Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records - <AUTHOR> http://www.govexec.com/defense/2016/06/computer-crash-wipes-out-years-air-force-investigation-records/129058/ <comment><USER2> There has been too much recently of government agencies losing data due to "crashes" or "inadvertent" deletions. For example the IRS, state department, and now the Air Force.

A really easy way to fix this is to make a law so that if government data such as this gets lost, then the cabinet level person responsible for overseeing the agency immediately loses their cabinet level position and is barred from further work with the federal government.

This would do wonders to align incentives all through the federal agencies when it comes to data safeguards.

<comment><USER3> This idea is too simplistic. Although I used to support it. I've changed my position from yours to 'retrained and demotion' position. Since people make mistakes, I think being 'barred from further work' is counter-productive and the government would lose out on many able and competent workers. Heck, this idea could also be exploited by lower-level workers due to not liking their higher-up bosses; i.e. a lower-level worker intentionally screwing up and costing the job of the higher-up boss because of the 'new law' stating the higher-up is now 'barred' from further govt work. Easy way to take out the competition going up a ladder.

P.S. I think legislating accountability is an issue the public needs to debate. In all countries. The US has seen numerous gross negligence/errors (heck one is too many) in various levels of govt (fed, state, local). I hope we can come up with a better solution than 'fire them and bar them' and even mine of 'demote/retrain'. There has to be a better way to legislate govt accountability.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, such ideas would create an atmosphere of fear and increase cover-ups, rather than solve problems. There needs to be a solution that acknowledges the inevitably of mistakes and still deals with the issue.

<comment><USER5> Exactly this. How many of us would be up in arms if developers were fired for making mistakes? You just need to look at all the stories around rm -rf...

<comment><USER6> Maybe thats exactly what should happen? I mean, whole "security" antics where companies loose tens of millions of logins/credit cards numbers and it all ends with "southpark BP apology" People fuck up epically and get a slap on a wrist with a promotion, I mean, come on

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh. When I was in university, I worked at a computer store one summer that provided IT services to local offices. One of the clients was the Mexican consulate. We were hired to do various things, including installing a tape backup system.

I was installing some service packs at about 5pm. Windows NT4. 5pm, everyone's gone home, safe, right? Server asks if I want to restart, I say yes. Then a guy walks into the server room, asks if I had restarted the server. I say yes. Whoops, OK, I guess someone was working.

Next day, the database was dead. Seemingly because I had restarted the server while someone was using it. It was a custom database job, and the contractor who had made it was on vacation in some other country. Here's the kicker. Usually tape backups have rolling tapes, right? But we hadn't started rolling tapes yet. So the good backup from 2 days prior was overwritten the night before with the crashed database. Ugh. And I was due to go back to school in 2 weeks in another city. Ouch. I still feel bad about that to this day. No idea how my boss ended up.

Never ever let someone who doesn't know what they're doing mess around with your mission critical systems where the consequences are not recoverable. Always guide them. Although in my case, it seems I may have known more than my boss at the time, so maybe wasn't possible for me....

</comment><comment><USER7> The records were not wiped out by a computer crash. They were wiped out by gross incompetence.

</comment><comment><USER8> The joys of IT. Back in the day, to wipe years of records you had to burn or shred tons of paper in multiple locations. Now you just crash one little system... Despite 20 years of Microsoft-induced crashes, clear best practices and yadda yadda, most organizations will still have a single backup system for any given data repository -- if they have one at all.

And the answer when shit happens is "outsource! Go to the cloud!" \-- so that local managers won't be responsible when the snafu happens and data is lost (if it happens to Google, it can and will happen to anyone).

Progress, eh.

<comment><USER9> I would consider it progress.

The only data loss to Google that I was able to find was [0], where a single datacenter was hit by lightning 4 times in short succession, and 0.000001% of disk space in said datacenter was lost. And only because the lost data consisted of recent writes that had yet to be backed up. And only because the lightning affected the AUX power systems in a way that they have since committed to fixing (or perhaps have fixed).

IMO, cloud storage is the most reliable way to store data, and Google the most reliable. I never know if I'm going to drop my laptop and lose all work. Or if the harddrive in my server is going to give up and burst into flames. But the great thing about cloud storage is that it abstracts away hardware components and failures so it's somebody else's problem. And they worry a lot more about data loss than I do. Cloud data storage is designed with the assumption that hardware is faulty. Spread redundant copies of data to geographically isolated datacenters, and you're much safer than some admin of averagejoe.com keeping his data on a single harddrive in his closet.

[0] - [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#57195...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#5719570367119360)

<comment><USER8> The problem is not just DR, but anything that can result in data loss. There was the one where they'd delete stuff you didn't mean to [1], the one where they got stuff back by the scruff of the neck [2]... i can't be arsed to look further back, but I'm pretty sure shit happened earlier as well (and I'm just looking at GMail). And of course there are tons of horror stories about accounts disabled or deleted for commercial or other unspecified reasons, because once you put your trust in another entity, that's it, they can do as they please. Their track record might be as good as anyone's, but it still has a few holes and people should prepare for it rather than considering "the cloud" as a magic bucket.

(disclaimer: my life would probably be ruined by losing the gmail account I've held since private-beta days, because life is short and I'm shit at sysadmin; but there's a big difference between a lone old geek and large organizations...)

[1] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2548010/Has-G...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2548010/Has- Gmail-lost-YOUR-emails-Glitch-causes-thousands-users-accidentally-delete- messages-report-spam.html)

[2] [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/03/01/googl...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/03/01/google- turns-to-tape-to-rescue-lost-gmail/)

<comment><USER10> I don't get the problem with [2]? The tape worked exactly as intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> He also criticized the Air Force for notifying Congress on Friday afternoon, five days after senior service leaders was told about the problem._

Prime time for burying bad news.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron I recall an episode of the X-Files where they talked about a 'basement fire', this reminds me of that. When you hear about a high-level government department "losing" files, it's usually because they've had an office party around the paper shredder.

Or something along those lines.

<comment><USER12> >office party around the paper shredder

This phrase made me laugh, but I don't really understand what it means, can you explain please?

<comment> King-Aaron "frantically destroying documents" I suppose would be another way to frame it... But I seem to remember that was the wording on the show, or pretty close to it.

It made it sound like the staff were running around and being very energetic in their operation of the paper shredder.

<comment><USER13> It's the 'big government agency' version of that movie scene where the hacker tosses all their drives in the microwave as the feds kick down the door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really? Like there are no backups? Is this amateur hour?

<comment><USER15> This is a Lockheed snafu, so yes, it is amateur hour.

Much of the data is backed up, and more of it will be retrievable from original sources. Maybe not all of it; I'll be very interested to see what gaps remain when they declare the issue resolved.

<comment><USER16> Lockheed is one of those companies that fires senior people to save money. Imagine how this plays out with turbine blades.

<comment><USER17> Why do companies do this, instead of "pay cut, take it or leave it?"

<comment><USER15> It's never phrased that boldly. People aren't "fired", their contracts are not renewed, or they are declared redundant because of the new kid with an advanced degree... usually just after they've finished training the new kid.

The most common move is to cut the highest paid section of the workforce after they acquire the service contract from a competitor. All major defense firms do this, which leads to problems maintaining institutional continuity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah, the great flood of '76\. Thousands of records were lost.

Very convenient, that flood.

<comment><USER6> Genuine question - can you post some more information?

<comment><USER18> It was a quote from the TV show 'Yes, Minister':

James Hacker: How am I going to explain the missing documents to "The Mail"?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Well, this is what we normally do in circumstances like these.

James Hacker: [reads memo] This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967...

James Hacker: Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: No, a marvellous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files.

James Hacker: [reads] Some records which went astray in the move to London and others when the War Office was incorporated in the Ministry of Defence, and the normal withdrawal of papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for libel or breach of confidence or cause embarrassment to friendly governments.

James Hacker: That's pretty comprehensive. How many does that normally leave for them to look at?

James Hacker: How many does it actually leave? About a hundred?... Fifty?... Ten?... Five?... Four?... Three?... Two?... One?... _Zero?_

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, Minister.

(Source: [http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0030014/quotes](http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0030014/quotes))

Edit: Although apparently a similar real-life incident occurred when Hurricane Sandy wiped out a significant portion of an FBI record archive: [https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/archival- neglect-...](https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/archival-neglect- flooding-of-fbi-archives-destroyed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-pages-of-files- related-to-civil-rights-movement-history/)

<comment><USER19> Reminds me of this: The Front Fell Off - [http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)

<comment><USER17> The is Australian, and if you like it, look for _The Games_ on YouTube, a mock drama series about the 1996 Sydney Olympic Games organizing committee

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you're going to say something about paper, see also the 1973 Personnel Records Archive Fire: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Cen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Center_fire)

</comment><comment><USER21> Dear 18F [1]: Help, please.

[1] [https://cloud.gov/](https://cloud.gov/)

<comment><USER22> 18F is severely outgunned. They need _your_ help. I can't say that enough. The entire Western US is on fire, there's a drought, they have one fire hose and their next boss may turn it off.

<comment><USER23> Nice to see an encouraging response for 18F here. They are fighting the good fight, and most people don't even know what they are up against.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Data about current investigations has also been lost, which is delaying them.

[...]

>"We've opened an investigation to try to find out what's going on, but right now, we just don't know," Stefanek said.

I wonder where they're putting the files for that investigation.

I wonder if their backups were corrupted too, or if they just overwrite the old ones with newer ones as a cost-saving measure. Or whether no one ever tried restoring from them and for whatever reason they never could have been restored from.

Since people rarely prioritize it until it's too late, maybe 'restore from backup' drills should be a common thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> May the additional security requirement deter sensible backup procedure? Like you can't have copies of backup somewhere? Or backups have to be encrypted and the keys are in a USB drive somewhere, which had gone missing/bad and the encrypted data can't be recovered?

</comment><comment><USER26> Good Grief. For a lot less than an F-35 program, they could install a TSM rig, with off sight backup.

Ours (at a state university) deals with petabytes of data. We've had to escalate to IBM's Tier 3 support a couple of times over the past decade, but we have never lost a file.

</comment><comment><USER27> Any information on the contract with Lockheed or the consequences of catastrophic failure?

</comment><comment><USER28> Do please keep in mind that on September 10th, 2001, the secretary of defense reported to Congress that the department could not account for 2.3 trillion dollars of spending.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's becoming clear that all government data should be part of blockchain(s).

</comment><comment><USER30> Just ask the Russians for a backup. And if that fails, the next-higher authority: the NSA.

</comment><comment><USER31> Always hard to tell the difference between gross incompetence and malice.

</comment><comment><USER32> Oh, _come_ on. Nobody ever made any backups?

</comment><comment><USER33> Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from a malice.

</comment><comment><USER34> Yeah this is believable. Where I worked, in the secured network there were maybe 15 workstations with a maximum of maybe 5 people working at any one time, unless there was a "TOUR" going on. We had 2 contractor and 1 government IT person supporting this network.

I asked the one of the contractor ITs when was the last backup. Response: "Do you want me to do a backup of your workstation tonight?"

WTF!!! I am no IT slob but the minimum is Mon-Thur backup of new and changed files that day, and Friday night was full network backup.

Why wasn't this done?!!!! The tape backup makes too much noise. I guess the bitch couldn't read her endless Romance Novels because of the noise.

I find an intern, not a full employee, working on a design file in the account of another engineer. WTF!!! We believe that since the intern was leaving soon, it would appear that the design was the work of the engineer.

Security violation!!!!! The contractor IT people swore they did not know this was going on...... BS!!! With so few on the network at any one time, and in the mornings only the intern was on the network, these contractor IT people were unaware!!!!

The government IT person knew, but she did not want to report it because she was well aware of the contractor's history of retaliation.

BTW..... during the investigation, the government engineer asked where was it written that they could not share passwords!!!!! Can you hear Snowden laughing at this.

All swept under the lumpy rug....... the violations would make the organization look bad.

As for me..... I got the IR treatment.... that's Isolation and Retaliation... then after 2 and a half days, supervisor sent me an email as to my where abouts.... my reply: Retired as of 4:00 PM PST, 3 days previous.

<comment><USER35> [http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Multiple_exclamation_marks](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Multiple_exclamation_marks)</comment></comment>


An alternative argument for why women leave STEM - <AUTHOR> https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522 <comment><USER2> But this is an argument for why women leave academia, not an argument for why they leave STEM.</comment>


Harvard Museums Releases Online Catalogue of 32,000 Bauhaus Works - at-fates-hands http://www.archdaily.com/793507/harvard-museums-releases-online-catalogue-of-32000-bauhaus-works <comment><AUTHOR> _The collection features work from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Bertrand Goldberg, Marcel Breuer, and Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius himself..._

It's unfortunate that this article doesn't take a moment to call out that Gropius stole a huge number of those photographs from Lucia Moholy: [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/photo-credit- negatives...](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/photo-credit-negatives- bauhaus/)

<comment><USER2> The site lists 53 items by Lucia Moholy, so not really a huge part of the collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just go straight to the Harvard Museums site - [http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/the- bauhaus](http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/the-bauhaus)

<comment><USER4> Classic example of what's bad about modern web site design. 1.5MB of javascript and misc overhead with a spinner over a blank page to load < 1KB of text and 5 small thumbnails.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure it looks great on an iMac (that's all artists and designers use, right?)

<comment><USER6> Looks okay on an iMac. Loads very slowly. Has poor navigation - doesn't keep your place if you click on an item and then click Back.

The content is absolutely fascinating, but I wish the images weren't just thumbnails.

<comment><USER5> click to view the image url and you'll find you can strip off the parameters to get a bigger image

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see "Bela Lugosi's Dead" anywhere ...

<comment> at-fates-hands Have an upvote for an obscure Music reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I lived in East Germany in 1998/99, I mentioned the Bauhaus in Dassau to my Germans friends (university professors) and they would not have a clue about it.</comment>


Show HN: GoJS - HTML5 Canvas diagramming library - <AUTHOR> http://www.nwoods.com/components/canvas/gojs-overview.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> This library is the culmination of two years of work by myself and another programmer. There's still lots to do, especially in the realm of animation and performance enhancements, but in spite of these I think it is one of the fastest and most complete canvas diagramming libraries to date.

Sorry about the site's look and feel, I have had little time to give it a (vastly needed!) makeover, but some people were asking when it would be released so I thought I'd make an announcement.

If you want to get right to the samples you can view them here: <http://gojs.net/latest/samples/>

If you have any questions (even just canvas-specific ones) I'd be happy to answer them. I've been consumed by canvas for some time now, so much so that if you asked a canvas question on StackOverflow there's a 10% chance that I was the answerer!

<comment><USER2> Quite timely, I was just looking for Gantt chart library. But examples page seem to consistently crash latest Aurora (18.0a2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh dear I see that too on Aurora, though I don't see the same problem locally for some reason.

Thanks, I'll investigate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No offence my friend. Given that there's d3.js, I doubt if this gains any traction.

<comment><USER4> Where exactly do you see a similarity to D3 besides the fact that they both use canvas?</comment></comment>


"Brainstorming is a terrible way to generate good ideas" - <AUTHOR> http://www.improvides.com/2014/03/24/creativity-team-sport-interview-vincent-walsh-prof-neuroscience-ucl/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interview with Prof Vincent Walsh of UCL, one of the world's preeminent cognitive neuroscientists. Some interesting points from the interview:

1\. You're only _aware_ of less than 1% of your brain activity, and most creativity happens in the other 99%.

2\. If you want to stimulate an idea, you need to give your brain time to go "off-line".

3\. Creativity is not a team sport, and brainstorming is a terrible way to generate good ideas.

4\. Execution of ideas is more important than generation, _and previous failure helps this_.

5\. There are no miracle exercises / processes / drugs / brain implants to "turn on creativity" in areas where it didn't previously exist.

6\. _However_ , creativity can be improved by giving people the right exercises, knowledge, experiences and environment.

<comment><USER2> All of the above is easy to understand when you think of creativity as unconscious problem solving.

Also John Cleese has a great talk about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ)

<comment><USER3> Yeah I dunno, it's a long video.

Is there a transcript? I can't listen to Cleese for more than the average length of a comedy sketch.

As for creativity not being a team sport, and brainstorming being "terrible", I disagree. Creative ideas need organised foundations, and brainstorming can solve problems for a team to action and expand creative ideas. The band jamming in the garage, is their musical brainstorming so terrible?

"Creativity" is such a loose word. As for what it even is, I lean towards the theory I read somewhere of it being about "discovery" rather than bringing something new into the world. Creativity is the act of discovering what was already there. Works for me until I change my mind.

<comment><USER4> My experience of brainstorming is that everyone comes up with a crap idea (a couple of people will probably come up with the same idea).

I can see why some are crap, and can't see why some others are. I have an OK idea, I can see is better than the crap ones. The loud people get hooked on one of the crap ideas and don't listen / or bother to comprehend why your idea may be better, they are too busy elaborating on of their crap one.

My best ideas come at unusual times. Staring into space. Or Riding my bike. Crap idea wins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have grown as a programmer since I started working from home with real autonomy. The software created has, by far, been my best. I'm also productively creating features, architecting the system, etc. It feels great!

I'm healthier. I eat better. I exercise regularly. I'm able to take naps when I need one. I can meditate or zone out as needed. I feel focused.

There's less need to appease peers on a day to day basis. I can have streams of thought without having to communicate them. I can then reflect on these thoughts & communicate a coherent story when I am ready.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think sometimes you can strike gold with a good brainstorming session, but it is a rare occurrence. But I do agree forcing out ideas without much thought and in usually limited amounts of time can result in some horribly uncreative ideas.

You can't force an idea, they just come and history has proven you come up with creative solutions and ideas to things when you try and fail, sometimes hundreds and thousands of times.

Do you think Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb right away? He failed multiple times, he didn't succeed the first time he created something. In- fact, I am fairly certain although nobody knows the exact figure, but it was over 1000 attempts. The difference between a good idea and a bad one is experimentation and the execution of said idea.

Once you have the initial idea, it never hurts to have a post-idea brainstorm to help further refine the idea. Conception should be natural, but getting multiple people involved to refine the core idea I think is still a great way to help a great idea even better as you get more than one angle you should approach it from. Don't be confused here, this is a different kind of brainstorm, not an ideation brainstorm like the article touches upon.

Great article that I think some companies who insist on brainstorming should read before they decide to pull an all day brainstorming session that will ultimately result in most likely nothing substantial or worthwhile.

<comment><USER7> Thomas Edison didn't invent lightbulb, per se. He improved existing designs to make it usable.

<comment><USER8> He did a lot of "improving" "existing designs". Although nowadays we call it "being a filthy thieving bastard".

<comment><USER7> Basically he was a more dastardly Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER9> No, just a regular Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER7> I'll be honest, I said dastardly merely because I see Thomas Alva Edison twirling his mustache.

<comment><USER9> He had a mustache? I learn something all the time on HN :)

Indeed Alva was a first-class bastard. But that's what it took to be successful in the gilded age I guess.

<comment><USER7> No, I took some artistic liberties. But he should have :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you generalise the whole world of ideas and problem solving to the word "creativity" then I have no idea what conclusions you can make. There are a great many types of idea generation to solve unrelated classes of problem. Brain-storming is most definitely a valuable tool for some but not all situations.

i) discover what colleagues know about the issues

ii) widen options beyond what you are immediately aware

iii) make connections between different topics

iv) experience explaining and talking about a problem

v) get a feel of how emotionally invested colleagues are in particular decisions

vi) spot bogus assumptions and false premises

etc.

What's the alternative suggestion, nobody works together? This type of article plays to the seductive developer trap that you can to put your head down and work on problems in isolation. Its fun and optimal for small projects but it doesn't scale. You can only build garden sheds, you will never build cathedrals.

Whiteboards rock.

<comment><USER11> All of your points are sound. But notice what's not on your list: generating new ideas, the ostensible goal of many brainstorming sessions.

From what I've read elsewhere, the "alternative suggestion" that you asked for is actually a two step process:

(1) Everyone, working alone, comes up with as many new ideas as they can, writing them down. It's best if you write down some crazy ones too.

(2) Everyone comes together to discuss all the ideas on all the lists, in a more classic brainstorming format. Here is where your points apply.

The reason for doing it this way is that people universally self censor in groups, often without knowing it, and don't contribute ideas that are too far outside the previous consensus. By taking off the immediate social pressure during ideation, you get a wider range of ideas that is more likely to contain useful new ones.

Edit: I'd forgotten where I got this, until another comment mentioned Quiet by Susan Cain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I actually find brainstorming a great way to refine existing ideas I've come up with but for which I don't have a clear picture of the details. Granted, it's something I'll do by myself and come back to it over time until I feel like I finally have clarity of purpose and implementation, but it is still a case of sitting there just dumping out a huge bullet point list of ideas and refinements as I think about the idea. Not only that, but often it also helps me expand the idea in directions I hadn't thought of, and sometimes pivot the idea into something even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> The professor's point is about group brainstorming, not individual brainstorming. Indeed, what he says in the context of brainstorming (see around 13:00 in the interview) supports individual intellectual effort as a better way to come up with good ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My 2 cents on the topic would be: it takes time for the brain to find a creative solution to tackle the problem, so a person has got to give a thought some time, kind of let it run on the background on its own. I've used this technique a lot of times in my life. If I can't remember where I've put something, I don't try to find it asap. I try to distract myself from the task by anything like reading news, or making a cup of tea or doing some exercises, anything really. It takes considerably less efforts to find the thing or the right solution when I don't feel that it's life or death important. And after the thing or the solution is found, it's really worth of sharing your thought with people as they might help you see some weak sides of the way you are about to take and help with peices of advice. So all in all, the best approach imho is giving a problem some time, no rush, no panic, and then share ideas with people to get the most of it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sh*t ads swoop in while reading, which always in my mind degrades the trustworthiness of the content and causes me to look for an escape out.

<comment><USER15> Also, when you hover over the 'X' on the ad, the black 'x' swoops away and is replaced with a red 'x'. Ridiculous.

<comment><USER14> Ain't nobody got time for dat! Look you either got time to tell me something or sell me something but not both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think a better process than brainstorming would be "idea brewing" (made up future-buzz-word :) ):

1\. Making the concoction: tell people about the problem they need to solve and about where to find good infos on it (and hopefully also spark their interest about the problem, otherwise it's pointless), let's say at the start of the week...

2\. Brew: just leave people alone for, let's say, a week, so ideas can "ferment" in their heads...

4\. Distill: meet and talk with people, have them present and discuss ideas they had and select ("distill") the ones that can be really good, let's say at the end of the week.

...now, I've never tried the process in a formal enough manner to have proof that it works better than anything, else, but according to this guy's theory it should.

(now, if you use up the term "idea brewing" a bestseller buzzword-creating management or self-help book, please be a nice chap and give me some credit for it)

</comment><comment><USER17> Using brainstorming in a business context is also problematic from a social psychological point of view: For brainstorming to work as planned (collecting lots of different ideas, every idea including the quirky ones count are valid at this stage, ideas only get filtered after the brainstorming session ends), certain criteria have to be met by the group doing the session. If the boss or a potentially competing colleague is around, most people won't brainstorm freely, even though the moderator says it's ok to get crazy. For brainstorming to work as intended the group has to be cooperative and without hierarchies (really without, not startuppy without). Otherwise, people will fear the criticism of the others and only speak about the too-dull-to-fail ideas.

<comment><USER10> You can have hierarchy within an effective team. Its not mutually exclusive in the same way that lack of hierarchy guarantees nothing.

Group problem-solving can reveal team problems and help resolve them. If your team is not working well together, you need to fix it ASAP and not avoid the situations where it comes to the fore.

<comment><USER17> > You can have hierarchy within an effective team.

Absolutely! I was talking specifically about hierarchiy affecting the brainstoring method.

> Group problem-solving can reveal team problems and help resolve them. If > your team is not working well together, you need to fix it ASAP and not > avoid the situations where it comes to the fore.

I have the suspicion we are talking about different things here (me not speaking English natively could also be reason). With brainstorming I meant the specific didactic method used to generate a collection of ideas with as much breadth as possible, specifically including quirky and unusual ideas for a specific class of open questions like finding a new product idea or a name for a new project. This method has a defined process and was subject to a few paedaogical studies.

I think what you have in mind is more like collectively trying to solve a specific engineering problem. In a setting like that many aspects of brainstorming methods do not apply, particularly because the problem to be solved is more closed in nature and has a specific class of right solutions.

(edit: formatting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Try out concepts as quickly and cheaply as possible. It's hard to know what works without real experiments, because idea guys think they've found the Fountain of Youth when they've just inspired people with charismatic snakeoil. Try something, anything already.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Brainstorming sessions and equivalent ideation techniques like Creative Problem Solving have an ever-growing body of evidence showing them to be an ineffective way to generate good ideas."

Any links?

<comment><USER20> Not sure if this is what you're looking for but I just found it an interesting read: [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does cathedral v. bazaar also apply to creativity?

Cathedral creativity = "divine spark" of the individual.

Bazaar = small/random steps shaped by the evolutionary processes of fork, commit, & pull.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how brainstorming in a collaborative text editor compares to real- life group brainstorming. In my experience using an EtherPad for brainstorming can be very fruitful because there is an element of both synchronous and asynchronous communitation. All parties can write down their ideas down simultaneously and one can comment very quickly and nonchalantly to other ideas at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER23> What I think often happens in a culture where group brainstorming is common is that the few meeting specialist, often the gregarious managers, is the ones leading the meetings and is in the end labeled as the creative ones. In the end people will start to expect that these people will make the suggestions and the others will just give feedback.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have found that brainstorming is great for getting a really good handle on the problem. Once I know exactly what the problem is with all the associated issues then I can start to think about the best solution. Often I just let the problem ferment in the background and the solution pops up when I am doing something unrelated.

</comment><comment><USER25> I had always noticed that I never came up with any good ideas during a brainstorm session. I also worried that this made me seem unintelligent to my peers so I would spend a lot of time before or after the session creating and refining my ideas to compensate.

I'm glad to know I've been going about it effectively.

</comment><comment><USER26> What fascinates me is that I learned about the ineffectiveness (in general) of brainstorming back in my first year of Communication Science, which was at least six years ago, and yet everyone around me still brainstorms all the time.

Why do businesses not take this research to heart?

</comment><comment><USER27> Counter example: [http://www.slashfilm.com/trivia-cafe-pixar-bugs-life- monster...](http://www.slashfilm.com/trivia-cafe-pixar-bugs-life-monsters- finding-nemo-walle-shuts/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I thought this would be a (common) business oriented (language) presentation, so I was quite surprised (relieved).

Recently had a great idea regarding binary search trees, which came to me while felling a (real) tree, odd.

</comment><comment><USER29> Brainstorming is where the initial kernel of good ideas comes from though, you take something from person A/B/C and combine it with your own - and that synergy is the source of good ideas.

</comment><comment><USER30> If people did not have egos then brainstorming would work fine.

I find it is hard to be creative on the spot. I do like meetings that discuss a range of preconceived ideas.

</comment><comment><USER31> I disagree with this. I've found that structured brainstorming and collaboration always yield better ideas and results than one person working solo.

<comment><USER32> That's the wrong comparison. You want to compare structured brainstorming against _all the people who would have been in the brainstorm_ working solo.

Otherwise, all you're finding is that N people are more effective than 1 person. That'll often be true; the question is how to make the best use of those N people, and the claim being made here is that brainstorming is worse than having them work mostly independently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think brainstorming has demonstrated that is useful, I believe in teamwork. The key is not the brainstorming but the brainstormers or teamworkers

</comment><comment><USER34> Brainstorming ins business is like jamming in music. Teams with great synergy can create great results.

</comment><comment><USER5> "What's the value of trashing your talk"

It also causes your idea to evolve or die.

</comment><comment><USER35> I read the book Quiet by Susan Cain. Brainstorming was likened to as the 'New Group Think' in that book.

The three reasons stated for the inefficiency of brainstorming are:

(1) Production blocking (Only one person can talk at a time while others listen. Think of a single entry queue.)

(2) Evaluation apprehension (Some (or most) people hesitate in presenting their idea because it might be critiqued or ridiculed.)

(3) Social Loafing (There are times when members of a group will slack-off because they know other members will take over the work.)</comment>


Show HN: Get on a list - Hide your search profile and make the NSA track you - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enlist/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone – I'm the creator of Enlist.

I recently discovered TrackMeNot[0], an addon that fights tracking by polluting metadata. It doesn't make you anonymous, but creates "noise" to hide behind.

We know that the NSA tracks us through it's XKeyScore program. Various sites showcase an interesting, but possibly vacuous list of tracked keywords[0].

My addon makes random Google searches using these tracked keywords -- this puts you on the NSA's list.

Realistically, the addon is pretty weak. It doesn't make "normal" searches, so it's trivial to filter out the "noise".

If people find this interesting, I'll consider making the searches more realistic, and harder to identify. Maybe I'll mix normal & incriminating searches with a random walk through a markov chain.

Thanks for your interest.

[0][http://attrition.org/misc/keywords.html](http://attrition.org/misc/keywords.html)</comment>


Malaria vaccine provides hope for a general cure for cancer - <AUTHOR> http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2015/10/malaria-vaccine-provides-hope-for-a-general-cure-for-cancer/ <comment><USER2> 4 years until human test subjects? Now this is very promising!!!

<comment><USER3> How is this story more promising materially than the rest of its ilk? I don't see it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342677)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site:thesun.co.uk+new+cancer...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:thesun.co.uk+new+cancer+could)

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that this is not specific to a certain type of cancer is quite amazing.

This paragraph captures it pretty well:

"In collaboration, the two university research groups have tested thousands of samples from brain tumors to leukemias and a general picture emerges to indicate that the malaria protein is able attack more than 90% of all types of tumors. The drug has been tested on mice that were implanted with three types of human tumours. With non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the treated mice's tumours were about a quarter the size of the tumours in the control group. With prostate cancer, the tumours disappeared in two of the six treated mice a month after receiving the first dose. With metastatic bone cancer, five out of six of the treated mice were alive after almost eight weeks, compared to none of the mice in a control group."

The first link you provided seems related, in the sense that the OP link is what was sought after in the linked submission.

<comment><USER3> University of Copenhagen says University of Copenhagen researchers are on the verge of a breakthrough. In other news, University of Copenhagen researcher reported, by his mother, to be brilliant and charming.

I'm probably being unfair, but I cannot get excited about "coming soon" cancer news anymore. Unless it concerns a treatment that is curing large numbers of people _already_ , I relegate it to the "Incurable Optimism" drawer, along with the stories of diabetes breakthroughs, and new methods for reversing Male Pattern Baldness.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Genghis Khan: history's greenest conqueror  - <AUTHOR> http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0120-hance_mongols.html

<comment><USER2> I went in thinking I'd read about Khan's reforestation plans or something, but instead it's just a side effect of stability... Internet, I am disappoint.</comment>


Apple-Samsung Case Muddies the Future of Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/technology/apple-samsung-case-muddies-future-of-innovation.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> I think it's pretty safe to remove "-Samsung Case" from that headline without impacting any of its content.

This is Apple's war and there is no need to imply that Samsung is responsible for any muddying.

<comment><USER3> They are all to blame. Samsung are part of the problem too. Apple may be the worst but they shouldn't be singled out. Disclaimer: I have never purchased an Apple product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the opening of the article: "Apple's victory on Friday in a patent lawsuit against Samsung could, if upheld, give its rivals a kick in the pants to create more original products."

That's quite the contrary of "muddying the future of innovation", no?

<comment><USER5> The title more accurately reflects the contents of the article rather than cherry-picking the first sentence of it.

<comment><USER4> "cherry-picking" the _first sentence_? Disproving your title in your _first phrase_ is... well, bad writing skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If innovation == blatant copying, yes, this will muddy the future of innovation. If, however, innovation == trying something that hasn't been done before, I fail to see how this will do anything but help.</comment>


Dark or white color theme is better for the eyes? - <AUTHOR> https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53264/dark-or-white-color-theme-is-better-for-the-eyes <comment><USER2> There's some comment about the straining effect of black on pure white, and some suggestion to modify the contrast. I'm pleased they all say to use black on off-white.

I cannot understand why people use light grey text on a bright white background - you're making your page hard to read for large amounts of the population.</comment>


MySQL 5.7 brings sexy back with JSON - <AUTHOR> https://www.symfony.fi/entry/mysql-5-7-8-brings-sexy-back-with-json <comment><USER2> NB: Despite the version number, MySQL 5.7.8 is a release candidate, not a production version.</comment>


Web Apps That Make Mashups Easy - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/07/08/10-web-apps-to-build-the-next-big-thing-without-writing-any-code/

<comment><USER2> Author failed to mention Drupal which is silly. Drupal does mashups quite brilliantly.</comment>


Mobile, smartphones and hindsight - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/2/19/mobile-smartphones-and-hindsight <comment><USER2> I'll remember two very good points from this:

\- Blackberry sales' went up until Nov. 2010 and then it was too late, Apple and Android had the market. Wile E Coyote indeend. \- it took ten years from the mobile operators getting the 3G licences before smartphones got really good (and then everybody wanted one).

The parallel with AR and VR seems on point but aren't things faster now?</comment>


Android To Surpass Microsoft Windows - <AUTHOR> http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/android-to-surpass-microsoft-windows/

<comment><USER2> You may very well be thinking "The PC cannot and will not be replaced."

For some tasks that is true. But, the same can be said of mainframes. They still are there, and still make big money for the remaining makers. But they are not relevant.

PCs will continue to be used, but with sharply attenuated relevance. What do I mean by relevance? Ask yourself: "If I am pitching a new venture, and there is a chance Microsoft will get into that sector, are my chances diminished?"

10 years ago, nobody would invest if Microsoft made noises about getting into some sector. Today, investors might not even take that into consideration. "What if the next version of Windows has that built in?" isn't a relevant question.</comment>


Amazon to deliver Whole Foods groceries in two hours for Prime users - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/amazon-prime-now-whole-foods-groceries-delivery.html <comment><USER2> I am always amazed by how smart Amazon was by buying whole foods. With one purchase they gained foothold in a bunch of upper-middle-class consumers. The type that doesn't mind paying a little extra for convenience. With this move, they will get additional prime members plus they sell groceries that bring a higher profit margin. Additionally, those are customers that they want shopping at Amazon.com.</comment>


Haxing Minesweeper - <AUTHOR> https://osandamalith.com/2018/04/07/haxing-minesweeper/amp/ <comment><USER2> On Windows XP we still had xyzzy[1]. I had so much fun that time in school, claiming that I had psychic powers of seeing through the minesweeper table... ;)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xyzzy_(computing)#Other_comput...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xyzzy_\(computing\)#Other_computer_games_and_media)

edit: The article links the original WinXP binary, and the cheat still works, even with wine ( [https://www.winehq.org/](https://www.winehq.org/) ) ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> In case anyone else is wondering, the debugger used is OllyDbg [0].

[0] [http://www.ollydbg.de/](http://www.ollydbg.de/)

</comment><comment><USER4> In Win2000 you could read from and write to memory of any app [1]. Which we did for minesweeper. By setting proper values and forcing the window to repaint we implemented a simple snake game. The body of the snake consisted of bombs and "fruit" you had to eat were flags. I don't remember how we captured keyboard input though.

[1] If your app had admin rights IIRC

<comment><USER5> There were GameHack and ArtMoney, they allow you to track memory address for specific value in game (gold, money, scores...) by input the value before and after changing it, and then allow to change the value at that address.

<comment><USER4> A modern version of these tools is Cheat Engine, which is brilliant: [http://www.cheatengine.org](http://www.cheatengine.org)

<comment><USER6> Watch out for the adware bundled into its installers, though. :(

<comment><USER7> Yeah.

There is a link on the download page to a zip of the files, without an installer (or the installCore adware/bundleware).

>"For those that want to have Cheat engine without automated installer and installCore recommendation during installation, click here"

<comment><USER6> To be honest, that's not really acceptable.

We as a community should be pushing back hard against open source developers who want to monetize their work with malware. There are better ways for them to make money from their work than something that's ethically dubious at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember when my buddy Charles hacked minesweeper for fun and learning. I thought it was so cool. He wrote about it here if you are looking for another reference point: [http://www.charleshooper.net/blog/minesweeper-hacking- viewin...](http://www.charleshooper.net/blog/minesweeper-hacking-viewing- process-memory-in-windows/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I always thought Minesweeper would compute the minefield dynamically as you played instead of generating a fixed map of the minefield at the beginning of the game.

<comment><USER10> There is one place where it's dynamic, which is that if your very first click is on a mine, then it'll relocate it to the upper-left corner (or the next available spot).

<comment><USER11> I'm now questioning my memory because I'm convinced I have hit a mine on the first click before ...

<comment><USER12> Maybe a clone?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dear Mikey: Welcome to Real Globalization - <AUTHOR> http://mindtaker.blogspot.com/2009/11/dear-mikey-welcome-to-real.html

<comment><USER2> Racism aside, it does seem likely that this was planned far in advance, and that Arrington fell victim to a serious con.</comment>


Computer program that could bypass patents to produce synthetic drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/83106/intellectual-property-patent/ <comment><USER2> > In the global industry, some of the best kept secrets are those necessary to > make life-saving medication and other pharmaceutical products.

What? Patents are not secret. Patents are the opposite of secret. The very word "patent" means "open". Are drug patents some kind of trick to do the opposite of what a patent is supposed to do?

> However, when the researchers designated some atoms and bond as untouchable, > the program proposed plans that avoided the patented ones.

Can someone explain just exactly how do drug patents work? Can this legally work? I understand that normally patents cover processes or working inventions. I didn't think that the precise chemical bonds were required to be produced in the final output of a patent.

Also, since apparently the researchers have read the patents in question and designed their software to produce drugs that avoid those patents, have they willfully infringed? Since they were aware of the patent and the process by which the drug worked, so using this knowledge they produced similar drugs that do the same thing?

I assume that the researchers know drug patent law well enough and are confident that their method avoids patents, so there's obviously a lot I don't understand.

<comment><USER3> I'm a patent holder for a pharmaceutically relevant class of compounds. There are two types of patents typically seen in pharma. One is procedural (how the drug is synthesized, isolated, formulated or administered) and another is composition of matter (the atoms in the molecule, their relative coordinates and the lengths and types of bonds that connect them). This program takes a target compound and does two things. 1) produces a library of similar compounds by structural diversification (making substitutions of atoms or small groups of atoms in the target compound with other atoms or groups which are known to behave similarly) with restrictions based on what has been patented under composition of matter. 2) It then takes each molecule and looks for ways it can be synthesized. It does this by breaking apart the molecule piece by piece until it obtains commercially available building blocks. These piecewise separations correspond to synthetic a steps in the other direction, which the program screens for literature precedence. It does this for every possible combination of piecewise separations until it finds a set of viable pathways from available compounds to the target. This is called retro synthesis. It then filters the potential synthetic routes for those that are covered by procedural patents until it has a list of non patented, commercially viable synthesis plans.

As you can imagine there are thousands of ways a moderately complex molecule could be deconstructed and the bank of known reactions is more than any one person can really grasp. That and the myriad patent literature and how cryptic and dense it can be make the problem particularly suited for algorithmic treatment. This is only being done now because cataloging all the research and patent literature (which goes back to the late 1800s) and digitally formatting in a way that allows it to be computationally analyzed and processed requires manual translation of each report by a human being. Not many people have the expertise required for this and those that do usually prefer less menial work. So it has taken this long to amass a digital library of sufficient size to give one confidence that the answers it provides are comprehensive and that further searching would be pointless.

<comment><USER4> > The research team hope that their software could help pharmaceutical > companies in the protection of their intellectual property, and to hasten > research into organic chemistry.

It seems what they are attempting to sell is a IP protection service: let us show you other molecules and synesis routes you should also patent defensively, without actually attempting them in practice. Pretty soon you will have algorithmically defined patents.

It's IP anti-science at it's worst.

<comment><USER5> A not-so-fun fact: My country used to be on the 301 Special Report (IPR "rogue country" list) until 2015 because American pharmaceutical companies didn't consider procedural patents good enough. The last patents in that category were issued in 1995...

Apparently the income of Big Pharma investors is more important than the affordability of generics.

<comment><USER6> > Apparently the income of Big Pharma investors is more important than the > affordability of generics.

You say this as if it is surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of misinformation in these comments. Both the process and end product are patentable, but some companies do not disclose their processes and opt to keep them as trade secrets.

As for the article, changing the molecule can have unpredictable effects on how the compound acts in the body. Even changing one bond/atom can result in dramatically different properties. The article doesn't address that.

<comment><USER8> More relevantly, this scheme doesn't address the _prescription_ side at all.

Doctor: I judge you to have [medical condition]. Here is a prescription for [expensive on-patent drug].

Patient: I would prefer to take this less expensive drug, which a computer program thinks might be equivalent.

Doctor: Hmm. Doesn't look like there are any clinical studies for this analogue drug. Since I don't want to risk a malpractice lawsuit, I'm not going to prescribe it. Without a prescription, your insurance won't pay for the analogue drug either, so it'll have to be cheaper than your copay in order for it to make sense for you.

<comment><USER9> The conversation goes more like this:

DOCTOR: You have [medical condition]. We can manage it with [medication which is on the appropriate tiered formulary for the patient's pharmacy benefits manager].

PATIENT: I would prefer to take this medication they advertised to me during the last football game.

DOCTOR: This medication is only a slight incremental improvement over the generic one approved by your insurance. If you want the newer one, it may have higher copays and will have more paperwork hassle as we try to get the insurance to cover it. In the end, it may not be covered. Do you still want it?

PATIENT: Yes. [Leaves angry Yelp review over how the physician wouldn't prescribe them X medication].

END SCENE

As for the final point, if there are no clinical studies (at all) for a given drug, then it is not FDA approved and would be illegal to prescribe unless under the auspices of a registered clinical trial with a filed IND with the FDA.

If it is FDA approved but not for that specific indication, then it depends on the clinical practice patterns at large whether this is a reasonable course of action vs malpractice. Case in point: Avastin is way cheaper than Lucentis for macular degeneration and works via similar mechanism, but was never tested or approved for that indication. Many Retinologists will inject Avastin anyway because some trials have shown benefit for cost conscious patients or patients from whom insurance will not cover Lucentis. This is not malpractice.

Using another drug from another class entirely without any clinical evidence to back up its use outside of a trial could be considered malpractice, but only provable if there is a bad outcome.

Without a prescription, they aren't getting the drug legally. With a prescription without insurance/PBM approval, then yes, it could be very expensive for unconventional treatments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to the paper: [https://www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451-9294(18)30567-9](https://www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451-9294\(18\)30567-9)

</comment><comment><USER10> But isn't a modified molecule a reformulation, which cannot be assumed to have the same effect, or dose-response, or even safety, as the original molecule? Say if you can synthesize something _like_ garblezolib or whatever, aren't you then faced with all the safety and effectiveness trials that were so expensive for the OEMs?

<comment><USER11> The end molecule is not patented, the process and pathway to creating it is.

If this software can come up with sufficiently novel pathways other processes can be used to come up with the same drug.

This is the idea anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It could bypass patents, but instead it is owned by Merck, Giant Pharma so they can now bypass all the patents for themselves

<comment><USER13> Exactly! I'm sure the first customers of this software will be the big pharma patent departments who will use it to further expand their patent space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love it when sci fi and sci fact seem to merge [https://www.npr.org/2017/09/20/548664924/in-a-future- ruled-b...](https://www.npr.org/2017/09/20/548664924/in-a-future-ruled-by-big- pharma-a-robot-tentatively-explores-freedom-and-sex-aut)

</comment><comment><USER15> More on this: [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/au...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/automated- route-finding-and-patent-busting)

</comment><comment><USER16> This article is not complete. In order for a drug to be approved by the FDA for a particular condition, it must demonstrate (through expensive clinical trials) superior efficacy to existing treatments unless the drug is considered a generic. It's hard to say if a drug with slight molecular modifications could be said to be a "generic" form of another. There's a good chance the answer would be no, because slight molecular modifications can cause significant differences in efficacy.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some commentary from my favorite chem-blogger: [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/au...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/automated- route-finding-and-patent-busting)

Sounds like this is for finding different synthetic routes to the same molecule. So it might help avoid method claims, but not claims for the product itself.

</comment><comment><USER18> Information wants to be free.</comment>


Tinc VPN: Secure Private Network Between Hosts - <AUTHOR> https://www.tinc-vpn.org/ <comment><USER2> +1 for tinc. I've used it for years in VPS providers and from home to VPS to cloak DNS from the ISP eyes and tampering.

It's not as fast as strongswan or wireguard, but it has dynamic mesh routing. If one of my nodes is down, I route through the others automagically, all in user space without having to enable forwarding on any nodes. This is handy when backbone providers are having issues.

<comment><USER3> >I've used it for years in VPS providers and from home to VPS to cloak DNS from the ISP eyes and tampering.

what's the logic behind that? are vps providers somehow more trustworthy than ISPs?

<comment><USER4> In the UK residential ISPs are required by law to store logs of your browsing data, and to make it available to ~50 government departments with no warrant or any other kind of oversight required.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016)

<comment><USER5> That's a dishonest misrepresentation of the law, and your link says so.

<comment><USER6> Could you be more specific as to where the poster is going wrong? Is it merely a correction that it's the domains stored and not the individual pages? (not that that's possible over SSL anyway). Or is there more to what you say has been misrepresented?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another interesting alternative to tinc is ZeroTier ( [https://www.zerotier.com/](https://www.zerotier.com/) ). I am using it to remotely play Steam games over the Internet and it is surprisingly easy to set up. Probably due to existence of centralized hub.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand your use-case. Is Steam banned in certain countries?

Also isn't the added lag of a VPN not ideal for playing games?

<comment><USER9> It doesn't seem like exactly what OP is describing, but people buy cheap region-locked licenses to arbitrage different geographic pricing (i.e., it may be cheaper to buy a steam key in eastern Europe than in the US), and then activate the games over a VPN in the original region.

<comment><USER10> Most big companies will check the PayPal recipient address for country match (yes even for virtual), or an CC avs address match for country, or card BIN lookup. Spotify, Netflix, etc. This is often for compliance, for example VAT collection in EU, or license rights affected by geography. IP Geo is meh, I'd even prioritize your Accept header locale over that.

<comment><USER9> 3rd party resellers in-country facilitate this and take a cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love tinc for another reason too. I've been using it for many, many years, and the one feature of the re-routing that always amazes me is:

I'm on the laptop, connected to Gb ethernet--- I do work on remote servers (via tinc).

I pull the cable, the lappy's network reconfigure to wifi, tinc re-connects and...

 _my_ connections to the remote serves have not skipped a beat. As far as x2go, ssh or VNC, the 'ethernet' it's using is still up; might have lost a couple packets, but that's it.

I just love it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have been usinh Tinc to create a private network between a few servers for a hosting that has servers in the same datacenter but only public IPs, no private networking available.

Transfers of quite large files as well as mysql/redis connexions work amazingly well. CPU gets loaded quite a bit, but overall it is fast (for such a setup) and easy to configure.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is as good a time as any to point people in the direction of sshuttle, which is a very simple and elegant VPN that can use any SSH server as an endpoint.

* No configuration required for endpoints - any SSH server that you have a login on will work.

* Works on Linux and FreeBSD and OSX

* Tunnels DNS and UDP, etc.

* I have no idea how fast it is.

[https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle](https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle)

<comment><USER14> sshuttle does not tunnel UDP out-of-the-box. It only works on Linux and only if you are using the tproxy mode, which is not the default and a little more involved to set up. See: [http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/requirements.html#l...](http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/requirements.html#linux- with-tproxy-method)

<comment><USER15> > It only works on Linux

Absolutely not. My colleagues with Macs are using it on macOS just fine.

> a little more involved to set up

Either TPROXY is the default on Arch Linux, or this is false as well. I just installed sshuttle via pacman and it worked without any additional setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main feature that sets tinc apart from the competition is automatic and reliable upgrading of proxied connections to direct connections through NAT hole punching.

<comment><USER17> This is the number one reason that I use tinc, and something that competitors (including WireGuard as promoted at the top of this thread) don't have without additional work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've made an ansible playbook, to simplify tinc nodes management. See [https://github.com/samsk/ansible-tinc](https://github.com/samsk/ansible-tinc)

</comment><comment><USER19> I currently run OpenVPN on a $5 raspberry pi. Powered off the computer's USB port. Works great. Haven't given Tinc or Wireguard a try but will experiment. I see a lot of suggestions for ssh. It's best to use a VPN.

All incoming tcp traffic is blocked to my VPN, it doesn't respond to ICMP. Pretty much looks like a dead host unless you know there's a VPN. To connect, you need both the key and password. So it's quite secure. I can then ssh to my internal network. Nice way to access my home network without exposing it directly to the net.

<comment><USER20> Do you have good config files for this? I've tried all the prebuilt stuff and I have serious issues with it. Would love to have a cheap VPN termination point at my office and at home.

<comment><USER21> Check out ZeroTier as mentioned above. Will do all this without any port forwarding etc.

<comment><USER20> Thanks much, will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tinc is pretty amazing. My only beef with it is that once a node is connected to the network, if you ever wish to revoke access, you have to update _all_ nodes on the network to ensure the revoked node is now gone.

<comment><USER23> Unix philosophy says keys should be stored somewhere else, and you can write your own logic to update them on each node.

<comment><USER22> Right -- the trouble is tinc only halfway adheres to this. It will happily distribute a key. This means if you delete a node from 3/4 of your network, eventually that node's key is redistributed across the network.

<comment><USER18> See [https://github.com/samsk/ansible-tinc](https://github.com/samsk/ansible- tinc)

<comment><USER22> Yeah, there are a number of out of band mechanisms available to manage keys, but the issue still remains that you have to rely on an out of band mechanism to revoke access. If nodes reside in multiple administrative zones the situation gets even more awkward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1.0 was 14 years ago and the latest release was 3 months ago. Any particular reason this was posted now? Great new feature / etc?

</comment><comment><USER25> This is as good a time as any to point people in the direction of WireGuard, Jason Donenfeld's modernized VPN:

* It inherits strong, modern crypto from Trevor Perrin's Noise Protocol Framework.

* It's designed to be extremely simple to configure for the common case.

* It has a microscopic trusted code base --- 4-5000 lines compared with hundreds of thousands for strongSwan --- and the protocol was specifically designed to enable that; for instance, the protocol makes specific allowances to enable implementations without any dynamic allocation.

* It's probably the fastest available VPN.

You can only use it on Linux at the moment, but that will change this year.

WireGuard is so good people at my company spin up Vagrant images on their Macbooks to use it. Check it out:

[https://www.wireguard.com/](https://www.wireguard.com/)

Benjamin Dowling and Kenny Paterson (a name you might be familiar with) just completed and published a formal analysis of WireGuard; the results are complicated (the eCK model WireGuard was proven under doesn't contemplate separate key exchange and data transport phases) but here's a TLDR from Kenny:

[https://twitter.com/kennyog/status/955884665801445377](https://twitter.com/kennyog/status/955884665801445377)

<comment><USER26> It seems a bit like a toy project right now.

SSH supports a wider array of features while having effectively the same cost in implementation and use. The only difference is SSH doesn't support dual IP roaming and IP over UDP. Probably didn't need to start a whole new project when they could have added this to SSH, but then crypto nerds couldn't reinvent the wheel (and SSH probably wouldn't accept the patches).

And this baffles me:

 _" In the server configuration, each peer (a client) will be able to send packets to the network interface with a source IP matching his corresponding list of allowed IPs. For example, when a packet is received by the server from peer gN65BkIK..., after being decrypted and authenticated, if its source IP is 10.10.10.230, then it's allowed onto the interface; otherwise it's dropped."_ _" system administrators do not need complicated firewall extensions, such as in the case of IPSec, but rather they can simply match on "is it from this IP? on this interface?", and be assured that it is a secure and authentic packet."_

If this is on a dedicated tun/tap interface, shouldn't it only be transmitting secure and authentic packets anyway?? Why is IP traffic on an interface just assumed to be authentic information, if for example you aren't sure what put that packet on that interface? And you still need firewalls, so this duplicates configuration. This is basically an .rhosts file for a VPN.

If WireGuard is as easy to set up as SSH, why not use SSH? Because you want a VPN. But if you want a VPN, don't you want VPN features? WireGuard doesn't have VPN features. So you have to get a real VPN, or use SSH.

To put it another way: if you _only want roaming IP and public keys_ , use WireGuard. For any other use case, you're going to get a real VPN or use SSH.

<comment><USER27> >If this is on a dedicated tun/tap interface, shouldn't it only be transmitting secure and authentic packets anyway?

I was confused about this too, but it made sense when I saw it another way. The network/IP address you put there is also added into the routing table, so it routes traffic to that network via the wireguard interface to the specific endpoint using the key associated with the destination address. While it might seem it doesn't have an important place in the receiving side (which I believe it does, especially when you have multiple hosts sharing a key), I feel it vastly simplifies things. You wouldn't have to worry about where a packet is getting routed if you look at the output of `wg` (if you keep the ACL minimal)

When the config is used with wg-quick(which you can setup as a service with systemd), it adds the address to the routing tables automatically and is less work for you to do.

>If WireGuard is as easy to set up as SSH, why not use SSH

Because SSH can't do many things that WireGuard can, and also speed. Especially since I believe it will get merged into the kernel. AFAIK Greg Kroah-Hartman is all for it[1], so I don't think it'll have any trouble.

Also, I'm interested in what you consider a 'real' VPN is. What do you think this cannot do, compared to say, OpenVPN?

[1]: [https://plus.google.com/+gregkroahhartman/posts/jD6N4BzToa3](https://plus.google.com/+gregkroahhartman/posts/jD6N4BzToa3)

<comment><USER9> > Greg Kroah-Hartman is all for it[1], so I don't think it'll have any > trouble.

This is no guarantee; he was all for AF_DBUS / kdbus and that never happened.

<comment><USER27> You're right, there is no guarantee. Just that kernel folk aren't entirely opposed to the idea, or I think we'd heard about it by now.

I think what convinced me at least was the argument that larger codebases like IPSec were merged into the kernel, so why would WireGuard have any trouble?

Of course someone upstream might just decide to say no, and we'll have to live with the kernel module which is just as fast especially since it tends to reach line rate.

<comment><USER9> Oh, definitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have SoftEther running at home - which is the opensource free enterprise version (development driven by Japanese university from what I gather). Which offer enterprise features and supports OpenVPN. This looks functionally rather poor compared so Softether...

<comment><USER29> +1 softether is great. Highly underrated and very fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.tinc-vpn.org/documentation/Generating- keypairs.h...](https://www.tinc-vpn.org/documentation/Generating- keypairs.html#Generating-keypairs) "Just press enter to accept the defaults."

is there an expert mode? does this support ED_25519 keys or use open/libressl libs?

<comment><USER22> 1.0 only supports RSA keys. In 1.1 (pre-release), 25519 keys are supported.

Here's an example of the full output from `tinc -n foo init` on a node named `yarp` in Tinc 1.1, which is roughly the same as the command linked to: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/95cd556cfcb66119234ed14255...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/95cd556cfcb66119234ed142553d7871)

"expert" mode would be to just generate those same keypairs with openssl, and configs by hand.

With 1.0, you can only have RSA. With 1.1, you can have RSA and/or ED25519.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> OpenVPN is still going to be the best choice for some time. There's nothing else as well supported across platforms and it does everything most people want, including allowing connected clients to communicate directly. It doesn't have mesh support but that's probably a good thing in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER32> I really like zeroTier

</comment><comment><USER33> If you need to securely connect servers that only have public network, I suggest you give Weave Net a try. It's developed for Docker and also runs on Docker, but the private IPs can be exported to the host machine so you can also use it as a VPN between the hosts. It's super easy to setup and reasonably fast since it uses ESP packets, which are encrypted on the kernel level.

<comment><USER34> Not clear what is the difference between the OSS and paid version. Paid version starts at $30/month/node (=server?) - which looks very very expensive.

<comment><USER35> Weave Cloud is the commercial service. It's a management platform for developers creating and operating Kubernetes-based applications. It helps you do CI/CD, observability, monitoring and networking/security[0]. It's across the whole 'developer experience' not just networking.

Weave Net is completely OSS and usable to create overlay networks between docker nodes or hosts. There's an extensive user guide [1] and project on Github [2].

You wouldn't need the commercial service for this sort of usage. Business users buy a subscription to get support for complex networking.

[0] [https://www.weave.works/product/cloud/](https://www.weave.works/product/cloud/) [1] [https://www.weave.works/docs/net/latest/overview/features/](https://www.weave.works/docs/net/latest/overview/features/) [2] [https://github.com/weaveworks/weave](https://github.com/weaveworks/weave)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Thanks bring me tinc, I just spend I whole day on this. Love it !! This will change what I want to do, with tinc, network become easier.

</comment><comment><USER37> +1 for tinc, I can login to my server and see the other three computers, it's nice for ssh-ing or tunnelling. On tinc, I was only able to get a Windows Remote Desktop connection for about 45 seconds, then it loses the connection. I'm guessing OpenVPN might not have this issue. Tinc is way easier to configure than openvpn though. I recommend it :)

</comment><comment><USER7> In my experience for a simple connection between two hosts a port forwarded over ssh was significantly faster than tinc VPN. Obviously ssh is port forwarding is not a network, but sometimes you don't need a network.

<comment><USER38> true there was a blog post here recently where the conclusion was that ssh tunnels were much faster (by a factor of 6 or 8) than vpns

<comment><USER39> By a factor of 6 to 8??? I think you mean "by 6 to 8 percent".

<comment><USER40> No he meant factor [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15773466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15773466)

<comment><USER41> The thread you link to has one performance test, with a difference of 750MB for OpenVPN and 870MB for SSH - how is that a factor of 6 to 8? And that's just for iperf/UDP traffic, which is hardly a good indicator of real world performance.

<comment><USER42> Why would iperf-created traffic not be a good indicator of real world performance?

On pretty much all sensible networks I've tested iperf3 on, performance of actual applications sending data was close to its results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> How does this compare to SigmaVPN[1] which is tiny and uses modern crypto instead of OpenSSL?

\--

[1] [https://github.com/neilalexander/sigmavpn](https://github.com/neilalexander/sigmavpn)

<comment><USER44> SigmaVPN doesn't seem to be in active development, plus there's no documentation.

<comment><USER43> The documentation is there. Click on the "wiki" tab.

[https://github.com/neilalexander/sigmavpn/wiki](https://github.com/neilalexander/sigmavpn/wiki)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> "WireGuard Key Generation in JavaScript </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

Various people believe in JavaScript crypto, unfortunately. This small example helps them fuel their poor taste."

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know if Tinc tunnels DNS requests on Android? The Android OpenVPN client does not and it introduces some problems.

<comment><USER47> It's tricky to get it working on Android. I'll just say that much cause I don't know the answer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is this similar to Hamachi?

<comment><USER49> I'm guessing so? You're the only one who brought up Hamachi. ZeroTier seems to be the preferred code. I might try that. Right now I use Hamachi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I cannot fathom why people who want _VPN_ keep using Tinc with its hand-rolled protocol riddled with cryptographic errors.

<comment><USER51> Citation?

<comment><USER50> Have you read the protocol and compared it with techniques used to build any widely used cryptographic transport? I did.

Given that this is not point to point protocol, you cannot just assume that the author used stock protocol (TLS or IPsec), because there's no such thing. And unless there was an analysis that confirmed the protocol's strength _or_ the author is a recognized cryptographer, you cannot assume he did a good job.

<comment><USER52> > And unless there was an analysis that confirmed the protocol's strength or > the author is a recognized cryptographer, you cannot assume he did a good > job.

nor can you assume he did a bad job..

<comment><USER50> It's a cryptographic product. You _have to_ assume he did a bad job unless proven otherwise.

<comment><USER52> Assuming a bad job for auditing purposes is not anywhere near the same thing as making a direct assertion that the protocol is 'riddled with holes'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Weren't the tinc developers caught adding NSA backdoors into it and getting paid to do it last year? I remember something like this remotely from the Snowden leaks.</comment>


Ask HN: Build a voting system,users vote without sign up, only once - <AUTHOR>

I am implementing a suggestion system where a user can vote suggestions by other people(much like what we see on ycombinator) but here is the problem:
- I don't want the users to signup before they vote(why? I dont want user to bother in the very first place to signup to vote, its not convenient) - for a particular suggestion I just want them to vote ONCE, they can vote all suggestions on a page, but not more than once
Is it a way to achieve this? I am working on my first app and want to learn how to do this
Thank you people <comment><USER2> Persistent cookies can easily be cleared. IP address limitations might prevent legitimate users behind firewalls, while allowing others to vote multiple times if they have access to multiple computers.

I've looked into the problem for my own voting site (<https://modernballots.com/>) and I haven't found a good way of doing this for public polls where anyone's allowed to vote.

The solution I developed was to just create the option for private elections that require invitations to vote in. This has its own issues (most notably the distribution of invitation keys), but it's worked so far.

Long story short, there's no good way of doing what you're looking for unless you're willing to accept the risk of false positives, false negatives, and the problems that come with both.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your first line of deduping will be cookies. When there's no cookie present, also check against (user agent, IP) pairs; remarkably unique at web scale. The chances of two people with the same browser on the same OS with the same plugins behind the same IP address hitting a random website are very small, and collateral damage is limited to not letting two people at a very IT- homogenous corporation vote on the same item.

<comment><USER2> Your method of detecting duplicate ballots is also subject to the vulnerability of false negatives if one person votes once on two different machines. There's no good way to protect against this. Further, useragent/IP pairs are easily bypassed by forging a false user agent string.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use an evercookie (or something similar): <http://samy.pl/evercookie/>

</comment><comment><USER5> It could be gamed a bit, but I think it's worth the trade off. I did something like this with a chat system (no login to post first), and it blew up. Avg 6,000 comments a day for a while, ~500,000 comments in a year.

++

</comment><comment><USER6> there are many sample scripts already available to do this depending on what language you are using.

everytime a vote is done, you would capture that users IP address and store it in a database with the ID of the question they voted for. In your algorithm, before each vote check the database to make sure the user IP and the question ID already doesn't exist.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't that prevent 2 people behind the same router (or work IP) from voting?

<comment><USER6> that's true. maybe he can store the source port as well along with the IP? the source port will always be different even if behind the same router.</comment></comment></comment>


The new utopias: Should we retain the right to feel unhappy at work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/05/new-utopias?fsrc=permar|image3 <comment><USER2> I suspect that some sort of biologically driven urge to dominate the gene pool will keep humanity from ever reaching any form of utopia. As long as we are programmed to compete with each other, this will always reflect in the way society is organized. To me it seems that all of these utopian scenarios have in common that people allow others to be successful, expecting the same in return. This only works if everyone behaves this way and seems easy to abuse by people taking advantage of others. In other words, we don't need to worry about retaining unhappy feelings at work, others will make sure that you will remain unhappy at work. Or you will become someone that makes others unhappy at work. It may work on a small scale, here and there, but in general on a global scale I believe we are doomed to live in an endless cycle of evolutionary driven struggle of some sort. I do hope I am wrong, but in any case we are a long way from reaching it, socially, not so much technically. Which makes me a bit sad at times.

<comment> Styx- Pessimist! :)

I disagree. I think much of human suffering due to competition stems from lack of security, or the lack of reassurance that basic needs will be met.

Imagine a technological utopia. All of your needs as a human being are met. All of the needs of your friends and family are met. Can you not imagine how much easier it would be to advance toward a "social utopia"?

Before the Renaissance, the cut-throat psychotic human beings tended to do the best in terms of gathering resources, security, etc. Since the Renaissance, this has become less and less true and merit has started to take precedence.

Eventually, once the conditions for a technological utopia are met and for the majority of the population, it will be a like a light has suddenly been turned on. Those that have all of their basic needs met, tend to be nicer to others on the whole.

Besides, even if I'm wrong, it's not hard to imagine some sort of machine or system that short-circuits "our biologically driven urge to dominate the gene pool" for the good of humanity.

<comment><USER3> > I think much of human suffering due to competition stems from lack of > security, or the lack of reassurance that basic needs will be met.

Good comment - there are two places I disagree with you:

1) See the hedonic treadmill theory[0]. You could point to someone, relatively speaking, who is on top of the world. But they are still unhappy. Why is this? It's sometimes theorized that we are at a "set point" in happiness, and while we can run faster on the treadmill, or slow down on the treadmill from time to time, we are stuck at this set level of happiness.

2) Surely the vast majority of the developed western world is not at a lack for "basic needs", but why is there so much anger and despair? Because I believe you might be missing more of the "basic needs" than just Food and Water. See Maslow's hierarchy of needs[1]. While it is also theory which has arguments against it, it utilizes a more comprehensive definition of "needs."

Surely there are many people in the western world who lack psychological stability or lack companionship.

> All of the needs of your friends and family are met.

 _You will need to define "needs"_ because IMHO, that is not true. I have relatives who are veterans of war, friends who have had psychotic breaks, friends who have everything they need but something just doesn't "click" with them.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

<comment><USER4> According to this post, the hedonic treadmill theory has been disproven. [0]

"The author is flat out wrong. The Hedonic Treadmill has been disproven. Moreover, the author seems to be conflating the concept of the treadmill, with adaptation. The former denotes the subject returns to the original state. The latter recognizes that while we become accustomed to new things, we still improve in happiness.

The author is also misquoting, or misunderstanding, Kahneman. Kahneman isn't talking at all about the treadmill. He's talking about what he called the "Focusing Illusion"\-- a fancy way of saying "the grass is always greener on the other side..."

Relevant links:

"Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being"

[http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S9_Diener.pd...](http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S9_Diener.pdf)

Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.

[https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056](https://www.edge.org/response- detail/10056)

Kahneman's paper where that OP misquotes Kahneman from:

[http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Schkade_Kahneman_...](http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Schkade_Kahneman_1998.pdf)

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535504)

<comment><USER3> Note the key word in my post _theory_ as opposed to "The Hedonic Treadmill" ( _law_ , or such thereof).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The core problem of utopias is that they take one dimension of human character and push it to its extreme. We are both competitive and cooperative beside many other things. On top of that, the same person can become/look as if more competitive or more cooperative in different groups. That is, even in a group of heavily cooperative people the one with more competitive tendencies will be described as competitive. This may even results this guy being expelled from the group.

Many novels and movies use this to build their story. In a "bad" world a guy saves everybody or in a "good" world things go wrong because one of them starts doing "bad" things.

The modern approaches we take give more emphasis to the differences of people in both work environment and society.

</comment><comment><USER6> The problem is when people expect work to be pleasurable. It's good when it is is, and it's something to strive for, but the reality of work is that some of it is unpleasant.

Software development in particular is hard. The problem you work on doesn't care about your feelings. We gloss over this fact when we turn our workplaces into creches. Pride in doing a job well is more sustainable than a demand for happiness and novelty.

<comment><USER7> If work was that much fun, they wouldn't have to pay us to make us do it.

<comment><USER8> Well, there are many OSS/FS projects out there, where people do exactly that. Do that work without getting paid.

It's not the software work per se that isn't fun most of the time.

Often the problem is that people who have no idea about software development want to shape "how" we work.

"I pay you mad bucks for this, so you have to sit here and be watched multiple times a day so you I know you're really working!"

<comment><USER9> Maybe I'm a weird case, but most of the time the part in which the work is paid for is enough for me to immediately lose interest. That is, I can do equivalent work 10x faster as long as I'm doing it out of my own motivation, and not because someone _expects me_ to do it.

(Yeah, I had problems with assignments in school too. I'm just wired this way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought most, if not everyone was unhappy at work?

I always thought the idea of being happy about doing a job was a little weird, and maybe it's just me, but given that almost every job puts you in a service position, I find it weird that people expect you to be happy to act as a service-monkey to someone's whim all in the goal of making someone else lots of money.

<comment><USER9> When I was younger I bought the idea that "you can be happy at work if you work on what you love". Well, few years and three jobs later I now know I hate programming.

Or rather, I still love to code - I just immediately switch to loathing it when the "for money" part gets involved. In time I realized that there is likely no job that would make me happy, and even if I started my own business, I'd probably be overwhelmed by various market-related bullshit. I stopped expecting to be happy at work, and... I got much happier.

(It's either that or SSRIs working.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't need utopia; I would be happy with just less stress, more support, and more free time.

Stress is working over 55 hours a week. It's having bosses who want impossible things faster. It's being overwhelmed with complexity and responsibility with little control. It's being compelled to continuously mask my personality, identity, and emotions.

But, that's just me.

I just want a safe, simple place to think about ideas and concepts and collaborate with other like-minded people whom I trust to build them into reality. The trust part is really important (and increasingly hard to find).

<comment><USER11> As a side note, while capitalism has been great at allocating resources, is it really the best way? It seems like it over-allocates politicians, middle managers, bean counters, marketers, advertisers, record keepers, and market optimizers. (and, of course, all of the duplicated efforts)

With billions of people networked together and with general understand of who the inventors, thinkers, leaders, and doers are, why can't we have something better?

I'd pay $$$$$$$ if some of you brilliant people can figure that out.

<comment><USER9> People treat economic systems like static things. They're not. Personally, I think capitalism _was_ good, but is not good _anymore_. It has driven us to the era of plenty, of advanced technology, but its incentive system seems to be increasingly misaligned with the shared values of humanity - hence e.g. the misallocation you refer to. So, for instance, competing on merit was working for a long time - but it no longer does, hence great rise of marketing that exists to _game_ the market into profits.

Capitalism served us well, but it's time to move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the most accessible evidence for the likelihood of anything nearing a "utopia" is right here in the discussions people have about it. You have divisions, factions, "camps"...opposing points of view on this and anything else that human minds might ponder. As long as people are capable of disagreeing with each other, you will never have peace. While you might try to put constraints on how damaging a certain division might be, that form of control or "management" will only produce a feeling of oppression in those it would constrain, no matter how well intentioned. As long as anyone can feel disenfranchised or marginalized at any level (the key here is "feel", again, intentions don't matter), you have the seeds of rebellion.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Utopia" is simply one person's idea of the ideal. If he's lucky, he'll get a group of people together to build that vision, but eventually new people will be born or coerced into it, and be unhappy with it because they would not choose such a structure.

Not to mention the fact that not a soul on this planet is capable of the foresight necessary to endure the changing needs of the people. We feel far safer keeping rigidly to the known doctrine, even if it makes everyone miserable.

Every single utopian vision is tyranny.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't see why on Earth I should be happy about wage-labor.

<comment><USER15> You shouldn't, but that doesn't mean you have to be unhappy while doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Historically, competition is what drives humanity forward. For a utopia to be stable, it'll probably need homogeneity has well, which sort of defeats the purpose.

<comment><USER17> It seems to me that, historically, it is simply adversity in a general sense (be that other humans or not) that has driven humanity forward. "Competition" per se is not the motivating factor, it is just that there is a problem that _needs_ to be solved. When the necessity of problem solving diminishes, so does progress.

The competition theory of social organisation tries to stimulate this by creating artificial adversity through (typically non-violent) competition between people. I speculate that one of the key issues with this approach is that a lot of the problems that you create are not bounded by "underlying reality" as such - they emerge from the competition itself, and so we end up spending a lot of effort solving meta-problems which, if you stripped away the competition, aren't really "helpful".

Further, it seems difficult to distinguish which problems are "real" problems, and which aren't, because the competition does exist - what we end up with is a pervasive sense that a lot of what we're doing isn't useful, but we can't work out what or why.

<comment> Styx- Yes, I agree.

Considering a post-scarcity world, it is not difficult to imagine a pseudo- utopia with the way technology is going. Using the example of Manna, imagine the ability to plug into some perfect VR world that looks and feels just like reality. Why would anyone want to "compete" in that scenario?

Already today, human beings would rather stay at home and consume various forms of media (tv, games, etc..) than go out and "compete." Humans typically value security over a marginal gain in luxury. Even the risk-takers among us err closer to the security-side of this spectrum on the whole.

I think those in this thread that worry that humans will always have an innate desire to one-up their brethren are worrying about nothing or some close approximation to nothing.

<comment><USER17> I'm afraid I am less utopian. To me it seems more likely that we will eventually overreach our productive capacity by wasting time on the "unhelpful" problems I mentioned above, and then enter a period of decline.

The best we could hope for in such a situation is that we realise the immediacy of the "real" problems, and start to focus on those, arresting the decline before it becomes too severe. I have an (unfounded) expectation that the process of switching our (i.e. humanity's) productive capacity to focus on the "real" problems would be characterised by cooperation rather than competition, because the adversity required for progress would already be there, and we wouldn't need competition to create it.

If humanity becomes more fragmented during that process (see the rise of the isolationist right around the world), then we would run the risk of that cooperation being focused on destructive goals - that would seem to me to be along the lines of the worst-case scenario.

It strikes me that a lot of that is my interpretation of some of what is in Joseph A. Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies", which I saw recommended on here, and subsequently read. I heartily re-endorse the recommendation (I did a search to see if I could work out whose recommendation it was that pushed me to read it, but I'm afraid I can't work out which it might be, for which I apologise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the war against any emotion other than "happy", is a real thing, but it's also something that we do subconsciously because of lack of grounding

</comment><comment><USER19> Unlikely that it's possible to be truly happy unless you know it's possible to be unhappy; aka lack of free will is often a killer.</comment>