All pull requests will be accepted. Let's see where it goes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tomekw/whatever

<comment><USER2> I know folks should be careful, but NB in the repo:

[edit: Probably worth taking down from HN front page.] __________________________________

#!/bin/sh

# remove all os files rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone has fixed that ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the game Nomic[1], in which the primary method of gameplay is to change the rules of the game.

Also reminds me of Twitch Plays Pokemon[2] and its variants, in which a whole bunch of people get to simultaneously play a video game.

I'm curious whether, absent any stated purpose, a mutually agreed upon purpose will somehow arise.

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

[2] [http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon](http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon)

<comment><USER4> The entire point of Nomic is getting people to _agree_ to rule changes, though. Not flailing as fast as you can to win out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So far: goatse, troll face, and rm -rf

epic trolls, gamers...

<comment><USER6> Wait for the curl script that downloads it and pipes it to sudo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What would it take to create a github integration that automatically accepts the pull requests in realtime? Looks like they're being accepted manually for now.

<comment><USER8> Wondering the same thing. Something rudimentary would need to be able to pull email and send HTTP requests.

A job for bash and cron?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of a far superior project: Legacy [https://github.com/EvanBurchard/legacy](https://github.com/EvanBurchard/legacy)

</comment><comment><USER10> So far no where...

<comment><USER11> Take a closer look at the commit history...

<comment> k-mcgrady Should've mentioned NSFW

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Suicide Linux [http://qntm.org/suicide](http://qntm.org/suicide)

</comment><comment><USER13> It goes to 4Chan. That's my prediction.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK, after a time of chaos, thanks to 81 contributors, we have a operating system kernel ready! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Down with the hate. Love wins!

 _note_ the files in the repo.

<comment><USER15> Huh?

<comment><USER14> there are two files 'hate' and 'love'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What if it becomes highly a illegal or dangerous codebase?

<comment><USER17> Then it can be dealt with at the time. But implying that an experiment like this shouldn't happen because of what it _could_ become isn't helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this is how open source started.</comment>


Atlas Air: The Boeing Crash No One Is Talking About - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/atlas-air-the-boeing-crash-no-one-is-talking-about.html <comment><USER2> Although the 767 doesn't have MCAS (that I know of), the strange nose down behavior is upsetting to see in this case.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found it odd that the day the NTSB(FAA?) followed the rest of the wotld in grounding the MAX is the same day the NTSB posted the black box details on Amazon's plane. The nose going back down after pilots reversed initial nosedive sounds somewhat spurious.</comment>


iTunes 11 is out - <AUTHOR>

First impressions: it has a nice clean look.<p>It's a real CPU hogger. <comment><USER2> I'm not having any performance issues, and I really like the new look. It feels less cluttered and the album view with the colored background is visually appealing with a few exceptions where the color doesn't work as a background.

I also really enjoy the placement of the play next button which is something I've already used several times. Overall, I'm very happy with the upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's a real CPU hogger.

It's not a CPU hogger; it's a studio apartment space heater.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm still using iTunes 8. I stopped trusting the updates after it messed up my files one time.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you migrate to new machines?

<comment><USER4> what do you mean migrate to new machines?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you buy a new computer, how do you get iTunes 8 on it. Do you keep the old installer around, etc.

Do you not use and sync any iOS device with it?

<comment><USER4> I haven't had to migrate to a new machine. I'm sure I'll need to update iTunes when I do, I'm not that hard-headed about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really miss the Coverflow view :(. Might be worth downgrading for, actually.</comment>


JFDI - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/jfdi.html

<comment><USER2> Fantastic post, Justin.

I'm a member of a mastermind, and spend most days in a Campfire room with fellow bootstrappers.

I work from home and don't have coworkers. Being able to have immediate access to really smart people who complement you is pretty much one of the best things that have happened to my business this year.

<comment><USER3> How did you discover the mastermind group, Brennan?

\- Matt Goldman

<comment><USER2> My mastermind group spun off from Mixergy.com.

But starting a Mastermind group is easy: find some friends who are in a similar position to you, and propose that you formally meet once a week. If you're local — great! Show up at a coffee shop. If you're remote, get on a Google Hangout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in 2 Mastermind groups as well. Both give me tons of great ideas and keep me motivated and accountable for the goals I've set out.

<comment><USER5> Did you find them or start them yourself? Why 2?

<comment><USER4> One is local and we meet up for drinks every 2-3 weeks. It was initiated by one of the others in the group.

The other is online and focused on WordPress products (plugins and SaaS services). We meet about every month and we'll see each other in person at a conference in October.

Both are pretty small right now (3 of us in each), but we'd probably do 4 if another person fit in.

I started up the 2nd because of the focus on WordPress and a little more frequency of connecting with like-minded entrepreneurs.

I like the idea of more regular spontaneous chats on hangouts or campfire though, especially if guys like bdunn and patio11 are doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post. Started MYOB with 2 partners 5 years ago, and have considered myself fortunate ever since.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know of an IRC rooms or anything, where like minded people could meet up?

<comment><USER5> I started this as an experiment:

[http://jfdi.bz/campfire/](http://jfdi.bz/campfire/)

We have 6 members so far; I think we'll cap it at 12.

<comment><USER7> Is it pretty active?

<comment><USER5> Yup. I'm in it right now!

<comment><USER7> Cool, I just signed up. Looking forward to getting my invite.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SecureDrop - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/securedrop.html

<comment><USER2> Can we rename the meme "war on whistleblowers" ?

When it is phrased like that, there's some ambiguity about the whistleblower ... since there could be good ones and bad ones. Further, a lot of folks may have been swayed by propaganda and believe that "whistleblower" is a negative term in all contexts.

I would like to suggest:

"war on transparency"

Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER3> Github Link: [https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/](https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Try The New Yorker's Strong Box without a client: [https://tnysbtbxsf356hiy.onion.to/](https://tnysbtbxsf356hiy.onion.to/)

</comment><comment><USER5> So... can this protect against internal attack, or attack by courts, like the one witnessed in the Lavabit case? I certainly hope so, since it uses TOR, but I don't know enough about TOR to be able to claim that the source remains hidden even if the destination is owned.

Another possibility is that courts would allow journalists to keep their sources hidden, but I wouldn't count on it...

<comment><USER6> As far as I can tell, the journalist wouldn't be able to identify the source, or even the codename that the source was using in order to interact with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The audit that Schneier participated in doesn't sound promising. These things stuck out to me:

[http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/UW- CS...](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/UW- CSE-13-08-02.PDF)

> _First, we experimented with leaking data to our DeadDrop deployment. We are > not aware of the ways that actual leaked documents are submitted, but we > assume that this way of leaking data is at least plausible._

In this controlled test, the researchers found that the app did not protect against sources accidentally including their meta-data in the submitted files (i.e the Properties of a Word Document, for instance)...this meta-data has been a classic source of amusement and stories _for_ journalists when they make public records requests and government officials forget to remove it...so, in other words, given that DeadDrop is meant for tech novices...it did not, in its audited form, protect against one of the most basic human- snafus in document-leaking.

But that can be fixed...what I'm concerned about is that this audit -- and Aaron and his original collaborators -- may not have considered the other less obvious human vulnerabilities. For instance...many (if not _most_ ) leak investigation/prosecutions happen well _after_ the publication of a story. It's not the journalist who gets the hammer, but the whistleblower.

At this point, the "attacker" (the government authority) has a short list of candidates for who the leaker could be: i.e. anyone who had access to the info that a journalist published...It's not a matter of intercepting all of the journalist's communications, but intercepting all of these shortlisted suspects' communications, and any prior network activity, either at the workplace, from their work phones, or even at home.

The "attackers" could seize on something as seemingly innocuous as the leaker visiting "newsorg.com/deaddrop/faq" from his office computer. And sure, they can't prosecute on something that circumstantial...but that's not the point...they just have to keep limiting their scope and keep questioning (the suspect, the suspect's associates) until they find the smoking gun.

I think too many tech people (though not Bruce) think that this process fails alone on the technology...i.e. if they can't break 4096-bit encryption, then you're good to go. But they don't have to break the security technology, just the person.

This should be pretty clear from the story of Silk Road's takedown, which was operated by someone who was more technically savvy than most of DeadDrop's audience:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds- took...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down- the-dread-pirate-roberts/)

The Feds didn't get their initial lead by using sophisticated NSA wiretapping. They did the kind of Google work that every amateur researcher can do: look for the earliest mentions of something that was previously unheard of, and find the pattern in those mentions:

> _The post directed readers to visit silkroad420.wordpress.com, belonging to > the blogging operator WordPress, where further instructions would be found > for accessing the real Silk Road site. A subpoena to WordPress Revealed that > the blog had been set up on January 23, only four days before the Altoid > post. If this wasn 't the first mention of Silk Road, it was certainly one > of them. Altoid became a person of interest, but who was he? Further > research revealed that Altoid had been posting on a board called Bitcoin > Talk—further suggesting a possible link to the Silk Road, which operated on > Bitcoin. A key break came when the agent found an October 11, 2011 post by > Altoid, looking for an "IT pro in the Bitcoin community" and directing all > inquiries to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com."_

Protecting against this kind of info-leaking _before_ using the app is outside of DeadDrop's purview of course...but that's kind of the problem. The kind of exposure vulnerabilities that leakers face is not typically from encryption cracking, but inadverdent human mistakes...

But perhaps even having a DeadDrop, heavily used or not, will at least put everyone at the news org (and their sources) on a higher level of situational awareness, and that would be valuable enough.

<comment><USER8> Is Schneier any good at auditing code? He has a big name but that's not my question.

<comment><USER9> Well he does have an extensive background in cryptography: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier#Cryptographic_al...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier#Cryptographic_algorithms)

But more than that University of Washington and Jacob Applebaum (tor) participated ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, what security does this actually provide? It seems to me that it only secures materials from the server to the operators, but that's a really small part of it. Someone malicious with access to the server can just inject something to get the plaintext, no?

<comment><USER11> Documents are public key encrypted and you view them on an airgapped laptop. Submission server is on TOR to provide obfuscation of the transmission source.

IMHO the system is over complicated. There should just be a client side HTML5 drag and drop that encrypts files pre-transmission. Should be symmetric so both source and journalist are reading messages on an airgapped laptop.

<comment><USER12> > There should just be a client side HTML5 drag and drop that encrypts files > pre-transmission.

The problem is that you'd be doing crypto in JavaScript. We're not currently at a point where that's viable:

[http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript- cryptography/](http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/)

Currently, if you want to securely transmit a document, you're pretty much stuck with learning and using something like PGP/GPG. Which is a pain for a lot of people, because there are new concepts to learn, software to install, and keyrings to manage. But it's the best we have right now.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious why more people aren't setting up dmz'd ssh servers on something like raspberry pi's for communication/document transfer with others. I wonder how viable a torrent like ssh p2p system would function... _mumbles thoughts to self_

All I know is that PGP/GPG use can be a pita, and I've noticed fewer people who used to using it these days, which seems strange. (I thought the NSA revelations would have upped adoption...)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure a P2P SSH system would be any better.

With SSH, you still need to manage and verify keys. This is where the PITA is with PGP. People don't like generating keys, fiddling with key rings, etc. So I don't see significant usability gains there.

Conceivably, you could do something with ephemeral keys, but then you're moving away from an SSH model. And ephemeral keys have their own problems. Namely, you have to verify the other person's key _every time._ (Often people use voice verification for this.) So while managing keyrings in PGP is annoying, so are ephemeral keys. I think crypto inherently imposes annoying burdens on end users.

Also, a big advantage with PGP is that it works asynchronously. I can send you a PGP-encrypted email, and your computer doesn't even have to be turned on at the time. With P2P, both parties have to be present and have their clients running at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There needs to be more information on now usable this is. That is key for adoption but particularly so at media organizations where many of the professionals can barely operate a spreadsheet. When security systems get cumbersome, they take shortcuts in security. Hence, the recent number of high profile Twitter phishing hacks among news orgs

<comment><USER14> As they are now getting arrested and wire tapped, they are heavily motivated to do it right though?

Suddenly they realise that they must be scrupulously disciplined.

<comment><USER7> It's true that even having something like this software imbues a certain awareness of, "Gee, if there has to be special software to keep transmitted files secret...does that mean all the other times I've been transmitting files via email is _unsafe_?"

But even when the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak...It's been well known for at least a century that you should wash your hands before doing critical surgery...and yet today it's been somewhat of a revolution to mandate checklists that enforce this at modern hospitals. It's not because surgeons are stupid, it's because the _workflow_ can be so dynamic that critical, easy steps are often missed when unexpected scenarios occur...especially when humans are involved (i.e. all major surgeons today)

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So this system at its best is just GPG?</comment>


Yahoo Changing Its Home Page, Gradually - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19ping.html

<comment><USER2> _AOL, for example, set off a user revolt in 2006 when it suddenly transformed the Netscape.com portal into a "social" news service. By the time AOL reversed course the next year, the Netscape portal had lost half its audience._

I remember reading that Calacanis was praised for his role in transforming the site before they switched back. Maybe I'm mistaken (I've always avoided AOL). But half of their audience? That's a very serious hit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been turning to Yahoo more often lately. I've noticed that with more complicated, technical searches, Yahoo now seems to give more useful results than Google.

The home page is still annoying, but at least it's avoidable.

<comment><USER4> I just realized all it takes for me to switch from google to yahoo permanently is change the control-k search bar on firefox from G to Y!.

That's one low barrier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can relate to the benefit of slowly transforming highly used software. Recently, we did a massive upgrade to our forum software (the most used part of our system), changing the look, some of the feel, and some of the functionality in one fell swoop, and with the instant change, there was quite a revolt from the userbase.

Luckily, were able to quickly revert much back to begin incrementally making the changes to little effect. Had we kept it like that, given the response from the users, we could have lost some long customers.

It was our mistake for making such a huge change in one massive patch, but we've learned from that mistake.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's like back in the day with eBay and their updates. The users were used to their yellow-ish background, and the company was looking for change. So while revamping their design, week by week they would alter the hex value from yellow to a grey color. Without the users knowing, they dynamically changed and improved the layout as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I were yahoo I'd change it to "Microsoft, Call us. We'll take the 40 some billion. Please, call us."</comment>


Russian agents allegedly used Bitcoin to fund the DNC hack - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611648/russian-agents-allegedly-used-bitcoin-to-fund-the-dnc-hack/ <comment><USER2> _Bitcoin is not anonymous! Using clues from outside the internet, which the Mueller team clearly had, it's quite possible to follow the money on the blockchain and root out individuals behind the transactions_

This is the golden moment. If this really is true, then in shifting funds from one wallet to another, they've outed a huge circuit of people. I don't think this is entirely like "all money in circulation has cocaine on it" -the linkages feel to me like ones which would identify key players really quickly.

Also, if somebody leaks even one of the hashes, we can all check/validate the chain surely?</comment>


How the world economy has evolved over the last 35 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-world-economy-evolved-over-35-years-2015-10 <comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was especially interesting that China VERY VERY recently outpaced Japan, and that Germany is actually shrinking proportionately.</comment>


Full Transcript: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Onstage at Lesbians Who Tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/3/9/17100884/transcript-facebook-coo-sheryl-sandberg-onstage-lesbians-who-tech-diversity-metoo-lean-in <comment><USER2> Lesbians who tech, seriously? After all those decades of teaching people to be accepting of those who don't follow a path identical to their own finally started to pay off. Identity politics is anathema to acceptance, to integration, it will only lead to the balkanisation of society and the eventual need to restart the whole process of teaching people to be accepting of others, no matter which identity group they are or claim to be part of.</comment>


Apple Alumni Don't Fall Far from the Tree - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_22/b4230039797088.htm

<comment><USER2> This article is missing the HUGE fact that the way these employees ended up at Apple in the first place was through acquisitions.

Lars Albright started Quattro Wireless, Bill Nguyen started LaLa and then Color.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you work for Google? - <AUTHOR> Given the large amount of flagging around news that put Google in the negative spotlight I want know if the are any large amount of "Googlers" here. <comment><USER2> > _I want know if the are any large amount of "Googlers" here._

There are many, although their representation is likely no different from any other company with a developer headcount that large.

I doubt there's any sort of flagging conspiracy. If anything, BigCo employees are probably _less_ likely to flag such stories. If I worked for a huge company like that, I'd probably upvote every such story and then grab some popcorn.

Likely what you're seeing is simply HN becoming sick of the topic. Subsequent news articles that cover ongoing scandals which do not significantly differ from prior articles tend to fare poorly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't. What articles have you seen that paint Google negatively and are frequently flagged? I'm genuinely curious.

</comment><comment><USER4> We need a survey feature on HN. Otherwise we get Yes or No questions like that...

<comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can confirm with 100% certainty that I, too do not work for Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't and I don't want to.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, but I wish I did.

</comment><comment><USER8> I do not.

<comment><USER9> Me neither.</comment></comment>


Why reddit won (old post, but since we're on the topic...) - <AUTHOR> http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest#yep

<comment><USER2> A large part of Reddit winning was Kevin Rose fumbling while CEO of digg. Reddit had open sourced its code by then, and Digg didn't even bother adding some of the useful functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really expected them to copy user-created subreddits. They'd had a critical mass of users at that point, so whereas it took a year or so of me seeding new communities, doing house ads, and generally hustling subreddits -- they could've been up and running with a myriad of healthy communities.</comment></comment>


College Startup Re-Imagines Bike Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225212

<comment><USER2> I'll tell you what, we had a bike sharing program over at Davidson College, by the end of each semester those bikes were unridable. Be prepared for some heavy maintenance fees and liability issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We've actually been operating our largest program for over a year now. Also, many new, specialized bicycles designed for bikeshare use now exist. We definitely don't want to use $100 Walmart bikes. We make sure the bicycles are up to certain standards for durability and rider comfort, and perform regular and as-needed maintenance.</comment></comment>


Translate Bio S-1 [RNA/MRNA Therapeutics] - <AUTHOR> https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-19-157006/ <comment><USER2> I'm confused - are they already public? I thought an s-1 was for IPOs or offering new securities, but they seem to be already publicly traded - I see news about a "private placement," is that something that involves issuing new securities that is different from selling more shares on the market?</comment>


Someone Forced World Internet Traffic Through Belarus and Iceland - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20131120/how-somebody-forced-the-worlds-internet-traffic-through-belarus-and-iceland/ <comment><USER2> The autor is dead incompetent or outright stupid.

      In network security circles, this is what's known as a Man-In-The-Middle attack. And for years it has been understood to be possible in theory, but never seen in practice.

Uh, no. What happened here was a BGP hijack, which has happened MULTIPLE times over the last few years. IIRC the one with the biggest fallout was some Pakistani ISP which fucked up a YouTube block order - they broadcasted the null-route to the entire Internet and Google couldn't do anything, lol.

And even "normal" MITM attacks have been done for years now. Every ISP doing censorship, BitTorrent throttling and anything that interrupts normal packet flow does active MITM attacking, and the NSA listening posts are passive MITM posts.

<comment><USER3> With all due respect, one thing that gets really tiresome on this board is the "OMG, this person is soo stupid because they don't know nearly as much as I do about this one particular topic" tone in this comment. If you started your comment with "what happened here was..." you'd come across as knowledgable and helpful to those of us who aren't knowledgable in this field, rather than (please forgive my saying it) an asshole. Maybe try thinking "what if someone wrote this to/about me" before hitting Submit. Just trying to be helpful in my own way, pardon me if it's unwanted.

edit: my point had nothing to do with the content of the article. It was more just saying "hey, effective written communication is a tricky thing. Where the author of the article may have failed in some of the important technical details of the article, you have also failed in presenting your corrections in a somewhat offensive manner. Maybe consider the _how_ next time in addition to _what_ you are trying to convey."

<comment><USER4> I don't think anything excuses the media for being so shoddy in (mis)informing their readership.

Remember, you're on _Hacker_ News. Thanks to people like the author, the average person thinks you and I are criminals. Because, hackers.

You may be right about omitting that tone in general, but considering the feelings of media hacks is not a big motivator.

<comment><USER5> I'd suggest that the average person doesn't think about you at all.

<comment><USER6> But the average person has been given the impression, however inadvertently, that the average "hacker" is engaging in clandestine, nefarious activities on the Internet. When I was in University I lost count of the number of people who freaked out because they saw me using a terminal and vim from my laptop during class.

<comment><USER7> This article refers to attackers, not hackers. The work "hack" does not occur once in the article. Calling these people attackers is accurate, and doesn't do anything to contribute to the people you describe thinking of you as a criminal, unless you think rerouting traffic in this way is in some way legitimate.

<comment><USER8> That isn't the complaint about this particular article. The complaint about _this_ article is the botched reporting on what happened, and what MITM attacks are. This criticism was defended by pointing out that misinformation from the media has the potential to have a negative effect. An example given of this was the careless use of the word "hacker" by the media "in general".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't really understand how that works. After all I don't think a normal Internet can hijack BGP, they need to be able to announce routes. So if an ISP announces low-cost routes, you know who did it -- unless the ISP's security was breached quite severely.

So, can't you just asked the ISPs who announced those fake routes if they were hacked, and if not, demand an explanation? (And if no explanation comes forth, stop peering with them)

<comment><USER10> A much more competent article written by the researchers themselves explained that they did contact the Iceland ISP involved in one of the attacks. Their reply stated that it was caused by a bug in a vendor's software that was resolved after a patch. The ISP wasn't interested in looking into it any further.

[http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet- hijacking/](http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/)

<comment><USER11> Also interestingly, somebody tried to submit that article yesterday. I know because I tried to submit it myself, and found that I'd been scooped. It got no responses and almost no upvotes, until allthingsd added the "MITM" keyword that people here recognize. It might be inaccurate - the attack seems to _enable_ MITM rather than being MITM itself - but it got some much needed publicity for the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It will be interesting to see how this rolls around. I have listened to people complain about the insecurity of BGP for years. Got to experience a bit of it when a bad router update our ASIN in it and sent our traffic out and about briefly (fortunately just pushing up latency not killing the web site.)

It is currently the most effective and useless DDOS strategy to push a black hole route out for the 'target.' Effective since all their packets will stop getting to them, useless because it points exactly at the point where it is coming from, and NOCs have gotten reasonably good at working around bogus advertisements. So it is short lived.

</comment><comment><USER13> >Cowie said the really big Internet service providers ... should be watching for when smaller players advertise false routes.

How can an ISP tell if a route is "false"?

<comment><USER14> By knowing what IP ranges the smaller ISPs own. If a small A connects to bit B, and B knows that A has IPs 123.234. _._ , then it should not accepts routes that route other IPs to A.

<comment><USER9> It's not that simple, an ISP that has multiple peering partners doesn't just accept traffic for its own IPs, but also for those of its peering partners (and their peering partners, recursively).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the report over here more useful?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6774263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6774263)

<comment><USER16> Content wise yes. Font size no. Font is so small it is almost unreadable.

Take-away: To improve time spent on site, and return visitors computing.co.uk should increase the font size!

That just reminded me of an (urban) story where a man went to Fairy Liquid and offered to increase their profits by 25%. He wanted 5% of the 25% increase. They signed contracts and agreed to the deal. The simple solution was to make the hole 25% bigger. The customers squeezed just the same and 25% more came out. Profit.

<comment><USER17> I heard a similar story about Listerine. A canny marketing manager boosted sales by realising everyone used the cap to measure doses. He made the cap bigger.

<comment><USER18> Wonder if you can do the same with SaaS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interestingly, the two UK cities marked on the map appear to be Bristol or Cardiff, and... somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Cumbria? Why not London, Manchester, Birmingham etc.?

<comment><USER20> Same weird placement effect on French cities: one seems to be Rennes, the other Limoges or Poitiers...</comment></comment>


The Paradox of Ambition - <AUTHOR> https://www.perell.com/blog/the-paradox-of-ambition <comment><USER2> Refreshing!

"Ambition is a paradox. We're taught that hard goals are hard and easy goals are easy. In entrepreneurial environments, the inverse is true. Paradoxically, hard goals can be easier to accomplish."

It's true

You can work for years with clients on small ccontracts, once you suddnly close a client on large contract suddnly you feel like you can do it again, and also that your service worth more for your other clients

What it means?

You could ask for high amount all along</comment>


Avert extremism before it starts by building better neighbourhoods - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/saunders-avert-extremism-before-it-start-by-building-betterneighbourhoods/article27403775/ <comment><USER2> The only known way of preventing ghetto formation is what Singapore does - prevents the formation of ghettoes via a highly intrusive housing policy.

Ever block of apartments has to have a proportional share of every ethnic group.

[http://qz.com/436056/singapores-forced-housing- integration-f...](http://qz.com/436056/singapores-forced-housing-integration- fueled-its-economic-success/)</comment>


Unenclosable Carriers and the Future of Communication - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/holochain/unenclosable-carriers-and-the-future-of-communication-4ac6045ac894 <comment><AUTHOR> Long but worthy article (1st of 3) about carriers of communication, how blockchains are not a silver bullet that will save humanity and a glimpse on the agent-centric approach that is the core o Holochain (which is not a blockchain),</comment>


More than half of American jobs are at risk because of coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/economy/job-losses-coronavirus/index.html <comment><USER2> It is a shame that the intro to this article appears only in the eighth paragraph: "Nearly 80 million jobs in the US economy are at high or moderate risk today, according to analysis in the last week from Moody's Analytics. That's more than half of the 153 million jobs in the economy overall."

Maybe it was buried because, in the next paragraph, there is some ferocious back-pedalling: "That doesn't mean that all those jobs will be lost. But it's probable that as many as 10 million of those workers could see some impact to their paychecks -- either layoffs, furloughs, fewer hours or wage cuts, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics."

Even so, it does settle down to: "Of those 80 million jobs, Moody's Analytics projects that 27 million are at high risk due to the virus, primarily in transportation and travel, leisure and hospitality, temporary help services and oil drilling and extraction."

Those figures are stark enough to make an intro. It is vexing that an article in the business news section of any big media house should have started: "A week ago, Darrin Dixon wasn't all that concerned about the coronavirus."

FFS. News, not drama, please. Relevance, not voyeurism.</comment>


Bare-metal Lua on microcontrollers - <AUTHOR> http://www.eluaproject.net/

<comment><USER2> If you're just discovering eLua and think it is cool, you will love eLuaBrain: <http://eluabrain.blogspot.fr/>

</comment><comment><USER3> good to see they are using a custom memory allocator, lua fragments memory a LOT with a standard allocator.

They have included dlmalloc but another good, maybe better, alternative is <http://www.gii.upv.es/tlsf/>.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems like it would be worth keeping an eye on - although I'm sticking with Arduino for the time being.</comment>


Ask HN: How to bulk transfer ~50 domains? (+ Registrar suggestions?) - <AUTHOR>

So, I've been using GoDaddy without incident for about 6 or 7 years.  About 2 months ago, my credit card was compromised, so I got a new CC number.  I immediately updated all of domains at GoDaddy to use the new number (about 50 of them).
Today, I get an email from them saying that three of my domains have been canceled and I have to pay a redemption fee to get them back.  I email support with a, "Uh, wtf guys?" and they say my CC was declined when they tried to auto-renew (wtf? their crappy backend told me that change that gone through!) and that I had a grace period but didn't renew -- I save all my emails and never got one from them about these domains (I get a ton of email from these guys, but often have noticed that it's sort of random -- some domains will generate an email when they auto-renew, some won't ... but whatever, it had never been a problem before).
So now I can't afford to stay with GoDaddy and risk losing a more important domain (like, railsforum.com), so I need to transfer to a more reliable registrar.
Two questions: 1. Any suggestions for registrars with competitive pricing, good support, and that don't suck? and 2. Bonus points if it is easy to transfer ~50 domains.  It'll be a pain in the butt do have to do these each individually.
I have considered just opening a reseller account via Tucows OpenSRS and selling domains to myself.  Seems like that is what Facebook does... anyone have any experience doing that?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm pretty happy with namecheap.com. The only problem I've ever had was a domain transfer that didn't go through. One quick email and they fixed it within minutes.

They also do bulk transfers and have free WHOISguard. A quick google for the monthly promo code will get you a discount.

<comment><USER3> I believe the free WHOISguard is only for the first year of the transfer/registration. Still nice though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gandi are very good, and was started by people who want to do the Right Thing. Pricing is competitive. Support is answered by real people who actually sort out the problem.

<http://www.gandi.net/>

They have a very good web UI, and a bulk transfer in of up to 20 domains in one go.

Moving stuff in is easy. The only problems I've had is with the losing registrar being rubbish, but Gandi helped out. (The main problem registrar was GoDaddy.)

</comment><comment><USER5> i'm an opensrs reseller, but it's mostly to sell domain registration services to my customers, not for my own portfolio. it's pretty easy to become a reseller and there are no minimums on how many domains you have to sell each month.

the built-in control panels are a bit clumsy, but if you don't have to interact with them that often it's no big deal. they do have an api that you can use to automate registrations, renewals, and transfers, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> domaindiscover.com has a very good track record (when we selected it 6+ years ago it was because it had the highest user ratings- I haven't looked lately but I can say they go way out of their way to let you easily renew domains despite CC issues etc. even well after actual expiration). Dunno about bulk transfer though.

</comment><comment><USER7> I haven't had any issues with 1and1.

<comment><USER8> I dont know if they have improved, but 1and1's interface was quite annoying when I used them a few years back. And trying to contact them? Forget about it.

I'm very happy with dynadot. Good pricing, Great Services, Clean Interface. Sold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any experience with domain transfers (with either DynaDot or 1and1)?

<comment><USER9> 1and1's entire interface is an unholy pain in the ass. I'm quite fond of DynaDot, actually, and switched to them as registrar of choice, transferring about 50 domains to them from assorted others and haven't had any problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Moniker works well for me

<http://moniker.com>

</comment><comment><USER11> Never had an issue with nearlyfreepseech.net, no idea about transferring though.

<comment><USER12> I moved a domain to them and I really really like them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like pairnic.com

They're expensive ($19 to $13 per domain/year), but the interface and support are great.

</comment><comment><USER14> DynaDot.com supports bulk transfer. Pricing is not highly competitive ($9.25 a year for .com) but I have had no problems so far with 5 domains hosted. It has all the usual stuff (DNS, own name servers, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER15> why not just get another godaddy account and transfer the domains between them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the reason is I just no longer trust their software. Only getting email updates about auto-renewals for some, but not all of my domains was never a big deal, but another apparent mistake (their software not updating my CC across all my domains -- some have auto-renewed without incident on the new card since I made the change, but it appears not all were updated when I used their bulk account info change tool) has sort of made it a big deal.

So I just don't trust their software anymore, and want to find a new registrar.</comment></comment>


Skype Etiquette - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/22/skype-etiquette/ <comment><USER2> Should really be 'IM Etiquette', this has happened to me, and I'm sure many others, in other IM networks as well.

He hits the nail on the head on the rest of the article though.

<comment><USER3> I have found quite the opposite. Most of his gripes would be easily fixed by matching his usage of the software to his issues/requirements for them, and about half of it either barely sensical whining or a desire to fundamentally change 90% of the human population (which is not going to happen).

<comment><USER4> The goal of a post on etiquette, _IS_ to change the behavior of others.

As much as i dislike Arrington, he's absolutely correct on this. And as the comment above notes, this is just as applicable for communication on IRC as it is for Skype (well save for the video bit).

As Arrington's posts are applicable to basically every IM protocol, i'm confused as to how you think Arrington's (and my) "gripes would be easily fixed by matching [...] usage [...] to [the] issues/requirements for them".

This is basically a spam filtering problem, and you're blaming the guy getting spammed.

<comment><USER3> > This is basically a spam filtering problem, and you're blaming the guy > getting spammed.

Only the gripe displayed in the video (and #2 on his list) is a spam issue, and it's trivially fixed by disabling auditory alerts, which are not only generally useless but systematically annoying.

Let's check the other ones:

> It's not a conversation until both sides are engaged.

Maybe it's not a conversation at all, and just an RFI or whatever. Furthermore, if you're not available _set your status to one that matches instead of marking yourself as available at all time_.

You can even default your status to "Not Available" or "Do Not Disturb". That way, people won't assume you're available... which is what you're saying by using the "Available" status.

Waiting for a SYN/ACK on IMs is entirely useless and highly counter- productive, you can ACK when you reply. In fact it's very annoying because I'm out taking a shit and instead of asking whatever you need and going on with your life as I come back and reply, you're either waiting in front of your screen for my ACK, or you're gone doing something else and by the time you come back I've ACKed and then I'm gone again, resetting the whole process.

If you want to converse, use VOIP.

> Don't just jump right into a phone call. It's polite to send a chat message > first saying "online? time for a quick Skype call?" It's annoying when the > Skype phone starts ringing randomly.

it doesn't ring randomly, it rings when somebody calls, because they have something to tell you in person. Don't want to answer the call? Then don't

> And all I wanted was a little bit of quiet.

See again, use your status already, if you're not available _say you aren't_.

> Video calls are not a God given right. Just because you want to do video > right now doesn't mean I want to.

Settings > Video > Show that I have video to > no one.

> Don't assume confidentiality.

That has nothing to etiquette, it only has to do with not being retarded.

<comment><USER5> _If you want to converse, use VOIP._

Why not "if you want to converse, go visit them"? Most of the time when I want to converse, I want to use text rather than deal with all the baggage of audio and trying to manage social context -- context which is mostly absent in text.

<comment><USER3> > Why not "if you want to converse, go visit them"?

Because you can't hit a button and be at their doorstep. With skype, calling and texting have the same technical cost.

<comment><USER5> If you _could_ hit a button and be at their doorstep, the vast majority of reasons to chat rather than going to visit them would still apply, though, right? Going to visit someone has a major overhead, socially. A quarter hour of conversation, at the least, before you can politely get to the subject of the visit, etc. Phone conversations have some of the same costs to a lesser degree: it's quite rude not to devote your full attention to the call (or appear to do so), and there might well still be a few minutes of overhead. With IM, you can almost just start talking. It cuts through all the extra junk around actually having the interesting part of the conversation with a person, but you can still have an actual conversation (even while you both do other things as the other person types), which is important for discussing things at length.

Basically, I would say that calling and texting have very different social costs, but calling and visiting are much closer that way, and that this is why it's almost always better to text than call, even for extended conversations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with most of the points, but the first is a little iffy. I'd rather have someone just skype me their question than chase each other around all day doing the "yt?" ... 15 min later ... "yes" ... 20 min later ... "sorry, I'm back now. you still there?" ... dance.

<comment> brown9-2 The most annoying IM in the world might be "Can I ask you a question?"

<comment><USER7> Questions have context. Explaining them is easier if someone's there interactively prodding for missing context you failed to give. "Can I ask you a question?" == "Got a moment to chat interactively?"

<comment><USER8> Agree, but willingness to answer also has context. I'm almost always willing to answer simple questions such as "Where can I find XYZ?" I have to be in proper mental state to answer more complex questions such as "Can we discuss the large and complex proposal I sent via email yesterday?"

This is all amplified when you have virtual teams. Those more complex conversations are more manageable when you are face to face. People can express how busy they are and how focused they are. IM doesn't have that luxury.

"Can I ask you a question?", in my personal experience, is usually a trap. If it was an easy question, the other person would have just asked it. Therefore, it's probably going to be a complex question that will take time and focus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it interesting to compare how I use Skype with how I use a regular phone. With skype, I always IM the person first (usually just saying "skype?") to see if they're available for a discussion. With regular phones, I'm used to just calling.

The skype approach seems far more preferable. My guess is that as SMS/IM/VOIP becomes more ubiquitous the standard etiquette will be to ask before calling.

<comment><USER3> > The skype approach seems far more preferable. My guess is that as > SMS/IM/VOIP becomes more ubiquitous the standard etiquette will be to ask > before calling.

That makes sense for services where voice is a peripheral system (MSN, iChat, ...) but I fail to see what sense it makes for Skype, which is first and foremost a VOIP system, with instant messaging tacked on.

If you don't want VOIP as a primary communication device, here's an idea: don't use a VOIP service as you primary communication network. Use some other IM, and when somebody requests a voice communication and you allow for it, you start the call (from a skype account set as invisible)

<comment><USER10> The segmentation between voice, sms, im, and video is obnoxious. Some sort of open XMPP is ideal. I don't want a different contact name for every medium. (I may want separate contact info for other purposes, but not for something that's a technical distinction like video vs. voice.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Once of my biggest pet peeves with Skype is the way presence notification permissions are handled. The default way to make contact with somebody seems to be "add them to my contact list" which then initiates a message exchange of "Can I see when you are online". The problem with this is that and once granted, presence notification permissions live on the other person's computer and _cannot be revoked_. Removing them from your contact list does not prevent them seeing your online status and blocking them outright is the only solution. This is overkill however since I may wish to be able to receive calls/chats from them still but don't want to broadcast my online presence to them.

While I can of course change my status to invisible, this is a global setting and affects all my contacts. I now live in a permanent state of lurking on Skype, because so many business contacts have initiated contact with the "can I see you online" and would have taken offense if I simply said no.

In short, I would love to see better presence notification options in Skype including the ability to revoke permissions and to partition people into groups and assign a corresponding status to each group.

</comment><comment><USER12> I will never understand why people will want to use alert sounds in the first place. I'm happy I still retain most of my functional hearing after enabling alert sounds in Messenger inadvertently while wearing headphones.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've never seen anyone abuse the enter button like he describes. On the other hand, if they did, I'd block them before they finished their second message.

<comment><USER14> Watch the video in the article. It is truly ridiculous what the person he is chatting with does, and I can completely understand why he would block them.

<comment><USER15> (As Arrington writes in the comments, that's a re-enactment, not a real conversation. I have seen people do that, though.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "It's annoying when the Skype phone starts ringing randomly"

You mean like, uh, when someone phones you normally? my counter view is that I hate it when people send me a chat saying "hey are you free for a phone call". Am I signed into Skype? Yes. That means I am probably able to take your call. Sheesh :)

<comment><USER17> Just because Skype replicates most of the functionality of a phone, it's not required that we import the bad parts from the phone.

I guess the difference is really whether you consider Skype an IM that's also a phone, or a phone that has IM. You're in the last camp, Arrington (and myself, for that matter) is in the first.

<comment><USER16> I'm not entirely in disagreement - but I dislike the idea of it becoming ettiquette. Me pressing call _is_ the bit where I check if you're available.

Part of the problem is that it's not always simple to silence a Skype call (like you could a phone) if you're busy. But then you also have the option, unlike a phone, of marking yourself as busy.

That last bit is, for me, the better innovation :)

(BTW constantly asking permission is a common grip of mine; "can I ask a question?" is one of the most annoying things in the world :))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe I interact with a different group of people, but I always use Google Talk/XMPP as my IM service and Skype only for VOIP/video.

</comment><comment><USER19> They need to let people see each other's message as they type it. Then people will start doing paragraphs... hopefully.

</comment><comment><USER20> Skype Etiquette #4(b) \- Wear pants.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe some people think the space bar and the Enter/Return key "do the same thing" so they push the one that's most convenient?

</comment><comment><USER22> HEY IS ANYONE GOING TO COMMENT? HELLO, ARE YOU GOING TO COMMENT? WHY AREN'T YOU COMMENTING? GOD YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE! FINE BYE.</comment>


A detailed exposé on how the market is rigged from a data-centric approach - <AUTHOR> http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4661.html <comment><USER2> You cannot defend frontrunning of a market.

If I ask for X at Y. Someone else shouldn't have the facility to buy it based on my own trade signal and try sell it back to me.

It is mindblowingly simple theft. The arguments for liquidity do not hold. There is some fascinating cognitive dissonance when it comes to the HFT industry.

<comment><USER3> That's not what's happening here. Traders are arbitraging and reacting to public trades and orders on multiple markets.

If you walk through a physical market where 8 apple carts are lined up, all selling apples for $1, buy every apple at cart #1, then buy every apple at cart #2, and so on, would you be surprised to find the price moving up or sellers stepping away as you approached carts #7 and #8?

The same thing happens when trading. Securities trade on multiple markets and multiple exchanges cannot match cross-market trades atomically. It's absurd to suggest that one side of the trade should be expected to close his eyes to what's happening in the world around him and sit tight while a huge trader runs his quote over. Why is one party more deserving of a good price than the other?

If you route to one exchange only there is no way for anyone to see or react to your marketable order before it executes, ever. If you route your orders intelligently, it can be very difficult or impossible for anyone to pull away before you get your fills. That's the executing broker's job. Instead of getting better at his job, this broker would rather complain to a very vocal conspiracy theorist who has been proven wrong many times in the past by people with actual experience and data: [http://zacharydavid.com/bad-research/the- hunsader-follies/](http://zacharydavid.com/bad-research/the-hunsader-follies/)

<comment><USER4> If you stood in front of all of those carts simultaneously and said "I'll take all of your stock at the advertised price", I'm guessing you'd be a bit peeves if someone else pushed in front of you and started buying some of the stock (the equivalent of the 1,570 shared bought by some random buyer at the exact point this order was put in).

<comment><USER5> You would be peeved. Doubly so, because in the context of finance, that's actually illegal.

But the key word in your example is "simultaneously", and it's the thing that did _not_ happen in this example. This is more like "I bought all the apples at the first cart, and by the time I got to the second card, half the carts had raised their prices, and most of the apples at the remaining parts had been bought by enterprising traders who decided there must be something special about apples all of a sudden".

It's hard to see the problem. Or the solution.

<comment><USER6> There are two possible solutions.

The first solution is to forbid multiple marketplaces for a single virtual asset. Honestly, the service provided by these marketplaces is very simple, and could be provided by a non-profit organization that is bound by law to ensure low barriers to entry. This would be a win for everybody, really.

The second solution is to enforce that markets operate on a synchronized heartbeat with sealed bid changes. It would work somewhat like this:

T=0: Bids from the last heartbeat are published; market starts accepting bids for the next heartbeat, but those bids remain sealed T=1: Market stops accepting bids T=2: Trading engine matches bids, executes orders, and publishes all bids; market starts accepting bids for the next heartbeat, but those bids remain sealed (that is, the market is now in the same state as it was at T=0)

Have one time unit be something like a minute, and force markets trading the same asset to be sufficiently synchronized.

<comment><USER5> Well, yes, those are potential solutions. But are they solutions to the problem we actually have? Indeed, what problem _do_ we have?

Do we, in point of fact, even have a problem that needs solving? The core complaint is some unnamed institutional trader really wanted to buy a very large number of shares in one go at a very low price, while other institutional traders wanted to sell the shares at a higher price. Why are we meant to care who wins that fight?

<comment><USER7> Yes. We have the problem that the 'financial industry' is running some kind of insane MMORPG which excludes and abuses most of the population to make a fast buck.

What markets should do to be efficient is invest in clever, talented people doing clever, talented things.

Every step back from that is economically inefficient, because it makes it harder to create a population with deep reserves of wealth and opportunity.

Games like this one are the equivalent of having someone cut in front of you on the freeway in a semi.

It's not efficient, it's just banal abuse of a system that is supposed to reward good ideas and filter out bad ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Say there are three exchanges, A, B, C, each with 1k shares of Ford on offer at $20. They are all random numbers of ms away from me, and for simplicity say A is closest and C is farthest. I send out my order for 3k shares at $20, and it hits A then B then C. People who are watching A see my request, and try to make adversarial changes on B and C. They have a low chance of success on B because it's almost as close to me as A is, but they have a higher chance on C because it's pretty far from me.

One way to fix this is to delay your orders carefully so that A, B, and C will all get your order at almost the same time. Now there's not time for someone who sees your order on A to react and send a message to C that will beat your message to C.

I believe this is what IEX does: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX)

<comment><USER9> That's not what IEX does. IEX is, to fit within your example merely exchange A. It can't control whether you delay your order to B or C or not.

What A does do is delay the output. When it receives an order it doesn't immediately broadcast that information back out, it waits some small (but relevant) period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A solution: Discrete double auctions. Instead of continuous trading, the exchange can divide up the day into a series of small windows (say 100ms). When you come to trade in the market, you have to wait for the next window to open. You submit your order and you find out what happened at the end of the window. This way nobody has any timing advantage and the delay is barely noticeable to 'normal' traders (waiting 1/5 of a second is hardly an inconvenience). It also stops all the order-book shenanigans that HFT players get up to (where they stuff the book with orders and cancel/resubmit them at high frequency).

So why don't exchanges do this? They make a ton of money in fees, it simply isn't in their interest to prevent HFT at the moment. Change their incentives (ie. regulate differently) and they might actually do something about it.

<comment><USER11> Actually there are lots of discrete auctions in the electronic trading world. For instance the S&P futures contracts trade this way before the open and depending on your perspective they have more "shenanigans" being played by HFT players. Not less.

There are 2 major issues that no one brings up when they say "simply add discrete auctions". A) what happens when there are more participants on 1 side of a price than on the other, what is the tie breaker after price? B) How does this solve the distributed systems problem of multiple exchanges trading at the same time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you offer something for sale at a certain price and someone says "I'll buy it!" you have a contract at that moment.

I don't fully understand the conditions under which you can cancel an order but it seems all the cancellations happened on exchanges where no orders had yet been fulfilled so I assume this means that the order had not yet arrived. This seems ethically just about OK to me but a sign that there is not one single stockmarket and that the system could be far better designed.

There is the single front-running trade which is suspicious but it seems plausible (unless it happens every time) that it was just a small random trade that happened to coincide with the timing of the big trade. It should be monitored though.

My conclusions:

1\. There is not one single market with a number of available shares but a number of linked markets. Send your trade to a single exchange (first at least) with enough offered shares that it should execute before offers can be cancelled. Wait, repeat.

2\. Much of the liquidity supposedly offered by HFT is illusory and disappears if you try to use it.

I think that the market could probably be improved if cancellation weren't free or at least weren't instant. If cancellations took a second (maybe 100ms or 10ms would be enough) to process and the offers could still be accepted in that period the offers made would be more serious and although the spread might be slightly larger it would more honestly reflect reality.

<comment><USER13> Plucking from throwaway's example. You have 20,000 copies of a book you just wrote. You put half of them on Amazon, and the other half on eBay, so Amazon has 10,000 and ebay has 10,000 of them.

You see an order come in for 5,000 of them on Amazon. You think "Hot dog, these books are popular. I must be selling them too cheaply!" You immediately raise the price of all the books by 25 cents to capitalize on this.

The books you sold on Amazon are sold, so they're gone. The remaining books on Amazon are slightly more expensive.

The guy who bought the books on Amazon also bought the same number of books on eBay, but the order hadn't arrived there yet, so between when he hit the buy button and the time the order arrived, the price had changed, so those orders aren't filled.

<comment><USER12> Using the analogy of the books you are raising the price in the milliseconds between the customer clicking buy and packets of that request reaching ebay's servers and all after the user has seen your price and stock availability a second ago. I don't think this acceptable business practice, if you have seen a price and a stock you should be able to place the order and (unless another order that isn't front running has arrived first to deplete the stock) the order should be fulfilled even if you show a different price to the next visitor to the product page.

I can sort of see that but I don't quite understand why there are different exchanges. I can't see the benefit except to those for whom it is an arbitrage opportunity.

I would also expect there to be low cost systems by which you could place simultaneous orders on all exchanges (at the cost of a slight delay in the order starting to allow them all to be posted at the same time as the furthest one.

The HFT still seems to add little real liquidity. The spreads that are shown may be narrower but the real spread seems much higher.

<comment><USER13> > Using the analogy of the books you are raising the price in the milliseconds > between the customer clicking buy and packets of that request reaching > ebay's servers and all after the user has seen your price and stock > availability a second ago. I don't think this acceptable business practice

Speed shouldn't be the factor for why this isn't acceptable. The seller doesn't know that there are orders in the queue for the eBay order, they're just raising the price. That they're doing it quickly is just a matter of efficiency.

> I can sort of see that but I don't quite understand why there are different > exchanges.

Yeah. No idea there.

> I would also expect there to be low cost systems by which you could place > simultaneous orders on all exchanges

There are.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough speed isn't really the criteria. In the Ebay example Ebay know what price they showed the customer on the product page when they went to the checkout and should fulfil it if they can (provided the transaction is completed in reasonable time - a couple of minutes in the book buying world). This is maybe an illustration of the problem with the analogy rather than being a useful insight into the trading system.

<comment><USER13> I think that the analogy works pretty well, surprisingly. I see no functional difference between changing the price in near real time as a reaction to another order on another exchange as I do "Hey, let's wait til midnight", which might equally screw the guy trying to put his order in at 11:59:59.

That said, I'm not an expert in the field, and I've just pieced this information from other posts. I have no strong opinion on the matter, but after throwaway's explanation (and all the subsequent discussion), my uninformed position agrees with his; that this article is exaggerative, and not indicative of anything being 'rigged'.

Moving fast, at least in my opinion, isn't cheating.

If they were raising the price on Ebay in response to the same customer's buy offer on Ebay, I would consider that unseemly, but not even necessarily unfair, as it only assumes that the buyer is willing to pay the newly raised price, and has approximately as much risk of losing the sale as making it.

<comment><USER12> As far as I understand it a contract is made when there is an offer and an acceptance of that offer. If you are Ebay/Amazon I don't think that you can show one price and then just happen to change it as the user accepts it. The price charged should be the one offered. If the product page shows a price and user puts it in their basket and orders in within a reasonable time (5-10 minutes) the offered price should be honoured even if the price changed in the 5-10 minutes and all customers going to the product page at that point see the new price.

Note: This is not the behaviour I expect to see of share trading platforms but it is the way consumer goods sales should behave.

<comment><USER9> With the advent of electronic price labeling in retail stores we will soon live in a world where the price can change after you've picked up an item of the shelf and before you check out at the front of the store.

[http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1181195/real- time...](http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1181195/real-time-pricing- coming-store-near)

<comment><USER12> I don't think that this would be legal in the UK unless on upwards changes the labels changed a reasonable[0] time before the prices. Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and probably some other laws would probably cover it.

[0] A small shop could probably do it much quicker than a large supermarket which might have to allow for people being in there for an hour.

<comment><USER9> Ya, I'm sure there will be tricky regulatory issues here both in the UK and elsewhere. I'm just pointing it out as I find it interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is happening here is really quite simple, and doesn't deserve an entire blog post.

There are two exchanges, A and B, and a market maker Jill is quoting (say) 10,000 shares on each of those two exchanges for $17.

Big institutional trader Jack sees the 20,000 shares and decides that he wants to buy 15,000 of them, so he sends two orders for 7,500 shares each to A and B. Because of various effects (network latencies, routing switching delays, whatever) his order arrives at exchange A first, and is immediately filled at $17.

Jill, who has her computer co-located at exchange A, sees that she has sold 7,500 shares for $17, and realizes that there is demand for shares. Because of this demand, she decides to raise her prices. She immediately cancels her remaining 2500 shares on exchange A and replaces them with 10,000 shares at $17.05 and sends an instruction to do the same thing at exchange B.

Because Jill has fast computers and low-latency connections, her cancellation arrives at exchange B before Jack's buy order, so Jack is told that there are no longer shares available on exchange B at $17.

RESULT: Jack is filled for 7500 shares at $17 (half of what he requested) and the new market best offer is $17.05. Jack is welcome to submit another order for $17.05 if he wants to buy at that price. Jill is now short 7500 shares at $17, and will try to buy them back at a lower price (she may or may not succeed - until she does, she is exposed to the risk of further price rises).

Jill was able to use her speed advantage to detect that there was additional demand to buy this stock, and raise the price at which she was willing to sell it before Jack had finished buying all that he wanted to. This is _exactly_ the way that an efficient market is supposed to work - it reacts to fluctuating demand (and other information) to set appropriate prices.

I think there are several things that get glossed over while people are working themselves up about this -

1\. Jack is upset because he couldn't buy 15,000 shares at the price he wanted to buy them. But Jack has no god-given right to be able to buy shares at the price he likes best. He is subject to the laws of the market, just like everyone else.

2\. The _only_ reason that Jill has a speed advantage over Jack is because she has paid for it! She has paid to co-locate her server at the exchange, and she has paid to use high-speed connections between exchanges. Are we going to declare that paying for a competitive advantage is suddenly immoral?

3\. If Jack doesn't like this state of affairs, he has several options. He can invest in high-speed infrastructure as well. He can use smarter order-routing logic (e.g. adding delays to his orders so that they arrive at the exchanges approximately simultaneously, or splitting his large order up into multiple smaller orders). Or he can use a broker who will do these things for him. If Jack doesn't want to pay for any of these things, then he has to put up with lower quality execution. As much as he might wish it, the ability to buy as many shares as he wants at the price he wants them is not a universal human right.

<comment><USER15> "Fresh Apples here! Only the best apples for 2 dollars!" \- "I would like one, please." \- "Thatll be 2.50, sir." \- "What? I thought you just said 2?" \- "Demand has just gone up."

<comment><USER14> I'm glad you brought this up, because this kind of thing happens _precisely never_ on a financial exchange.

If you go to a store, the store owner sees you take your apples up to the counter, and so he can theoretically change his price before you get there (although in practice, if he ever did that he would soon be out of business).

On a financial exchange, the market maker doesn't even find out that you wanted to buy _until the trade has already happened_. It is literally impossible for the market maker to change his price, because he doesn't find out about your order until it's already occurred.

What is possible is that the market maker is also quoting on _another, totally separate_ exchange, and he decides to change his prices there, in reaction to seeing a big order on the first exchange.

It's like an apple seller who owns two carts in different parts of town. When you come to his first cart and buy all his apples for $2, he guesses that maybe you are going to go over to his second cart and buy all the apples there as well, so he calls his business partner who's running that cart, and tells him to raise his prices to $2.50 - which makes perfect sense as a business strategy, because demand _has_ gone up.

Note that he only raised his prices because you bought _all_ the apples at his first cart. If you just bought one apple out of the hundreds he has (because you're a small investor, not a giant investment bank) then he wouldn't bother to raise his prices.

<comment><USER15> I accept that your explanation makes sense, but the fact that this can happen automagically in an intransparent way when someone just wants to buy a number of shares at a quoted price just feels wrong. And reading a few other articles on Nanex also give me weird image of what happens in stocks in general.

Then again, I have no idea about these things and should probably shut up.

<comment><USER14> Just remember that when you say

      "someone wants to buy a number of shares at a quoted price"

what you really mean is

      "a giant investment bank or hedge fund with some privileged
       information about a stock wants to buy so many shares that
       they actually need to go to multiple exchanges to satisfy
       their demand"

and you'll be all set ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article establishes that two things often happen shortly after you place an order to buy shares: 1) Another trader places a similar order on another exchange. 2) A large number of outstanding sell orders are cancelled.

It's not clear to me that either of these are Bad Things, deontologically speaking. [I don't recall Jesus mentioning them.]

The key question is consequentialist: Are there regulatory changes which would improve the lot of the average investor, investing through, say, an index tracker or pension fund? For each potential change, one ought see how it fares w.r.t. this standard, considering, to the extent that it is possible, the induced second-order effects.

Talk of theft, rigging, fairness (you don't owe people like me anything), stolen goods and frontrunning is only useful to the extent that it helps us converge on an answer to this question. These words are tools that we have developed for analysing more familiar situations, where they correspond to actions which are clearly harmful.

Most changes proposed here either lose market efficiency directly (trade buffering / increased tick sizes) or just give us new games to play (if the market clears once a second, we will get our orders in last), potentially resulting in a less direct loss. The question remains.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't see how this proves the market is rigged. What I do see is: 1) One market participant is being less than clever by trying to buy, in one order, 80% of the offered quantity, and 2) Another market participant realizes this, and reacts accordingly.

The post is written as if the world should freeze once the client sends an order. He was 'stolen' shares. Really?

</comment><comment><USER18> As a non-trader, my question is:

Were the 24k shares being offered by one seller/broker, as in "I have 24k shares to sell at 17" or was the 24k just an aggregation of the availability all the smaller offers?

If the former, it seem to me that the seller is cheating, if it is the latter then I can see how the HFT systems would raise the price in response to a sale, but I also see how frustrating that is to the buyer.

I wonder why these trades are not being performed in parallel across the various exchanges, partially preventing this kind of arbitrage?

<comment><USER19> > Were the 24k shares being offered by one seller/broker, as in "I have 24k > shares to sell at 17" or was the 24k just an aggregation of the availability > all the smaller offers?

The shares were being quoted on different exchanges, at the same ask price. 24k was the cumulative volume that the buyer wanted, but that couldn't be fulfilled by a single exchange (the quote was for a smaller volume at that price). Therefore, to buy 24k shares, the buyer needs to trade twice, once at each exchange.

> I wonder why these trades are not being performed in parallel across the > various exchanges, partially preventing this kind of arbitrage?

As has been pointed out, this is what a good broker will do - they will compensate for latency to make sure that bids arrive at differing venues at the same time to prevent the market shifting underneath them. A naïve broker will simply send out the bids at the same, and latency means that they arrive at different exchanges at different times. This lets the sellers at the more distant exchange move the market in response to the information of the trade being executed at the closer exchange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> All exchanges should have synced clocks and all messages should have a timestamp up to 2 seconds in the future when they will be published by each exchange. The buffering would be internal to each exchange and not shared with anybody. You can only cancel after what you are cancelling is published. This would allow everyone to make all exchanges publish at once so people with fast cable between exchanges can't beat out those that don't.

<comment><USER21> >This would allow everyone to make all exchanges publish at once so people with fast cable between exchanges can't beat out those that don't.

Why is one actor paying for an advantage that is available to anyone who should desire it, and have the means to pay for it, an issue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone explain what's happening with the order cancellations? What causes it? Who is the party that is canceling orders?

<comment><USER5> "Holy shit, someone is working there way through every broker, buying ever share of Ford stock they have! ...huh, I've got some Ford stock for sale. Maybe if I quickly pull it out of the shop window, and change the price, I can make some extra cash!"

That's what it is: People are seeing the orders pour through the various exchanges, and are reacting to it. If they were seeing the orders _before_ they hit the exchanges, that would be front running, and it would be illegal. But Nanex appears to be showing people responding to orders after they hit the exchanges, and that would seem to be legal and moral.

The moral is that if you want to buy so much of a single stock that you can't even buy it all from a single exchange, you MAY end up paying a bit of a premium, unless you're quite good at hiding what you're doing. And in this example, the purchaser was not. It's a story as old as markets.

<comment><USER6> The question, from a society-design point of view, is whether it is useful to have a whole class of people who engage in what is ultimately a zero-sum game and therefore an arms race, and whether it wouldn't be better to design markets in such a way that a large buy order can be placed _without_ having to be an expert at HFT.

After all, the market is supposed to be useful for organizing _long-term_ investments. The short-term stuff is pretty far removed from the progress of society.

<comment><USER23> That's what I've always thought as well. We have large numbers of very intelligent people dedicating all their efforts to playing games with the values of real companies. It seems like a massive waste of talent IMHO.

<comment><USER24> Is this comment real? You made this comment on a site that most people use to waste time, and where one of the top posts is an Assembly implementation of Flappy Bird.

Fun fact: HFT has an annual revenue ~1/50th[1][2] of Google's. What's worse: a few hundred people wasting their time moving prices of select stocks a few pennies, or several thousand wasting their time collecting scary amounts of data about you to try and get you to click an ad?

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- frequency_trading#Market_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- frequency_trading#Market_share)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> An interesting contradiction appears here. On one hand, this increases market efficiency, or so we're told. On the other, we are also told that if a big pension fund wants to avoid being played like this, they should spend money on their own HFT equipment.

It seems there is only one clear winner here - the IT people making money off developing HFT systems.

<comment><USER9> Here's the chief executive of Vanguard (one of the largest investment management companies in the world) discussing how HFT has dramatically lowered their trading costs:

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feabdc0.html#axzz37dq3BD3q)

Spreads used to be a quarter, and now they're a penny! That's a huge deal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't surprise me the least bit. Where there is something available to exploit (in this case, access to direct, fast feeds), it will be exploited.

Would it be possible, legally and technically, to put a special additional fee/tax onto high-frequency trading while leaving normal high-volume traders alone?

<comment><USER27> Go to the router just entering the exchange, type:

      tc qdisc change dev eth0 root netem delay 100ms 10ms

Problem solved.

<comment><USER22> what does this do? (non-finance guy here)

<comment><USER27> Its a bit of a joke. Its a network thing, not a finance thing. What it does is adds a delay and more importantly, a bit more _random_ delay to the time it takes the order to reach the exchanges server. Once you add in the non- determinism, HFT basically falls apart because you can't take your truckload of cash and buy yourself a place in a datacenter that's 2ms closer to the exchange and front-run everyone.

It would be a wonderful thing to see all of those millions these guys have "invested" shaving a millisecond or two off their transaction times laid waste by a single command.

<comment><USER28> This "solution" will only make it harder for regular folks to execute orders, since HFTs will beat the randomness by shooting multiple orders through multiple order gateways.

<comment><USER27> Guess we'll need a hierarchical token bucket with stochastic fairness queueing as well.

We don't just need it to be random. We need there to be no way of ever quite knowing if any given order will beat another order to the exchange (within a given time period, of course). They won't know if they can beat joe ordinary, and they definitely won't know if they can beat the other HFT's. That might be enough to put a lid on it.

Edit: For those playing along, here's the metaphor. Joe goes to market to buy sheep. Bill knows Joe is going so he sends a fast runner ahead of him to buy the cheapest sheep in town first so he can mark them up and sell them to Joe when he arrives. We try making everyone wait at the town gate for a random amount of time to give Joe a chance to arrive and get through. So Bill (being very rich) just sends 10 guys so one is very likely to be let in before Joe anyway. Next we introduce the stochastic filter. We make everyone line up and then shuffle the order every once in a while, but Bill still has more guys so he might still get one in first more often than not. Finally, we add the token bucket. For every one guy that we know employed by Bill admitted, we make the next one wait twice as long to get in, so if Joe and 10 Bills show up, Joe and the first Bill are essentially on even footing again because the 2nd through 10th Bill would have to wait too long to matter.

<comment><USER29> "For those playing along, here's the metaphor. Joe goes to market to buy sheep. Bill knows Joe is going so he sends a fast runner ahead of him to buy the... "

Seriously, how many times have we discussed this issue on this site and we still get this bullshit. Bill doesn't know Joe is going. He doesn't. Get it through your thick heads.

<comment><USER30> Somewhat farcically perpetuating the metaphor, is it not the case that Bill gets to know that Joe is interested in buying sheep once Joe has bought a few of them? And at that point Bill can outrun Joe and make money from his (very near) future purchases?

That was my reading of the article - it seems that either there is a flow of information from the trading events to the fast traders, or the scenario portrayed in the article was very unlikely (though I guess that couldn't be ruled out given how much trading there is). noonespecial's metaphor seems to apply, what have I misunderstood?

<comment><USER31> _Somewhat farcically perpetuating the metaphor, is it not the case that Bill gets to know that Joe is interested in buying sheep once Joe has bought a few of them?_

He doesn't _know_ with certainty. He can guess that's what Joe is doing, but he could be wrong and be stuck with sheep that he can't sell for the price he intends to ask. Every second he owns sheep is a second he's taking a risk that they'll go down in price, not up.

<comment><USER30> Yes, that makes sense. From what I understood of the article, and it really isn't my area so maybe I got something wrong, a buy order was not filled completely even though there were sell orders available to fill it. Doesn't that mean that people cancelled their orders whilst the buy was being filled, meaning that they must have been able to execute market actions out of order? That would put people who can act quickly at a big advantage on getting the price they wanted, because they can cancel and re-bid at a higher price. Sure it's a gamble, but it seems like one with little to lose.

I've probably misunderstood something, but it certainly seems to be an issue that gets people very exercised. I presume there must be some competitive advantage in being fast, otherwise people wouldn't do it, so surely the only real issue is whether or not the consequence of exercising that advantage is socially advantageous?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just in case anyone has time to help me out:

What's the difference between trades and quotes here in this chart? And how are the trader's order and purchases indicated?

<comment><USER33> A quote is a statement that someone is offering to buy or sell a specific quantity of shares/commodities at a specific price: "I want to sell 10g of gold at 40$ each". Typically the identity of the trader is known only to the exchange (and the trader )

A trade is an announcement that an offer was accepted and a contract was agreed on. "10g of gold have been sold at 40$ each". The identity of the traders is typically known only by the exchange, and each of the trader knows they are part of it, but don't know the counterparty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> what is market-pricing without arbitrage?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is the bad part of HFT, the one that is theft and destroy value. It is paid by the big players, and "solved" by imperfect solution like dark pools. A better solution could be to add a hour component to the order, so all commands from an actor in all markets are executed at the exact same time.

This rotted apple should not hide the good part of HFT, which is to reduce spread and inconsistencies between markets and to generate profits from this (positive) action. HFT took the place of traders, who were paid a lot for doing that stupid task.</comment>


Even the Pandemic Can't Kill the Open-Plan Office - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/05/open-office-design-coronavirus-risk-safe-workplace-health/611299/ <comment><USER2> I'd consider switching jobs if it meant I could work from home or have an office with opaque walls and an opaque door.

I'd forgotten how much more productive I am when I'm not in a cube farm or open space.</comment>


Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-markets-2-customermarket-risk-versus-invention-risk/ <comment><USER2> I think his spectrum is basically right, for most businesses in those industries, at the present time. But it may differ over time, as the maturity of the industry changes. Biotech might eventually become routine; and, in the enterprise, there was invention risk when the concept of the relational databases was first developed (or perhaps its inventors were quite sure they could make it work). In the future, there might be similarly seminal inventions, that transform the enterprise. It's so inefficient you'd think there'd be a better way.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure you can ever totally avoid market risk. Preferences change over time and there's always the risk of a market drying up during the time it takes to develop and produce a new product.

Examples of ideas with pure invention risk anyone?</comment>


Clockmaker John Harrison vindicated 250 years after 'absurd' claims - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-john-harrison-vindicated-250-years-absurd-claims <comment><USER2> What I don't get is, why did they dismiss the plans out of hand 200 years ago when the guy that wrote them was literally famous for producing a revolutionary clock? I mean, with that kind of track record, you'd have thought someone would give it a go.

<comment><USER3> 200 years ago, how would you validate his claim? You would have to have a more accurate time reference, and I'm not sure exactly what that would be.

<comment><USER4> Harrison measured the accuracy of his clocks by observing eclipses of stars by chimneys. We know that for a given star such eclipses happen every 86164.09056 seconds.

For those who might be wondering why it's not every 24 hours, or 86400 seconds, look up "Sidereal Day"[0][1][2].

[0] [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sidereal+day](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sidereal+day)

[1] [http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_day](http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_day)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time)

<comment><USER5> At that level of accuracy, however, you will find that the rotation of the Earth itself doesn't keep time that well.

The Shortt-Synchronome clock [0] was the most accurate pendulum clock, known to have an error of less than 1 second per year. It was used in 1926 to detect tiny seasonal changes in the Earth's rotation rate. An evaluation of the clock in 1984 revealed it was even more accurate than thought --- it was in fact accurate to within 1 second per 12 years, the discrepancy being due to "the slight changes in gravity due to tidal distortions in the solid Earth caused by the gravity of the Sun and Moon."

Harrison's claim of 1 second error in 100 days is clearly in the same order of magnitude as the Shortt-Synchronome's known error rate of 1 second per year in 1926, and thus would have been also affected by the tiny seasonal changes in the Earth's rotation rate.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortt- Synchronome_clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortt-Synchronome_clock)

<comment><USER6> This is why we talk about mean time and still have to account for discrepancies as leap seconds. That's not an issue with the clocks, just the earth.

However, the situations are actually pretty different. If you look into the study of the Shortt-Synchronome clock, you'll see it's actually talking about the gravitational effects of the sun and moon on pendulums. The Harrison clocks had no pendulums.

The Shortt-Synchronome is still a pretty amazing clock, though.

<comment><USER4>
      > The Harrison clocks had no pendulums.

The clock referred to in the article does have a pendulum.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I see, I thought they were asking how you would validate his claim of the "revolutionary clock"(s) he was famous for in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's more technical data about the clock, including pictures.[1] The basic issues in high-accuracy clock design for fixed clocks in air are 1) providing the same amount of energy to the pendulum on each beat, 2) sensing the completion of each beat while withdrawing a fixed amount of energy, and 3) dealing with variation in temperature, air pressure, and humidity. 1) and 2) are the hard design problems. The general idea is that the drive train lifts up a tiny weight by a fixed distance, which is then released to power the pendulum. The pendulum impulse is thus isolated from variations in the rest of the drive train. See "grasshopper escapement". Dealing with 3) generally involves bimetallic strips and other self-adjusting mechanisms. Temperature variation is the big problem. There have been clocks with mercury barometers in the pendulum to compensate for air pressure, but this isn't one of them.

Harrison designed this clock, like most of his clocks, to run without lubrication, eliminating another source of variability. It's a beautiful piece of mechanical design.

The Smithsonian Institution used to have a very nice collection of important high-precision clocks, which they kept set and running. They seem to have been retired from public display.

[1] [http://www.frodsham.com/burgess- regulator/](http://www.frodsham.com/burgess-regulator/) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_escapement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_escapement)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the greatest thing we can learn from Harrison is being able to throw away a great deal of work for something new if it will produce a better result. The fact he did this himself with his orginal large sea clocks in favour of the smaller ones really speaks of dedication to the idea over implementation.

<comment><USER9> Being able to disrupt your own work is a sign of greatness, that you aren't satisfied with resting on your laurels. Unfortunately, many companies don't get this (Apple being a notable exception with the classic iPhones killing iPod sales).

<comment><USER10> Well the iPod was getting savaged by MP3 playing featurephones anyways.

<comment><USER11> Yeah that's simply not true. iPod didn't decline until after 2009. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/ipod- sales_n_468000...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/ipod- sales_n_4680000.html)

<comment><USER10> Would love to see a pr model breakdown of that. Do they put the iPod Touch in with the rest of the iPods, or in with the iPhone?

<comment><USER11> iPod touch is counted with iPods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some more information on this site:

[http://www.frodsham.com/burgess-regulator/](http://www.frodsham.com/burgess- regulator/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Was the clock that was tested made with contemporary tools? It may be that Harrison was right (his design was correct) but so were his critics (it couldn't be executed as designed at the time).

</comment><comment><USER14> Why didn't Harrison build the clock and demonstrate the accuracy to counter the criticism?

<comment><USER15> I only know what I saw on the film adaptation of Longitude, which was a one- note perseverance story that may not be the most objectively accurate: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/)

Harrison apparently spent his whole life building these clocks and fighting to secure the prize given a hostile council of astronomers who had pre-decided that an astronomical method put forth by some learned man would win, not some pathetic carpenter. Every demonstration he made, they would decide they required some higher standard of proof, or some rule had changed which invalidated the demonstration. He became extremely bitter at the process. His son spent much of his life attempting to validate the timepieces in naval voyages. Harrison was only awarded part of the prize on his deathbed after intervention by a sympathetic sovereign and also the death of some of the strong personalities on the Board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Discussions of Clock accuracy remind me of

Thief of Time (from the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett)

</comment><comment><USER17> The classic tale of hindsight, undoing the wrongs of the past where labelling progressive and forward thinkers "insane" was commonplace.

I wonder if we will look back on the forward thinkers of today (Stallman, Assange et. al) in 50 years and regret the scepticism which we throw their way today.

<comment><USER18> I don't mean to sound critical here, but I find it interesting that, quite often, discussions like this assume that who the speaker likes or the ideologies the speaker accepts are the ones that will be vindicated in the future.

I'm reminded of AskReddit threads, where people ask "what will people 100 years look back on our time and think was crazy?" and the top responses are always relatively uncontroversial (e.g. "people will look back and wonder how we could have banned gay marriage").

I wonder if there have been any good discussions, on HN or Reddit or somewhere, that focus on that question from the perspective of "what kinds of things will people believe in in the future, things for which I'll be on the 'wrong side of history'?"

<comment><USER19> This is something I've tried really hard to think about, and it is indeed very difficult.

I'm a meat eater, and don't intend to stop. That's the best thing I can think of where I expect to be seen as horrible 100 years from now.

In the case of current online communities, I hope the current habit of picking one comment someone made, or one photo they took, and the whole internet attacking them for it, will be seen as unacceptable. (I'm not talking about people doing things genuinely terrible, but doing things which lots of people do every day, but then one person, for some reason, gets into the public sphere for it).</comment></comment></comment>