Blockchains Considered Harmful: Is Brute-Force Processing Replacing Good Design? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sigarch.org/blockchains-considered-harmful-is-brute-force-processing-replacing-good-design/ <comment><USER2> Hi. I'm Vinay Gupta, the release coordinator for the Ethereum launch.

Firstly, nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay - it's bleeding money from the currencies that use it at an astonishing rate, and as soon as Proof of Stake (or other algorithms) can replace it, they will. PoW is a direct financial drag on these economies, and it will not last long. Bitcoin will probably take longer to clean up its act than Ethereum, but that's largely for political reasons, not technical ones. Technically, it should be a lot easier to do than Ethereum, in fact. (It helps not being nearly Turing complete.)

Secondly, brute force is how things begin. The Unix philosophy has always suggested using brute force first: premature optimization is the root of all evil, as they say. We are at the very earliest stages of designing global public heterogeneous parallel supercomputers, and we should not be surprised that the early approaches are brute force.

It won't be that way for long.

<comment><USER3> > _nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay_

I do. I prefer to call it "Proof of Burn" instead of "Proof of Work". With Proof of Burn you can assure that it's difficult to create fake blocks because the attacker must burn even more petrol barrels that the good people.

Also, with Proof of Burn you get protection against an explosion of too many hard forks. If you have a hard fork in a Proof of Burn coin, the miners must select one chain to mine (or split the resources), so usually only one chain survives. In a Proof of Stake coin, after a hard fork the miners can continue mining in both chains.

<comment><USER4> Proof of Work (PoW) is inherent inferior to Proof of Stake (PoS). PoW is just the most simple way to archive consensus through cryptoeconomic incentives and that is why first blockchains implemented it.

It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized. On the chain that "wins" you can be penalized for mining multiple chains which is clearly bad behavior.

The main problems of PoS that Casper, the Ethereum implementation, is trying to solve are "Nothing at Stake" and "Long Range Attacks". Both problems are being tackled right now and close to be solved.

<comment><USER5> > It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being > penalized.

You're confusing multiple branches competing for being the most-cumulative- difficulty branch, with multiple distinct cryptocurrencies resulting from a hardforking code change.

Penalization only applies to the first case, but the parent was talking about the latter case. E.g. a miner could mine both ETH and ETC once both adopt PoS.

<comment><USER4> True. OP said _hard forks_ and I talked about natural forks.

I don't see any problem in hard forks and being able to stake on multiple chains. Let people hard fork as much as they want and decide, later on, which chains hold value.

<comment><USER6> >decide, later on, which chains hold value

How? Who decides?

This is really where every PoS algorithm seems to break down. The whole idea of blockchain is to build a decentralized consensus, and PoS just handwaves it away.

<comment><USER4> >Who decides?

Every user of the system.

>How?

Mostly by taking in consideration the differences of the software from both chains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree, there are much better consensus methods than Proof of Work. It's just that PoW is by far the most simple to implement. If you just take a peak at the ecosystem, especially around 2013-2015, it seems like every "altcoin" project had created their own consensus system. Of course, many of these were terrible.. but it's a good sign that this space has been trying to get away from regular ol' PoW since people started really finding out about Bitcoin.

Peercoin invented the core basis of the PoS algorithm in 2012 that was used throughout the 2013 and 2014 altcoin craze. This is still being used today in various projects, in augmented forms. Some projects tried to incentivize not just holding coins, but also making transactions (PoSV/proof of stake velocity, IIRC). Some projects tried making it so that you must burn coins to create blocks (proof of burn). And some projects tried doing genuinely useful computations instead of plain proof of work, such as doing protein unfolding (I think this was Curecoin?)... And then Dash invented the dBPF algorithm which is used by numerous coins today beyond just Dash and is similar to PoS but with a set number of stakers. (usually elected through an election on the blockchain)

If you look beyond Bitcoin there is a ton of innovation taking place in this space, and there has been for some time now. A lot of it is mired in scams, trolls, shills, and FUD.. but there is some genuinely awesome innovation happening in this space to drive forward consensus algorithms.

(source: co-founder of Qtum, a project in this space)

<comment><USER8> > I agree, there are much better consensus methods than Proof of Work.

It's like saying that there are better grammar parsing methods than binary search. Blockchain is not a consensus protocol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "Proof-of-Work" exists because money is being created. It is, then, > impossible to "create a new form of money" without invoking Proof-of-Work.

> Satoshi's design insight was to channel that inevitable work into a > cumulative process, to optimally stablize a peer-to-peer clock in a cartel- > resistant way.

– Paul Sztorc [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow- cheapest/](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/)

<comment><USER10> How is something cartel-resistant that _requires_ that entities must accumulate more and more capital (mining power) to still be able to participate?

<comment><USER11> Mining profitability is an equation with many variables. If the value of the reward climbs faster than mining technology advances, we might see mining open to regular people again.

Also, the traditional cartel action of limiting supply to inflate price would not work in Bitcoin due to auto-adjusting difficulty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It always bothered me how computer engineers who try to conserve energy and optimize all the time were excited by the wasteful Bitcoin implementation only because they see a potential in it to increase their wealth. It's like glorifying random sort because we haven't invented the bubble sort yet!

<comment><USER13> If you're talking history, I don't think that's quite fair. The whole hash- based algorithm was just the most mathematically simplistic way to make the idea work. It still is.

If you're talking present-day, yeah, mostly Bitcoin hoarders don't want to see any change that might make their currency start functioning like a currency instead of fake gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> PoW sticks because as a consensus backbone because it's 1.) easy to understand and implement and 2.) it's guarantees distribution of updates to the distributed state. IMO there are better ways to trustlessly secure distributed state but like all things there's a trade-off. The dirty secret of blockchain tech is that it can't scale - not without supplementary protocols. Even when you get it to scale you still have to deal with the storage of the blockchain. Bandwidth constrains the size of the blocks, which in turn constrains the amount of transactions. Turn up the block creation frequency (a la ETH) and you solved one problemt (Tx throughput) but created another (chain size).

I am fundamentally opposed to PoW because it wastes so many resources, but, for now, it's the most viable way to secure a chain. PoS is doomed to centralization and relies too much on game theory and incentives for my tastes. just my 2 cents

</comment><comment><USER15> This person is effectively arguing that all of Bitcoins problems would be solved by just using a centralized system.

This is correct, but it misses the point.

The whole point of crytocurrencies is to order transactions WITHOUT a centralized system.

There are many centralized systems already. If you want the benefits and tradeoffs of those, just go use one of them.

The people who do NOT like those tradeoffs will stay with crytocurrencies.

<comment><USER10> He also argues that those lofty ambitions come with a hefty bit of externalized cost - insanely high energy consumption - that is currently conveniently ignored but is harmful in the long run - for everyone, no matter if they use cryptocurrencies or not.

<comment><USER15> It's not externalized costs though. It's just regular costs.

People aren't stealing that energy (well, MOST miners aren't) . They are paying real money for it.

How is spending money to buy something and then using that thing (energy in this case) an externality?

Is me leaving the lights on at my house an externality? I don't think so. Im the one paying the costs.

If you don't want to pay for crytocurrencies, you don't have to buy them.

<comment><USER16> In many parts of the world (and particularly the United States), electrical power is generated through ways that are rather unfriendly to the environment, especially when load is unexpectedly higher. Causing higher demand and, thus, more pollution, is a negative externality that the miner is pushing off onto the rest of the public.

(Yes, some exceptions apply, like buying power from system operators that are primarily based around hydro or wind power.)

<comment><USER15> > especially when load is unexpectedly higher

Interestingly, this is actually the opposite situation for bitcoin mining.

Bitcoin miners are usually located right next to massive solar power plants, or hydro generators.

This way, the bitcoin miners use the excess energy, that nobody else was going to use, and they use this "free/excess" energy because it is cheaper.

There is no reason at all to run your bitcoin miner during peak capacity, when electricity prices are high. You just shut off the miners, and start them back up again during the night or something.

Bitcoin mining could even be considered a POSITIVE externality, in some situations, such as when power production is so high, that the power plants sell it for negative dollars (ie, the extra power disrupts the grid, so they need to get rid of it.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with this and also fundamentally believe that trust is a feature in systems and not a bug.

Building systems that work without trust (supposedly) is of very limited social utility since increasing trust is what makes for a healthy society and healthy economy.

<comment><USER15> Fortunately for you, there are numerous centralized trust money systems already. And if you want you should just go use one of those.

The rest of us who disagree should have the option of not using them though.

<comment><USER13> Not to be all "both sides tho," but I think you're both right. I code on blockchain stuff from time to time, and it's both really awesome for the decentralized no-trust part and straight-up nonsense for entire categories of problems that would be better solved off-chain. The hype machine is crazy and driving things toward the blockchain that absolutely don't belong there. ("Uh, do you need a blockchain, or do you just need to cryptographically sign something, and you've never thought about cryptography before today?") There are still some very interesting untapped possibilities that aren't better- served by any centralized system yet.

<comment><USER15> Oh, yeah definitely. Blockchains are for if you care about decentralized systems. And you pay a whole lot to get that one feature.

If you don't care about that one feature, decentralized blockchains are strictly worse on a number of metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice article. It is unfortunately woefully light, if not completely absent of alternatives. Yes, it is a massive waste of energy, but the ability to both prove and simultaneously detract counterfeits is brilliant as far as the creation of a store of value is considered. In the long run, I believe, that the optimization of ASICS + slowly decreasing power in the hands of a much larger set of miners will be the long-term winning factor defining legitimacy for POW algorithms. Until then the one who can burn energy faster and cheaper (a baseline commodity to begin with) will win.

<comment><USER19> Do we have that much of a long run, especially at current projected levels of waste, never mind use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing governments could do is this:

\- Create a digital token system that can be exchanged and accounted freely via a centralized server.

\- Give it a name. Don't even call it a currency, let people use it as money _if they want to_.

\- Give a limited amount to any citizen who wants some. Or maybe sell it, whatever. Just figure out a way people can get some. It can't be so hard.

\- Promise there will never be more than some fixed amount in total.

Only governments could do something like that because despite everything, most people trust them about money.

It'd be kind of a mixed between the different money systems.

<comment><USER21> > \- Create a digital token system that can be exchanged and accounted freely > via a centralized server.

This is a database

> \- Give it a name. Don't even call it a currency, let people use it as money > if they want to.

A token that is used as currency is currency

> \- Give a limited amount to any citizen who wants some. Or maybe sell it, > whatever. Just figure out a way people can get some. It can't be so hard.

How will the token have value if everyone receives it for free?

> \- Promise there will never be more than some fixed amount in total.

No one will fall for this again. Governments always print money to fund its own projects

> Only governments could do something like that because despite everything, > most people trust them about money.

Bitcoin's price goes up because people don't want to trust government with money

<comment><USER20> > No one will fall for this again. Governments always print money to fund its > own projects

But if the total amount of money was publicly visible, things could be different. For better or worse, people build trust from the past. If they see that the government has not raised to the total amount for many years, they may believe it won't do it either during many more years.

Kind of with treasure bonds. Despite the high level of debt most countries are in, investors keep believing the countries will pay back, because they have been for so long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Vinay Gupta thinks "nobody believes PoW is here to stay". Other commenters think "PoS might be impossible & no prominent cryptographer has some out in support of it".

It's worth reminding people of the null hypothesis: Perhaps blockchains don't work.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't like proof of stake because a large stake holder could be threatened privately by a third party into corrupting the whole system. With proof of work you need to spend a lot of money very publicly for a long time to break it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Proof-of-Work gives the token value because something was lost in order to create it

<comment><USER24> What you've described is labor theory of value and I don't think it makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It always puts me off when an article has "Considered Harmful" in the title.

<comment><USER26> I have to imagine some nonzero percentage of new CH essays are authored by people who agree (i.e. have seen [https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html) and the like) but proceed anyway, since the clickbait nature of doing so surely gives a boost exceeding the loss from those who are put off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "considered harmful" meme is tired and cliched, please retire.

<comment><USER28> "considered harmful" considered harmful

<comment><USER29> ""considered harmful" considered harmful" _considered harmful_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The underlying technology of blockchains to achieve distributed consensus > has been touted as a solution to many challenges in decentralized systems.

I hate blockchain hype and I hope the whole bubble around it dies soon, but even I can tell, judging from the title of the article and just the very first paragraph, that the author doesn't know a shit about how the thing works or why it is designed the way it is.

 _Blockchain does not solve consensus problem_. It's a timestamping service. Not a consensus solver.

And then the author draws dumb statements about what blockchain is from all over the place. Why the hell would anybody think "proof of work" is a "solution to denial-of-service attacks"?

<comment><USER30> Your comment comes off as pretty angry, yet I don't really get the faults you're pointing out in the original article.

> Blockchain does not solve consensus problem. It's a timestamping service. > Not a consensus solver.

Certainly Bitcoin seems to be a distributed consensus system. Is your complaint that it takes a whole system on top to provide the consensus aspect, which might be considered separate from the blockchain structure?

> Why the hell would anybody think "proof of work" is a "solution to denial- > of-service attacks"?

Isn't it? You can exchange QoS for non-malicious users for protection from DoS.

<comment><USER8> >> Blockchain does not solve consensus problem. It's a timestamping service.

> Certainly Bitcoin seems to be a distributed consensus system.

It is not. Bitcoin only tells which of the pair of documents was earlier (a document describes a single transaction). It doesn't allow to negotiate a value. If you swapped producing the proof of work with sending the transaction to a trusted third party for adding a timestamp, Bitcoin would work just as well. Go read "trusted timestamping" topic, Wikipedia has a good description.

>> Why the hell would anybody think "proof of work" is a "solution to denial- of-service attacks"?

> Isn't it?

What service does blockchain protect against availability disruption? How?

<comment><USER30> Still not sure what you're saying. What do you mean by "negotiate"? Because there are certainly rules for resolving conflicts. As long as we're using Wikipedia, the article for consensus in computer science explicitly mentions Bitcoin.

Proof of work can be used to protect against denial of service. If you provide a web service, you can choose to require proof of work before serving a client to make the client commit some proportional amount of effort.

<comment><USER8> > Still not sure what you're saying. What do you mean by "negotiate"?

OK, then what _do you_ mean by "consensus"?

> As long as we're using Wikipedia, the article for consensus in computer > science explicitly mentions Bitcoin.

Yes, and wrongly, too. Especially that the specific problem of establishing consensus that the Wikipedia page talks about has, since its very first paper, the impossibility proof at 1/3 of the participants, compared to 1/2 for Bitcoin (which means that Bitcoin is something different than consensus with Byzantine faults).

<comment><USER30> > The consensus problem requires agreement among a number of processes (or > agents) for a single data value. Some of the processes (agents) may fail or > be unreliable in other ways, so consensus protocols must be fault tolerant > or resilient. The processes must somehow put forth their candidate values, > communicate with one another, and agree on a single consensus value.

This seems to me to be exactly what Bitcoin does, where the "value" is the sum of all facts asserted on the blockchain.

<comment><USER8> Wikipedia page is about a very concrete problem described in a specific paper. Have you read the paper?

Then, Bitcoin does not allow to choose "the sum of all facts asserted on the blockchain", not any more than a typical DHT or a gossip protocol in a peer- to-peer network. In fact, there is nothing resembling the end state as in "we now terminate the protocol with this value as the outcome", which is required by definition of any type of "consensus" term.

Also, have you tried, _as I said two comments ago_ , swapping sealing transactions using proof-of-work with a trusted third party that provides unique timestamps for the transactions? Have you read what timestamping is?

<comment><USER30> What paper are you even talking about? You _might_ even be right, but you are a poor communicator.

<comment><USER8> Well, I sort of assumed that since you voice your opinion about consensus as defined in computer science, you at least should know _what it is_. I talk about Leslie Lamport's (plus Shostak and Pease) original publication about Byzantine generals problem, from 1982.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/dark-mail-hides-metadata-from-nsa <comment><USER2>
        Watt once had a lucrative Wall Street career coding software
        for real-time stock-trading systems until he wrote a packet-
        sniffing program for a long-time friend and found himself
        embroiled in a multi-million-dollar bank card heist that
        netted him a two-year prison term.

I love how puff-pieces always trivialize the things that would run counter to their narrative. He didn't _really_ do anything wrong - he was just helping his friend[0][1].

People do what they do, and that's cool - but let's not pretend he just accidentally found himself tripped up in some fraud situation, oops don't know how that happened hey look an awesome product in which trust is essential!

0\. There's a slightly more complete look here, though not focused on Watt: [http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-drugs-and- the-b...](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-drugs-and-the-biggest- cybercrime-of-all-time-20101111)

1\. Wired did a similar sympathetic piece last year in which they made Watt's past seem like a minor misdeed (some wording is essentially identical to what I quoted above): [http://www.wired.com/2013/04/stephen-watt-stalked-by- past/](http://www.wired.com/2013/04/stephen-watt-stalked-by-past/)

<comment><USER3> In response to the Rolling Stone article:

        Patrick's job was to probe corporate networks for vulnerabilities to a malware attack known as a "sequel injection," which overwhelms the victim's system with meaningless commands until the system gives up and defaults to using the malicious code.

Sequel injection, huh? :P

<comment><USER4> That... wow. That's _exactly_ what "Sequel injection" is, basically, you overwhelm the target with "v2.0", or the "sequel", if you will, and it just gives up and runs that code, thus "injecting" the "sequel".

Holy crap.

<comment><USER3> Yeah aside from that and a small number of other gems, it's a really good article. Read it a long time ago when it was first published, but definitely one I can re-read for the pure enjoyment factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Watt wasn't convicted for fraud, he was convicted for not snitching. I, for one, trust the man's integrity, and I'll judge his code when I see it.

<comment><USER3>
        Stephen Watt pleaded guilty to writing the sniffer code that proved key to Albert's operation but continues to insist that he never knew it was being used for illegal purposes, noting that he made no money from Albert's crimes.

[http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-drugs-and- the-b...](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-drugs-and-the-biggest- cybercrime-of-all-time-20101111?page=6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dark Mail is written by someone who was convicted of helping to steal credit card information?!

<comment><USER7> Who cares ? If the protocol is open and good, and we can build open source implementations, no one cares about the life of the creator.

<comment><USER8> The question is, can you trust someone who has broken trust in the past and in a major way?

<comment><USER9> How exactly did Stephen Watt break trust? He didn't steal any credit cards, he didn't profit from other people stealing credit cards, and he allegedly was not aware of the purpose for that sniffer program. He's an old-school black hat who broke into systems for the lulz, not for financial gain. (Ever heard of ~el8?). His mistake was believing his associates shared his priorities.

Not only that, but when he was being pressured and threatened by the government, he refused to cooperate. I think that's commendable and demonstrates real integrity.

<comment><USER3> Do you really believe he didn't know what it was being used for? He acknowledged it was using to sniff traffic, if not for credit-cards? What? Account details?

Unless there were logs or talks of them doing it for purely academic/educational purposes, which as we know Gonzalez isn't that "sort" of person, it would be unacceptable to think someone of Watt's intellect wouldn't be able to put 2-and-2 together.

He's been around the scene. He knows the scene. He's been a part of the scene.

I agree in terms of law, this all goes into a very grey and fuzzy area - if he had a better lawyer he may have came out in a different situation. Looking at the recent backlash for hackers, he may be looking at an apology (or even a payout) in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nezza-_- Has nothing to do with the Dark Mail Alliance, right? [http://darkmail.info/](http://darkmail.info/)

<comment><USER10> It is the one and same if you had read the link you provided... The Dark Mail Alliance lists Ladar Levison as part of the team who is one of the people mentioned in the article. The same name thing may be a giveaway also...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like we need to start a new meme of "they thwart spies!" along the lines of "they fight crime!"</comment>


DConf 2013 Day 1 Talk 2: Copy and Move Semantics in D by Ali Cehreli - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPr2UspS0fE <comment><USER2> D structs are similar to their counterparts in other languages but they have significant differences as well. The mechanics of copying and moving struct objects are special in D.

This talk shows how to take advantage of copy and move semantics of D to write efficient and safe data types in the presence of mutable, const, and immutable member variables and parameters.</comment>


Don't Alienate Open Source Contributors - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-alienate-open-source-contributors-tim-jurka <comment><USER2> Good article. I work on an open source project and we try to be as friendly as possible. As someone who accepts / denies pull requests, I try to point out any code issues to the author in a professional manner and to work with them to get their code into our repository if it is valuable (or if it isn't, explain why without being rude). It's worth taking the time to build that extra good will, in my experience, as they'll often come back with further free work. A little patience saves me time in the long run with free code contributions.

I had an opposite experience trying to report an issue to a certain Apache project I won't mention. Gave the exact version of their program in use, all platform information, a sample file with the issue and the exact command to run. Everything to reproduce.

I received an incredibly derisive response about "why nobody thinks to include a stack trace because we're not mind readers, duh" and the issue was closed promptly. Another dev re-opened the ticket and actually ran the command with the file to reproduce, but it already soured my experience. Needless to say neither I or my colleagues will ever consider contributing to that project again.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an excellent article. Also brings to mind some of the writing that Nadia Eghbal has been doing recently about open source ([https://medium.com/@nayafia](https://medium.com/@nayafia)).

Not being an asshole is obviously the right basic mindset. But if you're a maintainer of open source, there are a number of other considerations to keep in mind. You really want your project to be as accessible as possible.

People talk sometimes disparagingly about "drive-by pull requests", but these are good things! Your core contributors can only do so much, and you're likely to get only so many people capable of making core-level contributions. You want to take advantage of the long tail as much as possible.

This is especially true when you consider the pool of potential contributors is often much wider than seasoned open source contributors. You'll get people who have never squashed commits before, or never even submitted a pull request. A welcoming mindset is the first step. But you need to be thinking hard about how difficult it is for a new contributor to onboard onto your project.

I know it's a lot of work for maintainers who are already stretched thin. If this is a topic that interests you and you want to chat, feel free to email me. I'd love to help figure out how to make this easier for more maintainers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I agree. The LibreOffice team takes great pains to be polite to contributors, even though every year GSoC rolls around we get a multitude of students who honestly don't know the first thing about development.

In fact, we try to encourage them as best we can and I know that I personally try to be polite and positive about any attempted contributions even if they can't be accepted.

I figure just working out how to get, build and submit patches for LibreOffice takes quite a big of time (build time alone is massive, though getting better) and let's be honest, if you've never used git or source control it can be pretty intimidating to even clone a repository!

So I agree. Someone has taken the time to even attempt to make your software better, and even if that might be misguided it's good to remember that.

<comment><USER5> I think that's the right attitude to take. Getting intimate with a project enough to build it from scratch demonstrates a great deal of commitment.

Working with a Linux distribution probably eases the burden, but even with all the dev tools and build requirements at the ready a clean build might not arise until the environment is a perfect replica. These are things that regular contributors probably take for granted, they've set this all up previously and the order of magnitude is greatly reduced.

I've always enjoyed the challenge and healthy debate around open source tools, it's been an important part of my life in computing, and ethics are at the heart of it. I also like the restrictions that the tools impose, it's a constraint on creativity, but learning to be intuitive with constrains is also a creative outcome. In turn I've always tried to commit quality bug reports, and patches where I feel I understand the environment enough to fix my own problem. The time that goes into these things is prohibitive and takes a level of patience and good will that most people simply wouldn't bother with.

A projects culture really matters, and I think that open-source projects often are tainted by vicious personalities. But it's far more difficult to hire and fire in this world, a dominant contributor is still important even when their personality sucks, and the amount of work hours devoted to removing them by a community is often not worth the effort of just accepting an ego and warning contributors of the problem. This just continues to poison the pot. It only gets worse when the contributor becomes a lead.

There are projects that you might personally find valuable and that's a good reason to get involved, but everyone has a life outside of open-source. If you're lucky the project is what makes you money and it's in your best interest to quit complaining and do something. If you're contributing in your free time then your relationship will probably be fleeting at best. It's hard not to have a life.

I'd love to work in a culture of expected mutual respect, but it's not a perfect world.. In the meantime let's support peoples initiative for what it's actually worth, be positive and hopefully grow community by encouraging more people to get that little bit more involved. They've probably already taken extraordinary steps in that direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Between this and the seemingly over-aggressive response to the "iGiveHead" patch, I find myself struggling to reconcile my very positive experiences with R users on Twitter and StackOverflow...and the reportedly closed-off attitude of core members.

I'm not one who thinks that Linus Torvalds is completely out of hand -- in fact, whenever I read the messages and the context for whatever blowup he's allegedly stoking, I find him to be quite reasonable. And maybe that would be the case here after knowing both sides of the story...but the wording of the message received by the author really, _really_ rubbed me the wrong way:

> _" You were asked to correct this in 2013, failed to even reply, and it has > been archived. Please explain your inaction and lack of the most basic > manners."_

Sure, I don't know how CRAN works, and maybe the author is an unreliable narrator who is leaving out the part where his "inaction" caused CRAN to experience a week-long downtime...but barring that kind of disaster, the message the author received struck me to be not just callously judgmental, but just... _sad_. Has this person never been on the receiving end of a missed email? Does this person not realize that _life happens_ , even to people who contribute to CRAN? And that the author may have experienced some serious downtime in his life, such as a death of a loved one, or unemployment, and just simply missed the email? Why the _fuck_ would you harass someone who is actively seeking out to update his contribution in response to users' pleas? How jaded must you be to accuse someone through email of lacking "the most basic manners" when this person is offering help, rather than thinking that just _maybe_ you should give him the benefit of the doubt?

Maybe the author _was_ an inattentive jerk. But there's no reason to assume that right off the bat. Yeah, I know this is a relatively small scuffle in the scheme of things...but that's what really bothers me. One of R's disadvantages is that it doesn't have enough contributing developers...but small communities have their own advantages, and I feel that's why my interactions with R-users have always made me feel good about the language. But the way this CRAN maintainer allegedly acted...it just makes me sad...if someone in a community this small can be so cold to another member, then it's a downer to think how things in much bigger communities that lack the personal connectedness.

But good on the author for taking it in stride...he probably doesn't need R as much as R needs more people like him.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of politics currently going on in debates about open source inclusivity but this article is a great example for what it all really needs to boil down to: try to be respectful and assume good faith.

As a maintainer it's not your job to provide free therapy sessions to other contributors but despite the inhumanity of the medium it's still important to remember that on the other end sits a human like you with their own problems, worries and distractions.

There's nothing wrong with archiving the package for inactivity. But the unnecessarily hostile and judgemental tone of the message is inexcusable. There was also nothing wrong with turning down the "iGiveHead" patch someone else mentioned here -- it was simply a matter of how it was rejected.

Open source projects don't have to accept every contribution and they don't have to be endlessly forgiving when contributors don't fulfil their self- imposed duties. But showing at least a minimal level of respect should be basic human decency.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The No Asshole Rule" is a worthwhile read in this context.

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


Is renaming Git master branches for inclusive language reasons going overboard? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As with many these pseudoproblems, it is initiative by white people to signal virtue to other white people and show "moral superiority". I can't imagine someone actually feeling uncomfortable over it, this isn't even case of master/slave, "master" means just "primary" in this context. But I get it is easier to solve than real problems the marginalized groups face (such as police reform) and earn brownie points on Twitter (like with rainbow logos coming and going away every year).

What I am afraid of the most is that eventually GitHub etc. will force everyone to change names, including existing repositories, breaking CI pipelines and other things in the process. Sounds absurd, but unfortunately very possible in today's climate.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any evidence for your claim?

Because the first time I heard about it was from 17 years ago when a black man complained about the use of master/slave and filed an EEOC complaint. See [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave/](https://www.snopes.com/fact- check/masterslave/) .

Your hypothesis is that virtue signaling describes the movement to get rid of the term.

Have you considered that the term master/slave was popularized and maintained as a form of virtue signaling?

Quoting from "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature" by Ron Eglash" available from [https://sci- hub.st/10.1353/tech.2007.0066](https://sci-hub.st/10.1353/tech.2007.0066) :

> ... being unconscious of social mores was a good sign for a future > physicist, because physics transcends culture. Perhaps this kind of emphasis > on a technical identity is at work here, too, and the master-slave metaphor > is attractive to engineers because its free use "proves" that they inhabit a > nonsocial or culture-free realm, which is a matter of professional pride

<comment><USER2> You read my post wrong. I said explicitly this is NOT a master/slave situation, "master" has completely different meaning here, there is not any "slave" branch under its rule.

I agree the master/slave pair itself is a weird terminology to use (especially the slave part), but master branch, master degree, master ball in Pokemon games are all fine in my book.

Context matters. This is not far away from attacking anything associated with words white/black.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends what going overboard means. Is it a waste of time? Well, it doesn't take that much time, so no. Is it effective at fighting racism? My bets are on the number of people before and after the change who are racist being exactly the same. Whether it's effective or not is dubious because we have no way of doing a measurement. Aren't there some evidence-backed ways of fighting racism we can look at instead?

<comment><USER5> Agreed, this is token nonsense. No-one ever became racist because a MySQL server was referred to as a slave and no racist will stop being one if they are now called "Secondary" or something.

<comment><USER6> It makes some sense to remove the term slave since it's a direct reference to slavery and there are a bunch of other terms that you can use which won't be offensive and will also be more descriptive and professional. Master on the other hand has multiple different uses and meanings most of which have nothing to do with slavery. Changing the naming of git branches seems like a massive overreaction, doesn't achieve anything substantial and it also sets a strange precedent in which one use case of a word damages all others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Will "Digital Remastering" become "Digital Remaining"?

A little more thought should be made before we hastily insist on major changes to everyday language.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is just a start, even the word 'git' is offensive to some people.</comment>


An 'Unknown' Co-Founder Leaves After 20 Years of Glory and Turmoil (1997)  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/01/business/an-unknown-co-founder-leaves-after-20-years-of-glory-and-turmoil.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

<comment><USER2> So that's where the dummy contact "John Appleseed" comes from...

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how different the world would be if IBM did indeed buy Apple in the mid-90s.

<comment><USER4> The idea of the replacement for the original Mac OS being sourced from within IBM (instead of from NeXT) is flatly scary. OS/2 is the most obvious source, and it actually had quite a few strengths, but it's really hard to imagine it being an elegant replacement for Macs, just as it's hard to imagine Apple turning things around without Jobs at the helm. Really, I don't imagine much of Apple would still be around at all.

So unless we imagine Linux storming the gates, I guess that would mean _Microsoft vincit omnia_. And without Apple, smartphones would likely still be niche Blackberry variants for heavy email users and such. Certainly the advent of tablets as popular consumer devices seems unlikely.

Wow, the technology world might be pretty different.

<comment><USER5> There are always lots of problems with these counterfactual scenarios. For one thing, if Apple had gone ahead and disappeared they wouldn't have been around to compete with. It's hard to imagine what would have become of, say, the BeOS in a world without Apple because in practice Apple _did_ survive, and stole all of Be's oxygen.

It is important to remember that computing trends are driven by manufacturing. Even if Apple had gotten taken apart and Steve Jobs had (improbably) taken up bass fishing, processors would still have gotten smaller and more efficient, batteries would have continued to improve, displays would have been built. Touchscreen devices would have eventually arrived. Hard drives would still have gotten larger and cheaper on schedule; flash memory would still have gotten cheap enough to build SSDs. And these trends would have encouraged the growth of, say, pure-digital delivery of movies and music - Apple didn't invent the MP3, or Napster, and they famously didn't invent the portable MP3 player.

What Steve Jobs did was see all the trends very clearly, realize the products that they would eventually enable, and just steer straight towards those products with ultimate focus. But the trends were still there. These things were going to happen. It's true that some of them might have arrived years or even decades later, though, and with a lot less flair.

<comment><USER4> BeOS is a good point. And even if Be itself didn't change the world, there might have been flocks of Apple refugees who moved on to make something else wonderful. So perhaps many of the same things would have happened if another player had developed to fill an Apple-like niche.

As far as the technologies you mention go, they would have happened, but without Apple (or a sufficiently Apple-like player), they would have happened differently. Most of the other things you're talking about happened before Apple got to them. I had a Creative Labs Nomad -- it was cool to have, but the user experience kinda sucked. Sony and Toshiba in particular have a long history of making great thin and light computers that have generally fallen outside mainstream consumer price points, and many of these predate the original MacBook Air, nevermind the current generation ones. There were a variety of touchscreen phones that predate the iPhone, such as those based on WinMo. I had one or two. They tended to be unreliable and have errant apps that could wreck your whole system, so the UX kinda sucked.

What Jobs's Apple was great at, especially with iOS, was distilling things down so that they were simple and friendly and had really good judgement about what to include, what to leave out, and how much control to expose to the user. The net result was that lots of technologies that were slowly happening anyway suddenly became massively popular because Apple managed to build the perfect product for a mass market.

And as I say this, keep in mind that there's not a single Apple device that I use on a daily basis. I use Windows and Android happily, and wouldn't trade my current setup for any of the fine products that Apple makes. But simply by existing and releasing the products they did, Apple made Windows and Android better. Windows tablets had a lousy experience and sold poorly, and Apple completely redefined what it means to be a tablet with the iPad. Now Microsoft has delivered an awesome preview of Win 8 tablets, which would never have existed without the iPhone. Android and Windows Phone would be very different if the iPhone had never come to market and demanded that everyone rethink the idea of the smartphone.

That's what I was trying to get at. Hopefully it makes more sense this go around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple's first president was named Michael Scott.

<comment><USER4> As noted in the article:

"When the company dismissed its first president, Michael Scott, in 1981, for example, Mr. Markkula, agreed to cede the title of chairman to Mr. Jobs and become Apple's president -- but only until a permanent chief executive could be hired. That took two years, but when Mr. Jobs hired John Sculley in 1983, Mr. Markkula quickly stepped aside, though he remained on the Apple board."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another example showing why the valuation formula, "add $1M in value per hacker, subtract 500k per MBA," holds.

</comment><comment><USER8> The "real" story on the floppy drive: [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt)

Usually the expressions "gave the go ahead", "instructed", "supervised", "was instrumental" mean the person in question didn't do shit.

<comment><USER9> That's the story of the Mac floppy, the article refers to the Apple II one. If by "didn't do shit" you mean he didn't actually hold the soldering iron, you're missing a lot.

<comment><USER10> When Woz spoke at Michigan State in May I heard him tell the story of how he built the original floppy drive for the Apple II.

Woz wanted to go to Las Vegas for a show (Comdex?) and was told if the floppy drive was ready by then he could go. He said after working for days he took a break and that's when the solution just came to him. He said with a big smile Vegas was great!

<comment><USER11> The full, amazing story of Woz hacking a floppy drive is in his Founders at Work interview.

One of my favorite interviews in JL's book.

<http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html>

<comment><USER12> "You have all these waiting periods, and it was just too awkward and too slow. So Mike [Markkula] said we needed two things: a floating point Basic (that's a Basic with decimal points, which I didn't have) and a floppy disk."

Sounds like a meaningful contribution to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sparse Distributed Memory - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_distributed_memory <comment><USER2> Kanerva's approach has been championed by Jeff Hawkins' Numenta and Redwood Neuroscience Institute. Numenta uses the terminology Sparse Distributed Representations (SDR).

While the theoretical basis seems sound, a practical implementation comparable to the SOTA is lacking.

</comment><comment> bra-ket Ha, I wrote most of this article. Also check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_associative_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_associative_memory) but it needs some work

<comment><AUTHOR> Double Ha! I just posted that too, in a comment last week...

Discussion: Algebra and the Lambda Calculus (1993) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18296384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18296384)

Is holographic associative memory one of your areas of research too?

<comment> bra-ket it's the closest we can get to modeling something like phase precession or phase resetting in grid cells [http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Grid_cells](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Grid_cells)

<comment><AUTHOR> Any good papers/code examples that discuss data model design and implementation details?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't keep around many items from my collection of my mid-90s AI books, but for some reason Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory book always managed to make the cut whenever I go in to cull things. There is something about the idea that seems appealing and I keep waiting for some excuse to see if any of the ideas can be melded with more recent approaches to NN memory...</comment>


Twenty Places to Hide Cash in Your House - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesimpledollar.com/twenty-places-to-hide-money-at-home-besides-under-your-mattress/ <comment><USER2> Now the top twenty place thieves will look for cash on your house</comment>


Pascal-S (Self-Compiling(*) Subset of Pascal) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.hs-rm.de/~weber/comp/pascals3.html <comment><AUTHOR> (*) It compiles itself to instructions which then run on its own internal VM...

"procedure interpret;" implements a tiny VM in 30-40 lines of code -- an amazing gem of CS, if you ask me...</comment>


Tweeteorites - a Twitter leaderboard - <AUTHOR> http://tweeteorites.com/

<comment><USER2> isn't this just a favrd clone?

<comment><USER3> Nope. Favrd doesn't show you what your friends are favoriting, which is why I made Tweeteorites. Also, I recommend people you should follow.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Practice data science interview questions in a newsletter - <AUTHOR> https://www.interviewquery.com <comment><USER2> Really dark pattern. Essentially this is not a newsletter, but a paid product - without giving the impression on their website or the signup confirmation mail.

I signed up via the "Subscribe Now" bar at the very top, not the premium offering they mention below. The confirmation email reads like this:

Thanks for signing up for Interview Query! We're excited to help you on your journey to landing the data science job of your dreams but before we can do that we need to confirm your email. We'll send you our first data science example question and solution right after!

It contains a link to a "confirmation" page which is in fact a CC form and offers the coice between a 12$ monthly fee or a 200$ one off payment.

Totally fair to take money for curating this - but then don't call it a newsletter, cause it's not.

<comment> enahs-sf I signed up today and got the email without paying. I think it's just an upsell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. Pretty standard concept and bloated market for software engineering that's not too common in data science right now. There's also not really a standardized data scientist curriculum at this point so it'd be interesting if the market is big enough for it to take off.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very cool</comment>


How to Start Reading Less and Doing More - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nimblegecko.com/how-to-start-reading-less-and-doing-more/

<comment><USER2> What a dangerous thing to post to Hacker News :-)</comment>


Ron Conway Explained - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/07/ron-conway-explained/ <comment><USER2> How exactly do you get into this network? Is his network closely connected to the PG/YC network?

<comment><USER3> Make something that is noticed. They will find you.

6+ years ago I went from knowing nobody in the valley to almost everybody within a few days. Just generate buzz and build a good product.

Silicon Valley is tiny. You are only an email and a single intro away from almost everybody.

Ron shows up to the YC demo days, but you can definitely meet Ron and other angels without YC (it has been happening for years, after all). He invests very early and tracks most of the tech blogs.

<comment><USER2> At what size for a consumer app do you start getting "noticed"?

I would very interested to hear what kind of product you made.</comment></comment></comment>


Oh My God, It's 1993 Again! Historical data defuses "Depression" talk - <AUTHOR> http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/UNRATE.txt

<comment><USER2> I don't think anyone is worrying about a depression based on the _current_ unemployment number. The concern is that things are going to get much worse because of frozen credit markets, nationalized banks, globalized finance, trade deficits, a worldwide demand slump, a weirdly-behaving dollar, and, most importantly, the fact that interest rates are at zero so we don't have any normal macroeconomic tools left.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you were a recent graduate looking for work at that time, you might view those figures a little differently. We're also on the downward (rather than recovering) side of that particular data slope, with worse to come.

Looking at the tech-sector alone, those in most (all?) industrialized nations have slid from a world of "Yay! We can live on page views and happy thoughts!" to "How can I scrape together enough to either eat or pay rent?" in just a few months.

That many economies have suddenly seized up in a halt is not a typical thing. As historical data goes, the current situation is remarkably bad.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was some great data to calm nerves about the "Next Great Depression" many people speculate we are entering. Funding may have temporarily dried up, but as long as things don't crater we are actually doing ok at least vis-a-vis unemployment.

BTW headline came from Virginia Postrel's Dynamist blog:

<http://dynamist.com/weblog/index.html></comment>


Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://lg.io/2015/04/12/run-your-own-high-end-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html <comment><USER2> I might not mind if Valve just made all the games available this way. No download, no waiting: a button in the Steam client starts streaming the game immediately.

<comment><USER3> I think they already do. You begin the download and after it has downloaded some portion of the game you can launch it and the stream the rest.

<comment><USER4> I didn't know about this. Which games?

<comment><USER5> Blizzard games also do this, you usually only have to download about 25% to start playing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's kinda weird how hackers are pioneering the technology that's going to be the DRM of the next decade.

<comment><USER7> Computer people aren't known for doing things that are in their long-term self interest.

<comment><USER8> Only if you view DRM as intrinsically evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks hard. Somebody should automate this and charge me a few bucks for it ;)

<comment><USER10> Like, umm, Amazon's AppStream? [1] There's a process that involves, approximately, running an installer on a virtual Windows desktop, after which you can stream an app to a Windows or Mac desktop or laptop. Or to a Chromebook (!!). You _can_ even stream to an Android or iOS device, but without a physical keyboard or mouse you can't DO much with apps. [2]

And considering how much work we've done to cut down on latency, I wouldn't expect the Steam streaming app running over a generic VPN connection to even come close in performance -- the VPN is almost certainly going to run over TCP, while AppStream will run over UDP, meaning in any but the best network environments AppStream will clobber a VPN connection for latency.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/](https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/)

[2] Disclaimer: I work on AppStream for Amazon, but my opinions are my own and don't represent Amazon. I'm just commenting as someone who has a lot of experience playing with the product.

<comment><USER11> Ahem - a bit late to this thread, but any pointer as to how to run a steam app with amazon appstream ? I've tried installing both games from humblebundle packages and steam + one game, but it seems to fail to properly package the app and launch it.

<comment><USER10> Hmm. I don't know what's different, but I KNOW Steam games work on AppStream. I remember playing Arkham Asylum from my own Steam account.

As a developer I have tended to prefer the "standalone instance" route, and I almost certainly installed Steam that way: Follow the standalone instance instructions [1] and then log in to it as a remote desktop, installing whatever you need.

If the Steam _install process_ needs GPU acceleration, then you'll also need to set up a VNC server on the instance and connect that way. Windows' "Remote Desktop Connection" can't use the GPU, where a VNC connection can.

BUT beware: Make sure your VNC password is as strong as possible; maybe even turn off VNC when you're not actively using it.

Good luck!

[1] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/appstream/latest/developerguide/a...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/appstream/latest/developerguide/appstream- test-app-ec2.html)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the insights - Digging into it, my first install was standalone and failed for no proper reason (trying to run guacamelee from the humblebundle - no meaningful error message was given).

Steam games seem to fail whenever something needs to be admin, most likely installing directX on first - run. I'm going to try running them once first before packaging the appstream and then see how it goes.

<comment><USER12> Did this work? I'm looking into doing this as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how this compares to nVidia's commercial GRID product[0]. They claimed latency up to 150ms from their recent announcements. I'm sure AWS can spike to worse than 20ms.

Either way, I still think adding latency will poorly effect certain types of games: online/twitchy ones predominately. It's cool how easy it is to set something like this up on AWS, though.

[0]: [http://shield.nvidia.com/grid-game- streaming](http://shield.nvidia.com/grid-game-streaming)

<comment><USER14> I have never noticed latency spikes like that from Amazon through transit… especially not for anything as trivial as 10Mbps which even a Micro instance is capable of sustaining.

<comment><USER15> Its not about the instance, its about the datacenter. They share routers, and somebody somewhere needed the bandwidth at the same time you did. So random latency.

We run office collaboration software in the cloud but not on Amazon. Rackspace has better latency guarantees, or at least better average latency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would even be great if you have your own tower computer/high power computer and have an okay laptop... (even save on paying for EC2, with better ping!)

<comment><USER17> For this, check out Splashtop. I've been using it for years and it works great. They even have Win8 touch integrations so you can play Civ 5 touch, and an OS X client so you can use a Mac from a tablet or phone.

<comment><USER18> How does it compare to Steam In-Home Streaming? Can you use it over a (sufficiently fast) network?

<comment><USER17> I haven't tried Steam's streaming yet or Nvidia's Shield based streaming (have a Shield, but needs a 6 or greater series card and I have a 5 series).

Splashtop does work with OS X, tablets, and phones, and also works over the internet (with additional latency obviously). I'll give Steam's streaming a shot sometime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The OTOY AMIs do something similar to this. They use the GPU's onboard encoding as far as I know, but they don't stream through Steam - it goes through some custom HTML client.

[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller- profile?id=795808b...](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller- profile?id=795808b7-f99d-426d-bb03-8aa79ff5b65e)

(Disclosure: AWS employee)

<comment><USER10> Also: Look at Amazon's AppStream. It sets you up with Windows app streaming automatically.

(Disclosure: I work on AppStream at AWS.)

<comment><USER20> Can AppStream use GPU acceleration? Does it support custom apps?

Edit: sorry for not reading the info - the answer is _yes_ , one of the use cases listed is CAD.

[https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/use- cases/](https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/use-cases/)

Looks like it's not supported in Sydney which kills it for me. Any hints as to when that might be coming?

<comment><USER10> Sorry, but I'd get fired if I started leaking any information about future plans. If I even knew. Which I can't say if I do. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am asking a tangential question here. Is there any service that can stream android games / apps?

<comment><USER22> What on earth is the use case for this - using something that's only available on Android on a non-Android device?

<comment><USER23> Quickly testing Android apps on your laptop without having to deal with an emulator?

Concrete example, I've just finished the first beta of our companies new Android app. Now I want to show everybody in the company to get feedback and generally let them know what is happening.

Hard: Convince everybody to install the beta on their phones, and then convince everybody with an iPhone to borrow an android phone and test it there.

Easy: Send everybody a link that they can click and have the latest beta show up running on their desktop.

<comment><USER24> I imagine you could run something like BlueStacks on an Azure cloud and allow people to remotely control it. Probably costly though.

[http://www.bluestacks.com/](http://www.bluestacks.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can also confirm that Football Manager 2015 runs pretty well on a c4.8xlarge 36-core Xeon machine, for they eye-watering cost of about $1.65 an hour in Spot instance costs.

Always wondered if you could break even hosting leagues on there.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, this is so incredibly cool. As a big fan of OnLive, I saw a lot of potential in the approach being used for making old school classic games available remotely, without you having to manage to keep them around locally.

It's really neat that you can do this yourself, and seeing the costs as low as they are is pretty encouraging too.

Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER27> How about spot insance + EBS. Can your "EBS" not be terminated after spot instance is overbidded in this case?

<comment><USER28> Yep. That's correct. EBS isn't terminated when your SPOT instance is.

<comment><USER27> Thanks. Looks like that'd be the cheapest way to run g2.2xlarge.

<comment><USER14> I would probably recommend setting everything up with an on-demand instance to begin with. You don't want your whole machine to be terminated as you're configuring things.

<comment><USER27> Well it's a good point. 2 min is probably still too low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do you get the $0.11/hr rate as opposed to the spot rate?

<comment><USER24> Nevermind, found it :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> i'd be interested in seeing a screencapture of this.</comment>


1 Strong Against "Whence" - <AUTHOR>

I just noticed that "whence" is used a GET argument for HN voting.
This will not stand. Whence is not an argument.
Here's an example of a way you would use whence:
"…from whence has this buxom cherub descended?"
Well, on second thought....maybe it is appropriate for HN, after all. <comment><USER2> "Whence" means "from where," and thus "from whence is redundant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Buxom cherubs --- sounds like great startup web site potential! (albeit in the porn area) Also a good name for a band.

As a side note, I've always thought with the power of some of these startup ideas, if they we combined with porn? Amazing.

Imagine twitter where you hear of sexual escapades happening realtime in your local area. Or BoobBook instead of FaceBook -- one can imagine the types of material presented there. Or RateAChick app for your cellphone where you can take pictures of girls as you meet them for instant peer reviews.

Sorry -- just got back from Halloween party and a little tipsy. Apologies for the silliness.

<comment><USER4> Too bad rule34.com is taken; it would make a good name for a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> whenceforth this malcontent stems return it forthwith

good DAY sir.

<comment><USER6> We shall correct this aberration post haste!</comment></comment>


New Apple Patents Detail Plans for Travel, Clothing and Commerce - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/07/30/apple-itravel-virtual-closet-patents/ <comment><USER2> Different source, different take, earlier submission, much discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561364></comment>


How to create, keep and grow more time - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-create-keep-and-grow-more-time.html

<comment><USER2> Polyphasic sleep is one way to get more time. The basic idea is that by splitting sleep up from one 8 hour chuck at night to one or more naps throughout the day can reduce your overall need for sleep. I first discovered the Uberman schedule, which requires you to take on extreme sleep deprivation in order to compress your normally 90 minute sleep cycle into 20 minutes, and then only take 6 20 minute naps throughout the day.

This is the extreme case, and I'm still not convinced that can be healthy, but the less extreme options seem to have some long-term merit. My friend has successfully adapted to sleeping 3 hours at night and taking 3 20 minutes naps during the day, and he says he loves all of the extra time during the night. And apparently biphasic sleep is the norm in some countries. <http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/> has some interesting articles about different schedules.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really interesting. I haven't heard of it before but will do some research. Thanks for the insight...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First step: Stop checking Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> Yes, at least like 5 times a day :)</comment></comment>


Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w26408 <comment><USER2> I often tell people to watch out for selection bias. Immigrants are a distinctly unique people. They're not just members of their foreign racial/national group, they're members of their foreign racial/national group with the ambitions/motivations to leave.

To make the abstract concrete. Canadians living in the US are often thought to be "just like" Canadians living in Canada. But they're often not. Often they're the Canadians that sufficiently didnt fit into Canadian culture, or found something immanently attractive about US life (at least the perception of US life)...

So this study is kind of saying "The children of ambitious and effortful parents have higher rates of upward mobility than the general populace of US people"

<comment><USER3> There's also significant selection bias on the entry side. U.S. immigration policies are heavily biased towards people with unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country, and biased against people who are likely to be a drain on public assistance. That means that most hyphenated-Americans have already passed two significant high-pass filters: they have to be willing to uproot their whole life to leave, and they have to bring enough to the table to convince U.S. immigration to let them in.

<comment><USER4> > _There 's also significant selection bias on the entry side. U.S. > immigration policies are heavily biased towards people with unique skills, > high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country_

Categorically false! Most of immigration to the US is family based; actually about two-third of them.

source: [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/17/key- facts-a...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/17/key-facts-about- u-s-immigration-policies-and-proposed-changes/)

<comment><USER3> You take an initial immigrant who gets in because of the merit categories and then have them bring over all their family members, whose gene pool ends up in the U.S? Whose family values?

This article is about upward mobility in the children of immigrants. What traits do children get from their parents? Most people would say it's nature (their genes) and nurture (their upbringing). All of these are widely shared with the family members of the initial immigrant, so most immigration being family-based does not invalidate this conclusion.

<comment><USER5> As far as I'm aware, there's no strong link between motivation and generics.

<comment><USER4> Or as Vincent said in Gattaca: "There is no gene for the human spirit."

<comment><USER6> it is a whole constellation of genetic, epi-genetic, environmental factors, and experiences in concert. to say that there is no genetic predisposition for behavior is... not confirmed by the science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: [http://www.equality-of- opportunity.org/assets/documents/race...](http://www.equality-of- opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf).

If you look at table 1 on page 56, you can see that for white americans, the probability of a child ending up in the top quantile of income where a parent is in the bottom quantile of income is 11% (about half the probability one would except of there was zero correlation between child and parent incomes). For Asian Americans its almost 27%. A white child born in the bottom quantile is about 2.5 times more likely to _stay_ in the bottom quantile (28%) than to rise to the top quantile (12%). An asian child born in the bottom quantile is about 1.5 times more likely to _rise_ to the top quantile (27%) than to stay in the bottom quantile (12%).

<comment><USER8> Something that many HNers will probably be embarrased to admit being surprised by is how higher education attainment rates for immigrants don't exclude African immigrants. In fact, black immigrants from Africa and the West Indies have among the highest degree attainment rate of any group. This belies the lower college-and-advanced-degree attainment rate for black Americans as a whole.

All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.

This also makes me wonder if there's data about the mobility of native vs immigrant blacks. If it's similar, it would align with other data that show that degree attainment only serves to partially overcome the barriers to upward mobility placed in the way of black workers.

I'm of the opinion that many of the impediments that punish or withhold assistance from minorities often bleed over into mainstream American life. The specific drum I'll keep beating is that if, perhaps, the infrastructure to battle the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health issue had been allowed to be built to a robust state, the opioid epidemic would not have become so dire. The apathy towards these issues, even as they encroach upon "mainstream" middle class life, must be part of the mechanics of the calcification of class in America.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. While you're covering multiple topics, I wanted to touch on the education specifically.

I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.

Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.

If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.

<comment><USER10> If education in the USA is underfunded, then education is underfunded in pretty much every country. The USA pays more per student than Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Korea. Look:

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp)

So that isn't the problem, at least relative to the rest of the world.

The worst schools in the USA seem to spend the most. Maybe the money is anti- educational, being used to purchase distractions. DC is spending well over $30,000 per student. At that rate, DC could easily pay 300k for a teacher. It would only require the funds from 1/3 of the class.

<comment><USER11> The countries you cite are all relatively homogenous. The U.S. has greater disparities in education funding due to funding coming primarily from local sources rather than national.

<comment><USER10> Sweden and Germany are no longer homogeneous at all, and anyway isn't diversity supposed to be a strength?

The specific example I gave, DC, simply destroys the argument that local funding is the problem. DC is very well-funded from national sources, and it has horrific schools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy:

"Diversity is the engine that drives this country. We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation... snowboards and takes improv classes."

Feels like one of those things that we all thought was true.

<comment><USER7> John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."

<comment><USER13> How do you define weak and strong, though?

<comment><USER14> I think of it as resiliance to adversity. If someone has had a comparatively easy life, they'll probably have a harder time dealing with difficult situations. The problem is that everything is relative, so people may not see their life as easy, even if it is compared to most people. For example, I used to work with someone who was raised by wealthy parents, went to super exclusive private schools, and had multiple college degrees paid for by their parents. They didn't think they had an easy life though, because their parents only had a couple million dollars in the bank, and his classmates were mostly old money with 10s or 100s of millions in the bank, so they wouldn't hang out with him because he was "poor".

The good thing is that resliance is like a muscle and can be strengthened, people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally.

<comment><USER15> _people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally_

It would be nice if that happened, though. You tell your students, 75 % of whom have no grasp of 8th-grade math, that they have been cheated out of an education and that consequently they now need to work twice as hard. But instead of knuckling down they all march off to the Dean to complain. Of course the Dean enables the underperformance.

You can't frame "easy life" only in terms of money, "easy life" also means coasting through an underperforming school and never having to face reality.

<comment><USER16> Analytics driven education is the worst thing to happen to education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is because people who immigrate are "artificially" pushed down in social status and income due to issues like differences in language, and not having some of your work or education experience recognized in the foreign country. These people are just "bouncing back". In some cases people who were professionals in their country of origin do relatively lower ranked or even menial work. Their children will be constantly reminded "I was a dentist back home, not a hygienist", which affects their self-image.

Back in their home country, people who are _actually_ from a poorer class do not experience the same upward mobility.

That is all the more so in places that have caste or caste-like systems. Who your great-great-grandfather was still influences where you stand.

<comment><USER18> That was my first take as well. This is explicitly called out in the Conclusions section in paper.

"Furthermore, immigrant parents were "under-placed" in the income distribution, thus allowing their children who were native English speakers and educated in the US more scope for upward mobility."

I don't see numbers on how much of the total "upward mobility" can be attributed to any of the individual factors.

<comment><USER17> The thing is, it's not just about income. If you come from generations of poverty, it's written all over you, and that closes doors in your face.

The children of upward mobile immigrants who don't come from lower classes in their home country reflect that, even if the parents struggle in the new country.

They are socialized differently from true poor people.

For instance, language: the children will tend to pick up the "socio- economically preferred dialect"¹ of English, rather than a socially stigmatized dialect. The children will do this naturally, because they will tune in to how the way people speak English in America determines the perception of social class, and then they will learn that way of speaking which fits their self-image about where they fit in society.

\---

1\. A phrase I picked up years ago from a linguistics prof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Being a first generation immigrant myself (parents immigrated to America in 1975) I can give a few cultural reasons:

1\. Stable two parent home - my parents lived together and shielded us from any arguments/disagreements they had and presented a stable unified upbringing

2\. My father had a degree in Microbiology, but when he first migrated had to take a less paying job due to language/racism. My mother had a high school education. My father eventually ended up in a top research company and my mother got a masters in computer science from the local state university. This example ingrained the merits of grit and hard work

3\. Education - specifically math and science - were emphasized in my family over sports, social and other activities. This was very different then my friends.

4\. Academic expectations were extremely high - in my family strait As was baseline.

5\. Family and community support - we had strong support from other immigrant indian community growing up. And the community as a whole valued the same things as my family.

These traits can be replicated in non immigrant American society - but often it is not. The main difference I see is a lack of a strong family unit and acceptance of low academic standards.

This could be just my experience - would be interested in hearing others

<comment><USER20> If you're born into America to Immigrant parents, doesn't that make you a second generation immigrant?

<comment><USER19> I should have clarified - I was 4 and my sister was 2 when my parents immigrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Immigrants are frequently working below what you'd expect of similarly talented/skilled/educated (especially if you exclude consideration of English language fluency) native born, so it's not really surprising that their children do better by comparison to them than the children of the native born.

<comment><USER22> Immigrants have left everything they know behind. They know they don't really know their way around, so they are raising their kids to be better than they were.

I know factory workers raising their kids to be a factory working running some machine on an assembly line. It never occurs to them to encourage their kids to be something. They know that their their own factory had 10 times as many factory workers just 30 years ago but not even that is enough for them to think they need to start thinking of getting their family to do something else.

<comment><USER23> Maybe it's contentment. They've had a good life being a factory worker (or replace with any other formerly good earning but now dying job). Had the house and 2 cars and raised a family on the work, so why change things now. I know intellectually yes you can say this industry is dying and the wages are going down, but it's probably not as emotionally connected a thought process.

Most immigrants never had that luxury. They came with no credentials and worked low wage jobs at or below the poverty line. They want to get out of that situation and maybe more importantly want their children to get out of that situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The education entrepreneur Adam Robinson did his own survey a few decades ago. He found that while children of two immigrants did better on standardized tests than children of two non-immigrant parents, the "best" combination came from having an immigrant father and a non-immigrant mother. ("Best" when focusing solely on standardized test results)

<comment><USER25> That's curiously specific, as in the gender role and immigrant standing are tied together, but apparently that isn't the case. Googling around found the following editorialization of the source material [1] that gave a TL;DR faster than I can type it up:

Study of NYC school data and using custom questionnaires of teens across the world testing into Stuyvesant HS Cutting to the conclusion: Groups that overcame socioeconomic factors to improve on tests (test improvement is more sensitive to those factors than outright performance) had the following factors: immigrant father US-born mother Speculation to why this mattered? One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. The gender didn't matter, it just turned out that the father typically tended to be the immigrant. This combo even outperformed both parents being born in the US.

[1] [https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/](https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/)

<comment><USER26> > One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language.

This at least passes the sniff test. I know plenty of 1.5 or 2nd Gen Indian Americans who seamlessly assimilate because they and/or their parents speak English, in an accent coded as classy (ie British-sounding)[1]. This is even true to some degree in the workplace: I work with some brilliant first gen Chinese immigrants, but there's a practical ceiling on their ability to work at higher levels because of the increasing importance of communication as you rise,and the way their thick accents and lack of vocabulary interact with that. A hypothetical kid of theirs with the same level of talent would shoot up the ranks.

[1] Note that this doesnt cover all Indian accents, only most traditionally upper-class ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's because immigrants often have artificially lowered status compared to what they had in their home country. They might have been white collar workers there but they have to work worst jobs in US because of language and other barriers.

They still have high expectations for their kids and support them like better- off parents would, so when kids enter the job market with no language barrier - they return to their usual place.

<comment><USER28> This makes sense - my grandfather was a top lawyer in his home country before fleeing a war. As a refugee in a foreign country, he did manage to get a law position with some connections he had - but his XX years of foreign law experience weren't very useful in the new country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I suspect that parents who "achieve" by coming to the U.S. are more likely to have children of the same persuasion.

<comment><USER30> People with enough gumption to upend their lives and leave everything they knew behind for an uncertain future … it's the "right stuff"

<comment> vincent-toups Is it the "right stuff"? One might just as plausibly expect such people to be highly risk tolerant and to end up screwing up really badly as often as they succeed.

<comment><USER31> I'd expect them to screw up much more often than they succeed. But if 25 people take a risk and found a company and 1 of them succeeds, that one company might employ 1000 people. The 24 failures may be worth it. That's leaving aside whatever useful services the company provides.

~20% of the world population of foreign-born people lives in the US. It's difficult to think that's unrelated to the fact that the US produces a disproportionate amount of global innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Title editorialized from "Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the US over Two Centuries"

Abstract:

>Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants' advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. In the past, this advantage can be explained by immigrants moving to areas with better prospects for their children and by "under-placement" of the first generation in the income distribution. These findings are consistent with the "American Dream" view that even poorer immigrants can improve their children's prospects.

<comment><USER32> So, the American Dream as upward mobility for established citizens was never true?

<comment><USER33> I read this more as it can be easier to move from really dire straits 3rd world country to middle class America. Whereas it can be harder to go from middle class America to Upper class.

3rd World -> Middle Class America takes hard work (once you're in America) Middle Class America -> Upper Class takes strategic, risk, and hard work

<comment><USER32> Adding: I think there is some selection bias. Those who self-select to move to the US probably already have motivation, means, etc to _get_ to the US and the intelligence to manage the complicated immigration process. Then, there's the "burn the ships" part, where you simply _must_ succeed because there's no option of leaving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How much of this is attributable to immigrants clustering in highly productive urban areas?

<comment><USER35> Quoting the study "Geographic choices were important: first-generation immigrants were more likely to settle in areas with higher mobility prospects for their children. When we compare children growing up in the same US region, the intergenerational gap between immigrants and the US-born is reduced by 70%. When comparing children growing up in the same county, we no longer find an intergenerational gap between the children of immigrants and US-born individuals. In other words, immigrant children did not earn more than others who grew up in the same location. Rather, their parents chose to live in locations that offered high mobility prospects to all."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is this really a surprise?

There's so much more to capital than assets! While often asset-poor, a lot of immigrants to the west have considerable intellectual capital and good social capital among their community. Even when foreign diplomas are judged worthless, the fact that the individual was able to acquire them in his country still probably places him in the top percentile of his home nation. And the immigrant community often serves as a pipeline for employment, no matter what the skill level.

Even if two third (that's the number claimed) came through family migration, it doesn't really matter as the first person that's sponsoring them had to get selected in the first place through employment. Even if the initial sponsor went to some diversity lottery, I suppose applying and meeting all requirements still requires a little bit of education and some financial resources to send the application in the first place.

I would be curious to see the breakdown per initial immigration category and country, with folks coming in from family based immigration counted as the category of the initial sponsor.

</comment><comment><USER37> Given how strict the immigration rule has become I'm not surprised, especially for those who work in tech/academics. Also UPWARD is relative, which means many immigrants start from scratch and there's just not enough time to gain too much wealth and social status, thus makes it easier for their children to go 'upwards', while it may just be their children are living like average Americans.

</comment><comment><USER38> That's because (legal) immigrants have high social capital (education, values, two parent households) and often migrate to places where they have the highest relationship capital (hence the CountryVille neighborhoods like Koreatown or the Ukrainian neighborhood on the East side of Manhattan). So when you measure their kids income it jumps up on average.

</comment><comment><USER39> While this is good to see verified, and I absolutely think it is important to rigorously double-check whether things that "make sense" are actually true, it would have been really surprising if this were not true. 1) immigrants often have language difficulties that their children do not 2) immigrants often have cultural knowledge difficulties that their children do not 3) immigrants often have moved to places (both country and place within country) for the exact reason that they believe their children will do better there

But, again, just because it was predictable doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to have rigorously verified that it is so.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is it because they have fewer ties to the place where they grew up and they're more willing to move to a new city to make more money?

</comment><comment><USER41> This seems like a variation on regression to the mean. If you take a group of people who have had unusually bad circumstances (language + cultural barriers) and compare with a similar group (their children) odds are that things will improve on the next iteration (assuming that the bad circumstances are transient and not endemic).

</comment><comment><USER42> The "ain't no making it" attitude that has been historically attributed to poor blacks is increasingly popular among "native" whites.

<comment><USER16> Except they don't say "ain't no making it", they say "life is about the experiences not making money". I've heard 35-year olds say this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Like father, not like son [https://archive.vn/YIjwk](https://archive.vn/YIjwk)

</comment><comment><USER44> positive discrimination

</comment><comment><USER45> Malcolm Gladwell hypothesizes in Outliers that children whose parents' efforts are rewarded are more likely to work hard themselves because their brains are wired from a young age to associate work with reward.

Immigrating to the United States, for a lot of people, is a great reward.

</comment><comment><USER46> A lot of the comments are crediting the immigrant parents as being "motivated" parents...maybe, but in this modern economy I think there is a more economic reason:

US born children have parents that more likely than not are indebted; whereas, even poor immigrants are unlikely to be indebted. It likely follows children whose parents not in debt, no matter how poor, likely have higher rates of upward mobility than children of indebted parents. There are very real glass ceilings in the US (having the lowest socio-economic mobility of all 1st world countries), so you are likely to raise from below the poverty line to just above, but if you are already above their isn't much likelihood of going up further.</comment>


The Troubles of Korea's Influential Economic Pundit - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_minerva

<comment><USER2> The full-length article on one link:

<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_minerva/all/1>

</comment><comment><USER3> "For 103 days, the South Korean government held Park in a 50-square-foot cell at a Seoul detention center."

I'd like to say that this sort of insanity is not possible "here" (here being wherever you live). But these days I'm not so sure.

</comment><comment><USER4> "That's the government's job, to maintain a nice, clean Internet."

</comment><comment><USER5> I smell movie coming out of this.</comment>


How to Say: Van Gogh - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/01/how_to_say_van_gogh.shtml

<comment><USER2> I think the problem exist due to a peculiar sound that doesn't exist in european languages,

Van is simple: As in Can Gogh is: Go as in "goggles" and gh as the sound of letter gain in Urdu/Arabic. That sound is so peculiar, that even wikipedia calls it gain, when the sound is similar to kh as in "khan"

the kh sound in dutch, is the nearest sound to gh in Arabic.</comment>


Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection In 2016 Memo - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data <comment><USER2> Boz's response: [https://twitter.com/boztank/status/979478961582325760](https://twitter.com/boztank/status/979478961582325760)

Mark Zuckerberg's response: [https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/979486163642630144](https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/979486163642630144)

</comment><comment><USER3> Always wondered what facebook leadership told themselves so they could sleep at night. Now i know. Connection at all costs. Didn't matter if you destroyed their privacy, violated their trust, got them hooked, manipulated their emotions, allowed fraud, clickbait, and misinformation to take over. They'll be happier when connected.

The ones who think theyre building a utopia are always the ones who build the dystopia. They're the best at delluding themselves.

I'd almost feel better if the memo cynically admitted the mission was just to sell ads.

Facebook employees: why are you still there? Do you buy into this?

<comment><USER4> "it's the lies that we tell ourselves, they introduce us to him"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty incredible scoop by BuzzFeed. This guy seems like a sociopath.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's no longer clear that Uber is the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dear Mr Boz,

You and your kind are the reason I deleted my facebook account years ago. You can claim you didn't mean it, but at the end of the day facebook's behaviour is what counts and it behaves as you described. Your product is hideous.

Also, please delete my shadow profile. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER8> "questionable contact importing practices"

Now this seems like something "no one" (other than "techies") would really care about, right?

Yet he is calling this out specifically. This just shows that people inside Facebook (or LinkedIn or the other internet companies that do this) cannot claim they see nothing wrong with these practices. They cannot claim "no one cares" except some outliers, e.g. nerds.

They _know_ what they are doing is _wrong_. Even if users dont know what Facebook is doing, if they are duped into giving "consent", Facebook knows _and_ knows it is _wrong_.

If someone pilfers other peoples email address books or mobile phone contacts, that gives a very effective view into peoples personal and business connections. The thief can "connect people" (e.g., find her next targets).

But, assuming this thief hasnt gone bananas, she doesnt start trying to justify the theft by saying she is on some grand mission to "connect people" and "Its just what I do." Shes a thief who steals email address books and contacts -- personal belongings that were never intended to be shared with anyone else.

Nor does it make sense for her to try to start a "debate" on whether or not her thievery is justified. Its wrong, she knew that from the start and she did it anyway. Her actions were intentional. Theres nothing to debate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for deleting your account from Facebook people!

I usually get minus points only, when criticising facebook or google. So much so.. that I stop to commenting anything in hacker news. I really do not like hacker news way to block comments!</comment>


Libgit2: a linkable library for Git - <AUTHOR> http://libgit2.github.com/ <comment><USER2> For anyone else who was wondering why the one really important piece of information was completely missing from the website, here it is:

 _libgit2 is under GPL2 with linking exemption, which basically means you can link to the library with any program, commercial, open source or other. However, you cannot modify libgit2 and distribute it without supplying the source._</comment>