Google de-emphasizes 'Don't Be Evil' motto in its code of conduct - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 <comment><USER2> Open instant messaging interconnectivity with third parties was canned.

Play Services won't install on unapproved devices anymore.

Sideloading apps doesn't work the same way on Daydream as it does for the main Android system (can't launch non-Google Play store apps inside Daydream).

BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.

Many webpages that only work on their webbrowser.

Long-con bait and switch as they morph into Microsoft of the 90s?

<comment><USER3> You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain

\-- Harvey Dent , in The Dark Knight

<comment><USER4> Ironically Bill and Melinda Gates turned into sort of worldwide heroes, targeting the big difficult unprofitable problems with the most social impact

<comment><USER5> I disagree, and also Gates ruined computers for everyone forever.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. If Windows were a lot better, the open source revolution might not have gained quite so much momentum. If IE was a lot better—or rather if they didn't let it stagnate—the very concept of installing alternative browsers might never have entered the mainstream zeitgeist.

<comment><USER7> Same thing is true for Apple's OS, which for many serves as an expensive several year pit-stop between abandoning Microsoft and embracing open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the article ends by confirming that the "don't be evil" phrase is still in the code of conduct, admittedly just at the end after a rewording. Its title is entirely misleading, despite reflecting the original article.

Can this submission's title be changed to something like: "Google Deemphasizes "Don't Be Evil" Motto in Its Code of Conduct"? That'd at least frame this change accurately for discussion.

[Edit: I see the change was made. Thanks!]

<comment><USER9> placed randomly in a sentence at the very end vs. being the entire core of the message is a rather significant change IMHO.

<comment><USER10> > placed randomly in a sentence at the very end

"Randomly"? The very end is where you put whatever you want to be the most important key summation and takeaway message of a document like this.

<comment><USER11> The old bury the lede technique. That's widely regarded as being not so good.

<comment><USER10> > The old bury the lede technique

The CoC is not a news article, and the dynamics are different there. And burying the lede is when you mislead by putting a key point that shifts, rather than summarizes, the understanding conveyed by rest of the article late in a news article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's almost as if Brin and Page predicted how bad it was going to get when they first described Google:

"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

"Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."

"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed." [0]

[0] [http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> To play devil's advocate for a second - I don't mind this (that much).

The phrase "Don't Be Evil" seems like a kitschy nod to Google's earlier days when they were just a couple of programmers in a garage. However, that was decades ago and Google has grown into a more matured entity. This statement comes from a time before Google had to meet with Government agencies on a (probably) daily basis or start policing YouTube for terrorist beheading videos and pornography. They are actively trying to do good - but they're no different than IT - you only complain about when things go wrong, never when they go right. Google does plenty of good, they don't need a snide comment about how everyone else doesn't to do that.

To remove this artifact of the past isn't to say "it's time to start being evil!". It's a child putting away their toys as they move to more mature times.

EDIT: As someone mentions, the line is still there. Leaving my post up as it still stands if they took it out tomorrow.

<comment><USER14> > To remove this artifact of the past ... It's a child putting away their toys > as they move to more mature times.

That's just depressing.

<comment><USER13> By all means, I am still very much a child at heart... but I also know I shouldn't go around telling everyone to "Suck It", like my WWF-watching childhood.

<comment><USER15> I think we can all agree that a positive ideological statement and goal to strive towards is a little bit different than an immature insult.

<comment><USER16> Dividing the world into Good and Evil is childish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone think that 'don't be evil' is enough? Evil is basically the worst someone can be. You can be bad, wrong, repugnant, reprehensible, vicious, and malignant and still not be evil. Honestly, why is there so much credit given to a company for saying 'don't be as bad as you can possibly imagine' which is a pretty reasonable translation of 'don't be evil'.

<comment><USER18> Imagine if it had said "Don't be immoral." Think of the discussion there, whose morals? Googles? The employees? The country where the employee lives?

In my mind, it is largely aspirational because it takes a back seat to 'make Google money.' Or perhaps making money is by definition not evil, so if you're making money by what you are doing it is transitively not evil.

When I worked at Google, management explained it to be "Would you be embarrassed to be a Googler if what you were doing showed up on an article on the New York Times? If so then chances are its evil, don't do that." But then came Project Maven, a sort of real world test, and well that is still going on now isn't it?

<comment><USER16> Is it obvious that fighting a war of defense is evil?

<comment><USER18> Is it obvious that is is not evil?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always thought the "Don't Be Evil" phrase was more like a don't be comically evil. Don't wear black suit, boring logo and more imaginary related to an evil person. Instead be fun, use kindergarten colors, use the fun noogler hat and offices that look like playground. Evil seems like a cartoon-ish word for me and feels like this was more of a reminder to the whole company that they are doing some sketchy things with users' data so let's be sure to not be 'evil' about it. If you think about it from this perspective a lot of the Google-way of being makes sense.

<comment><USER20> I've always thought the same. Where "Evil" is the comical caricature of evil corp. Like what the 1984 Apple ad makes IBM/Xerox/Big Brother look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is definitely something everyone has been waiting for.

The only question I have is.. why? One generally hopes that everyone is out to do no evil, including those that do so unintentionally.

So why remove something that's been so closely associated with the company for so long? Did some executive find it "tacky"?

At any rate, this is truly a loss for the internet.

<comment><USER10> > So why remove something that's been so closely associated with the company > for so long?

They didn't, per the body of the article (contrary to the headline.)

<comment><USER9> Yes, and if you read the article you'll notice the significant difference.

Anyone that was with google from the beginning knows the significance, and to try to play off "hey they used it in a sentence" as some sort of passivity, doesn't really grasp the depth of the change. (IMHO)

<comment><USER10> > Yes, and if you read the article you'll notice the significant difference.

Yes, but neither the headline, nor the text of the article, nor any of the commentary here so far mentions the significant difference in the excerpts shown, which is only tangentially connected to removing gratuitous repetition of the phrase "don't be evil."

The signficant change is removing the value statement connected to the old motto in the first paragraph of the excerpt from the older Code of Conduct: "Yes, it's about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it's also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect."

(Now, it's possible that those value statements were redundant with other parts of the CoC or that the revision moved them to someplace other than the place preceding the rest of the excerpt and that they retain equal prominence in the new CoC, in which case the selection of the excerpt boundaries would be another misleading aspect of the article. And you can even make the case that they were largely redundant with the last sentence of the second paragraph of then old—first of the new—excerpt, so that, while it's more significant than dropping a few repetitions of "don't be evil", it's not all _that_ significant.)

<comment><USER9> Gratuitous repetition? Come on. It's been the unofficial company motto since the beginning.

When they filed their IPO, it was one of the very first things they included in the IPO

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504124025/ds1a.htm)

.. now it's been reduced to a footnote at the end of a sentence.

If you don't get the significance of this, you're either, very young, very naïve, or astroturfing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Clearly they're trying to guide internal ethics. "Don't be evil." suggests that it is forbidden to be evil in all circumstances. How to read the new guideline: "Do the right thing, even if sometimes it requires evil." Some big event inside must have triggered this change in stance. Like a letter requesting they capitulate on some requirement to protect or give up user data, reveal whereabouts, key escrow, or something like that.

I guess what is confusing is how subjective "the right thing" can be. If an employee were to cite this new slogan and try to address a problem with it, is the right thing to capitulate or to defend. Who is to say really.

It almost seems like it is reworded to be more vague so higher ups can just wave their hands and say these aren't the droids you're looking for. But, are they waving their hands at employees protesting the mistreatment of customer data and privacy? Or, are they waving their hands at the powers that be who want unfettered access? I guess time will tell.

<comment><USER22> > Some big event inside must have triggered this change in stance

I don't know what triggered the change in stance but this may have triggered the removal.

Citing 'Don't Be Evil' Motto, 3,000+ Google Employees Demand Company End Work on Pentagon Drone Project [0]

[0][https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/04/citing-dont- be-...](https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/04/citing-dont-be-evil- motto-3000-google-employees-demand-company-end-work-pentagon)

<comment><USER21> They changed to "Do the right thing" from "Don't be evil" back in 2015 long before the 3000+ employee protest against the Pentagon drone project. I doubt this is the event that triggered the change in stance.

<comment><USER22> You are right.

<comment><USER21> The objections to the project internally could have been brewing for years, though.

<comment><USER16> Years before the DoD project was invented and the contract proposed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I liked the old google of the 2000s, focused on search and being scrappy and quirky. Now it's super corporate without any real identity as far as I can see.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Don't you think making AI that poses as a human is unethical? Isn't our motto don't be evil?"

"You're right Johnson. Take that don't be evil line out"

<comment><USER25> Can you elaborate why making AI pose as humans is unethical?

<comment><USER24> Humans have a right to know whether they are talking to a human or a machine. Even the benign example of restaurant hours -- maybe the guy was willing to tell the restaurants holiday hours to someone who is wondering, but DOES NOT want it posted to Google bringing in more customers and forcing him to stay longer on the holidays. I don't know, it's a contrived example but it's not the right approach to say "why should they have a problem?". The right approach is just to tell them and let them decide whether they have a problem with it or not. Anyway this is kind of a moot argument because Google has said that they will tell people the call is coming from Duplex, so Google itself has conceded that people have the right to know they are talking to a machine. It is somewhat unfortunate that people care about this from a software perspective though, because it probably is beneficial from a "learning" standpoint to have people just speaking as they would to a real human.

<comment><USER26> You can't just declare that humans have a right to know if they are talking to another human or a machine. That's just restating what you already said. You have to justify _why_ humans should have that right.

<comment><USER24> We don't really have any "rights" at all, a right is just a concept that refers to the expectations humans have of each other and what is and is not okay to do. For example you may have a right to life to but you could still be murdered. Conceptually your rights have always been more than just what the law currently says. The US Declaration of Independence famously declared that all men are simply born with certain inalienable rights. That's just one way of looking at things, but it's an idea that kind of caught on.

Nobody declares our rights, we feel them in our guts. And the public feels this one in their gut without me having to explain it, which is why I call it a right: If something is generally accepted by the public, it is a de facto right. For example you could repeal the 1st amendment tomorrow but that wouldn't change anyones mind about whether freedom of speech is their right. But if you want me to stop being pedantic and actually defend my position, I would argue that people should have this right so that spammy AIs don't just ruin human interaction all together. Imagine a world where you never know if you're talking to a real person or some kind of AI trying to sell you something subtly... Not knowing explicitly whether you're talking to an AI or a real human could have a chilling effect on human-to-human relations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I thought they did this years ago. I distinctly remember a big kerfuffle over it.

<comment><USER28> Read the article, it gives the history on this. (Basically the motto was replaced by "Do the right thing" when Alphabet was formed in 2016 and this article points out that the language was recently removed from the code of code, although in reality it was just deemphasized.)

<comment><USER6> "Do the right thing" is not even remotely the same as _don 't be evil._ The former is highly contextual; the latter is an appeal to our shared morality.

<comment><USER16> What is our shared morality? If shared morality existed, there would be no Evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Source title is misleading clickbait [0]: as the text of the article makes clear, Google rewrote one section of its Code of Conduct in a way which, among other things, removed the phrase "don't be evil", but retained that phrase in another (more prominent [1]) place.

[0] which is necessary to pretend there is anything even worth having as a story here at all. "Google updates Code of Conduct; reduces number of repetitions of phrase 'don't be evil'" is an obvious nothingburger.

[1] the final line; in any long document, the very beginning and very end are the most prominent.

<comment><USER9> Removing the company's unofficial motto, and mixing it in with a random sentence at the very end is 'more prominent'.

Hmm.. I'll believe Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, before I believe that.

Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation is an interesting choice of words.. but fits very well.

You have a strange agenda, friend.

<comment><USER10> > Removing the company's unofficial motto, and mixing it in with a random > sentence at the very end is 'more prominent'.

It wasn't mixed in (the article itself notes it was retained unchanged) and the final sentence isn't a random placement but, along with the first, one of the two most significant places in a long document of this type—the beginning is where you put meant you want to shape the reading of the rest, the end is where you put the most important high-level key takeaway.

> Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to > lampoon the Muller investigation

I've actually never noticed in that context, apparently it's a big thing on Twitter in that context, but I'm quite selective of my consumption in that channel.

But the terms been in use for 60+ years.

> You have a strange agenda, friend.

What agenda is that, then?

<comment><USER9> I have no idea what your agenda is, but trying to say that removing all references of the companies former official motto and mixing it in at the very end of a sentence of their core of conduct somehow makes it "more prominent" is literal nonsense.

One hopes you have an agenda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think this motto became fairly diluted as far back as when Google went to China.

<comment><USER30> I had understood that the motto was heavily involved in the decision to leave China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I felt that when they started the "Don't be evil" motto, it was sort of a declaration of war on big boy Microsoft, which was seen as the evil alternative.

They're now about the same size, do similar things that people once criticized Microsoft for, and Microsoft is seen in a much better light now. The motto no longer applies.

<comment><USER32> Repeating history, including using dominant position to push their own browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> More of a marketing phrase than a code of conduct. Google realizes the sham is up so there is no use pretending anymore.

<comment><USER34> I agree it was more of a marketing phrase. The code of conduct is more likely something like "Only do evil if it makes good money and don't get caught."

<comment><USER9> Isn't the bigger question though, why not continue marketing?

<comment><USER34> At some point it begins to be obvious when marketing is full of it - I think they passed that point and had to accept what everyone already knew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My guess is that they realized it fits into the "corporations are evil" narrative that has become popular with many angry people on twitter recently, and then decided they didn't want to feed into it.

<comment><USER36> > "corporations are evil" narrative that has become popular with many angry > people on twitter recently

I'm fairly certain that narrative, and it's popularity, precedes Twitter by at least a few years.

Here's an Atlantic article that details a bit of the history:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/evil- co...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/evil-corporation- trope/479295/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I always thought the slogan was odd. In my mind evil is the absolute negative end of the spectrum of good vs evil. Why not something more positive sounding like "Do good"?

<comment><USER38> They use "Do the right thing" in their corporate code of conduct: [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of- conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-conduct.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Good thing it's gone, they won't have to pretend anymore.

<comment><USER40> Consider how much time and effort they can save not pretending. They can censor political opinions all day long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Total monopoly on search on the internet. Duopoly with FB on the internet advertising (85% belong to them, 15% belong to the rest of publishers, big and small). Rampant violation of privacy of billions of individuals. Destruction of journalism and small internet-based publishers who cannot compete against a monopoly that follows people everywhere.

Evil corporation all around.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hmm I'm on the fence on what this means exactly. Wording change seems to be fairly innocuous but the visuals here are not good.

</comment><comment><USER43> Also, from yesterday: _Google's Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering_

> _The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X > (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The > video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data > collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, > custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the > behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and > disease._

> _When reached for comment on the video, an X spokesperson provided the > following statement to The Verge:_

> _"We understand if this is disturbing -- it is designed to be._

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x- selfish...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish- ledger-video-data-privacy)

<comment><USER16> > This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a > technique known as 'speculative design' to explore uncomfortable ideas and > concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate. It's not related to any > current or future products."

> Google prompts users to select a life goal and then guides them toward it in > every interaction they have with their phone.

<comment><USER43> Thanks, Google PR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yep no longer applies, 5 years late

</comment><comment><USER45> Google scary video: [http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-selfish-ledger- vid...](http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-selfish-ledger- video-3475446)

</comment><comment><USER46> "everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct."

As measured against Goldman-Sachs.

</comment><comment><USER45> Google mgt was asked to mandate equality and diversity.

They said no! [https://i.redd.it/htqi8nuk6xx01.jpg](https://i.redd.it/htqi8nuk6xx01.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER47> As with laws, rules are made up by people and followed by some.

<comment><USER48> > As with laws, rules are made up by people and followed by some.

That still seems way better than the alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> And replaces it with "Don't be naive".

</comment><comment><USER50> [https://imgur.com/a/6sNdIZt](https://imgur.com/a/6sNdIZt)

</comment><comment><USER51> Apparently they've decided there's increased shareholder value in being evil

</comment><comment><USER52> This is why I use DuckDuckGo

</comment><comment><USER53> Absence of one doesn't prove presence of the other. But I digress.

</comment><comment><USER54> It was this or manipulating all search results for "evil".

</comment><comment> oh-kumudo It is better to keep it as a lie. Time for Google to grow up.

</comment><comment><USER55> Was beginning to sound a bit disingenuous anyway ...

</comment><comment><USER56> Ironic that you uploaded this with an AMP URL

</comment><comment><USER57> Some video evidence: [https://youtu.be/I7wwhsDJECw](https://youtu.be/I7wwhsDJECw)

</comment><comment><USER33> More of a marketing phrase than a code of conduct. Google realizes the sham is up so there is no use pretending anymore.

</comment><comment><USER58> That's the problem with don't be evil. You can only remove it when you become evil.

<comment><USER14> So... Takes one to know one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Served by (evil) AMP!

</comment><comment><USER60> Roll the evil laughter...

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm guessing they're not happy about the whole drone assassination debate going on internally. It's so disadvantageous that their staff can call the leadership outright hypocrites based on their own professed values. This makes everything so much easier for everyone.

Information on the drone program: [https://theintercept.com/drone- papers/](https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/)

Google's complicity in Project Maven: [https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project...](https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project- maven-to-deploy-computer-algorithms-to-war-zone-by-years-end/)

Google's Internal Debate: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/inside- go...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/inside-google-a- debate-rages-should-it-sell-artificial-intelligence-to-the-military)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for this. I actually had not seen this.

Very remnicient of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust.

<comment><USER62> Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a company to provide services or software to a military?

<comment><USER61> I think it's pretty obvious: when there's an obvious military threat that would have implications for civilians (e.g. invasion, blockade, etc), the software is tailored to that need, and the military is not currently engaged in multiple offensive bloody wars based on lies with a long history of doing so.

<comment><USER62> What about non-obvious threats? Generally speaking, nations that fall behind technologically fare poorly against more advanced nations.

What about software that is adapted by the military for new use cases instead of tailored use cases? Should Microsoft be responsible for damage caused operations planned in Word and PowerPoint? What about iPhone with sniper windage apps? How many layers removed before a company is considered ethical?

<comment><USER61> You're right that you can get into morally gray areas, but if the military is using applications that are available to ordinary consumers, businesses, and governments worldwide, it's not really giving them an edge now is it?

We should focus our criticism on people that are doing bad things and know it. We don't need to dive into the most murky territory in order to achieve worthy effects when there's so much low hanging fruit.

With regards to novel threats, it'd be nice if the military could justify these investments without resorting to propaganda, and outright lies. There should be a clear explanation that most people would understand the necessity of and how it works in their interest.

<comment><USER63> While I support a lower military budget and less interventionist foreign policy, the reality is that it's impossible to publicly justify some investments without revealing classified information that would put intelligence sources at risk. If we're going to have a military at all then people have to be willing to delegate those investment decisions to their elected officials and operate on a need-to-know basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The headline is of course wrong, they didn't remove it fully, they removed it from one paragraph.

More interestingly, they removed another sentence from that paragraph:

"[...] providing our users unbiased access to information."

In other words, Google wants to crack down on wrongthink without violating their own code of conduct.

<comment><USER65> I damn sure want some of my search results to be biased, e.g. when searching for "string".

That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.

<comment><USER64> Do you, _really_? When do you ever search for just "string"? You're going to add some context, like "split string C++".

Now maybe you'll say Google should know you're programming in C++ all the time, so having learned that, Google should be able to infer that when you type in "split string", the results should all be for C++.

Except then somehow Javascript comes into your requirements and now you need to retrain _your Google_ to give weight to that.

I'd much rather be able to use _the Google_ , not _my Google_ , so that I get more predictable results. It's already annoying that I can't tell people to google something and be sure whatever I'm talking about is in the top ten results of _their Google_.

> That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.

Nothing about that sentence was stupid and it's frightening that you don't seem to understand the ideal of being "unbiased" (as in "unbiased reporting"). We're going to be heading in the direction where's there's "liberal" and "conservative" _search engines_ , causing even more polarization of our collective world views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I wrote an entire essay about one problem: [http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick- mozi...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla- essay-final.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> Slow news day.</comment>


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This is just my 2 cents. Overall your design, and the product itself looks really good. The signup just seems to be a weakness.

</comment><comment><USER6> Syed - Are you A/B testing the three big bullet points at the top of the page? I read all three, and said "I'm pretty satisfied with what I use today, maybe, no." I probably would have left the page then under any other circumstances (update: "any other circumstances" meaning had I not found this link through HN posted by the founder of the company).

Also, the 'free for bootstrapped startups' section is below the fold on my 1680x1050px screen. Plus, the text in that section (once I found it) doesn't give me a lot of confidence in your longevity (don't get me wrong, I'm bootstrapped, too. It's just a psychological hurdle other users of yours will need to overcome).

<comment><USER5> Below the fold? Really? You can't scroll?

The whole concept of a fold is ridiculous to begin with (for the most part), but then to give feedback that the "here's how you get our paid app for free" link is not front and center? Really?

In the 10 seconds I spent looking at ScrumPads home page, I think it's a good design. The #fail didn't come until i clicked the link and landed on a FAQ not related to the promotion. I'd be interested, but I couldn't find more promotion details. Because of this, we'll probably stick with Unfuddle and their ticketing system.

I will say that yes, this HN thread is a promotion, and therefore, the URL should take us to a new landing page highlighting the promotion. Not to the general home page.

<comment><USER6> The article is entitled "ScrumPad Offers Free Subscription for Bootstrapped Startups," I'm using a fairly high-res screen, and I don't see a 'free subscription for bootstrapped startups' link anywhere.

I can scroll, but I won't unless something captures my interest. A free subscription _might_ , but not if I'm not aware of it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how about a paid-for SMTP service? - <AUTHOR>

Many ISPs (UK anyway) only allow you to use their SMTP server from your ISP connection. Many also stop you from using your own SMTP server (altho I don't understand why). So moving my laptop between home and office is pain - I have to switch my email client's configured smtp server each time.
Or - would be great for mobile email clients, where potentially an app could be installed on any network and IP.
Solution: a paid-for SMTP service, using some kind of authentication mechanism (e.g SMTP-AUTH which most clients can handle) for a nominal monthly/annual fee.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> "Many also stop you from using your own SMTP server (altho I don't understand why)."

Spam countermeasures, they usually block the port.

If you do follow up with this idea you will also have to find ways to prevent spam. Very troublesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> if its paid-for, with a monthly massage cap for example, this would be effective spam prevention no?

<comment><USER3> No.

What you'll get is tons of people subscribing to your service, you'll be so happy.

Then they start using your service, right up to that cap, and you're _still_ happy.

Then two months later the chargebacks start rolling in and you're dead in the water.

Curing spam on a service like this will take a lot more than just a message cap, you'll have to think this through very carefully because spammers have been at this much longer than you have.

They'll eat you alive if you're not careful.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok yes - you need excellent debit/credit card fraud prevention/detection. There are ways to mitigate this risk tho I think, at a cost obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can use gmail's SMTP to send from any From: address. It'll add your gmail address into a Sender: field, though, which you might not want.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes but my ISP wont allow me to use any other SMTP server...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> AuthSMTP (www.authsmtp.com) seems to be the canonical recommendation for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> ha - ok already done :) (Edit: obviously)</comment></comment>


Listen to this - <AUTHOR> http://stephenfry.com/blog/?p=59 <comment><USER2> It's an article about lossless audio codecs.

I discovered FLAC thanks to a fellow file sharer. When I can't find it in FLAC, I buy the CD, usually from Discogs.com or Amazon. I'll never go back to MP3, except for rarities I can't buy or get FLACced.

The only problem is I don't know how FLAC works, but that's not very important to enjoy the music.</comment>


Ask HN: what happened to LastPass? - <AUTHOR>

http://lastpass.com yields:

    An error occurred during a connection to lastpass.com.
    Peer's Certificate has been revoked.
    (Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate)
 <comment> mike-cardwell Their certificate has been revoked. Will be interesting to find out why.

EDIT: They have a new cert online now. One which hasn't been revoked. The issuer is the same. The new cert was generated two days ago.

EDIT2: Their old cert. The one which was revoked wasn't due to expire for another 323 days. I wonder if this is a precaution in case they actually were hacked and their private ssl key was compromised. Hopefully they'll explain what happened.

EDIT3: Here's a screen grab of the information Certificate Patrol gave me about their old and new certificates side by side: <https://grepular.com/lastpass.png>

EDIT4: On twitter they are stating: "As a security precaution we acquired a new security certificate, they revoked our old one a bit too soon. Fixed" - <https://twitter.com/lastpass>

EDIT5: Their latest tweet: "Our new SSL cert is active, this was a planned security upgrade : In the words of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, DON'T PANIC."

Checking out their latest blog post from 4 days ago: [http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/05/lastpass-security- notificat...](http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/05/lastpass-security- notification.html) it says:

"Multiple security experts and firms were brought in to help us, we've engaged one firm to do a further source code based review."

I'm guessing one or more of these security experts advised that they should get their certificate revoked and replaced purely as a precaution. The new cert has the same expiry date as the old one.

<comment><USER2> Your speculation is correct -- we re-keyed the certificate just as a precaution. Rolling a new cert is tough as thousands of people's clocks are wrong, so we thought we'd give it a full day so those people wouldn't receive errors -- we didn't realize the old one would be revoked so quickly (it was automatic with the rekey).

<comment><USER3> Best practice in this case would be to get your new cert from a new CA, then revoke the old one with the original CA once you've got the new cert in place. Plus, of course, announcing everything in advance. (I'd wait a month or so unless you had specific fear of the old one having been compromised).

<comment><USER4> Just wondering.. Why use a new CA?

<comment><USER3> The new CA won't invalidate your old CA's cert. You want to preserve availability of the old CA's cert until the new one is deployed across all your servers.

In practice, SSL (with CA certified keys issued by lame public CAs) is only really protection from passive eavesdropping anyway; there are enough bad or lax CAs out there that you have to assume an attacker can get a key for an arbitrary site, or can steal a site (not protected in an HSM) from almost any site.

There's nothing really wrong with the X509 PKI in the abstract, but it doesn't really work well for real identity on the Internet. Protection from passive attacks is worthwhile, but it's not worth the disruption to your users to push beyond that to try to keep only one key at a time out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems to be back now...

</comment><comment><USER6> it works fine for me. I see they've updated their website design.

</comment><comment><USER7> works for me...</comment>


Show HN: Viwi – You're more than a sheet of paper - <AUTHOR> https://myviwi.com <comment><USER2> I think that the 'Early Access' button disappears when I try to watch the promotional video, so I missed subscription

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We'll fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great video. I think video resumé it's actually better than a CV.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this has potential!

</comment><comment><USER5> very nice! #Beatslaha</comment>


The Slowest Generation  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324807704579085084130007974.html?mod=trending_now_3

<comment><USER2> "America hasn't won an Olympic marathon medal since 2004."

American Men also didn't win a medal from 1980-2004, or between 1928 and 1968. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_at...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_athletics_\(men\)#Marathon)

The Marathon for women only started in 1984, and American's did not medal from 1988-2004. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_at...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_athletics_\(women\)#Marathon)

I'm not American, but American's have never been marathoners. It's an extremely shaky argument that the current generation is slower based on the statistics quoted in this article.

If America sees a long-term decline in something like the 4x100 relay (running or swimming), then I'd say there might be some cause for concern, but I suspect more people are competing in running events as a whole, and most of those people are going to be slow, compared to the past when athletics was for athletes.</comment>


CPU reliability – Linus Torvalds (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/cpu_reliability.html <comment><USER3> I don't work in environment where I get to deal with hardware failures, so pardon my ignorance, but has anyone seen a failed CPU piece which has failed during normal operation? I am under an impression that it is very rare for a CPU itself to fail so that it would need to be replaced.

The only times I've even heard about failing CPUs has been if they've been overclocked or insufficiently cooled(add in overvolting, and you get both :)) or physical damage during mounting/unmounting or otherwise handling hardware. And even then the failure has usually been elsewhere than the CPU itself.

Of course I am not saying it'd be unheard of, but for me frankly, right now it is.

<comment><USER4> My dad had a laptop which would not boot unless he put it in the fridge first for half an hour. As long as he didn't reboot everything then worked "fine". Does that count?

<comment><USER5> That's probably a bad contact or a tiny fissure that makes contact again when cooled

And the failed part is either needed only on bootup or when the current gets going it doesn't stop until it's powered off again

<comment><USER4> Thanks for clearing that up - it's always been bothering what it could possibly be (that and the "how on earth did he figure that out in the first place?")

<comment><USER6> The cold would shrink the motherboard to re-connect the contacts; it might have been fixed by doing the old Xbox/nvidia trick of putting it in the oven (which would soften the solder, causing it to shift and re-connect). With the Xbox, you could apparently even just wrap it in a towel and let its own heat do the trick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> so not even mentioned here is metastability - basically signals that cross clock domains within traditional clocked logic where the clocks are not carefully organized to be multiples of each other can end up being sampled just as they change - the result is a value inside of a flip-flop that's neither a 1 or a 0 - sometimes an analog value somewhere in between, sometimes an oscillating mess at some unknown frequency - worst worst case this unknown bad value can end up propagating into a chip causing havoc, a buzzing mess of chaos.

In the real world this doesn't happen very often and there are techniques to mitigate it when it does (usually at a performance or latency cost) - <USER2> CPUs are probably safe, they're all one clock but display controllers, networking, anything that touches the real world has to synchronize with it.

For example I was involved with designing a PC graphics chip in the mid '90s - we did the calculations around metastability (we had 3 clock domains and 2 crossings), we calculated that our chip would suffer from metastability (might be as simple as a burble on one frame of a screen, or a complete breakdown) about once every 70 years - we decided we could live with that as they were running on Win95 systems - no one would ever notice

Everyone who designs real world systems should be doing that math - more than one clock domain is a no no in life support rated systems - your pacemaker for example

<comment><USER8> If a failure mode was likely to happen once every 70 chip-years of operation, then it seems like if you sold a few hundred thousand chips then you would expect several instances of that failure mode to occur across the population of chips every day?

<comment><USER7> simply yes - but as I mentioned in our case by far the most most were going to be pixel burbles - you'd likely see one in the lifetime of your video card - the chances of the more serious sort of jabbering core sort of meltdown are much less likely - we design against them - but, one has to stress, not impossible.

You can design to be metastablity tolerant - use high-gain, high clk->Q flops as synchronizers, uses multiple synchronizers in a row (trading latency for reliability), you can do things to reduce frequencies (run multiple synchronizers in parallel, synchronize edges rather than absolute values etc), but in the end if you're synchronizing an asynchronous event you can't engineer metastability out of your design - you just have to make it "good enough" for some value of good enough that will keep marketing and legal happy.

It's our dirty little secret (by 'our' I mean the whole industry)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be awesome if companies like Google would calculate MTBF statistics on components. They've done it for disks and it would be great to extend it to CPUs and memory modules. They're probably in a better position than even Intel to calculate these things with precision.

<comment><USER10> I'm almost sure that the components without moving parts will become technologically obsolete long before they start to fail. When I buy used laptop I always change the HDD, the DVD and its reliability jumps sharply up.

<comment><USER9> That may very well be true on average but I'd bet there are plenty of CPUs and memory modules that fail in the first year of usage for example. After all CPUs are tested and sorted into high/low performance parts, so sample variation itself would be enough to generate some early failures.

As a consumer it's hard enough to keep up with what's reliable in hard drives. Keeping the manufacturers honest with good stats for the most common parts would be great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was an interesting quote/anecdote, Joe Armstrong likes to tell, it is about people who claim they've built a reliable or fault tolerant service. They would say "This is fault tolerant, they are multiple hard drives in there, I have done formal verification of my code and so on..." and then someone else trips over the power cord and that's the end of the fault tolerance. It is just a silly example, of course they'd properly provide power to an important rack of hardware, but the point is, in the simplest case the system is only as fault tolerant as its weakest components. It is that one bad capacitor from Taiwan that might the whole thing down, or just a silly cosmic ray.

One needs redundant hardware to provide certain guarantees about the service being up. This means load balancers, multiple CPUs running the same code in parallel and comparing results, running on separate power buses, different data centers, different parts of the world.

<comment><USER12>
      > different parts of the world.

Still takes just one asteroid.

<comment><USER13> Seems like after an asteroid hitting the earth, "server fault tolerance" is the least of our worries.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but with the number of 9s you see you realize that asteroids are NOT taken into account. For example, Amazon advertises 99.999999999% durability for a given year for S3 objects. This is just stupid. An extinction-level event (asteroid, global thermonuclear war, black hole) could easily wipe out ALL data on S3. We know that mass extinctions have occurred about once every 100 million years. That means that if we expect a 10^-8 chance of a mass extinction event in a given year, Amazon would need a 99% chance of surviving a mass extinction in order to meet average durability ratings for S3.

After a certain number of 9s you just have to smile, nod, and truncate the number.

<comment><USER15> They really advertise 99.999999999%? Isn't that 1 byte lost for every 100,000,000 Terabytes or something silly like that?

<comment><USER16> Yes:

[https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3)

I suppose that if they ever lose an object then they can say "well we warned you that you might lose an object every hundred million years."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thread context: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/11/179](https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/11/179)

</comment><comment><USER18> This study by Microsoft Research is interesting:

"Cycles, Cells and Platters: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs"

[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1448...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=144888)

</comment><comment><USER19> If MTBF is such a big issue then would it be ever possible to build space craft that travels across the stars and still has ability communicate? I guess hats off to designers of Voyager and other spacecrafts whose MTBF seems to have crossed 36+ years for many components including CPU and power supply. But for inter-steller crafts that MTBF seems VERY low. And, seriously, MTBF of 5 years seems to be joke for desktop when lot of mechanical components with moving parts actually lasts longer.

<comment><USER20> Spacecraft and rovers use ridiculously armoured, redundant systems to get past the fact that they would fail quite regularly in such a hostile environment. The Curiosity rover in 2001 uses what would normally be quite an outdated 132Mhz CPU that's been specially shielded to achieve the reliability the program needs; even then there's two redundant systems that do health checks on one other to avoid bit flips. Even with all of that, they're running on only one CPU and trying to diagnose why the first one failed.

It's probably not fair to compare the MTBF of specialised hardware to the $35 CPU I bought at the retailer down the street either, the RAD750 processors in Curiosity cost almost a quarter of a million dollars each.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Specifications](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Specifications)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening#Radiation-h...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening#Radiation- hardening_techniques)

Though that said, Voyager is still happy running on it's 8064 words of 16 bit RAM, which is something.

<comment><USER21> [http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html](http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html) very interesting article on the computer system of the Voyager. It turns out most of the systems is not powered for most of the time, even the component that is doing the health checks - its called CCS.

"The frequency of the heartbeat, roughly 30 times per minute, caused concern [176] that the CCS would be worn out processing it. Mission Operations estimated that the CCS would have to be active 3% to 4% of the time, whereas the Viking Orbiter computer had trouble if it was more than 0.2% active15. As it turns out, this worry was unwarranted."

They are using DMA a lot; instruments write to memory, occasionally the CPU is turned on and picks up the new values. Also they had to manage with the fact that memory is degrading, so the system needs to adapt to working with less memory. The bus is 16 bits wide, but actually they are processing 4 bits at a time, so addition takes 4 cycles. CPU registers are stored in RAM, so probably they can reassign them if a memory cell fails.

Parts of the system were reused from the Viking mission. Also they where reprogramming the system in flight during the eighties ! That's the reason why they could start the the mission, even without having the full software on board, the mission was extended thanks to reprogramming. Just for the Jupiter visit they had 18 software updates, think about that next time that a software update breaks something on your system.

Also its all a distributed system with several CPU's, and some elements of redundancy, awesome tech. I guess one day alien hackers will have fun with reverse engineering this system.

<comment><USER21> I thought about another very reliable system; deep under the sea the NSA has a big switch that is splitting deep underwater communication lines;

Now this one has to work 24/7 in a hostile environment; has to be hidden; has to deal with enormous quantities of data and it costs a lot to replace/repair so it must be very reliable.

What is driving technological progress? Instead of a space program, we now have political control of the Internet as driving forces. I guess that's what they mean when they say that civilization is turning inwards ;-)

Yes, in many areas the NSA and Google are pushing the envelope; long term data storage; map reduce of large data sets; AI, you name it, they have it.

<comment><USER20> I imagine under the sea is actually quite a nice place to be, if you assume perfect waterproofing. There's litte radiation penetrating the water, so there's less chance of bit flips I imagine. You don't need to worry so much about cooling, as the whole ocean is your heatsink. Accessibility would suck, but a bunch of redundant hardware wouldn't be awful.

Weren't they using hardware in submarines anyway?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Conventional) Solid state devices are very hard to fail - exception: flash memory

Apart from electron migration issues and failures by excess (voltage/temperature), they're pretty long lasting

Much easier to have a failure because of something else: capacitors failing, oxidation or mechanical failure (for example, because of thermal expansion/contraction)

I've seen people complaining about a dead CPU but I can't find it right now

<comment><USER22> I actually just returned my CPU (Phenom II X4) to AMD, and they've replaced it, but they didn't say exactly why it died. I've asked them for more details, hopefully they can tell me.

Overall though, given with how many computers I've worked with, CPU failures still seem rarer than Memory, Disk, Mobo, or Graphics failures. Of course it ends up being the CPU in _my_ computer that fails -.-

<comment><USER5> Interesting.

How long did it work for before it died?

There is still some variance in silicon, so yours may have had a defect that manifested itself after some time, I'm not sure they evaluate returned defective chips to see what happened (and if this is public info)

Also, the packaging is extremely complex and prone to the same kind of defects as other PCBs in the system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a side note, the whole site is an amazing collection of wisdom and worth bookmarking:

[http://yarchive.net/](http://yarchive.net/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to through my experience: I was in charge of 300+ x86 rack servers and around 50 desktops for 3 years and never seen a single CPU fail, even old Pentium 4 with dusty fans.

Disk failures are very common, followed by much rarer RAM chips and motherboards failures.

I suspect server chips are rated for 10-15 years average lifespan

</comment><comment><USER25> Soft errors are a very real property of low-voltage digital electronics. I personally observed what could only be realistically explained as a soft error in a unit running customer hardware in the field. A single bit was flipped in the program memory of the embedded application and was causing the system to malfunction in an obvious and repeatable manor. We've since added CRC checking to the program memory and some of the static data sections to flag and reset this in the future.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a more than 100 pages's thread talk about GUP failure after two years use in Apple Support website. [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577)

</comment><comment><USER27> It doesn't seem worth it for Intel to measure MTBF. By the time they got good numbers for a specific chip, they'd be trying to sell its successor.

<comment><USER28> Long term failure rates are not usually measured in realtime but in deliberately heat elevated environments which simulate many years of stresses in a few months. This work is essential to ensure design decisions they've made don't accidentally cause their chips to fail after 2 years (which might be outside warranty lifetime but would still result in class action law suits and horrible publicity).

<comment><USER29> Intel guarantees their consumer CPUs for 3 years.

[http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/cs-020033.htm](http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/cs-020033.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can say that the Z80 if my ZX Spectrum keep working since 1984... Or some old K6-2 300 was working this last year...

<comment><USER8> For how much of the time since 1984 would you imagine that your Z80 has been on and running?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My immediate reaction is to ask how this reliability characteristic of CPUs affects critical software applications? Certainly some space missions and medical devices out in the field must have surpassed the MTBF mark for the given CPU deployment.

</comment><comment><USER32> I always wondered about this, but does it seem transistor do wear off over time ?

Does that mean a CPU/RAM/GPU will not perform as well as when it's brand new ?

</comment><comment><USER33> Never had a CPU go on me.

RAM yes, PROMs yes, CMOS batteries yes, PSUs yes, drives yes.

They're probably the most reliable bit of a computer.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice thing about the cloud is that someone else is worrying about this for you.</comment>


Online Python Tutor: Learn programming by visualizing code execution - <AUTHOR> http://pythontutor.com/ <comment><USER2> Oh wow, woke up this morning to some great emails. Thanks, everyone!

Here is some context behind the current incarnation of Online Python Tutor:

<https://plus.google.com/+ResearchatGoogle/posts/cseo9qi7LWq>

</comment><comment><USER3> Un-fucking-believable!

This is exactly what I needed to help people visualize their code. I can't tell you how many beginners have a hard time figuring out how a program steps through their code and this is a huge win there.

Huge thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks good.

However, my big criticism of these sorts of visualisations is they seem to be entirely geared towards imperative programming. Has anyone seen similar visualisations for more functionally structured code?

Oh, I see you can write your own code to be visualised. Here's a simple list comprehension: [http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#code=myList+%3D+range(...](http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#code=myList+%3D+range\(10\)%0Atotal+%3D+%5B2+*+x+for+x+in+myList+if+x+%25+2+%3D%3D+0%5D&mode=display&cumulative=true&py=2&curInstr=0)

Not the most enlightening visual.

<comment><USER5> Generators are similarly confusing to visualize... [http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#code=def+fib(n)%3A%0A+...](http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#code=def+fib\(n\)%3A%0A++++i+%3D+0%0A++++a,+b+%3D+\(0,+1\)%0A++++while+i+%3C%3D+n%3A%0A++++++++yield+b%0A++++++++i+%2B%3D+1%0A++++++++a,+b+%3D+\(b,+b%2Ba\)%0A%0A++++++++%0Afor+x+in+fib\(8\)%3A%0A++++print+x&mode=display&cumulative=false&py=2&curInstr=0)

<comment><USER6> It does look a bit confusing, but it does step through the program in the order it executes. Unlike list comprehension, where it completely misses some instructions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just 5 days ago HN was all so negative about Bret Victor's visions[1] of how programming should be taught. And yet here we are, looking at a working example of one of the ideas he wrote about.

[1] - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577133>

<comment><USER2> Bret has certainly been an inspiration to lots of us who work in this field, but I still don't think this is an implementation of his vision. To truly implement his vision, someone would need to design a new programming language and environment.

My motivation has been to ease the learning path for an existing popular language (Python).

<comment><USER8> I have been thinking of such a language for several years. Now that life programming environments are getting traction, I might be able to bootstrap the process and program my ideated language on top of one of them.

See this 2003 PhD thesis at MIT for two examples of existing languages designed to take full advantage of live programming environments. (Flogo I -graphical- and Flogo II -textual): <http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch- phd.pdf> Particularly interesting is Flogo II capability to mix the imperative and functional-reactive programming paradigms in the same code block, as parallel runtime processes; I hadn't seen that before.

<comment><USER9> Christopher Hancock's thesis is pretty good; flogo II plays around with this feature called "live text" where it embeds code exucution visualizations directly in the text of the code. I still haven't seen anyone pull that off again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Former discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609263>

</comment><comment><USER11> I saw it some months ago (1) but it didn't get much traction. And I failed to upvote it, shame on me. This is really good work.

(1) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3759858>

</comment><comment><USER12> This would have been really useful when I was learning Python on Udacity and was confused by the behavior of = and += on lists and tuples.

This should definitely be integrated into Udacity and other learning platforms! Most instructors have to do this by hand in CS 101 lectures anyways.

</comment><comment><USER13> Too bad it stops at 300 steps, I would have loved to use it for my hand-ins at the university - still, pretty cool! I checked how it looked with MergeSort and it was pretty awesome, even though it didn't get far with 300 steps.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hey guys, Isn't this the same as a debugger. Can people not learn from that?

<comment><USER15> Even now, after almost 10 years of programming, I still wish my debuggers had arrows pointing to data structures in a nice GUI. Sometimes, you don't want to interrupt your train of thought to recall the gdb or pdb command you need, or to remember "was 0xAE32F542 the first node in the list or the second node?" And consider the WebKit debugger for Javascript: just by looking at the Scope Variables tag, it's not obvious to catch a bug where you did `x = y` rather than `x = deepClone(y)`.

TL;DR I wish this was the same as a debugger, because then debuggers would be awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Philip, this is fantastic stuff. How have I not heard of your project before? Have I not been paying attention, or have you not shown it here before?

<comment><USER17> I don't think Philip has posted this project on here before. His user name is: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pgbovine>

Another project he worked on that you may have seen on HN is the PhD Grind book (about getting a CS PhD from Stanford).

<comment><USER16> Oh, I know. He's been a regular here for a while. Which is why I was surprised I did not know about one of his projects.

<comment><USER2> I've never actually posted any of my projects in the past. Every so often I wake up to an inbox flurry and then check HN :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sold. Great work! I advocate learning to program to non-programmers all the time (and typically suggest Python), but visualizing flow is hard to teach succinctly with words. I really think this type of visualization with accompanied explanation, where needed, will help quite a bit. Heck, I may use it for debugging at times in the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> A big plus for most people out there. I'm a visual learner myself. I've always had trouble in the early stages of learning because I didn't really realize I was a visual learner until later on. Also, college professors didn't give simple tips like you should draw out diagrams of what's happening in the code because that helped me out a lot.

</comment><comment><USER20> this is awesome, learning from visualizing how the code is executed IMO is a great way to learn to code. To add to that, its teaching python which I believe is already very easy to read and learn, brilliant. If this doesn't make it easy for young students learn programming for the first time then I don't know what will ! great job !

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not exactly Python (or I'm doing something wrong). Which is very confusing / "dangerous" for people learning Python (They will learn it wrong and not have the xp/confidence to question tutor)

locals() and globals() are undefined.

Still crazy slick (if it were the early 90's I'd say "l33t") bit of coding.

<comment><USER15> If you're learning Python and are using locals() and globals() as anything more than a debugging tool... I'd venture to say you are doing something wrong ;)

In seriousness, any programmer will need to know that functions don't just magically appear... if they don't work, they'll need to know how to pull in some sort of library, or realize why those functions just _don't make sense_ for the current environment (one could explain to a complete novice why it would be a security breach to allow I/O functions, for instance). Python is a language, not a standard library, just as C is C even if you don't #include <stdlib.h>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://ec2-107-21-160-68.compute-1.amazonaws.com/crs- ltp/tut...](http://ec2-107-21-160-68.compute-1.amazonaws.com/crs- ltp/tutor.php#mode=edit) I think the tool of the course in coursera.org is the same.

</comment><comment><USER23> I used to browse this tutor on MIT earlier.. <http://people.csail.mit.edu/pgbovine/python/tutor.html>

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there a self-hosted option for this? I think this would be an excellent resource for my students, but I'm having trouble getting _my_ examples to run. (memory overload?)

<comment><USER25> Looks like the source is on GitHub: <https://github.com/pgbovine/OnlinePythonTutor>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why would they simulate a linked list using tuples? It seems a bit contrived (or rather, not Pythonic) when lists are a built-in datatype.

<comment><USER7> A quick way to emulate cons cells[1], which are good for explaining how linked lists work?

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons>

<comment><USER2> Yep, right on! I wanted to show off linked list recursion and render box-and- pointer diagrams like those seen in SICP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is really awesome. I am trying to teach my kids Python and this will be very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh man! This is useful. Thanks.</comment>


London's rental market: where $2k a month gets you a bed beside the toilet - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/29/uk/london-renting-compared-berlin-gbr-grm-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> If you look at the floorplan[0] shown in the article, it looks like any sane person who lived in the flat would treat it like a normal studio and put their bed in the main room. It's baffling to me why the floorplan shows a sleeping area in the bathroom, but perhaps it's a legal quirk of some kind.

[https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200212132008-04-londo...](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200212132008-04-london- rental-market-intl-exlarge-169.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Well, in another EU country (Italy) that flat would be against building rules and Laws, not only you cannot call a bathroom "sleeping area"[1] but usually (there are exceptions for historical buldings and handicap toilets) a toilet (where the wc is) cannot be connected _directly_ to a kitchen or more generally where meals are prepared, but long before that the very minimal surface for a flat is 28 sqm (the one in the article is around 26) to be an autonomous unit.

Additionally, from the photo it appears that the WC is connected to an electric sanitary macerator, which is not admissible unless it is for a secondary bathroom.

[1] the area of any room aimed to the permanence of people cannot be less than 9 sqm

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's find out what you can actually get for $2k (about £1560), in the same area CNN went for:

[https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to- rent/find.html?locat...](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to- rent/find.html?locationIdentifier=STATION%5E1712&maxPrice=1750&minPrice=1400&radius=0.5&propertyTypes=&mustHave=&dontShow=&furnishTypes=&keywords=)

It doesn't take long to find something better than a "bed beside the toilet".

</comment><comment><USER5> I live in London. The main reason for this is that government generally doesn't allow buildings higher than 3 stories. Everyone wants to live in central London but there just ain't enough flats. This situation is somewhat similar to the zoning thing in the US. Supply is lower than demand, so prices go up, who would have guessed?

<comment><USER6> > generally doesn't allow buildings higher than 3 stories.

This seems a strange claim in the city that has the Shard. I doubt London is really constrained by planning permission, just that it seems only to be granted for hyper-luxury flats.

<comment><USER5> You doubt, but it's the reality. Sure, if you're going to build $600 million in a sky-scrapper you can also spend some more in convincing authorities to get you the legal permissions. But if you're going to try and build a 4 or 6 floors building, that's going to be complicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article mentions Berlin's rent controls. Just going to put it out there that rent controls almost never work, and tend to have the exact opposite effect that they are intended to. Rent control isn't a solution to a housing shortage.

<comment><USER8> > rent controls almost never work

So what's the average rent in Berlin for comparison?

Edit: From here I'm getting 50% lower rents.

[https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&country2=Germany&city1=London&city2=Berlin&tracking=getDispatchComparison)

<comment><USER9> The rent is low, sure, but good luck finding a flat to begin with: [https://www.thelocal.de/20191125/nearly-1800-people-turn- up-...](https://www.thelocal.de/20191125/nearly-1800-people-turn-up-for-flat- viewing-in-berlin)

<comment><USER10> That's exactly the expected result of rent control!

<comment><USER11> To benefit current renters who never want to move again, and no one else?

<comment><USER10> Yes. It increases demand while reducing supply and the expected result is exactly what is illustrated in the article posted above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I mean, Camden. Go two or three stops up the northern line, and you can find something much more sensible. The rental market might be insane in certain areas, but this isn't representative of what 2k dollars a month will get you

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure what the solution here is... At the end of the day, if your city is nice enough, and demand is high enough, and supply is low enough, you're going to see prices per unit of area rise. And you can do two things, pay more, or accept less space. And in the latter case you run into these ostensibly weird constructions like sleeping in your bathroom.

I don't know what to think of that. On the one hand its inhumane. On the other hand, it's self-inflicted. If you're in the UK, you absolutely don't need to live in London to live a normal life with a decent job, food on the table, good healthcare, good education for your kids etc. The person who rents this place probably is single, late twenties, works in finance, and will likely live here only 2 years before moving to something bigger with a longer commute, but not quite yet before he/she wants to live in the city near the action. Although there's reason to pity, this isn't your stereotypical dystopian pity-case of a family of three menial workers living in a Hong Kong cage.

You can have a discussion about London being a place only for rich people, and that without mitigating measures you get an economic divide between rich and poor, with no socioeconomic mobility. And that's true. In this context I have quite clear opinions on the need to keep neighbourhoods mixed, which requires subsidised social housing (council housing), subsidised private (public) education, subsidised after-school programs etc. But that's a matter of distributing scarce high-value resources to poor people to keep a healthy level-playing field in society. But it does not solve the underlying scarcity. Whatever government system you apply to London, you'll always have this scarcity, and people self-inflicting themselves by choosing to pay 2k for a bed in a bathroom. You can take that choice away through regulation (no beds in bathrooms, minimum unit sizes etc), but it doesn't solve the underlying scarcity issue, just the symptom.

One course of action that I think we should take, is driving centralised decentralisation on a national level as much as possible. Yes we can acknowledge urban centres do wonders as knowledge/financial/cultural hubs. But we can also acknowledge that hyper-concentration in one place, is not preferred to concentration in 5 places. the UK does this very poorly with London taking up a huge part of the national economy. Germany does this much better, with many regional economies which are all very strong and have their own pull.

</comment><comment><USER14> [The following is a rant] I've been living in London for 2 years now and I find the city dreadful. The quality of housing is usually well below the standards I'm used to from Germany (I won't start on the pricing), but what really bothers me how decrepit everything is. I was looking to rent in the area south of Brixton and frequently felt like I was looking at trash heaps with a roof and flatmates. Sometimes there was a permanent garbage dump on the front porch or something?! I now live in something resembling modern construction, that was however cheaply built and has thin walls and lacks thermal insulation in my bath, so I have to keep the door closed when it's cold outside. I "only" pay 900 GBP to live with two flatmates, which is OK for London I suppose. I have this nagging thought in the back of my mind to brexit at some point...

<comment><USER15> This video comes to mind: [https://youtu.be/gzVJw1-YrkM](https://youtu.be/gzVJw1-YrkM)

Note that PJW is perhaps a bit too far right leaning, so take his views and opinions with a grain of salt. A lot of the content is quite true though, and both liberals and conservatives alike ought to be concerned.

<comment><USER7> I've been living in London for three years now, after living in the countryside. This video is correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi The first time I moved to the UK from Spain, I was like "hey, rentals are not _that_ expensive. 300, 400, 500... more or less like in my home city".

That was until I realized the "pw" near the prices meant "per week", of course.

</comment><comment><USER16> I live in London, it is expensive for sure.. I have seen some pretty ridiculous flats for around the same cost as the one in the article, one with a shower cubicle in the bedroom comes to mind... not quite as bad as toilet but still you don't want a wet bedroom.

Some of the landlords are just taking the piss, there are much better places for better value in decent areas just don't get tricked by the snakey estate agents like foxtons and look around you can find reasonably good value..

</comment><comment><USER17> London is an amazing place to live, and (painfully cognisant of how this sounds) if you get a chance to live there for a while, I'd heartily recommend it.

Though of course much of the shine has indubitably disappeared since Brexit.

I was there 2008 through 2013 - and in 2010 we rented a relatively new 1 bedroom flat, on the 2nd floor (of 13), overlooking the Thames, around the Docklands (east London, near the secondary financial sector) on a clean, safe estate with a concierge. This was £280 / week.

A decade later, and doubtless having spent quite some time to find a highly unpleasant flat in a ridiculously inflated part of town (Camden) and TFA are citing £375 / week for a shared bedroom & toilet.

Like any metropolis, London is immense, with huge variations in quality and cost -- everything is a tradeoff against how close you want to be to the center versus how long you want to spend commuting.

FWIW when we moved from London UK to Sydney Australia in 2013 we went from river views, 40 minute commute to city center in London at £280 (~ AUD475) / week , to 60 minute commute to city center, highway views, for AUD500 / week, for the same quality apartment.

Never move to Sydney if you can avoid it.

EDIT: Oh, one of the problems with high-rises around London is the fact the whole place is a few metres above sea level, and the ground water levels are insanely high. I had engineer friends who worked on the underground (tube) extension years earlier, who told me that if the bilge pumps stop working, tracts of the underground lines would be flooded within fifteen minutes. The Thames Barrier (worth a google if you don't know of it) is unlikely to be effective within 10 to 20 years. Plus they've got lots of real estate locked up by investors who simply never occupy it -- all of this does brutally wonky things to real estate pricing there.

<comment><USER18> > The Thames Barrier (worth a google if you don't know of it) is unlikely to > be effective within 10 to 20 years.

Not quite true. The Thames Barrier is expected to remain effective for the next 70 years (till 2070).

There's a plan to figure out it's replacement sometime around 2050.

You read more about it here if you're interested:

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thames- estuary-21...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thames- estuary-2100-te2100/thames-estuary-2100-te2100)

<comment><USER17> Thank you. I'd had in my mind that 2040 was when it approached (effective) EOL, and from the country that had 40 years to plan for the Concorde replacement, I was not overly optimistic.

Seems there has been a general trend of increasing need to use the barrier, though the 2014 'blip' threw this number upwards. I'm seeing some references to 'it's fine until 2050-2070', but OTOH I'm not seeing a lot of 'we've underestimated global warming effects, so sea level won't be as bad as we thought' stories -- so presumably we should be looking towards the lower end of that 2050-2070 range.

I read through the v.interesting link you provided -- it reads very gov.uk.

Sadly, after the past couple of years of gov.uk activity I'm not particularly sanguine that they will actually attend to this work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know we need to keep using euphemisms like "housing crisis". Just call it what it is; greed and and exploitation. These apartments are usually not fit for living, they're damp, cramped and thats likely to be the least of your concerns.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you want to support some people working on fixing this situation [https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/](https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm a bit confused about the flat they're talking about. I thought that there needs to be 2 doors between the loo and the kitchen, and that you can't have a loo that opens into a kitchen.

Turns out that's probably wrong: [http://www.extensionbuild.co.uk/can-door- open-directly-from-...](http://www.extensionbuild.co.uk/can-door-open- directly-from-bathroom-kitchen.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> I recently moved to London and rent in Zone 1. The single bed apartment I live is in pricey but it's a great location and a short commute to my office in central London.

That said, I am in tech and a significant part of my pay goes on rent.

However, from my recent house hunting experience, there's definitely better options for the price mentioned in the article especially in Zone 2.

</comment><comment><USER23> There used to be a 2 door building reg rule for between toilet and kitchen... I think that was relaxed but I am pretty sure you are not allowed to install toilets in open living spaces. I suppose it wouldn't be surprising to see many regulations broken in London given the opportunity for profit.

</comment><comment><USER24> This particular flat is quite poorly laid out. I'm presuming it's a subdivided flat.

That's pretty common where I live but usually the internal walls would all be knocked down and placed more sensibly before renting it out. I guess the UK has more strict planning laws which prevent this.

</comment><comment><USER25> When it comes to housing markets the discussion is usually centered around free market vs. government regulation, but both sides selectively use sources to underline their points.

Viewing the housing market simply as an issue of demand vs. supply is faulty - there are other factors at work that are detrimental for renters. I have terrible internet right now which makes it hard to look up sources, but almost all cities here in Germany have rents rising faster than wages or inflation - even those with decreasing populations.

Even if it was just an issue of demand and supply, housing isn't just any commodity. Cities shouldn't just maximise for supply, they also have to factor in other things, like life quality, availability of services, pollution and more. For example I don't think rent control is an effective tool to be used broadly, but if I look at the district I grew up in in the 90s, almost all the native people were pushed out of it, and the rich people living there now not only fundamentally changed the districts spirit, they also effectively segregated themselves from the poorer segments of society. If this trend continued on a city-wide level, you would have boring rich districts and ghettos, as well as increasing and very visible inequality.

So in the housing market I think capitalism fails quite spectacularly in accounting for very important factors that are only indirectly tied to profit. The few metropolis that have a functioning housing market _usually_ also have massive public-housing companies, and they mix meaningful regulation with fast and easy bureaucracy. - The obvious examples coming to mind would be Singapore and Vienna.</comment>


Play-by-Mail Games - <AUTHOR> http://reality.com/ <comment><USER2> They're still in business?! In the late 90s, I would wheedle a few bucks out of mom every two weeks to get a few rounds of combat in Duelmasters. It was a surprisingly rich simulation. The game was obviously pay-to-play in the most direct way possible, so my gladiatorial team never advanced to much of anywhere, but waiting for the biweekly printouts was still a huge thrill. The operators even facilitated passing hand-written notes between players as an anonymous mail system!

The other, older, founding operator of PBM games is the wonderfully named Flying Buffalo, Inc., who are also the publishers of Tunnels & Trolls.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to play a lot of Daifen [1], a French play-by-mail game that blends strategy, diplomacy and role play. Games can last about a month, with different game speeds (one turn per day, three turns per week, etc.) It's still up, though the player count isn't what it used to be. You can do everything in the interface, from sending orders to planning battles to contacting other players, but the core mechanic of play-by-mail is still there. I sometimes toy with the idea of making an international version...

[1] [https://www.daifen.com/index.php](https://www.daifen.com/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER4> They have links for a webring! Alas, the webring is no longer working, although you can check it in the Internet Archive.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20191213105245/http://www.webrin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191213105245/http://www.webring.org/cgi- bin/webring?ring=pbmring&id=7&next5)

</comment><comment><USER5> > _What is a Play-by-Mail Game, Anyway?_

> _Play-by-mail (PBM) games are a rapidly expanding realm of the gaming > world._

I somehow find that hard to believe.

</comment><comment><USER6> I made a comment somewhere, where someone was asking about FTP games, and I thought there were looking for games that would be like this. You'd upload stuff to an FTP server instead of mailing it...

</comment><comment><USER7> Play-by-mail games are a pivotal part of John Darnielle's novel WOLF in WHITE VAN. Some of these games sound like ones depicted in the book. Very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER8> Now what I'd love is a list of play-by-email games.

<comment><USER9> PBM is probably the easiest list - [http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/)

The PBeM server on gamerz.net has a good sized list of games they host. [http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/](http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/) (I used to play a bit of Firetop Mountain long ago - [http://www.gamerz.net/~fm/](http://www.gamerz.net/~fm/) ). Note that this is a very old server and I haven't checked if anything is still running.

<comment><USER8> Now I realize it could be possible to play both IF and Nethack over email with some scripting.

You can already play IF over the web and gopher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This brings back memories! I used to play a PBM football game back in the late 80s and had written my own fantasy-themed PBM RPG. Fun times.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's gonna be a hot domain, you already made it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there a link to a fully played out game? I didn't see any on the website.

</comment><comment><USER13> The question is... What site comes up when you type _this_ domain into Safari?

<comment><USER14> Their competitor, a horse simulation game: [https://horsereality.com/](https://horsereality.com/)

<comment><USER15> I hope that's more fault tolerant than Bella Sara was.

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/05/26](https://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2008/05/26)</comment></comment></comment>


Overstock.com Will Start Taking Bitcoin Next Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/overstockcom-will-take-bitcoin-next-year-2013-12 <comment><USER2> I hope that they are actually planning on implementing this and it is not a well-timed PR stunt to get Overstock.com in the news just in time for last minute Christmas shopping. If so, it will be a huge boon for the Bitcoin economy and could be an important catalyst for other companies to follow suit.

<comment><USER3> That is certainly possible, but the CEO mentioned 1 1/2 months ago that they were considering this move.

See this NY Times article from 10/31/2013: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin- pursues...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin-pursues-the- mainstream.html)

<comment><USER4> What's taking them so long? It's pretty trivial to integrate something like Bitpay or Coinbase for merchant accounts.

Maybe they're negotiating a deal with one of those companies?

<comment><USER5> Not so trivial.

* Presumably they need to integrate with their backend systems for reporting, inventory and tax purposes.

* They need to integrate with their customer support system so bitcoin payments are recognized as such.

* They have to update their refund policy and other legal docs to take bitcoin payments into account

It's not just about making the right API call, you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another source, since the source in the OP isn't working for me: [http://www.businessinsider.com/overstockcom-will-take- bitcoi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/overstockcom-will-take-bitcoin-next- year-2013-12)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I checked later, and was up again for me, so I could archive the original: [https://web.archive.org/web/20131219231638/http://newsbtc.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131219231638/http://newsbtc.com/2013/12/19/overstock- com-begin-accepting-bitcoin-2nd-half-2014/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does a merchant go by accepting Bitcoins? Is the price conversion based on the last trade? Average of the day/week/month? Are the Bitcoins going to be converted to $ right way or at certain intervals?

Given the high volatility of bitcoins, there is no way to predict if a transaction will net profit or loss. How do they account for this?

<comment><USER9> Hedging via insurance, futures, put/call options, etc. The same way companies that deal in commodities like grains and metals handle this sort of risks. I'm sure people like the Winklevi are more than happy to offer this sort of service.

<comment><USER10> Your going to have to pay a lot of money to someone to take on btc volatility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Based on my companies performance metrics from our Overstock offerings, they are willing to try anything at this point to stop the bleeding.

Overstock was absolutely murdered after a Google update. They went from being a solid source of revenue from our multi-channel division to being virtually non-existent.

</comment><comment><USER12> it coin pumping site pumps bit coin. Now, that is news.</comment>