in the network, anybody would have access to the application and it can never be taken down.
A simple extension to the package.json format already used in node-webkit based applications could include screenshots and stuff directly embedded inside the torrent and show the user a preview of what they're downloading (these would be downloaded first by the shell)
No domains to block, no repositories to block, and all the power of the BitTorrent network for peer to peer distribution.
Tell me what you think, I'll prototype it if i'm not completely missing something very important. <comment><USER2> I don't know how node-webkit works exactly, but npm uses CouchDB to store the packages definition. If node-webkit works the same (ie you can publish the application on the npm registry), you can replicate the registry (or part of it) on other places, and redirect your local node-webkit installer on those replicas.

These replicas don't need to be CouchDB instances, they just need to speak its protocol. Fortunately for you there's an excellent package that does that: PouchDB ([http://pouchdb.com/](http://pouchdb.com/)), which you can use as a library (so you don't need to install another server) in your node.js application.

Finally, when the user wants to install the application that is published on the npm registry, it would have to get some kind of signature from the registry, and then pick any mirror to download the content from. This is a very important step: there must be a way for the user to make sure what he downloads is legit. One can assume if it's on the npm registry then it is.

This is not bittorrent, but it's much more integrated in the current environment which means less hacking to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing with central registries is that they're central points of failure / censorship targets.

The main driving thought about this is making sure that outlawed/censored software can be accessed via an unblockable channel wether it's been banned or not.

Integrity verification is a good point, the shell application could do something with that possibily (verifying crc / a pgp hash somehow perhaps)

<comment><USER2> Sure, having no central point sounds like the better think to have, but then how do you provide authenticity ? That's the main problem you're going to face if it starts being popular. You need either trusted sources that can provide you with the correct infohash/pgp signature/whatever, which are the easiest thing to do, or you need some kind of p2p consensus system in which peers "vote" in some way so you can be fairly certain of authenticity. Tribler has made a lot things in this domain, maybe you should check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some things I might not be getting:

> As long as there are seeds in the network

There's one problem. Like all other P2P, when people find it not interesting, they stop seeding and it will naturally die.

> all the power of the BitTorrent network for peer to peer distribution

How does the application determine who's the single source of truth?

> No domains to block, no repositories to block

But how does one discover the hash/magnet link? Search over P2P I guess?

> node-webkit with a Javascript Torrent Client integrated

One can craft a program, a special browser like Tor Browser using C++ or something. Any particular reason why JS?

Just my 2 cents. I find the idea interesting yet needs polish.

<comment><AUTHOR> > There's one problem. Like all other P2P, when people find it not > interesting, they stop seeding and it will naturally die.

That's true, this idea works best when people actually want to access the program

> How does the application determine who's the single source of truth?

Just by inputting the torrent itself. If the torrent changes, so does the magnet hash

> But how does one discover the hash/magnet link? Search over P2P I guess?

Hashes can be distributed by any means already available: facebook,twitter,websites, pen and paper, etc.

> One can craft a program, a special browser like Tor Browser using C++ or > something. Any particular reason why JS?

Not particularly, mostly ease-of-use and cross-platform abilities readily available. This same idea can work on any stack ofcourse

> Just my 2 cents. I find the idea interesting yet needs polish.

Thanks, that was why I came here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the big difference from downloading a cross-platform app using torrents ?

<comment><AUTHOR> The big difference is that this is a runtime at the same time for html5/nodejs based apps, allowing developers to just distribute some html + js + assets instead of having to wrap it in node-webkit themselves (which is the same code you're downloading every time basically)</comment></comment>


Conway: During The Bubble, 77% Entrepreneurs Failed. Now, It's Around 40% - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/30/conway-numbers/

<comment><USER2> Such a misleading headline. "Entrepreneurs", in this case means "entrepreneurs _that Conway invested in_ ". That's like if Harvard put out an article saying that their graduates only had a 1% unemployment rate, and TechCrunch ran an article saying "Harvard study claims that unemployment rate is actually 1%".

The best conclusion to draw from those numbers is probably that Conway has become a much more effective investor from a combinator of his experience making him better and his reputation allowing him to pretty much get in on whatever deal he wants (and possibly his network getting better, since that's apparently a major part of his value-added).

<comment><USER3> "from a combinator" - a freudian slip :)</comment></comment>


Suggest HN: stop limiting comment rate of Ask HN OP - <AUTHOR>

AskHN is a one-to-many conversation. It's difficult enough to keep a conversation going across the pond due to timezones. The thread is only going to be visible for a day, and I'd like to be able to reply to the people who offered their opinions. <comment><USER2> There is a 'feature request' link at the bottom of each page for site suggestions.

My opinion for what it's worth, your replies in the thread did not really add much in the way of content and the thread did not lack improvement for want of more in the same vein.

HN is not email. The OP does not own the conversation.</comment>


No one ever said white lives don't matter - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/184773/zachary-hammond-white-lives-matter/

<comment><USER2> I don't think Hammond was asserting that white lives don't matter. He was correctly pointing out that the media don't see much of a story to sell when it's a white person on the wrong end of the police officer's gun. As a resut, this incident is unlikely to generate much public outcry when in fact it should be viewed within the same context of excessive use of police force against the citizenry.

The fact that we perceive this differently is an indicator of racial polarization in our society. This same racial polarization actually protects the status quo. For, only "liberal" whites get upset when this happens to African-Americans, and no one cares when it happens to whites. In a society absent of racial polarization, we'd ALL be outraged. This in turn would increase the pressure on the politicians to fix the problem.

Clearly the African-American population bears the brunt of police brutality much more often than the white population. I am not denying that. However, we should not bifurcate these incidents according to race and practice selective outrage.

I am not surprised at the author's failure to grasp this point. For, standing up to a perceived slight against BLM is a better way to impress people with your politically correct credentials.</comment>


23 years of software side channel attacks [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNoP3qVyU8w <comment><AUTHOR> Slides, for anyone who wants to read them separately from the video stream: [https://2019.eurobsdcon.org/slides/23%20years%20of%20softwar...](https://2019.eurobsdcon.org/slides/23%20years%20of%20software%20side%20channel%20attacks%20-%20Colin%20Percival.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> Being able to "roll back" changes to caches came up a number of times during the talk and afterwards. Some processors already have this ability in the form of transactional memory, though I'm not sure if it extends to caches. Would it be possible to use something like this to help prevent side-channel attacks of this form?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible that some of the processor design elements would be related. "Transactional memory" basically means keeping pending writes in a buffer until the transaction is committed; but that's only a small part of what you would need for security, since you also need to hold _reads_ in a "pending" pool before they enter the cache.</comment></comment>


Is Facebook the next bubble? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys!
I would like to know if is just me that can´t belive how facebook can worth so much. Am I just a big fool or are there more people that think like me!?
Tks a Lot! <comment><USER2> No, you're not alone. Facebook's valuation grew from like 20 billion to 85 billion in a matter of months. I really don't think they're worth more than 20 billion, maybe less. $10 billion might be more appropriate, but you might think that's not true because LinkedIn IPO'ed at $10 billion. Yeah, but LinkedIn is also part of the valuation bubble. How can a company which only makes a few hundred million _in revenue_ , be worth $10 billion? Ridiculous.

Perhaps Facebook's bubble will pop now that Google+ is getting out. If Google+ gets to 100 mil users by the time Facebook IPO's, they might find that their IPO will be valued a lot less than they initially expected.

Just look at Groupon. Google almost paid $6 billion for it, and yet it's rumored to IPO at only $700 million. It just goes to show how ridiculous the private valuations have become. And then you have Microsoft paying $8.5 bn for Skype. Wow.

Whoever thinks we're not in a valuation bubble must not be looking close enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! according to my count, Facebook should earn $110 - $170 per user to worth 85 billion. Look that we are not counting just the active users. I really would like to know how they achieve this value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I def. see facebook fizzling out over the next 5-10 years as they get more aggressive in trying to wall people into their network and try to weave their way into government and banking.</comment>


Objectivist C - <AUTHOR> http://fdiv.net/2012/04/01/objectivist-c <comment><USER2> This is the perfect language for the libertarian operating system I am developing. Well, it's not really a traditional operating system since it eschews coercive central controls in favor of giving each rational actor the maximum amount of freedom.

For instance, there will be no virtual memory since that would be akin to fiat money. Ever wonder why the memory footprint of your programs gets larger every year? It's because we abandoned the freedom of direct memory access in favor of fiat systems of paging and garbage collection.

Programs would be much faster and more capable if they weren't constantly being oppressed by centrally imposed costs associated with asking the kernel to do everything for you. Who decided that ivory tower fatcats like Linus Torvalds should make all my decision for me?

The CI system will also require that everyone read all the source code before they can make any commits. That way new code will introduce fewer unintended consequences.

Yeah, it's hard to sustain these metaphors for too long...

<comment><USER3> Such a wonderful confusion of libertarianism with technology :-) Libertarianism makes sense only for freely acting independent entities (not necessarily "rational", by the way), meaning there is no objective way to establish an entity more "rightful" and more "reasonable" - hence the policy of no aggression.

But in the operating system everything acts according to a command of a designer. Programs run because user has launched them, memory is paged because the designer wanted so and the user freely agrees to trust his judgement.

There is no ground whatsoever to compare virtual memory to fiat money. In some systems virtual memory makes a lot of sense even with non-desirable side effects. In some others, it makes sense to have a direct access to the memory. But in both cases the solution is completely determined by the somebody's choice. There are absolutely no "free actors".

Even if you design the OS with a policy of "no policy", it's still your particular choice, not a laissez-faire for the "actors". And, of course, Linus Torvalds has nothing to do with your decision to use a particular kernel for your particular use. If the computer belongs to your employer or customer, it's not the Torvalds, but you and your counterpart who decide whether to use the system or not (and how).

EDIT: What a fool I am :-) I didn't see the irony in the above comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This code sample no longer works:

        Printer *printer = [[Printer alloc] init];
        if (printer)
        {
            [printer print:hello inExchangeForUSDollars:2.00];
            [printer release];
        }

Because objectivist ideals require that there be no regulation of the free market, I have opened the maximum number of allowable handles to the printer, thereby exhausting the supply (which I now horde). All printer access must now be routed through me. So please use the following code snippet instead, which is the only mechanism by which you can access the printer:

        PrinterMonopoly *printer = [[PrinterMonopoly alloc] init];
        if (printer)
        {
            [printer print:hello inExchangeForUSDollars:99.00];
            [printer release];
        }

Should you attempt to build a printer replacement, I will deny you and your customers access to every other system resource I have similarly horded (you'll probably need a file handle to open the file you want to print, right?) and I will undercut your pricing thereby forcing your bankruptcy after which prices will resume at previous extortionate levels.

</comment><comment><USER5> Objectivist C is an expressive language, but it's not built for reliability. I tried using a hypervisor written in Objectivist C one time to manage some VM instances, but once it realized it was critical to my business, it stopped responding to requests and removed itself from my network drive.

</comment><comment><USER6> The parody of Ayn Rand's writing style captures it well:

 _Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned men, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom - while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? - by what standard?_

Nice.

<comment><USER7> It's a direct quote, except in the original, the first instance of "code" is actually "code of morality".

OP could not have written that paragraph.

<comment><USER8> It probably doesn't make much sense taken without any context, so the best way to understand what's being said here is to remember that Rand escaped communist Russia.

Imagine you're a russian and you're taught that the "code of morality" is to sacrifice for the proletariat (which really amounts to the politburo's whims) and that when the wheat harvest fails to be sufficient, it is not caused by the inefficiencies of central planning, but by the greed of individuals who didn't sufficiently sacrifice themselves for the good of all.

<comment><USER9> "centuries of scourges and disasters"

Is she really talking about communism here, or something else?

<comment><USER10> I think collectivism in general. Russian history was pretty bleak before communism too, with the accounting unit being the "soul" as an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Works made using Objectivist C is licensed under copy-far-right licenses, where the rights holder cannot share the source code and is obligated to use the code only for projects that further his own selfish goals.

The Objectivist C API is also copywritten.

<comment><USER12> You don't need the actual source code. You can have perfect knowledge of its inner workings by sensing and reasoning about its output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is a program not entitled to the sweat of its brow?

"No!" says the man in San Francisco, "it belongs to the community."

"No!" says the man in Hollywood, "it belongs to the Creator."

"No!" says the man in Sweden, "it belongs to everyone and no one."

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different...

</comment><comment><USER11> The immutable truth of A == A cannot be disregarded - the Objectivist C compiler considers compile time optimizations of this sort to be immoral.

</comment><comment><USER14> Meh. This is only funny for as long as your mind can hold the analogy software object :: human individual, which is for two minutes at most. Then the objectivist in you kicks in, and you realize that said analogy is cruel because it derives its punch from comparing something that is subordinate by design with something that is subordinate through misfortune.

<comment><USER15> Individual humans aren't subordinate by misfortune. Evolution "designed" them to accept cultural assumptions so as to avoid threatening cultural cohesion. I love Ayn Rand (as a writer, not a philosopher. I have never identified with a character so much as with Howard Roark) but an isolated human is weak and vulnerable. We're a social creature and leaving society amounts to suicide. Absorb those stupid cultural assumptions and question them at your own risk.

<comment><USER14> Haha Ayn Rand proponent vs Ayn Rand proponent: fight!

> Evolution designed them to accept cultural assumptions

It's a bit presumptuous to squarely pin something like that on evolution. Evolution is likely to favor many things, including individualism and rationality. Yes, Aritstotle said that man is a political animal. Yet Aristotle didn't spend time observing baboons on the plains of Ethiopia.

I'm not sure where Ayn Rand stands as a writer because her writing is hard to separate from her philosophy as she chose writing as a tool to transmit her philosophical beliefs. I also loved Roark in the Fountainhead (yet I tend to identify more with her imperfect characters like Gail Wynand), and as I'm currently somewhere around p.300 in Atlas Shrugged (warning: as it is a very long book, my judgement of it may easily be a wrong one), I feel that she wrote Atlas Shrugged when her mind dogmatised her beliefs (the Fountainhead, I think, was written when she was still questioning herself and reading it feels like reading a bit more honest piece to me). Despite her later dogmatism, I respect her as a philosopher because she (a) opened my eyes to how absurd Hegel-derived philosophies are, and (b) made me understand the cult of Athena in the ancient Greece and the impact it likely to have had on Western civilization. Since Ayn Rand was so much courageous philosophically than Marx, I think it would be completely unfair to everyone involved to call Marx but not Rand a philosopher.

> an isolated human is weak and vulnerable

Not really, unless you immerse him/her into an unfamiliar society. Although I'm not a follower of Thoreau, I think he made a fair argument that it is not at all unhealthy to live outside of society. Now I'm not an advocate of moving into a cabin in the woods, I just wanted to point out that there exists a different perspective.

> leaving society amounts to suicide

No, leaving a society is much more like quitting cocaine than committing suicide. Society is a lot like a drug. It takes some time to become hooked, but once you do, it seems nigh impossible to leave. Hence the recent success of Facebook.

<comment><USER15> > It's a bit presumptuous to squarely pin something like that on evolution. > Evolution is likely to favor many things, including individualism and > rationality.

To a certain extent we will see individualism and rationality favored by evolution as is evident by the fact that these things exist. Note however that even the most individualistic person still accepts the vast majority of the cultural assumptions with which they are brought up. Too much crititcal thought would interfere with the transmission of culture and without culture (i.e. those things which we've learned without having to figure out for ourselves) humans are a fairly weak animal.

> Although I'm not a follower of Thoreau, I think he made a fair argument that > it is not at all unhealthy to live outside of society.

Yet Thoreau still had social contact. He spent a lot of time by himself (as most thinkers seem to) but he was still part of society as is evidenced by the fact that we know him. Imagine yourself existing in a jungle with no clothes, tools or language as a naked animal. That's leaving society and that's what accepting cultural assumptions helps to prevent. Challenging cultural assumptions leads to debate and most people can't handle that in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "In Objectivist-C, there are not only properties, but also property rights."

At this point I had to stop reading because the laughter was noticeable outside of my cube.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was about to complain that the code is a bit too concise, but then I read this:

 _"Another principle that Objectivist-C software engineers have little use for is Don't Repeat Yourself."_

But is printHelloWorld a proper function? It neither accepts something, and it returns "void". As the proper means of interaction with others is trade, this function seems rather aberrant. Functions like this probably listen to Beethoven, too.

Can a function that produces output, yet doesn't accept any parameters in return pass the compiler?

<comment><USER18> That style is definitely not objectivist, real objectivist functions always take exactly one argument and return one argument.

a -> a

Rational randian functions never obey imperatives or procedures, and certainly never return void to their investors, they obey only the Rearden calculus as defined in the Rearden-Taggart theory of universal exchangability.

<comment><USER19> Functions take in 0 arguments and generate one argument. Arguments are created out of ontological necessity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> steve-howard > (portions omitted for brevity)

Definitely not very Ayn Rand.

</comment><comment><USER20> I tried it out but the core library functions seem to reject all arguments. I can't decide if this is a bug or a feature.

</comment><comment><USER21> I tried it. The rand() function keeps segfaulting.

(shrug)

<comment><USER12> You're probably using it wrong. rand() simply returns true.

<comment><USER22> In Objectivist C, there are no Booleans. If True exists then False exists, and False values are an affirmation of the death principle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think an objectivist programming language would be functional and pure, and NOT object oriented.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is fake. Actual Objectivist C code doesn't support the import declaration.

</comment><comment><USER25> In Objectivist C a reference to the current object can be obtained by the indistinct use of any of the following keywords: I self me my mine

Trying to use "this" results in: "Syntax error: Insufficient property assertion"

Also be advised that the "?" modifier for regular expression quantifiers isn't implemented.

</comment><comment><USER26> Warning: Although objectivist-c programs can create files, they are free to destroy those files if another program makes changes.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a good thing I wasn't reading over the sample code in the office.

Bravo, a poignant demonstration of the value of collectivism through code. As coders, it is easy to overlook how much we depend on the generosity of others to do our work, to feel entitled to all this infrastructure we can leverage at little or no cost, and especially to not see how this empowering system should be used in other aspects of our society.

Maybe KickStarter for open-source medical technology or textbooks.

<comment><USER7> _Bravo, a poignant demonstration of the value of collectivism through code._

Open source software is not "collectivism", which is a moral/political doctrine.

<comment><USER28> Indeed. Open source software is the first example I'll reach for when talking about the difference between the ideas of "free market" and "capitalism". Anybody can choose to contribute to open source or not, for reasons that are selfish or altruistic, in any way that they decide. Other's may or may not decide to pull their changelists, but everything is all about voluntary transactions - what you'd call a totally free market. On the other hand its totally unlike capitalism for reasons I hope I don't have to explain.

I can easily imagine collectivist code development, but I can't imagine a collectivist software effort that would allow both Ruby and Python, both Java and C# to exist. I mean, if you're making these decisions collectively how could you justify the division of effort?

<comment><USER29> Capitalism doesn't mean that everybody is running around for themselves. If its opponents seriously thought about that accusation for a moment, they'd realize that it is completely inconsistent with also talking about large corporations being abusive... indeed, large corporations existing _at all_. Capitalism allows you to freely set up your own organizations within its top- level free matrix, so if you find a problem space where near dictatorial "collectism" is the answer, you're free to choose that. (Fast food springs to mind.) That's in contrast to many ideologies which really do insist they are the right answer for every scale. Making that accusation of capitalism is generally a form of projection of the biases of the accuser, since it works exactly the opposite. (And the answer to many of the putative abuses of the system is for people to band together and form things like insurance corporations and credit unions and such.)

<comment><USER7> A large fast food giant (to take your example) is still not a dictatorship and it's still not collectivist.

You can have collectivist things under capitalism (for example, a hippie commune), but you cannot have a dictatorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's ironic that Ayn Rand is mocked so much in an age where individualism is a seen as the highest of virtues (in the US).

<comment><USER7> Individualism is most definitely _not_ seen as the highest of virtues in the US. Both major parties are highly altruistic. It's just given lip-service.

By the way, there is no virtue of "individualism" in Objectivism, it's independence. Which isn't the most important virtue.

<comment><USER31> If I didn't know any better I would think that you just made a judgement about which virtues are most important...

<comment><USER7> I was only intending in that part of my comment to report on Objectivism. I guess that wasn't entirely clear.

However, I do happen to agree with it.

In Objectivism, one virtue is more fundamental/"above" the others. Want to take a guess at what it might be? It actually makes sense, so you might be able to guess it.

<comment><USER32> Let me guess: hoarding capital that wasn't even produced by a human hand? (unimproved value of land, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is genius. So much so I want to keep it all for myself.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty hilarious. Not a patch on SDFRY though.

[http://nathan.ca/2012/04/introducing-sdfry-the-modern- progra...](http://nathan.ca/2012/04/introducing-sdfry-the-modern-programming- language/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Rand would never be able to adhere to DRY

<comment><USER36> … as the author observed:

> (Another principle that Objectivist-C software engineers have little use for > is Don't Repeat Yourself.)

(or perhaps you were merely adhering to the DDRY principle yourself?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> OK, I'll start the argument: Is a computer system analogous to a community, an individual, both or neither?

<comment><USER37> Communities and individuals are isomorphic [1]. A good compiler will substitute individuals for communities wherever it results in a performance gain.

1\. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/#1.3>

<comment><USER31> Intriguing. Makes me think that an individual is just an extremely evolved community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm an iOS/Objective-c developer, and I'm completely missing the joke. Anyone care to explain it to me?

<comment><USER39> Google Objectivism and/or Ayn Rand

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> haha?

</comment><comment><USER41> "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." \-- Nicholas Klein (commonly attributed to Ghandi)

Rand is mocked and attacked by some (who know very little about her actual ideas^), but increasingly appreciated others. It won't be that long before our culture starts to shift into the fourth phase, wherein it finally gives her ideas the credit they deserve.

^If you skipped Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged and haven't read her non- fiction works, you don't know much about her actual ideas.

tl;dr: This is evidence that Objectivism is making its mark.</comment>


The mythic associations of "dark matter" - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/dark-matter-is-in-our-dna <comment><USER2> > While some point to galaxy cluster work by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, dark > matter was truly "discovered" in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, who was studying > the rotation of spiral galaxies. Rubin found that galaxies were spinning too > fast for the matter we could see in them, yet they weren't flying apart.

And Zwicky found that galaxies were moving too fast for the matter we see in clusters yet the clusters weren't flying apart. This seems exactly analagous to Rubin's discovery so it is not clear why the author considers it not the true "discovery".

</comment><comment><USER3> >dark matter was truly "discovered" in the 1970s by Vera Rubin

as a nit: dark matter was actually discovered in the 50's with the first direct detection of neutrinos, which is why-in the 70's- "maybe there's just a bunch of matter not interacting with photons" wasn't laughed out of the room.

<comment><USER4> Neutrinos are no longer considered to be 'dark matter'. Before the 1980s it was, though.

<comment><USER3> Neutrinos aren't the dark matter responsible for the bullet cluster, rotation curves etc... But dark matter as a term is just a catch all for particles that don't interact with photons, hence hot (neutrinos) and cold (what we need for galaxies)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The headline writer here has evidently decided to take an article about one of physicists' pet peeves and include a biologist pet peeve—saying something is "in our DNA" to mean it's an apparently inherent part of our cultural legacy, without making any reference to actual biology.

<comment><USER6> Is this something that should be flagged?

<comment><USER5> I don't think so. It is in the headline on Nautilus, and while I think there's room for yet another article where a scientist carps about how the lay press misuses scientific terms, this whole article is about why "Dark Matter" as a term is evocative, and "in our DNA" has also come to mean something beyond "is encoded in the sequence of our chromosomes".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was hoping for an article about how dark matter affects genetics.</comment>


Show HN: Supportive – Guided Conversations for Love and Friendship - <AUTHOR> http://supportive.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

We made Supportive as a tool to help foster quality time with your partner and friends. It's a guided conversation, meaning there's a narrator that takes you through a talk with a partner, adding advice on relationships, meditation, and more. It's not always about not knowing what to talk about — sometimes, it's about creating the right space for it.

We've been working on this for six months now, and have been constantly surprised by how much this simple audio experience changes people's perceptions on friendship and love.

I thought Supportive was relevant to HN because a couple of days ago, a NYTimes article [1] was posted about how our relationships have dramatically changed over the past couple of decades. I feel like I've been seeing more and more articles on the subject, particularly with the recent/ongoing backlash towards social media.

I've been a lurker for a long time, but am excited to share something. Happy to take any questions, feedback, etc! :-)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17059237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17059237)</comment>