The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator - <AUTHOR> https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ <comment><USER3> There's an interesting point in the bitcoin forums that someone basically had to mine the entire first year or two, just to ensure the network even existed. If someone downloaded a client to play around with it and there was no network to connect to, the project would never take off.

So it's possible Satoshi ran a client or two for that purpose, which had the side-effect of mining coins.

To me, this seems like a very likely scenario. Almost required, even.

Another interesting comment- if enough miners agreed, coins from the Satoshi blocks could just be blacklisted from the network. Some irony there, eh?

<comment><USER4> > _"if enough miners agreed, coins from the Satoshi blocks could just be > blacklisted from the network. Some irony there, eh?"_

Well, if enough miners agreed, anything can happen, but I doubt you'd get the required majority. It would undermine the entire system.

<comment><USER3> There's previously been talk supporting blacklists for stolen coins.

I suspect it's the sort of thing that will increase in pressure if bitcoin grows much further. It wouldn't surprise me if blacklisting eventually happens in some form or another.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes listening to BitCoin proponants is hilarious. They point out all the disadvantage of current money transfer systems and how BitCoin will solve them ("No chargebacks! No transaction fees! No-one can take your money!"). Then when you quiz them, they'll admit people'll probably build systems like that on top of bitcoins ("Well people'll probably use escrow services on top of bitcoin to prevent dishonest merchants, and eventually there'll be transaction fees from the miners"). It looks like they are even talking about removing the "no-one can take your money" aspect!

<comment><USER6> This theme occurs often in software development. Someone sees a system that is very complex, old, difficult to understand, and has some known bugs. They implement a simpler, cleaner, new system with fewer known bugs and a handful of missing features. If it takes off, the missing features are added, often by people less intimately familiar and more likely to introduce a few bugs. The cycle repeats.

<comment><USER7> You're right, of course, but it's worth noting that the current system of national fiat currencies with floating exchange rates isn't very old at all. Commodity currencies (especially metallic standards), in which the money supply is bound to a good of fixed supply, are much older and more thoroughly debugged. Bitcoin, as a virtual fixed-supply commodity, is thus built on a firm theoretical foundation.

<comment><USER5> What? Commodity currencies are not fool proof. If you find more of the commodity, your currency suffers. This happened to Spain after they started colonizing the Americas. They found lots of silver, and their economy tanked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I don't find 5% ownership of a currency as a justifiable "deserved" fortune to any one person. That's trillions on the scale of existing currencies. That's enough to buy a world power.

Is the idea so novel that it can't be re-booted in a manner that has better protection of anonymity and which isn't amenable to being mined for years by just a handful of people (to the point that they own a huge % of all available coins)?

The guy who owns all of the gold mines is more than happy to back gold as a currency, after all.

<comment><USER9> Welcome to the endemic problem of deflationary currencies! People get undue credit just for being there first.

<comment><USER10> You could say the same thing about land or real estate in big cities.

<comment><USER9> Yes you can! Consider Manhattan: young people cannot today afford the same kind of house in the city that their parents could afford doing the exact same job at the same age. Their standard of living is lower (either living in the city and living in a much smaller place, or commuting in from outside the city) than their parents, in the area of housing, simply by virtue of the fact that their parents go there first.

Imagine extrapolating the injustices of the NYC housing market to the whole economy...

<comment><USER11> * People get undue credit just for being there first*

 _simply by virtue of the fact that their parents go there first_

Lots of parents didn't choose to go there at all. Some parents chose to buy residences in better parts of Manhattan, some in worse. Some chose better buildings, some chose worse. Some parents took out big loans betting on their future to own real estate, some preferred to spend that money on vacations.

In your mind, what investments that appreciate over time are not "undue credit"? Do you have a certain amount of gain that we can all know is fair, deserved, or not lucky?

<comment><USER9> > In your mind, what investments that appreciate over time are not "undue > credit"? Do you have a certain amount of gain that we can all know is fair, > deserved, or not lucky?

Investments generally appreciate over time because they create increased value. If your Apple stock goes up, it's because Apple is making more money each year. That's due credit. Investments that appreciate simply by virtue of fixed supply result in undue credit to older generations.

<comment><USER11> Apple stock is a limited commodity as well. If they split their stock 20 times, then the value would be much lower.

Your statement of "undue credit" is unfounded and arbitrary. Following your logic, all appreciating investments are "undue credit".

<comment><USER9> You're conflating two different things. Real property has intrinsic value, and being a limited commodity means that prices for it will rise by virtue of the fact that it is a limited commodity. Stock is limited as well, but because it has no intrinsic value its price doesn't increase imply by virtue of its being a limited commodity.

Forget about price for a second and look at intrinsic value. What is the underlying asset represented by ownership of property? It's the right to exclusively use some land and accompanying buildings. What is the underlying asset represented by stock? Leaving aside different kinds of stock, it's generally the right to receive a certain percentage of the profits of a company over time. Now, look at how price changes in the two assets are correlated with changes in the intrinsic value of the assets. A plot on the UES might appreciate 50% between 2000 and 2013, even though the neighborhood hasn't really changed in that time. The use and enjoyment a given person gets from that property is the same in 2000 and 2013. Now, compare to a stock. If the price of a stock appreciates 50% between 2000 and 2013, it's generally because the company has increased profits. Your enjoyment of the $150 in stock in 2013 is higher than your enjoyment of the $100 in stock in 2000 because it represents the same percentage of the right to receive a larger amount of profits.

<comment><USER11> _It's the right to exclusively use some land and accompanying buildings_ _even though the neighborhood hasn't really changed in that time_

I have no idea where you get that notion. Are you suggesting that Manhattan and the surrounding area hasn't changed? It's the very changes that have driven the rise in value for living there.

 _it's generally the right to receive a certain percentage of the profits of a company over time_

Not even close. Most equities these days don't distribute dividends.

As another responder said, you're not understanding how people value assets - whether they be property or stocks.

Value is inherently fluid but ultimately only what someone will pay for it. Your arguments for the limited nature of property vs stocks are tortured. You're working extremely hard to call gains from property value "undue". Gains from speculation are fundamentally the same whether they come from stocks, currency, property, commodities, collectors items, whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some context:

This blog post is written by Sergio Demian Lerner who has found a number of minor security vulnerabilities in bitcoin's source code.

His method of associating blocks to Satoshi's identity has been disputed by several developers of bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> No "developers of bitcoin" have disputed Sergio's findings.

The 2 persons who are disputing Sergio's findings (gmaxwell and DeathAndTaxes) are the minority. I personally agree with Sergio, I understand his analysis technique, and I have read his previous supporting arguments.

gmaxwell was for example making incorrect claims, saying you would need 50+ computers to mine at ~5 Mhash/s (average hashrate throughout 2009) because CPU and code at the time was not optimized. I proved gmaxwell wrong by benchmarking an early version of Bitcoin and showing a 5-year old $200 4-core Phenom was able to do 5 Mhash/s. This validates Sergio's theory that Satoshi could have very well represented the majority of the mining hashrate with a single computer throughout 2009.

<comment><USER12> <http://bitcoin.org/en/development>

Gregory Maxwell is listed as a developer. He also has contributed a lot of code to the project.

<comment><USER13> My bad. I forgot his status. It does not change my opinion though (that his criticism is invalid).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Satoshi attempts to spend his coins, this might reveal his identity. Which in turn would increase a risk of kidnapping/blackmailing/torture/etc from anyone willing to get a share of his stash. Same applies to his heirs in the future. My guess is that he may have deleted all the keys to early coins traceable back to him, just to avoid temptation.

He could have mined a lot of cheap coins in 2010-2011, though, so he's probably not without a big reward.

<comment><USER15> Could he sell (I'm ignorant of BTC details) to John Doe like I could sell a chunk of Citibank stock to someone? Presumably some known and trustworthy investor says he's looking to buy $xx Million worth BTC and Satoshi responds.

Then he's just another rich person, holding cash, not BTC coins that can be taken after a serious beat down.

<comment><USER16> Yes or probably thousands of other transactions for some or all of the value of these wallet(s), but the real question is there a secure way to get most/all of the value out without revealing enough information to leak his/her/their identity?

<comment><USER15> What if he transfers them at a huge loss, say 30%-50% cheaper with attached conditions? Or use LLCs and offshore corps? If there's a will and lots of money involved, there's a way

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> eric-hu Many comments here discuss how easy it is to discover Satoshi if he moved any money out of these known accounts. Please point out the flaw in the following strategy:

Satoshi (the man, the woman, the government, the organization, etc) programmatically creates many wallets at random intervals over an extended period of time (months, years). Money is moved into and out of these accounts to make them appear to be 'consumers'.

Bitcoins are then moved from Satoshi's wallets into these accounts as well as some percentage "burned" by sending bitcoins to random addresses not belonging to him. The larger the burn rate, the higher the chances he won't be discovered.

(Essentially, this ends up being a self-implemented version of Bitlaundry that sends the service fee to random members of the Bitcoin community).

<comment><USER17> If Satoshi only mixes his own BTC then taint tracking will easily reveal it. He'd have to mix his BTC in with (a lot of) other people's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is clearly illuminating the Ponzi-like elements of Bitcoin. As in a Ponzi scheme, early arrivals to the system earn easy money, funded by later arrivals. Tales of bitcoin fortunes draw more and more entry to the system, leading to large payoffs for second stage arrivals, attracting more speculators due to the media attention and very real money that has been made by early players. This continues until, oh, wait, bitcoins aren't so easy to mine anymore and there's no new wave of incoming money to pay of the next generation of miners.

The hilarious thing is that Bitcoin is quite transparent about exactly how it works, while a real Ponzi scheme goes to great lengths to hide this dynamic. Anyone can see this dynamic in the rising price and the increasing CPU time needed to mine a new coin. And yet, brilliant, savvy investors like the Winklevosses are somehow still getting involved...

<comment><USER19> By that logic, any emerging industry has this Ponzi-like characteristics. Early players will always have a large share, almost by definition.

A more defining characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is that the early player's dividends are actually paid from the principal of late-comers. Which only works until you have a steady stream of new investors. As far as I understand Bitcoin, this is not the case there. It just gets harder and harder to "mine" new coins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Well Deserved Fortune of the Federal Reserve

Seriously, as the world's currency and failures of other countries to issue a reserve currency, one of the dollar's biggest threats would be a crypto- currency. Either the project succeeds and you have an enormous source of potentially hidden money in the currency to maybe overtake the dollar, or it fails and you make sure it fails with such repercussions that no other crypto- currency can be easily introduced again, either due to new laws or loss of confidence.

Additionally if they have the ability to crack SHA256 (designed by the NSA), the government could print the money. And they could probably have planned a way to sabotage bitcoins if they decided to back out before a certain point.

The financial crisis may have helped sway the final decision to execute the plan:

August 7, 2007: BNP Paribas terminated withdrawals from three hedge funds citing "a complete evaporation of liquidity".

September 6, 2008: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac placed in conservatorship by the U.S. government.

September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

November 1, 2008: Satoshi Nakamoto publishes first bitcoin paper.

Sources of dates:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932012_global_finan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932012_global_finan..). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_takeover_of_Fannie_Mae_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_takeover_of_Fannie_Mae_..). <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/>

<comment><USER21> Breaking SHA256 does not allow any party to "print bitcoin". It lets them be more successful at mining it, but the same amount per block will be generated, and the difficulty still adjusts to 1 block every 10 minutes.

All they'd be doing is screwing miners out of profits.

<comment><USER20> Depending on how much you can exploit SHA256 you could take all chance out of getting the longest block and earn the new coins or fees as often as you want. I don't know the specifics of the moving average of difficulty but you might be able to game it by backing off and letting the difficulty reset before finding the right hashes quickly again.

If you're already starting at 5% of the coins, and you're steadily gaining more, and the currency is tending to deflate, that sounds pretty close to printing money. Sure you're constrained but so is the Fed today in its abilities to print money effectively. Additionally, having so many BTCs pretty much ensures you can find a way to continue bettering your financial situation, generating interest or something more creative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry if this is a obvious question but I haven't read much about Bitcoin actually. This Satoshi Nakomoto, is he/them a company, person, community or even a government?

<comment><USER23> Thats the million dollar question.

Satoshi invented Bitcoin and worked on it for 3 years. Sometime in 2010, just as Bitcoin was gaining traction, he* withdrew from the project and no one has been heard from him since.

There have been many attempts to discover the real identity of this person/group/company/government but to no avail.

I believe the focus of this new analysis technique, whilst interesting in its own right, was done for the primary purpose of trying to identify Satoshi. The analysis technique purports to show that certain bitcoins were generated by the same person/computer. This information may assist the tracing of historical bitcoin transactions to their original sources. At the top of the tree is the 'genesis' block - the source of the very first bitcoins. Its reasonable to think that Satoshi mined this block considering he invented the system.

There is a thread in the Bitcoin forums[1] discussing whether the initial blocks (up to around 50) were mined by an individual or a group. There is heated debate about what, if any, facts can be concluded by analysing the early blockchain events to discover how many (and what type) of CPUs were involved in this early stage.

Satoshi appears to have political motivations (he references distain for bailouts and fiat currency): <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto>

The Bitcoin story would make a good movie script.

*he/she/they/...I

[1] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1843782#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1843782#msg1843782)

<comment><USER16> Do we have enough writing from Satoshi to try to correlate language/linguistic patterns against known actors in the field of cryptography?

<comment><USER24> Yes; we have a number of emails from the p2presearch ML, the cryptography ML, the Bitcoin ML, his Bitcoin forum posts, his whitepaper, and source code revisions & comments. This amounts to easily 80k of text, which should be more than enough to run stylometric techniques on him.

The real trouble would actually be getting enough text from all the 'known actors' you might want to compare him against (for example, one Redditor thinks Satoshi is Mike Reiter, but almost all of Reiter's papers are co- authored and he doesn't seem to have any other online presence, so what would you use as your Reiter corpus?).

<comment><USER23> Regardless of the comparison with other actors, is it possible to run an analysis over Satoshi's corpus to determine if its internally consistent or likely written by multiple individuals?

<comment><USER24> I haven't actually seen any mentions of stylometric techniques or analyses which look into that question, although I'm sure it's been done. (The only example I can think of, the Federalist papers, was known to have been done by two people with large pre-existing corpuses to go on, and so the question was simply assigning responsibility.)

<comment><USER25> I actually have read a paper once on stylometric authorship attribution, part of which was oriented at detecting whether it was a single or multiple authors. I think "authorship attribution" were keywords in the title, but that's all I remember. So I don't have anything more to go on :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If this one person/entity really owns 63% of the market and their currently hoarding it, I imagine that anything they do with their coins could have a huge impact. It might be worth ~100M USD but if they tried to cash out it would likely collapse the market. Even if they start circulating those coins, if not done properly could cause huge inflation.

<comment><USER27> You misread, it's not 63% of the market. Its about 10% of the market - <USER2> BTC

<comment><USER26> I was looking at this part: >Note that from the 1814400 BTC awarded, 1148800 BTC has never been spent (63%). I suppose (but have not checked it yet) that these are exactly the segments that belong to the mystery entity

So I guess I'm confused the market bigger than the 1,814,400 that have been awarded somehow? I'm not that familiar with bitcoins so that's very possible, but the author seems to imply that Nakamoto has 63%.

<comment><USER27> The chart stops at 2010, many more bitcoins have been mined since.

<comment><USER26> Ah that makes sense, thanks. In that case I wonder how many more BTC Nakamoto may have mined since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Since everyone's saying Satoshi can't spend any of these bitcoins without revealing him/her/itself, my question is why can't Satoshi convert the bitcoin to USD in a numbered swiss bank account? Is there no way to make a sale like that today? And if not, then what's stopping there from being a way to do that in the next few years?

<comment><USER5> _Is there no way to make a sale like that today?_

Correct.

There are not enough people who want to buy bitcoins. If those 1M bitcoin were put on the market, the price would plummet.

<comment><USER29> Allowing him to buy more of them for a very cheap price.

<comment><USER24> Err... Suppose that works. Take it to the logical conclusion: Satoshi drives out every buyer and buys up all outstanding bitcoins. Now what? Bitcoin has become worthless. What does he do with 10m worthless bitcoins to cash out? This is the classic question in attempts to corner a market: how do you bury the body?

When you hold as many bitcoins as does Satoshi, you will profit far more from not selling and trying to help out the entire Bitcoin economy and make it grow.

<comment><USER29> I'm thinking it is more of a DeBeers situation. Keep tight control over the supply.

<comment><USER5> BitCoin already has a hard limit hard-coded into the design. You don't need to hoard 5→10% to achieve scarcity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I highlighted the conclusion of Lerner's analysis here [https://tldr.io/tldrs/516f951cc8cb5249260002c5/the-well- dese...](https://tldr.io/tldrs/516f951cc8cb5249260002c5/the-well-deserved- fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin-creator-visionary-andgenius). This looks pretty convincing even tough one might think that Satoshi would own multiple wallets.

</comment><comment><USER31> Satoshi is a smart. I would assume that if he/they wanted to remain anonymous and still get some money out of bitcoin later on then he/they are probably mining to multiple wallets.

Not sure what the motive is to continuously mine with the wallet linked to block 0, but assuming there are multiple Satoshi wallets in the picture it may be to divert attention away from the wallet he/they are actually spending money with.

</comment><comment><USER32> Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym of Keyser Söze.

</comment><comment><USER33> I believe its not difficult to find Satoshi Nakamoto. However admitting that you found this person/entity would likely put you in danger. So there is no motivation for the people who might know to speak up.

I believe that most large governments do know the identity.

<comment><USER34> Why would finding _him_ put _you_ in danger?

<comment><USER35> Because anyone motivated sufficiently to find him now knows that you know who/where he is, and can likely be coerced in unsavory ways to divulge that information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wouldn't Satoshi have spent at least some Bitcoins? Testing the system, or encouraging early economic activity?

Although maybe this entity represents just one of the mining machines controlled by Satoshi.

<comment><USER14> The first transaction was to Hal Finney, as a test. But if he tries to buy something pointing to his physical address, it would help a lot revealing his identity. Even buying drugs on Silk Road, since they are delivered by mail to your door.

<comment><USER24> Satoshi seems to have been offering bitcoins to play with to a lot of people early on; a hacker of my acquaintance mentioned sending Satoshi 'hate mail' (he was annoyed by Satoshi contributing to the babel of half-baked P2P networks at the time) and Satoshi replied with some links explaining Bitcoin and an offer of some coins to try out. So false alarms are perfectly possible in tracking early bitcoins' movements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Let's assume Satoshi (the entity) is insanely patient, decides to wait until say 2015, by then BTC is trading around $1000/BTC (theoretical). He is then sitting on BILLIONS of dollars in value. If he feels the market can bear it, he starts liquidating and reveals himself. Assuming the market doesn't collapse and he isn't kidnapped, he would quickly become one of the wealthiest people on the planet (top 20).

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there enough liquidity (I'm not even sure if this is the right word) in the standard exchanges to move $100M USD of BTC?

<comment><USER3> Sort of.

Selling 1,000,000 coins on MtGox right now would take the price down to $0.10, with an average price of $19.64, so you'd net $19 million.

Of course, what would really happen is that everyone would see it happening and cancel their bids before the wave reached them, so you'd likely not be able to actually sell them all at once.

Leaking them out a few thousand a day, though, would be completely possible. And if done correctly need not move the market at all.

<comment><USER39> I disagree that 1M coins could not be sold very quickly on MtGox. Yes, the price would go way down, but there are plenty of interested buyers who would be happy to "cash Satoshi out" to take some profits; he would certainly get serveral millions of dollars for his coins.

The bigger problem is that selling on MtGox requires identifying himself to create an account (not to mention the current $1,000 per day withdrawal limit for USD).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What's stopping someone with a really fast computer from corner the bitcoin market? I'm probably being naive here as I don't know the details of bitcoin, just that it's a digital currency that can only be mined to come into being. Anyways, a good explanation from the HN community would be really helpful. thnx.

<comment><USER41> (Opportunity) cost. Right now bitcoin mining is starting to require custom ASICs/FPGAs to be worthwhile (although the increasing price offsets that, obviously), because mining bitcoins becomes harder the more bitcoins there are found, so the costs of hardware and electricity start to get very large.

If you had a supercomputer with tens of thousands of CPUs it's probably being put to more scientific use than trying to corner the bitcoin market, which is basically still a gamble at this stage.

<comment><USER40> good answer and thank you. I was thinking of it more as an accepted currency. Because if it's seen as being such, then it would be worth it to mine as much as possible. And what happens when they run out? It's pretty confusing to me...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I dont think Satoshi owns a single bitcoin. Never did he write anywhere that Bitcoins should be hoarded as a shady get rich scheme and all his writings clearly are for Bitcoin to be used for pseudo anon payments.

He also gave thousands of them away to Hal and other people on the cryptography mailing list.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any particular reason Satoshi Nakamoto would want their identity hidden, other than personal preference? If I had $100M USD then I probably would care a lot less about who knew it.

<comment><USER43> Perhaps the person (or persons) is concerned that bitcoin will become even more successful and will threaten powerful institutions like major world governments. I wouldn't want to be Julian Assange right now, and that is a perfectly sensible reason for the inventor of bitcoin to wish to remain anonymous.

A different reason might be a fear that if a single inventor were known that bitcoin would become vulnerable to "change it this way because the founder says so" attacks, weakening the decentralized, P2P nature of the currency. (This is a less plausible reason, but still valid.)

<comment><USER44> it's to avoid bias in the system

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Someone should verify the 'large entity' discovered by Shamir is distinct: <http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584>

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe Satoshi Nakamoto died before bitcoins got popular ...

</comment><comment><USER47> When it comes to Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, the first character comes to my mind: Kira from 'Death Note'

</comment><comment><USER48> Someone wanted to get rich so they invented their own money and suckered a bunch of people into a "cult" with a bunch of hippie ideas.

Nothing new here. Do you know how many cults have done this throughout history?

<comment><USER49> except this hippie idea is based on sound mathematical proofs and concepts, and not some flying spaghetti monster god.

<comment><USER50> The technical operation is not the ideology behind Bitcoin, and it certainly isn't the whole of how Bitcoin is used.

There's plenty of utopian fantasy surrounding it and a fascinating social dynamic that has absolutely nothing to do with "sound mathematical proofs and concepts" but more intangible qualities assigned to it by its proponents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why is everyone here completely forgetting about the recent Zerocoin development? It's a system that could one day piggyback on the Bitcoin blockchain, and it pretty effectively wipes BTC of any prints that might be on them through a system not unlike an anonymous exchange (based heavily on zero knowledge proof of work concepts). Once Zerocoin becomes a "thing" in the BTC community, the Satoshis can spend as many of their coins as they want with zero fear of being tracked down through transactions.

<comment><USER52> I found this on bitcointalk re: zerocoin:

 _"Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door."_

From [http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/bitcoin...](http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/bitcoin- zerocoin.html)</comment></comment>


TIOBE Index March 2018 – Ruby replaces Delphi in top 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ <comment><USER2> Alternative ranking : the [PYPL index]([http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html](http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html))

Disclosure: I maintain it.

<comment><USER3> I just can't take TIOBE seriously, I don't think Kotlin is as popular as the Logo educational programming language and Rust dropping 20 positions despite adding a new keyword to it is also interesting. And Typescript isn't even measured. Yours is much more believable, but I don't see C++ there. Is this a bug or a feature? EDIT: I saw the clarification in the other comment but maybe C/C++ would be better then?

<comment><USER4> It depends what you are looking for in a rating. If you are making a new programming language and want to know which concepts and syntaxes are familiar to people, than TIOBE is probably not that far off. PYPL on the other hand seems to show how many people want to try the language, not necessarily trying or sticking with it, but more like a measure of its visibility on the market. Both are useful metrics and help to paint a better overall picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised that Kotlin's rating is so low and PHP and VB still so high.

<comment><USER6> The world outside the bleeding edge of tech is a _really, really_ big place. Also, software, once written, has a way of sticking around for a _long_ time.

Ruby has been around for almost 20 years and decidedly hip for more than a decade, and only now breaking into top 10. Delphi has been more or less dead in our bubble for a couple of decades, yet only dropping out of top ten...

<comment><USER3> I know that always looking for the most recent/hyped technology is not a good thing and there is a lot of legacy code out there, but I also know that a lot of people started using Kotlin after Google announced official Android support, so if a language rating fails to capture this, then it's not a good ranking in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's the point. If Kotlin remains popular, it might make the top ten in 10-15 years.

<comment><USER7> Swift made it to the top 10 instantly, there are more Android devices than iPhones so you might expect it next year or in 2020.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Delphi ...

I just started picking up pascal again, freepascal to be specific.

I started with pascal in school, quickly moved to C, then C++; As I gain experience and wisdom, I migrated back from C++ to C. I just discovered freepascal this year, and has been enjoying pascal again. Pascal is just like C, but cleaner.

<comment><USER9> Wow do people still use these languages enough for them to be in the top 20? I wrote a lot of Pascal after Basic and some Delphi when it came out but I haven't heard anything about either in like 15-20 years.

<comment><USER8> The thing about language popularity is mostly about its ecosystem -- libraries, teachers, friends, and corporations behind them. However, all ecosystem are transient in nature, and all code that interwines and depends on a ecosystem will go with it in time. I guess that is why as I get older, I find myself more attracted to classical languages that do not have much ecosystem anymore. It makes my code to feel less mortal in a sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> funny how regardless on of index, interesting languages start from scala and below

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, R fell a lot in the last year.

<comment><USER12> Yeah true. R and MATLAB are down and Python is up, makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> .NET VB ahead of JS, Ruby, Swift, Go, R? Interesting...

<comment><USER14> There's not really a compelling reason for VB.NET to even exist at this point. It'd be lovely to have whatever effort is expended on that shifted to F#.

<comment><USER15> The great hidden mass of folks scripting Excel spreadsheets strikes me as unlikely to migrate to anything else, anytime soon.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, those users are also using VBA, which is still in the VB6 line, not the .NET VB. Visual Basic on .NET is almost identical with C#, just with different syntax, and is a second-class citizen with regards to documentation and resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What explains the rise of C over the last few years?

<comment><USER17> Probably the rise of IoT bringing people down the stack to microcontrollers</comment></comment>


Show HN: Frontend in the Cloud – Native Mobile Apps on Python – Open-Source - <AUTHOR> http://fase.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/igushev/fase_lib](https://github.com/igushev/fase_lib) — Fase library to develop the server of a Fase Service;

[https://github.com/igushev/fase_ios](https://github.com/igushev/fase_ios) — iOS client for a Fase Service;

[https://github.com/igushev/fase_android](https://github.com/igushev/fase_android) — Android client for a Fase Service;

Examples of Fase Services:

[https://github.com/igushev/notes_fase](https://github.com/igushev/notes_fase) — Saves and synchronizes notes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If someone interested to learn more or collaborate, happy to chat!</comment>


Unofficial Ether Faucet – Free Ethers for Testnet - <AUTHOR> http://faucet.etherparty.io/

<comment><USER2> Awesome!</comment>


A 1700-ton telco building that was relocated while running in 1950 - <AUTHOR> https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/managed-retreat/2/ <comment><USER2> My father worked for a company in Switzerland in the 80s and early 90s that was solely specialized in relocating buildings: either too old to be demolished due to historical value or because it was a cheaper alternative than demolishing everything and building again 10 meters to the side. He loved that work but it was very stressful and took its toll on him. I was very young but still remember seeing this old wooden church crossing the street with my father running in circles yelling to people.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't see it mentioned there, so I have to ask: what about the cabling? Depending on where the telephone cables entered the building, they would have to get up to 12 meters longer. How did they make that work? Did they splice every cable? Or did the cables already have enough slack?

<comment><USER4> That depends very much on where the cables were running. Some of them will have gotten longer than needed, others shorter and for some it may not have made a big difference, merely a slight change of angle.

The phone companies deal with cable splices all the time (roughly at the rate of backhoe deployment), so they most likely shut down the trunks one-by-one, extended the ones that needed more wire and they may or may not have decided to take up the slack in the remainder (to avoid parasitic inductance and capacitance from rolling up the excess wire).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Indianapolis has a very similar relocation story from 1930, with the 11,000-ton Indiana Bell building [1].

Fun fact: Kurt Vonnegut's father was the chief architect who recommended rotating the building [2]. Earlier than that, there was also a building that was moved by a team of horses to make way for the Indiana War Memorial, but I can't find a source anywhere (I read about it while touring the memorial).

[1] [http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html](http://www.paul-f.com/ibmove.html) [2] [https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/01/07/indiana- bell/4354705/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Zero-downtime deployments 1950s style.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves of the many mission critical practical applications in disciplines outside of Computer Engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Impressive feat - however, I was puzzled by this:

> _Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus > was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators > and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the > building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old > son, Juan Jorge._

Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by _rising_ the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)

<comment><USER9> You are correct in that… however I think that this harkens back to "talk is cheap, actions lead." That is, it is very easy to say "this is safe" even if you don't think that it is. By putting something that you value on the line, then you are showing your level of commitment to the statement that "this is safe".

I think that you will find it is not the "technical experts" who were afraid, but the workers in the building. This is exactly the sort of action that reassures these people, since they see that you have "skin in the game". It is also worth noting that he almost certainly didn't believe that he was placing his wife and child in danger.

<comment><USER10> There is also a tradition to have architect and engineer of the new bridge to float in the boat under it while the bridge is being load-tested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of the raising of Chicago in the 1850-60s [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago)

<comment><USER12> I was floored to see shopkeeps still open _while they moved the building_. Today, OSHA would have a heart attack.

<comment><USER11> Crazy huh?

> Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and > furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers > and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as > to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw the same thing being done with a theatre in Manhattan in 1998 (to make way for the Disneyfication of Times Square) : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Theatre_(42nd_Street)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Theatre_\(42nd_Street\))

<comment><USER14> The cleanup of NYTS was essential in getting tourists to keep going to new york as well as make it a livable place --companies were all moving to NJ for tax and quality of life reasons.

I really do not miss all the sex shops and prostitutes, pushers and all around hustlers who used to have a run of the place. I for one am glad they cleaned that up.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Faninating story, I first heard of it while listening to the latter part of linked 99% Invisible podcast episode.

There's some information on Jorge Matute Remus the engineer who designed and ran the building move on Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus)

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/01/07/indiana- bell/4354705/)

They moved and rotated an Indiana Bell building in the 1930s.

<comment><USER16> I came here to post this. It's crazy to see the big bundle of cable snaking away from the building!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am surprised that it was practical to move, I suppose it must have been a small manual branch exchange given the time.

Big central offices are massive buildings often with deep basements.

<comment><USER18> Is that true even in places with high water tables? Like much of Florida for example?

<comment><USER19> Im pretty sure even with a high water table, its not as though the water would seep through if its well sealed. A lot of times they have to seal them for fire-safety

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised that they don't move more buildings - I guess it is fabulously expensive. When I was a child I remember that one local building was moved to allow a road to be widened ([http://www.engineering- timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem...](http://www.engineering- timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=597)). I've never heard of a UK building being moved since.

<comment><USER21> There used to be a show in the US about moving houses - generally they were wooden houses and moved a mile or so to either a new part of town or another town. I think the huge wide (and pretty empty looking) roads helped - I can't think of many cases where you'd be able to do similar in the UK due to the narrow roads.

Plus I'd rather move a wooden house than a brick or even a stone one.

<comment><USER22> It's fairly common to relocate houses in New Zealand, up to a couple of hundred km away.

Wooden buildings built on piles used to be the standard construction method in New Zealand before poured concrete bases became the norm, so they're relatively easy to move: just chop the piles and jack it up onto a truck.

My parent's friends actually gave a house away for free. They were rebuilding, it it was cheaper to give the house away for free and have the new owners pay to get it relocated, rather than pay for demolition.

<comment><USER23> The Museum Hotel in Wellington was also moved in 1993.

[https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital- life/74342852/...](https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital- life/74342852/museum-hotel-rides-the-rails--150-years-of-news)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I actually saw this building and the statute of Jorge Matute Remus pushing it while visiting Guadalajara last year. Fascinating story.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you know about the story / history behind the building before visiting the area?

<comment><USER24> No I had no idea, just kind of randomly came across it while walking around.

<comment><AUTHOR> That somehow makes it even more special in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This gives new meaning to "location transparency" a la Erlang..</comment>


Metal Exoskeleton To Be Tested By US Navy - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1321868/metal-exoskeleton-to-be-tested-by-us-navy

<comment><USER2> I've often wondered how fail safe these things are. If you're lifting 200kg and the system fails, is that 200kg load suddenly being put onto your body?</comment>


What we just learned about the Magic Leap One's hardware - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/magic-leap-is-ready-to-talk-more-about-its-ar-headset/ <comment><USER2> This definitely feels a lot like the people selling perpetual motion or energy devices. A CEO/Entrepreneur who uses non-standard terminology, speaks like Deepak Chopra with fanciful but fictitious sounding explanations, a kind of word salad designed to impress.

I had high hopes for Magic Leap when it was first announced. I though this was going to be a device that had opaque overlay LCD or laser-retina projection so that it worked outside in daylight. I thought it would have a full on FOV. Now it seems really like a kind of Hololens 1.5.

At this point, I think we may have to wait for Apple to solve workable AR glasses.

<comment><USER3> The fact they refuse to let people try it is such a red flag.

<comment><USER4> They gave private demos at GDC in March. [https://twitter.com/radiocurea/status/976549719664050176?s=2...](https://twitter.com/radiocurea/status/976549719664050176?s=21)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple is going about AR right: incremental, shipping now, and already building a developer ecosystem. Smartphone based AR is mediocre at best but millions of users already can access it and provide feedback on it. Apple doesn't have to convince users to spend $600 (at least) today on a new gadget that would still mostly be a novelty. They have bought themselves time to develop a great AR hardware product, and when they do release it, a whole ecosystem will already be in place

In fact, Apple may have already won this space unless they seriously drop the ball or someone releases something amazing. I mean the hololens is shipping today and is really cool but few people seem to care because it's so expensive and it's not clear why you need AR. To make AR more than a novelty requires developers. Developers will go where the users are because that's where the money is, and users go where the apps are and where their friends go. Apple is using smartphone based AR to work around this catch 22

</comment><comment><USER6> The book practically writes itself: "Tragic Leap: An un-augmented look at the reality behind a secretive startup"

<comment><USER7> It's virtually unusable: A crystal clear post-mortem for spectacles with a foggy future

</comment></comment><comment> squeaky-clean They didn't just "not mention specs". They mentioned someone asked a hardware spec related question, and then said something along the lines of "I'm not falling for that trick question."

That's waaaay worse than just silence in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> No kidding. Have their staff not been trained to deflect questions using basic reasons that are omnipresent to any cutting edge hardware company? For example, "we are unable to reveal that information yet due to contractual obligations with our vendors" or "we can't talk about that yet because we are still finalizing a few minor details."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a clip of the intro. Decide for yourself: [https://clips.twitch.tv/BreakableTentativePassionfruitPipeHy...](https://clips.twitch.tv/BreakableTentativePassionfruitPipeHype)

<comment><USER10> I think this thing is going to be the biggest bust ever. There are only so many variations of laser tag that one can play.

The twitch clip has a home shopping esque feel to it. That seems ...appropriate. All this from a company with a ~$6B valuation. Imo, that was the real magic leap.

I predict that in a few years, AR vendors will focus on AR for industrial purposes, and then it will be useful.

<comment><USER11> Industrial AR, $5K glasses shipping today:

[https://daqri.com/about/leadership/](https://daqri.com/about/leadership/)

[https://shop.daqri.com](https://shop.daqri.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Clickbait you can skip without missing out on anything.

All they learned is irrelevant details, sadly they did NOT say anything about the color of the top or the exact haptic feel of the third knob from the right.

Nothing about the vapourware tech to learn.

Skip and keep watching from your safe distance.

<comment><USER13> > All they learned is irrelevant details

I disagree. Perhaps you mean that they didn't learn anything positive.

I learned that it doesn't work with glasses, that it can't work outside, that the required processing puck will run so hot that it needs ventilation, and that only months before release they still have no content, specs or anything functional except a green LED.

I think those things are very interesting and important.

The fact that they are all very damning of the company and its product _is_ the story.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. This article seems to try to paint the tech in a positive light, but it really shows a damning story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This thing is going to be the Daikatana of AR. Tons of hype, many years late, finally delivered as garbage nowhere close to what was promised. It's a shame they couldn't ship before the VR hype flamed out, otherwise they might have at least made some of their money back from curious buyers, but now there's going to be nothing.

Just get a HoloLens. That at least has shipping hardware and a real company behind it. Even if Magic Leap eventually does most of the same thing, it's not going to be so much better that it was worth all the bluster.

<comment><USER16> "Rony Abovitz's about to make you his bitch."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bets on whether or not that hockey puck just contains a Snapdragon 845 and some other COTS stuff? I'd wager significant money that it does.

<comment><USER18> More likely an XR1, but yeah there's absolutely no way these guys are designing silicon.

[https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/29/snapdragon- xr1/](https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/29/snapdragon-xr1/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Save you the click: Absolutely nothing.

</comment><comment><USER20> It must be for real now. It has lots of blinky lights.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't care how informative this article is, we should not be linking to pages that both prompt you for notification permission _AND_ begin autoplaying a loud annoying video immediately upon page load.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree the autoplaying is annoying. I did however find value in the content. How to properly label that this link has a video that autoplays?

<comment><USER22> [mutebeforeclick]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> tl;dr:

No specs, no demos, no video or images of what is seen through the glasses.

The only functionality demonstrated live was a green LED on the glasses.

Even in a world where the glasses work 100% as advertised, I'm still skeptical that goggle-vision AR will be a multi-billion dollar industry. Who wants to run around playing AR video games in their house or office? Who'd want to wear goggles and buckle a gaming PC to their belt just to check e-mail and watch YouTube? Where is the market for Magic Leap's ideal, everything-works AR headset?

Some might say industry, architecture, or medicine, but that doesn't appear to be their focus right now, and it's hard for me to see those niche applications justifying their billions in investment so far.

<comment><USER24> While this particular AR may be overhyped, I do expect AR to become a multi- billion-US$ industry before 2025. Even if it's just two apps, Sunglasses.app and Google Maps pasted onto your view with no careful design, that's still worth $30 and could run on that year's version of the Raspberry Pi Zero. 30 million units per billion dollars, doesn't feel unreasonable.

<comment><USER25> Is sunglasses.app just slightly darkening the lenses so they work as sunglasses?

<comment><USER24> Pretty much. People already pay a premium for photochromic lenses that take minutes to adjust, LCD can do the same in milliseconds.

<comment><USER26> I just want the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

<comment><USER27> Oh come on, let me have just a little bit of peril?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There are a lot of big name companies betting a lot of money on the success of this device so I'm willing to give it a chance, but unless they start releasing some actual details about how well it works I remain sceptical.

<comment><USER4> This is one of the strongest counter arguments to all the cynicism in these comments. Sure they didn't give specs but guess what neither did Hololens until preorders opened. The main thing they haven't done yet is a live demo which we know is a challenge because when Microsoft did it they caught a bunch of flack for misleading the tiny FOV. For magic leap they're not launching until end of the year. Demos are supposed to come in a couple more moths. But really what compels me Is all the partnerships. Why would Weta put their reputation on the line and say their magic leap game is launching this year if it were so obviously vaporware. Same for Framestore (big Hollywood gfx house) who announced this week that they've been working on content for years that will be available at launch as well. It's one thing to be skeptical of magic leap, but it becomes harder to think that they've hoodwinked all these other reputable companies into making content for them for a product that is crappy or not ever coming out.there have also been about 30 other devs who have announced they're early partners who have received hardware kits privately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a puff piece that doesn't answer the fundamental question - have they solved the core problems with AR - field of view, and dark images?

<comment><USER9> Almost a direct quote from the presentation: ML is an additive device, meaning the darker an image is, the more transparent it is.

But in practice it probably isn't a problem. All that matters is that they deliver killer apps. What you can do with mixed reality vs the PC is what counts.

Remember how lifechanging the original iPhone's google maps integration felt? I used to get lost. No one ever gets lost anymore.

We need something like that for the mixed reality space. It's too early to know precisely what that could be, but we'd be betting on the wrong side of technology to dismiss it out of hand.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that they've been making lots of promises but then also publishing misleading demos that seemed to disobey the basic laws of physics (i.e. demos showing subtractive image synthesis in a compact form factor) which makes it hard to take any of their tech claims seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting seeing the tone in comment sections here change with time. Threads on Magic Leap used to have many defenders. Now, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER31> can anyone think of any way to make money betting against magic leap?

</comment><comment><USER32> Queue in a blog post by the guy who despises Magic Leap.

<comment><USER33> Karl Guttag rules.

<comment><USER6> Say what you will about him, but his predictions have proven accurate so far: ML has made very suspect claims to investors and the public and ML's technology offers little innovation over the status quo, based on the information available so far.

<comment><USER4> So far it's the only headset coming to market that contains all of the following: Standalone, eye tracking, variable focal planes, hand tracking and a 6DOF controller, and a significant increase in FOV over Hololens (roughly 55 degrees to Hololens' 35). There are other AR headsets announced that may have a huge FOV but are tethered to a PC and have questionable visuals. Really, once Magic Leap is out it will be quite unique, and not just because of the tech it packs compared to the competition but because they've also been building content from their first party studio as well as numerous gaming and productivity partnerships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Theranos 2.0?

<comment><USER35> Worst.

[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/magic-leap- technolog...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/magic-leap-technology- reportedly-years-away-from-completion)

<comment><USER36> Citing an article that is 1.5 years old? Ignored

<comment><USER37> actually, I think you're missing out by ignoring that article.

'technology ... is "not really what we're ultimately going to be shipping," but that his company's prototypes were good for showing investors and others'

Unlike Theranos, Magic Leap has received investment from people with knowledge in the industry, so I think it is less smoke and mirrors than Theranos, but similar in that they are doing a big promotion on technology that is not ready yet. I'm not going to call it vaporware, and I don't think Tharanos was vaporware either, but they were selling to investors and their customers a product that didn't exist as they had sold it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Karl Kuttag was right all along I guess. Good for him, but a bit of a bummer for the dream ML was trying to sell. Of course that dream turns have been made of lies and horseshit, so...</comment>


Elevated Error rates in Heroku - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/?hn=1 <comment><USER2> Does anyone else feel like Heroku's error rates on top of its higher costs makes Heroku badly overpriced?

It would be one thing if it was running on like a 10-20% premium but its premium is much, much higher. Or if its rare of errors was much lower.

<comment><USER3> i've been kinda slaggin them off forever on this. they pretty much make money off how inefficient RoR is plus a bunch of vendor lock-in. I switched to Java and work for enterprise now so we have our own servers but for the next hobby project I doubt it'll be on Heroku.

The thing that pisses me off most is that Heroku's policies on error/performance/updates are shaky, but their add-on makers (who are charging HIGH premiums) are far worse.

I've had such a shoddy experience with WebSolr for example. Every few months all their stuff breaks, then when you follow their instructions to spin your instance back up you find that the client API or instance type you use is no longer supported and have to debate which parts of your codebase to upgrade just to get back to where you started.

That's why I think the Heroku ecosystem is trash -- after 1-2 years of forced upgrades and code refactoring you get so tired of it. "Oh another email saying if I don't change ___ in 6 months my app will die." "Another slew of unexplained errors followed by Googling eventually leading to 1 tweet about how this add-ons service is temporarily f __ked ". Seriously, just learn Java or some hipper JVM lang and spin up a Tomcat or Glassfish container somewhere, then connect to 3rd party services directly rather than through an extra "add- on" layer that supposedly provides convenience by forcing you to jump through one more hoop. Most of the add-on companies seem to have non-Heroku offerings that are much more flexible to integrate.

<comment><USER2> I don't really blame the add-on Makers since they have to pay Heroku's markup and then their own.

<comment><USER3> true it may be that the situation is to blame since they are only doing this special Heroku add-on interface to pander to its clients. but yea bad situation indeed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's getting worse and worse... And their uptime is way worse than what they show. Today for example they started tracking outage almost 20 minutes after it started...

</comment><comment><USER5> EC2 itself is having some network issues.

</comment><comment><USER6> eu-west-1 had some network connectivity issues earlier on that are now thankfully resolved. We were seeing particular issues with instances that were behind ELBs that had x-zone balancing enabled (only to instances in eu- west-1b).</comment>


The DevOps Security Checklist - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqreen.io/checklists/devops-security-checklist <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm the co-founder and CTO of Sqreen (YC W18) [1].

After publishing the SaaS CTO Security Checklist 2 months ago [2], I'm excited today to share the DevOps security checklist with the HN community.

With the "DevSecOps" movement, security is more and more a topic for DevOps engineers and this checklist is here to help.

Have feedback? Please share it!

[1] [https://www.sqreen.io/](https://www.sqreen.io/) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615593)</comment>


Url Knife - extract-pattern https://github.com/Andrew-Kang-G/url-knife <comment><AUTHOR> Even after looking at the examples, I have no idea what this software does, what problem it is supposed to solve, for what I would use it, nor what the input and output are supposed to be, nor any of the examples, which are not self-explanatory to me.

The live demo doesn't work on my phone as well. It only shows the jsfiddle header and menu but no content.

The only thing I've understood that this is about parsing and extracting URLs and possible typos.

For starters, what does the first example try to achieve? What does the input syntax mean? How do I interpret the output?

<comment><USER2> It takes in text that contains malformed URLs and tries to make sense what valid URLs they might be.

I think the purpose is to extract URLs from formatted text, for example from discussion forum posts where they might be mixed up with HTML or other markup and contain typos (due to user errors or users trying to deliberately make the URLs undetectable).

Might be also useful if you want to extract URLs from PDF. PDF to text conversions might cause all kinds of errors to the output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is disappointing that so many comments here dismiss the tool as useless. The heuristics provided are priceless and worth days of engineering.

</comment><comment> extract-pattern Please leave issues on Github if there is an exception. Normalizer does not work for intranets as I indicated.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting but why? Just fail whatever input is given if it's not in an expected format - why even bother trying so hard to recover?

<comment><USER5> I would guess it could be used for use cases where you can't fail. For example recovering URLs from erroneous OCR scans, or unstructured text which might contain errors.

It could probably also be used immediately on user input to suggest possible corrections for invalid URLs.</comment></comment>


Why not beat Google? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Today, everybody wants to be Googles good boy. We all hope for attention and money which is exlusively distributed by Google these days. Entrepreneurs even want to sell their business and their souls to godfather Google.

Is that real entrepreneurship - playing someone elses game as good as you can? Why not go after Google itself? Linus Torvalds didnt write cool applications. He rewrote the operating system.

I like the idea to rewrite the web. To reorder how the whole thing works and turn it from monopoly to ecosystem again. I feel fed up with the whole Googleweb.

<comment><USER2> Linus re-implemented an existing thing; Unix. He didn't go off and invent his own OS with its own concepts, e.g. Plan 9. I think he's a bad example for your point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright. You are correct.

Lets do it all completely different. Lets get rid of search and advertising alltogether.

Any ideas?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I for one dream about beating Google. My scheme would have been a p2p based search engine - by now there are projects trying to do that, but not with very good results, I think :-(

I might have overestimated the demand for privacy, too...

I also think the social bookmarking things would have a chance in improving on Google.

<comment><USER4> How does a p2p search engine improve the results upon a non-p2p search engine, e.g. Google?

<comment><USER5> We can imagine different search results for a same request depending on the peers you connect to (if you connect to people you know). You would share a dedicated subset of a search engine with your fellow Cthulhu programming language fans, one with your coworkers, another one with your family, with your bowling club, etc.

Google always searches the same, entire web whoever you are; maybe it is not the best solution?

Yes, whether it is P2P or not is not very relevant to this problem. On the other hand, P2P allows a not-for-profit, ad-free, "do no evil", privacy and freedom of speech friendly search engine (because the infrastructure costs would be shared between the users). I guess a big problem would be the latency.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, my thoughts would have been to avoid the costs of the data center, and to provide more privacy. Although it is not trivial to protect the privacy in a p2p scenario either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, I for one am about to launch a startup that pretty much goes head to head with one of Google's properties. Maybe I'm nuts.

<comment><USER7> We're going more 'side-to-side' with our new product:

<http://www.litepost.com>

(We're hoping to introduce new ideas and more usable presentation methods, without necessarily duplicating sheer technical superiority..that can always come later.)

Anyhow, I'd say you're not nuts. Google's products all suffer from numerous defects, not the least of which is usability (in many cases).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're going to beat up Google on searching, you're just playing their game...</comment>


4,000 Foxconn workers on strike over iPhone 5 quality control measures - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/10/05/iphone-5-foxconn-workers-strike-quality-control-measures-cited/

<comment><USER2> Here's a crazy idea.

A hedge fund puts a couple billion dollar short on Apple, and then pays 20,000 Foxconn workers $5,000 each to take the month off from tomorrow and go somewhere else. That's a $100m outlay for a vastly higher profit.

It's not a serious suggestion but it's feasible. It's an interesting situation - an extremely highly valued company underpinned by extremely cheap labour.

<comment><USER3> Hedge funds (and anyone) can make money regardless of the direction the market moves, or even if the market doesn't move. So why would they do something risky, illegal, and difficult that has the potential for unbounded losses?

<comment><USER4> It's easier for a third part with only money to cause damage to apple (which will happen in a known time period) than to cause a buff.

(an industry player could cause positive effects, like a huge purchase of Apple into a new industry like enterprise/government, or vendor neutrality for public sector purchases, or Microsoft committing to OSX as a tier-1 OS, etc., but a hedge fund can't do that)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Foxconn denied the report this morning. This article is referencing a release from yesterday.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/foxconn-denies- re...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/foxconn-denies-report-of- unrest-at-iphone-factory.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Who is China Labor Watch and who are they funded by?

<comment><USER7> A quick Google search yields: <http://chinalaborwatch.org/upfile/20110706Annual.pdf> (list of large donors)

+

<http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/OurPeople.html>

Seems like a fairly new, pretty standard 501(c)(3)

<comment><USER8> Note: Anonymous donors are also allowed and aren't included on that list. Not saying anything is odd about it all. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't mean to justify Apple's policies with regards to Foxconn, but Apple delivers its products on time, on a massive scale. Contrast this with Lenovo, who released a Macbook Air copycat in August, the X1 Carbon. I ordered it as soon as it came out, and it still has not shipped.

<comment><USER10> I had a Lenovo and hated it. It felt like a cheap computer made entirely of plastic. With normal use, the enclosure started to crack. Later pieces of the enclosure actually started falling off. I'll never buy one again.

<comment><USER11> You mean like virtually every single MacBook ever? A fault Apple only fixed by discontinuing the line? [https://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+wrist+rest+cracks...](https://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+wrist+rest+cracks&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER12> Discontinuing the line and replacing all broken cases for free. I changed mine twice at no charge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Foxconn has multiple plants with more than 200k workers. 4k workers on strike must be a small enough thing for them.

<comment><USER14> 2% of your entire workforce being on strike is not insignificant - imagine if 2% of the US population suddenly took to the streets!

This, followed by the riots at other Foxconn factories, labor action, and becoming the whipping boy of the Chinese government, local labor, _and_ international rights groups.

No, I think this whole labor business is a _big_ friggin' deal for Foxconn right now.

<comment><USER13> In Belgium where I live, 10% of prison wardens and 50% of the public transportation sector go on strike at least thrice every year. Here at least it's not a big deal. Sad country, I know.

I agree it's probably more significant in China, where they are not used to this kind of behaviour.

<comment><USER15> That is very bad. I was always curious how life is in Europe (being the first world) but didn't think that's how the state of affairs would be.

Is it because of unions?

<comment><USER16> It's not "Europe", it's parts of it. France is particularly bad I hear, supposedly paralysed by unions. In the UK things are much better because unions lost a lot of their power in the 80s under Thatcher.

<comment><USER17> FWIW, France has a lower proportion of unionized workforce than the US, and a lot lower than the UK in the public sector. It's more about cultural differences than any single thing like unions.

<comment><USER16> Oh, I didn't know that. I've just heard bad things about it.

Although I might be confusing this with the government business laws in France, which are also a bit messy. There's a reason lots of French companies have exactly 49 employees.

<comment><USER17> I found it amusing that, when in college, the only people who objected to the on-campus bar's pool table usage scheme - "winner stays, loser pays" - in the whole four years I was there, were French :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _"It was reported that factory management and Apple, despite design defects, raised strict quality demands on workers, including indentations standards of 0.02mm and demands related to scratches on frames and back covers"_

It seems like a few cracks are showing the ole' Apple's armor.

<comment><USER19> I am not sure how you make that deduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> good marketing for Apple :)</comment>


Life, Death, and the Nile River – Diplomacy on the Ethereum Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://omarmetwally.blog/2018/01/11/peaceful-african-continent-on-the-ethereum-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, so this is a special case prediction market? Why not just put it on Augur or Gnosis? Really nice idea though.</comment>


It's Time to Call Out the #BadApple - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/its-time-to-bringappletojustice-cf12ce860932 <comment><USER2> These assertions are highly debatable.</comment>


Show HN: Adding List Comprehension in Java - ExprEngine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yuemingl/ExprEngine <comment><AUTHOR> ExprEngine compiles a string of expression to java bytecode in memory at runtime. The bytecode represents a static method or a class which implements a user defined interface. The method can be called as normal Java method and returns Java object.

The list comprehension grammar in Python is implemented in ExprEngine.

</comment><comment><USER2> Any reason why they are compiled at runtime and not compile time? That might be preferable for large programs.

<comment><AUTHOR> ExprEngine can be used as a part of large programs. The expression is supposed to be small enough so that the grammar issues in the expression can be addressed easily. Dynamic evaulation is designed in purpose for applications which prefer this style.</comment></comment>


How I stopped using RSS and didn't even notice - <AUTHOR> http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/01/how-glenn-fleishman-stopped-using-rss-and-didnt-even-notice/ <comment><USER2> The web would be much less useful to me without RSS. But I don't use the features common to most RSS readers. I don't care about tracking which articles I have 'read' or syncing this information across machines. I subscribe to so many feeds that there would be no value in that.

There is no way that I could read all the content I am subscribed to. I just treat it like a stream that I monitor when I feel like it. My reader archives content indefinitely and indexes it so I can search it if I get curious.

I will eventually add more features but it works for me in ways that no other reader I tried ever did.</comment>


The CIA's Dragonfly Spy - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/drones/a30795266/cia-robot-dragonfly/ <comment><USER2> I bet its really cool.. Guess we'll never know.</comment>


National Film Board of Canada: Start Watching - <AUTHOR> http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/title/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was failing to find any of the documentaries by Alanis Obomsawin on Netflix, and was astonished to discover that the full films were available for viewing online by the National Film Board of Canada:

<http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Alanis-Obomsawin/>

There look to be some incredible things on this site that haven't seen available anywhere else. Any recommendations for hidden gems in here? Are there parallel sites for other countries?

</comment><comment><USER2> Glad you found what you were looking for. As for hidden gems, here are some suggestions: <http://www.nfb.ca/start/></comment>


Yahoo malware enslaves PCs to Bitcoin mining - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25653664

<comment><USER2> It's a little alarming that one of the major online newspapers in the world can reveal such news, yet provide no substantial information on what the malware was, what platforms it infected, and how to detect if it's infiltrated your system, and furthermore remove it.

From what I read on the guardian, it seems that it's a Java-based exploit: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/08/yahoo- malw...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/08/yahoo-malware- turned-europeans-computers-into-bitcoin-slaves)

More info from the original source: [http://blog.fox- it.com/2014/01/03/malicious-advertisements-s...](http://blog.fox- it.com/2014/01/03/malicious-advertisements-served-via-yahoo/)</comment>


Noise Protocol Framework - <AUTHOR> https://noiseprotocol.org/ <comment><USER2> Noise is a fantastic set of protocols for building modern cryptographic applications. Here are a few things to look out for:

\- The interactions in the protocol are precisely specified

\- The exact security properties of the different interactions are precisely specified, including in-depth concepts like the AKE's KCI properties (AKE: authenticated key exchange, KCI: key compromise impersonation, where post- compromise, an attacker can impersonate anyone to the victim, instead of being able to just impersonate the victim to anyone).

\- Several mutually compatible reference implementations.

As great as it is, most applications should still rely on TLS for transport security. Noise is primarily for places where TLS' properties aren't suitable.

Another interesting tidbit that might not be obvious: like TLS, Noise is one protocol with many instantiations. Because it builds on a few simple primitives, these can be swapped out, although Noise defines sane defaults. However, an application built on top of Noise is far more likely to have one fixed ciphersuite set (agility, but not negotiation) -- so it wouldn't be unreasonable to think of Noise as a blueprint for a set of protocols.

I'd be happy to answer any detailed questions about the Noise protocol; I am a cryptographer, but I've had nothing to do with its development.

<comment><USER3> What about Noise vs QUIC? Which should end up getting adopted?

<comment><USER2> Noise is a blueprint for building a protocol, so they're not quite the same kind of thing. If you think you'd want QUIC, you probably want TLS instead. Noise is for more bespoke applications that have a good reason why TLS can't be their transport protocol; I don't think it should generally be the first port of call for most applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Noise is a great protocol. It used to actually be only one protocol (when it was first being worked out a few years ago), and I implemented a very shitty version of it then. Since then, it's now evolved to be a set of protocols, and it's much more robust now. (You should be able to rewind the git history and see what changed.)

I've been thinking of trying my hand at something like writing a new implementation of the modern protocol, but I have no need for a truly general one supporting every agreement/primitive set, since I'd rather just implement one, exact Noise protocol. Plus, it'd probably be easier to wait for TLS 1.3 to hit libressl and just use libtls, then. Maybe one day, though...

EDIT: Actually, I remember at one point, I had a early version of the original Noise protocol called "TweetNoise" that I tried to fit into 100 tweets, based on TweetNacl. That was fun. I think I got it finished but never released it. Unfortunately my laptop with the SSD holding that code had its fan die after Christmas, so I can't be sure until next week.

If anyone would like to still do this with the _new_ noise, it'd probably be fun. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to see Noise in action, applied to a real protocol, check out Wireguard: [https://www.wireguard.io/protocol/](https://www.wireguard.io/protocol/)

<comment><USER6> I wrote WireGuard. Happy to answer any questions.

[https://www.wireguard.io/papers/wireguard.pdf](https://www.wireguard.io/papers/wireguard.pdf)

That paper has a bit more in depth elaboration, if you're interested.

<comment><USER7> Looks awesome! Do you have any plans for GUI apps?

<comment><USER6> I don't intend to write these, but I know that people are working on things like plugins for Network Manager, which has a GUI, so I think a GUI-able WireGuard will be a reality at some point.

I also have an Android client written but still private, which I suppose constitutes a GUI.

So: the future will probably include clicks and swipes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So if I understand correctly, this is a framework to design your own secure protocol for your applications?

Kind of a higher-level building block instead of working directly with NaCL and such?

If I'm missing something, can someone explain it to me please?

<comment><USER2> Yes. There are a few "layers" of crypto in most modern applications:

\- Low-level primitives, like AES, ChaCha20.

\- Usefully combined primitives, like AES-OCB, NaCl secretbox...

\- High-level protocols like TLS and Noise.

\- (sometimes) crypto spoken over the encrypted protocols, often for E2E crypto e.g. GPG over SMTPS, or CloudFlare blinded CAPTCHA tokens over HTTPS

This matters because people sometimes think that they're not doing homebrew crypto because they are using e.g. AES. Noise builds on many of the things available in libsodium, including Curve25519 DH, ChaCha20, BLAKE2 et cetera.

<comment><USER9> Is Noise the right answer to any of these crypto "questions"? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593916)

<comment><USER10> Not yet. It will be the best answer to the last of those questions, and it is a great case study for how the preceding questions are best answered. (Those questions, by the way, originally come from Colin Percival; I didn't choose them, and wouldn't say they're the best questions).

What we're waiting for is good Noise-primitive implementations in enough languages. The Noise protocols themselves are probably the best secure channel protocols we're going to get for awhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been working on a secure UDP file transfer protocol recently and this was of particular interest to me because I ended up using many of the same design choices. At the same time, my implementation ends up being simpler since I limit the types of digests and ciphers used. It really goes to show you how difficult it is to create a general protocol that allows for massive flexibility while keeping it secure.

<comment><USER2> Noise is a blueprint for a lot of concrete protocols, mostly in the way that TLS has many ciphersuites. While most TLS implementations need to speak most ciphersuites in order to be useful, Noise applications are typically bespoke, so applications using Noise will typically also limit themselves to one ciphersuite and one Noise mode, e.g. Noise_IK_448_ChaChaPoly_BLAKE2b.

<comment><USER11> I'm excited see things like this because there are a lot of applications now starting to use homebrew crypto protocols and not all of them follow good design practices to mitigate even common pitfalls in something like a key exchange (despite using vetted libraries for crypto primitives). Having good, vetted patterns like Noise that cover key exchange and authentication should help improve the security of a lot of these applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the things I feel are underrated here, is that this spec ships with implementations written by different people in different languages.

The fact these are interoperable confirms they meet the spec.

Contrast to Argon2, where recent independent implementations found the reference implementation was incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER13> I come late but there is a video explaining the basics of the Noise Protocol Framework here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceGTgqypwnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceGTgqypwnQ)

</comment><comment><USER14> Would a implementation in Erlang be useful?

<comment><USER15> I wonder how a language/platform like Erlang/Beam VM, with its 100s of thousands/millions of concurrent processes can be utilized for speeding up deciphering/key search operations.

The math operations for each process would have to be made really fast using C libraries or custom assembly code.

Other concurrent languages/libraries would offer the same benefits I suppose.

I guess the same question can be asked of operations on current generation of GPUs.

<comment><USER16> For computation-bound processes, having more than one thread per CPU just means you pay task-switching fees unnecessarily.

In fact, "I'm just starting with Erlang/Haskell/Go and I wanted to play with parallelization so I took the first 100 million integers and spawned a thread to add each individual pair together in a distributed fashion and it's ten thousand times slower than just using a C loop, WTF?" is a very popular post on the relevant language forums. In that situation what happens is because the "payload" of each thread is a single machine-language instruction (give or take loading and saving to memory), _all_ you see is the overhead of starting, stopping, and joining threads. (Or processes or greenlets or whatever.)

Key search is embarrassingly parallel, which is basically a term of art that means "it's so easy anything works".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any implementation for Ruby or Python?

<comment><USER12> The wiki lists an "in progress" python implementation:

[https://github.com/anupsv/The-Noise-Protocol](https://github.com/anupsv/The- Noise-Protocol)

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py simple fast and secure, pick any two?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure is particularly necessary to choose. It's true that many protocol design concerns are highly complicated beasts. Do you care about repudiation, or do you want the exact opposite? Do you care about your entire protocol being indistinguishable from random to prevent fingerprinting? What are your performance requirements?

I think this is where the real challenges lie. We've got plenty of good tools for most of this, and we're now seeing protocols like Noise and STROBE that break new ground past TLS and in many cases help fill gaps TLS left open. You don't need to understand all of the design choices in those protocols in order to be able to write useful applications on top of them.

There are plenty of experimental tools left, like SNARKs and multiparty computation and all sorts of cool stuff -- but that's OK, we can take out this class of problems first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reading "I am a cryptographer" got me wary, looking back at your comments, I see that you did this multiple times before and I've tried looking you up but I couldn't find anything that substantiates that claim, I've looked also for publications and couldn't find any so I am curious, what are your credentials?

<comment><USER2> I try to keep my resume to myself unless absolutely necessary because a) recruiters b) arguments to authority are damaging, but Crypto 101[0] is probably the most interesting public one. Other than that, being one of the founders and the resident cryptographer of PyCA and Latacora, also caesium and magicnonce specifically.

[0]: [https://www.crypto101.io](https://www.crypto101.io)

<comment><USER15> The silver lining in this exchange chain is that I got to download what looks like a great eBook on Cryptography 101 and a link for future reference. Thank you LVH.

<comment><USER2> Glad you liked it!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


McAlpine libel: 20 tweeters including Sally Bercow pursued for damages - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/23/mcalpine-libel-bercow-monbiot-davies <comment><AUTHOR> Jesus, this is a dangerous and slippery slope. Yes the various tweets e.g. by Monbiot were suggestive or perhaps insinuating something, but they did not actually allege Lord M was guilty of any crime.

If this goes ahead then Twitter may as well just shut down as any errant or flippant comment about a politician or celebrity could lead to a lawsuit.

<comment><USER3> > If this goes ahead then Twitter may as well just shut down as any errant or > flippant comment about a politician or celebrity could lead to a lawsuit.

People, not Twitter, are responsible for the tweets they make. Twitter isn't being chased, the individuals are. (Twitter's involved so that addresses can be found.)

That seems reasonable. Say what you like, but take responsibility for it.

Sally Bercow tweeted: "Why is Lord McApline trending? _innocent face_ " - <USER2> was shortly after a news report (later found to be incorrect) about a high profile Tory politician pedophile. (Lord McAlpine is not a pedophile. The news programme was erroneous.) That's a clear insinuation against a totally innocent man.

Other people named him and called him a pedophile directly.

He's going after people with substantial numbers of followers. Anyone else is being asked to donate £5 to a children's charity.</comment></comment>


Chip-Ing Revolutionary New Retrievable Golf Ball - <AUTHOR> http://chip-ing.com/indiegogo <comment><AUTHOR> Track your golf ball using your smartphone! Support us on Indiegogo!</comment>


New research reignites concerns that pesticides are harming bees - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/11/18/new-research-reawakens-the-huge-controversy-over-whether-pesticides-are-harming-bees/ <comment><USER2> Also big monoculture offers no environment to most beneficial insects to live on, I guess that's why some people are moving beehives across the states every year to pollinate trees

<comment><USER3> This in fact a really big problem for the complete food chain.

In Germany, some regions lost more than 90% of their "small" birds because of the extensive monoculture. As soon as the crops could provide food for the birds, they are harvested. Ironically, it means that rural areas are like deserts for birds and they can only survive in cities!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You mean all that insecticide is killing....... the insects?

Monsanto said it would only kill the bad ones......

<comment><USER5> No. Thiamethoxam is already known to be 'acutely toxic for bees', quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamethoxam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamethoxam) .

As the NYT piece says, this isn't about killing the insects:

> "Most of the studies in the past have focused on direct effects on the bees, > both the adults and the larvae," said Robbin Thorp, professor emeritus and > bee expert at the University of California Davis, who was not involved in > this paper. These can include effects on bee mortality or reproduction.

> "This study now clearly demonstrates that in addition to effects on the > bees, both direct effects and sublethal indirect effects, that these effects > are influencing their ability to pollinate plants," Thorp said. "And they > used apple as an example of this, as an important crop."</comment></comment>


SwiftlySocial- Repurpose your blog content into social content automatically - <AUTHOR> https://www.swiftly.social <comment><AUTHOR> Apologies all, I forgot to add a description.

I've recently developed the first version of SwiftlySocial and would love to get people's feedback.

I'm new to this forum too. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hitesh</comment>


Lets create a collaborative Book List on Computer Science & Programming - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDGF6R-A4z_KuAc68rZuqQDtVVg0O21YsnXe0678Lfo/edit?hl=en_US

<comment><USER2> We should compliment that list with this one about free programming books [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely- ava...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available- programming-books)

</comment><comment><USER3> Added the gang of four under OOP. Do developers still read this, or has head first superseded it?

Then again, a major pitfall of Design Patterns is that everything starts to look like the patterns you already know, which essentially boxes in your design process. Apply the knowledge at your own peril.

<comment><USER4> Gang of four?

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns_(book)>

Commonly referred to as the Gang of Four (or GoF) book, due to the four authors: Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides.

<comment><USER6> I am currently reading it after seeing it quoted in multiple lists of "books to read".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm getting "permission denied" when going to the URL in the title. Where has the document gone?

<comment><USER8> Google Docs might be blocked at your place like it's blocked here in office.

<comment><USER7> I should have been more clear: I am able to access google docs in general, it's just this document that, after signing in, it's giving me "You need permission to access this item". I was able to access this document previously without signing in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I definitely recommend "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Steven Skiena.

Will see how this grows...

</comment><comment><USER10> getting permission denied errors</comment>


Dolphin-assisted Fishing in Mauritania - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ12t_VoZwA <comment><AUTHOR> In response to "First Proof That Wild Animals Really Can Communicate With Us" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144521)</comment>


Exhange HN: Build my app and I'll design yours - <AUTHOR>

Sup guys! Im looking for a exchange here.
I need someone to build my app in exchange I will design his. (Sure, I can do your logo too.)
Whats my app about? Basically, it's an old fashioned online dating site with a couple cool stuff.
I will brief you more if we close the deal.
If you are interested drop me a line at nico at heynico dot com and let's talk.
Ok, see ya! <comment><USER2> do you have a link to a portfolio?

<comment><USER3> I don't know if he's got a portfolio online, but his work is highly recommended, and what I've seen of it is very impressive.

I recently had the opportunity to work with Nico before my side started falling apart (which I still owe him an email about), but I recommend him and his work to anyone.

Also, his dribble is in his profile: <http://www.dribbble.com/nicogarcia>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks Barry! You are way to kind! Sorry to hear about your startup falling apart. Wish you the best!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of curiosity what kind of turn around time would you expect for someone to build your app?

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Design only, or HTML/CSS implementation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it depends on the exchange ;)</comment></comment>


ACLU Sues for Records on Border Laptop Searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.techpolitik.com/2009/08/26/aclu-sues-for-records-on-border-laptop-searches/

<comment><USER2> Searching the laptops isn't the point - we can all protect the contents of the laptops.

What would be more interesting is to know whose laptops they are taking:

Is it just shiny new Macbooks because the agents fancy a nice toy?

Is it from anyone with a certain skin color just to discourage them?

Or anyone who has made a contribution to the ACLU?

Is it people working for certain companies? Anyone landing in Seattle from Airbus, Houston and working for Shell, Detroit and work for any competent car company?

</comment><comment><USER3> Schneier has written about this before, and provided a protocol for a way to prevent search without having to lie to security agents.

 _Companies and individuals have dealt with this problem in several ways, from keeping sensitive data off laptops traveling internationally, to storing the data -- encrypted, of course -- on websites and then downloading it at the destination. I have never liked either solution. I do a lot of work on the road, and need to carry all sorts of data with me all the time. It's a lot of data, and downloading it can take a long time. Also, I like to work on long international flights._

 _There's another solution, one that works with whole-disk encryption products like PGP Disk (I'm on PGP's advisory board), TrueCrypt, and BitLocker: Encrypt the data to a key you don't know._

(the article goes on to describe exactly how you can use a key that you don't know) [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/laptop_securit...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/laptop_security.html)

<comment><USER4> The idea proposed in Schneier's article lacks plausible deniability. If it's not self evidently clear to the customs official that you can't decrypt it, you're in a sticky situation regardless.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can you explain Lisp-style macros to non-Lispers - <AUTHOR> When I tell people that my favorite language is Clojure (pick your favorite LISP dialect), I inevitably have to explain what makes it so great. That brings me to macros, yet I struggle to explain what a macro is and what it can do succinctly. Any ideas on how to explain this to people from a mostly C/C++ background? <comment><USER2> Macros are code that your program adds to the compiler to create custom language features just for that program (or as a library for other programs). A macro allows the compiler to recognize new syntax, and provides the translation of that syntax into working code.</comment>


Paypal System Outage - <AUTHOR> https://www.x.com/content/follow-major-impact-express-checkout-paypal-apis-virtual-terminal-and-website-payments-pro

<comment><USER2> Hi, I'm with PayPal. Comments are my own. :-)

Yes, I could've imagined a better way to start the week.

We had some errors on our API's being returned in the morning (7-10am GMT) followed by prolonged issues with Instant Payment Notification messages not getting sent out to merchants.

Things are looking up again and Instant Payment Notification messages are currently going out. We're now working on reducing the backlog of messages.

This is expected to take the next 24 hours before we're fully caught up.

A few more updates are available at [https://www.x.com/content/update-5-issue- receiving-instant-p...](https://www.x.com/content/update-5-issue-receiving- instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27)

Let me know if you, or anyone affected by these issues, have any questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

-Robert</comment>


Opinion: Getting rich has more to do with luck than talent - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170525-opinion-getting-rich-has-more-to-do-with-luck-than-talent <comment><AUTHOR> Bit thin this!</comment>


Gruvi: an asynchronous I/O library for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/geertj/gruvi/blob/master/docs%2Frationale.rst

<comment><USER2> I do wish the author would have put up a comparison with the tulip aio lib in Python 3.x</comment>


LPCNet: DSP-Boosted Neural Speech Synthesis - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/lpcnet-dsp-boosted-neural-speech-synthesis/ <comment><USER2> Is there a library available where a person could use this algorithm for text- to-speech? What is necessary to generate the input features for this algorithm?

<comment><USER3> No, this is just the vocoder part (like Wavenet) that converts from some representation to audio. You could probably use a Tacotron2-like approach to predict input features (which appear to be 18 Bark-scale cepstral coefficients and two f0-related parameters) from text.</comment></comment>