The Surprising Failures of 12 Steps - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/the-surprising-failures-of-12-steps/284616/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> this. so much this. after spending 2 years being forced by my local court to attend 12 step meetings I absolutely can attest to everything stated in this article. It is a religious ceremony disguised as addiction treatment.

I was raised Jewish, however I no longer identify with any religious affiliation. Being forced pretty much at gunpoint to attend Alcoholics Anonymous at churches where they end every single meeting with the people at your table standing, holding hands, and saying a christian prayer out loud with each other, was absolutely abhorrent. The one time I declined to participate in this hand holding I was getting looks full of daggers from everyone who noticed.

Until this recent experience with the judicial system, I still had faith in law enforcement. Now, I think we'd be better off policing ourselves.</comment>


Google Backs Bid To Keep Turing's Papers At Bletchley Park - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1900064/google-backs-alan-turing-papers-bid

<comment><USER2> Respect for our history is something that helps keeps a perspective on the future.

Alan Touring was a martyr to both the Computer industry and the War effort. He dies because his society would prefer to villanize his personal life (Which had no effect on others) rather then laud his achievements, and that's something we should never tolerate.

I realize that the documents are just "Historic notes", but they're the starting block of our computing age. Good for Google.</comment>


Dynamicland and the Whimsical Digital Object: Analoguing the Digital - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/kan-sperling_olivia_28_august_2019.php <comment><USER2> Good / bad / ugly ...

The good: unlike 20 love letters to Bret's work previously upvoted on HN, this response pays it the respect of considering whether it has inherent shortcomings.

The bad: this essay cites Donna Haraway approvingly, which places it firmly in "critical theory" territory, which for some of us flips the bozo bit. Way too much grad student virtue signaling, and while I genuinely admire her decision to think through Dynamicland's PARC heritage, the OOP bits don't work.

The ugly: the author notes Dynamicland's commitment to "working closely with the Oakland community", then blows it off. Having visited Dynamicland, I can confirm that they are serious about being a particular human space. If you're going to challenge their vision (and we should IMHO), you need to grapple with their actual vision, which is of people gathered in a room working together. No "creepy animism" there.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean "creepy animism"? You mean like SJW-type stuff? I don't understand.

<comment><USER2> The phrase comes from the article, and I think it is silly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me, the strange thing about this concept is the emphasis on textual code. There is still a screen and a keyboard, they are just projected or on paper. I think I would enjoy more something like a cable-patch interface. I would draw an integrator on a piece of paper, draw a line to a plot window, also just a rectangle on that paper, draw and an incoming signal from a generator to the integrator, then play with that. Something more like Bret Victors previous demos on dynamic exploration and simulation.

<comment><USER5> _I think I would enjoy more something like a cable-patch interface. I would draw an integrator on a piece of paper, draw a line to a plot window, also just a rectangle on that paper, draw and an incoming signal from a generator to the integrator, then play with that._

That's called LabView. Widely used with instrumentation, or for simulating instrumentation.

The trouble with programming by wiring stuff together is that it doesn't scale. It's been tried many times. The Blender game engine worked that way, and you'd end up with a maze the size of a tabletop for a modest game. At some point you need abstractions, and that model doesn't lead to them.

<comment><USER4> I was going trough wikipedia after your comment, browsing different visual programming languages and paradigms. I suppose you're right that they don't scale in the same way as textual languages. Maybe someone finds a good set of constraints to make them scaleable and the elements abstractable.

Anyway, they do have niche success (if not in general programming); and some of Bret's explorable explanations ideas [1,2,3] seem to point away from textual programming.

[1] [http://worrydream.com/#!/ExplorableExplanations](http://worrydream.com/#!/ExplorableExplanations) [2] [http://worrydream.com/#!/InteractiveExplorationOfADynamicalS...](http://worrydream.com/#!/InteractiveExplorationOfADynamicalSystem) [3] [http://worrydream.com/#!/LadderOfAbstraction](http://worrydream.com/#!/LadderOfAbstraction)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Analoguing the Digital" title reminds me of Goodiepal's Radical Computer Music: [https://vimeo.com/11152592](https://vimeo.com/11152592)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know when the next open-house for dynamicland? I stopped by when I was in San Francisco, but they seemed to be closed to the public. Writing the website got me no reply.</comment>


Java EE application server popularity - <AUTHOR> https://plumbr.eu/blog/most-popular-application-servers-in-2014

<comment><USER2> No blog post of this sort would be complete without a _useless_ pie chart.</comment>


Sacha Baron Cohen Interview Turned Over to the FBI Over Fears of Pedophile Ring - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/sacha-baron-cohen-cut-interview-fbi-pedophile-ring-las-vegas-1202030461/ <comment><USER2> The government shut down Backpage and Craigslist personals because they were supposed conduits for sex trafficking (which seems like it'd make those sites and easy source to find the perpetrators), and here they were presented with video evidence of suspected child sex trade, yet they declined to pursue it.

Is the government interested in stopping this behavior, or just pushing it farther underground and out of sight (yet still accessible to those with enough money and/or power)?

<comment><USER3> A government claims to fight sex trafficking because it's a good excuse that appeals to people's emotions to consent to its abusive behavior and ever extending power over people. It's sort of like a weapon against public opinion, not an attempt to stop any of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a reason hearsay evidence is generally not admissible to establish the truth of what was said. Because people lie all the time, for any reason or no reason at all.

Asssuming this even happened, it's a lot more likely the concierge was trying to entrap or blackmail Sacha than it is that Sacha stumbled upon an underground pedophile ring on the first concierge he interviewed. But Cohen admitting the player got played isn't such a great story.

For all we know this is just more guerrilla marketing for the show. It's not a crime to lie to the public about reporting something to the FBI.

Without a quote from the FBI confirming an investigation was opened and closed there is no actual story here that is fit to print. If there even was an investigation, the fact that it was closed substantiates Cohen having been played, and not a grand conspiracy.

</comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr:

> "And this concierge had said that he'd worked for politicians and various > billionaires. But in the end the FBI decided not to pursue it."

Uhhhh... right. I'm sure those statements don't have a causal relationship whatsoever.</comment>


Using Chef to automate setting up a Rails Server (including sample code) - <AUTHOR> http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/2013/09/using-chef-to-provision-a-rails-and-postgres-server/

<comment><USER2> This is a total side-topic question, but I've always been unsure about this usage of openssl to generate passwords:

          // generate this with: openssl passwd -1 "plaintextpassword"

I'm assuming that there is an implicit presumption that the person executing this snippet will replace the string literal with their own plain text password, but I suspect a lot of new users will simply run that command. Because this is being used as a user password, which will then be hashed again by the OS, is there any security concern here? I'm just not knowledgable enough to know for sure, but it seems like the kind of thing that warrants questioning.

I tend to use `openssl rand` to generate passwords so that I avoid having to create any input myself.

        openssl rand -base64 24

If I need some password length that results in '=' padding, I just use cut:

        openssl rand -base64 41 | cut -c1-41

I've seen this suggested in a lot of places, but likewise, I lack the required knowledge to say if this is any better.</comment>


Ask HN: Interface Engineer Deciding Which System Language To Learn - <AUTHOR>

I have focused the majority of my web development career on developing web interfaces with Javascript/CSS/HTML.  I'm pretty comfortable on the command line in a Linux environment.  Last night I started playing the AWS EC2 and I'm itching to start building a dynamic application.  The last piece is picking a language, the problem, there are so many I don't know which one to invest my time in.
Right now I'm considering:
PHP Python Ruby on Rails Node.js
Any insight is greatly appreciated.  Thanks! <comment><USER2> I never programmed a thing before last year and picked up PHP in just a couple months. The W3schools tutorial is easy: <http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_intro.asp> and the manual is easily understood with examples. <http://php.net/manual/en/index.php>

Python would allow you to code beyond the web though...

</comment><comment><USER3> Node.js might not be a bad option seeing as you already know JavaScript, so could save you time learning new syntax. The other options are more mature though.

</comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't matter. Just pick one and execute.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a front end guy as well and in the last couple of years I've been picking up PHP. Love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the engineers I work with are PHP guys too, so it might be beneficial as I can use them as a resource. Then again, node.js may be the next big thing so I could get ahead of the curve...</comment></comment>


We Are Not Living In A Simulation. Probably. - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40537955/we-are-not-living-in-a-simulation-probably <comment><USER2> People who think they've found a way to contradict the simulation hypothesis remind me of breathless gamblers who are sure they've figured out a system to beat the house. It's simply impossible--the simulation hypothesis is not falsifiable even in principle, so no, you haven't found a way to falsify it. If you think you have, you've failed to understand the possibilities.</comment>


Xfce 4.14 released - <AUTHOR> https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/08/21/xfce-4-14-released-yeah-like-a-week-ago/ <comment><USER2> XFCE is like the Goldilocks DE for me. Not too New Age (Gnome 3) not too much (KDE) and not too little (tiling WM). It's not the prettiest thing but if something bothers me I know I can tweak it and be happy.

Thanks team for keeping some of us sane!!

<comment><USER3> You've perfectly articulated what I love about my current window manager (LXDE). Going to give XFCE another spin based on your comment.

<comment><USER4> I've used both Xfce and more recently tried LXDE. The latter was fine but more minimal and a bit lighter on resources. Now with the upcoming LXQt it might be a good time to switch back to Xfce to avoid the transitional pains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> XFCE is by far my favorite desktop manager. Minimalist, snappy, clean (but not ugly), and customizable.

I like it so much I run GalliumOS on all my Chromebooks and Xubuntu on all my Desktop PCs/VMs.

<comment><USER6> Honestly I think it is the best desktop manager on the linux space, but moving/resizing windows is still very painful compared to windows.

I binded the windows key and arrows to move windows, but it is still nowhere near as powerful as window movement on windows 7, 8, or 10.

<comment><USER7> > but moving/resizing windows is still very painful

Press alt and drag inside a window. Left mouse for moving, right for resizing.

<comment><USER8> I think GP was talking about limited snapping functionality not resize itself.

Those functions were expanded in Windows 10 lately too.

I haven't checked xfwm4 4.14 yet though. If these functions have been enhanced, excellent! If not, it's worth a request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love Xfce. I've never been able to get into a decent workflow with Gnome or KDE. Much lighter on resources it seems, too.

Congrats to the devs!

<comment><USER10> I'm using bspwm on my personal machine and Xfce on my work machine. There's some bug with bspwm and my work's EliteBook docking station that I haven't figured out how to solve yet - something to do with how the internal screen and VGA output are layout...

It's surprisingly complete and stable compared to how light it is. The EliteBook w/ an Intel 520 can't run Gnome without major slowdowns. It has some visually rougher edges compared to Gnome or KDE but it's perfectly doable to make it very presentable, and doesn't take as much resources as both of them - although KDE is not remotely as heavy as Gnome.

I really don't understand how Gnome became this monster of a thing it is today.

<comment><USER11> Well Miguel de Icaza started working for Microsoft, and Gnome immediately went into the toilet. Totally unrelated I'm sure, but that did happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't use xfce any more, but back when I had a hard drive die I ended up installing xubuntu partitioned across 4 USB flash drives(8-16GB each) so I could keep running my laptop. It was one of my first forays into Linux and it blew me away I could do such a thing and have a fairly fully featured desktop environment run smoothly in that situation.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have been using Xfce for 5 years and it never disappoints me. Light, minimal, and very customizable. I hope it does not undergo radical change at the cost of performance just for the sake of redesign that many other desktop environments have gone through.

I still have 15 year old hardware lying around in my home and they come to a stall while running some of the desktop environments that have modernized themselves. But Xfce continues to run fine on them. It would be great if Xfce remains the way it is for another 15 years so that my old hardware continues to work for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672890)

<comment><USER15> But now, the "tour" is available: [https://www.xfce.org/about/tour](https://www.xfce.org/about/tour) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is XFCE these days compared to MATE?

(Although I use MATE with i3wm and panels disabled. I moved to MATE sometime after GNOME 3 was released and I missed GNOME 2)

<comment><USER17> my opinion might be a little dated, because I am currently using deepin, and before that I used xfce for about a year coming from MATE, so I believe the last time I used MATE was 18 months ago.

At that time XFCE seemed to me like a bare bones MATE but in a good way. A little less polish here and there, but overall the system seemed to work better, that means less crashes and less fixing.

One thing I missed in XFCE is the way you can set panels in MATE. It has a lot more placement control and if I remember correctly, it had more plugins and they worked better. But apart from that, XFCE felt more solid and performant than MATE.

<comment><USER18> Crashes?

Last time I had a crash was.... Over a decade ago?

Not that I've used either of those desktops in years, but _any_ crashes from a desktop seems like a major red flag.

<comment><USER17> the ecosystem of a desktop comprises the desktop itself and the bundle of software. I can't recall exactly what went wrong, it might even be I messed up something manually, but using MATE that time I remember things not being as stable as when I moved to XFCE, for instance the display configuration app, albeit uglier in XFCE, for me was much more stable.

But again I might have messed up configuration the first time around

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> XFCE4 is the bomb! I need to start reading the source to see how I can make my own taskbar plugins...

<comment><USER20> [https://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins](https://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At work, I have to use a Windows laptop running stock Ubuntu 16.04 inside Virtualbox. This VM used to behave in weird ways - network got disconnected periodically (only a restart could bring it back), the whole thing would freeze all of a sudden etc. Finally, I got fed up and switched to Xfce. Absolutely no problems now. Thanks to the Xfce developers for a truly amazing piece of software!

</comment><comment><USER22> XFCE for when I want the traditional gui DE (such as on my touch laptop 2-in-1), and Awesome the rest (most) of the time. XFCE is great and continues to improve, highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm using Xfce with Xmonad. Enjoying how simple yet flexible (configuration options) Xfce is.</comment>


Copyleft.org - <AUTHOR> https://copyleft.org/ <comment><USER2> [http://copyfree.org/](http://copyfree.org/)

<comment><USER3> > [http://copyfree.org/](http://copyfree.org/)

If your licensing standard rejects[1] licenses like Apache 2.0 and CC-BY, you _may_ be construing 'Free' too strictly.

[1] [http://copyfree.org/standard/rejected](http://copyfree.org/standard/rejected)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Please Stand Up – macOS app reminds you to stand up every 30 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KNNCreative/please_stand_up <comment><AUTHOR> We sit at our desks for hours each day, wouldn't it be nice to have a dead- simple app to remind us to stand up every 30 minutes? I just create such simple app. Enjoy and love to hear your feedback :)

<comment><USER2> What's the benefit of having this be a desktop application rather than mobile app? How does this differ from existing mobile apps that seem to offer the same general functionality?

<comment><USER3> Not the creator, but it is in your face.

<comment><AUTHOR> lol that's true. I just wanted something to block your screen, you either stand up or click to dismiss, at least I know it's already 30 mins!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat idea. Just a suggestion. Can be made into an Electron App .

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Can you please explain more about Electron App? It's based on Electron. I already exported the binary for macOS and Windows ([https://github.com/KNNCreative/please_stand_up/releases](https://github.com/KNNCreative/please_stand_up/releases)).

Do you mean submit it to Mac App Store? I plan to do it later.</comment></comment>


Getting the details right in an interactive line graph - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heapanalytics.com/line-graph-redesign/

<comment><USER2> Mike Bostock just posted some examples on more accurate line graph mouseovers:

[http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/8027835](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/8027835)

Generally I like google finance's approach of showing mouse over data. Static legend, with everything displayed in one row so it doesn't take up too much horizontal space.

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX%3A.DJI&ei=DfOxUpCA...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX%3A.DJI&ei=DfOxUpCAGsrn0QHp7gE)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the graph is way too busy with the interactive elements and animations. Get rid of the legend box hopping over the data I want to see. In fact, the whole interactivity is pretty useless: the user does not really interact with anything, you're just hovering stuff over the graph. Just utterly pointless.

<comment><USER4> "Utterly pointless" is a bit harsh. Interactivity in a line graph is useful because it helps the user understand the value of any chosen point.

But I do agree that one way to improve this is to make the key static, moved off to the side so that it does not obfuscate the graph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd suggest not moving the legend box (2nd chart) but simply updating it with mouse movements. This will reduce distraction & also provide necessary information. The points on the graph are valuable to see values at a particular space in the graph.</comment>


Dany Levy: What it feels like to cash out, then watch your company die - <AUTHOR> http://bluesky.chicagotribune.com/hub/chi-inc-dany-levy-daily-candy-bsi-hub,0,0.story?track=bluesky-ct-head

<comment><USER2> On the bright side, she made a lot of money (3m for majority share, and then sold to Comcast for 125M, of which she still had probably a non-trivial share) for an email newsletter she started "with the idea to sell it" and for a lot more than she intended (1M).</comment>


Please help us evolve social sharing. - <AUTHOR> https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/42-get-things-centup/invited/4349

<comment><AUTHOR> OR if you want to simply sign up for more info in the future. Check out CentUp.org</comment>


The Illustrated Word2vec - <AUTHOR> https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/ <comment><USER2> _There are clear places where "king" and "queen" are similar to each other and distinct from all the others. Could these be coding for a vague concept of royalty?_

This is a common misunderstanding and unfortunately strengthened by the example of 'personality embeddings'. It is easy to understand intuitively why this is normally not the case. If you rotate a vector/embedding space, all the cosine similarities between words are preserved. Suppose that component 20 encoded 'royalty', there is an infinite number of rotations of the vector space where 'royalty' is distributed among many dimensions. Consider e.g. the personality vector openness-extroversion as values between 0-1. Now we have two persons:

[0, 1] [1, 0]

These vectors are orthogonal, so the cosine similarity is 0. Now let's rotate the vector space by 45 degrees:

[-0.707, 0.707] [0.707, 0.707]

The cosine similarity between the two vectors is still 0. Clearly, the direct mapping of personality traits to vector components is lost (as can be seen in the second vector).

Obviously, this is something that you generally do not want to do for personality vectors. However, there is nothing in the word2vec objectives that would prefer a vector space with meaningful dimensions. E.g. take the skip- gram model, which maximizes the log-likelihood of the probability of a context word f, cooccuring with a context word c. Shortened: p(1|w_f,w_c) = 𝜎(w_f·w_c). So, the objective in vanilla word2vec prefers vector spaces that maximize the inner product of words that co-occur and minimize the inner product of words that do not co-occur. Consequently, if we have an optimal parametrization of W and C (the word and context matrices), any rotation of the vector space is also an optimal solution. Which rotation you actually get is dependent on accidental factors, such as the initial (typically randomized) parameters.

Of course, it is possible to rotate the vector space such that dimensions become meaningful (see e.g. [1]), but with word2vec's default objective meaningful dimensions are purely accidental, and the meaning of vectors is defined in their relation to other vectors / their neighborhood.

[1] [https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1041](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1041)

<comment><USER3> No one is saying that the "royalty" direction should be in the same angle as an axis, or that it should be in the same direction every time you train word2vec of course. It doesn't mean that that direction doesn't exist, and that word2vec doesn't code for such a Royalty direction (or region)

<comment><USER2> Well, obviously, all royalty are going to have similar vectors. The skipgram is just an implicit matrix vectorization of a shifted PMI matrix. And most royalty will have similar co-occurrences. My point is that the vector components do not mean anything in isolation. There is no dimension directly encoding such properties. The king vector means 'royalty' because queen, prince, princess, etc. are have similar directions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

Author here. I wrote this blog post attempting to visually explain the mechanics of word2vec's skipgram with negative sampling algorithm (SGNS). It's motivated by:

1- The need to develop more visual language around embedding algorithms.

2- The need for a gentle on-ramp to SGNS for people who are using it for recommender systems. A use-case I find very interesting (there are links in the post to such applications)

I'm hoping it could also be useful if you wanted to explain to someone new to the field the value of vector representations of things. Hope you enjoy it. All feedback is appreciated!

<comment><USER4> Nice work jalammar! Author of gensim here. Quotes from Dune are always appreciated :-)

Here's some more layman reading "from back when", for people interested in how word2vec compares to other methods and works technically:

\- [https://rare-technologies.com/making-sense-of-word2vec/](https://rare- technologies.com/making-sense-of-word2vec/) (my experiments with word2vec vs GloVe vs sparse SVD / PMI)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU4TlwZzTfU&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU4TlwZzTfU&t=3s) (my PyData talk on optimizing word2vec)

<comment><USER5> The Dune references aren't limited to this article. :)

The BERT article [1] has 'em too!

[1] [https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated- bert/](https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're the first to point that one out! Nice catch!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, I think that is important to remember that dimensions of word2vec DO NOT have any specific meaning (unlike Extraversion etc in Big Five). All of it is "up to a rotation". Using it looks clunky at best. To be fair, I may be biased as I wrote a different intro to word2vec ([http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king- man-woman-queen-why.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen- why.html)).

For implementation, I am surprised it leaves out [https://adoni.github.io/2017/11/08/word2vec- pytorch/](https://adoni.github.io/2017/11/08/word2vec-pytorch/). There are many other, including in NumPy and TF, but I find the PyTorch one the most straightforward and didactic, by a large margin.

<comment><USER7> Well, sort of. They do have a meaning. It's probably not an easily findable or understandable concept to humans. If you hypothetically had a large labeled corpus for a bunch of different features, you could create linear regressions over the embedding space to find vectors that do represent exactly (perhaps not uniquely) the meaning you're looking for... and from that you could imagine a function that transforms the existing embedding space into an organized one with meaning.

<comment><USER8> you could still interchange the dimensions arbitrarily. You can't say "dimension 1 = happiness", a re-training would not replicate that, and would not necessarily produce a dimension for "happiness" at all.

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying that. I'm saying you could identify a linear combination of x,y,z that approximates happiness, and by doing this for many concepts, transform the matrix into an ordered state where each dimension on its own is a labeled concept.

People are quick to claim that embedding dimensions have no meaning, but if that is your goal, and your embedding space is good, you're not terribly far from getting there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent article, thank you. My snag in thinking about word2vec is how the vector model stores information about words with multiple, significantly different definitions, such as 'polish', Eastern Europe or glistening clean.

<comment><USER10> Word2vec doesn't really address multiple meanings (polysemy). There has been some progress on this though. Sebastian Ruder has been tracking the state-of- the-art in this here: [1].

[1] [https://nlpprogress.com/english/word_sense_disambiguation.ht...](https://nlpprogress.com/english/word_sense_disambiguation.html)

Edit: formatting

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you very much for writing this and for making such excellent visuals. This is the single best description of word2vec I've personally ever seen. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER12> Is word2vec still the cutting edge of NLP?

</comment><comment><USER13> fantastic explanation</comment>


Using temporary IPs in the cloud considered harmful - <AUTHOR>

Here's an amusing hobby: 1. Start Amazon EC2 instances (or any other cloud service) 2. Use something like honeyd to listen on all ports 3. Wait for random activity associated with the previous owner of the EC2 instance to start flowing in.
I stumbled across this by accident after getting flooded by connections from apps.facebook.com which seems to be trying to interact with a Facebook app that was previously hosted on an IP which I'm now using. Presumably the previous owner of an EC2 instance had a DNS name that resolved to this IP and didn't see the risks of doing so. Remember: the Amazon public IPs are temporary and will be reassigned once the EC2 instance stops or dies.
For the sake of your users' privacy and security, use Elastic IPs. Even if the instance dies, the Elastic IP still belongs to you and won't be accidentally be reassigned to someone else. When you start up a new instance you can have the Elastic IP assigned to the new instance using ec2-associate-address. <comment><USER3> Am I the only one who get's frustrated by 'considered harmful' titles? Sorry for being off topic.

EDIT: I'll give you that it's not as bad as the whole (win|fail|this) thing that's becoming popular.

<comment><USER4> "x considered harmful" considered harmful

<comment><USER5> <http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html>

<comment><USER6> "'x considered harmful' considered harmful" considered harmful.

Also, I have anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile missiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the sake of your users' privacy and security, use TLS (or IPSec) and a certificate that identifies your server. Anything sent in the clear is vulnerable to eavesdropping and tampering, whether or not the destination IPv4 address appears to be under your control.

<comment><USER8> That's not always practical if you're interacting with another service like Facebook that won't know to check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You should make a web site with examples or a report of the kinds of traffic you get. I'd do it, and get a zillion hits on it and probably some press attention, but it's your idea.

You have a really good point.

<comment><USER10> A cloud version of the Museum of Broken Packets? <http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/mobp/> It could be interesting. Especially if you can identify some random proprietary/custom protocols.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I still get requests to my dedicated server at Softlayer for the Facebook app which used it before me. I've had the server since mid-2008. Really, this seems like a problem on Facebook's side.

The bigger problem is trying to run a mail server on EC2. You can't, really, as a lot of providers are still doing (stupid) IP based filtering.

<comment><USER12> I've been permanently blocking all connections from any AWS/EC2 netblock I identify after an initial exploit attempt. I much prefer temporary blocks triggered by bad behaviour, but the constant onslaught from AWS finally got to be too much. In the last several months, blocking AWS has done more good than harm. I don't seem to be blocking any legitimate traffic or users, just badly behaved startups and downright malicious crackers. It was a tough compromise, but so far it doesn't seem stupid.

<comment><USER13> Right.

Email has essentially converged on a patchwork ad-hoc net-wide implementation of a few of the proposals lampooned in the famous Slashdot copy/paste thing. Small businesses who are serious about getting their mail delivered pay what amounts to a delivery tax. The difference is it is not actually a tax, it is just a per-piece rate paid to a mailing service that keeps up with all the SPF records, feedback loops, blacklist monitoring, etc for us. However, considered from the perspective of the firm, it is essentially a tax, and it means that people paying a penny or two per email end up trustworthy. Everyone else is left in the email wild west, where they either have massive amounts of physical and reputational capital (Amazon et al) and get their mail accepted for free, or they're almost certainly trying to spam you (statistically speaking).

This is strongly related to strong centralization of email. I just had my 20,000th email submitted yesterday. Of those 20k, over 12k belong to just 10 domains. Even that overstates the diversity of spam squashing strategies, since most of the domains eventually use the same RBLs, etc.

<comment><USER10> > "Everyone else is left in the email wild west"

In my experience some anti-spam organisations seem to want to keep that area wild. Or they just don't see the standard problems from their high horses. I get most of my servers listed as dynamic at least twice a year just because the ISP happens to provide residential dynamic DSL in the same netblock. And I can't change the rDNS of course, because the ISP doesn't allow it for people with ranges smaller than /28. Good luck explaining the situation to sorbs or people who block based on sorbs' dynamic list unconditionally.

<comment><USER14> Yeah that sucks. But you have to admit their reasoning is pretty sound.

The minimum "credible" IP suitable for duty as an email server is probably a cheap VPS somewhere.

<comment><USER5> I've had /23s and /22s listed as dynamic incorrectly, and anti-spam organizations wouldn't take them off even when they were either SWIPd through to my company, or were in my ASN.

Getting off the lists is an enormous pain in the ass. They make absurd demands, like changing the rDNS on every single IP in the block to contain the word static.... as though breaking rDNS is a good idea.

<comment><USER14> Argh. Well that's pretty indefensible. There must be some reason, though - <USER2> probably had the bad luck to take over a block that had previously been blacklisted.

That "static" thing is just stupid. God I wish ISPs would just standardise on putting "dyn" into the rDNS of their dynamic IPs though. That would solve so many problems.

<comment><USER5> _you probably had the bad luck to take over a block that had previously been blacklisted._

That's exactly what happened. It was apparently dial-up space many years ago.

I say many, because the space in question has been under my control since 2005, and it's STILL on the dynamic ip list, despite a roughly annual attempt to get de-listed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OMeta: an Object-Oriented Language for Pattern Matching - <AUTHOR> http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. OMeta can create a new parser that inherits from an existing parser. It's unique. But we have to not just parse but also evaluate. OMeta's external DSL is excellent for parsing but seems difficult to use for evaluating.

There are other parser libraries based on PEG such as pyPEG (Python), LPeg (Lua) or Parsec (Haskell). They use internal DSL rather than external DSL. I have used Parslet (Ruby) in my project and it's worth to try. <http://kschiess.github.com/parslet/></comment>


Physicists: Nobody's Telling the Truth About That Downed Russian Warplane - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/physicists-nobodys-telling-the-truth-about-that-downed-1745006126 <comment><USER2> When a plane is hit by a missile, depending on the level of destruction, aerodynamics can be changed so dramatically that any kind of acceleration may occur. This physicist never played a realistic flight simulator, and much less has witnessed a real missile hit. A 90 degree turn is perfectly possible after a missile hit, this is not an elastic choc! Similarly, the plane doesn't fall in free fall, in a vacuum! FUCK, there's an atmosphere, and even if the motors didn't provide any propultion at all anymore, and even with most wings destroyed, planes are made to FLY, ie. they still have lift (cf. eg. the F15 that landed with a single wing).

So while it's a good idea to check facts with some trivial physics, if you use simplified models you cannot begin to approach a description the reality.

Therefore this article should not have the highlighting it is given here (already saw it twice, that's too much for such a poor article).</comment>


How We're Building a Business to Last - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-were-building-a-business-to-last/?m=1 <comment><USER2> I wonder if we will eventually see open source projects getting a fair cut from cloud vendors. For example, with AWS both their cache offerings are built on open source (redis and memcached), many of their DB offerings (Aurora and RDS versions of MySQL and Postgres) etc.

It seems like giving a meager cut back to these companies could go a long way, rather than forcing them to compete with added features on their own SaaS offerings.

I wonder if this could be done via licensing, i.e a commercial license that only kicks in when you offer the project as a service.

Does anyone know of anything being done like this?

<comment><USER3> > I wonder if this could be done via licensing, i.e a commercial license that > only kicks in when you offer the project as a service.

The AGPL can be used this way. The project is free and open source, but people wanting to sell it as a service will pay for a commercial license instead of using the AGPL.

<comment><USER4> Only if they want to modify it and not give back. If people want to use the code as is AGPL doesn't really help.

<comment><USER5> And from the outside, it's nigh impossible to know if the source code for a hosted open-source product has been modified or not, unless they make it blatantly obvious, which makes the AGPL extremely difficult to enforce. In addition, a lot of great hosted open-source products are designed to be extensible through plugin architectures so that its functionality can be extended through code that lives outside of the core codebase, and AGPL can introduce a perverse incentive to close off the product for extension to the detriment of the quality of the code base and the experience of end-users, in the name of not circumventing the protections provided by AGPL.

That said, AGPL is still my go-to license to reach for when I build open- source products that can be self-hosted, but it's by no means a silver bullet, even for its intended purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > features necessary for a startup to succeed will be APL, and part of the > open core; a feature which is primarily useful only to an already successful > company will be CCL, and part of the enterprise product.

This sounds like an excellent guiding principle to strive for in an open-core development model. There's definitely still a fine line to walk to determine how to apply that principle to each new feature, but it's encouraging to see that they've at least put enough thought to arrive at a reasonable-sounding compromise to hold themselves to.

I personally still vastly prefer to use and build products that are entirely open, funded through hosted SaaS services and support contracts, but that model definitely doesn't fit very well for infrastructure products like databases where a very significant portion of the user base would prefer to self host.

And speaking as a pragmatist, if a open-core product's paid features genuinely only become useful once a product reaches a scale where licensing costs become insignificant relative to the revenue generated by the product, and the source code for those paid features are readily available to be inspected and extended, then as far as I'm concerned it's as good as any fully open-source alternative from a licensing perspective.

I'd much rather see companies use a open-core model like this that makes reasonable compromises in order to sustain their business rather than close off their product entirely. This is especially important for core infrastructure products like databases, where the difference between open-core and fully proprietary often means the difference between a product worthy of a cautious evaluation and one that's simply a non-option for many developers, myself included. And that's always a shame because there are some very promising proprietary products like this that I simply refuse to consider using in a early stage product due to feature/scaling/deployment/licensing restrictions (Datomic being the one that's always lingering in the back of my mind).

</comment><comment><USER6> Seeing the fall of RethinkDB followed by the death of Basho is not an encouraging sign for the industry, however my personal gut feeling is that if they deliver what they promise, there is definitely room in the game for them.

<comment><USER7> Is Basho dead?

<comment><USER8> Sadly, it is. HN discussion from 11 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15182566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15182566)

> _In 2017, Basho was put into receivership._

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cockroach in context of resiliency towards Nuclear impact is a great name for this DB. But it doesn't sound serious.

<comment><USER10> I'm under the impression that this name based aversion is only existing among English native speaking people. Here on the other side of the fence, even if some do know what a cockroach is, I see no gut reactions (but I'm only a single data point).

<comment><USER11> I can say for sure it's not just for English speaking people.

Rather, I'm actually curious why you think some cultures may even think that cockroaches are OK.

Cockroaches are universally considered as pests all over the world because they ARE pests, that's how they survive. Look up wikipedia to learn more about cockroaches. They have an entire section describing the relationship between humans and cockroaches, mostly about them being a pest.

<comment><USER12> I read bpizzi's post as saying that, for non-native English speakers, the name doesn't trigger the same aversion because the mental connection between the English name and memories of the bugs is weaker, since we grew up calling them something else. At least that's the case for me, as a non-native English speaker myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Previous discussion from January [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13438476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13438476)

</comment><comment><USER14> Congrats and definitely it's for the long game. Changing infrastructure is a hard thing to convince revenue generating companies to do, as they aren't as price sensitive. It'll take years to grow the product to the point where it reaches enough word of mouth recommendations to be considered the first choice. That or you have some killer feature that everyone has got to have.

</comment><comment><USER15> Suggestion : smaller cockroaches belong to the family Ectobiidae.

How about EctoDB ?

(I actually love the name CockroachDB but it seems to be an intractable problem for some!)

<comment><USER16> I like the name but there's potential for confusion with Ecto[1]

[1] [https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto](https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto)

<comment><USER15> Dagnabit, we're running out of words!

Well, all Cockroaches belong to the order Blattodea... but BlattoDB conjures the wrong feelings.

I'm sure these have been offered before, inspiration from nature:

TardigraDB (Water bears)

EchinoDB (starfish)

Morphallaxis

BorgDB (OK, that one is Star Trek!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> By making the association with cockroaches so explicit, they're placing a bet:

      *People will change their perceptions and "cockroach" will assume a new meaning. Instead of "something disgusting and negative", people will associate the word with "something resilient and positive".*

It's a tough bet to place. We've been around cockroaches for millions of years, and the roots of the disgust are deeply biological (HW, not just SW).

Will the masses shift their mental model, for this company?

</comment><comment><USER18> I was hoping they'd choose DBaaS. But I get it. How do you really compete when you'd ultimately probably have to run your operation on cloud providers' infrastructure.

The "open core" model in open source has always felt like a "poor man's acquihire" to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just wish it had a better name like ResilientDB.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. I actually didn't give it much attention for the longest time simply because of the name (I'm talking years - just checked it out a few months ago although I heard of it probably a couple years ago). Now that I've taken the time to check out the project, I'm sold and will definitely use it in place of Postgres, etc. But, the name does turn off some newbies. Eventually it may not matter as all good brands eventually just become familiar.

<comment><USER11> One of the reasons I'm put off by their name is because I know that they know a lot of people don't like the name. Them knowing this AND keeping at it means they don't care about losing out on tons of users because of this trivial matter, which means they are not being professional. When it comes to something like a database system, I want to use something that's built by a professional team.

When I say they don't feel professional I don't mean their tech is unprofessional. In fact I'm sure their tech is excellent and that's why they're so confident enough to keep at this name. But what I'm saying is I don't believe that the executives or whoever is in charge of the business is reliable enough to keep the business stable.

I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable buying a piece of enterprise software or service from a company whose CEO thinks it's OK to have a brand name that turns off tons of users and don't care.

<comment><USER21> turns off idiots, sure, I honestly can't believe the stupidity of these bikeshed comments.

<comment><USER11> That's not how bikeshedding works

<comment><USER21> Instead of discussing the merits of the business model, or technology, they are discussing what it is called, because it is easier.

It is not bikeshedding in the traditional sense, but the spirit is the same.

<comment><USER11> With that reasoning, every single discussion thread that contains criticism is bikeshedding.

Bikeshedding is for people who care about a project in one way or another. In their mind they're contributing because they're providing feedback, but overall they're just wasting time because their "work" is far from significant, which means they are not really achieving what they think they're achieving.

In this case most people who complain about their name are not their users. Some actually do want to be excited about their tech and want to be their users but they are not. Which means none of these have any intention of trying to make this project better. I am not their employee nor their shareholder. Why should I care about them?

"Bikeshedding" only applies to people who have stakes in a project or care about the success of the project because they are foolishly wasting time on something that doesn't matter when they actually think they are contributing.

This is not the case in this case. I do not care about cockroachdb and I am not trying to contribute to their success. I just bitch about it because i think it's a stupid decision. This is not bikeshedding.

<comment><USER21> It's like criticizing the hairstyle of your doctor. Do you complain when users report 'bugs' to you too?

My first reaction when I heard that name was to think - 'must be designed to be hard to kill'.

<comment><USER11> If I went to a dentist and he had a mohawk with pink hair, I would be concerned. And that's how most people react too. I'm not a fan of dressing up which is why I can't imagine myself working at a wall street firm, but at the same time it's arrogant to think that you can beat everyone else even when you are clearly exhibiting a behavior some people find repulsive.

If there was another dentist with exactly the same skills both technically and socially, there is no reason for patients to go to the guy with pink mohawk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Stubbornly and childishly keeping a name that is revolting is not what I'd call 'building a business to last'.

The name is instinctively disgusting. I will never recommend this product to any of my clients for that reason alone.

<comment><USER23> And I am sure that they are very happy to not have you or your clients as customers. Anyone who would base a technical decision on a name should never be in a position to influence technical decision-making, and anyone who hires such unqualified people deserves the bad advice they will receive.

<comment><USER22> Sorry, but technical decisions _also_ need to be based on trust, and a company that chooses a name like this is _not_ a shining example of trust. But we're not going to see eye to eye on this, so let's end it here without anymore personal insults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's all well and nice, but we're currently not living in a world that will last. We're on the brink of some huge changes: oil getting replaced as main resource, AI becoming more and more able to really help making business & political decisions, space flight becoming affordable, the big players on the planet increasing their military and trying to buy each others valuable corps and resources.

Even the biggest companies are more and more moving to flexible business models, not really being anything like what the label says outside on the door. Just think about banks. Once the most stable institutions in the world, now not sure what they are. But everybody knows they need to adapt in some way if they want to stay relevant.

Trump, Putin, Xi, all people you better don't mess with. All people who are totally willing to mess with others. What happens when they start to mess with each other? And maybe that just has symbolic value, but next week the German government is re-elected, and the Nazis will get 10% of the parliament seats.

Nobody knows what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years. How can you build something to last that is not a few hundred meters underneath a huge mountain and self sufficient?

<comment><USER8> Yes, the world is changing and there's a lot that's uncertain. However, this is really over the top and has little to do with the submission per se. Do you have anything specific and constructive regarding the post? Strategies they should be using to build their business? Say what you want about their business strategy. At least it's an ethos.

<comment><USER24> I don't know if this fallacy has a name, but many people have it. In many situations the goal itself must be adapted according to the environment, in this case attempting to build a business to last is the mistake. The smarter way is to not have a company and let others worry about it, or to build a company to grow quickly, so that it can take a newly formed space quickly.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any advice or resources for socially responsible investing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends on what one considers socially responsible and the forms of spending one considers investment. I mean, endowing a medical research chair at a university is a form of investment, but it doesn't offer cash on cash returns to the endower.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given that one has a desire to purchase investment returns and purchase the feeling of doing socially responsible things, it is highly recommended to purchase these separately. Most products available for "socially responsible investing" are mutual funds who use social responsibility just as a marketing angle; they often charge 100 basis points or more higher than vanilla offerings from Vanguard or similar. (Performance prior to fees is similar; no definition of socially responsible investing or socially irresponsible investing creates alpha over the market.)

I can appreciate that one might capture utility from knowing that one does not support institutions that one thinks are odious, even in the _extremely attenuated_ nature that beneficially owning a few shares of their stock counts as support. That said, weigh the options here: 100 basis points drag on your return over your investing life costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. If your choices are a) sleep the sleep of the righteous while doing nothing of positive value for causes you care about or b) give causes you care about hundreds of thousands of dollars at the cost of occasionally owning ~5 shares of a company whose operations you dislike, which sounds like a better option to you?

Edit to add:

People might feel like I'm not being concrete enough here, so let me use an example which (playing the percentages) is specifically chosen to gore my ox rather than yours. Ave Maria Mutual Funds has a variety of actively-managed and index fund products which are targeted specifically at Catholics. Specific example: AVEMX. Their investment criteria is, basically, "US equities at any sizes in any industries at our discretion; we promise not to invest in anyone who supplies abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, or pornography."

People have entrusted this fund with $200 million. I will elide their investment results, as you should assume that any fund will probabalistically get market results going forward, and focus strictly on their expense ratio: 1.19% per year.

If you take out the Catholic angle, this firm is selling exposure to the US stock market. A competing way to buy this exposure is through the Vanguard Total Market fund (INT), or its ETF (VTI). Vanguard charges, for the mutual fund, 0.16% per year (103 BPS less) or 0.05% per year (114 BPS less) if you get their admiral shares (minimum investment: $10k).

You should reasonably expect approximately 8% average returns over the long- run in US equities. Maybe less. If you invest $10k in the Vanguard option and hold for 30 years, you will have $96k. (I used the more expensive of the two options for giggles.)

If you invest in Ave Maria and hold, and Ave Maria gets market returns, you will have $60k.

$36k could do a lot of things a Catholic might care about, which is why I am not invested in Ave Maria, am invested in various Vanguard funds, and have an exposure denominated in tens of dollars to e.g. IHG, a hotel chain which earns basis points of its revenue from selling pornographic movies.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to piggyback on this to suggest that, as Patrick says, invest your money responsibly to make more from it... If you want to then plow some of it back into socially responsible causes, use the same scrutiny. As a reference, I recommend Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better.[1]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective- Difference...](http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective- Difference/dp/1592409105/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Vanguard has a social responsibility fund.

</comment><comment><USER6> Which area you are interested in?</comment>


Dropping Prices Again-- EC2, RDS, EMR and ElastiCache - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/dropping-prices-again-ec2-rds-emr-and-elasticache.html <comment><USER2> Does anybody have a history of AWS price decreases?

I have seen a lot of startup internal docs where they compare the costs of AWS with colo, other cloud etc. and not one of them took into account the discounts that Amazon applies. Chances are that over 3-5 years you will see a number of price discounts - one of the only providers that does this for existing purchased infrastructure, keeping your costs in line with savings from Moore's law rather than locking in for years.

I would like to know the complete discount history because there would be enough data points now to project estimated discounts forward

<comment><USER3> If you rent servers or buy colo from anyone else, you can ALWAYS renegotiate all prices based on a new level (if you've got a cage and want to expand to a floor, it becomes a negotiating point; you don't get stuck paying the higher price on that cage and a lower price on the floor.

Until very recently, the only Amazon discounts I've ever heard of were the Reserved Instances (which really only makes sense once you're familiar with your needs). Inability to negotiate pricing is one of the main reasons a lot of consultants still go with non-Amazon options -- the client sees the list pricing for EC2 and knows what markup you're applying, vs. another option (or your own cage/suite/floor/facility) where you can consolidate all the charges.

<comment><USER4> If consultants can't do business by adding a line item for their costs and have to mark up what you buy then don't hire them.

<comment><USER3> There are a lot of resellers of various services with different levels of value-add. The reality of the hosting business is that different providers give different levels of service, and in a lot of industries you do not want your customers to know your costs, so breaking it out as a separate line item isn't always optimal. Businesses actively try to avoid their product being viewed as a commodity.

There are also purchasing people in big companies who are paid to negotiate down quotes. If you tell them there is only one price for EC2, and they can't get a 5% discount for a large order, they will in some cases have a perverse incentive to go to a more expensive (list price) provider who will give them a discount (so they appear to be doing their job), even if the total price ends up higher, or the service ends up worse. This is one of the many problems with enterprises.

I'm not saying which model is better, but it's definitely a factor with some clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most dedicated hosting solutions offer some bandwidth in their pricing and not a trivial amount either. 3TB a month is not uncommon which would cost an extra $350 a month on Amazon. If they want to compete vs dedicated hosts and it seems they are with all these price drops and reserved instances, they should take that into account, because right now they are just way too expensive.

<comment><USER6> We actually get 10 TB included... :)

<comment><USER7> You get 100TB at 100tb.com... :)

<comment><USER8> I dropped my account with them because their network could never push data faster than a few MB/s. Just personal experience.

<comment><USER9> Bandwidth =! total data transfer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not dropping the hourly rate for existing reserved instances leaves me feeling very short-changed.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I feel like an idiot now for just buying a bunch of reserved instances. By my calculations if you just bought a reserved instance you'd actually save money by rebuying it if you plan to run it heavily over the three year period!

<comment><USER12> I've been holding off on buying reserved instances because it looked like they were overdue for a price cut. Even now I'm not sure if I should go ahead and buy -- sure, I'd save money compared to the current on-demand instance prices, but is the 2012 reserved pricing cheaper than the 2014 on-demand pricing will be?

I really hope Amazon adds more transparency into the pricing so I can stop worrying about things like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off topic, but...

I launched a little web app about a year ago to play around with AWS and to take advantage of a free trial. It has grown organically with absolutely no marketing and even got covered by Lifehacker. It's a filesharing app for groups and is used heavily by the education sector.

My free trial period expired a few months ago and I don't know if I can justify supporting the app. I've put it maybe 10 minutes of work since I launched it a year ago, and have not yet attempted to monetize. Anybody interested in taking this off my hands? Cash or something else? I'm open to ideas.

<comment><USER14> How much traffic?

You could try selling it on flippa.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So i could just be dumb, but there is something about this pricing that doesn't make sense to me. All of this is based on micros in the Virginia region, and having them for 12 months.

 _On demand for 12 months: $170 = (0.02_ 24 * 365)

 _Spot instance for 12 months: $52.56 = (0.006_ 24 * 365)

 _Light utilization - reserved for 1 year: $128 = (($0.012_ 24 * 365) + $23)

 _Medium utilization - reserved for 1 year: $115.32 = (($0.007_ 24 * 365) + $54)

 _Heavy utilization - reserved for 1 year: $105.80 = (($0.005_ 24 * 365) + $54)

I get that the spot instance price may change, but it would likely always be lower than on demand and given that the others prices change, are they just the best option?

So...maybe the marketing words are getting me confused, but i thought that heavy would be more expensive? Or is this telling me that i'm located with other heavy users, therefore i'm getting less and i pay less?

Today we use a lot of micros, i'm starting to realize how much we could save if we switch...however whats a "better server" a heavy or a light?

<comment><USER16> From Amazon:

Light Utilization:

"Light Utilization RIs offer the lowest upfront payment of all of the Reserved Instance types. Along with this low upfront payment, you'll receive a significantly discounted hourly usage fee. Light Utilization RIs allow you to turn off your instance at any point and not pay the hourly fee."

Medium Utilization:

"Medium Utilization RIs are the exact same Reserved Instances that EC2 has offered for the last several years. They have a higher upfront payment than Light Utilization RIs, but a much lower hourly usage fee. Medium Utilization RIs allow you to turn off your instance at any point and not pay the hourly fee."

Heavy Utilization:

"With this RI, you pay a little higher upfront payment than Medium Utilization RIs, a significantly lower hourly usage fee, and you're charged that lower hourly rate for every hour in the Reserved Instance term you purchase."

Source: <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/>

<comment><USER15> Yeah i get the pricing of light and heavy etc....but it doesnt actually state if they are different in performance or if its just a pricing thing?

If its just a pricing thing, the difference between $23 - $54 to add an extra $15 / savings over a year seems reasonable to me...but if there was a performance hit i'd think again.

<comment><USER17> It's only a pricing thing. (Think of it as a variable capex/opex tradeoff)

Source: AWS guys that I met a couple of weeks ago were repeating this like a mantra (I think they get a lot of support requests for it)

<comment><USER15> ah ok then. Well i guess thats good news. That will make our business a lot cheaper to run...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We're almost done updating over 2,000 prices from AWS clouds: [http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/03/were-updating- over-2000...](http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/03/were-updating- over-2000-prices-from-aws.html)

You might prefer to use ShopForCloud.com to get cost estimates rather than use Excel spreadsheets. They have a lot prices to update, for example, EC2 has 7 clouds x 13 types of instances x at least 3 OS choices (Linux, Windows, Windows with SQL Server) x at least 4 purchase options (on-demand, light/medium/heavy-utilization reserved) => 1,092 individual prices! Just goes to show that they have pretty complicated pricing schemes.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's fair to mention that maintenance of your infrastructure on AWS is far from negligible. This is not unique for private clouds.

Especially given certain unpredictability in instance and EBS performance.

<comment><USER20> EBS is like the Matrix part III and Star Wars Episode I... It is best if you ignore the rumors that it exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Must be kind of funny to look at their accounting reports.

"Thanks everyone for your hard work this week. We're making substantially less money than last week. Let's keep it up people!"

<comment><USER22> You can either sell one can of soda for $5 profit or you can sell ten for $1 profit.

<comment><USER23> Or you can sell 1 for $1 profit, and lose $4 dollars over one sell at $5.

Lower prices != more volume guaranteed, you have to find an equilibrium.

<comment><USER24> Something tells me Amazon understands price elasticity pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Off-topic but relevant: does anyone have a good up-to-date tutorial on how to get started with cloud computing? Ie different alternatives, and pros/cons of each. And some info on how to get started doing common tasks.

<comment><USER26> I wrote a basic primer for django on EC2 to take advantage of the free tier last week here: [http://eddychan.com/post/18484749431/minimum-viable-ops- depl...](http://eddychan.com/post/18484749431/minimum-viable-ops-deploying- your-first-django-app-to)

<comment><USER27> Thanks, I'll need this in a few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If only mobile phone service providers followed the same path...

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm anxiously waiting for that moment where cloud storage becomes cheaper than buying a hard drive. Only at that point will consider I going all-cloud.

<comment><USER30> As a heavy EC2 user, you have got to think about the performance ramifications. EC2 EBS disks are abysmal in terms of performance.

<comment><USER31> I keep wondering why Amazon doesn't fix this. The problem isn't so much the baseline performance which isn't stellar but can be designed to, but rather the massive variance in performance that arbitrarily changes moment to moment.

<comment><USER3> Arbitrary configuration networked disk is Hard, probably harder than anything else AWS does. Enterprise still spends a lot on storage (generally big hardware RAIDs, dedicated storage area networks, etc.). 1 GB of enterprise storage might cost 50-100x the base per-GB cost of the cheapest SATA disk, by the time you include all the costs. No AWS customer wants to pay that much of a premium.

You can often build a storage system for a very specific purpose more more cheaply (maybe 3x the base drive cost?), like the Backblaze pods, or just figure the cost of adding 4-8 x SATA drives and software RAID 10 to each of your servers, but then you get to try to solve the filesystem problem, and have weird performance characteristics. Plus, if you think EBS reliability is bad (it is), wait for the joy of statistically significant number of spinning rust drives in anything not designed with enough redundancy, and where some failures are correlated (trays failing at the same time, controller bugs, ...).

One of Google's big advantages was always their Google File System. And GFS is a lot better for the specific loads in search than for the kind of loads applications like gmail impose.

Local instance storage is really the only performant and cost effective thing. You can hang a lot more direct attached disk off your own server than off any AWS instance (1.7TB).

The other area where AWS kind of falls down is "mad RAM" servers. I can buy 288GB RAM servers (18-slot) cheaply now (well, 144GB is cheap, 288GB is less so), and 2TB RAM is available (64-slot). AWS tops out at 68GB for about 5x the lease payments on these servers (so maybe 2x the loaded cost after Reserved Instance discounts)

<comment><USER32> Moving from MySQL on EBS to a Cassandra cluster on locally-attached ephemeral storage was the first time I was happy with a database on EC2.

EBS is convenient as a permanent root for instances, but for anything that actually uses the disk, it's a pain train. I think of it as a large "pen- drive" for the cloud these days.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kindle now $189 - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C <comment><USER2> I got my Sony PRS-300 (no WiFi or 3G) for $115 from Woot, and I love it (never thought I'd buy, or like, an e-reader). So, why pay for a Nook or Kindle? When I'm out-and-about with my reader I'm, shock of all shocks, reading with it (not buying more books).

Thoughts?</comment>


Show HN:  VerticalChange, SurveyMonkey meets Highrise (and a LOT of AngularJS) - <AUTHOR>

We built a "people management platform".  I think this falls into the "unsexy" category.
Users can build custom forms to track any type of data for people. While the application is applicable in many different markets, our initial target is social-service agencies, non-profits, and case-managers (it's where we think we can make the biggest positive impact).
Technology wise, our upcoming blog posts might be something like "2 years with AngularJS" and "HIPAA Compliance on AWS".  We've had a great time developing with tools and platforms like AngularJS, Postgres (w/ hstore), Rails, Golang, Chef, AWS (VPC), etc.
A long time in the making, we have happy clients, and are really excited to get some more eyes on it.  Any feedback is always appreciated, and I'm happy to answer any questions.  Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: [https://verticalchange.com](https://verticalchange.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> Love to hear more about HIPAA compliance on AWS, been there recently and would love to see other's take on it. Especially because the AWS whitepaper is so....unsubstantial.

<comment><USER3> A lot of HIPAA compliance comes down to documentation, etc, for example getting AWS to sign BAA

From a technical perspective, here are some highlights.

Run everything in VPC, with private and public subnets only exposing bare minimum externally

All disks are encrypted (we used dm-crypt)

All data at rest on s3 or in flight is encrypted.

Redundant encrypted backups

Enable multi-form auth on AWS signin, audit IAM users

Don't rely on external service providers for anything (except AWS of course)

Make sure have an audit trail for everything. We log every action a user makes including the response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be great if you could share your insights into handling authentication with an API. I am still yet to find a perfect way to do it.

<comment><USER3> I am not certain if you are referring authenticating to an API via Angular or just API auth in general, but I can touch on both.

atm, we just use traditional rails authentication since our angular app is the only consumer of the api. But, that will be a bridge we need to cross soon and will post our findings. I would start by looking at how other market leaders do it, eg Stripe et al.

As far as connecting an angular app to backend api, I would look at this [http://www.frederiknakstad.com/authentication-in-single- page...](http://www.frederiknakstad.com/authentication-in-single-page- applications-with-angular-js/)

<comment><USER4> Yes I am referring to Authentication via Social Auth like Facebook and normal email/pass auth as well. But I am using Django as the backend, not node like most of these tutorials are using.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unsexy is the new sexy. Go Silicon Beach!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what we were thinking! Out of all the markets we looked at, this seemed to be the most underserved in terms of software. There is _a lot_ of partial software solutions out there, but they are all extremely antiquated and end up being a huge burden on the users.

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of Appfolio and how antiquated rental property mgmt software was before they came out with their product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So this is a CRM for non-profits? Or a HR tool?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is actually a combination of both.

HR Tool: You can add all of your agencies employees, and use the system like a case management platform. You can see what your employees are doing in an event stream, and also assign them tasks.

CRM: More so this. Add all of your clients, jot down case notes, administer surveys for them, etc. You'd see a lot of similarities between us an Highrise in terms of CRM features.</comment></comment>


Coronavirus: Why Everyone Was Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigkeit/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong-fce6db5ba809 <comment><USER2> > Those young and healthy people who currently walk around with a mask on > their faces would be better off wearing a helmet instead, because the risk > of something falling on their head is greater than that of getting a serious > case of Covid-19.

I'm healthy and young and I might not die from Covid. But if I catch it I will almost certainly kill my mother.

<comment><USER3> Either there's something very unusual about your personal situation, or you're using "almost certainly" to mean "well under ten percent", or your statement is simply false. Estimates of the household secondary attack rate vary but are typically low tens of percent[1][2], and the IFR even for patients >80 years old is about 8%[3]. The probability that your mother would die if you became infected is the product of those two.

To be clear, I wear a mask and I support orders requiring that, since the cost of mask-wearing seems very small to me in exchange for the possible benefit. (If anyone finds a mask uncomfortable, I'd suggest a better mask. Surgical- style masks are much easier to breathe through than fabric, and widely available near pre-pandemic prices.) We should avoid hyperbolic, misleading, or false statements in support of a noble cause, though.

1\. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099\(20\)30471-0/fulltext)

2\. This is unintuitive given the close contact sharing a household and R0 = 2.5, but consistent with the theory that spread is driven by a small fraction of super-spreaders, while most infected transmit the disease to no one at all.

3\. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099\(20\)30243-7/fulltext)

<comment><USER4> You might be ignoring the fact that they know what "comorbidities" their mother has. So general population percentages might not apply to them.

<comment><USER3> I started my reply with the words "Either there's something very unusual about your personal situation...". So can you give an example of comorbidities that you wouldn't consider very unusual, and your estimate of the probability that the mother would die if the child were infected in that case? Remember that:

1\. The secondary household attack rate is far less than 100%; the paper I cited found 18% for people >= 60 years old sharing the same address. So even if the child becomes infected, the mother probably wouldn't be.

2\. Most eighty-year-olds have a lot of comorbidities already, so the IFR for that age group accounts for that.

Assuming only that the mother is in the oldest age category from each paper and the probabilities are independent, I get a probability that the mother dies if the child is infected of 1.4%. Comorbidities can indeed drive that higher, and maybe there's some dependence (sicker people both more likely to catch the coronavirus and more likely to die from it); but I think you'll find it very hard to build a plausible set of assumptions that would get you to "almost certainly", unless the mother is so sick that she's likely to die soon regardless. (Of course, that wouldn't mean her life is without value. But it would mean that when we decide we can't do something until a vaccine is available, we're deciding she can't do it ever again in her life. If it were my life, then I'd judge that calculation differently.)

Most discussion of probability of death feels rather ghoulish, and the above is no exception. All of us will die, though, and it's a question only of what we can do in the time before that. I'd rather plan that time using the best empirical estimates we can make than with half-informed hyperbole. Wouldn't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Less than 2% mortality for those under 65 years of age in developed countries. I think we should have only quarantined the elderly.

<comment><USER6> Let's separate the mortality rate from the actual impacts, which are multiple. The hospitals in multiple places are overwhelmed for months with cv19 cases. The mortality doesn't matter when NYC, much of Italy and Spain, and now Texas and Florida hospitals are overfull with patients being treated for cv19, and other patients are hurt because they can't be treated or are afraid to go. There is excess deaths (ie more people dying than would otherwise, more than a typical flu year).

In the us we went through a long period of shutdown and we still ended up with this happening in several places. If we only quarantined the elderly, we'd still have this happening, but it would have been much much worse. Even if the death rate ends up being low, like 2%, we'll still kill a lot of people through hospitalization overload. That's why we need to social distance and wear masks - we don't need to wear masks only if the death rate is > 2%. It's to decrease the whole impact.

Plus when this article was written it was back in the magical thinking period that somehow in the summer the incidence would go to almost 0. We now see that it's still very infectious and will be ruining people's lives for a long time.

<comment><USER3> The IFR is far below 2% for young people--a recent meta-analysis[1] got 0.7% over all ages. That study didn't break it down by age, but an older one that did[2] (and got a similar IFR over all ages) got 0.14% for <60 years old, mostly from the older end of that.

There's moderate evidence for seasonality, from studies comparing countries with different climates and trying to control for other factors, trying to regress against actual weather over weeks, etc. That's empirically not enough to bring R < 1 in the summer in the USA in combination with whatever we've been doing, but a big effect might still be there--we might just have relaxed the social distancing by enough to more than offset. If that's the case, then we're potentially in for a terrible fall and winter (and places that have built up some degree of herd immunity--whether quasi-intentionally like Sweden or accidentally like NYC--could end up better off in the end).

As to excess deaths: As far as I understand, most of those actually observed are probably unconfirmed coronavirus deaths, rather than unrelated deaths due to an overrun medical system or people afraid to seek care. I've seen speculation that the latter may occur, but no strong evidence (since even NYC barely occupied the Navy hospital ship or other temporary facilities, and since no excess deaths have been seen in areas with the lockdowns that would discourage people from seeking care but without big coronavirus prevalence).

To be clear, I'm strongly pro-mask, and pro-social-distancing. (I do think stuff like factory and school closures comes at an unacceptable social cost for the benefit to public health, though that's been reversed most places.) I just want to make the argument with the right facts.

1\. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v4.full.pdf)

2\. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099\(20\)30243-7/fulltext)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few good points (like the PCR detecting only RNA which does not equate to live virus) in a sea of "interesting" spin about the current data.

I really don't understand why it's "us vs them" in either camp ("doom and gloom" and "skeptics"). This makes things worse, since both camps tend to quote only evidence which support their respective claim (two examples: the Guardian saying that asymptomatic people spread more virus than the symptomatic ones, despite the study they quote saying that it can't be said, because they did not check for live virus; and some web page called "Swiss policy research" which quotes only the parts of the studies which conform to the "skeptical" narrative).

<comment><USER8> Indeed, with so much published stuff about it and still so much in the unknown and with that, our best evidence so far is what is published. then the ability to cherry pick across many sources of published data/reports and stitch together those in a way that you could make so many things appear legit, well. It really don't help as other people will just reference the sewn together published article and propagate from their. Vague news is after all, latent fake news most of the time alas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it discouraging that exceptionally little is said about the outcomes for those who survive a bad case. IMNSHO, the big scare isn't death, it's being out of breath for the rest of a considerably shorter life, or being tied to a dialysis machine, or being perpetually foggy brained and easy to anger, etc.

The long-term damage to the country will be from damage to survivors, not from deaths.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's funny in a sad way to read an article like this one now a month later when it has become very clear that the virus comes back with vengeance in places that have lifted restrictions summer or no summer.

Also, the semantics of whether it can be called novel or not doesn't matter one iota when the virus-caused pneumonia overwhelms medical systems in mere weaks if left to roam unchecked.

<comment><USER11> it really sounds like the youth got sick and tired of the lock-down and would rather get sick than continue with the never ending prison like conditions

it probably is the right course of action - even though ethically no official can suggest that

the paper is supported in the sense that everyone is wrong about how dangerous the disease is, and whether people should be allowed to decide what risk they are willing to take

<comment><USER6> I disagree with your last point - this is very infectious and because we can't know in many cases if we are carrying it, it's incumbent on everyone to protect others by wearing a mask. Because many don't know they have it, it's different than the flu where ordinary flu often has clear symptoms before infectiousness starts.

<comment><USER11> the "mask" is the red herring of every discussion. It is a talisman that people cling to as a way to ward off any of the ills.

I happen to be convinced that some types of masks, like the reusable cloth masks actually make you sicker.

Here is a well research piece with a randomized trial that shows how continuously worn cloth masks are worse than using them more rarely (control) (leading to 4% more infections):

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/)

Of course I don't expect this research to be quoted in the current hysterical environment.

But I would not be surprised if by this time next year the world will be full with publications on how cloth masks cause more trouble than worth with a strong recommendation to avoid them.

<comment><USER12> You have misread the paper. It says that cloth masks are worse than medical masks, and worse than "standard practice" which seems to be mostly medical masks but not worn as rigorously. They didn't test against no masks, which would be insanely dangerous in a hospital.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. I saw that paper cited frequently back when the public health authorities were advising against masks, and I'm afraid their decision to characterize standard practice including medical mask wearing as the "control arm" has caused considerable confusion and harm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the middle of a pandemic he suddenly realizes why everyone was wrong and now he is right. I totally believe him ... not. The long term effects of the virus are still unknown, if infected have long term immunity is unknown.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's hard to get past this being another wrong medium article that doesn't match reality. Why does covid19 attract so many quacks who cant help but argue that it's no problem really, go on about your lives (with 130k dead in the us, 600k dead in the world). It's actually a problem. It hasn't gone away somehow, even with massive amounts of magical thinking for the past 6 months.

Edit: we're actually a week away from reaching 600k, per [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries). Will it take 200k dead in the us before we can stop arguing it's no big deal? A million in the world?

<comment><USER11> The 1 million deaths are a big deal only because it may include rich white people or even, gasp, you and I. This is the only reason this number is quoted with such an incredulity.

Throughout history we have had and we continue to have far bigger problems than that.

Did you know that 20K people DIE every day of hunger (9 million per year)? And this has happened like so for the past twenty years? Where is the counter for that? Why aren't we locking everything down until we fix that?

I tell you why, because you and I are at zero risk of dying of hunger. Stating that 1 million deaths is a big deal sounds extremely hollow.

<comment><USER14> "Be thankful with your broccoli because there are kids starving in Africa" generally doesn't work even on a fifth grader - I honestly didn't expect to see it on HN.

At this rate, I wonder when I'd see people saying "no worries" because it's not Black Death. Or has it already started?

<comment><USER11> > no worries" because it's not Black Death.

I think mentioning the Black Death as a counterpoint weakens the argument greatly.

This disease is far-far more similar to the flu than black death, no? So we should probably deal with it as a flu not black death.

<comment><USER15> I have emails from Italy saying it is like flu.

Those same people a few weeks later?

Our grandparents and families are dying.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'The Wolf of Wall Street' film was also a real-life scam - <AUTHOR> https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-perfect-irony-that-the-wolf-of-wall-street-was-also-a-real-life-scam <comment><USER3> >Since they can't get back the stolen millions used to bankroll DiCaprio's dreams, part of accomplishing justice in this case means the U.S. government now owns the rights and royalties of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Minor correction: U.S. government received a $60 million settlement from Red Granite Pictures, but not any rights to any film directly[0]. Obviously a big chunk of that $60 million derived from the royalties of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the government didn't get the rights and royalties directly.

The author might have confused it with the fact that the government was _attempting_ to seize the film rights during the court proceedings[1], but the final settlement didn't include these film rights.

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-scandal- redgrani...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-scandal- redgranite/the-wolf-of-wall-street-producers-to-pay-60-million-to-u-s-in- lawsuit-settlement-idUSKCN1GJ0FH)

[1] [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/feds-look-seize- wo...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/feds-look-seize-wolf- wall-912733)

</comment><comment><USER4> But the movie wasn't a scam/fraud. The funding was stolen, the result of fraud. The moviw would have been a fraud if they collect a lot of money for it claiming Leonardo DiCaprio will star and Scorcese will direct, and then that doesn't actually happen bc they blow the money on booze.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't make for a clickbaitey enough title though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Directly related book recommendation: Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, published 2018.

They book follows the founders of 1MDB, the quasi Malaysia soverign wealth fund wbhose investments included the founding of Red Granite the producers of Wolf of Wall Street, from pre-1MDB days through to it's demise. Quite quick and easy, repeats itself a bit and imho falls apart/seems rushed at the end, but a fascinating account of greed, corruption, and how easy it seems. Well worth a movie adaptation itself!

<comment><USER7> .

<comment><USER3> That's really weird. Does it have something to do with its UK distribution rights or something?

Funny enough, I was able to find the Spanish version of the book on Amazon UK[0], but the English version apparently "will be released on September 12, 2019"[1] for Amazon UK.

I guess there exists a tiny niche market here where you can buy "early release" books from "early release" jurisdictions and ship it to "late release" jurisdictions.

[0] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/6073176899](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/6073176899)

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1912854546](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1912854546)

<comment><USER8> The publishers have been facing an injunction from Jho Lo & Co. in the UK and other markets, preventing publication. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/14/bookshops- thre...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/14/bookshops-threatened- with-legal-action-jho-low-billion-dollar-whale)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some of the writing here came out really petty. Made it difficult to read and take the article seriously.

> It seems the socially-awkward Low had a thing for rich, mildly attractive, > blonde daughters of famous American families.

> [Low would] be photographed with his sweaty, alcohol-flushed face on her > shoulder.

<comment><USER10> Almost as petty as pointing out pettiness!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looking at Admissions/Deposits/Fees for the private English boarding school that Low went to (Harrow School), I was surprised at how "affordable" it actually is. /I/ couldn't afford it, but for the level of access you are giving your child to the world of the elite, £30k doesn't seem like its all THAT much money.

<comment><USER12> That sort of school then has all sorts of "optional but really compulsory" extra fees for things like trips abroad etc. If the sticker price is 30k per year, the actual one is probably around 40k.

For comparison, the average salary in UK is 28k before taxes.

<comment><USER13> 40k gbp still isn't that much. That's around what the top boarding schools cost in the US. My main concern wouldn't be the sticker price but whether you need to come from the right "background" (e.g. not nouveau-riche) for your child to get accepted. To my understanding the top US boarding schools are less concerned with your financial pedigree, which makes sense given that most rich people in the US _are_ nouveau-riche by British standards

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it the responsibility of any project/startup to find out who the LPs are for a VC fund? Sometimes this information is not only inaccessible, it would be illegal for you to know. Especially in a case where - wait for it - <USER2> sovereign wealth fund might be involved.

So... call me crazy, but I don't think Leonardo DiCaprio did anything wrong here. I'm sure he's used to rich a __holes giving him money and trying to buddy up with him all the time, why would one seem more suspicious than the others?

<comment><USER15> I don't think the author necessarily says Leo did anything wrong, it was more of "How could Leo not know something was up."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The best quote

>As far as justice goes, it's extremely poetic: a film about guys who believed they were above the law until they got caught by the feds was made by guys who believed they were above the law until they, too, got caught by the feds.

>Art imitating life imitating art.

Inception in real life :-)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's understandable that clubs pay celebs to show up, though it always blows my mind how much.

But for a person? Surely this can increase one's 'personal brand' \- I guess - in some way, but really it's utterly sad. Literally paying people to hang out with you.

I don't worry much about ever being a billionaire, but that is one thing I did ponder: how hard it would be to tell the true friends from the clingers. So sad.

And $1B scam is not even a lot. Many 'national leaders' routinely take 10% of foreign direct investment right off the top. It happens in the open, clear as day, but there's hardly any reporting about it.

</comment><comment><USER18> _allegedly_

<comment><USER19> After having watched White Collar I usually say that about most accusations. We have all seen shows where an innocent person looks guilty. We somehow went from innocent until proven guilty to ridiculed and reviled until dead (and even that doesnt end it) regardless of the verdict or the reality.

<comment><USER20> Innocent until proven guilty is a legal standard, it is unreasonable and impractical to expect individuals to abide by it in their day to day life. Every day you are constantly making assessments on people based on the information you have, whether that's in the context of a crime or otherwise. The justice system (in America especially) is not "fair" and does not treat guilt as the phrase "innocent until proven guilty" might lead you to believe — in many circumstances innocent defendants plead guilty.

Some people like to cling to the idea of innocent until proven guilty because it's a nice sentiment that makes things easy — "I don't have to make a decision about this person, I can just agree with the court outcome" — but it's meaningless outside of the legal process. Many people do not have a clear understanding of what it takes to prove guilt in court (and also do not understand what can derail a conviction) and would be surprised to learn how difficult it can be in some situations where there is (to the layman) clear evidence.

<comment><USER21> "Innocent until proven guilty" is an example of cargo-culting in personal ethics. Or if you prefer, following a process while forgetting the principle that drove the creation of the process in the first place.

The principle is that for most people accused of a crime by the state, the state has much, much more power than the accused. To act as one check against abuse of that power, we establish a higher bar for conviction of a crime than for innocence.

But if Frank's lunch is missing from the fridge, and he thinks Homer ate it, there is no massive power imbalance, so Frank doesn't have the same burden of proof to decide to dislike Homer, or to accuse Homer.

Of course, if the state listens to Frank and decides to charge Homer with theft, then the state has a higher burden of proof to impose criminal consequences.

If homer is declared innocent under law because the state couldn't prove its case, we don't go back to Frank and harass him for making a false claim. His standard for accusing Homer is lower than the state's standard for laying charges.

After all, the state has investigators and attorney generals and grand juries and congressional panels and other apparatus for deciding whether to pursue a case in court.

We only go after Frank is he was truly reckless, not just on the basis of whether the state can meet the very high bar of proving the case in court.

People get this very badly wrong when it comes to accusations of sexual misconduct or rape from long ago. The standard for a person accusing another person is much lower than the standard for the state obtaining a conviction in court, and that is as it should be.

<comment><USER22> the point you missed is how the media is almost as powerful as the state but get a pass to act like a small individual from your example.

<comment><USER23> > the point you missed is how the media is almost as powerful as the state

"The media" collectively might have such power, but the media isn't a single entity like the state, and in any case neither the media nor the entities actually comprising it inflict criminal punishment, and even the State does not bear the high burden of criminal proof when it isn't trying to inflict criminal punishment.

<comment><USER24> Given how consolidated media ownership has become, I'm not sure this is true. In addition the ability to destroy reputations is real damage that the media does all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just finished the book on this, Billion Dollar Whale, good read. Also shows how money like this affects politics with funding to Obama's re-election and his subsequent visit to Malaysia.

</comment><comment><USER26> There are stories about someone losing a five pound note that are more interesting than this. Guy blatantly steals loads of money. Celebrity. Spends it on bullshit. Celebrity. Large number. Celebrity.

<comment><USER27> Then you missed the whole point of selling pens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did they just misuse the word "irony"? Or am I just dumb and having trouble identifying which form of irony this is?

<comment><USER29> A film about financial scams was funded in part by a financial scam.

Is this not ironic?

<comment><USER30> It would definitely be ironic if a movie about honesty and integrity had been funded by a scam. This is sort of the opposite, the topic of the movie and its source of funding are thematically similar, rather than being in opposition. So rather than describing it as "ironic" I'd use an antonym like "fitting" or "congruous".

<comment><USER31> The ironic part is that one might expect the producers of a film about a massive financial scam to be more educated and diligent about avoiding the same pitfalls in their own production. The fact that they were so easily gulled while essentially lecturing the world through their film, that's amusingly contrary to expectations, hence ironic.

<comment><USER27> Gonzo movie making</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>