A rogue Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times <comment><USER2> When I was in my final year of high school, Coca-cola was giving away an iPod Nano to lucky winners who entered codes from plastic bottle caps or glass bottle labels.

An iPod was given away once per day, except Monday, when they were given out once per hour. I was competing against the rest of Switzerland. Each code had to be entered on a website, earning 0, 5, 10, 20 or 50 points. You could then choose how many points to gamble during the day/hour, and would hear at the end of the day/hour whether you won.

The school had a bottle-cap recycling bin. Every day, I dug through that looking for Coke caps. I volunteered for GAOS (a theatre group) and served drinks outside their show, collecting many paper wrappers from glass bottles.

After collecting 1500 points, at 2 am on a Monday night, I struck with half my points. And I failed! Shocked, I tried again at 3 am, risking all the remaining points I'd saved up. And I won! I was the "lucky" recipient of a 2GB iPod Nano.

Was it worth it? Yes, because I was under the employment age. I couldn't have earned money legally, so my opportunity cost of time was low.

Earlier, in primary school, the classes bought Pizza Hut once a week. During a promotion, their pizza boxes were printed with stars, which could be saved up and exchanged for free pizza. So I went around and asked all the teachers for their old boxes, cut out the stars, and got a second pizza every week!

If only it were that easy for me to find a job nowadays, despite a first-class MEng in Electronic Systems Engineering and 4 years continuous relevant work experience. Even trying to follow the rules and get all the qualifications doesn't seem to work.

<comment><USER3> I had a very similar story for the launch of the Xbox 360. Mountain Dew was auctioning one every 10 minutes with points. The obvious thing for me, though, was that you could get a code when signing up with your email. I had my own domain name at the time so I made a few hundred addresses and signed them all up. I actually won two Xboxes but never got the second one. Either they saw it was the same IP or caught on to what I was doing.

As a broke kid who has never won anything in his life, getting that Xbox (right at launch no less) was AMAZING. I was literally dancing with excitement which I don't think has ever happened since.

I sold it after a few months (was more of a PC gamer) and the hundreds that I got for it was also awesome.

<comment><USER2> Selling it after was a good idea - I built my own iPod Video by fixing broken iPods for friends, and didn't need the Nano in the end. After a few years I gave it to a kid at church in Shenzhen.

However, I did find a way to convert UBS KeyClub points into cash. They're a loyalty-card system similar to frequent flyer miles, and are worth 1 CHF per point. When my friends visited Geneva, we planned to spend the points in the Manora restaurant. But it was shut! After some thought, we found a store willing to accept the points, bought a suitcase, and returned it immediately for a cash refund. Then we had cash to buy a cheese fondue!

The exchange rate was even better when I could exchange points for iTunes songs - the songs were worth 1.40 CHF. So that's how I collected a lot of legal music in the early days of the iTunes Music Store.

<comment><USER4> Buying a cheese fondue is the most Swiss thing about this story. Cheese fondues were a fad in the US before I was born, and I know a lot of people's parent's who own them and use them maybe once every 5 years.

<comment><USER5> We still love fondue but mostly do chocolate at home...

The cheese ones are so yummy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> AFAICT, many jackpot style lotteries get an expected value (EV) above 1 when the jackpots get big. They're set up so their average EV is 0.4 - 0.5, but when a jackpot isn't won, the payout is under 0.1. String a bunch of those together in a row, and the EV creeps above 1.0.

The calculations are easy to do. You do need to estimate the number of people who buy the tickets so you can calculate the odds of sharing the jackpot. The real number isn't publicly available, but newspapers often have numbers for similar jackpots in the past.

As the article mentions, lotteries protect themselves by making it logistically impossible for anybody to buy every ticket.

Here's the calculation for Canada's Lotto 6/49 in 2007: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vHOOdmobb3729ezH1BnO...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vHOOdmobb3729ezH1BnOSZBGfmcF0rzQvgM18EVGOyo/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER7> While true, expected value isn't necessarily a useful metric at that point.

If I have a one in a googol chance of winning a googolplex dollars, it doesn't really matter that the expected value is going to be huge, I still won't win anything because I'll be insolvent before the requisite number of tries to have a reasonable chance of winning.

<comment><USER8> thats why the people who do this work as a company and pool their resources

<comment><USER9> It's more that the people who do this do more than just buying a single ticket with positive expected value - as described in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems kind of silly that they hyped it up as some kind of mathematical savant genius story, when it seems like they just took a simple lottery system (x numbers give y combinations, which sell for $1 per combination, for a total payout of >$3y) where the logistics operation was the more impressive aspect.

<comment><USER11> From the linked article [1](Romanian language) it sounds like he had _claimed_ to have a special mathematical method to convince his early investors in Romania but it was entirely made up. He was basically scamming them and had no idea if they would actually win.

[1] [http://www.bursa.ro/industria-de-gambling- iulie-1994-primul-...](http://www.bursa.ro/industria-de-gambling- iulie-1994-primul-si-singurul-interviu-din-presa-romaneasca-stefan- mandel-o...&s=print&sr=articol&id_articol=159657.html)

<comment><USER12> > Meanwhile, Mandel paid himself ... $1.7m, and ... $14m. After overhead fees > ($5.5m for the tickets, and $500k in expenses), he was left with a princely > sum.

> Records show that he funneled this cash into the Pacific Basin Fund, a Hong > Kong-based account managed by his brother-in-law. "What we calculated to be > the reality has changed," he wrote in a 1994 letter to investors. "It may > not seem such a hot investment now." After that, his investor updates went > cold.

Proof that it was a scam all along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Virginia Lottery director Ken Thorson pled to the press. "It is an opportunity for the common man to spend a small sum for the possibility of a higher prize… We never anticipated a group trying to make such a large purchase."

Neither corporate lawyers nor government would ever acknowledge that loophole in a business models does not necessarily equals to fraud.

<comment><USER14> > Neither corporate lawyers nor government would ever acknowledge that > loophole in a business models does not necessarily equals to fraud.

There's a lot of negations in there, I'm not sure if I'm reading it incorrectly, or you have one too many, but is sounds like you're saying that corporate lawyers and government will always maintain that a loophole in a business model is fraud?

<comment><USER15> Exactly, because they want business model to benefit them, not customers.

Think about casinos banning players for counting cards in Black Jack: the only reasonable strategy of playing the game is considered illegal.

In other words - you are welcome to play if you are bad at it, but once you get good you are considered "fraud"

<comment><USER14> Card counting is generally legal in the US as long as it's done with the mind, and not an external device[1]. That said, it's usually against casino rules, so they will make you leave if they suspect it, and possibly put your face on the internal list they have of known card counters if you do it enough or win enough.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#Legal_status](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#Legal_status)

<comment><USER15> Ok, so maybe it is not against a federal law but still, making you leave the casino because you are too good at the game you're playing seems weird.

<comment><USER14> Eh. They've defined rules that say you can't count cards. If you do so, you aren't playing by the rules, therefore you aren't allowed to play.

It's slightly odd to set rules that define what you can and can't do within your own mind, but it's not out of bounds, just hard to _correctly_ enforce. Lucky for casinos, they don't care about correctly enforcing, they just care about making money. They're happy to let you count cards badly and lose money, and they're happy to kick out people winning a lot, regardless of whether they are actually breaking any rules.

It's sort of like cheating at playing Marco Polo. Sure, you're _capable_ of opening your eyes when people can't see, but doing so is cheating, and calling out people you suspect of cheating but can't prove can be somewhat common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > His legacy lives on in US legislation: All 44 states that run lotteries have > enacted laws preventing the profitable replication of Mandel's strategy. In > effect, this secures him a title as the first and last man to ever > successfully game the lottery by buying every possible combination.

This doesn't seem true? He didn't buy all of the tickets in question, he only bought most, and people have been running lottery syndicates under the same logic which buy some or most tickets to ensure winning for centuries. Even Voltaire ran one.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems strange to me that any lottery would ever let itself get an EV > 1.

<comment><USER18> Well it also has to do oddly with 'fairness'. If the pool never grows from failures they are more likely to suspect that it is 'rigged' against them instead of merely being unlucky. But if the pool growth is fixed as either an absolute or a percentage there is no incentive for the running agency to try to make people lose.

So long as people keep buying in they really haven't lost anything even if the build up turns it into a sure bet. And winning splitting solves the equilibrium as well in a rather market allegorical way - if everyone puts money into a sure bet the returns eventually diminish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting that Jefferson had thoughts about the original intention of the lottery system. The logistics of buying each ticket seems nightmarish. I wonder if this same gaming can be applied to other things

<comment><USER20> Look into arbitrage betting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage_betting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage_betting)

The basic idea is you bet on every possible outcome of a match (win/lose/draw) with different bookies offering different odds that cover each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This was also possible in Poland last year or two years ago.

The string of failed top prizes was so big that cummulated prize was so big in the end that buying tickets for all combinations was abt 2/3rds of the top one.

This isn't gaming the system though its brute forcing it. And you are not guaranteed a profit. You bet against other ppl hitting the jackpot. Excluding oneself from the system, what is the chance that after N fails for top prize N+1 will also fail? Earning this way is not so easy as just winning the lottery.

</comment><comment><USER22> That brought some memories. I calculated that Spanish football _quiniela_ had a little more than three million possible results. Since you could make multi- result bets, only a few thousands _boletos_ were needed to make a sure win. The rules required to manually fill the bets, but it was workable building a robot.

Then the government, that was not happy of paying a percentage of the profits to football teams, introduced loto and prizes plummeted.

</comment><comment><USER23> >... he was a natural with numbers who spent every spare minute analyzing theoretical probability papers written by the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.

Hope Pascal doesn't read this.

</comment><comment><USER24> Don't they split the prize if there are multiple winners? How can they ensure +EV?

They could spend money to buy every combination but split the jackpot with multiple winners? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER25> I think they know it's still a gamble...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Similar to David Walsh, he set up MoNA with his profits.

</comment><comment><USER27> _The investors — small business owners, machine operators, housekeepers, and doctors — had been regaled with tales of riches, and promised participation in up to 9 lottos per year. Yet, they'd only received a $1.4k return on their $4k investment._

Folks: thats > 25% return on investment. I'm sorry but my sympathies with these investors walked out the door at this point: If you can get 25% ROI, stop looking for more.

<comment><USER28> Is that $1.4k _in addition_ to getting their $4k back? I always assume that with lotto-based shenanigans, the "return" isn't actually a profit, but the maximum of payouts after having bought all the chances their money could buy. I'll spend $20 on tickets for a large jackpot, and I'll will $2 on occasion - that's not a "10% return" but a "10% refund," and I'd expect a non-finance journalist to get that wrong.

<comment><USER27> Oh I totally misread it (or read it the other way). If its a loss of 3/4 of their investment, thats a poor investment indeed.</comment></comment></comment>


Thoughtbot Releases Playbook for Building Web & Mobile Applications - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/08/24/thoughtbot-releases-playbook-for-building-web-mobile-applications/ <comment><USER2> disaggregated: <http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> great call, rhizome. everyone should read the full playbook, fantastic read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> would be great to see this in a pdf for easy reading

<comment><USER4> Here's a quick and dirty single page HTML version as a stopgap: <http://danielchoi.com/software/thoughtbot-playbook.html>

<comment><USER5> Awesome, thanks! how did you accomplish that btw?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/finding-a-rhythm/daily- standu...](http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/finding-a-rhythm/daily-standups/) is too weird: we do the exact same thing, at the same time, every day.

<comment><USER7> It's not that weird; these meetings are the most fundamental part of the "scrum" methodology, and lots of companies do them.

There are whole books on the subject of "scrum", though you needn't read them to hold the meetings and find them useful. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice.</comment>


Is Economics Becoming a Real Science? - <AUTHOR> https://evolution-institute.org/article/is-economics-becoming-a-real-science/?source=tvol

<comment><USER2> What would Betteridge say?</comment>


Show HN: 3cosystem – biggest tech and event calendar in your city - <AUTHOR> http://www.3cosystem.com

<comment><USER2> Its nice. I will use this to keep an eye on events in Sydney.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are just aggregating Meetup and Eventbrite.

How do we get other events listed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but it seems that meetup and eventbrite are about 90% of the events in any place. So chasing that last 10% is not part of the MVP.

That said, I've been thinking on this question. I see two easy ways:

1\. a Webform with email verification / admin verification

2\. (My favorite) - Make a calendar invite to email@example.com and I can have Mailgun handle the request to my API.

3\. Submit your URL to an iCal/Gcal and I scrape it on a daily cron.

Any other thoughts?</comment></comment>


SimCity Player Spends 3 years on optimal city design - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/user/TheImperar#p/a/u/1/9ezZgAl6aN8 <comment><USER2> The best part of the vid is from 5:35 onward, where it shows pretty decent detail of the city.

It's interesting to see the way "perfectionist" players approach their games. The details of the optimization are often surprising. Even the specific choice of factors to optimize for are interesting. In SimCity, one player shoots for maximum population; another might go for the quickest time to reach a particular population level; yet another might seek to maximize industrial production. I like seeing how they work within the rules to reach those different goals.

<comment><USER3> Yes. SimCity is not really a `game', but more of a sandbox, where you set your own goals. Of course you can set your own goals in more traditional games as well, but they tend to come with a pre-defined one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If someone had fun, how could this time be wasted?

It's interesting, that the kind of people, that see this as wasted time, because they think this isn't changing the world, that it isn't ethical to use your own time this way, that these people will always criticize themself and others regardless what they do, because there's always something more meaningful to do.

At the end these people won't change anything in the world, but just bring harm to themself and others.

<comment><USER5> In some ways it's equivalent to solving any other seemingly esoteric theoretical problem that people seem to like solving (and some people get PhDs for doing so!). He took a formal system (a particular simplified model of city simulation), and produced a constructive proof of some properties of the system. Of course, the SimCity simulation parameters are unrealistic in a lot of ways, but it doesn't seem inherently any more absurd than the people who get PhDs for game-theory theses that also rely on absurd parameters in their problem setup.

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori I'd be interested in seeing more of the analysis that went into designing this.

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested in seeing the maker give a lecture on that. Well that and getting a copy of the city and removing all the firehouses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a little disturbed at his population distribution in the final city. Scary how his optimal city has no one over age 60.

<comment><USER8> Well, that last city was optimized for population count, not longevity.

<comment><USER9> or culture.

<comment><USER10> or life quality.

<comment><USER5> bunch of commies in this thread!

<comment><USER11> or homogeneity of political views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i wonder if there's a scriptable game like simcity (maybe freeciv? i dunno) ... that could make for a good testbed for certain optimization algorithms

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure, but you just made me miss the day of scripting BBS Door games such as Trade Wars 2002.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do not understand why such a large piece of a person's life would be spent doing this. Even model railroads have some tangible significance -- it is possible to share them with others in such a way that the others enjoy them and you bring happiness into somebody else's life. Perhaps this is because I find value in helping others. Some may find value in simply being pre-occupied as they wait for death. To each his own. I do not understand a lot of things.

What I found totally amazing wasn't spending years trying to optimize solutions to random problems others have created, but how this guy made a super-awesome video explaining how he did it. Very impressive. Loved the music and the camera movements. This guy should start charging to do demo videos for software products.

<comment><USER3> > I do not understand why such a large piece of a person's life would be spent > doing this.

You can share your digital artefacts with people all over the world. Isn't that much better by your metric than a model railroad?

<comment><USER14> It gets tough to debate life values, because we all come from a different place, but I'll take the question as just for me. I can't answer for this other guy. His reasons are his own.

The problem with spending so much time optimizing an artificial mathematical model (game) is that less work and time is required to create the model than to optimize it. Therefore (to me), it's the losers than spend time working on other people's problems that never move up to the next level: being creative. It's just a mechanical process. (and yes, I'm aware that some creativity is involved in the optimization)

My value system is in creating something for other people. So creativity and value to others, are the metric I use when allocating my time. I guess if such a electronic work could benefit people -- by making them happy for a bit or providing them with information they needed or something, it would be worthwhile. I mean heck, under my value system you can stretch a lot of things to make them work. The question (for me) is whether or not those 3 years could have been better spent.

Yes, at the end it's all gone anyway. That doesn't mean piss away your life. If anything, it means you only have a certain amount of time to do things you find valuable.

My opinion only. To each his own.

<comment><USER3> > The problem with spending so much time optimizing an artificial mathematical > model (game) is that less work and time is required to create the model than > to optimize it. Therefore (to me), it's the losers than spend time working > on other people's problems that never move up to the next level: being > creative. It's just a mechanical process. (and yes, I'm aware that some > creativity is involved in the optimization)

I can see where you are coming from. But I do not entirely share your view. E.g. inventing the game of Go is much simpler than mastering it. But I would not call go players losers.

> My value system is in creating something for other people. So creativity and > value to others, are the metric I use when allocating my time.

Why make an exception? Just use: "My value system is in creating something for people." You are worthwhile, too.

<comment><USER14> I've toyed with reverse Solipsism for some time now. Must be too much philosophy.

What did Steve Martin say once? He didn't have a lot of philosophy in college, just enough to screw him up for the rest of his life. :)

I don't seek validation in others -- but I do seek validation in my own assurance that I am creating something that will prove of value to others. By that metric, I question if I would be able to be so certain about that if I had spent those 3 years doing what he did.

Game-playing, drinking, singing, hiking, flying, etc are all wonderful activities -- but they are wonderful because they help me optimize the other things I am doing. When I start focusing on the pleasure they give me in themselves, I lose track of the larger goal. Perhaps even forgetting I have a larger goal. Not a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As an aside, and because SimCity doesn't get mentioned much here, if you're on OS X and want to play Simcity 4, I spent a lot of time getting it to work "just so." The trick is.. Windows XP + Parallels 5 (I'm a big VMware Fusion fan but Parallels 5 boosts SC4 performance wise somehow) + software rendering (hardware rendering is a FAIL/unstable on both Parallels and VMware with SC4).. and I can run everything on high no probs on my iMac. Works a treat.

<comment><USER16> I'm using Ubuntu but this should still apply to OS X. SimCity 4 works nearly perfectly (both software & hardware rendering) under Wine. There used to be a problem with the installer but based on test results on the Wine AppDB that works now too. Also you can set a custom resolution using "-CustomResolution:enabled" and using eg. "-r1440x900x32" which helps make the game more playable on widescreen monitors. I used to run SimCity under VirtualBox but with larger populations it's much faster under wine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone who's played SimCity for many years, I'm super impressed by this. Although he didn't use cheats, SC3000 was the best cuz it had a cheat where you could place a specific building and have it be there permanently--without any worry of abandonment. SimCity 4 is much harder because there are a lot more variables to deal with, including the fact that you can run multiple cities in a region.

<comment><USER18> Huge SimCity nerd back in the day here - his city design is impossible in SimCity 4; the new game requires all lots be connected to some kind of road. The secret to his success is that there are _no_ roads, every single tile is connected to a subway station that's impeccably designed. There's no traffic congestion of any sort.

Personally, I think SC4 teaches people a bad lesson - that cars are an absolute necessity to urban planning.

<comment><USER19> Cars might not be, but roads certainly are.

How do you expect to even build the place without a road? Much less deliver furniture and other things?

<comment><USER18> It's not so much that roads are necessary, but that every single lot must be directly adjacent to one - it's entirely reasonable in real life to have large complexes that are pedestrian primarily, connected via some kind of mass transit, where road density is greatly reduced.

This is impossible in SC4, since every single building must be directly adjacent to a road.

Also, because of the city size limit increases between SC3000 and SC4, the pathfinding algorithm used for transit calculations is _really_ barebones - your sims will only ever travel towards their destination. Even there was a direct subway line to their destination _right behind_ them, they won't take it. This makes transit in the game a complete pain, since the model the game follows is counter-intuitive to the max.

The trick of course is, with a grid road network, this pathfinding works really well. This only compounds the problem - since a subway system, no matter how well designed, has a hell of a time competing with a road network - and in no time at all you have citizens screaming about congested roads, and a perfectly good subway system that's sitting at 5% capacity.

There are ways to "trick" the game - mostly involving designing your road networks in such a way that you create disconnected islands between demand zones. In essence, you're creating a ludicrously broken road network nobody will ever use just to get people onto mass transit. But it's worth it (in the game, and IMHO maybe real life also) - the capacity and density of rail mass transit blows the crap out of driving, and allows you to get people much further, much more quickly. Air pollution becomes a complete non-problem

<comment><USER19> Sounds more like a problem with the game rather than a lesson about cities having cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how many of the theories could be applied to actual urban planning.

<comment><USER21> A grid of subway stations with a stop at every block? Sounds rather expensive.

Besides, all attempts to build "perfect" cities in real life have resulted in dull and lifeless places. A certain amount of chaos is necessary to keep cities liveable.

<comment><USER22> what if the subways weren't subways we know of today, but rather conveyor belt like roads. might be feasible if in a more automated future.

<comment><USER23> This is stuff of science fiction. I remembered Arthur C. Clarke for having written this, but apparently H. G. Wells was first: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Science_fiction>

<comment><USER24> Jules Verne did it before that, in the Floating Island if I remember correctly. Which is a parody of 19 century USA, by the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The other day I was studying 'dashboard' systems for ERP software and the like and it occurred to me how SimCity and Civilization type UIs would fit the bill (if only they worked on reality).

<comment><USER26> Remeber the old Caesar series from Impressions/Sierra?

It was ostensibly a city-building sim set in ancient Rome, but gameplay was more like a supply-chain logistics simulator. About 3/4 of the time spent playing was in allocating raw materials to production facilities and designing distribution networks for finished goods.

If Impressions or Maxis decided to start writing enterprise software, they'd probably dominate the market within a couple of years.

<comment><USER3> > If Impressions or Maxis decided to start writing enterprise software, they'd > probably dominate the market within a couple of years.

Yes, if the enterprise software makers would compete on their software. They seem to compete more on having better sales teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> impressive, fascinating, yet a tad bit disturbing... kudos none-the-less

</comment><comment><USER28> What a waste of time! I'm a bit ashamed that we (me included) are all so impressed by this. We should be weeping for the tragic waste of human ingenuity and productivity. Three years of _work_ for nothing.

<comment><USER29> from commets to TFA:

To everyone belittling his 'waste' of 5 years of his life on a pointless endeavour, remember that in life, everything is essentially pointless, you are born, you live, you die. And thats that.

You may in life build the perfect Simcity city, or refurbished a muscle car, or discover electricity. But at the end of the day you end up dead, and its all irrelevant.

<comment><USER30> I'm sure that people like Martin Luther King Jr and others who have made a difference would beg to differ.

Your life doesn't have to be pointless.

<comment><USER31> Your two sentences are inconsistent.

The assertion was that _life_ or _existence_ itself is pointless, nothing to do with the esteem of individuals. You say "people like Martin Luther King Jr" would beg to differ about gtt's assertion, but you follow-up by saying " _your_ life doesn't have to be pointless." So, a life can be pointless? So you disagree with MLK? Either that, or your entire comment doesn't really have anything to do with gtt's.

Regardless, the worth of an individual wasn't really what gtt was getting at.

So, SimCity guy felt compelled to be awesome at SimCity, besides that I don't know much else about him. But there are billions of people in the world, so there is room for someone like him and there is almost no reason to stifle diversity in personalities. After all, that's how MLK eventually came to be. Perhaps the same force that compels SimCity guy to build awesome Megacities is compelling him to do something else that most people would consider more worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm surprised he could find the time with all the sex he must have been having.

<comment><USER32> Burried in record time! God I love how pompous this site is.

<comment><USER33> Though it might seem like it that isn't the case - people here are generally helpful and down to earth. The problem is that there's an ingrained fear here that the site will turn into reddit[1] with all of the oneliners, memes and silliness that defines it nowadays. HN is the last resort for intelligent discourse for many users. And they don't want to lose it.

As a result of this fear anything that resembles a comment that might have been made on Reddit will get downvoted.

[1] I have nothing against Reddit, on the contrary I personally write loads of silly comments there and enjoy the oneliners.

<comment><USER34> Funny jokes seem to get upvoted (see the first comment here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277622>)

<comment><USER35> But the funny jokes that get up-voted are generally intelligent, too (I think).

<comment><USER36> At least we can say the bar is higher than reddit where half the stories are dominated by a big 50-level-deep thread of stupid puns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fucking loving Jeezus christ. This guy could have solved wolrd hunger with his skills, instead he maxed out Simcity 3000.

<comment><USER38> Nah, to max out SimCity he probably only has to know about a few dozen variables and how they interact, to solve world hunger he probably has to know how thousands of variables interact with each other. Maxing out SimCity is one of the easier problems out there :)

<comment><USER29> But he could made one step, say reducing number of varibles involved from 1000000 to 999999. And someone else could reduce this number too...

<comment><USER3> Maybe he did that reduction by stepping out of the way?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Loopwheels: A vibration-reducing wheel with integral suspension - sahin-boydas https://www.loopwheels.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The interesting bit is found in an animation[1] embedded on the how it works page[2].

1.[https://www.loopwheels.com/wp- content/themes/meat/library/im...](https://www.loopwheels.com/wp- content/themes/meat/library/images/anim-directions.gif)

2\. [https://www.loopwheels.com/technical/how-does-it- work/](https://www.loopwheels.com/technical/how-does-it-work/)

[edit] formatting

<comment><USER2> Why doesn't the wheel deform at all? If it doesn't, how is it a suspension?

<comment><USER3> The wheel will be attached to something that will move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case people don't know, this was a successful Kickstarter a few years ago for bike wheels. They went to bike shows with a lot of enthusiasm but given the additional weight and cost it was likely a hard sell. Great to see they are still around!

<comment><USER5> Rough terrain on bikes was already solved with suspension or larger tires I doubt they managed to create something that worked better than that.

<comment><USER6> Suspension sits between a wheel and the vehicle so the entire wheel is displaced over a bump which means it's momentum exaggerates a shock.

Deforming the wheel means far less mass is moved and thus momentum. This is why we use air filled rubber tires in the first place, but they have real size limits. So, this could actually provide a smoother ride.

Probably not worth it for a bike, but someone with a broken bone for example can be extremely sensitive to shocks.

<comment><USER7> The Loopwheels page is explicit about the wheels having a rigid rim.

<comment><USER6> Yea, but the wheel is more than just the rims. Play around here [http://www.wheelbuilder.com/wheel-weight- calculator.html](http://www.wheelbuilder.com/wheel-weight-calculator.html). The Rim is generally a large fraction of total wheel weight, but both spokes and Hub's are important.

On a bike the total weight also includes the fork and parts of the suspension. Not sure about wheelchairs, but I suspect deforming the center of the wheel still easily cuts unsprung mass in half.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> related: [http://softwheel.technology/](http://softwheel.technology/)

<comment><USER9> And this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this different from simply reducing the tire pressure?

Your body weight is constantly pressing down the rotating axis from the center of the wheel so in order to move forward you'll be spending energy on compressing the next section of the wheel equally much? Even if you get some of that energy back once the rear section of the wheel decompresses it's never going to be 100%.

It might have some benefits compared to a loosely inflated tire in terms of more parameters to calibrate and less road friction but this will never come close to a suspension locked in the vertical direction on the frame in terms of efficiency. Maybe this is not an important factor for wheel chairs?

Edit: Actually the softwheel has an efficiency comparison which claims it's more efficient than both rigid frame and fork suspension, even on flat ground [http://softwheel.technology/technology/#softwheel-science- wo...](http://softwheel.technology/technology/#softwheel-science-worlds-most- energy-efficient-wheel), maybe if you bike fast enough the wheel never has time to compress so it's still considered round and center?

</comment><comment><USER11> Matbe it is just me, but isn't £799.00/£849.00 (ex VAT) a tad bit steep as a price?

Not that the alternative posted of "softwheel" are any better, 2250/2800 $ for a couple wheels?

I have quickly browsed through both sites and they seem to put an accent on lower maintenance costs, but for that kind of money you can buy new (traditional) wheels every other month or so ...

Bonus, an article (seemingly actually published) on the matter, it's a short one, only three pages that is IMHO worth reading, only to have an idea of what can be published:

[http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr- jmce/papers/NCRIME-2018/Vol...](http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr- jmce/papers/NCRIME-2018/Volume-5/3.%2012-15.pdf)

Excerpt:

The loop wheels concept is found which has become a very beneficial to the world which reduces the wear and tear of bearing that makes novice after completion its specific life which increases the cost and maintenance of a bicycle. In this case the loop wheels gives a better results and reduces this all the bad impacts created by the normal cycles and gives a one new morning to the innovation.

<comment><USER12> The first site that I got from searching for "buy wheelchair wheel" has what seems to be a decent range of off-road wheels. £144 for the cheapest, up to £320 for the end of the "cheap / mid". These loopwheels are on there, and have a similarly priced "fat wheel" to compete with.

2-4x the price doesn't seem too bad tbh; its specialist gear for a non- standard use case

[0] [http://www.epc-wheelchairs.co.uk/wheels-wheel-parts/rear- whe...](http://www.epc-wheelchairs.co.uk/wheels-wheel-parts/rear- wheels/wheels)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This company started off making bike wheels circa 2013 - [https://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/loopwheels- spokeless-...](https://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/loopwheels-spokeless- suspension-wheel-on-show-37032/) \- I know because I featured them on my own cycling blog too.

<comment><USER14> I was wondering about an application to bikes -- now I wonder why (it seems like) they pivoted to wheelchairs.

<comment><USER15> In their FAQ they say they're working on MTB wheels, but that the challenge is the (lack of) lateral stiffness in a bigger wheel, which makes sense. The larger the diameter the spring needs to cross, the harder it is to have it only flex in one dimension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much does it increase friction and would this be feasible on other vehicles as well? Once electric cars are eventually here, their wheels will be the primary noise emitters.

<comment><USER17> But that is something you should not get rid of in electric cars anyway. They emit already much less noise than regular cars and are thus harder to hear by pedestrians. You don't really want super silent 1ton metal blobs moving around at 30++km/h as far as I know

<comment><USER18> At 30 km/h, the car's sensors will make it stop near instant in case this is required. There is no need for insisting on noise pollution.

<comment> core-questions Awareness of what's around you is greatly aided by a bit of noise. Given the early failures of self driving cars and what we know about mechanical reliability of normal ones, I don't think I want to pin my life or the life of my children on some automatic stop that might not work. Better to be able to get out of the way sooner.

<comment><USER18> As always, it is a trade-off.

Our joint use of the public streets is based on a certain trust that drivers will not try to plow into people. That doesn't mean you have to recklessly abandon all precaution, but it does mean that there are always going to be edge cases that are unmitigated. I think the vehicle based terror attacks have sadly illustrated that point.

Walking the streets in a defensive mode that assumes low speed sneaking up by a driver intent to kill, or being completely oblivious to the surrounding, while at the same time driving a vehicle with defects in its core functions feels like an edge-case. The near ubiquity of people walking or cycling with headphones, or fully being fully engaged with their mobile phones seems to support that.

Cars are dangerous and operated without proper care for sure, but there are very, very few injuries from ultra low speed collisions with cars.

On the other hand there is enormous evidence of serious stress caused by traffic noise having an impact on health.

The whole 'car noise' thing was lobbied by car-makers hoping to cash in on a 'custom ringtones for cars', modeled after the mobile phone market of the 90's. Do you believe that these random noises will avoid more deads and injuries than those created by the resulting stress and 'postal' incidents by those having to involuntarily suffer this?

There are better options. Have slow moving cars emit a low powered radio or radar signal instead. Very compact and extremely low cost detectors and emitters already exist for those. Those that wish get a proximity warning without harming innocents, and as a added bonus this also works for people with reduced hearing, either because the have a hearing problem, or because they are wearing headphones.

The only ones that would suffer a tiny bit are the car makers missing out on selling sounds. Can't say I'm very sympathetic to that crowd as they have amply shown a lack of responsibility and care for people's health and well- being . As usual, the benefits they want to pocket are once more blatantly oblivious to the societal downsides as they have been fully externalized for them.

<comment> core-questions > car-makers hoping to cash in on a 'custom ringtones for cars', modeled after > the mobile phone market of the 90's

This is singularly the worst idea I have ever heard in my life

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe good for wheelchairs where comfort is crucial, but for anything else (bicycle, car) it would waste a lot of energy, not to mention the rigidity issues.

<comment><USER20> I wonder if the wheel is more suited to wheelchairs because they are pushed at the rim, rather than turned from the hub (as in a bicycle or car). The whole mechanic whereby the hub moves eccentrically relative to the rim when the springs compress seems likely to create all kinds of rolling resistances if the wheel is being turned from the hub - or even if it is being pushed along undriven by a load at the hub. But the unusual rim-driven mode of wheelchairs maybe is the sweetspot for this kind of thing? In particular, it seems that by compressing the springs in particular directions, torques on the wheels will create linear forces on the load - and vice versa - which might be helpful for things like getting a wheelchair up a curb, or over a bump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Odd that you have to read quite far down the site's text until they give the context of the type of wheels they're selling (ones for wheelchairs). The pictures in the background do not make it obvious either.

Presumably the site was designed by someone close to the company, who obviously knows the product and didn't get it tested on users who didn't know the product (or they'd have picked this up)

<comment><USER22> The top photo, immediately visible on my mobile browser without scrolling, is of their wheels on a wheelchair.

<comment><USER21> The site didn't load like that when I posted my comment. I had gone back a second time before posting, to be sure. It had a much darker image where it wasn't clear what the item was (you could see the wheel but due to the angle and the dark filter, not what it was part of)

Now I agree there is a video of a wheelchair loading, so context is clear now. Would be curious to know if someone changed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks interesting but I would worry about how durable it is. It seems like if one of the springs breaks then you are stuck and you probably have to get in contact with them for a replacement that could take a while.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting idea... but not too crazy about the price. £1,000 for a set of wheels seems pretty expensive.

How much is a standard set of wheelchair wheels?

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd be interested to learn how much additional energy is required, presumably that's the trade off.

</comment><comment><USER26> Cool, wheels with integrated leaf springs. But what about shocks? What prevents oscillations?

<comment><USER27> There is a German Opel-manufactured bicycle in the Ulster Transport museum that has short springs mounted all around an inner rim with a metal outer band retaining them.

Apparently due to the shortage of rubber during WW1 which made pneumatic tyres infeasible but I also wonder about oscillations.

<comment><USER26> Wow!

But with composite leaf springs, I'm guessing that they could make them less perfectly elastic. That'd damp out oscillations, but also increase rolling friction on bumpy terrain. However, vibration also dissipates energy. My mechanics is inadequate, but they very likely optimized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good tech and great looks! Want! for my cousin's chair.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does it break? I'm guessing like the bicycles, it's probably some sort of disk break mechanism. It's just not very clear from the photos.

<comment><USER30> Probably your phone auto corrected, but it should be brake, else you're talking about the failure mode! ;-)

<comment><USER31> Probably a reasonable thing to worry about with composite wheels!</comment></comment></comment>


StackFu Beta Program - Open Source Social Server Provisioning - <AUTHOR> http://stackfu.com/

<comment><USER2> Can you show what you do? Is this VM provisioning or is it something that runs scripts on my server or is it a dependency management program like Apt/RPM?

I need screenshots and more explanation (without having to apply for the beta program)

<comment><USER3> That is fair enough, but we're not there yet. But we will in a few weeks and we're gonna release screenshots and screencasts. Stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the definition of a "stack" in this context? Is it the actual vm itself, or the services within the vm? What makes it social?

<comment><USER3> In a nutshell, stack is a collection of components, with the goal of setting up one "server environment".

You could, for instance, have a Django or Pylons stack that would be composed of a script that installs Python, MySQL, Apache, mod_wsgi and finally Django/Pylons itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like collaboration on Chef/puppet scripts?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think its making server-provisioning social. Like a github for server stacks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain what "social server-provisioning" means?

Are you making server-provisioning "social" or are you provisioning a "social server"?

<comment><USER3> Not really. Social server provisioning means sharing deployment strategies and being able to search through a collection of user-driven installation recipes. On top of that, StackFu will allow you to deploy that stack, straight into your server, with one command.</comment></comment>


How we learned that Stripe alone was costing us customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.blurity.com/blog/2012/10/05/how-we-learned-that-stripe-alone-was-costing-us-customers/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Have you guys explored other alternatives beyond PayPal? I realize its probably difficult thing to do if credit cards are out of the equation completely but given the problems that could arise (freezes, etc)... It would seem having a backup plan beyond relying on a single source for any country would be smarter. Would be interested in knowing what you guys come up with.

<comment><AUTHOR> For many countries and potential customers, both Stripe and PayPal are viable options, so if one becomes unavailable for some reason, we at least have a fallback that will cover the vast majority of customers.

A gentleman with whom were were talking mentioned Plimus as another option for countries where bank transfers are common, but they have extremely high fees and low name recognition. Amazon's payment platform could be another option; an older incarnation of Blurity used it.</comment></comment>


Paypal gives FBI the list of IP Address of 1,000 Anomymous hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/07/paypal-gives-fbi-list-of-ip-address-of.html <comment><USER2> "They have not been charged yet, but the house was the source of 3,678 packets in about two-and-a-half hours."

really? were they mounting a DDOS attack using a pocket calculator attached to 4800 baud modem?

<comment><USER3> 3678 packets / 2.5 hours = One packet every 2.44 seconds * 1500 byte MTU = 3.5KB/s Yup, a 4800 baud modem.

<comment><USER4> You don't multiply packet size by interval, you divide (or multiply by the inverse). And baud is measured in bits. But the numbers come out close anyway. 3678 / (2.5 * 3600) * 1500 * 8 = 4904.

<comment><USER5> Did 4800 baud modems even exist in volume?

I just checked wikipedia and there's indeed a protocol for them, but I've never seen one in the wild. In my day it was 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14400, 16800, 19200, 28800, 33600, 56k ...

So, back on topic, wouldn't it be more likely he was channel bonding two 2400 baud modems?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The closest equivalent to a voluntary, publicized DDoS is a sit-in. While those do lead to arrests, they _don't_ lead to wholesale confiscation of (expensive!) property, and even the organizers don't get more than a few months in jail. Furthermore, the computer-use ban you can get for "hacking" is incomparable to any punishment for a sit-in or occupation.

My problem with this isn't that they're reporting participants; it's that the participants and organizers are going to be dealt with an order of magnitude more harshly than if they'd done the same thing minus a computer.

<comment><USER7> _The closest equivalent to a voluntary, publicized DDoS is a sit-in. While those do lead to arrests, they don't lead to wholesale confiscation of (expensive!) property_

And DDoSes don't result in you being dragged across the floor by your arms.

Why? Because that's the point where they're non-analogous. If you participate in a DDoS, you'll wind up getting your computers confiscated while the FBI crime labs scour them for evidence. If you sit on the floor of Kentucky Fried Panda, you'll get dragged out by your arms.

 _the participants and organizers are going to be dealt with an order of magnitude more harshly than if they'd done the same thing minus a computer_

because it's not "the same thing", it's a slightly different thing, somewhat more pernicious and dangerous, because the cost to a protestor of carrying out a sit-in is large, whereas the cost of carrying out a DDoS is large.

I find it's always useful, when determining the legitimacy of a given political tactic, to assume that it's being used by someone we hate rather than someone we like. So let's suppose the Westboro Baptist Church gets up one morning and decides to target businesses owned by gays. If they do this via sit-in, then they can probably only target one business at a time, and they have to sit around all day getting jeered at. But if they do it via DDoS, they can take down businesses at their leisure.

These are both illegal and illegitimate forms of political protest, but the DDoS is potentially much worse than the sit-in.

<comment><USER8> For a different point of view on the legitimacy of tactics like sit-ins, please check out <http://goo.gl/5JuJn>

<comment><USER7> But this is exactly what you _shouldn't_ be doing -- determining the legitimacy of tactics by assuming they're being used by someone whose cause you like. There's always the temptation to think that the end justifies the means, when you're supportive of the end.

Always assume that the questionable tactic is being used by the Illinois Nazis (I hate those guys) or the Westboro Baptist Church. Because if it's okay for Martin Luther King to do it, then it's gotta be okay for Fred Phelps to do it too.

<comment><USER8> There's a misunderstanding here. I wasn't saying that those tactics are justified because Martin Luther King wrote a justification of them. I'm saying Martin Luther King wrote a justification of them, and a damn good one.

The point is not the reference but what the reference points to.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, I didn't read the whole thing, I only vaguely skimmed it. Can you summarize his argument? It seemed to boil down to "This is the right thing to do, because we're right, and the other guys are wrong"

<comment><USER8> A key paragraph:

"You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue."

The point of nonviolent activism isn't to harm someone else or their economic well-being (though the latter is often a side effect). It's to force a rupture or break in the institutions of a community to resolve what King calls an underlying tension in that community. By forcing people in power to use violence against nonviolence, it disrupts the ruling ideology by pointing out its hypocrisy and forcing action by threatening the breakdown of the social order predicated on that ideology.

Of course, a neo-Nazi may well try a sit down, but that's likely to be ineffective as it's not exploiting any inherent tension and isn't going to cause any huge community squabbles that have the potential to degenerate into violence.

As to why it's okay to threaten the social order... well, in effect because laws and order exist to establish justice, and we are compelled by moral law to oppose unjust laws. Which is, you might say, just saying we should do this because this is right. Perhaps. But it's a difficult proposition to say every action can be be considered individually and judged without moral context. Occupied Resistance in WW2 fought the Nazis and broke many laws (including not just vandalism but murder). A slave in pre-Civil War America who ran away, and anyone who helped that slave run away, was breaking many federal and state laws, as well as seriously disrupting the economy and commerce. Those were unjust situations, though, and so it was right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _To be fair the names on the list will probably be the bottom feeding script kiddies rather than the hackers at the top of Anomymous's greasy pole_

Isn't it likely to not even be script kiddies, but machines that are part of a botnet owned by script kiddies?

<comment><USER10> Usually, yeah. In this particular case, however, it was more about political activism and voluntary participation. People organized to use their individual computers to make their collective voice heard.

If this were actually some kind of conspiracy to take down Paypal, the organizers would have created a botnet trojan and encouraged everyone to distribute it and infect others with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Flagged; this is a poor quality "article" and we already had this discussion yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER12> Since it is an act of political protest, I wonder how this plays out. Seems it is a lot like the cyber version of picketing/marching/protesting at a business, government building or any physical location like that. Where would you peaceably assemble online, in such a way it makes a statement? If everyone joins a chat room so what? Only they notice it, where if you protest in public, you get noticed, for disrupting the day to day flow of things. This seems like one of the few ways to accomplish that same effect online.

<comment><USER13> You can't call this action picketing/marching/protesting.. This group has brought down multiple websites, with the malice as the intent. The next best real-world comparison would have been a riot. Attempting to shut down a business is in my eyes not something the police would let slide in real-world situations

<comment><USER12> Yeah they do give off more of a riot like atmosphere, with the breaking and entering tactics. For this to be more equivalent, they'd need a permit to take up so much traffic on public roadways, or in this case, internet connections. Plus there is no clear cut description of what is causing the disruption. If a building was surrounded by protesters, there would be plenty of signs, clearly stating what the group of people felt was so terrible that they needed to protest about. The way it is now, average person thinks the website is having technical difficulties, and knows no different, until the news informs them. Which gives the media all the power in framing what the protest was about. Still regardless of this particular incident, I wonder if it is a tactic that could be used to any sort of degree of effectiveness, as a means for people to express their displeasure in the virtual world of the internet. We the People are powerful only as a group. People doing evil things, might not always respond to a PR attack through Twitter or Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought we banned thehackernews.com ?</comment>


Google Talk now archiving all messages - <AUTHOR> http://beauclaar.blogspot.com/2013/05/google-talk-is-now-keeping-message.html Got an interesting message from Google Talk when I booted up this morning.  I will be uninstalling Google Talk. <comment><USER2> The feature is no longer available by client, it's available via web: <https://mail.google.com/mail/#chats>

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-interface- for-g...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-interface-for-gmail- chat-history.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Non-"off the record" chats were always archived, difference is that controlling the archiving behaviour is no longer done by client rather via a new web interface at: <https://mail.google.com/mail/#chats>

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-interface- for-g...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-interface-for-gmail- chat-history.html)</comment>


Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-surveillance-state-beyond-imagination-being-created-one-freest <comment><USER2> > A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

 _A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created_

There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.

This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House"

The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?

<comment><USER4> You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value. The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy. The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended to keep the government from searching your property.

A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker?

The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet.

In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.

<comment><USER5> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

<comment><USER4> Key word: "their." The lynchpin or a lot of the surveillance efforts is accessing information that doesn't belong to the target of the surveillance. Phone call metadata is generated by the phone company, stored in the phone company's computers, and is used for the phone company's business purposes. Its the phone company's data, not yours. Same thing with the data Google and Facebook collect about where you go on the internet. You didn't generate it and you can't even access it. How can you say its "yours?" Its "about you" but that's totally different. If your neighbor keeps a diary tracking your comings and goings, you can't assert 4th amendment protection over that data.

Privacy advocates talk about "metadata is data" as if the government's lawyers don't understand that bits are just bits. What privacy advocates don't understand is that the "metadata" distinction is about generation, ownership, and control, which are implicated in the 4th amendment by the word "their."

<comment><USER6> Putting aside what the law and constitution currently say, do you think mass surveillance of metadata, URL tracking and search history should be fair game?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty apathetic to the whole issue. I'm a lot more worked up about the fact that these things are already fair game when it comes to private corporations. As someone who isn't hoping for some libertarian, trans-national world order based on the internet, I'm a lot more worried about how private companies can abuse that data than how the government can do so. Yes, the government can throw me in jail and private companies can't, but the government has little reason to want me in jail. Meanwhile, private companies have a lot of incentive to access that data and screw me over.

I think the libertarianness of the whole digital privacy movement is losing a lot of potential supporters. If the restrictions on government surveillance were bundled together with restrictions on corporate surveillance with a consumer protection angle, I think you'd get a lot more people on board.

<comment><USER6> > but the government has little reason to want me in jail

It has plenty of reason to want dissidents in jail which you may care about for various reasons both practical and ideological. Though I think jail is outmoded: with (near) total surveillance there are more effective deterrents.

I do think you are right about the lack of emphasis on corporate surveillance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent."

From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.

The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy.

A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.

Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.

We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.

The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone.

The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.

As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.

Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.

In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.

That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.

<comment><USER8> > The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face > recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they > look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic > cameras placed strategically around a city.

Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally considerably more worried about incompetence, ill conceived reactionary policies and unintended consequences than the potential control technology would have if it was optimally exploited by those in power.

<comment><USER9> You probably wouldn't station them in the city, too easy to obfuscate avoid if the locations are fixed - something like this will be forthcoming from the Met's Open Source Intelligence Unit fairly soon, I imagine.

[http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20130524.asp...](http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20130524.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't say it's beyond imagination. Science-fiction authors have been predicting this for years.

<comment><USER11> Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking _Nineteen Eighty Four_ , was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 _Men and Machines_ , edited by Robert Silverberg).

<comment><USER12> I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon)

<comment><USER13> Second 'Darkness at Noon'. A very powerful read. By Arthur Koestler 1940. Orwell's 1984 was published in 1948, wasn't it?

<comment><USER12> Well yeah, wikipedia says 1949 but 6 months up or down doesn't change much..

About DaN[1]: 'In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon at number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.'

Although the depth of thought and analysis of the 'soviet regime' was impressive, I had no idea it was that highly praised novel.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Guys I would invite you to read my perspective on what we can do about this:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169)

And _please_ , put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this petition:

[http://wh.gov/lsuFw](http://wh.gov/lsuFw)

Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%!

[http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha...](http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_that_cops_wear_on_body_cameras)

[http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras- po...](http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-police-use- force)

 _" The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens' complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."_

All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital.

You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great line: It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.

</comment><comment><USER16> Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a crazy idea. Why not open source surveillance to the world?

<comment><USER18> Total surveillance does not return us to a no- or low- surveillance ground state. Nor does it put us in an "everyone has dirt on everyone" state. It just makes it easier for everyone to identify who is more than N standard deviations away from standard/accepted behaviors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Has already been.

<comment><USER9> I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling.

What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.

The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.

<comment><USER20> Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.

<comment><USER9> There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.

<comment><USER21> GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court cases because it would need to be tested in open court.

They haven't said anything about intelligence provided to law enforcement.

<comment><USER22> > GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court > cases because it would need to be tested in open court.

Yep. And that's the whole reason 'parallel construction' exists at all in the U.S.... even when NSA has solid evidence of actual crimes being conducted, they will not burn intelligence sources & methods to allow for a court prosecution of the same.

So LE has to either find a way to independently arrive at the evidence that they _know_ is there, or go without prosecuting criminals they _know_ to be on the street.

Parallel construction is definitely distasteful but nor is it planting evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.

On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The _NSA is the good guys_. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.

<comment><USER24> I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to _defend_ this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.

<comment><USER25> This is a minor problem now, but it will get much worse if you consider technical development.

Every individual gets more and more power and capabilities with time. In not too many decades, hackers will be able to design bacteria for hobby at home, even if they probably will send for a lab to synthesize the DNA etc. Now, it is still quite expensive to make artificial life.

Consider North Korea and the possibility of a biological analogue to the Stuxnet virus...

Without a 1984 surveillance state, you need some form of immune handling -- everyone as their own bubble boy or intelligent analysis of bacteria/viruses (and hoping that Stuxnet vectors are only oriented towards military installations).

At that time, NSA surveillance like today will literally be trying to stop something as bad as terrorist nuclear weapons. You can't argue analogues about how much liberty costs, since there might not be anyone left to enjoy liberty, if NSA of the 2030s-2040s fail...

I have no clue how to solve this.

<comment><USER26> How can we be sure that someone on the other side of the apparatus won't use their position as a means towards necessary training and equipment, and as an opportunity to act with authority above suspicion, to engineer this supposed killer virus that destroys us all?

What if they become the problem we tasked them with preventing?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heroku adds MongoDB support through MongoHQ add-on - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/30/mongohq_add_on_public_beta

<comment><USER2> The Mongo storage isn't local to the network though, right? The data must be read/written over the Internet?

<comment><USER3> They are both on ec2 IIRC so i think it is effectively local.

<comment><USER2> Aha! Thanks for the info.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Hawk, a new HTTP authentication scheme - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hueniverse/hawk

<comment><USER2> I'm saddened by the trend "the code is the specification".</comment>


Ask HN: How to Manage Remote Teams - <AUTHOR> There are around 7-10 developers working under me. I am thinking to give my devs working remote option . What are the best practises that i should follow or better question how do I plan "working remotely". <comment><USER2> This is a big topic. I am assuming you are all centralized today given how you worded it.

Assuming the team has worked together in a central office so far, it is best to do this slowly and expect some headaches and maybe a false start or two. Start with going to a remote friendly environment where you allow remote work 2 days a week and work through the communication changes. Then open it to more days as you work through the process.

The biggest change is communications, no matter how small all communication has to be done in a remote friendly way. Even impromptu meetings can't have a final resolution until you include the remote participants. So essentially decisions will slow down, especially at first but it gets normalized after sometime. Also, recognize that not everyone can work remote because it requires a different mindset, for example, some people trying to work from home are totally distracted and aren't productive.

I have led remote teams for a long time, I am happy to answer specific questions or help anyway I can. The biggest thing is communications and making sure people always feel included and no one is left out. This is a hard thing to do, so do not underestimate the amount of effort it takes, especially if you already have an existing team since it is changing the way people work today versus starting that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we sit in one open office where our maximum communication happens verbally which is the reason i am not very confident. Our slack/skype uses are very minimum. I think we should practise first with work from home twice or thrice in a week to see if we can actually go with working remotely kinda job.

<comment><USER3> If your team is using both Slack and Skype, I think it'd be better to choose a tool and stick to it. Face-to-face communications can still happen via video for both tools, so you can still have that but it may just require more coordination and isn't as instant as in the office.

As your team slowly gets a hang of things, another thing I'd keep in mind is to make sure you keep the team motivated and maintain a good remote team culture, as remote work may feel lonely at times or team members may feel detached from one another.

There are some well-known remote teams that you can try to learn from, like Buffer and Zapier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think i'll need to add more informal and causal conversations in our chat rooms to multiply fun element.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: High Performance BitTorrent Tracker in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chihaya/chihaya

<comment><USER2> A very good choice of language. I hope you keep working on this actively.</comment>


Ask HN: Has been your experience moving everything to React - <AUTHOR> I work in a Rails shop where we have a monolith with most of the frontend written in either; 1. Server rendered haml pages. 2. Client side React.
Currently, there's a discussion going on to move all stuff to react.
Curious about people's experiences and thoughts about it. <comment><USER2> I wrote a pretty sophisticated longitudinal study app that's currently being used by a top 100 university. The front end is entirely in React.

I only have limited experience with Ruby, but tbh, I think I would feel more comfortable maintaining a front end code base either in Ruby or React, not both. Then again, I usually operate alone and my personal preferences definitely play a role.</comment>


Tell HN: Fate of a typical webapp - <AUTHOR>

I remember http://hnstartups.com/ was launched here and it received some 200+ votes. I genuinely think it is a good idea but when I tried visiting it today, I found it full of spam. I feel sad for people not caring about their apps. What do you do with your project where you lost interest and motivation but somebody else might be using it?<p>Btw, thread where the app was announced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572631 <comment><USER2> Attention span is a huge problem for developers in general. Creation is more fun than maintenance, so there is plenty of drive to fire off new projects, but only a little bit of energy for maintaining stuff.

I think that if something does not take off almost instantly (say within the first month of roll-out) that the attention will shift to something new for a large number of people that are capable of making these things.

That site is a sample-of-one though. The funny thing is that it would be the ideal vehicle to keep track of what is happening to sites announced as 'new' here...

This is roughly where it went wrong:

<http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287>

If the spam had been removed right from day one (but hey, how to figure out with the theme of that site what is spam and what is not, that's a tricky one!) then it would be a useful resource today.

<comment><USER3> It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: [http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic- programmer/extracts/so...](http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic- programmer/extracts/software-entropy)

Once you let something that is clearly wrong hang around, problems (spam) increase exponentially until it is no longer worth trying to fix.

<comment><USER2> Yep. HN seems to be doing a pretty good job of it though, hardly any spam ever makes it past the bottom of the new page without a [dead].

But for that to work you have to have an active community that values the resource more than they value the few seconds it takes to flag a bad submission. Absent such a community you have to do it yourself at least until such a community has formed.

The funny thing is that the combination of 'flag', karma thresholds and community seem to be enough to let the 'submission' box sit there without any tricky stuff like captchas and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A well-developed site blocks most spam. There are plenty of good services out there for it too, like Mollom.</comment>