Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York - <AUTHOR> http://norberthaering.de/en/home/32-english/news/787-bundesbank-gold <comment><USER3> > Gold is money, which is based on physical ownership, not on trust in the > willingness and ability of another party to honor their promises. If you > have gold, but you do not have it under your control, it is almost pointless > to have gold.

Really digging this one. That's why I proactively not listen to investors/consultants who suggest to buy some gold derivates for _savety_ purposes.

In other regards: What's the point of the author? That's how the "king's peace" works since forever. Having the biggest stick and control over the valuable stuff makes you the king. And as long as you provide a stable leadership live of people is mostly peaceful. That's why people are willing to accept this trade. It's unfair but we actually want it that way. And what should the others do? Say "yeah, we totally accept that he has us by the balls"? No they act like it would be their decision so that they also keep some of their own power.

It seems the author is smart enough to know all this, so seriously: What's he attempting to achieve here?

<comment><USER4> Gold is no longer tied to power. Real estate now defines who is to be king. Look to the wealth funds of the middle east. They dont trade oil for gold these days. They buy land, the real international currency. The man with the most diversified land across many countries is king.

<comment><USER5> Land may be valuable at the moment, but that will likely change in the future when fresh, clean water will be more scarce and climate changes will render parts of Earth uninhabitable.

I'd recommend you reading this interview with M. Burry (guy who foresaw the real-estate crises in '08): [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/big- short-geniu...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/big-short-genius- says-another-crisis-is-coming.html)

<comment><USER6> That's still a real estate issue; you're just saying that the three important factors in real estate are "location, location, and location" and that those factors aren't stable over time. Tell that to the Carthaginians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bloomberg has a very interesting article on this topic also: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-02-05/germany-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-02-05/germany- s-gold-repatriation-activist-peter-boehringer-gets-results)

Reading in between the lines, it seems as if a good chunk of gold has gone missing and there is an attempt by both sides to save face.

<comment><USER8> This puts me in mind of the rai stones of Yap, and particularly of one that was lost at sea, but which continued to be used in transactions because of a general agreement that it still existed and so its ownership could be recognized.

I have lost track of the clearest version of this story that I have seen, but it is mentioned in the 'Transfers by Clearing' section here: [http://www.wondermondo.com/Countries/Au/MicronesiaFS/Yap/Rai...](http://www.wondermondo.com/Countries/Au/MicronesiaFS/Yap/RaiOfYap.htm)

<comment><USER9> One funny thought down these lines is that after 50+ years the gold in the vaults has been cold welded together. Gold is soft, malleable and heavy and after years maybe it's effectively a solid chunk of metal.

Would explain the logistic challenges and the need to re-melt the bars if they had robbed chiseled apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _The US had paid for its imports with pieces of paper on the promise, that > these pieces of paper were as good as gold and would be exchanged for gold > at a fixed rate upon request. In 1971 Nixon just said screw you, you can > keep those papers and we will keep your commodities and the gold. We stayed > friends anyway. We had to._

It's a bit more complicated, isn't it? Wasn't it West Germany, in May 1971, that said "screw you" to the US and the Bretton Woods system (the same system that helped them rebuild their economy after the war) and performed a competitive appreciation by floating the currency, contributing to the resulting Gold crisis? The Nixon shock happened in August 1971, when the game was up.

<comment><USER11> This Germany may have done, but "the gold crisis" / general Bretton-Woods- Exchange-Mechanism crisis brewed since the mid-late 60s and culminated visibly in France (de Gaulle I think) sending a tanker to collect their $ trade surpluses in physical bullion form, see the ending of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool) \--- all Nixon did in Aug 1971 was basically just confirming to the world the completion of a transition that had been in progress for years, at that point.

It all started with the emergence of "Eurodollars" in the City of London, in the late 50s --- in itself, and their consequences, an inevitably that only a few thinkers such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Rueff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Rueff) foresaw with any kind of accuracy (even though his favouring a gold standard isn't something I personally buy into as a good idea for the modern globalized economy --- same goes for a dollar standard or Euro standard or crypto- standard or any such notion though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the background to this is that, during the Cold War, Germans were worried about a possible Soviet invasion, so storing gold in the US at the time made sense. As the article states, conditions have changed somewhat and there has been political pressure to return some of the gold in recent years.

<comment><USER3> You read the news "Robberies in <your area> have increased by 30%". Would that make you more willing to redirect half your savings to my account? If so, I'm happy to discuss further via email.

<comment><USER13> If the alternative was keeping it under my mattress, and you were known to be a respectable citizen, then I don't see why not. Isn't this basically what a bank does already?

<comment><USER14> A bank is bound by more rules than the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's difficult to take this article seriously.

> the New York Fed, an institution that is _owned and controlled by Wall- > Street-banks_

No, it isn't.

> In a country, whose current president considers it an imposition that the > law and so-called judges tell him what he is allowed to do and not allowed > to do.

His rhetoric doesn't prevent the judiciary from acting or render the other two branches moot.

> The way in which the official gold of the US, and the gold held in custody > for other countries, is guarded against public scrutiny and shielded from > its owners, gives fodder to any number of conspiracy theories.

You can bet the largest repository of gold is off-fucking-limits. And, no, it doesn't.

> Had the New York Fed refused to let a foreign central bank, which was under > such obvious pressure, retrieve some of their gold, these conspiracy > theories around official gold might very well have become intense enough to > damage trust in the dollar.

What? How? Negative.

<comment><USER16> Can you really say with a straight face that if they can't produce what they say they are storing for a third party that their reputation is not going to go down the drain?

If any bank prevents anyone from getting their deposited money, for reasons other than legal, there would be serious questions about their trust

<comment><USER14> Absolutely. If countries want their gold, and the US refuses to give it to them, what does that mean? Has the US stolen it? Has someone else stolen it? If this is true, it suggests that all those countries were wrong to trust the US, as the US is untrustworthy one way or another.

Of course those countries having lost their gold is not good for them either, so it seems everybody has agreed to continue the lie.

This stuff sounds bad enough that it might turn me into a conspiracy theorist. But how is any of this even remotely acceptable?

<comment><USER17> "Has the US stolen it? Has someone else stolen it?"... to complete your line of thought I would make one more question: Has it ever existed? The whole thing about gold lies in the impossibility of speculation. Of course, it doesn't hold if one single institution controls of all of it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That reminds me of the history of Spanish gold. In summary: the republican government made an arrangement with Russia to send their gold reserves to not let Franco capture it.

Suddenly the russian military help became quite expensive. Paid in gold of course. All of it.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, they have a history of keeping other countries' gold "safe", forever...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "In 2013 and 2014 they melted 55 of the 90 tons they retrieved in these two years, destroying all evidence if anything should have been wrong, like some of that gold being inferior "coin-gold", for example." \- and I'm done.

Melting bullion is the standard way to determine that it is in fact gold. If it were "inferior coin-gold" (which I assume he means some form of alloy), that would have been detected _through the process of melting_.

This man is too far into conspiracy theories to present a neutral view of anything.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think that at 41k per kilo one tonne of gold is worth $41m.

1300 tonnes of gold is therefore worth a bit more than $51bn, which is a lot, but approximately 1 year of the UK's defence budget, so in the scale of things not really all that much.

Now, this would mean that (given that Germany is a big economy) there would be what... 20 times that amount of gold available to back a gold currency - <USER2> about $1trn. I think that the world economy is about $80trn which leaves a big problem with the assertion that a gold backed currency could challenge the $.

<comment><USER22> Gold is valued at only $41k per kilo because central banks managed to convince us that we don't need it to back up our currency.

If China really created gold-backed currency then gold price would skyrocket, increasing at lest 6 times (that's how much inflation we had since 1971, when the gold standard was abandoned)

<comment><USER23> > because central banks managed to convince us that we don't need it to back > up our currency.

No, it's because we switched to much more productive things to back up our currency. Our currency is backed by the willingness of our citizens to work and the value of the land and other possessions.

The currency is stabilized by not printing more than what there is to back it up, nor less.

Gold is a terrible thing to use because you can't create more of it as the economy grows.

Don't think fiat money is not backed by something - it most definitely is.

<comment><USER21> I think that fiat money is backed by the state's ultimate monopoly on violence.

<comment><USER23> If that were true people would not use the currency outside the country. But they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> " It seems clear that they negotiated hard with the US and acted rather shrewdly."

I do not even understand why one country would need to negotiate about their properties held abroad.

There are two reasons I can come up with right now:

\- Country A holding assets of Country B wants leverage over Country B or

\- Country A does not hold 100% of these assets any longer

<comment><USER25> Centuries ago countries, or strongmen anyway, used to formalize allegiances by trading human hostages. We're friends for all eternity because your cousin is a valued "guest" of my court and vice versa. We do that with central banks and gold now a days.

So keeping a relationship of balanced trust, yanking assets from one location will have an equal and opposite reaction probably in a completely different form somewhere else. The manipulated currency exchange rates will wiggle. Imported black forest cuckoo clocks will get a different tariff. The ratio of central bank interest rates will wiggle. Sometimes 3rd parties get roped into the deal so perhaps the GBP-USD ratio will wiggle in some manner. Something is gonna happen to balance it and you can either control what happens, influence what happens, or toss hands in air and hope the free market does the right thing. A lot of people are paid a lot of money to not do the later, so you can generally assume that politician-like or IT consultant-like, the strongly advised reaction by the people is never for their paycheck writing organization to do nothing.

So something of equal and opposite reaction, probably agreed upon ahead of time, is about to happen.

Ideally in some sort of pacifistic utopia it would be illegal for citizens to store movable assets in-country or invest locally. We're rather unlikely to bomb Germany again anytime soon, or unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, but it is sad to see the old (by my human lifespan standards) relationship on shakier grounds. Oh well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why do countries bother to hold gold? Wouldn't it be sensible to sell as much of it off as possible? (I'm asking like "ELI5" because I'm sure there is a reason)

<comment><USER27> They do. Switzerland sold more than half of their gold in the past 20 years, including all their holdings at the Federal Reserve in New York (that's like 1300 tons of gold that was sold, in comparison the hundreds of tons that are mentioned on the article for germany and netherlands).

Not sure why the article doesn't mention that fact, maybe it doesn't feed into the FUD/conspiracy theory?

<comment><USER24> Did Switzerland sell them themselves, i.e. were they flown back to Switzerland first or was the sale done by the Fed?

<comment><USER27> I would assume the gold is typically never traded by moving it physically between location, but just brought into a vault where both parties have an account (like the Fed, or London)

They didn't say how much gold they had at the Fed, just that they used to and that they no longer have any.

[https://www.bullionstar.com/gold-university/central-bank- gol...](https://www.bullionstar.com/gold-university/central-bank-gold- policies-swiss-national-bank) has a bunch of data.

For example with the sell via the BIS, I assume they just transferred the gold within the Berne vault to BIS (BIS has an account there), and then let the BIS handle the sale. The London gold was likely already there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _...the US will allow central banks to repatriate as much gold from New York as is absolutely necessary to allow them to have half of their gold at home...._

What the actual fuck? Why do we need permission from the US to have our own gold?

<comment><USER3> Try to take the gold from someone with a bigger stick. You know how that'll end, right?

<comment><USER28> Indeed. FYI, I'm Dutch, not German, and am just wondering about the whole "the world needs permission" kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everyone, stop. This guy is literally batshit insane.

Germany isn't being stiffed, strong-armed or muzzled. They are distributing assets amongst the world's soundest systems at will - at home in Germany, the UK, US and France. This guy isn't just speculating, he's making stuff up with absolutely no basis for it.

[http://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Pressemitteilungen/BBK...](http://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Pressemitteilungen/BBK/2017/2017_02_09_transfer_gold.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> Germany or Europe is no threat to the US dollar dominance; if anything the euro and the usd are "same" currency thru central bank arrangements.

The real threat to the US dollar system comes from China; slowly thru many decades.

</comment><comment><USER30> If there really is a doubt that the US holds less gold than it claims, surely this would be reflected in the pricing of US-held gold? Yet I've never heard that such a price gap exists. What am I missing?

<comment><USER31> You're not missing anything. It's just another conspiracy theory. They'll claim that the gold price is being kept at an artificial level.

<comment><USER27> Also all that gold is not in open market, just in central banks and international institutions (e.g. IMF) balance sheets. So I assume the argument is that they're covering it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For anyone interested in reading more about the standards of gold storage and exchange, the company BuillionVault has some good information on their help/FAQ pages, such as explaining what 'good delivery' bars of gold mean, and how professional gold vaulting works. (Naturally, the pages also promote their own services, but you can ignore all of that)

e.g. [https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-guide/ready-to-buy- gold](https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-guide/ready-to-buy-gold)

</comment><comment><USER32> If not stolen, what's the advantage for the USG in keeping it there?

<comment><USER33> 1200 tons of gold is worth $50B; Germany currently owes the US $175B. [1] Could it just be collateral?

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696)

<comment><USER27> And according to that site, the US owes Germany over $400B, so not sure what the point would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The opposite of this is 'Gold repatriation' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation)

Chavez was the one I remember who got his gold back onto Venezualian soil: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin- america-15900885](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-15900885)

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised to see on HN an article clearly written by a conspiracy theorist without any proof. As soon as he started adding in his own opinions of what might have been taking place, I checked out.

 _This is my reading anyway, based on what I understand is usual diplomatic custom and lingo in such affairs._

Pass.

</comment><comment><USER36> The article really dances around the obvious answer to the question in the title: "because Germany is a conquered puppet state of the US."

<comment><USER37> Good grace. In Germany, this opinion is considered to be in the militant right wing spectrum (aka sovereign citizens/Reichsbürger movement), I'm surprised and disgusted to see this here on HN as the top-rated comment.

<comment><USER36> The fact that Germany was conquered is an indisputable historical fact. Most people in the present day, myself included, are happy about that outcome. The fact, however, is clear.

I'll admit that speculating about US influence over Germany is more debatable, but I'm fairly amused that you're "disgusted" by that debate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How do you even transport 300 tons of gold? Load it onto a military ship, maybe in smaller batches, and hope the crew isn't too corrupt?

<comment><USER39> Lots of smaller shipments, each secured. Potentially air or sea (probably would do 1-10 ton air shipments for JFK-FRA). Plenty of $100mm-1b items get shipped around the world routinely, although gold is pretty uniquely fungible. It is mostly determined by insurance or willingness to self-insure, though.

This is a great article about a similar problem: [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/08/23/how-to- get-...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/08/23/how-to- get-12-billion-of-gold-to-venezuela/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> if you're into reading about gold, you can do a lot worse than reading the archives of [http://fofoa.blogspot.com/](http://fofoa.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER41> > Switzerland is a small, neutral country without a serious army. They would > hardly refuse to hand the gold back on request.

This guy is suggesting that Germany could invade Switzerland if they refuse to give back their gold, so this is a good reason to keep it there. I'm pretty sure such action would be illegal under UN rules, ie: you can't invade a country because they don't give you back your posession.

And Switzerland neutrality is highly debatable given that it's surrounded by NATO and part in a lot of EU mechanisms.

Also, an invasion would make no sense under the writers own assumption, that something is wrong in the gold market. A war in the heart of Europe will tank a lot of markets.

<comment><USER3> As Russia-Ukraine has shown you can take stuff by force without creating big scale war. And remember how Hitler just went state shopping before there was a war?

The thing about war is that most party's don't really want it. So sometimes it's possible to grab some advantage that theoretically should result in war.

<comment><USER41> So you are saying that Germany would begin military action against Switzerland for $50 billion worth of gold (rough value of 1000 tons of gold).

How much damage to the Euro and to the European stock markets would such action cause? Not to mention other costs

<comment><USER3> Not 100% what I'm saying. I'm saying that if Switzerland holds a lot of Germanys gold and has promised to give access whenever and don't hold up to that promise, Germany just moving some tanks over, then taking the gold, then moving the tanks back, is quite a possible scenario.

Yes that would harm the EU in short term (1-5 years). But so would it get hurt if a powerful member of that alliance is not able to enforce rightful demands. Anyways if we include the EU into the discussion, it's very likely that a lot of other steps would convince Switzerland before the first tank needs to get manned.

<comment><USER42> Such an action would destroy trillions of dollars of wealth. For less than apple has in cash. It doesn't make sense, $50 billion of gold is still just $50 billion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "I am not criticizing the Bundesbank for storing 37 percent of Germany's official gold in in a place there it has no control over it. It seems clear that they negotiated hard with the US and acted rather shrewdly."

I am sorry, but as a layperson, I do not know what's to negotiate. If I own something, I should be able to take it home whenever I want?? This is mind- boggling. What's the point of property that you cannot access? That's not property.

<comment><USER44> > that's not property

That's the whole point. The US government effectively treats other country's good reserves as their own.

It was shrewd negotiation because they got much more than zero, and then US government/Federal Reserve has significant negotiating ability on its side by virtue of having the world reserve currency and the ability to impact monetary policy and systems so heavily on a global scale.

<comment><USER45> The blog post implies, without much proof, that it is the US Fed that is causing the gold to be moved slowly, which conforms to the blog posters political opinions.

It could of course also be that the German gold is not moving out of the US Fed quickly because the German central bank has promised it as collateral for something, or it is involved in some other financial deal. The Swiss for instance were able to move about this much gold out of the Fed during the same time period with no problems.

<comment><USER27> Is there anything on record claiming that the Bundesbank tried to withdraw more than 300 tons but was denied (besides the speculations)?

Officially, they wanted to rebalance some of their holdings. The original plan was to remove 150 tons in 3 years, but due to undisclosed issues, that became a 300 tons withdrawal in 7 years, which was achieved three years ahead of schedule.

I'm also wondering why all those articles assume that moving tons of gold is trivial, is there any description at what is involved in X tons of gold transportation (insurance / planning / protection / etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm not really understanding what is going on here and the article doesn't address that:

1 - Why do Germany and Netherlands even store their gold in the USA?

2 - Why shall the USA/FED have any saying about Germany wanting their property back anyway? It's like me having to negotiate with my bank weather I can or not withdrawal my money from there.

<comment><USER47> > 1 - Why do Germany and Netherlands even store their gold in the USA?

Today: because it turns out they cannot get it back. Originally because countries did not want that when they were invaded by others that the invader would also run off with the wealth. So keeping it on the other side of the world in a 'neutral' country looked reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The gold is long gone. There's nothing there.

Of course they had to work out a 'deal' otherwise both/all banking systems come down.

</comment><comment><USER49> The gold is stolen.

<comment><USER22> You mean from Jews, during World War II? Then you're probably right :)

<comment><USER49> No. By the civil servants in the USA.

<comment><USER50> I also hear 9/11 was set up by the Americans, the moon landing was faked etc etc.

Yet as far as I know just making 3 people keep a secret for years is next to impossible.

If people wants me to believe in frauds so enourmous that you'll need hundreds of people to never mention anything - then I will need pretty solid evidence.

<comment><USER49> You mean just like NSA warrantless surveillance.

If it is done by the state you can keep it confidential, can't you?

And I don't think that you need hundrets of people to steal gold. Several people with state orders to delete and change regord will be enough.

<comment><USER50> The NSA case however strengthens my argument:

Someone did come forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It could have been just swapped out for gold coated lead bars.

Hard to tell without any transparency.

<comment><USER51> The down vote is exactly why polls will continue to get it wrong. Every time I make a comment on economics or tax policy on HN, I get down voted. I will stick to tech, and everyone can keep getting surprised every election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> When we build systems, we run tests to see if they actually work the way we think the should. We verify, as independently as possible, because it is important.

What would happen if we went to evidence based banking instead of just taking the word of people with obvious ulterior motives.

<comment><USER53> Somebody'd figure out how to game a blockchain, or just render it irrelevant. You cannot engineer around human ingenuity. But it's always so much fun to watch people try.

<comment><USER52> That's not the point I'm trying to make. A simple way to test this system would be to allow the 'owners' of the gold to count it once in a while. As it is, there's no verification of anything.

A system with no transparency or verifiability is just waiting for abuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Best reason NOT to repatriate it:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2017/03/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2017/03/28/record-220-pound-gold-coin-stolen-from-german-museum-in- mysterious-heist/?utm_term=.44a89a7374c7)

Record 220-pound gold coin stolen from German museum in mysterious heist</comment>


The Scourge of Error Handling - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/the-scourge-of-error-handling/240143878? <comment><USER2> Error handling is indeed very hard to get right. In Rust we've been experimenting with different mechanisms:

* Much of our code uses the Result<T,E> type for local error handling, which is very similar to the way Haskell handles exceptions with the Error monad.

* For long-distance, fatal error handling, Graydon was very influenced by the "crash-only software" paper [1]. There is a `fail` statement which brings down the task permanently with no chance of recovery. (The only code that executes after a `fail` expression is evaluated is the set of destructors attached to the data the task owns.) Of course, other tasks can continue executing and might restart the crashed task.

* For long-distance, nonfatal error handling there is a new condition system like Common Lisp's -- you register a handler and that handler gets called whenever an error happens. The handler could tell the function that signaled an error to restart with a new value, to return a value of the handler's choice, or to fail the task (the default in most cases).

The hope is that this is a more robust and performant model than the traditional exceptions model, while not being particularly verbose.

[1]: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only- softwa...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only-software)

<comment><USER3> Crash-only code sounds good.

It is worth remembering that the convention in early c development was to check for null values whenever doing memory allocation. In most PC programs, this convention added considerable overhead more or less for nothing since once a program runs out of memory, recovery really possible (oh, and Linux doesn't even return zero even when out of memory, it just boot programs).

<comment><USER4> Checking for null values from malloc does not create serious overhead, it creates minor overhead for your branch predictor, unless for some reason malloc frequently returns null.

A single context switch back to the kernel generates far more load than the null checks could ever hope to accomplish.

<comment><USER3> I mean all those checks create considerable mental overhead from code-bloat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel the same way about error handling, but I think it is more of a design issue than a language issue. Ideally, an application has a barrier that deals with anything from the outside world that can cause an error. Past that barrier, code can concentrate on the main goal, not errors.

Bertrand Meyer once said that exceptions are for cases where you can't tell whether an operation will succeed or not before trying it. Generally, that happens in I/O, system calls and input validation. The problem with a lot of error handling is that it moves beyond that realm and mixes with the logic of the system.

<comment><USER6> _> The problem with a lot of error handling is that it moves beyond that realm and mixes with the logic of the system._

What is the motivation for this? What are the perceived pains that programmers are trying to cure which are not, "cases where you can't tell whether an operation will succeed or not before trying it?"

<comment><USER7> Most often I think it's due to poor separation of concerns. The programmer is about to push an input down a stack of method calls several layers deep. There's the success condition, the failure condition, then the exception which captures unexpected behavior from the rat's nest of code he just called.

<comment><USER6> How often can this be addressed with orthogonal finite state machines? (For example: one which embodies whatever business process, and another that embodies errors and failures with IO and the network.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I personally avoid reporting errors with null return values, though that approach might actually be useful in some situations. I've seen cases where less-than-skilled developers had an irrational fear of exceptions and just treated them like undesirable error states instead of an error reporting and handling mechanism. It resulted in systems where every layer of the call stack was polluted with blocks such as:

if (result != null) { } else ...

This usually results in the real cause of an error being completely and utterly lost somewhere in the call stack, as using this kind of binary approach to error reporting is inadequate to communicate what really happened.

Question:

How do you handle data concurrency issues in big multi-user systems? For instance, if your lowest level service (usually data access layer) throws a data concurrency exception due to some other user modifying the data that the current user is trying to modify, how do you communicate to your user that the data has changed and that they are supposed to refresh the web page, if you are masking the real cause of the problem by just returning null values from the lowest level of the call stack?

I personally handle cases like this by allowing the appropriate exception to propagate to the highest level so that I can make a judgment call whether it's the kind of error that needs to be reported to the user, silently logged or something else. On lower levels I still might have try-catch blocks for logging purposes and in certain situations I might rethrow exceptions if the error needs to be reported to a higher level.

</comment><comment><USER9> "the conventional use of a null return both as an indicator of an error condition and as an actual data item"

Yet, this is a thing that I have never done, nor would never do. Can someone explain to me how it makes sense for this to happen in any other mode than as a genuine error? If I want to indicate an error condition I throw an exception, perhaps even one that I've written a class for. This allows the compiler to check that I've put proper handling in the code to deal with this condition. If I am stupid and I handle it with { e.printStackTrace();) well, this gets me no where... but if I listen to the compiler and write in handling code that repairs the condition then all proceeds nicely, as if the problem has been properly dealt with and all..

Or is it just me?

return null; just says "your problem f*wad" to me...

Not acceptable.

<comment><USER10> In C you have _no_ exception handling. The closest you can get is seqfualts. With a segfault the debugger can give you a backtrace at almost the exact issue point.

The easiest way to get segfaults is by dereferencing NULL. In C dereferencing NULL is invalid. Thus returning NULL on failure will result in something close to what raising an exception in other languages does.

In any language with real exception handling it makes much less sense, ignoring optimization.

<comment><USER11> Dereferencing NULL is undefined -- on AIX the page at 0x0 is readable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps some taxonomy is required to help us deal with this.

Some errors are essential/problem domain errors. They represent an impossibility with regards to the purpose of the code. I place validation code under this heading.

Some are accidental/solution domain errors. They represent a failure of the environment or computing platform. They are present to allow the code to decide what to do when a design assumption (network availability, disk availability, RAM availability etc) is broken.

There's also the question of who must handle the error. Exceptions allow errors to propagate up a stack. Both C-style and multivalue return error handling styles force inline handling. Common Lisp conditions allow out-of- band error handling (some other agent freezes execution and steps in).

To me the core problem is this:

1\. Error handling obfuscates the purpose of a piece of code. It hides the happy case and alternative cases.

2\. Error handling is an unavoidable requirement of all code. Things go wrong.

How best to reconcile these problems?

It would be nice to have an environment that hides and shows code in terms of the path of execution. So you'd have a happy path view, views for each alternative path, a view for the malloc fail path and so on.

No idea how that could be done. Sounds dangerously like generated code; or alternatively a self-contained image environment à la Smalltalk/Lisp.</comment>


Passbolt: Self hostable, open source, password manager for teams - <AUTHOR> https://www.passbolt.com <comment><USER2> Pros

      - free open source
      - group management can be delegated
      - works fine with mac, linux & windows browsers
      - maintenance free self hosted on k8s for 2 years
      - lack of mobile apps has not been issue
      - UX is ok, no complaints
      - requires little end-user support

Cons

      - only password field is encrypted
      - no warning that Notes are not encrypted
      - promises 'Secure files & notes (Coming soon)'
        for more than year
      - password generator has no complexity options
      - requires browser plugin
      - user passwords have no minimum entropy requirements
      - no helm chart, used our own

Experience based on free version with ~75 users. Plan to switch to paid version when _Secure files & notes_ become available.

Noticed that former lead developer [https://github.com/markstory](https://github.com/markstory) now works on Sentry. Sentry has same list of _Pros_ as above: it ' _just works_ ' without maintenance or support, running self hosted on k8s for free.

<comment><USER3> More like "fauxpensource". All the useful features are part of the expensive looking Business plan. I don't mind people charging money for software, but I really wish they wouldn't pretend to be open source when they're not.

<comment><USER4> So many "open core" projects are really crippleware. The open core business model just makes too much of an incentive to make core functionality proprietary. I guess one nice thing is you could fork the open-source version and add the "business/enterprise" features to it yourself. I'm sure that would earn you the ire of the company that makes said software though. I'd love to see the pull request to add such features to the open source version. Would you get a response like "The PR looks great, but it doesn't align with our business model, so we'll have to reject it."?

<comment><USER2> Gitlab regularly considers moving features to Open Source version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this a lot. I've been a Bitwarden user for the past few months and I'm not looking back, but I'm so happy there's reasonable competition:

\- It's still OSS, so you can self-host, which is a big selling point for me

\- There's a managed/hosted option, which is a big selling point for probably _most_ users

\- It's got a browser plugin à la BitWarden/1Password, which is a crucial feature for any well-polished password manager (and hopefully it also comes with Android autofill integration)

Hopefully Passbolt, BitWarden and others can keep eachother on their toes and help this be an innovative and widely accessible space!

Expanding on that last point: I'm a _huge_ fan of the general idea of having the option of self-hosting with a business model revolving around a paid, managed option, for password managers or otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Likewise, and I'm loving Bitwarden so far!

Although I'm using the dockerized rust API (1) for self-hosting it, and so far it's been working great for months! I am keeping a close eye on the container, and backing up the data hourly to ensure I don't need to worry about loosing anything.

(1): [https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs](https://github.com/dani- garcia/bitwarden_rs)

<comment><USER7> I was evaluating Bitwarden years ago (before bitwarden_rs), but was thrown off by the lack of support for 2FA tokens without a subscription.

Does selfhosting with bitwarden_rs solve this ? or do i still need a subscription for storing 2FA tokens along with passwords ?

I have absolutely no problem paying once per major version for software, open source or not, but i refuse to pay any subscription. At least when buying a version i can choose to upgrade or not.

<comment><USER8> Yes bitwarden_rs supports 2FA, including U2F keys. I setup my own instance in a Docker container on my Synology. I only have access to it while I am at home (or VPNed in) as I'm not willing to punch a hole in my firewall for external access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> heh, i know a guy that will be having rage-fits of the use of "on-Premise" on their web site...

Premise:

noun /ˈprɛmɪs/ LOGIC a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion. "if the premise is true, then the conclusion must be true" verb /prɪˈmʌɪz/ base an argument, theory, or undertaking on. "the reforms were premised on our findings"

Premises:

noun a house or building, together with its land and outbuildings, occupied by a business or considered in an official context. "the company has moved to new premises"

<comment><USER10> Hope you let the site operator know, or filed a bug on their github

<comment><USER9> That's possibly the first time I've ever done a bug report :-P Lets see where it goes #358

<comment><USER9> hey cool, they fixed it :-D

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the report

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why would I pay at least 450 euro per month for something I have to run myself? I appreciate that support and maintenance costs are certainly something to pay for, but a high monthly charge when I'm taking all the risk, and paying for the hosting immediately turns me off.

Especially considering the 4 hour SLA on phone support for the enterprise version. If the password management system is down, work stops. I'd rather not have to break the glass on the emergency god account at all.

<comment><USER13> > _Why would I pay at least 450 euro per month for something I have to run > myself?_

Some people/teams/departments are busy with other things, so that amount is worth the cost of outsourcing a service such that the team members can focus on other things.

Also:

* why would anyone run RHEL when they can run CentOS? (The cost of a service being down is more than the support fee.)

* why would I go to a restaurant when I can cook a meal at home for much less?

* why would I pay for a car wash when a garden house and a sponge worth just as well?

Also also, you may want to actually check what the pricing is:

* [https://www.passbolt.com/pricing/pro](https://www.passbolt.com/pricing/pro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a small dev team we needed something similar to passbolt, but that would primarily be used for sharing API keys and other application secrets for our code base. (Although we use it for other passwords as well) A lot of the existing tools are fairly complex to setup and are not tied to identity management systems. (i.e. You have to setup and maintain separate user accounts)

Since, we were on Keybase already for employee identity and chat, we created an extension to encpass.sh to use Keybase for our secret storage. ([https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/master/extensions/...](https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/master/extensions/keybase/KEYBASE.md)) It has been working really well so far, as when we add someone to a Keybase team, that person immediately has access to that team's secrets. No extra setup required.

</comment><comment><USER10> My team has been using this for over a year. It's been my favorite answer for this problem-space. I love the self-hosted part (which means I also get backups I can trust). It's trivial to put inside a VPN for added security. It's security reviews were good and built on standard tools (so maybe if PB is dead I could recover outside?). Just save the key you download when you setup or your hosed!

Which reminds me, I've been meaning to make a plain-text archiver for this -- to print out secrets and put them in my safe.

<comment><USER15> imho, [https://www.deadmansswitch.net/](https://www.deadmansswitch.net/) is a better option than paper in a safe.

your house could burn down or someone might not be able to open your safe (easily).

pgp encrypt a message that gets sent to someone with instructions for how to access your things if you don't check in.

<comment><USER10> I hear you; I've got three copies, two physically distant safes, and a deposit-box -- it's a habit I got doing SysOps for a bank back in the day.

<comment><USER16> Be careful with safety deposit boxes - [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit- box...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box- theft.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You just need git, ssh and pass ([https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)), see [https://fr.jeffprod.com/blog/2019/gerez-vos-mots-de-passe- av...](https://fr.jeffprod.com/blog/2019/gerez-vos-mots-de-passe-avec-des- logiciels-libres/) (french)

<comment><USER18> Or [https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass](https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass) if you want something passwordstore compatible but with additional team features.

<comment><USER19> I use gopass myself and got it working on my windows laptop Including WSL and still use it. I even tried to adopt within the team and then its flaws were in full view. Hard to setup correctly on machines, hard to share passwords in team. Reencrypting passwords worked sometimes but not always for all team. I gave up trying to get team to use it.

<comment><USER20> Sad to hear that. This is likely due to the additional complexity of GPG I guess?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I feel like this is becoming a very crowded market. What sort of differentiation separates this service from the pack?

For my purchasing decision, I'd lean heavily on the probability the service will be there in 5 years (it's obvious I'm getting older I guess), as the market seems pretty mature.

<comment><USER22> I did a pretty thorough review of PassBolt a couple of years back when I was trying really hard to get a company to adopt it and give up their "we store our all of our passwords on a spreadsheet" approach.

I don't have my notes any more, but off the top of my head, the big points in favor were:

\- Self-hostable. The tech guy in charge just resolutely would not use any hosted service, period. In his evaluation, trusting a centralized password management service was less secure than a spreadsheet in a Windows share.

\- Low cost. Password management is integrated into some MSP products but these can be a bit pricey for small shops.

\- Built with PHP. Same guy was uncomfortable with Python, Node, and all that, and insisted that he be able to maintain and troubleshoot the codebase himself if necessary, so it had to be PHP.

The main failing was that it didn't have proper mobile device support, so it would be a pain in the ass for some of the employees.

As far as I know that same company still keeps their passwords in a spreadsheet. They've had several costly security incidents over the years.

<comment><USER23> > \- Built with PHP. Same guy was uncomfortable with Python, Node, and all > that, and insisted that he be able to maintain and troubleshoot the codebase > himself if necessary, so it had to be PHP.

Now that's an interesting perspective, I don't think I've heard anyone consider PHP to be more secure than Python before.

<comment><USER24> > I don't think I've heard anyone consider PHP to be more secure than Python > before

If you heard anyone discuss language X being more secure than language Y, then I'm sorry - but that person has no clue what they're talking about.

PHP is as secure or insecure as Pythong / Ruby / Go / <insert language here>.

Hammer depends on the one holding the hammer.

<comment><USER23> Of course; the best comparison you can make in security here is the amount of raw memory access.

People condemn languages for two security reasons: the average level of competence in products usually written in a language, and the amount of footguns a language provides.

PHP is very easy to learn, which is why a lot (really, a _lot_) of open source software is of very questionable quality. For many, it's the first programming language someone learns, which means the quality is often far from what a developer is capable of with a little more experience.

PHP also has a lot of weird functions and behaviourisms, all perfectly well documented (but nobody really reads up on the details of `isset`, it seems). APIs seem inconsistent and mysql_escape_string and its cousin mysql_real_escape_string tell a story of a problematic history. There's also the typing issue that plagues all loosely typed languages.

I personally consider Go to be more secure of a language than PHP or Python because the behaviour is a lot easier to understand.

Of course properly written, typed, well-tested PHP can be a lot better than many Go products, but the expectations for the different language are just different because of the different levels of experience programmers are when they start with each language.

<comment><USER25> >problematic history

You say it as if it didn't happen to Python and Go. Also experienced programmers are luxury.

<comment><USER23> Every language has its troubled history, but PHP is especially famous for security vulnerabilities by either beginners or intuitive API design.

It might have something to do with the fact that PHP is still taught in a lot of web dev classes (though NodeJS has taken its crown) and that Go is relatively unknown for beginning programmers. Python generally just runs on your own machine because it's not as optimized for being a web language like PHP has been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We have been considering it in our team but the lack of capability of creating a "shared vault" and connecting it to a centralised AD/LDAP identity was a no go for us. Also, the lack, due to the tech itself, of a recovery method for users and administrator (with audit of course) was a big disapointment. PS : never connect it to your AD/ldap or it will spam everyone in your organisation by default ! #lessonlearned

</comment><comment><USER27> pass[0] has been the best of everything so far. gpg based and easy to use with keyboard shortcuts. i like alternatives like htis, but pass is super barebones and highly available.

[0]: [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

<comment><USER28> Pass has got to be one of my favorite CLI tools and is descent third-party browser plugins and mobile apps. Gopass works well too, especially for Windows and is compatible. I wish someone would build a bookmark manager using a similar concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This one doesn't have any limitations, and can use LDAP/AD. Along with it, you can use NextCloud other features:

* [https://git.mdns.eu/nextcloud/passwords](https://git.mdns.eu/nextcloud/passwords)

</comment><comment><USER30> Slightly off topic: I love this tag line under "Methodically tested"

> Half of the code base is there to make sure the other half is behaving.

</comment><comment><USER31> self hosted system requirements seem much more lightweight compared to Bitwarden

<comment><USER32> There's a alternative implementation for the BW server that is much more lightweight than the original called bitwarden_rs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like to evaluate this, however, I'm curious what was the Passbolt's tasty recipe for building on top of CakePHP web framework?

<comment><USER11> Hi passbolt developer here, the reason for building on top of CakePHP was mostly: \- it's been audited multiple time (last in date was by Cure53, financed by mozilla foundation) \- convention over configuration \- good versatility for hosting (= less support) \- lovely community (less big but very friendly)

<comment><USER34> I see no mention of a CakePHP audit here [https://cure53.de/#publications](https://cure53.de/#publications) ... am I looking in the wrong place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I like Clipperz

Seems quite similar:

[https://clipperz.is/](https://clipperz.is/)

</comment><comment><USER36> > Self hostable, open source, password manager for teams

One of my teams shares passwords as well. We use KeePass over WebDAV. Works for us. I fail to see the market niche here.

</comment><comment><USER37> Hmm, this is the kind of software I'd sooner the developer have a liability for rather than "You get what you pay for" when my passwords are leaked.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why is is this better than Bitwarden?? - [https://bitwarden.com](https://bitwarden.com)

<comment><USER39> Not necessarily better, different. Folders management for instance : [https://help.passbolt.com/assets/img/help/2020/05/rc1/folder...](https://help.passbolt.com/assets/img/help/2020/05/rc1/folders.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've become quite the fan of 1password. I think that this kind of thing is critical enough to spend money on.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does "for teams" mean that passwords can be shared?

And is password sharing a good idea to begin with?

<comment><USER42> Password sharing is not a good idea, but sometimes or even often unavoidable.

<comment><USER41> I have the feeling that password sharing is only unavoidable in a company that doesn't care much about security.

Any company that takes security seriously would, I suppose, have personal passwords as a strict requirement. They wouldn't use services that can't comply with this requirement.

<comment><USER43> Not necessarily true.

In the health insurance industry, for example, many insurance portals offer one account that has to be used by a team. And, in a team scenario where all staff need access to all third party vendor accounts, it can be simpler to share the one password rather than manage 10.

For on site systems under a company's control, they can enforce the policies. But third party resources are where the limitations are. It's not the company that's minimal on security hygiene, it's the non-tech vendor in many cases.

<comment><USER41> > In the health insurance industry, for example, many insurance portals offer > one account that has to be used by a team.

Sorry, but are you kidding me? Do these companies pass security audits?

This only shows that security is near the bottom of the priority list for these companies, probably right above privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is there a web API for changing passwords? Would be nice if these passwords managers could help you change passwords when they are found on a list through an API (that would require the old password anyway).</comment>


How Internship Helped Me to Get Full-Time Software Engineer Job (Worth $45k) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shreenivas_rp/how-internship-helped-me-to-get-full-time-software-engineer-job-worth-45k-9ec3b6328b7d <comment><USER2> Coming from a part of the world where most people studying IT start working (as full time programmers) on their second year of college I really don't understand the mentality that even after paying for your education you still are not trained enough to go into a real workplace environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, This is the drawback of Traditional education system where most of the people are good at studying like you mentioned doing programming or other tech work during their college.

And because they are worried about Grades that they will get in exams is most popular thing for their career before even they get graduated and enter into REAL WORLD.

It's not about even how much you paid for your college degree, it's all about people's minds when they get REAL TECH JOB work just after getting a degree.

I am grateful that, I learned this all doing an internship and getting real- world experience in the industry.

It's even so sad in this modern fast pace digital world, the education system is still not changing and teaching a REAL WORKPLACE environment.</comment></comment>


Mysterious Laser Turret Appears on US Navy Destroyer USS Dewey - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30941/mysterious-laser-turret-appears-on-us-navy-destroyer-uss-dewey <comment><USER2> This new US Navy acronym is going to make googling for Linux installation issues a lot more tricky:

"Ruggedized High Energy Laser (RHEL)"

<comment><USER3> That is actually a good way to hide public information. Even the best search engines might fail you here.

<comment><USER4> Wonder if there are more examples of this hiding, intentionally or not. I recently could not find the Trinity and Beyond [0] movie on DDG, because all hits were of some family vlog (though I still find it on Google first page).

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

<comment><USER5> Rudy Giuliani's company is named Fraud Guarantee. This was apparently chosen to push down search results about one of the co-founders' legal issues.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left- trail-o...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left-trail-of- troubled-businesses-before-ukraine-probe-push-11572527608)

<comment><USER6> Seems incredibly...apt in retrospect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Eventually, the Navy will be doing more than "dazzling" and "blinding" enemy optics. The Tactical High Energy Laser project[1] demonstrated that incoming mortars and Katyushas could be shot down. It seems unlikely that this technology was abandoned, albeit it's probably much bulkier and more expensive than the RHEL.

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

<comment><USER8> Couldn't you just start putting a reflective coating on your mortar rounds?

<comment><USER9> You need a coating that won't burn off even if it reflects 99.9% of the beam, and rugged enough to survive being field handled.

Those don't exist, it will be scratched off well before it's even used.

Not to mention the cost of such material and the cost loss of scrapping or converting existing inventory won't make it a viable solution.

The majority of mortars fired at US troops today were likely made in the 60's and 70's.

You are better off with simply using mortars in large volleys to saturate the system or simply attacking unprotected targets.

Most rounds fired at US troops can't penetrate their body armor either it doesn't stop them from trying not did it force them to switch to armor defeating projectiles.

They just are less effective and hope they'll either land a lucky shot to the face or lower limbs or a debilitating shot to unprotected areas such as the arms and shoulders.

<comment><USER10> You don't necessarily need the round to survive. If it's reflecting 99.9% of a destructive laser beam, then that poses a risk of that beam bouncing back at the ship and causing damage. It might be a minuscule risk in isolation, but dozens or hundreds of rounds with retroreflectors designed specifically to bounce lasers back whence they came could wreak havoc on all sorts of fragile sensors (including the squishy ones in sailors' eye sockets).

<comment><USER11> That would make this an illegal weapon system according to the Geneva Convention. Weapons that are intended to injure rather than kill are prohibited.

<comment><USER12> That's not the right reading of the convention. The rule is against unnecessary suffering and even excessive lethality. For example hollow point rounds are more effective at killing but solid rounds have the same disabling effect and give the recipient a chance of survival. Hollow point bullets are banned by the convention.

Its also illegal to use excessive calibre bullets against human targets. Even though such large projectiles are much more likely to kill.

The exact phrasing is:

"It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering."

[https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...](https://ihl- databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule70)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can thedrive.com/the-war-zone please stop calling stuff "mysterious", "shadowy", and "secretive"? 80% of everything on their site is one of the three.

"New laser turret" doesn't have the same cachet as "mysterious laser turret" I guess.

<comment><USER14> Also it's not really "mysterious" if we know what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a super stupid question, but in the rendering it looks like the turret only has a ~180 degree turning range. It can't point behind the ship because there's a giant wall behind it. So as the enemy...can't I just shoot the back of the ship?

Obviously the solution here is to put another turret behind the ship, but is that actually the plan or am I missing something? Do missiles always come from the front of the ship for some reason?

<comment><USER16> Each _Burke_ as a fore and aft mounting point for a point defense system. Flight I and Flight II ships have a 20mm Phalanx system mounted there. Flight IIA ships (which the _Dewey_ is one of) were originally built without point defense guns because they were fitted with the Evolved Sea Sparrow point defense missile system (carried in the vertical launch cells), but the Navy later decided to retrofit a Phalanx turret onto the aft mounting point of the Flight IIA ships. I have no idea why they only felt the need to have the gun on the stern arc.

Presumably if a point defense laser reaches operational status it would be fitted to both PD mounting points.

<comment><USER17> They are constrained by ship design and efficiently tradeoffs. It's a big space/weight/manning requirement for each system. No one is really worried about missile attacks except from on the beam and above, so mounted high and aft is a decent compromise. Personally I rather carry more ESSM reloads in the magazine than cwis rounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _The system is likely the service 's new "ODIN" laser dazzler that is meant > to blind enemy optics on ships, boats, aircraft, and missiles._

Couldn't you now just home in on the laser? I feel like I'm missing something.

<comment><USER19> Not if your optice are totally saturated by the laser. Point a laser at a camera some time, and see if you can tell where it is in the resulting picture. The image will probably be solid red

<comment><USER20> Sweep a physical occluder across the lens, measure abatement?

<comment><USER21> So you want your lens covered 99.9% of the time, just in case someone points a laser at it?

<comment><USER22> >> Sweep a physical occluder across the lens, measure abatement?

> So you want your lens covered 99.9% of the time, just in case someone points > a laser at it?

Don't some missile seekers already work that way?

[https://www.ausairpower.net/TE- Sidewinder-94.html](https://www.ausairpower.net/TE-Sidewinder-94.html):

> The Sidewinder's seeker used an ingeniously clever optical arrangement, with > a Cassegrainian mirror fitted with a tilted secondary mirror. The secondary > mirror rotated in unison with a reticle, projecting the whole instantaneous > field of view of the mirror through the reticle onto a filter/detector > assembly. Because the mirror secondary was tilted, rotating it about the > missile's axis swept the cone of the mirror's field of view about the > missile's axis in a fashion analogous to a conical scanning radar seeker > (see diagram).

<comment><USER23> Modern systems are Focal Plane Array which is aerospace speak for a typical camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Title: Royal Navy deployed laser weapons during the Falklands War

[https://newatlas.com/falklands-laser/28574/](https://newatlas.com/falklands- laser/28574/)

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/aquilon-1986-image01.jpg)

That one is stationed in my hometown

</comment><comment><USER26> Can't that baby burn retinas? If that's the case isn't a violation of the Geneva Convention to use that?

<comment><USER27> AFAIK it's a war crime to deliberately blind people. Incidental blinding is acceptable, as long as the intent is to cleanly kill whatever's being lased.

Similar to how shooting to kill is ok, but shooting to maim is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure i see the point. Surely gyros can just keep it on track for last known good reading?

<comment><USER29> How good was that heading? Good enough that the missile can hit the ship _with no further adjustments for the rest of the flight?_ Probably not.

(This is less important if the missile has a nuclear warhead...)

<comment><USER28> Given how fast missiles are and how slow ships move I can't imagine it being hard.

Between a good gyro, some satelitte positioning I can see it getting a good hit rate even if blind.

And even if you miss just triggering an explosion in roughly the right area will do a fair bit of damage to ship antennae etc

The whole thing strikes me as a bad stopgap till lasers are powerful enough to take down missiles

<comment><USER29> When I was a kid, we drove up I15 in southern Idaho. There was one place where we topped over this rise, and the road was straight for miles. Way down there in the distance there was an overpass across the interstate. I remember wondering how my dad could aim the car precisely enough to go under that overpass way out there. Now, as an adult, I understand. He didn't aim it that precisely. He steered along the way.

But if you don't steer along the way, and you're off half a degree, say, and you go blind 10 miles out, you miss by 10 miles times sin(1/2 degree), which is 0.09 miles, which is 460 feet. I don't know what the effective radius of an anti-ship missile is, but 460 feet seems to me to be a rather long distance.

That's assuming you _just_ have to worry about aiming accuracy. You could also have things like wind gusts. And the ship could be not just moving, but maneuvering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Pardon my non-HN tone but...remind me again how this would have prevented 9/11; is useful against cyber-warfare; or can prevent the public's beliefs and decision-making from being influenced by a fistful of dollars and some well- placed digital ads.

We keep spending more and more, and are being outsmarted with less and less. Three-quarters of a trillion dollar (i.e., the USA's DOD budget) is a significant amount of money.

<comment><USER17> That's a valid criticism of budget allocation favouring existing modes of conflict. However, things like jamming maximize the technical advantage the US has against adversaries seeking to develop asymmetric threats -- it is possible to make all the (cheaper) missiles miss.

One school of thought is that cyber/IO is like the air force -- it prepares the environment for ground action but doesn't hold territory. So once the West is weakened and divided enough, kinetic operations (Taiwan, Ukraine, Georgia, Syria/Iraq) become possible. So it is still very valuable to have a kinetic defence.

<comment><USER30> Valuable? In the sense that we keep getting beat with less and less? Where does value end and Military Industrial Complex begin?

The USA out spends the next 10 or so nations __combined__. Most of those are allies.

<comment><USER17> Much of the spending is pork. Existing programs that are hard to cut. The US has very expensive tastes when it comes to capability. However, modern EW techniques are far more bang for buck than most programs.

The US doesn't get beat in the fight, they get beat by the strategy the US govt chooses. They keep wanting what is almost impossible (like a peaceful, democratic and tolerant Afghanistan that does grow opium) and half committing to do it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla's Model Y Gets High Marks from a Critic Musk Respects - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/tesla-s-new-model-y-gets-high-marks-from-a-critic-musk-respects <comment><USER2> As long as Tesla sees their cars like a piece of software I won't be buying one. The norm for cars is to get updates tested and approved by national testing centers and then get it applied and re-tested at dealers before letting someone drive the car. Tesla updates over the air as if is not a self driving car that could kill people but an IoT toaster. In my opinion -especially with how unsafe the so-called auto-pilot is- they shouldn't be allowed on the road with uncertified software.</comment>


Ask HN: How does your company train and evaluate their developers? - <AUTHOR> I work for a small startup. I have been tasked with organizing some training materials for on-boarding and continued skill development. I have gathered a set of resources like tutorials, videos, and books that the existing developers have learned from.<p>My question is, how is your company tracking and evaluating performance and participation? I looked at something like creating classrooms in repl.it but the PHP environment does not have any way to add extensions, so setting up Laravel in there won't work. I looked at some other websites like Hackerrank and Coderbyte, but they are focused more on hiring rather than on the job training. <comment><USER2> For on-boarding, we've been working on [https://usecodeflow.com](https://usecodeflow.com), which is a way to create walkthroughs of your codebase for newly on-boarded engineers. We've found that these walkthroughs are very helpful for developers to start asking deeper questions about a codebase.

Feel free to reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> We like to encourage developers to go for certifications in the technologies that we use (AWS certifications, Snowflake certifications, etc). Our vizualization folks get Tableau and PowerBI certified. We also have some Tableau admin certified people. This way you have a measurable qualifier that someone is training in a relevant skillset. We allow developers to spend a certain number of hours per year on training, and reward them with raises (500 or 1000 dollars per year) when they achieve their certification. We are flexible about what certs people go after (as long as they are relevant to the business). We also try to send people to conferences hosted by the relevant company once they pass the exam (re-invent for example).

<comment><USER3> I forgot to answer your other question about tracking employee engagement. We make people track their work down to the 15 minute increment, and make sure they hit specific allocations per project exactly. We also micromanage their tasks in Jira so all of the time tracking lines up to tickets.

For the love of god do not do this. Engineers hate this and flee from it in droves.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm definitely not interested in micromanaging, I just want to have some way to measure the effectiveness of the program. Certifications makes a whole lot of sense, because there's a required exam.

<comment><USER4> I get it where you are heading, but I'm more a "showoff" person. I can talk about the things I have done and things that I want to learn and definitely need to learn.

If you look at my GitHub, there are some things missing, like CI/CD, MSFTStudy with powershell, AWS and Azure things.

I follow the books that have exams in them, but I don't the exams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We at msb.com have been looking at this problem for a while. While we're mainly a k8s training platform, we've been slowly adding more features to make it more like a "developer experience in a box" and one interesting use case we've come up with for companies to put their own internal content that works on our infra (basically their whole ci/cd setup, git practices etc.) for the purpose of onboarding new engineers. We haven't explored it much, but if this sounds interesting it would be great to talk</comment>


San Francisco housing – The NIMBY challenge - <AUTHOR> http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-nimby-challenge.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> In all seriousness, the problem is incredibly simple: there is nowhere near enough residential units to support the population, and this is entirely due to the various municipalities complete unwillingness to allow anywhere near enough new residential units to be built.

Even Plan Bay Area is at least recognizing there is a problem, but their "resolution" to the housing crisis was simply to have a _reduced_ deficit between projected net new job creation and new residential unit construction. In effect, saying that more people should be living sharing rooms, living in their RVs, cars, or just living without any shelter, at all.

I genuinely fear that there is a potential for increases in property crime, violent crime, and even civil unrest. When people are denied access to shelter, they become desperate and more likely to engage in violence.</comment>


F1's Australian GP to be cancelled after coronavirus case - <AUTHOR> https://www.skysports.com/f1/news/12433/11956439/f1s-australian-gp-to-be-cancelled-after-coronavirus-case <comment><AUTHOR> I was commenting yesterday about how surprised I was that the FIA was continuing with the season, especially given the international travel requirements. It seems this has all unraveled even before the first race of the season.

It's also worth noting the FIA hasn't confirmed this yet, and it seems to be a decision made by the teams to not compete.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's still not up at F1.com. But if the teams won't compete, there won't be a race, whether it's officially canceled or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the bad publicity would be too much for the FIA to accept this time. But they have refused to cancel races at the request of the teams in the past. 7/10 teams wanted to cancel the 2005 US GP, but the FIA refused. Resulting in what was probably the most farcical race in the history of Motorsport (where 14/20 drivers retired after the formation lap).</comment></comment></comment>


Homebrew "python" formula migrates to Python3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/788b65e645bb342e82946b52173997cd00c322ac#diff-a37f3b41ad358542dc557c344a8164a9 <comment><AUTHOR> Better link with discussion of PR would be — [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew- core/pull/24604](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/24604)</comment>


Popular Science puts 137 years of archives online for free - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/archives

<comment><AUTHOR> A cover view of all the issues: <http://books.google.com/books/serial/wzsEAAAAMBAJ?rview=1></comment>


Intervals in modular arithmetic - <AUTHOR> https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/intervals-in-modular-arithmetic/ <comment><USER2> Interval arithmetic is neat. This is a great article for introducing modular interval arithmetic too. I'm going to add this to my toy interval arithmetic library when I get a chance. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> One quirk worth mentioning is equality testing. That is _not_ simply a matter of checking that lower and upper boundaries are equal:

      [4,3] = [8,7]

      [4,4) = [8,8) = (4,4]

(The latter independently of the issue whether you think those sets are empty or the complements of the empty set)</comment>


Experimental Music Notation Resources - <AUTHOR> http://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/149/98

<comment><USER2> It's kind of surprising what a hard design problem musical notation is. Like modern mathematical notation, modern standard musical notation is incredibly elegant.

\- It can be read almost as fast as being played

\- It captures a tremendous level of complexity and expressiveness

\- It communicates the music _almost_ exactly

\- It's flexible and can stretch to accommodate almost any instrument in the Western cultural inventory

Like mathematical notation, it's incredibly general purpose, you can write jazz, rock and symphonies in pretty much the same system.

It's not _perfect_ , it doesn't perfectly encode every nuance of a performance in the same way a recording can. But it's possible, without ever hearing a piece, to read modern notation and be able to provide a very high quality replay of the original work.

It's also paradoxically simple. A young child can learn the basics and be able to perform simple pieces reasonably well.

In the early 20th century there was an explosion of ideas (seen here) for alternate systems, all part of the deconstruction of music movement, but they're almost all specialist systems, not really capable of encoding general purpose music.

For a while, I was interested to see who else had come up with notation systems and I spent some time researching through history. It turns out, surprisingly (considering the often amazingly deep musical traditions many cultures have), that there aren't many [1]

Most systems use a simple language glyph to note correspondence, but things like duration weren't encoded. A modern take would be like writing a song something like: A A E E A E D E F E and having only that kind of system to encode everything from symphonies to pop-music.

A major innovation in Korea was the introduction of a system that _did_ encode duration.

Other systems used relative markings, early European chants would indicate things in such a way that notes were higher or lower than the preceeding notes.

Both kinds of systems required lots of verbal information transmission to properly transfer the knowledge of the song's performance. With repetition a performer could learn the proper way to recreate the song, using the notation as a memory aid.

Later Western efforts encoded things on a bar to provide more detail and the modern system is merely an extension of that.

In the East, the Eastern Orthodox Christians developed a system known today as Byzantine Notation, and it's quite beautiful. But it's still a relative system that requires some significant contextual knowledge to perform from sight.

For fun, I encourage any musicians here to try to come up with, from first principles, a good general purpose musical notation system. It's incredibly hard to do without sacrificing things like in-performance readability or compactness. If you aren't a musician, I encourage you to do the same with math notation, starting with numbers and see what you can come up with. I've found it's very hard to do so without more or less ending up with some variation on the current systems we use.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries) 1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Notation_in_various_countries)

<comment><USER3> > It's not perfect, it doesn't perfectly encode every nuance of a performance > in the same way a recording can.

There is a common misconception that music notation (at least the European kind) is about capturing a performance, or describing sound. It is not. The function of the notation is to preserve and communicate an abstract musical idea.

That idea is then interpreted by musicians and becomes a "performance". For example, in a jazz context 8th notes would be played "swinging", in a similar fashion to the "notes inegales" of baroque music. In early music in general, the idea is that the notes convey only the gist of the music, and the performer is expected to elaborate on them with ornamentations and diminutions.

This double life of the music, as an eternal abstract idea and an ephemeral, momentary sound happening, is perhaps the defining characteristic of the classical European tradition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A pity there is no musical rendition to go with them.

Well, _Clouds For Piano_ did come out nice. [http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832...](http://llllllll.co/uploads/default/a5a394625f34fb9f61fa24832b779dcbae99961d)</comment>


Ask HN: Book recommendations for 2014? - <AUTHOR>

I've just been going over all the stuff I read in 2013[1], and I particularly enjoyed a few recommendations that I got from HN last year including the Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. However, I'm looking at my To-Read List now and I'm shrugging my shoulders. I suspect there's a lot of good ideas out there and more like me who need something good to start the new year with. Any recommendations for the HN demographics?<p>[1] http://danielhough.co.uk/blog/books-of-2103/ in case you're interested <comment><USER2> Rework by 37Signals ^ is good.

Personal favorite are:

1) As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

2) Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

3) 2nd half of Steve Jobs Bio

4) Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy

5) The Big Short by Michael Lewis

6) The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank

</comment><comment><USER3> _Rapture of the Nerds_ , Corey Doctorow.

</comment><comment><USER4> \- The Alchemist</comment>


IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transactional memory. - <AUTHOR> http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/38653.wss <comment><USER2> Can anyone who works with big iron regale us with tales of modern mainframes? These days it seems the term "mainframe" is associated with the 70s and 80s (and COBOL!), but I'm pretty sure the contemporary mainframe market has a bunch of cool stuff that we mere mortals hardly get to hear about.

<comment><USER3> I used to develop software for system-z(2 years ago). As someone else said, if you are already using mainframes, get another one. If you arent, pretty much you can ignore them. Their hardware is of higher quality, but I think their uptime has more to do with the hermetic seal of human process that exists around the installations. You can't get anything changed in production, ever. And thats fine, because banks have been doing the same thing for the last 30 years.

I don't actually think performance wise they have anything on a cluster of x86 servers. But its hard to benchmark things like that accurately.

From a developer point of view, its not a great technology stack to work on. Its old and out dated, and is pretty incompatible with other platforms. EBCDIC is a pain, 3270 terminal is a pain. Having to allocate files manually is a pain. Having actually about 7 different types of files is a pain.

Its really all a pain. Just dont go there.

Also, I found that guys who had been working on mainframes for a really long time have a pretty outdated view of what the "distributed" world has to offer. A lot of the time they dont understand what "web Scale" at the level of google, facebook et al are operating at.

As an additional funny annecdote, the I/O that a lot of people have been talking about is now conventional if high end disk array's AFAIK. But internally the disks are emulated for the OS to look like the disks it was using back in like 1975. Thats how it gets backwards compatibility, just dont change anything.

<comment><USER2> As a technologist I'm always excited about new stuff, but there's another part of me that thinks it's really neat that some of the world's most important software was written 30 - 50 years ago and still works just fine.

Can you imagine a time 1000 years into the future where software written today might still be in use? How cool would that be?!

<comment><USER4> Most of that software is still in use because it's very poorly written using a combination of COBOL and assembler and people are afraid to touch it.

<comment><USER5> Very poorly written _and it works_ , at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The actual system information can be found at [http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/s...](http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/sg248049.html?Open)

As someone who never has need to touch a mainframe, it's quite strange to look through this. It's not the 120 processor cores and 3 TB of RAM that surprise me; it's things like the cooling system and the I/O system that are so different from what I'm used to from working on a desktop system.

<comment><USER7> There's also the fact that the 120 cores are all in one cache-coherent domain...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The funny thing is that IBM and other major DP firms have had cloud servers for years. Decades, even. You just can't get to it with a credit card.

I've sometimes thought that a cloud provider backed onto z/VMs could be a nifty business model. Sure, you'd be priced above even the "expensive" providers like AWS; but then ... it's a mainframe. At the very least your customers would get hipster cred, which tends to attract a massive markup.

<comment><USER9> I'm struggling to find it, but I'm certain a germany company said they would launch a service to access Linux VMs running on zSeries.

The IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ Service (what amazing names IBM comes up with) does incorporate zSeries machines.

<http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/managed-cloud-hosting/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work with supercomputers.

Mainframes are very, very extended nowadays. Researchers use them, the government uses them, some big business use them.

From my point of view, there are four "mainframe" concepts, and one of them is not a monolithic mainframe _per se_ :

1\. Supercomputers: thousands of CPUs, each with access to a few gigabytes of RAM, which can run massively parallel jobs

2\. Shared memory machines: 64-256 CPUs, each of them can access to 0.5-2TB of memory

3\. GPUs: Hundreds of CPUs, each with access to 1-4 GPUs and a few gigabytes of RAM, to run highly parallel vector jobs

4\. Clusters: Commodity hardware (either racked or workstations) connected by a network which uses a queue system

The first three belong to the modern implementation of the mainframe, the last one is a "supercomputing"-like facility, built with regular hardware.

This brings us to OP's article, and to my main point. There are many research centres, business and government which use them, but there is a trend towards using regular Intel processors instead of mainframe-like vector processors.

Why? Because they're easier to program for. Us at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center have worked with ppc, ppc64, cell, ia64, i686 and x86_64 architectures, and here's what happened.

Some of these architectures don't have debugging/profiling tools available.

I joke with my colleagues about how it has been 10 years from the first CPU with hyperthreading and we still don't have fully automated tools to take advantage of parallelism on legacy code. We know it's difficult to do, but that has to be taken into account when planning to buy a new machine. Old code might run slower on the new machine because of the highly parallelism but lower raw speed.

Others (cell) are just so difficult to optimize that we needed 2 postdocs working 2 years only to make a matrix multiplication take about 80% of the full computing power. I'll only say that our next machine was going to be a Cell supercomputer, but that idea was dropped after a scientific panel advised against it.

Some months ago I took a course on GPU programming, and for those of you who have never programmed on vector processors, it is like the Hello World in brainfuck. My CS degree+masters wasn't just enough. It is overwhelming. The guy teaching the course was a PhD with 3 year experience programming GPUs, and he admitted that most of the times, if you compare the time it takes for you to program on a GPU with the time you save running the software, it is just not worth it. Hey, sometimes it is, and you save a lot of time. But not for most cases. So we're back to regular Intel processors again.

What I'm trying to say is that nowadays we buy machines for different purposes (large number of cores, large amount of memory, large throughput for vector multiplication, etc) but _most of them are x86_64_. GPUs are an exception because we buy software which has already been adapted to vector operations, but somebody had to spend many days adapting the code.

We work with Intel and IBM and we have access to the most recent CPUs and tools. IBM makes great hardware but they don't have anybody writing a development framework for that hardware, so you never reach even 70% of its peak throughput.

TL;DR: Yes, many companies use mainframes, but most of them try to put x86_64 processors in there, because they are easier to parallelise and there are many tested programming tools available.

<comment><USER11> Nice rant, but not really relevant.

Unfortunately, none of these are mainframes. Mainframes are a fairly different architecture and usually run OS/390 or z/OS these days. They really aren't about performance computing and are more oriented towards databases and IO.

<comment><USER10> We also work with banks and process huge amount of data, but we don't use those kind of mainframes.

I'm not saying nobody uses them, but rather that there is a trend to use a NoSQL database on a regular Linux system rather than z/OS.

It's easier to find developers, more widespread support, and hopefully they will be more compatible in the future.

Edit: chuckMcM's comment [1] provides more insight on this. I must admit I've never worked with traditional mainframes myself, but I know of many research groups who are trying to develop new high-troughput data channels for commodity hardware (i.e. fibre-channel disks).

The current trend is going towards Intel+Nvidia+Linux. Anything else might be a good investment for some, but generally a bad idea for most.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4447122>

<comment> no-truth Most of banks use linux boxes for downstream systems (reporting and so on) but a mainframe is the centrepiece of it all, executing end of day batch jobs (this can be anything from the feeds to the clearing house, or end of day reconciliation) and processing trades.

You will be surprised, but it is due to the fact that banks were some of the first people to start using computing decades ago, and some of the programs I have seen in use at banks were older than me. Moving everything to a Intel based platform removes that backwards compatability, but z/OS is made with this in mind.

<comment><USER12> > Most of banks use linux boxes for downstream systems (reporting and so on)

I don't know - for regular client-server computing, I've seen a mix at the 6 banks I've worked at - some Linux, some Windows Server, some Solaris. Most banks have a mix of all three, but have one that they "major" in.

Also, mainframes tend to be more of a Retail banking thing, for the core banking platform.Some Investment Banks use mainframes for back office stuff, but not many (in my experience).

Where I am working now, I have seen plaques in recognition for using a particular mainframe program from VISA for 20+ years. Also, the recently- retired core-banking platform from an acquired retail bank ran on mainframes, but was written in assembler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Putting these in place this weekend :)

<comment><USER2> Just watched the intro video for the water-cooled EC12. I know nothing about mainframes other than what I've learned reading this thread and scanning IBM's website, but man that thing looks wicked.

I really like the "RAIM" stuff that's apparently new. It seems like a similar idea not only to RAID, but also to this "lockstep execution" thing I just read about. I suppose the idea is that you can configure all or certain memory slots to be slaves such that all reads and writes are identical, or does this RAIM stuff also have RAIM with parity for reconstruction plus storage size increase?

Also, is the ability to install this thing on a normal (non-raised floor) pretty new, or has that been an optional feature of larger mainframes for a while?

Finally, the guy in the video mentioned some Java stuff. Do these things typically see lots of Java use or are they mostly programmed closer to the metal?

<comment><AUTHOR> They used to be commonly programmed very close to the metal. The assembly languages for the System 360 and 370 machines (40 - 50 years ago) were well suited to processing records of data. These days, I believe using these as hypervisors to hundreds of Linux VMs is more common. IBM has their own Java implementation, but I don't know what it's adoption is like in the mainframe industry.

<comment><USER4> hey actually sell special processors that run Java for 'Free'. Most people don't know that IBM charges you for 'MIPS'. They actually charge you for using your computer. They have some other specialized processors as well ... all are very expensive.

<comment><USER14> I remember looking it up a while ago, for a processor to "run" Linux cost $28K at the time. Not at all sure how many VM's you cuould support there.

<comment><USER15> The previous generation could run up to 50000 VMs, I'd wager the new system announced here could handle a lot more.

<comment><USER4> They will only 'run' that number if they're not actually doing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone comment on the implications of hardware transactional memory here?

<comment><USER17> I only found this [http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4218914/IBM- plants-t...](http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4218914/IBM-plants- transactional-memory-in-CPU)

any other info?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "curl <http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/38653.wss> | grep -io enterprise | wc -l" >44 This new CPU is very "enterprisey".

</comment><comment><USER19> Great hardware but we just upgraded to the z196. Maybe in a couple of years :)</comment>


Hackers can figure out passwords just from the sound of typing - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/cyber-security-passwords-hackers-a9070411.html <comment><AUTHOR> _... however there are certain caveats to the method. The attacker would need to know the material type of the table that the victim is typing on, as metal and wood surfaces produce different sound wave patterns._

So I will be Kickstartering "secure desktops" with random layers of disparate materials, plywood, p-lam, and so forth, plus "secure laptops", basically trousers with random patches of corduroy, burlap, spandex and whatever sewn onto the thighs.

<comment><USER2> Indeed. If a hacker knows the exact material makeup of the table I'm typing on, I think I night have some physical security issues I should address first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Michal Zalewski's book Silence on the Wire (2005) had an entire chapter devoted to this called "I can hear you typing".</comment>


Every animated GIF on Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikigifs.org/ <comment><USER2> I was idly flicking through, took quite a while before I looked at the title whilst waiting for this one <http://www.wikigifs.org/#Ajax-loader.gif>

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting way to spark curiosity and learn new things! I wish there was a link to the Wikipedia article/section under each GIF.

<comment><USER4>
        > Interesting way to spark curiosity and learn new things!

Thanks! That's exactly why I designed this page. I've learned so much from just looking at GIFs.

        > I wish there was a link to the Wikipedia article/section under each GIF.

If the image is used in an "en" language Wikipedia article, a link to that article appears beneath the image.

For example, this image is used in the "Screen Printing" article: <http://www.wikigifs.org/#PrintLayers500px.gif>

You can also click on the title of the image to get the file information for any image, scroll down to the "file usage" area for a full list.

<comment><USER3> ah, didn't see that. thanks joel!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Warning: Some GIFs are NSFW! I just hit space to see some penis GIF.

<comment><USER4> Dang, sorry about that. Do you happen to remember the title of the image you saw?

I've been playing wack-a-mole with the NSFW GIFs and I appreciate people reporting images that I've missed. (<https://github.com/jpf/wikigifs/commits/master/animated-gifs>)

<comment><USER6> Dereccion.gif is one.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, removed. ([https://github.com/jpf/wikigifs/commit/7568a938942b1ce37ac40...](https://github.com/jpf/wikigifs/commit/7568a938942b1ce37ac4059ff0d3d237602c68bc))

<comment><USER7> you could set up an alternative 'naughtypedia' site for these!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This would be a lot more impressive if it didn't just come from a dump prepped by Wikipedia. MediaWiki has an API, you know.

<comment><USER4> I know about the MediaWiki API and use it to find the articles associated with an image.

However, I wasn't able to figure out how to use the MediaWiki API to get a list of all animated GIFs with >=2 frames. Did I miss something?</comment></comment>