I'm done with Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> https://thewebb.blog/thoughts/2017/im-done-with-kickstarter <comment><USER2> Kickstarter should stop surfacing delivery date so prominently. It's clear by now that the vast majority of crowdfunded campaigns do not come close to hitting their concrete timeline goals. Is this inherently a bad thing? I don't think so, developing a new product is incredibly difficult and complex in the best of cases. Add that Kickstarter is by definition almost exclusively 'amateur' projects, and it's clear that you should be paying little attention to delivery dates.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree about just ignoring delivery dates. There are plenty other projects that delivery on time, if not early. I don't think these project creators should be let off the hook because a bunch of them can't keep promises.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find a ruby hacker in london for my side project? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on a SAAS project which I'm intending to launch over the next couple of months. I'm intending to make some money out of on the side of my day job, given enough revenue I'd like to go full time on it. Problem is I'm a one man team and I'm just not getting it done fast enough. How can I find another ruby hacker to collaborate with in London? <comment><USER2> Maybe go to the ruby meetup <http://lrug.org/> and meet some people who might be interested.</comment>


Justice Department Updates Marijuana Enforcement Policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/August/13-opa-974.html

<comment><USER2> "These schemes must be tough in practice, not just on paper, and include strong, state-based enforcement efforts, backed by adequate funding."

Ah. There it is. That's what they're really worried about, if the "war on drugs" somehow comes to an end, or is dramatically reduced, by legalizing marijuana. They're worried that law enforcement agencies won't get as big budgets anymore, so they're now strongly "encouraging" states to keep the money flowing to them, but this time for "regulatory enforcement", instead of just catching them and throwing them in jail.</comment>


The best card trick I ever saw - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX7v6pK0lrU

<comment><USER2> I dont use and dont have flash on my system so how can I see your clip in browser? Please convert it into mozilla-compatible format.</comment>


5 Things I've Learned in Four Years at a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://emzingo.com/5-things-ive-learned-in-four-years-at-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> Great advice to "be good to people that helped you, and people in general". Never hurts to share some goodwill!</comment>


Why public libraries need to support open source - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/life/16/9/public-library-open-source <comment><USER2> And this is why I don't use the term "open source" anymore. The "top 5 reasons to use open source" are all completely disconnected and don't really have any logical progression from the "ideals of open source" ("open source" doesn't have an ideology). Why libraries should use free software is a much more straightforward list:

1\. Free software means that libraries can be assured that they can continue running on the same software and freely maintain it, without needing to worry about downgrades or license agreements.

2\. Free software means that libraries can collaborate on improving the software they use (and help one another to run their libraries efficiently) without violating a proprietary license agreement.

3\. Libraries are meant to be stewards of knowledge, and proprietary software takes away your ability to learn about software. Free software solves this problem, for the patrons as well as the librarians.

4\. The reading history of an individual should remain private, and there is no way for a library to be sure of this without using free software. A reading history that can be used as evidence threatens human rights.

5\. A library running on free software cannot ever be pressured by developers to stop distributing some form of book. As libraries are a primary source of information and knowledge, this is a freedom of speech issue and can only truly be solved by free software.

All of the above list clearly links to the four fundamental freedoms (with emphasis on my own politics). But that's why I invite everyone to refer to free software by it's proper name.

<comment><USER3> _Free software means that libraries can be assured that they can continue running on the same software and freely maintain it, without needing to worry about downgrades or license agreements._

While true in principle, that doesn't happen very often. A large open source application that's abandoned by it's maintainer(s) will die very quickly, and it's hard to find someone who'll take on the job of maintaining it even if you're willing to pay. Of course, using a closed source alternative will have the same issue, but without the possibility of someone taking over, so it's worse.

The ideal course is to use an application, regardless of license, that supports an open standard for importing and exporting your data so you're not locked in; that way you can transition everything to an alternative application should things go wrong.

<comment><USER2> > While true in principle, that doesn't happen very often. A large open source > application that's abandoned by it's maintainer(s) will die very quickly, > and it's hard to find someone who'll take on the job of maintaining it even > if you're willing to pay.

While that does happen, you get people forking the original project and so on. And it should be noted that if a piece of software works "well enough" then there isn't really a need to update every two weeks -- the software works and don't touch it. If there's a bug that's bothering them, then you can absolutely pay a contractor to modify the code and fix the bug (that's what contractors do). Obviously the contractor wouldn't be happy to implement huge new features, but that's why you should fund the original project so it doesn't die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Former Librarian (9 years out) : I was shocked at the negative reaction I received from all librarians at the time with the terms Open Source / Free Software.

Caused is the proprietary nature of the Library Systems. They were so archaic and backwards it caused me to look for a new job within 6 months. Mine was from Sirsi Dynix. Steve Balmer had nothing on these people.

My servers was a Windows Server with a Oracles DB Array and a few other servers. I was required to reboot daily my windows box and I had to halt the whole system so I could do my daily backups. It was horrible (I also had to switch to two systems since they killed the system we purchased from them (prior to my arrival)) In total about 120 hours of webinars in 3 months can cause anyone to lose the will to hear and see anything. So I started the research to replace everything to Open Source (Evergreen) and the onslaught was intense. I was just doing research and they were already telling my boss how everything they did wrong was my mistake. I had the logs to show that they were lying and a boss who trusted me, but it was SO FRUSTRATING.

They would do everything to discourage the ideals of Open Source in conferences they would have info sheets just spreading FUD about the insecurity of Open Source since Hackers could have access to the whole code.

Wikileaks even did a release. Check out the Librarian defending the FUD. [http://jasongriffey.net/wp/2009/11/03/sirsi-dynix-vs-open- so...](http://jasongriffey.net/wp/2009/11/03/sirsi-dynix-vs-open-source- software/)

So glad I am not a Systems Librarian today. That and paying tens of thousands every year for old dusty journals pay for by tax dollars.

</comment><comment><USER5> Libraries do support open source software. In some cases, they even create it. For example, Enki, an ebook platform created by Califa (a consortium of CA libraries) was created in response to OverDrive (a larger for-proft ebook platform). This isn't to say that they couldn't do more to get the word out about consumer-facing open source projects/tools, but we should give credit where it's due.

<comment><USER4> Evergreen is the best Open Source Solution. They Georgia Libraries made their own after all the money and frustration using a closed source one.

[https://evergreen-ils.org](https://evergreen-ils.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article doesn't say why open source is more important for library staff to know about than the thousands of other subjects libraries have books on.

<comment><USER7> I agree -- the article is more of a collection of pointers towards Open Source resources, and doesn't directly say why it's important or interesting.

But, at the risk of deviating from the article contents _I_ do have a great reason why they should. It's simple -- as someone who I can't recall said, "If libraries were invented today, they'd be declared illegal and shut down." We seem to be perpetually moving towards a world where you don't _own_ any content, you have to perpetually license it to consume it; and the company that really owns it can take it away if you can't pay the monthly subscription, or have the wrong name, or happen to travel to another country.

Libraries and open source are alike in that both have shown that you can make a model different from the standard "produce this year's widgets / buy this year's widgets" actually _work_. Libraries buy and discard millions of books per year, and ensure that anyone, regardless of their financial standing has access to literature. Similarly, Open Source has ensured that you don't necessarily have to pay massive sums to Microsoft or Apple or their ilk and comply with their ridiculously restrictive policies in order to run software on the computing hardware _you own_.

Perhaps a bit tenuous, but I think this is a good enough argument that libraries should know about, and possibly promote an interest in Open Source.

<comment><USER8> > "If libraries were invented today, they'd be declared illegal and shut > down."

Wow, this is such a great quote. Do you have any sources on who said this? I cannot figure from a simple search.

<comment><USER7> I really can't remember. This is the earliest source I can find that basically says the same thing. [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100630/12152310025.shtml](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100630/12152310025.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An open source library system is one good way to get libraries first-hand experience with the advantages: [http://www.koha.org](http://www.koha.org)

</comment><comment><USER10> Shouldn't it be the other way around?

<comment><USER11> Both wouldn't be bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Site under maintenance"

Archived URL: [http://web.archive.org/web/20161007165853/https://opensource...](http://web.archive.org/web/20161007165853/https://opensource.com/life/16/9/public- library-open-source)

</comment><comment><USER13> I was hoping this was an argument for the software powering libraries to be open source :)</comment>


People don't understand overdiagnosis - <AUTHOR> http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2016-04-06-public-dont-understand-overdiagnosis <comment><USER2> I don't like the method they use (ignoring that it's an online survey). They measured that most of the people don't know the meaning of the word "overdiagnosis". There is a small chance that some of them know the concept, but don't know the technical word to name it.

I guess that most people really don't understand overdiagnosis, but I'd like to see a survey that really measure that.

For example, with the same method it's possible to make an article with the title: "People don't understand surfactants"</comment>


Rappel: A REPL for x86, amd64, and armv7 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yrp604/rappel <comment><USER2> This is cool. In the old days... computers came with these things built into the ROM (BIOS, Firmware, etc.). They were mostly called a 'ROM Monitor' or just the 'Monitor'. I never knew why they were called that, but I would guess that it was probably a term DEC or IBM invented.

On a Sun, NeXT, or Cisco box, you could hit a magic keyboard sequence (or send an RS-232 BREAK over the console) to get to the monitor. It was a very powerful thing to be able to interrupt the running OS, modify it, and then resume it. On the NeXT, you could even work with OS structures or sync the disks. The monitor typically had a disassembler and a simple single step debugger.

Earlier microcomputers also had these, and were helpful, but less powerful. For example, the Apple ][ had a monitor, but later ROMs did not allow you to invoke it with a key sequence.

On the later Suns and Power Macs, the monitor was implemented as a standard called Open Firmware. This was basically a standardized Forth acting as a Monitor. Device drivers could be embedded as a bytecode like sequence of Forth words for ethernet or display cards. That way, you could use newer devices even with old firmware and with any CPU. Very cool.

I wish this functionality would come back.

<comment><USER3> On the old Sun gear if you sent a break signal over serial you wold interrupt the OS sure and be at the ROM monitor but you couldn't "resume" the OS, you could boot back up to single user or run level 3 but all of your previous state would be gone of course. Is that was you are referring to? I don't remember a disassembler being available from the prom monitor I do remember there a FORTH(sp?) interpreter though. Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER2> There was a command to resume the OS after a break.

You just hit 'c' then enter.

[http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field- notices/misc...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field- notices/misc/fn-tsbreak.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Same could be done using radare2 [1] tool in debug mode ("r2 -d") and using "dxa" command, to write an opcode using assembly language and execute it in place. Or even using simple C-like language (called regg [2]) to do the same.

P.S. It's always better to try radare2 from git, since it's very actively developed.

[1] [http://rada.re](http://rada.re)

[2] [https://github.com/radare/radare2/tree/master/libr/egg](https://github.com/radare/radare2/tree/master/libr/egg)

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool! I did something very similar to this a couple of years back: [https://github.com/osandov/asmase](https://github.com/osandov/asmase). Instead of assembling to a file, I used the LLVM libraries to assemble in memory, then used ptrace to get a child process to point its instruction pointer at that machine code.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would seem useful idea to restrict the print only changed registers and have a command to print all registers. Right now you can fit like 3-4 operations in 80x25 terminal window.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like how it colorized which registers have changed due to the last instruction.

Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool. Like debug[0][1], but less functional? I could myself using this more if some of debug's features were implemented.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_\(command\))

[1] [http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/debug.htm](http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/debug.htm)

</comment><comment><USER9> A (probably) shittier version of this for OS X: [https://github.com/Tyilo/asm_repl](https://github.com/Tyilo/asm_repl)

(I'm the author of it)

</comment><comment><USER10> I was looking for something exactly like this a few months back.

</comment><comment><USER11> Would love x64 support.

<comment><USER12> As opposed to AMD64?

<comment><USER13> Maybe the commenter prefers Intel's branding. More resell value that way.</comment></comment></comment>


How ISIS Became the World's Deadliest Tech Startup [Vanity Fair] - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-isis-became-the-worlds-deadliest-tech-start-up <comment><USER2> My friend recently told me that they recruit through the popular mobile game Clash of Clans in the UAE. They provide players with in-game resources and support, and slowly start using their leverage to brainwash youngsters. It's scary stuff.</comment>


Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-02/snapchat-passes-twitter-in-daily-usage <comment><USER2> 30something here -

It took me a while to "get" Snapchat, but in my opinion there is no better way to keep up with friends and family digitally than via Snapchat Stories.

You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Posting more than once or twice a day to Instagram/Facebook seems excessive, Twitter is a bit more of a firehose than a way to see what everyone is doing.

It took me a bit to get used to the interface, but the goofiness of the entire service is so enjoyable, including all their filters and whatnot.

I've noticed myself spending way more time on Snapchat than on other services as of late, even in my "old age for social media."

<comment><USER3> There is nothing to "get". It's all the same. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. People want a free way to broadcast to their friends. Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over. Now the stream needs to be "curated". It's no longer a timeline. It's no longer sensible. Now you can no longer reliably broadcast to your friends. People search for a new service that did what the old service used to do. They don't even realize that's what they are doing, but that's what they are doing. I've done this myself now what, a half dozen times? Every 2 years you have to do it again.

It's the same damn model. It's all the same thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Does no one see this?

Snapchat will rule until he ads take over. Your stories will slowly be interrupted by ads. Then your stories will fall out of time sync and you'll only get some updates or a "Featured Updates" or some other features that's really just a way to prioritize and guarantee ad delivery. And while this is happening someone will put out something new, that essentially does what Snapchat originally did in a slightly different format. Maybe square instead of portrait or GIF or Live Photo or whatever. But it's all the same thing. This game will continue forever.

All people want is a way to broadcast into a stream of content, and view other people's content in a timeline. That's it. It works for a while until you get too big. Then you can't pay for it and you have to start inject ads and resorting the timeline until it's no longer a timeline or it's a timeline full of all this stuff no one ever wanted or asked for.

When I was 15 I'd get home from school and run to my computer to check my favorite message board. I'd hit "New Posts" and see all the content from my friends. Cool new video game discussion, new video card benchmarks, some photos someone uploaded, some rant. Honestly, nothing has really changed in 15 years except the format of the content has been continuously updated to be technically (and culturally) relevant. But a post is still a post.

<comment><USER4> >Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over.

The problem really is that no one wants to pay for services, or no one is willing to try charging for their services. Ads are the "safe" option, but it will also make your users leave in the long run.

I was pretty baffled when a publisher wrote that they would rather make money from ads on their site, than make money from people buying a subscription. Service like Twitter, Snapchat and what not seems to be the same way, there's no desire to try anything but ads.

It is still my belief that at some point some large seller of physical goods will announce that they're pull their online ads due to lack of profitability. After that the entire online media business will be forced to charge their users, and we'll all be better off. Maybe it's just wishful thinking.

<comment><USER5> So what is the alternative? We don't want to pay, we don't want ads.. how else can these things make money?

<comment><USER6> I pretty much use Facebook to follow local companies I'm interested in (as it is currently useless for personal interests at this time). I doubt I'm alone in using Facebook in this manner. I've sometimes wondered if ultimately Facebook could monetize off of that.

(Even on this angle, the problem right now is that Facebook's ad algorithm is a bit, er, dumb. At least, it hasn't figured out that I'm far more interested in local business X, Y, and Z that I'm following and not whatever unrelated spam some megagiantcorp is pushing...)

<comment><USER7> Following companies is a "pull" method that would not generate significant revenue. Facebook corporate customers want to be able to push, and that's why we have ads.

I firmly believe product placement, and the information exchange that surrounds it, is _the_ monetization scheme. Unfortunately, not only Facebook's ad algorithm is broken, but pretty much everyone else's. They have come a long way nonetheless, ad targeting today is one order of magnitude better that it was only a few years back.

People want advice not advertisements. When someone has money to spend and a need to fulfill, to have the right "advisor" is an incredibly valuable asset. Imagine a bot that knows my tastes, my assets and basically my life. This advanced bot could psyche me, at the right time, into making valuable and exciting purchases. A bot I could trust would succeed turning my money into happiness. That's the direction current algorithms have taken, with ever- increasing (and rather suspicious) omnipresence in our lives, grabbing any input they can get their hands on. The key difference is that companies look after their interests instead of mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's amazing how misguided this article is.

Twitter is a publishing platform. You go there for (links to) news, blog posts, commentary on particular subjects (some of them very niche), notifications of events or live reporting of something happening in public.

Why does every form of communication have to fit the mold of "keeping in touch with friends and family" and match the user numbers that these services inherently deliver?

I'm so fed up with the dominance of "keeping up with friends and family". I have better things to do than to "keep up" with pointless brain farts and daily routines of people I know.

And why is everything measured by what kids or teenagers do? So much so that people on here pride themselves of "getting" snapchat in spite of their advanced age (>30) as if that was difficult or any sort of achievement.

The salient feature of teenagers is that most of them haven't yet found anything that they are deeply interested in. Most of them don't have very complicated social relationships yet as they don't have a past with anyone. They are not held accountable for anything, and they don't have to make well informed or consequential decisions yet.

In other words, their demand for information and communication is hard to predict but can often be met by something totally inadequate for others. So it's not about "getting it", it's about finding it unfit for purpose.

There's a pattern in the demise of Google Reader and Twitter's current problems. It seems to be difficult for internet behemoths to justify investment into the significant but limited niche of people with advanced information needs.

I wish Twitter had the courage to try to increase usage, utility and depth instead of growing user numbers. And no, it's not an inherent problem with capitalism. There are many successful, publicly traded companies that do something useful, make a profit, and don't grow much.

</comment><comment><USER9> My 77 year old father forced himself to learn Twitter. Why? Financial news. My journalist friends live on Twitter. Why? Breaking political news. People I follow in national security circles... on twitter. After a certain number (age or users) its not about quantity but quality.

<comment><USER10> I've found Twitter has become my primary news source over the past couplefew years.

<comment><USER11> Right after Google shut down Reader for me. Twitter remains the best source of news + programming + local + academic content for me. Although on the whole I'm a little burned out on 'content' in general.

<comment><USER10> All I can say is, follow reporters who handle topics you're interested in and it's like having your own personal news site. A messier, but more direct advance beyond RSS (which I also still use religously).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Twitter = realtime news/sports, one-to-many jokes/announcements or whatever

Snapchat = catch up on friends & families days, one-to-one connection

It's OK that they each have their purpose, and I wish both services's stated goals would embrace that. And maybe I use those services different than other people, but I just think it's strange that two _wildly_ different services are competing for the same eyeballs in the same verticals. Obviously the shareholders disagree with me.

<comment><USER13> At some level _every_ service is competing with every other for users' time. But at some point, such comparisons become meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Snapchat has undoubtedly grown; it's really impressive. But much of Twitter's content you can consume without being logged-in. Is that accounted for at all?

<comment><USER15> Hmm. That's an interesting thought about how to skew 'engagement' stats. Maybe that's why I can't view Pinterest pages without that irritating "you must log in" sheet scrolling over the content.

<comment><USER16> You can actually delete that and keep scrolling

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really respect the Snapchat service, but the thing is that I don't like to create things that will disappear. If I want a thing to disappear I simply don't create it. I believe I am an exception, I see a lot of people that loves Snapchat because it erases things after a while. May I still don't have the problem Snapchat was created to solve.

<comment><USER18> > If I want a thing to disappear I simply don't create it.

The point is that it mimics a natural conversation. Do you refuse to speak just because no one is recording you?

<comment><USER19> As someone who can relate to the parent post, I will admit that if no one is actively listening to me then I absolutely will not speak. But I'm on the quieter side of personalities and don't enjoy talking for the hell of it.

<comment><USER20> But there is someone _listening_ on snapchat - the person on the other side still sees and hears it.

The conversation analogy that xux made seems perfectly reasonable to me in that regard. However, it is (depending on the user, I suppose) not super "real-time" the way conversations are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've come to recently replace Twitter with Snapchat, having replaced Facebook Timeline with Twitter.

The process is definitely cyclical, but there is at least one new emphasis that's changed:

Content is treated as low-value, which makes it low-pressure. Mainly because:

1\. it has a short life span (it expires in 24 hours)

2\. the lack of per-item ratings (e.g. likes or favourites)

3\. it is always packaged non-individually (i.e. as a bundled "Story")

4\. pictures are not dressed up (ie not "Instagram photos") and videos are short

5\. simple UI promotes content creation as central and valued over content judging/consumption

Add to that it offers the best visual blogging UI (and specifically vlogging).

Whereas with Facebook and Twitter every new post would bring thoughts like "is this good enough? Will I regret this post down the line? Will people like it?", Snapchat promotes the "just do it" attitude. Is this interesting _right now_?

I expect my personal use of Snapchat will wane as it did with the other platforms. When something becomes too big it becomes too public, and brings too much pressure to be idyllic. Right now Snapchat feels closed and personal.

</comment><comment><USER22> People here only think about how they use Twitter and Snapchat. My first thought would be: Snapchat has more girls with less clothes. It is not the content we are looking for, but that's what draws a lot of young guys and girls there. Twitter offers content. That is nice, but not so interesting to the amount of people that would be willing to use new apps.

That you can show your daily life to your friends and family is also nice, certainly may be the tip to lead to higher traffic than twitter, but it's probably not the majority usecase.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Snapchat is too "dangerous" for me. Too much gamification, fueling FOMO etc.

This story was fairly scary (imo): [https://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to- snapchat-like-the-t...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat- like-the-teens)

</comment><comment><USER24> I downloaded snapchat a few years ago. Didn't know enough people on it and uninstalled after a month or two.

About a year ago I reinstalled as a way to share a trip I was on. It was perfect for that.

You'll post one perfect, curated photo to insta of your day, but you'll snap the random guy in the street, a funny sign in another language or just some bullshit you're up to.

Instagram feels a bit past its prime these days. I follow more commercial accounts on insta than I do on snapchat.

Snapchat it's like 40 close friends and fam. People who have my phone number.

Plus if you want to meet girls (sub 30 I should add) snap is the easiest way to connect lately.

<comment><USER24> The worst thing about snapchat when traveling however, is battery life.

That app literally sucks the juice out of your phone in 10 minutes.

Too much gps trying to load all their filters or something I don't know. I have to turn off cellular data when roaming or my phone will dead 20 minutes after I left the house.

<comment><USER25> I always have GPS disabled, unless its more to do with where i live, GPS features of snapchat aren't worth using.

The infuriating thing i notice though is that since the android update was released where you no longer hold to view a picture or video, your phone will never go to sleep if snapchat is in the foreground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This metric is not quite accurate, but Google Trends [1] gives a decent overview of how Twitter has been on the decline for the past 3 years.

Instagram has surpassed them in search traffic. Snapchat is more than a year away, but given how young they are is quite impressive.

[1] [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=snapchat#q=snapchat%...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=snapchat#q=snapchat%2C%20twitter%2C%20instagram%2C%20reddit&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5)

<comment><USER27> How exactly do you know it's not accurate? If you're saying that because of Google trends, keep in mind that Twitter is a website, Snapchat is not. Lots of people still google "Twitter" to get to the homepage. Pretty much no one would be googling snapchat...

<comment><USER28> EDIT: March and April saw over 9,000,000 searches.

On average, 5,000,000 people google 'snapchat' every single month.

Source: Google Keyword Planner

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another 30something here:

Just spent the past month forcing myself to understand Snapchat and I finally get it now. Took a bit, especially since the whole experience is heavily gamified. I swear the developers are huge video game junkies!

The big takeaway is that Snapchat is just much more personal and real than the text based social networks.

For those interested in trying it out I recommend.

Mark Suster => [https://www.snapchat.com/add/msuster](https://www.snapchat.com/add/msuster) (Venture Capitalist, tech/leadership 'Snapstorms')

Justin Kan => [https://www.snapchat.com/add/justinkan](https://www.snapchat.com/add/justinkan) (creator Justin TV, now Twitch, very open in business/tech)

Here is my snapchat as well [https://www.snapchat.com/add/mrelijahlynn](https://www.snapchat.com/add/mrelijahlynn)

edit: This article got me to try Snapchat, I was a big fan of Justin TV and streamed a ton of content, including live broadcasts from the Ron Paul Blimp. [http://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat](http://justinkan.com/why-i-love- snapchat)

Also, this article can get you up to speed on the very different UX => [https://bothsidesofthetable.com/snapchat-101-for-vcs-and- old...](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/snapchat-101-for-vcs-and-old- folks-47fbfcb29f78)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not a Snapchat user, but my girlfriend is. I watch her use Timehop and she laughs at old tweets she made... when she actually used Twitter. She then goes to Snapchat and watches other people's stories for the next hour while I catch up on news (HN, industry news, etc). I understand why Snapchat is popular, but I don't understand people who use it (sorry bae).

</comment><comment><USER31> 2 minutes of snapchat = 3% battery life on Android (Nexus 5) - I like the app and the idea but it kills my poor baby!

<comment><USER32> I suppose that is because it keeps the camera running even if you are at the stories or PM panel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The moment Snapchat clicked for me was when I was using the current events features and it was stitching together different short video clips from the campaign trail. These were raw, candid, and extremely fresh videos showing the candidates with their guard down. I felt like I was spying. It clicked again for me last week when a friend was casually flipping through her contacts "stories". The little glimpses of peoples lives was so intimate and meaningless at the same time. They're really onto something here.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone else wish there were an option to not auto play the next story (of User B) when you're watching the story of User A?

</comment><comment><USER35> It doesn't surprise me that more people prefer personal conversations than the news. What surprises me is that Snapchat was able to figure this out in their own wacky way.

Kudos to them, but this certainly doesn't diminish the importance of Twitter. People that complain about Twitter so far haven't created a better solution.

<comment><USER36> By 'wacky way', I assume you mean disappearing convo's centered around photos.

If so, I find it absolutely fascinating that Evan Spiegel was able to think of photos as a conversational medium in this manner, and more than just sexting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Honestly thought this happened a while ago.

<comment><USER38> I was actaully thinking WhatsApp would outspace Snapchat since Facebook has been investing in them. Interesting to see that Snapchat gained that much more users

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Social media networks are like night clubs.

Myspace was edgy and underground, then it got invaded by the masses and it was no longer trendy, so everyone went to Facebook.

Facebook was good for a while but now your parents and family are in every conversation. How much fun can you have in a nightclub with your parents watching everything you do?

Twitter is more like a massive dance hall filled with people shouting at each other. If you stand close to your selected friends it can be fun, and if you get access to the mic on the main stage it can be awesome, but the usual experience is that it's filled with randos.

Snapchat is like.. I don't know. I lost interest in nightclubs before I could get into Snapchat.

<comment><USER40> Meanwhile, we all still have email, phones, snail mail and texting.

<comment><USER41> XMPP died though, and Matrix hasn't yet replaced it as it should, which is a problem.

<comment><USER42> XMPP died? There must be a bug in my Pidgin then, it claims to still be connected to my XMPP server. /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> enahs-sf I'm excited to see when snapchat figures out a way to replicate the 'DJ Khaled' effect. I want to discover interesting people doing cool stuff and right now i'm not sure how i'd go about doing this on snapchat whereas Twitter won't stop recommending people to me.

<comment><USER43> I think it's by design. They're already doing well without the discovery and the lack of discovery is probably one of the key reasons why people like it. Snapchat is more about keeping in touch with people they really care about than some DJ Khaled. In fact a lot of people who first started following DJ Khaled just to see what the hype is all about don't really care anymore, and probably increasingly so as more people start using Snapchat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It also took me a while to 'get' it. I sort of think I do now and wrote down what makes Snapchat different: [http://piks.nl/wordpress/snapchat/](http://piks.nl/wordpress/snapchat/)

</comment><comment><USER45> The thing about Snapchat is that it has no web footprint. It's impossible to judge how big it actually is. They can report whatever numbers they want. Remember how Google+ claimed to have more active users than Twitter? Yeah.

</comment><comment><USER46> Snapchat on Android killed my Nexus 5. Phone got exceedingly hot, even when not in use. By next day display also stopped working. Do I dare try again on Nexus 6P?

</comment><comment><USER47> Can someone tell me how do I get out of stories in Snapchat?

</comment><comment><USER48> I feel like I've been using it wrong after reading these comments. It's always been one huge attempt to make my friends laugh. We'll take embarrassing/stupid photos with the goofy filters and face swaps for a cheap laugh, knowing it'll be gone in 15 seconds or whatever. I'm not really using it to keep up on their lives or anything like that. and I'm not sure they are either.

<comment><USER49> Nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If only they wouldn't be such *sses about Windows Phone maybe I would be able to keep up with my friends this way ...

<comment><USER51> No desktop/web app either?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Social Media are like TV Shows, and Facebook is like the HBO of Social Media.

One day something else will come up and capture "young people's" attention and Snapchat will have a slow, painful MySpace-esque death.

This is the price you pay when you don't have anything real to offer to the world, and instead trade on shear popularity alone.

<comment><USER53> I believe this is true to a degree. But I believe what differentiates this comparison of the shift from Myspace to Facebook, is that Snapchat embraces the concept of ephemeral sharing. Ephemeral sharing I believe will be a huge part of the future of social media as the younger generation becomes more aware of the effects of the permanence of the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> late 20something here. Is it possible for me to "get" snapchat if none of my friends are using it? If so, how?

<comment><USER55> You need to have friends on it to really "get" it, but you can add celebrities, people in your address book, or get snapchat usernames from profiles on tinder/instagram/...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> All due respect to SnapChat, I'm glad people use it and enjoy. As for me, I had it before, it wasn't really my thing. I never had instagram either, so maybe there is some relation there.

edit: spelling

<comment><USER57> I guess I'm on a similar camp.

For some reason the idea that I would be posting my day to day seems to me very "un-private" for a person like me that doesn't want to voluntarily broadcast my every waking second.

I use Facebook and I post from time to time, but mostly re-shares of other interesting stuff and very very seldom something about myself. I even try to stay untagged as much as I can because I find very creepy the amount of info one can get for the purposes of fraud calls, kidnapping (I live in a country where this is a very real threat) or other malicious acts.

In the end I'm aware that there's a limit on what I can do without going "more dark" (i.e. only Tor browsing via VPN from internet connections not in my house, using Qubes on a laptop bought over the counter, with cash, etc etc), but I hope that by using things like PasswordSafe with a YubiKey 2FA for my passwords (32+ random chars) and having the usual, uBlock HTTPSEverytwhere, DoNotTrack, PrivacyBadger, etc I can at least lower the attack surface.

Like they say "I don't have to run faster than the lion, I only need to run faster than you".

I just hope that all this really does make a difference, even if tiny, at least against your regular online-savvy asshole/criminal (I know that I'm really a sitting duck against a state actor)... otherwise it's just one big mental masturbation scheme.. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Anyone else get an ad blocker message when you're not using one?

<comment><USER51> I got an ad blocker, but no ad blocking message on that page...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> No surprises here. Snapchat captures the use a common person wants. Twitter's really just good for tracking celebrities.

<comment><USER60> I track approximately zero celebs. I do track a lot of people in CS/Math fields. Kindof a live bookmark feed.

<comment><USER14> The point still stands, there are two kinds of Twitter users: 'VIPs' who attract followers, and 'consumers' who follow them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I think headline means SnapChat crashes more than the twitter app or anything else.

</comment><comment><USER62> pretty cool for an app engine app. I wonder how big their ops team is.

</comment><comment><USER63> Well, you're right that the ad problem drives people away, but you're wrong in saying that they deliver the same information in a functionally different but essentially similar method.

I broadcast and ingest very different information on Snapchat than I ever did on facebook. The ephemeral nature of Snapchat, combined with the lack of public "likes" makes it a much more positive experience to post, and thus I in turn see more interesting posts from friends.

edit: you all are starting to use the downvote button like a bunch of redditors

<comment><USER3> Because you got into Facebook so late.

People who are 20 are doing on Snapchat today what I did on Facebook when I was 20: multicasting. I either want to send a message to everyone or to a group. Sometimes in a personal message. I see almost no real difference in content. Snapchat might be a little racier in personal messages, but that happened on FB and Twitter as well.

The ephemeral nature was built into Facebook and Twitter as well, to some extent, as the services weren't searchable. You'd post something and after a few more posts it was essentially "gone from view".

Outside of marketers and people trying to "build an audience" I really see almost no difference at all in the way people use it. It's just a matter of how old you are and what service was popular at the time.

Don't believe me? Do this as an experiment: Create a new account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Follow only 30 real people. No more, no less. 30 people you know. No marketers or self promoters or any of that nonsense. Just follow 30 real people, maybe a celeb or two the way a 20 year old might. Look at the content. It's all the same stuff. Having fun here, doing this with person X, Y, and Z. Cute dog photo. Inspiring quote. Maybe a DM with some nudes. There is nothing to "get" other than to understand that as you become older the thing that's changing is you. The biggest difference between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat is how old you and your friends were when you started using it, and what what point in the lifecycle of the service you were at.

<comment> J-dawg Great post.

> There is nothing to "get" other than to understand that as you become older > _the thing that 's changing is you_

For proof of this, look no further than when Facebook introduced the timeline, making it easier to view old wall posts.

People went crazy, claiming their private messages had been made public [0]. In truth, they just couldn't remember how unconcerned with privacy they used to be.

[0] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19699205](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19699205)

<comment><USER64> It's not about privacy directly, but about the expectation for their old posts to be "forgotten." This is why the so-called "right to be forgotten" is/was a big deal in Europe.

<comment> J-dawg It was more than that. People were looking at old wall posts (which were always public) and they couldn't believe that they'd ever had those conversations in public. Hence jumping to the conclusion that their private messages had somehow been converted into public posts.

I think it's fascinating on two counts. Firstly that the accepted etiquette of how we use social media changed so quickly. And secondly that people's brains can simply reject something they did in the past, if it doesn't fit their current sense of self.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> In other news, bananas have surpassed OS X in daily Caloric consumption. I _knew_ Apple couldn't make it without Jobs.

People conflate the purposes of various products under the umbrella term "social network", which makes the assumption that all social networks offer arbitrarily similar function. Simply not true.

Snapchat offers ephemeral pictoral content with humorous ad-hoc additive filters. This tailors the product for those that desire ephemeral pictoral content with humorous ad-hoc additive filters. Apparently, a bunch of young kids.

Twitter offers what is now known through the shorthand, "microblogging". This tailors the product for people who like "microblogging". Apparently, a bunch of people, the median age being higher than Snapchat's median age.

Just because more people are spending time on Snapchat than on Twitter, does not mean that Snapchat is "taking away" from Twitter time. Perhaps different people are signing up for Snapchat that are not signed up for Twitter. Perhaps people that are spending X hours on Twitter are now spending Y hours on Snapchat without taking away from the X hours spent on Twitter. Elapsed eyeball time, and, ergo, ad revenue, are still the same. This isn't a zero-sum game. Twitter shouldn't break a sweat because Snapchat is getting more popular. Facebook shouldn't break a sweat because Twitter's no-character limit policy may increase user base.

Perhaps the zero-sum approach to competition makes sense in certain fields, like when products are similar substitutes of each other; like two different kinds of general-purpose glue offered on the market. Or when market capitalization of a certain kind of product is fixed : it's been widely assumed that the average American's entertainment budget is relatively fixed, so in a philosophical sense, if one popular band didn't exist, another popular band would be more popular.

But when it comes to products like "social networks"? With vast design philosophies and product focus and varying demographics? It's very reductionist to publish a headlines like this and assume it makes any sort of meaningful conclusions. As with any sufficiently popular business, this stuff is capital-C complicated and you can't explain relative differences in success using singular metrics like this.

<comment><USER66> I think I almost had a seizure reading your post. So many buzzwords lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I had this realization a while ago, Snapchat is basically what Twitter tried to achieve, a realtime pulse on everything happening anywhere, democratic and spontaneous because of information constraints. The difference being that Twitter is plagued with bad actors (you can be mean when you're just typing), whereas Snapchat is much more engaging, friendly, and to put it in a term that everyone understands: fun! The sad thing is I think Twitter engineering is much more talented than Snapchat... _cough_

<comment><USER68> Uh. Twitter is instantly public and indexed by google. Snapchat content goes away.

They have very, very different goals.

That said, it's easily agreeable that Snapchat the app is a flaming pile of brogramming.

<comment><USER67> Personally, I think in the long run, when you think of it, they are really similar. I get that they are physically entirely different products, but I feel like they are both competing for the same limited resource: attention.

I'm speaking solely from what I value personally, but to me, I lump Twitter and Snapchat in the same category that can be described as: what I do when I'm bored and want to see what's happening around me. When the problem statement is that, Snapchat just blows Twitter out of the water in terms of entertainment. When I watch the Warriors play off on Snapchat, I get to see the entire game filmed through crowdsourcing - it's like I'm _there_. I'd argue Twitter is trying to capture that same feeling of being _there_. Also, I haven't included Facebook in this since they are beyond that, they are basically a utility at this point.

I thought Snapchat was dumb at first, trust me. However, it's increasingly proving itself to be a very, very important medium of video distribution. Of course, there will always be a market for more curated content, but for real time, spontaneous content, Snapchat beats Twitter for me anyday.

<comment><USER69> Snapchat is your generation's MTV. It'll be okay. Then one day you'll get old and see the kids do something else. Rinse repeat.

<comment><USER67> Couldn't you make this argument for literally any product at any period of time?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A major milestone has been reached in our Brain Preservation Prize - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brainpreservation.org/2015/05/26/may-2015-bpf-prize-update/ <comment><USER2> Note that this approach should be compared with cryonics, which attempts to vitrify the brain and preserve it in a glass-like state at liquid nitrogen temperatures:

[http://www.alcor.org/](http://www.alcor.org/)

Personally I have some reservations about the plastination approach to personal longevity. Depending on your philosophical views on the nature of consciousness, it may be that under this procedure you would die and cease to exist, while some future emulation of your brain thinks it is you -- i.e. biological-you and future-emulated-you are two separate people that just share memories.

It is however interesting science and may be a short-cut path to getting necessary scanning resolution for whole brain emulation.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this the same as saying you are a different person every morning and that the person that went to sleep and the person that woke up are separate people?

<comment><USER4> No, its very probably not the same. The brain doesn't shut off when you go to sleep. It keeps going, it keeps doing it's stuff, messing with memories, thoughts, all the bodily functions and a whole extra stuff that we don't know too well, but which probably still makes you you. Killing _that_ brain and then simulating it somewhere else is not the same.

<comment><USER5> More importantly, does anyone suggest that running the original brain and the copy doesn't result in two separate diverged intellects? If running two results in separate consciousnesses then obviously they are not the same.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that follows. If "your" consciousness is just the consciousness that has a continuity of memory with a previous version of you, then the two copies would both be you, but they would not be one another.

<comment><USER2> Let's say that I a suitably advanced fMRI is developed that is able to map out the connectome non-destructively, I use this device on you to create a copy of your mental state, and then let you go about your day. At some point later I turn on a whole-brain simulation from this data. What do you, the you-that- walked-into-the-scanner expect to experience?

<comment><USER7> You'd experience nothing unusual.

<comment><USER2> I agree. But the further implication is that for the same reasons, if your brain is plasticised and later scanned and turned into an uploaded whole-brain emulation, you'd still be dead. Uploading is not a pathway to personal longevity, or whatever you want to call continuation-of-me-not-just-my- memories.

<comment><USER8> That's the crux of it all, isn't it? Is your self any more than your personality and memories? If so, then you'll have to resort to a soul or some such. If not, then the upload is really 'you', or a copy anyway.

And who's to say a soul wouldn't attach to a copy anyway? Souls are not that well understood. Perhaps it would be fooled by the copy, or have an affinity for it, or some such. As long as we're speculating.

<comment><USER2> No, there are plenty of perfectly reasonable physical theories for the nature of consciousness that don't equate identity with memories and don't involve souls. There's no reason to resort to dualism.

For example, there is the identity-is-the-instance-of-computation theory which says that it is not the information being computed (memories) that is relevant, but the computation itself.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, the hardware/wetware is just as important as the bits being uploaded. Especially for chemical brains that store much of personality as neural wiring.

But lets say that's uploaded as well, as part of the 'program' details. Then where are we? An 'instance' of this is not actionably different from any other, if it behaves exactly the same. Its arguable that they are the 'same person' in some sense.

<comment><USER2> It matters to the person who is now dead and not living on in the machine.

<comment><USER8> But they are living on! Kind of. Like you are, in that body of yours, once all the cells are replaced by new cells every decade or so. Its ok; you still sound like the same person.

<comment><USER2> Another strawman. No one is claiming that identity is tied to the molecules that make up the body, even in aggregate. There's a sense in which a car remains the same car even after continuing comprehensive maintenance has replaced every single part, but that car stays different from the next car off the production line. Does that example make sense?

<comment><USER8> Come on! If its a new car, its a different car. Doesn't matter how convoluted the path to get there (replace every part or build new). Not a strawman; an example pointed right at the argument that 'a copy isn't the same thing'. Be fair.

<comment><USER2> You be fair too. The instance-of-computation model of personal identity allows for cells of your brain to come and go, but as long as the whole thing is operating continuously, you remain. It is exactly analogous to my car example.

<comment><USER8> Its also exactly analogous to my build-an-entirely-new-one and program it exactly as the previous one was programmed. It has exactly the same result. If I did it without anyone looking, they would never be able to tell the difference.

<comment><USER5> Except the original that you replaced with your copy. You're opting for an external functional description of identity but the discussion is about the individual.

It should be understand as conceded that a perfect copy of me would pass any Turing-style test applied by an external auditor that the copy is me, but that doesn't mean that I am the copy.

<comment><USER8> Its different in a sense, sure. But consider: if I replaced it so perfectly that it was atom-by-atom identical, then God himself would not be able to say if it was you or not. Unless we admit to some external agency that defines 'you' that is not present in the mechanism e.g. a soul.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One step closer to me being able to spin up multiple instances of my brain to work on my side project and play video games with.

<comment><USER10> Please add a load balancer too. I hope we can have an interface like amazon ec2, but for brains

<comment><USER11> That would have been a somewhat less ridiculous explanation for The Matrix. "Oh, those vats full of humans? They're our neural network cloud".

<comment><USER12> Yes, and considering that _The Fall of Hyperion_ was published in 1990, that scenario should have been obvious to the Wachowskis.

<comment><USER13> It was actually what they intended, before the execs told them audiences wouldn't understand it.

<comment><USER11> Not surprising, considering I had relatively techie friends that were absolutely mindblown by concepts like pervasive virtual reality (never mind taking the next step beyond the Matrix to "uploading"). I was utterly taken aback at the realisation of just how foreign ideas like that were to people that weren't steeped in SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We just has a plastination vs. cryonics debate ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9595853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9595853)) which might be of interest here.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am glad progress is being made here, but until we can avoid the destruction that occurs in the last 24 hours of expected death (eg cancer), or the damage that occurs with unexpected death (eg heart attack or trauma) from sitting at room temperature for hours after death, then all we are going to be preserving is grey mush.

<comment><USER15> You're assuming this "grey mush" can't be recovered. We don't actually know that. A sufficiently advanced AI should be able to recover a person from way less.

<comment><USER16> You're assuming the phrase "a sufficiently advanced AI" answers anything at all.

Presumably you're assuming if the information is there at all - if the necessary data hasn't been scrambled beyond the noise floor of the scrambling process - then there's something for magic (because you're really talking about magic here) to work with.

So, please (a) set out your claim with precision (b) back up your claim.

* What is the information you need to recover?

* To what degree is it scrambled?

* What of it is scrambled below the noise floor of the process?

* How do you know all this? (wrong answer: "here's a LessWrong/Alcor page." right answer: "here's something from a relevant neuroscientist.")

For comparison: even a nigh-magical superintelligent AI can't recover an ice sculpture from the bucket of water it's melted into. It is in fact possible to just lose information. So, since you're making this claim, I'd like you to quantify just what you think the damage actually is.

<comment><USER17> I'm quite sure I've read somewhere that information cannot be lost in the absolute sense, lost to us: yes, lost irrevocably and irrefutably: no.

In that sense, 'a sufficiently advanced AI' is not magic, because when people say that they definitively have something in mind, at least the people I often discuss this with do.

In short: if you're smart(fast, precise, determined) enough to look at the individual molecules of a puddle of brain-goo. And if you can infer the way it has collapsed by ray tracing those molecules back through how they collided with each other/the walls of your mold then it should be possible to reconstruct the spatial form of the brains at least. That's a pretty big IF obviously, but equally obviously not impossible. If only you can look deep/far/fast enough.

If you want to be theoretical about it, then yes. There is probably an upper bound on how smart/big an AI mind can possibly be. And thus there is a limit on how much information it can extract from arbitrary systems. So I agree with your assertion that there is information that even the smartest of all AIs cannot possibly reconstruct, but I'm not sure that the brain is such a structure.

Any justification about why/how 'a sufficiently advanced AI' could come about is more questionable.

Many knowledgeable people are making guesses based on our current understanding of intelligence/computation/AI, and then extrapolating. The paradoxical thing is that on the one hand AI-doomsday speakers tell us no to anthropomorphise (for good reasons) with the motives of an AI, but on the other hand apply human reasoning/understanding to predict such machines/patterns.

<comment><USER16> > I'm quite sure I've read somewhere that information cannot be lost in the > absolute sense, lost to us: yes, lost irrevocably and irrefutably: no.

This is probably not quite at the requested standard of backing up a claim, and sounds very like "but you can't prove it isn't true!" But I'm not the one making a claim.

In any case, please back up your claim. What is "the absolute sense"? How does it differ from "in a practical sense", with examples?

> In short: if you're smart(fast, precise, determined) enough to look at the > individual molecules of a puddle of brain-goo. And if you can infer the way > it has collapsed by ray tracing those molecules back through how they > collided with each other/the walls of your mold then it should be possible > to reconstruct the spatial form of the brains at least. That's a pretty big > IF obviously, but equally obviously not impossible. If only you can look > deep/far/fast enough.

Noise floor. In this case, thermal noise.

Also, you literally can't know that much about all the molecules in your puddle of goo. (Heisenberg.) We do not live in a Newtonian universe.

<comment><USER17> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory)

[http://phys.org/news/2014-09-entropy-black- holes.html](http://phys.org/news/2014-09-entropy-black-holes.html)

[http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-hole- thermodynamics.html](http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-hole- thermodynamics.html)

Ben Crowell, phd in physics:

[http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83731/entropy- inc...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83731/entropy-increase-vs- conservation-of-information-qm)

The reason I didn't/don't back up those claims is because I'm really not knowledgeable about those subjects. I'm not sure what good sources are/how legitimate they are, but I have read it one day. Even if I cannot interpret the technical jargon behind it and/or give more nuance to my claim due to a low understanding of the subject.

Given a bit of googeling to "can information be lost", "conservation of information" one finds the articles I linked to above.

But you have dodged my refutal of your initial claim, the one I was really responding to, that: 'sufficiently advanced AI' is not just a stop-gap-word for magic. Because in this case it doesn't stand for "I don't know how or why but this and this", but instead it stands for "I don't know why(in the motivational sense), but given a bigger brain one can use and interpret finer instruments, which in turn enables us to extrapolate further back in time".

<comment><USER16> None of your links support your claim that winding the clock back is even theoretically possible, and the stackexchange link seems to say it isn't: "The resolution is that entropy isn't a measure of the total information content of a system, it's a measure of the amount of hidden information, i.e., information that is inaccessible to macroscopic measurements." Even if you're assuming a physical God, that physical God can't get good enough measurements.

<comment><USER17> I think that perhaps our views of the world are slight off- kilter/incompatible.

I agree with you that even godlike-AI must have an upper bound on what they can extract from a 'puddle of atoms'. It's obvious that given a handful of atoms it's not possible to predict what happened to a completely different bunch of atoms 5 billion years ago at the other side of the (observable) universe. That's also not what I'm claiming.

What I do claim is that, given enough smarts, it's possible to do this to a bunch of molecules present in the brain-goo.

I'm assuming here that whatever it is that makes the brain 'tick' is located on the molecular level, and not a lower level.

As to your claim of being able to 'turn back time', don't we do this all the time?

If we look at the link we've both referenced, say we had two pictures of the last milliseconds of the book falling, and we knew the exact time between when these pictures were taken then we can turn back the time right? We know exactly how/when/where the book was if we can interpret those pictures.

In a similar way, the information about the locations of the molecules in the 'brain goo' is available to a 'sufficiently advanced AI'. Thus what I'm arguing is that this is not information that is 'lost' in the way that we've been discussing so far.

Therefore it's also not 'magic' when people refer to such AI, because when they do they have this in mind. Not some law-bending/breaking super godlike- ai, but rather a system with the resources needed to stitch together the complete video from the last two images.

<comment><USER16> > I think that perhaps our views of the world are slight off- > kilter/incompatible.

Yeah, possibly. I blame LessWrong fatigue. It's an entire site made of handwavy claims that, no matter how far you trace back through the links, never quite actually get backed up. So I tend to be harsh on similar claims, particularly when they appear to be from that sphere (judging by the buzzword "sufficiently advanced AI", which is in practice used to put forward outlandish claims and then try to reverse the burden of proof).

I actually started reading the site because of a friend who was getting into cryonics. I'd hitherto been neutral-to-positive on the idea, but the more I investigated it the more I went "what the hell is this rubbish." (Writeup is at [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics) which is a very middling article, and is still about the best critical article available on the subject ...) The handwavy claims are endemic, quite a few rely on effective magic (actual answers from cryonicist: "But, nanobots!" or "sufficiently advanced AI") and it really is largely just ill-supported guff, even if I'm being super-charitable to the arguments. Extracting a disprovable claim is nearly bloody impossible itself.

> As to your claim of being able to 'turn back time', don't we do this all the > time? >If we look at the link we've both referenced, say we had two pictures > of the last milliseconds of the book falling, and we knew the exact time > between when these pictures were taken then we can turn back the time right? > We know exactly how/when/where the book was if we can interpret those > pictures.

But we couldn't do that if the data had been destroyed. That's the claim way up there: the information is recoverable from the mashed-up goo. The two pictures have been destroyed, we have the book sitting on the floor, there's nothing to reconstruct the fall in sufficient detail.

I say this because whenever I've seen an actual neuroscientist who's been asked this sort of question (can we recover the information with a magic AI or whatever), they answer "wtf, no, it's been utterly trashed. No, not even in theory. You can't even measure it. It's been trashed utterly." The questioner usually comes back with "but if we use a SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED AI ..." _i.e._ , if we let them assert their conclusion. And first they'd have to show you could measure stuff on the nanometre scale without messing it up. Let alone, _e.g._ , reconstructing the precise locations of proteins in a cell after they've been denatured by cryoprotectant. Remember that it's a claim about physical reality that's being made here.

(A couple of examples, from scientists who would LOVE to be able to preserve and get back this information: [http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8f4/neil_degrasse_tyson...](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8f4/neil_degrasse_tyson_on_cryonics/6krm) [http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/14/and- everyo...](http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/14/and-everyone- gets-a-robot-pony/) )

>In a similar way, the information about the locations of the molecules in the 'brain goo' is available to a 'sufficiently advanced AI'.

Remember that there is no way to distinguish two molecules of the same substance. You're requiring more information than can actually be measured (Heisenberg).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


XOS: an hobbyist OS project by Omar (15-year-old) - <AUTHOR> https://omarrx024.github.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's the follow up of this story: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045254)</comment>


Thoughts on Thunks; How JavaScript thunks explain promises - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getify.com/thoughts-on-thunks/ <comment><AUTHOR> (self post)</comment>


Macs Are Slower Than PCS. Here's Why - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=947op8yKJRY <comment><USER2> For those avoiding clickbait titles, this is about thermal throttling.

I was genuinely fascinated by the number of people that were surprised when the i9s in Macbooks were thermally throttling. Additionally I ended up in a bit of a reddit argument with someone who was adamant that the ipad pro can maintain max GPU output without active cooling.

I guess no matter how much people understand tech, we still want the biggest specs in our computers, even if we sometimes choose to overlook the actual limiting factors.

<comment><USER3> I just upgraded to a MacBook at work - I requested an i9, but they downgraded me to an i7 because they've had too many bad experiences with the i9's overheating and having to be sent back.

<comment><USER2> Just out of interest, why did you request the i9? I'm not having a dig at you, I'm genuinely interested.

<comment><USER3> I just picked the top-of-line everything - I wanted to keep myself as future- proof as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While this is entirely valid criticism, it glosses over the fact that the experiments were heavily biased towards long running workloads typical for media producers.

I'm not using my MBP to render 4k video or maxing all cores of the CPU for sustained periods.

It seems clear to me that for the casual/developer segment, that has eaten up the entire marketshare, having short bursts of peak performance on six cores is perfectly fine for compiling/coding/browsing workloads.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that sustained 100% cpu tasks should be run on portable hardware. Use remote desktop/SSH and a VM/Mac Pro if you need to hit maximum TDP for long periods, RDP has great in-house latency and has the added benefit of your lap not becoming lava.

There's a much better pattern for these tasks, and it isn't using hardware designed to be portable. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

<comment><USER5> > long running workloads typical for media producers

But aren't MBP's pitched at these types of users as the tool for this type of job? I mean, if you look at the blurb at [https://www.apple.com/macbook- pro/](https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/) it's pretty much the selling point.

We may know better because we like to understand the underlying tech. But pretty much every content and media producer I've run into over the years isn't that interested. Pretty much in the same way that I'm really not that interested in how my old field engineer company motor's mechanicals work as long as it didn't break down 400 miles from home.

<comment><USER4> I agree that this is shady marketing.

However, like I said, there are superior solutions available for these content/media producers.

Am I supposed to feel bad for them not optimising a tool that is apparently critical for their throughput and suffering mediocrity as a result?

There's an information asymmetry here and if they don't put the effort in to squeeze extra performance out of their equipment then either:

A) Someone who is putting this minimal effort into actually choosing the best tool for their job will usurp them with greater productivity.

B) Render times really aren't a bottleneck compared to the struggle of coming up with content ideas/filming the actual content -- slightly longer running tasks while people slack off and drink coffee are just fine.

I suspect it's actually the latter hence this is really a non-issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a little facetious.

Linus Media Group have a small render farm, and don't render on any ultrabook, let alone Apples. Its not like they don't know there isn't really the expectation to be able to do that a full speed.

I can completely understand why Apple have gone for the 'provide burst capacity, but keep quiet for as long as possible' route. If you looking to tilt absolutely max performance out of a piece of silicon you just don't buy in that form factor. Linus misunderstands the market, not Apple.

This has been avoided in the phone because Apple are not constrained by what Intel hand them in that space. Maybe things will change with an ARM MBP?

<comment><USER6> They have to drop the obsession with with CPU temperature too.

The 'gamer science' scene is obsessed with it, but cooling a processor to 40 degrees for the most part is just a waste of energy, which in a battery powered laptop, is important.

The reality is that these chips will run at 95 degrees for decades.

<comment><USER7> > The reality is that these chips will run at 95 degrees for decades.

That tends to be less and less true as semiconductor feature sizes decrease - there are thermal runaway phenomena that can absolutely threaten long-term endurance in CPUs, GPUs or other electronic components. At temperatures as high as 95C, you'll also have to worry about endurance in the packaging, due to e.g. thermal stress. This is a genuine issue and the gamers are quite right in being concerned about it - in fact, their rather extensive experience with running stuff in out-of-spec, "overclocked" conditions means that they can speak with some authoritativeness here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Macs are a subset of _OTHER_ PCs? Or are they saying that Macs are slower than Sprint PCS?</comment>


Ask HN: Interviewer/advising tips for undergraduate interviewees? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be interviewing undergraduates soon for a position which involves writing a mobile phone application. These students are primarily first and second year students, so I don't expect them to have much experience under their belts. What kind of things should I be looking for/asking about?<p>Also, how should I go about advising such a student? Meetings would be weekly or bi-weekly. <comment><USER2> Coming from a student's perspective here.

I would advise doing your best to help the student learn. That is why they are applying for your position. Because they want a great experience that they can put on their resume and also so they can learn a new skill. Show them how the things you are working with them on can be used not only in your application, but in applications in general. At the same time however, give the student time to learn on their own. Give them the resources they need to solve a problem and then let them go for it. When they need help, show them how to find help or help them yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try and look for passion. Just ask questions that will get them talking about what they're interested in. Don't discount people with little or no experience. Just because they haven't done something yet doesn't mean they're not the best for the job.

Meet with them regularly and give them a lot of space to get the work done. Meet with them regularly to make sure they're on track. If possible, give them a resource that they can talk to if they get stuck on anything.</comment>


Ask HN: Why Do Government Websites Work Human Hours - <AUTHOR> Here is a perfect example of the IRS deciding servers only work 4am to 7pm pst<p>https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/apply-for-an-employer-identification-number-ein-online <comment><USER2> Since we're constantly reading about how old and unstable the IRS's computer systems are, I'd guess that their choice of uptime hours might actually be due to technical constraints.

For example, they might need several hours in the middle of the night to process the day's transactions through ancient, overloaded mainframe batch- processing systems. Or they might need the nights and weekends to do maintenance (e.g., programming, testing or backups) on the system, which the system is too overloaded to handle while it's available to users.

Not to mention that it's currently not even a month after the tax due date, so right now they'd be prioritizing the use of their systems to process people's tax returns while deprioritizing all other transactions.</comment>


Spectrum Analyzer Software for OpenRAMAN - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepulsar.be/article/spectrum-analyzer-software-for-openraman <comment><USER2> This is great!

I have been searching for a decent piece of spectroscopy software, currently I use a mix of an ancient VB program I wrote in high school, an even worse labview program I wrote in undergrad, and a jupyter notebook I wrote in grad school.

The reliance on the point grey libraries is a bit of a bummer since my cameras are mostly based on firewire cameras using the dcam protocol via libdc1394.

Kind of an odd choice to license it with the cern open hardware license, being that this is really a piece of traditional software as opposed to a hardware design or firmware.

Speaking of, there is a great laser beam profiler called Bullseye that is in a similar spirit to this project. [https://github.com/jordens/bullseye](https://github.com/jordens/bullseye)

It also supports point grey cameras, so if you have a camera for the openraman project your camera is probably compatible with bulleye as well.

<comment><USER3> _The reliance on the point grey libraries is a bit of a bummer since my cameras are mostly based on firewire cameras using the dcam protocol via libdc1394._

Also a bummer that the software apparently can't even run without the camera hardware attached (having just tried it). How are other people supposed to load and view result files?</comment></comment>


Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/qawithmark?hc_location=timeline <comment><USER2> Top comment (for me):

        Hello Zuck, I would like to ask that when our facebook fanpage's reach will be come back? its too frustrating having 100k -likes with only 1k, 2k reach ,& 1m likes with only 10k, 20k reach .. sometimes too low

        Don't destroy our hard work and efforts, we want organic reach back !!! im not the only one who is unhappy with pages post reach . , Hope u are not ignoring my comment . thanks

        (i also wanted to know that is there any source to reach you ? if there is, i want to know..and if none..do establish one... a good idea can come from anywhere..from anyone.. )

I've also experienced this, you're only able to reach 5-10% of your fans without paying. Only way of getting a message out to all your fans is to "boost" your post, which will cost you around 0.015 EUR per like the page has. [1]

And on top of that if you ever used Facebook ads to get likes to your page, a majority of those are fake. [2]

[1] Based on my rough calculations on a couple of pages I run.

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

<comment><USER3> Removed quotation sidescrolling:

> Hello Zuck, I would like to ask that when our facebook fanpage's reach will > be come back? its too frustrating having 100k -likes with only 1k, 2k reach > ,& 1m likes with only 10k, 20k reach .. sometimes too low

> Don't destroy our hard work and efforts, we want organic reach back !!! im > not the only one who is unhappy with pages post reach . , Hope u are not > ignoring my comment . thanks

> (i also wanted to know that is there any source to reach you ? if there is, > i want to know..and if none..do establish one... a good idea can come from > anywhere..from anyone.. )

<comment><USER4> 🙌

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course, the most-Liked proposed questions such as "when u gonna introduce the dislike button ?" and "Why you forced us to install Facebook messenger ?" are the ones that would never be answered in a million years by Mark, therefore making the "vote on a question you want me to answer by liking it" community selection process somewhat pointless.

<comment><AUTHOR> or "Why can't the news feed stay as 'most recent?"

<comment><USER6> It has been answered so many times. The data has shown that it actually hurts engagement. The algorithm is better than a simple time-ordered sort.

<comment><USER7> Overriding a user's stated preference by silently reverting it is what we're talking here, not changing the default.

If you change your view to "Most Recent," it should stay that way, regardless of what they think it does to "engagement."

<comment><USER8> I'm one of the users that actively changes my feed to "Most Recent" any time it isn't. I've noticed that as long as I'm logging in from the same device (typically my desktop/laptop in desktop mode) that it tends to stay the same. I'm not sure exactly what triggers it to switch back to "Top Stories" but I've definitely had it happen when I log in on my Android phone through a browser (typically Chrome) after having to request the desktop version (I dislike the mobile version and uninstalled the app long ago due to battery consumption). Also, it does give the message "Viewing most recent stories · Back to top stories" if it is still on "Most Recent", so the lack of that message is one way to know to switch back.

That's not even what is frustrating for me. I'm pretty sure that it didn't used to work this way, but now whenever somebody likes or comments on a post it is moved to the top of "Most Recent". Just as a poster above has noted, the main reason Facebook wants you to use "Top Stories" is to increase usage, and I would guess that is exactly the reason they are doing this. When I log in I just want to see all the new posts, but now I have to scroll through a bunch that I have already seen just because more people have liked them, and I have to keep scrolling past several posts I've already seen unless I can remember how many likes/comments they had the last time I checked to make sure I've seen everything that's new. Ironically, I submitted feedback to Facebook about this last night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My fav so far was: Will you call future sessions like this question mark?

<comment><USER10> In case anyone didn't understand it with the punctuation removed:

Can you call future events like this "Question Mark"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have a Facebook account so I can't post a question. Can someone post this question for me? Ask Zuck why he's invested so much money into making their own frankenstein PHP when they could have just used Java? I mean I like PHP and all. It's great for blogs or personal websites, but why would you invest all of that blood, sweat and beers into build something at that scale on PHP?

<comment><USER12> By the time they got around to building "frankenstein PHP", it was way too late to switch languages. Before that, there was no time to switch.

The whole development process of Hack is interesting. It was very organic, if the stories I heard were true. Someone got it in their head to try compiling php to c++; they tested it and got a free 20% (ballpark) speedup of everything. Then they made a VM to make it faster and more efficient, and once they had that vm, it was easy to add small, useful features like 'await' and such.

Much of what people hate about PHP isn't in Hack, by the way. It has type hinting, lots of dumb conversions don't happen, and obviously it's not interpreted. Hack is really just a better language they made that, because it shares the same syntax as PHP, was very easy to switch over to while still developing features.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> so I am wondering whether Mark will able to answer more important questions on privacy and government requests etc if he chooses the most liked ones such as celebrity crush,dislike button,etc?

<comment><USER13> I asked about it on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/What-has-happened-to-Mark- Zuckerbergs-o...](http://www.quora.com/What-has-happened-to-Mark-Zuckerbergs- opinion-on-privacy-since-the-early-days-of-Facebook)

<comment><AUTHOR> now let's wait for the answer. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> did he actually answer ANY question? i cant find any...</comment>


Why the New American Real Estate Dream Is Renting - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350432677038184.html <comment><USER2> Dumb article! Homeownership is dead because you could be foreclosed upon? This is news?

I bought my first house in the city about 12 years ago. First thing I did was paint one bedroom wall cobalt blue cause I loved that color. Lawns are a pain in the ass to take care of (and I don't much care for monocultures anyway), so I began ripping up the lawn in the back and planting veggies, strawberries, raspberries and prairie wildflowers that can take care of themselves. Added a computer room in the unfinished basement.

Sold that house after 5 years and move to the suburbs (bad idea!). I like to cook, so the second house had its kitchen ripped out and replaced with real slate floor tiles, nice countertops and custom cabinets within 2 months of moving in. Built a metal-casting setup behind the house. Bought house #3 way out in the country and rented out house #2 for 2 years then sold it.

Hope to stay in house #3 until economy improves. I have 10 acres to play in and a small machine shop in the basement. We have horses, chickens, large vegetable garden, maybe goats or cows someday and can do whatever we feel like with the property -- like the outdoor clay oven I haven't finished. Next summer I think I'm digging a goldfish pond/water garden.

Try doing any of that with a rental! Not everyone buys to flip or to sell at a profit. Most of us just want a place to live in that we can hack to suit our current mood.

<comment><USER3> "People who rent talk about the books that they've read, the trips that they've taken, the skills that they are learning, the friends whose company they are enjoying. Property owners complain about the local politicians, the high rate of property tax, the difficulty of finding competent tradespeople, the high value of their own (very likely crummy) house or condo, and what kinds of furniture and kitchen appliances they are contemplating buying. Property owners are boring. The most boring parts of a property owner's personality are those which relate to his or her ownership of real estate."

[http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early- retirement/whe...](http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early- retirement/where-to-live)

<comment><USER4> Hm. Boring and secure, or interesting and anxious? :)

<comment><USER5> why would renters be, by default, anxious? I would be anxious if I owned a home and saw the drop in value over the past two years. or if I were upside- down. or if my mortgage rate could reset in the future. or had to worry about fire, flood or earthquake wiping me out.

as a renter, I don't care about any of those things. if my apartment building burns down, the thing I'll be most sad about is my macbook and some personal mementos. if they increase my rent beyond what I'm willing to pay, I just move to a cheaper part of town. maybe I could be evicted, but finding a new place is more of an annoyance than a financial tragedy.

frankly, owning goats and painting walls don't sound terribly exciting to me. OTOH, things I value, like living in the grip of a big city and being able to walk to work are essentially impossible without a fat stack of cash or else renting.

<comment><USER4> As a renter, I am living someplace at the sufferance of someone else. Yes, in some jurisdictions there are legal issues if they want to kick me out, and mostly they wouldn't want to anyway, as long as I pay my rent on time and don't annoy the other tenants too much, but the difference is that if you own a house, it's _yours_. There's always someplace you can go where no one has the right to make you leave. There's an added level of security to that, even if most renters don't care.

<comment><USER6> The "ownership" isn't what it used to be - you have to pay property taxes, and if you don't you will be kicked out of "your home". In effect you are renting your home from the government.

<comment><USER5> not to mention that until you pay off your mortgage, your home belongs to the bank. anecdotally, I know more people who have had to deal with foreclosure than with eviction.

so, OP, would you revise your statement to "boring, but secure in ways nobody really cares about, and even then, not really or interesting, but anxious (if you're prone to be anxious about things that rarely happen and even then are more hassle than hardship)."? I'm not having a hard time with this decision.

home ownership is great if you need lots of space for your things or your kids, or if you want to impress people. but that's not me. and I don't feel the slightest bit anxious about my choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why I cringe when I hear people say that the current economic crisis is an indictment of capitalism; a proof that free markets behave irrationally. To believe that you have to ignore the enormous distortions government has created, not just with recent legislation but with things like the mortgage tax deduction that are so entrenched and popular we take them for granted.

<comment><USER8> If the market were so perfect, why wouldn't it cope with distortions perfectly? In other words, why wouldn't it predict the effects of mortgage tax etc., and still come out OK in the end?

<comment><USER8> I find it very interesting that when this argument is presented, people don't post a counterargument - they downvote instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> another disadvantage for homeowner:

in unstable countries, the new government that replace its old one will try to steal the land from owners

if the new gov is democratic, it only honors those who can show certificate on ownership (even the ones granted from old foreign govt -- the countries that gain independence from colonial in ww2 show this trend)

if the new gov is communist, it will simply take the land (worse, the big owners will be labeled capitalist and shot to dead -- happened in china, see the movie 'to live' by zhang yi mou for ref)

those are best and worst case, of course, america is far too remote from civil war or foreign invasion

the renters can just walk away; however, the old money will be of no value ... so it's better to diversify to foreign currencies or precious metal ... or tools

my grandparents actually buried a minivan when the japanese invaded us. once the new govt is set, they resumed the transportation business. it could be more optimal than currencies/metal because ... after a war, the survivor is the only pioneer, no competition -- sufficiently a monopoly by event

</comment><comment><USER10> Never rent unless in a precarious situation or if just recently moved to a new city. Buy as soon as you can. You will never ever see a penny of what you paid for in rent.

If you buy, even if temporary, you get all your money back, sometimes more, sometimes less, but you always get some.

I lived most of my early adult life renting and I can tell you this, more than $100K wasted and no way at all to get one cent back.

<comment><USER11> Mathematical identity:

        price to own = price to rent + speculative ownership premium + transaction costs

If you rent, you get to keep that speculative ownership premium and the transaction costs.

An additional problem with owning is that your investments are bound to your living situation. Orthogonality is good. I can change my living situation without even thinking about my investments.

<comment><USER12> On average the owner does get something in return for the speculative ownership premium, though, so you have to factor that out.</comment></comment></comment>


When it comes to election meddling, America is as guilty as Russia - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1218013/russian-election-meddling-the-us-is-guilty-of-influencing-elections-too/ <comment><USER2> That's why we haven't levels too many sanctions against Russia.</comment>