What is Continuous Deployment? - <AUTHOR> http://sdarchitect.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/understanding-devops-part-6-continuous-deployment/

<comment><USER2> First, Continuous Deployment is really awesome.

Second, you should completely ignore Continuous Deployment until you have sane systems.

I do contract systems work for a living and have seen hundreds of live production systems. Nearly every system I see is in some kind of serious peril:

      - no backups
      - if backups, no docs on how to restore
      - no monitoring (or very little)
      - production passwords in the wild (former employees, etc)
      - no configuration management
      - no path to scale
      - no path to replace defunkt servers
      - etc... (I could go on for hours)

Often when I'm talking with a potential client, they are SUPER interested in Continuous Deployment (or whatever the hotness is at the time), but they start to yawn when I start talking about getting their core systems in order.

Your systems are the _foundation_ of your application and your business. You wouldn't build your office building on top of an active volcano or below sea level on the coast, yet many businesses happily do this for their systems.

You know all those constant news stories about massive outages, security breaches, crippled sites, etc? I'd bet 99% of them are due to them failing at the fundamentals of sane systems. Having seen behind the curtains of so many companies, I'm honestly surprised there isn't more massive systems failure in the news.

This is a critical problem in the tech world. Does it affect you? A few of you will have amazing solid secure systems, but the vast majority of folks reading this won't.

If you're using a PaaS like Heroku or Parse, then you have most of the systems worries taken care of for you. You can breath a bit easier.

But if you are managing physical or virtual servers and aren't even using configuration management (puppet/chef/salt/ansible/etc), then your systems are probably in a very precarious situation. You might not think so, since everything just happens to be working at the moment, but you are essentially coding without using version control.

You would probably think that a developer that used email for his code version control is an idiot. You would be right. But consider that emailing code around for version control is actually _better_ than what most companies do for their systems. Most companies set up their servers manually. They often don't even have any docs or even shell scripts.

At one client, it took them 2 weeks (!!!) to bring up a new server. The engineers thought it would take only 4 hours. Those engineers nearly killed that company.

Do you want to be a 10X or 100X systems engineer? Then use configuration management! After we put that client's systems in Puppet, we could bring up a new server in under 5 minutes. Yep, that's 4000X faster.

If you aren't using configuration management and don't know where to start, just use Ansible. It's by far the simplest and easiest to get going. I've written a quick intro to it here: [http://devopsu.com/blog/ansible-vs-shell- scripts/](http://devopsu.com/blog/ansible-vs-shell-scripts/)

If you're curious about how the configuration management tools compare, check out my book: [http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt- stack-a...](http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack- ansible.html)

<comment><USER3> IMO, the example you're using in your blog should be simplified even more. I've never heard of Passenger before and it's not something I've needed.

But I have needed to ensure that a file exists in a particular folder on the server. An example of ensuring that would be more universal. Then you can explain that this vs a shell script is better because it's error prone/difficult to run the shell script twice, etc.

But I did get a lot of value out of this article because now I know that Ansible exists. Thanks

<comment><USER4> Ansible is pretty decent but new release seem to break backwards compatibility quite a lot so be prepared for playbooks not working on newer versions should you need to reuse them at a later stage. Of course virtualenv gets around this quite nicely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > You may only continuously deploy to an environment before 'Prod' – UAT/Pre- > prod…, but the environments you do deploy to should be 'production-like', so > you know with very high confidence, that the final deploy to production will > work without issues, when you do really need to deploy to it.

In my experience this is a pretty dangerous way to think about it. One of the best reasons for continuous deployment is to allow you to push small changes to production. This is desirable because small changes are easier to debug when things go wrong, and are less likely to make things go wrong overall. But the core assumption behind this is "the system is really complicated and has a ton of moving parts that are virtually impossible to think about at all times." Continuous delivery makes the assumption that a preprod environment is highly likely to be similar to a prod environment, and making that true is usually extremely hard at scale. Couple that with the fact that prod will (especially for large, consumer facing sites) often expose you to many more edge cases, and the fact that a developer who has pushed to preprod may not be there to help debug when his or her code finally gets to prod and breaks things, I see continuous delivery as a pretty suboptimal alternative to continuous deployment.

<comment><USER6> Coming from a banking and healthcare background it seems pretty suboptimal to build a process around waiting for stuff to break in production.

It also seems rare to find bugs in production that cannot be replicated on developer machines so I don't think getting an exact match on the preprod environment is a huge obstacle.

<comment><USER5> The important part is being able to push very small changes without it slowing you down (you need a quick and easy deploy process).

If you have a small change, it is easily testable, and the chance of it breaking something is small. The goal isn't to discover bugs on production, it's to make it extremely easy to fix bugs on production. Continuous delivery batches up many small changes and thus makes it more difficult to figure out what exactly the issue is when you discover one. I have yet to see a process that is able to release bug free code, so knowing that bugs do get to production as a matter of life, it is highly optimal to make your process make those bugs easier to fix. Ultimately you end up with fewer bugs, when you do have bugs they have smaller impact, and when you need to fix them they are easy to track down and fast to change.

Getting an exact match on preprod is extremely difficult when you have a relatively complex data environment (sharding etc.), a relatively complex build environment (assets built differently in production than dev) etc.

<comment><USER6> I still don't believe it's that hard to create a preprod that matches production. What kind of asset generation are you talking about that can only run on the production server?

Is continuous deployment just something for teams that don't know how to make a copy of their production server?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really consider continuously pushing to staging or QA true continuous deployment. This still leaves you with the big push when you deploy features.

At Wealthfront, we prefer to push out everything and releasing features amounts to pushing out a single small change of whether a feature is hidden behind a user flag or experiment.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I think the term for this workflow is Continuous Delivery, as in Jez Humble and David Farley's book: [http://martinfowler.com/books/continuousDelivery.html](http://martinfowler.com/books/continuousDelivery.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Continuous Deployment and Delivery both are there to remove the fear of change. Coupled with testing this is definitely a way to 10x your engineering productivity.

We've stopped counting how many times per day we push changes at Codeship as the number is meaningless in itself. If you feel you can't push regularly you giving up before starting the fight already.

It's just a very different and way more relaxed method of software development where you can actually focus on pushing the product further without getting stopped by infrastructure all the time.

Immutable Infrastructure will be the next big iteration in getting this 10x productivity I think.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really like the resources that ThoughtWorks lays out on their CI page -- down at the bottom they have some whitepapers on the topic that are certainly worth a peek --

[http://showcase.thoughtworks.com/continuous- integration](http://showcase.thoughtworks.com/continuous-integration)

</comment><comment><USER11> We are language and environment restricted to waterfall at my job. The language does not have any form of unit testing and an extremely archaic version control. The language does not have a viable way to encapsulate small changes without coding the whole shebang. The environment itself follows some of the same pitfalls. CD sounds amazing in theory, but some languages simply do not fit into the paradigm.

<comment><USER12> If your language has a way to put an if condition around a block of code and change the value in the if condition at runtime, then you have enough to hide experimental changes behind a flag.

If your language has a way of calling an existing block of code from a new location and checking the results, you have enough to write unit tests.

I don't know any languages which are unable of those things.

<comment><USER13> I can't think of languages, but I can think of environments where it can be difficult. Maintaining software for embedded systems developed ages ago, for example. Unit testing of your new algorithm is, on the platform, not feasible. You may be able to put the code segment and mock up the rest of the software/hardware environment on your PC, but then you'll find out about undocumented features when you push it to the platform, or performance characteristics that make one algorithm less suitable than another (memory usage, time consumed). And you have to persuade those above you to give you the time to do this, when they don't see the value and want to get the code changed, reviewed and pushed to their normal testing procedures (which _might_ be white-box testing, but is likely black-box testing at its finest).

And when your office has been built around this model for years, decades likely, introducing unit testing for new desktop apps (support apps like I make), is hard because they don't see the value of it. They have a process, I should just stick to it (that's their attitude, not mine).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote up a bunch of pros/cons on continuous deployment about 3 months ago

[http://mayerdan.com/programming/2013/08/04/thoughts-on- conti...](http://mayerdan.com/programming/2013/08/04/thoughts-on-continuous- deployment/)

I am pro continuous integration, continuous delivery to staging. I think it takes extra care to do continuous deployment to production. There needs to be a number of systems in place some of which @mattjaynes mentioned others really depend on having a very solid and accessible deployment pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER15> For smaller product, continuous deployment can move at a really fast pace. For larger project, continuous deployment has to have a release and deployment cycle.

Google I heard does an amazing job at this. If I remember everything I heard from a Google talk, before peer review there is a pre-build/testing process. And while waiting to be reviewed, there should be a build triggered (or the build should sits in a CI queue waiting for testing).</comment>


Kubernetes brings all the Cloud Natives to the yard - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/podcast/314 <comment><USER2> lmao you get a point from me for a catchy title</comment>


Ask HN: How do I keep learning while I am having a job? - <AUTHOR> I have 3 years experience of backend engineer. I get the things done at my job, though more often I am missing my deadlines by few days.
I always feel I am missing knowledge at the theoretical and practical level when I see myself compare to my co-workers.
I feel uncomfortable at understanding the dev-ops kind of work (how web servlets work, how Nginx works), coming up with good design solutions (which won't need much rework after new requirements come).
How do I make the best use of my surroundings (my coworker's knowledge, online resources) to fill this gap and be a better developer? <comment><USER2> I know you are missing your deadlines, but there could be a simple reason there: bad estimates. Who creates the estimates and where are you in that process?

One thing I did when I felt I was stagnating was doing Lunch-And-Learns. I lead a few and for each one, I would research a topic and then teach it during the lunch.

Lastly, don't waste time. Go home and read and program. Go to meetups relating to the topics you are curious about. It's not easy after a long, frustrating, and possibly demoralizing day (especially when missing estimates), but watching online videos will only do so much for you.

<comment><USER3> > Lastly, don't waste time ...

From my 12 yrs work experience, I cannot emphasize how innocuous, trivial and prevalent above advise is, thus risking getting ignored. Please don't. This advise is most critical for ones growth (in all aspects).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Deadlines aren't always meant to be made, depends on who's doing the estimate and how much the scope changes along the way.

Some managers also setup impossible deadlines to try to squeeze all the productivity they can out of their team.

But you can work on improving meeting deadlines or raising a flag early on with your manager that you need to bump out a deadline a couple days. He'll appreciate hearing it earlier rather than the day it's planned to be completed.

If there is a topic you're curious about set aside a couple hours in the evening to research it and play around with it. Run through some dev ops tutorials.

As you do more and more projects you'll get a feel for how the design UI/UX should be. As a backend engineer I would expect you're not doing much design. But for mocking things up use a framework like bootstrap or one your team uses for projects.

Try to learn from senior developers around you.

Start doing some side projects at home. Sometimes the most learning occurs trying to build an application you are interested in for your own use instead of following a todo list tutorial.

Pick topics you are interested in. Google some tutorials. Don't just watch them or read them. Dig in and do them, extend them, take them beyond where the tutorial stops.

Get involved/netowrk with forums, user groups, bloggers and podcasters who develop in your language creating similar things.

Check if your company sends employees to conferences.

Development is definitely a continued learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had to prepare a developer improvement program recently. After doing a lot of research, I thought plural-sight was an invaluable resource. I don't get anything in return for promoting them. I think it is time and money well spent.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Pluralsight was really helpful as a learning resource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Figure out what you want to learn. Find a good training course that will teach you that. Ask your boss to send you to it. Explain why doing so will make you better at your job. That way you get real training without you paying for it, and your company gets a more valuable employee.

Your company may decide not to send you. But it's the first thing to try.

</comment><comment><USER8> > often I am missing my deadlines by few days.

Life's easy to understand, hard to do. Classic Planner Fallacy > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy)</comment>


Buysmaart.com - an artificial intelligence product - <AUTHOR>

buysmaart.com is a website that uses artificial intelligence (NLP) to help you find the right phone. <comment><AUTHOR> buysmaart.com - uses personalisation and AI to help you save time and money, and buy the phone that is right for you.</comment>


IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/07/29/internet-explorer-iq/

<comment><USER2> Actual paper and much discussion submitted earlier:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818847></comment>


Breaking Smart - <AUTHOR> http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/ <comment><USER2> I wrote up a very rough summary/set of notes. Please excuse all the errors in punctuation, spelling, and formatting. Thought it might be helpful for people who want to skim, as the whole thing is more-or-less a book.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_IwAfXh4U6ZUlAxK5XYA/pub)

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord This is a very syncretic fusion between computing, dialectical materialism, entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism and a bombastic techno-optimism.

Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.

"Towards a Mass Flourishing" makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct.

The "Purists versus Pragmatists" essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson's ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It's a false dichotomy through and through.

"Agility and Illegibility" again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically.

The "Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness" essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the "direction of maximal interestingness" and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s.

"Running Code and Perpetual Beta" presents the dogmas of "release early, release often" and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned _once_.

"Software as Subversion" equivocates "forking" as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS/2's mismanagement to argue in favor of "worse is better" (ignoring all other great systems besides OS/2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust.

"The Principle of Generative Pluralism" sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric/software-centric and car-centric/smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer's understanding of hardware.

"A Tale of Two Computers" prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.

"The Immortality of Bits" is one of the worst, and makes this claim: "Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today." This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very _dangerous_ view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid "hardware doesn't matter" thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the "sharing economy" will usurp everything, which is ridiculous.

"Tinkering versus Goals" again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.

The "Free as in Beer, and as in Speech" essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the "open source" ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case.

\----

Overall, I do not recommend this.

<comment><USER3> There's something about the HN users that makes them enjoy taking a shit on other people's work without including positive or at least constructive feedback.

I've been a member for almost four years and I still haven't figured out what it is, but it makes me shake my head every time.

<comment><USER4> What would constructive feedback look like in this case? Padding the comment with something like "While I understand that the author put a lot of work into these essays..." would merely lower the signal to noise ratio. The way I see it, HN commenters who don't mince words are merely doing the same as HN's founder, Paul Graham. To quote from his talk "Great Hackers" ([http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)):

"I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book."

Also, comments that amount to "I like this" can be compressed to an upvote. So we don't see many of those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first essay on that list starts talking about "soft technologies" without defining what they are.

They don't match other definitions of "soft technologies" and I'm having difficulty figuring out what the definition is here that only includes writing, money and software (frankly, I suspect if anyone other than an American had written this, money wouldn't be on the list).

<comment><USER6> I was comfortable with the notion. It seems to me that "soft technologies" are the ones that cause ideas and thoughts to be materialized in the world. The other technologies seem to be physical transformations of matter and energy.

What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already.

<comment><USER7> "What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already."

It was a little laborious, but I went through each essay and used dotEPUB ([http://dotepub.com/](http://dotepub.com/)) to convert it to epub, then transferred to my ereader manually.

I considered looking for a more automated solution, before realising that it would take more time looking for a solution than just manually doing it.

Similarly for pocket I imagine with the frequency these are coming out it would be easiest to simply manually add each essay to pocket.

<comment><USER8> here is the script that I use for doing this: [https://gist.github.com/ilyakava/47aedca7bc39483d7a94](https://gist.github.com/ilyakava/47aedca7bc39483d7a94)

All you have to do is input a txt file of links, in this case: [http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4](http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4)

Here is the output epub for all to enjoy: [http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24](http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24)

In cases when I care about formatting/metadata, I might use pandoc to merge all the \d+.html files, regex or edit, and then use pandoc to output *epub

<comment><USER9> I've deleted some "Share this" and such stuff if epub and it's available here – [https://www.dropbox.com/s/ws3xakwcd6dqbss/Breaking%20Smart%2...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ws3xakwcd6dqbss/Breaking%20Smart%20-%20Venkatesh%20Rao.epub?dl=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Umm, who is Venkatesh Rao and why should I read _30_ essays by him?

<comment><USER11> I read some very good posts he wrote and would highly recommend reading this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296)

<comment><USER12> Here's another good one: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs- are-the-new-labor-part-i/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TIL "polyannish" [sic] is a word.

Agree Ribbonfam peaked with the Gervais Principle essay. Agree with some of the criticisms here. Will add my own: the first three essays are somewhat accessible but after that the author is talking to the echo chamber which is his regular blog audience.

</comment><comment><USER14> I sense this may coin several new phrases, much like "software is eating the world." breaking smart, Promethean mindset /pastoralist mindsets.

Also lots of references to previous great insights: Alan Kay, Carlota Perez, Jeff Bezos,

<comment><USER15> Coining a phrase is every tech pundit's ultimate dream.

I refer to this as "cementing the drive."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So this is a blog that will write 1 article every 5 weeks and batch release them in 2017? I am all for thoughtful content, but binging isn't a concept that can be applied to blogs. This makes no sense.

Edit: i get what turned me off by this. It was the positioning as a radical new media concept and the convoluted and confusing explanation.

What do you call the development and research of a text based narrative which is catalogued for direct and total consumption online?

> an e-book. Got it now guys.

<comment><USER17> It's a valid thing to do because the ideas are all interrelated in complex ways. Releasing them all at once allows you to read a little, get inspired, jump around, check another intriguing title, and then come back tomorrow to read a little more (if you are inspired).

A somewhat darker view (from a certain perspective) is that he wanted to say his piece without being contradicted or argued with. To write a series of essays that don't have to respond to "the community" and get weighed down by reaction. One could even say that it's an expression of a pastoral utopia of pedagogy! :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Holy negativity batman!

This is a great collections of essays, I'd say bed time reading for the budding entrepreneur and/or VC.

Ignore (or misunderstand) at your own peril.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can somebody provide cliff notes? This is too long and I strongly dislike what has been written in the first few essays. Maybe somebody can sum this up in shorter form.

<comment><USER20> "I'm too lazy to eat this steak because I have to chew, can somebody please turn it into liquid so I can drink it?"

<comment><USER21> [https://www.soylent.com/](https://www.soylent.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The text on the site is too small and too wide to read comfortably on a screen.

The lines are over 120 characters long at 16px. On a 1080p screen this is just to small and wide to follow properly.

This sort of thing is bearable here on HN when skimming comments but for reading over '30,000 words' it's just too off putting to even start reading.

<comment><USER23> You realize you can shrink your browser window width and increase the text size to make the layout how you want?

For some reason there's always some highly-rated complaint on HN comments about the website layout, and I do not understand why. They are honestly the most boring comments to read.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps dang should answer this, but is flagging these kinds of comments a good use of flagging? I generally find the rules governing flagging a bit murky (even after searching around HN for dang's posts on this).

I would much appreciate an answer as I've tried taking up the responsibility of doing my part in keeping HN a great place with valuable comments and insights!

<comment><USER22> I commented in this case because of what the website is 'providing'. It's a 30,000 word collection of essays, of READING material. It greatly bothers me that such effort is put into the content but such lip service has been paid to the presentation.

To divorce the content and the presentation is simply not feasible and pretty insulting to the good work of designers/typesetters and indeed readers.

I suspect the frequency of this sort of comment is due to the frequency of bad design.

Perhaps in other cases this sort of comment isn't relevant, I can accept that argument. I argue that here it is relevant because the entire premise of the material is that it's for reading and the presentation makes that unviable.

Do we also stop positive comments like this[0] one?

Perhaps what I should have done is make a more detailed post outlining the issues with the content and perhaps linked to well accepted design practices that help improve the reading experience. But to suggest 'these types of comments' are without relevance (*and deserving of flagging) is to deny conversation about an important part of the submission content.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990140)

<comment><USER24> That's a fair point, and there's definitely a difference between being pedantic about design details and commenting on a relevant design-related issue.

I definitely would not flag _every_ design-related comment, but I was mostly wondering if it is _ever_ justified to do so.

(and just to be clear, I had no particular opinion on your comment - it just reminded me to ask about flagging etiquette)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GeoTreat.com: Delight Website Visitors by Their Geolocation - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone.
I would really love any feedback you have on GeoTreat.com. I went from idea to implementation extremely fast, but I am also quite happy with the value that a simple prototype can deliver.
https://GeoTreat.com/ -
With a tiny snippet of code, you can drop "Treats" on your web pages. That means, depending on your visitors location, they will be shown a special (modal popup) promotion of your choice. The treat can be placed anywhere in the world and have any radius.
The home page has a quick (and sloppy) 1min 30sec video that gives a quick overview and demo.
If anyone has any criticism, feedback, questions, I would absolutely love to hear what you have to say.
If anyone wants to see a Live demo, just let me know your general location and I will give you a URL with a demo for your area :) <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: [http://GeoTreat.com](http://GeoTreat.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> Can I check out a live demo? Looks interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely cendev. Want to let me know (generally) what area you are in? If you aren't comfortable sharing publically, please email me at email@example.com</comment></comment>


Inside the Windows 95 File System (1997) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tenox.net/books/Microsoft_Windows/Inside_the_Windows95_File_System.pdf <comment><USER2> I ran into an interesting bug in 1997. My employer was developing an IDE and close to the release time we got a report from a beta tester that creating a project failed on a Windows 95 test box, where it would create the directory but then report that it didn't exist!

The debug log was mystifying: the app was successfully creating the project directory but then failing to open it because the Win32 API to enumerate `C:\ _._ ` was returning an empty list and it hit the error handler when the expected directory name wasn't in the empty list.

Naturally, we couldn't reproduce this on any system we had access to and the customer could only reproduce it on Win95, not NT. I remembered that the Win95 networking stack was a deeply-invasive kludge and on a hunch tried disabling network file sharing, which immediately made the problem reproducible even though the local C: drive hadn't been shared.

The IDE developer was able to side-step the big by changing the existence check to use a different API and shipped on-time. Our theory was that Microsoft's QA team had missed the bug for the same reason we had: everything in the test environment was networked to have access to the shared builds and testcases.

</comment><comment><USER3> Windows 95 was a marvel of pragmatic engineering. While it won't win any awards for purity, it did a great job of delivering real value to people while still allowing their old programs to run. FAT32 was a major part of that.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Windows NT (and OS/2) were better from a purity standpoint but they were too far ahead of their time due to their high ram requirements (a whopping 4 megabytes per 16-bit application run!). It took a half a decade for hardware to get sufficiently better and cheaper for the compromises of the Windows 95 era to no longer make sense. Also, it's funny how now with Docker we're going back to this multi-tenancy process isolation model (which was the major secret sauce of Windows 95) instead of running everything in full blown VMs.

<comment><USER5> That 4MiB per application assertion is not true of OS/2\. 4MiB was minimal physical RAM requirements for 32-bit OS/2, which I myself ran on a 4MiB machine for a while, but it did _not_ scale up from that by number of applications run, let alone by number of 16-bit applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an entire book.

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565922006.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565922006.do)

It might be useful to have said which bit of this is most interesting.

<comment><USER7> And, is this a pirated book?!

I see nothing on the O'Reilly site or the host site that gives them the right to redistribute this freely, but please let me know if I'm wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> this fat32 is still used a lot! One weekend I figured out how to copy an fat32 UUID from one sdcard to another when you "upgrade" your sdcard on Android and want to keep the same path names because Android is using UUID as part of external sdcard path names [https://superuser.com/a/1294893/95714](https://superuser.com/a/1294893/95714)

<comment><USER9> That reminds me of how much I hated software license USB dongles.

<comment><USER10> After all the trouble I had with activating Windows and Office and whatnot, I have come to kind of appreciate dongles, actually. Migrating a license from one machine to another is as easy as unplugging the dongle and plugging it into the new machine.

OTOH, the company I work for has a customer that uses some _ancient_ automation software to run an industrial plant, and that software uses dongles attached to the parallel port, and I mean _the_ parallel port. Using USB-to- parallel-adapters does _not_ work, and finding motherboards with parallel ports has become rather difficult. :-|

<comment><USER11> > Using USB-to-parallel-adapters does not work

Have you tried modifying the Device Manager configuration for the USB-to- parallel adapter to assign it the I/O port and IRQ traditionally associated with LPT1 (I/O port 0x3BC, IRQ 7)? Changing exactly those kinds of mappings are the whole (original) purpose of the Windows Device Manager :)

The other thing you could do, though, is just run the automation software in a VM, and map the USB parallel port to the VM's LPT1. It's the IBM z/OS philosophy :)

<comment><USER10> Thank you! I will pass the hint regarding the Device Manager on to our automation people!

But as far as I recall, the software runs on DOS (for real!), and attempts to run it inside a VM have not been very successful, because the link between the software and the PCL is very timing-sensitive or something like that. FreeDOS did not work, either; I got to install MS-DOS 6.22 on a few machines two or three years ago for that reason. It was fun actually, but finding three floppy disks for the installation media was ... challenging. ;-)

<comment><USER12> You can easily make a bootable CD-ROM for MS-DOS by using the boot emulation...

> mkisofs -b dos622_1.img . > \temp\dos6.iso

something like this, will get you a bootable CD that'll emulate a floppy and get you onto that first disk... It's probably easier to do a dump/restore set of whatever it is you need to install, or just make a boot floppy to load up MSCDEX & friends so you can xcopy as another solution.....

Parallel ports aren't too hard to find, there is PCI cards you can find with parallel ports.. Now ISA slots on the other hand....

<comment><USER10> I actually tried something along those lines, but I could not get it to work properly. The installation started normally, but when it was time to enter the second disk, the installer somehow did not accept the second disk.... :-|

On the upside, installing MS-DOS 6.22 from floppies took less than 15 minutes, and the freshly installed system booted withing 15 seconds. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The lovely thing about FAT32 was that you could mount it from Linux which was a big thing back then. So for example, I could use WINE to run Counter Strike on Linux, and actually have a more stable experience than Windows 9x.</comment>


Passive income for grandparents - <AUTHOR>

I am a senior software developer and I would like to build something that would allow my grandparents to receive a small passive income (between $600 and $1000 a month would be great, but anything is better than nothing). Any ideas? I would be willing to spend between 2 and 3 hours a week to maintain it after building it. Thanks in advance :-) <comment><USER2> Have they considered buying a small ecommerce site, preferably one that sells digital products? If you are willing to put in time, better to train them on the store platform and SEO/marketing end.

</comment><comment><USER3> About a review site for products that people of their age could find useful. The site could earn money through affiliates (e.g amazon e.t.c).They would have to write the reviews for each product.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking about such thing in a global way, for all old people that have a lot of free time to be able to earn some money, but havent come up with any good ideas unfortunately :(

</comment><comment><USER5> \- I've never tried it, but I've heard that a porn site is very lucrative. Just get some nice videos, ads and your good. It shouldn't be that hard to maintain.

<comment><USER5> \- But you'll need alot of traffic. Also it is very competitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> How much traffic would be required to get $600 a month?

<comment><USER5> \- I really don't know but here are some links that can help you:

a. [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-make-hundreds-of- thous...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-make-hundreds-of-thousands- per-year-owning-a-porn-site-2013-8)

b. [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061121202548AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061121202548AAXMCh0)

c. [http://www.bloggerheads.com/porn- report/](http://www.bloggerheads.com/porn-report/)

d. [http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat- seo/4460...](http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat- seo/446011-worth-starting-new-porn-adult-website.html)

e. [http://howtostartpornsite.blogspot.com/2013/01/starting-a- po...](http://howtostartpornsite.blogspot.com/2013/01/starting-a-porn- site.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get it Now - Chromebooks Magically on Sale Today Through Gilt - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/get-it-now-chromebooks-magically-on-sale-today-through-gilt/ <comment><USER2> I recently spent $50 on eBay to get an old Pentium II "ultraportable" laptop. It's very thin, has an acceptable screen size and resolution (1024x768), a keyboard bested only by my ThinkPad, and is fantastic for the two things I'm using it for: a) All the exercises from programming books (currently PAIP; after that I'll resume SICP). (It can _easily_ run Emacs, SLIME, and SBCL.) b) Web browsing, both with Chrome and links2.

Did you hear the part where it cost $50? And how it runs all the software I want?

Now, I'll admit it's not quite as small, nor as glossy, nor quite as fast as a Chromebook. And I do love the web, and could manage most of my life with nothing more than a browser. But I absolutely do not have a spare $500, and even if I did, I could get an <strike>iPad 2</strike> Android tablet, beefier netbook (nevermind a netbook with more flexible OS options: I'd probably dualboot ChromiumOS and "real" Linux), a Kindle DX and normal-sized Kindle, 10 of the aforementioned craptops, or any number of more practical things. Even if I was told to spend it on a novelty computer, I'd be tempted to get an OLPC for $200 and use the rest on...well, anything.

This rant brought to you by someone who actually likes ChromeOS. What the heck will someone who's on the fence about it going to think?</comment>


Aggressive Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2009/04/24/aggressive-learning/

<comment><USER2> "Try something you're 99% certain you'll fail at. Sign up to speak in front of a crowd. Enroll in classes you don't have the prerequisites for."

Doesn't sound like fun for the crowd or the teacher...

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder: is it better to aim for "impossibly hard", or simply " _implausibly_ hard"? That is, it's obviously good to be challenged, but if you're in it for the learning experience, is it better to do something so hard that you can't _possibly_ succeed, or is it better to set the bar so that there's some small, but nonzero chance of success? This is disregarding the fact that constantly failing will discourage you emotionally from proceeding, as it is assumed that the learning itself is considered the success.

To put it another way: would students learn better/faster in school, if _every assignment_ was designed to be impossible to complete? (Obviously, the assignments would thus go un-graded, but frequent micro-examinations would be inserted to assert the learning derived from all the failure.) As an interesting side-effect, in such a curriculum, any student that _succeeded_ on an assignment could be immediately skipped ahead to the stuff they _can't_ do.

<comment><USER4> Pushing against a brick wall won't move the wall -- but if you do it long enough, it'll make you stronger.

The point is that it's good to reach beyond your grasp every once in a while. And when you're trying, you can't always tell if the thing you're grasping for is too far away. You just reach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the point about achievable success vs aggressive learning.

</comment><comment><USER6> no. Learning and difficulty is not linear where the most impossible teaches the most. After a certain challenging level you learn less. Like in weight training, piano, math, etc. Learning a piano piece you cant play wont make you a good piano player.</comment>


America's brainiest cities - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/01/pf/college/Americas_brainiest_cities/index.htm

<comment><USER2> _Call it America's brainiest place to live._

I will do no such thing, CNN.

I grew up in the DC metro area. It's a horrible place, don't ever move there. Where SF has an entrepreneurship draw and LA has a fame draw and NY has a money draw, DC has a power draw. People literally move there so they can take their shot at being the best Machiavellian sonofabitch they can be. There aren't any brainiacs around there. Some very smart people, sure, but no brainiacs.

<comment><USER3> It seems to be one of those few places where people will be content to be absolutely miserable in their jobs for 20 years. There's a certain _feeling_ to doing business in the area (even if it's not with the government), a certain soul-sucking tired grind, that doesn't seem replicated exactly the same way elsewhere.

*edit: the high prevalence of degrees also means that B.S./B.A. degrees have almost no weight. You'll commonly see the phenomenon of multiple degrees, multiple masters, very young PhDs...just so you can get noticed in the crowd. People seem to go to school forever out here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dear CNN, people with degrees != brainy people

<comment><USER5> +1 - In my experience educated people is a good thing. I work with many of them, and I live and am related to them. However intelligence and education are absolutely not the same thing.

Intelligent people have a tendency to educate themselves, the education doesn't make them smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sadden by the bottom 10, 2 cities in Florida. I wonder how the state fairs as a whole. Fark might have a point with their Florida tag.

<comment><USER7> In Florida, I think it's something that will be fixed as time goes on. Right now, florida is home to several very large universities (Orlando has University of Central Florida, which is quite large now), but these colleges basically did not exist until sometime quite recently (the past 30 years maybe?). Right now they are going through a period of large growth, so I think that while the older generation mostly did not go to college, the current generation will be going to college in increasing numbers.

Additionally, while Florida is still mostly known for its gigantic tourism industry, there are newer industries popping up throughout central florida. Biotech is quite large in Orlando, and additionally optics is quite big throughout central florida (Tampa and Orlando).

So I think in the future, the trend will be towards more education in florida.

<comment><USER6> That's a good point.

I did not realize UCF was that new. I'm guessing USF is probably not that old either.

I've only lived up in north Florida (tallahassee) while in college at FSU and that town is almost 30% students so that number doesn't match my experience in the state. I think that holds for Gainsville and Jacksonville too albeit, Jax it's mostly due to the type of industries there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ironic link text is ironic.

Is this article suggesting that cities have a sort of "maturation" process whereby the city attracts smarter people the older it gets?

</comment><comment><USER9> I've heard that Los Alamos and/or Huntsville have the most PhDs per capita, which makes a lot of sense, but may not actually be true.

</comment><comment><USER10> After reading this, I also found this interesting article on degrees per square mile: [http://blog.robpitingolo.org/2010/05/where-smart-people- live...](http://blog.robpitingolo.org/2010/05/where-smart-people-live.html)</comment>


SemicolonScript - <AUTHOR> http://rodhowarth.com/semicolonscript/

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of a demo I saw Billy Hoffman[1] do a while back at a conference. He demonstrated a way of embedding whitespace in a forum post that is mapped to a malicious JS method injected via XSS. The point was to circumvent HTML sanitation attempts to strip raw JS code.

This tool could be used for something similar. Just replace the semicolon token[2] with something less obvious (say '\t' for example), and you've got a pretty interesting tool.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Hoffman> [2]: [https://github.com/RodH257/SemicolonScript/blob/master/Defau...](https://github.com/RodH257/SemicolonScript/blob/master/Default.htm#L41)</comment>


Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its profits? - <AUTHOR> https://earlymoves.com/2016/04/29/why-is-amazon-all-of-a-sudden-not-re-investing-all-its-profits/ <comment><USER3> Frankly I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner. So much money is sloshing through Amazon these days, keeping it balanced to the point where you don't let it accumulate (generating profit) or flow to fast (generating loss) has got to be scary complex. At every large company I've worked at there are things on the balance sheet that are "tunable" by management which helps with this. It was a running joke inside Network Appliance that we always beat expectations by $.01 cent per share. Of course until you didn't and that usually meant that what ever mechanisms you used for tuning your cash flow didn't have enough dynamic range to cover the change that quarter.

Amazon then, being a services, merchandising, payment processor conglomeration then has to be crazy hard to manage cashflow in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER4> Bezos is in it for the long haul. He's probably the most impressive business person there is right now. Buffett and Musk are impressive in different ways.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, but Bezos and Buffet are not even in the same league as Elon Musk.

<comment><USER6> Who, then, would you say is in Mr. Musk's league?

<comment><USER5> Musk is in a league of his own. This is based on my own research and comparison. I believe I've watched every interview he's given, read his biography, read the in-depth profile on waitbutwhy.com, and followed his companies fairly closely. I've done the same with Bezos, since the day Amazon went public. While I highly respect Bezos, I believe if you did the same, you would come to the same conclusion.

<comment><USER6> I guess we just have a fundamental disagreement over the definition of the term "league".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Summary:

Because they're "proving" they can make a profit when they want to in preparation for spending a decade investing 100% of profits into building a world-wide logistics system.

(I think it's an interesting theory, but the author provided little evidence.)

<comment><USER8> I don't think any company will wait a few quarters to invest in something. And if they did that and win, well, they have invented a time machine.

<comment><USER9> Most big projects require a research & planning phase where a small team tries to learn everything possible about the domain, works out exactly what the opportunities are, and runs a few small trials to verify their assumptions. This is not capital intensive, and it's a good time to build up capital & goodwill for the rollout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it very interesting to know what Amazon's competitive advantage would be from having their own logistics business.

1) Shipping is the definition of a commoditized business. Unlike AWS, for example, they will not be pioneering a new business model or technology.

2) What they pay right now to FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, OnTrac, etc. should be very close to zero margin, given their position to negotiate those companies against each other in real time. Surely, the margin should be comparable to the cost of capital.

3) Amazon seems to represent less than 10% of packages in the US [1]. Given that they have to cover more or less the same area as other shipping companies have, they will not have the economies of scale of other firms, so their cost per shipment may end up higher.

[https://www.quora.com/Shipping-What-percentage-of-UPS- shipme...](https://www.quora.com/Shipping-What-percentage-of-UPS-shipments- are-Amazon-boxes-packages)

<comment><USER11> > Shipping is the definition of a commoditized business. Unlike AWS, for > example, they will not be pioneering a new business model or technology.

I'm guessing it's the one-hour-delivery thing - last year they started testing one hour delivery for popular products in a couple of pilot cities.[0]

Presumably they can't do one hour delivery with a traditional model of centralised-warehouse -> shipping company -> shipping company's regional hub -> customer; they need an Amazon warehouse near that city, with products dispatched from there to the customer directly, or it takes too much time. Building a warehouse and dispatch operation near every major city won't be cheap.

[0] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/33332018/amazon- launch...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/33332018/amazon-launches-one- hour-delivery-service-prime-now-in-parts-of-london)

<comment><USER12> Related, I don't think certain niches of shipping are truly commoditized.

Have some high impact document that needs to be shipped somewhere within 24 hours and be guaranteed to get there safely? I can't imagine trusting anyone but FedEx for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazon's fundamental source of competitive advantage is rarely talked about, but I think this is a great example of what that is -- they have built a company that succeeds in very low margin businesses.

So they started in online retail with < 10% gross margin. With AWS with its ~40% GM they have INCREASED the GM of the company. Contrast this with Microsoft and Google which sell software at 80%+ GM. When they do Azure or GCE, they have to decrease their GM. This is hard! FedEx runs around 60% GM. So just think about what this will do for Amazon ...

<comment><USER14> > So they started in online retail with < 10% gross margin.

They succeeded there because they didn't pay sales tax so they had a 5-10% advantage over brick and mortar.

Now that that advantage is gone, they are finding that retail isn't so nice anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I will probably get down voted but I think it's because we are in for a big downturn this year. Amazon is preparing for that and they will garner more market trust because they can show profits. When the bust happens, people are going to be very careful on what stocks they invest in and will most likely lean towards safer, profitable companies.

<comment><USER16> Are you saying Amazon have built a tool to time the market?

<comment><USER17> If Target can figure out that someone is pregnant based off of buying unscented lotion, mineral supplements, and cotton balls, then Amazon could easily gauge the financial health of its consumers. Perhaps they noticed a trend leading up to the last recession, and its occurring again. Whether or not it's true, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think they calculated wrong and forgot to spend all the money. They mentioned that Cloud Services was unusually more profitable this quarter.

<comment><USER19> Another thing to consider is how the money is spent changes how much profit is made.

If Amazon reinvests into assets, that money isn't considered a loss. So it doesn't reduce profits. So when Amazon buys a video library those IPs are assets.

You only deduct spending that are expenses.

As Amazons business changes it might be harder to hide their profits in expenses.

<comment><USER20> investments in assets result in depreciations which are expenses that reduce profits; you don't write off the asset as a loss all in one year, but it all gets written off across a series of years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Because that was the plan all along?

At some point Amazon is going to get a return for all of its investment. The entire market is now dancing to Amazon's tune. Why not now?

<comment><USER22> They don't seem ready to me. Seems like a temporary blip due to their investment schedules. They clearly have ambitions to build out a logistics infrastructure, and they haven't even setup in some obvious markets yet (Australia). Lots more growth to pursue.

<comment><USER23> 30 million people over those distances? I wouldn't roll out in Au until driverless delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think it's because of the bubble. No sense investing in innovation when you're chasing billions invested by VC firms. Better to bank profits for a couple years and then come back in.

</comment><comment><USER25> This happened once before, during early 2000s tech bubble burst, as was immortalized in the web comic The Joy of Tech:

[http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/288.html](http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/288.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/business/amazons- shrinking...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/business/amazons-shrinking- profit-sets-off-a-seismic-shock-to-its-shares.html?_r=0)

I think a couple years ago they got tired of their stock tanking every time they reported a lower profit than previous quarters.

<comment><USER27> What are they going to doing they can't sustain these profits in future quarters?

<comment><USER26> Massive capex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> AWS, prime, and content have much higher margins than _objects_, so a small unexpected increase in sales creates a disproportionate amount of profit.

<comment><USER29> I was joking with colleague last night that Amazon's unexpected profits were largely due to us not turning off on-demand i2.2xl development instances overnight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My theory: Bezos/Amazon is preparing for a potentially dangerous financial situation in the market, and taking a little cash out for a rainy day is a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER31> Amazon bought 3 city blocks in Downtown Seattle a few years ago. Two of those are done or nearly done, the thirds one houses a scrotum-shaped building (three connected spheres, what's going on here?) that's still under construction.

Technically that counts as reinvesting profits, but its the old "Are we an X company or a real estate company?" issue that happens so often.

Personally I think it's the last chance for Bezos to roll around in his piles of cash before he has to start giving some back to his investors.

<comment><USER32> This is what those three connected spheres are:

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/24/5023454/amazon-giant- biod...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/24/5023454/amazon-giant-biodome- design-board-approval)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how much talent retention comes into play here, since Amazon has a very high ratio towards RSUs in the total comp package if I remember correctly.

When $AMZN girates or tanks, at least some part of their workforce would be tempted to leave. Though maybe that's the exact segment they wouldn't mind see leaving anyways?

<comment><USER33> > Though maybe that's the exact segment they wouldn't mind see leaving > anyways?

Generally the people who leave voluntarily are the people you don't want to see leave. Good talent is likely to have little difficulty finding better opportunities. Mediocre to bad employees are going to have a hard time finding another job, so they stick around.

This is based on my personal observations as an Amazon employee, and not just hand-waving, by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't accept the premise. It still has a PE of 530.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think all of us who aspire to be entrepreneurs can learn something from the events happened after Amazon's stock crash during last quarterly earnings. Stock price dropped to about $482. Amazon quickly announced stock buyback program and stock is up again. It was around $612 before latest quarterly earnings report. And, it is now at $659. Keep an eye on Amazon's amazing stock management skills

</comment><comment><USER36> My theory is they simply can't find enough things to spend on, but can't afford to lower AWS pricing without being swamped with more demand than they can handle.

I don't think Amazon are preparing for period of capital investment - <USER2> profits and then taking them away is surely worse than consistently making very little as far as the stock market is concerned.

This is not the sort of problem many businesses come up against.

</comment><comment><USER37> Maybe they didn't stop re-investing all their profits. Whether Amazon keeps and re-invests all of its profit (as retained earnings) or returns it all to shareholders, the reported net income number doesn't change.

It seems like you would have to look at their balance sheet to answer this, not just their income statement.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe the stockholders are getting restless. At some point, they have to pay dividends. Amazon is too big to be bought out.

Much of Amazon's expansion is in physical facilities. Those are hard assets which can legitimately be financed with debt at low interest rates.

</comment><comment><USER39> Because we transitioned to the next step of the Bezos Singularity State Machine.

</comment><comment><USER40> Do they really need to show that the switch is working? Shouldn't it be obvious from their financials?

<comment><USER41> People got spooked. The stock tumbled. Time to flip the switch back to 'profit' for a quarter or two, then once everyone understands that the switch exists, put it back to 'invest' where it belongs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Because many of their business have become self sustaining businesses like AWS.

</comment><comment><USER43> Could Bezos somehow take these profits and invest it in Blue Origin?

</comment><comment><USER44> How can you all of a sudden not redo something?

</comment><comment><USER45> I bet they go big on transportation.

</comment><comment><USER46> Investors are demanding it.</comment>


"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on software patents - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/your-criticisms-are-completely-wrong-stallman-on-software-patents/ <comment><USER3> Richard stallman has always been eccentric and unwavering in his stand on politics around software.

Somehow, people find this odd, wrong, and or bad, and I dont understand it. On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good attribute. Even being an eccentric is better than not caring for the issue. eccentricness is often a key aspect before a change reach a critical mass.

Take a random politician opinion about abortion or nuclear power or any other common political subject. Say his/her opinion is "well, some should be able to do it, but then again there are problems so maybe not, and the issue is not one that need to be address today, and the system today do continue to work, and well, legal greyness is not that big of an issue, only for those in the courts...".

Clear, direct, and consistent opinion is a good thing. Diplomacy and "meeting half-way" has it places, but in politics, there is also times when it should be clearly avoided. In software politics, there are plenty of people working the diplomatic route. There is no shortage of diplomats, and a few eccentric and unwavering voices is then much more useful to maintain the goals of where we want to actually go without moving the goal in favor of diplomacy.

<comment><USER4> > _On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good attribute._

Only in the movies. In real life, this trait can be disastrous towards making any progress for the betterment of society.

<comment><USER5> > Only in the movies.

You mean the movies made about people who were unwavering in real life? Gandhi, MLK, Lincoln are a few high-profile figures that spring to mind, but there are countless throughout history who have made a difference by standing up for what they believe in.

I understand your point, that romanticized notions rarely have a place in reality. But I think Stallman, even with all of his eccentricities, is the perfect figurehead for these ideologies. He is a believer, and that gives others permission to believe themselves. It's a very powerful thing.

<comment><USER6> I think we Indians will spend a lifetime correcting "Ghandi" as "Gandhi". :-)

EDIT: To add to the discussion - not many people are aware but MK Gandhi was indeed very thorough in his use of Non-Violence and other means of protest. On few occasions when a protest became violent he was the first to call off the protest. When most of India & Pakistan were celebrating their independence he was busy caring to people affected by Hindi/Muslim riots. Having unwavering attitude is not just stuff of movies.

<comment><USER7> If you take "Gandhi" I'll take "they're, there, and their"

<comment><USER8> I'll take "it's" and "its".

<comment><USER9> You have those the wrong way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mr. Stallman's proposed solution is both simple and elegant: take all software that runs on a general purpose machine and legislate a "safe harbor" from patent claims for software falling in that category. This essentially would return the state of the law to what it was through the early 1990s, recognizing that software patents are fine when tied to specialized hardware or when they pertain to a special-purpose machine but not otherwise. Such a proposal is "radical" in dealing with the problem once and for all but is also remarkably conservative in only singling out for elimination the one category of patents most vulnerable to the potent objection that its retention does little or nothing to further the progress of science and hence doesn't warrant the monopoly protections afforded by the patent laws. The logic here _should_ enable Congress to support it _if_ it chose to reexamine the issues purely from a social and legal perspective.

Still, the _practical_ issues remain daunting. What becomes of existing software patents, for example? Purists may say these are not "property" but massive dollars have been paid for the rights to own them and there will be _huge_ resistance, not to mention constitutional objections, over any idea that these suddenly should be rendered worthless by legislative action. If these stay intact for the next 20+ years, what good does a safe harbor do in applying only prospectively? More important, those with a stake in the game - even relatively benign players such as Google - want to hedge and trim on the issues in order to protect their investments, and this means that inordinate pressure will be put on Congress _not_ to single out software patents for elimination, emphasizing instead more limited measures to help fight trolls and so on.

With so much resistance, and with an apathetic public, how to build sufficient momentum to push Congress toward a true solution? Developers might lead this charge but I wonder. Founders are mostly not directly affected by software patents and neither are employees at bigger companies who are conscripted to keep churning them out. And those most directly hit in the patent wars resist reform to protect their own investments.

So Mr. Stallman finds himself alone in his position at this conference: not because his solution is bad but because of inordinately difficult practical barriers. At least we see in this conference that persons of influence in this area are finally willing to begin seeking incremental reform. If the worst of the abuses can be fixed (e.g., the troll issue), that at least is a start. And, who knows, maybe radical changes can occur after initial progress is made. Time will tell.

<comment><USER11> Stallman doesn't simply talk about a _solution_ to a _problem_.

He talks about what the optimal Software Patents situation is, and why.

We are in dire straits because we ignored him 20 years ago.

It's our problem to either get to the optimal situation, or to try and fail.

<comment><USER12> Maybe someone could patent this optimal Software Patents situation? Let's call it a design patent.

For completeness, let's patent the process of getting to this optimal Software Patent situation as well just for good measure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I read most of the transcripts of the Oracle v Google trial. This was a case where both sides had highly paid expert legal teams staffed with the best lawyers in the country that spent an enormous amount of time preparing to argue a case about patents and copyright in software.

What jumped out at me, and I imagine anyone else on HN who read these transcripts, was that despite what was a set of the optimum circumstances for lawyers dealing with software issues, none of them had the slightest idea what they were talking about. They were way off the mark. "What is an API?" - <USER2> central issue to the case. The lawyers from neither side understood the answer. "How do people use a programming language?" Again, both sides were desperately clueless (although Oracle's Boies was obviously more so, sometimes hilariously.)

So often in reading those transcripts I wanted to grab one of the lawyers and scream in his face, "you idiot!! What the hell is wrong with you?!? Are you stupid????"

The situation with software patents is the same - the same clueless legal people are having the same clueless legal discussion about it. They don't understand how software works, they don't understand what software patents really mean, they don't understand the marketplace, and they certainly don't understand programming. Unlike me, who just sits back and screams in my own head at the clueless people who are the self-appointed architects of the legal world in which software developers and entrepreneurs will live and work, Richard Stallman is standing up and screaming in their faces about it. It must feel satisfying to do that. Someone needs to.

<comment><USER14> Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't help to try to set legal precedents that extend todays extreme intellectual property obligations in software to legal documents.

When you come to think of it. A contract is very similar to a piece of code. The main difference is that it is to be executed by humans instead of machines and enforced by a legal system instead of a machine's design.

Contracts have been deemed non patentable and a high bar has been set for copyrightability compared to other text because of the requirement that contract language be well defined with particular sentences having an agreed upon interpretation based on court precedents.

This means lawyers writing contracts don't have to worry, for each sentence that they write, that it may be infringing on someone else having written a similar one. They also don't have to worry that a combination of clauses have been patented and they can't use it in their contract.

Programmers on the other hand worry about it for every new piece of code they write. The bar is so low for patentability and copyrightability that we pretty much know someone somewhere has patented a large part of the code we write. We just hope nobody with the patent is interested in going after us because we aren't worth the trouble. But there is always that feeling that if ever we become commercially successful, the trolls and wolves will be waiting to try to get a slice of our profits. This is quite an annoying disincentive to write new code or 'innovate' which in this case means just plain doing our job.

<comment><USER14> I was pondering this further and it would actually be conceivable with a bit of natural language processing and machine learning to build a 'verdict machine', maybe a Watson type of thing.

You would input legal documents, contracts and laws to 'program' the machine, It would read these legal documents and compile them into legal tests that depend on case facts.

Then when you needed to judge a case, you would enter the facts or fact probabilities about the case in the machine. It would then generate a verdict and tell you which legal tests passed or failed to arrive at the verdict.

Even it it was just used as support to help courts untangle cases or for law student as an educational tool, it could be a useful machine.

Here is the kicker: All contracts and laws are actually software code for this machine.

<comment><USER15> You've certainly got lots of data to train it with. And you can test it by simply testing its predictive power. But instead of selling it to the court system I'd sell it as a service to law firms and/or use it in prediction markets. This would ensure that it would be funded and refined until everyone simply accepted its outcomes as a foregone conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Stallman's position on software patents is clear. It's the response from the rest of the world which is strange. There is one, simple statement that no one attempts to make and defend: "Stallman is wrong." I suspect it's because we all know that Stallman is right, many of us find it socially uncomfortable, and so there are all kinds of attempts to distance the ideas.

Personally I regard Stallman as one of the few moderate voices in software. Most discussion today is at an extreme best described as fascism: all privileges of decision and control reserved to a single person. Stallman is the moderate voice calling for a individual self-determination. He hasn't demanded any kind of social protections. Take a few minutes and imagine what the philosophy underlying the social democracies of Scandanavia would look like when applied to software.

<comment><USER17> I don't view Stallman as moderate at all and there are a large number of ideas he has that I disagree with, but I do agree with him on software patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As usually RMS is spot on. "Can a person program a new solution to a problem?" Any answer involving "no" seems a bit like insanity.

Duffy on the other hand misses the point (IMHO): "The question is, will you get very serious research that is patent-motivated?"

There is no "serious [software] research" that actually costs money. I have yet to be shown a single software patent that is the result of research and not just a spark on insight. Sparks of insights are great. The point to note, though, is that they would have happened anyway, they do not cost anything. Granting a legal monopoly on them does not benefit society as a whole.

I have no illusion that anything will change. Big companies (with the notable exception of Google) love software patents to keep the competition (especially new players) at bay. Patent trolls love patents, which they can exploit with extortion schemes. Last not least lawyers _love_ software patents; not a single patent case is won or lost without the involved lawyers being rewarded handsomely.

<comment><USER19> _I have yet to be shown a single software patent that is the result of research and not just a spark on insight._

You could argue that every patent is just a spark of insight. However, how many sparks could be made if not for all the research that came before them?

Google's driverless car comes to mind as a well-known present-day software research project. When you boil down their achievements, they are all just small sparks of insight. But without all that funding and time put into the overall research, would those sparks have ever materialized? There is little reason for one of the algorithms they have developed to just pop into someone's head otherwise.

<comment><USER18> I agree. It is not always clear cut.

I would stand by initial statement, though, that patents on software do not serve society as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Speech recognition, for example, is very patent-intensive.

Speech recognition is patent-encumbered, not patent-intensive. Anyone who has done any research into the field would know that.

<comment><USER5> Serious question: What is the difference between patent-intensive and patent- encumbered?

<comment><USER21> Encumbered is a pejorative.

<comment><USER5> Ah, I see what it is now. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's all well and good that we are attempting to address the software patent system but the myth of beneficial medical patents still prevails. If you are of the opinion that medical patents are necessary, please read through this document - [http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm) \- in particular, chapter 9. Just like software patents, medical patents have a long and rich history of stifling innovation. Don't buy the lies wholesale - look at the evidence and make your own decision.

<comment><USER23> Medical patents are only necessary to preserve inflated pricing models intended to support the owner's (and/or licensee's) advertising campaigns.

<comment><USER24> Which means they are necessary to preserve status-quo profit margins. And the people with the microphone who control the hand of law are those who _really_ like their status-quo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The thing is I would actually favor software patents if it required the patent applicant to submit all related source code to the public domain. Software is the only medium of creation that is essentially a double-monopoly with copyright and patent protection.

<comment><USER26> You've hit on one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to software patents: by the time you've described the "invention" at a low-enough level to actually allow replication by future patent readers, the resulting patent would be nigh-indistinguishable from actual code.

<comment><USER27> And/or would be math.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So suppose I want to make a novel device, part of its functionality is software. I can't patent the software only the hardware. It's a mass market device, so I have an incentive to make the software a trade secret. I don't want people to conveniently reverse engineer my software so I design a custom CPU and store the code in encrypted form. That's a whole bunch of overhead that has been created by abolishing software patents.

Not only will this kind of thing happen, but it will become commonplace and convenient (e.g. there will be off the shelf CPU designs that support obfuscation). Imagine the digital world returning to the guild system — and the beauty of digital technology is that this could happen ridiculously fast.

Now, yes, trivial algorithms would not be worth protecting this way, and that's a Good Thing. But consider the inefficiencies and stupidity that will be created by abolishing software patents altogether. Oh and the DMCA will make any efforts to penetrate obfuscated software illegal in perpetuity.

<comment><USER29> That's fine. Trade secrets are already how most things work in software and it's a much better model. I don't want their dumb ideas; I don't want their bad code; and I don't care about not being able to repurpose subsidized hardware.

All I care about is removing the veto power the patent system gives random strangers have over my ability to develop things they have nothing to do with.

<comment><USER28> This is a random veto power with a fixed lifespan in exchange ofr which the design is published. Trade secrets were an ongoing disaster. We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made violins, for example.

Yes, stupid things get patented. Yes, the system is corrupt. But don't assume some other "simple" system or non system will have no downside.

<comment><USER30> > We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made violins, for example.

We're actually _not_ trying to figure out how to make violins that sound just as good: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stradivarius&o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stradivarius&oldid=522654141#Comparisons_in_sound_quality)

Also, Stallman is specifically talking about software, not manufacturing specialized devices.

<comment><USER28> A typical specialized device today is largely driven by software. To contribute to this debate you need to understand this.

For example: most musical instruments today are electronic. If I build a guitar amplifier out of vacuum tubes, Stallman will let me patent it, but if I build a high tech amplifier with digital preprocessing to simulate the behavior of any one of a large number of old vacuum tube amplifiers etc. then no patents for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Speech recognition, for example, is very patent-intensive."

The nytimes article with the guy who DID spend lots of time trying to innovate in speech recognition, recognized as a genius in the field, who was driven out by someone elses patent.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars- amo...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech- giants-can-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER32> Stallman was the only speaker that day who wasn't streamed.

 _> "Streaming online would require use of [the] Microsoft Silverlight plug- in, which would pressure people to use proprietary software. Dr. Stallman considers it wrong to pressure people to do that."_

Why is Silverlight necessary? [http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/live- streaming-webm-with...](http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/live-streaming- webm-with-wowza-server.html)

<comment><USER13> He was likely talking about the situation in that particular conference, which was using Silverlight for its streaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm glad to see that RMS is using his trademark good manners to reach out to the undecided middle.

<comment><USER34> If you want reform, be polite. If you want revolution, don't bother.

<comment><USER4> Revolutions are won by winning over the masses. So this is not an either-or dichotomy.

<comment><USER35> This can't be overstated. The primary goal of all revolutionary groups that I've studied has been gaining the support of 'the common man.' Inside the revolutionary group itself, things are different and a unified front is pursued to the point of coercion. However, the goal of this front has usually been to gain the public's favor, and then once the public is stands with the group official social change becomes a realistic goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Pinned to his chest was a large white button: "Pay Cash—Don't Be Tracked."

Looking at the photo, it looks like it actually says "Don't Be Tracked—Pay Cash."

<comment><USER37> How long until its "Don't Be Tracked-Pay Bitcoin." :)

<comment><USER38> Every single transaction in Bitcoin is tracked and published. Why do people think this is even remotely close to anonymous?

<comment><USER37> I thinks its because the addresses are only able to link to your real self once you make a link. (buy something and have it shipped to your address, deposit real money with a exchange that requires your identity, etc..)

however you could always make a new account on mtgox, send the coins to the exchange and send them out to another address you made, and I think, unless the exchange gives that transaction (That is internal to their network) to the authorities, you can begin to remove your-self from being traced.

The way I see it is this, you can determine how traceable you are in Bitcoins, you can't determine easily how traceable you are with native transactions (USD, AUD, EURO, etc...) This may help you hide better

<comment><USER39> Law enforcement agencies routinely unravel money laundering schemes that are much more sophisticated than this. You really think this'll stop them if they have a reason to investigate your funds?

<comment><USER37> Your right, I heard that sending coins through a several eWallet services, back and fourth then to a brand new address would require a massive operation to track you down. Could this easily be circumvented?

<comment><USER40> You mean a massive operation similar to the scale of the federal government?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely an issue to be tackled. After working in a large software company I can attest to the fact that ridiculous stuff that are patented just to increase the portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER41> _Those include creating key components of the free software system that he calls GNU/Linux (and many others call simply Linux)_

I've always savored the irony of Stallman's fight to have content creators relinquish control of their creations while steadfastly refusing to let people just call Linux by the name they choose... while also attempting to steal top billing.

<comment><USER26> I don't see the irony.

"The right to copy" exists only in so far as external forces limit inherent behavior. One could copy all day (as our brains do unbidden) without anyone but the copier being the wiser or needing to care.

The credit for one's labor, on the other hand, is an inherently rivalrous "good". Terms like "steal" have a place here, as it takes away from the measurable "social capital" earned by another's labor.

It's the difference between re-printing "Alice in Wonderland" and re-printing "Alice in Wonderland, Written by <Not Lewis Carroll>".

<comment><USER41> _The credit for one's labor_

I guess if you get to define the value and credit of one's labor, you can still maintain that there is a difference where one doesn't really exist.

 _The credit for one's labor, on the other hand, is an inherently rivalrous "good"._

But encouraging content creators with financial incentives for creating things that consumers desire is not an inherently rivalrous good?

 _It's the difference between re-printing "Alice in Wonderland" and reprinting "Alice in Wonderland, Written by <Not Lewis Carroll>"._

So you're okay with taking all financial rewards from the creators of content, but leave them the scraps of naming credit as though your framework is logical?

Meh... if you're going to steal from people, you might as go all the way.

Stallman is a hypocrite for demanding control of anything he creates while seeking to "free" everything everyone else creates.

<comment><USER26> _I guess if you get to define the value and credit of one's labor, you can still maintain that there is a difference where one doesn't really exist._

"Value" distinguishes between "Someone dug a hole where I needed it" and "Someone dug a hole and filled it back up".

"Credit" distinguishes between "I dug that hole" and "She dug that hole".

If we're having trouble distinguishing between "value" and "credit", even before addressing principles of valuation, then I can no longer concern myself with this discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What we're missing is a fiscal disincentive, a cost of acquiring bad patents and suing others for violating them. Currently the equation is unbalanced, it's too cheap to harass others with patent litigation. The harmful effect of bad patents isn't factored in into the complete patenting scheme, thus the bad outcome. It's like spam.

Not that I support (software and any other) patents at all. I deliberately don't want my name on any patent. I might work on something that my employer wants to patent for they do pay for my time and creativity but I don't want my own name involved outside of that. This isn't just a principle; it has happened in reality. I wish Stallman was heard and patents were banished completely.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone who doubts the validity of getting rid of software patents need look no further than the fashion industry. Fashion cannot be patented, and there seems to be plenty of innovation and a flourishing business in that sector. The only thing that is appropriate in fashion is trademarks. It is just a bad idea to allow anyone to tax or monopolize ideas.

</comment><comment><USER44> "They cover common practices on the Internet, like showing an ad before a piece of content."

Why do patents like that get granted? And once they are, why aren't they extremely easy to invalidate after the fact? There is a _non-trivial_ aspect to a patent that is supposed to be passed. It seems to me that at least enforcing that would be a nice step.

</comment><comment><USER45> _"Streaming online would require use of [the] Microsoft Silverlight plug-in, which would pressure people to use proprietary software," explained Andrew Chin_

just for the record, that statement is absolutely incorrect. you can offer streams and watch streams just fine with free and open-source software. for example with ogg theora or webm.

<comment><USER46> Guessing they meant the conference only uses Silverlight for streaming.

<comment><USER45> I guess so too but phrases like that are going against free software/content/everything. It gives the reader the impression of requirement of cost and proprietary technology.

<comment><USER23> Do you really think he implied that SL is the only possible way to stream? He was talking about the immediate situation.

<comment><USER45> I am sure he was and that it was obvious in the context of the conversation. In the article however it is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Well, sad he act in such a fool'ish way here, raging are often resulting in that people rather trust the counter-arguments. I would acted just like that myself though, and I agree that some of the counter arguments was wrong. I highly wish RMS and the whole FSF community was more respected.

</comment><comment><USER43> The fashion industry does just fine without patents. Plenty of innovation and investment and profits going on there. Fashion relies on trademarks, not patents. Huge difference. We all lose when ideas/knowledge is monopolized or taxed by the few.

</comment><comment><USER11> As much as I dislike his GPL licences and prefer the MIT licenses because I find the GPL too limiting, I can't help but to be totally in agreement with him regarding Software Patents.

The best we can do is to abolish them.

</comment><comment><USER48> Reduce the problem by reducing the software patent's lifespan, say to 7 years? That would force innovation to be more business-efficient and greatly reduce the number of patent trolls.

<comment><USER30> But then when I come up with a good idea that I want to use in FOSS, I still have to keep it secret for days/weeks until it gets though a "patent-mining process" at whatever company I happen to be working for at the time.

There are a lot of costs associated with just having software patents at all, no matter what the duration. Can you demonstrate why we _need_ patents in software so much that it justifies these costs, despite the fact that in practice, we did fine without them for 20 years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Software idea patents are bad for everyone, except patent lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER50> "YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID": RMS on most things.

<http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/30612915.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER51> " _while Google abhors them, its arch-rival Microsoft is increasingly enthusiastic about them._ "

Wait, what? Google abhors patents? So all the patents they've been buying up is because they abhor them so much?

<comment><USER52> Isn't Google one of the few corporations that hasn't started using patents offensively? Assuming that's the case, I think it would be reasonable to stockpile patents defensively, even if they abhor patents.

It's just a terrible situation, the only way for google (or any other software company) to protects themselves from certain death is to build up a defensive barrier of patents. And I think this is a great argument for abolishing software patents entirely.

<comment><USER51> I think they've used their patents to go on the offensive at least once (post Motorola acquisition), and indirectly by transferring patents to HTC. So, that kind of makes me puzzled by the whole 'they find them abhorrent' aspect. If they did, they wouldn't be using any of their patents like that.

<comment><USER53> Google's use of patents with motorola was defensive, going after those who are suing android. Google never used patents offensively in the whole company history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > "Maybe it wouldn't be quite as good, but we would all be okay. None of us > would be shafted."

So rather than reward the talented and ignore the ungifted, he'd rather punish the talented and ignore the ungifted?

</comment><comment><USER55> stallman would be far more convincing if he would stop eating stuff from his feet (and drinking pepsi).

<comment><USER56> You're saying arguments are more convincing if it wasn't for ad hominem x? Says more about you tbh.

<comment><USER55> it was more tongue-in-cheek, but whatever...

<comment><USER56> Sorry, didn't get it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MIT website makes you decide who a self-driving car should kill in an accident - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mit-research-crowdsource-moral-decision-making-self-driving-cars-2016-9 <comment><AUTHOR> I've seen this nonsense keep being shared on Twitter and now even MIT thinks this is a huge dilemma for some reason.

They make you think there's only two choices (hit the pedestrians or hit the car), but you know what? You can just hit the guard rail.

And what's funny is, that's exactly the choice most human beings will make too. Which is why I think this is such a buillshit--the two choices given doesn't even include the one most likely outcome that most normal human beings / machines would make--It's just an infographic made to generate traffic and for some reason people think it makes sense and are sharing it everywhere.

Why would MIT follow this sensationalism fad? Do they really think there's only two choices in this picture?</comment>