Can Facebook Save California? - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/12/can_facebook_sa.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29 <comment><USER2> California can't be saved as long as they have pension obligations that far outstrip any potential new sources of income. [http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/06/opinion/la-oe- crane6...](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/06/opinion/la-oe- crane6-2010apr06)

<comment><USER3> did you too not notice the _/opinion/_ part in the url you provide? please do not submit someone's opinion as a fact.

could you provide a link to the original studies mentioned in the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Building data centers in Oregon[1] and North Carolina[2] sure won't help. Why would a California based company build their first data center in Oregon?

[1]<http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=262655797130>

[2][http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/11/12/1831199/facebook...](http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/11/12/1831199/facebookfacilitycomingto- nc.html)

<comment><USER3> tax break, what else?

 _After officially announcing plans to build a data center in Prineville on Thursday, Facebook officials told The Bulletin that the tax incentive offered to the company through an enterprise zone was a key reason it came to Central Oregon. By locating its new data center in the zone, Facebook will be excused from paying as much as $2.8 million a year in local taxes._

[http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100...](http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100122/NEWS0107/1220410/1001/NEWS01&nav_category=NEWS01)

Seriously, 50bn SecondMarket cap company looking to save $2.8 million in taxes?

<comment><USER5> _Seriously, 50bn SecondMarket cap company looking to save $2.8 million in taxes?_

$2 million here, $3 million there, sooner or later it adds up to real money. A $50 billion company doesn't stay a $50 billion company by blowing $2.8 million on nothing.

Sadly, that's a lesson the California gov never learned. If they had, they might not be wasting similar amounts of money on pensions for criminals.

[http://www.newsoxy.com/world/disgraced-sheriff- pension-13760...](http://www.newsoxy.com/world/disgraced-sheriff- pension-13760.html)

<comment><USER6> You can find examples of some public employees getting outrageous pensions but these examples are at not typical. Given that California has a huge budget shortfall are you suggesting that this shortfall is due mostly to outrageous pensions?

We presently live in a system where states often times compete with each other to offer incentives to attract factories or other operations that employ a lot of people. These tax incentives are paid for by the people of the state, that is, by the workers. It's a perverse system. Maybe companies should be willing to pay their share of national defense, roads, etc.

<comment><USER7> The shortfall itself is due mostly to decreased revenues as opposed to increased expenditures. That said, pension expenditures are a fairly good size chunk. There is a decent overview here <http://reason.org/news/show/fix- california-pension-crisis> but if you want to drill down through the data itself, it is available here: <http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/Enacted/agencies.html>

<comment><USER6> Yes, pensions are a major part of the shortfall but I specifically said outrageous pensions payouts. It remains to be shown that the shortfall comes from outrageous pensions. I've noticed that often times people mention the unfunded pension liabilities in California and then point to a few extreme examples. Are the extreme examples causing the problem?

There are structural problems with California governing system that give more plausible reasons for its present problems. To go from Facebook setting up a data center in order to save a few million dollars to an extreme pension abuse example is very weak.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget the unfunded part of the current pensions, this has been a problem building over multiple years and probably won't have and easy solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the thing I found most interesting in this article was the fact that facebook is now trading at a 67B valuation on the secondary market, making it almost 1/3rd of what google is today. Very impressive growth.

<comment><USER3> it was 50bn last week :)

<comment><USER10> but it's not a bubble ...

<comment><USER11> i might concur with that sentiment...but i think facebook is not the best example. their upside is still tremendous, as they haven't fully exploited their ad revenue (which is better positioned than google imo)

<comment><USER10> Facebook does have tremendous potential upside (as well as significant risks). But it's really hard for me to see any reason their valuation would increased by 30% in the last few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The first surveillance state of the union, brought to you by the national security apparatus - national infrastructure division. (facebook+cisco+your- isp=full-stack-surveillance, little brother.)</comment>


Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/02/cant-we-all-be-reasonable-and-speak-english/ <comment><USER2> _" It's almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you're not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren't comfortable enough to write in them."_

Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid mistakes I make; e.g., i usually write "no" instead of "know" or vice-versa, just because in my brazilian mind they sound exactly the same. And at my most voted comment ever I wrote "maked" instead of "made". No one mentioned (?) it, but I still feel the shame.

I think it is a great move by SO, lots and lots of developers I meet here (i am not one) don't speak fluent english. Our basic education is very poor (in every aspect, including english language there). If we want a world where everyone can learn to code/develop early in life, this sure come in hand in Brazil, where there is a huge just-got-out-of-poverty youth that didn't learn english at all, but could easily learn to code.

Congrats SO!

edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often make. Again, just because in my mind they sound exactly the same - and "de" is a word ( _of_ ) in portuguese. Gosh, I make this mistake for so long, I should have learned already.

<comment><USER3> There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes.

Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a software product is, try thinking of a way to create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization, but it covers the entire range - English doesn't, for example. And your words are a huffman tree - the most popular ones are the shortest, though that can only ever be realized when the language is conceived since the common vernacular shifts over time).

Now try to figure out how to get _that_ market penetration.

<comment><USER4> > create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human > vocalization

There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better.

Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united? Chinese characters, by allowing different pronunciations without changing their written form, do fix this issue. This has helped China to stay centralized for a long time, and share one common continuous cultural ground.

So, if optimal means "can be shared by more people for a longer period of time" maybe the optimal language would need to add an articulation, and represent meanings instead of sounds.

<comment><USER5> > _Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they > carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because > phonetics tend to shift quickly._

But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

> _In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is > different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped > communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But > what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united?_

English (or Spanish, etc) is a real-world example of a mostly phonetic writing system, and I don't think it is that bad. We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem. In contrast, I think it's very important to have a writing system that is easily learned, so that it is accessible to the entire population (not just those able to invest lots of time & effort).

<comment><USER6> > If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it > becomes hard to understand what is being said

That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically. Today the spelling of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the pronunciation diverges.

Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ").

There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation. Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words, making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be (and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the middle ages).

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms. However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People barely now this, but theres a social inclusion aspect by creating the portuguese version of StackOverflow.

In Brazil, at least, only the kids of wealthy families have access to private english courses..

In regular school its just too weak to make a difference.. and of course there are the self-taughts.. a minority..

So, there are a very good social inclusion aspect in all of this.. make the rookie programmers start with the portuguese version.. then maybe they will just hit the english with time.. imposing a language barrier is a sort of elitism that will create a virtual barrier that doesnt do good to anyone..

I dont know why people rant about it, since all the good content is already in english language..

Allow even more people to enter into the technology world is a good thing.. let them learn english later, when theres a need..

<comment><USER8> This! People aren't realizing that in a lot of countries, english classes in the normal school system are a joke. And there are many people that don't have the resources to go to college or private classes to learn this. I have some young friends in Mexico that don't even have assurance of their next meal and would like to learn some skills to help land a better job than washing cars, but they're stuck. It's a catch-22 and having programming information and curriculum in their native language would remove one more barrier to them getting out of that situation. It'd also help me teach them since I wouldn't have to translate so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have strongly mixed feelings on this. When I was a kid my family moved to Brazil for a couple of years and I learned Portuguese. When I was about 20 I moved to Chile and learned Spanish. Speaking the language of the culture you are in is hugely important - and not very easy.

So on the one hand if the culture of programming is in English (is it?) then I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to program to learn English. On the other hand, helping inject a programming environment into another language seems a worthy goal as well. On balance it seems like stackoverflow is doing the right thing.

<comment><USER10> While learning English will help immeasurably when you're learning to program, the languages themselves are often highly English-baed, trying to tackle programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier.

Since being able to ask difficult, technical questions in your native language would make it easier to learn, I don't see what's so bad about that. Yes, it fragments the community, but it also recognizes that the world is not English only. Right now there's large Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and French communities that are second-class citizens without a tool like Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER11> The connection between programming languages and English is highly exaggerated. Programming language syntax is generally nothing like natural language syntax, and programming language vocabulary (keywords, data structures, standard library names) is usually completely divorced from similar-sounding or similar-spelled words in English.

<comment><USER10> The biggest problem I've seen is that a lot of the words have subtle meaning and the jargon used to describe the theory is often difficult or impossible to translate.

For example, a "stack" or a "filter" or a "queue" all have specific meanings outside of programming, their nature hints at how they work, even if the technical meaning is obviously different.

Not knowing what any of the things were leaves you with a hazy concept of what they are until you understand their English analog.

I still think it makes sense to try and explain concepts in the language in which one is most proficient, then worry about English later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > We do want as much centralization as possible

Yup, totally centralized. Spent half an hour figuring out where my question should go (StackOverflow vs Programming vs ServerFault vs SuperUser vs Ubuntu vs Unix-and-Linux). Ended up not asking the question at all.

Shall they open some foreign embassies, I guess users'll spend 10 minutes more deciding in which language should they ask (i.e. whenever they prefer native language or bigger community) or duplicate the question.

<comment><USER13> The only difficult difference here is Stack Overflow vs Programming, the others are pretty descriptive. The difference is not too hard to understand, but still not intuitive for a new user.

There is also some overlap, so if you have a question about Ubuntu you can also ask it on Unix&Linux.

<comment><USER12> For me, Stack Overflow vs Programming is easiest to understand - it's whenever the question is about implementation or theory. But some areas, for example, packaging, lie in the grey area between programmers' and sysadmin's job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an America who spent years in Brazil (hence the username), both teaching English, and programming together with a lot of software developers there (always speaking in Portuguese), I think this is great.

I never met a developer who had _zero_ English skills. But I also met very, very few developers who could really converse fluently in English. I realized how much additional difficulty a lot of them have with coding, because a lot of them time they can't "just Google it" to find a snippet of code that fixes their problem, or that documents a known platform bug.

And remember that learning English, while not living in an English-speaking country, generally takes _years_ of dedicated work -- you're probably either going to become a good programmer, or good at English, but most people are not going to have the time for both, that's just reality.

So this is a great move on Stack Overflow's part. Kudos. (Plus, Brazilians are basically the world's most active social-network users, so there's always that, too.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Programming specific I think is easier in English.

I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them.

Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and when translating them to other languages, they have a translation but it just sounds very awkward.

So you can have 2 people talking and one uses all translated terminology one uses the "native" equivalent. And yeah if both happen to speak English they'll understand what they mean, but if they don't then they might as well speak different languages. But if they already speak English and it is a public forum, might as well try to speak English.

Anyway that is just my perspective.

<comment><USER16> I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc.

I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non- english speaking programmers.

But what does it look inside private corporations?

<comment><USER17> You have a weird jargon of mixed languages... Basically you end up bolting together english words with other grammar to create monsters...

I try to limit the amount of this weird jargon, but is extremely easy to fall into that.

PD: This is in Spanish

<comment><USER18> Personal experience: weird jargon is a good thing. I've read a book on Hadoop once and it didn't use weird jargon - everything was in my native language. It was super hard to read - basically I needed to translate the book from my native language into English in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia.

Many Ruby developers won't have a problem with this.

<comment><USER20> Yup. Matz immediately came to mind. Also, to the question of english but not native would be Salvatore of Redis fame.

<comment><USER21> So, not to be mean, but can you name his FQJN (fully-qualified Japanese name) offhand?

The score of people here saying "Matz" somewhat underscores the issue.

<comment><USER22> And how many people know that DHH is David Heinemeier Hansson? I don't think the use of a nickname or abbreviation is relevant.

<comment><USER23> Most, right? I don't write Ruby and I barely know who that is (I could pick him out of a lineup but that's about it) but I knew that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Adoption of English language is one of the major reasons, why 3rd world countries like our, India and Pakistan are thriving in IT. I feel sad for nations, who are stubborn in their adoption of English language, merely out of political reasons. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you can't convey your point of view to others.

Oh and by the way, India is 2nd and Pakistan is 3rd largest country by number of English language Speakers, 1st of course is USA. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English- sp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English- speaking_population)

Moreover, Do I need to name key Google and Microsoft Employees, who were born and bred in India too. :)

<comment><USER25> I see English as more of a liability for a country like India. Only 10% of the Indian elites have any sort of proficiency in English. Indians never developed an 'infrastructure' around their native language like China did, which results in a debilitating problem for India. There is a big language barrier in India. A poor Chinese kid doesn't need to learn a foreign language to be hired as a full time programmer. But in India, unless you have a working proficiency in English, say goodbye to any chances of being hired as a programmer. Say goodbye to any real possibility of using a computer. Say goodbye to the possibility of understanding any real biochemistry. In India, I can't take a guy from the streets, give him 2 days of training and ask him to do some work on a computer. I'll have to spend 2 months with him, teaching him a new language.

Thus now there are two Indias, the 80-90% non-english speaking India, and the 10-20% english speaking elite India. And the language barrier makes it that much harder for the under-privileged India to cross over to the other side, which is not the case in China or Japan.

In 10 years, the kind of language used for human communication will become irrelevant. Thus, I hope that the Indian problem won't last very long.

<comment><USER26> >> A poor Chinese kid doesn't need to learn a foreign language to be hired as a full time programmer

Not really true.

English proficiency is a very important factor in job hunting in China also. Most of the good programmers I know have certain level of mastery in english, at least in reading. For sure, China has its own internet ecosystem, the same applies for the programmer community. But English is still the dominant language in computer science, a fact that will not be changed in near future.

China has its own english proficiency test, called "四级", literally "Level 4" or officially CET4 Test. It is required for all college students to pass this test when graduating, a huge pain for many. And we are not done :a higher level test, "六级"(Level 6, CET6) awaits for whoever wants to show better than average english fluency. Which makes thing worse, high score in those tests doesn't really guarantee real-world good english ability, so additional tests will be taken by companies themselves to make sure the candidates meet their requirement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I, for one, am amazed that this would need justification at all. (And that half the comments here seem to be saying that devs should 'just learn English'.)

Languages with many speakers have their own 'world'. Kids, and people without higher education in such language areas won't have much opportunity to pick up English. They'll start out without access to English language programming communities. The only way they'll get anywhere in the field is to have alternatives in their own language.

</comment><comment><USER28> As a non-native English speaker, I have pretty strong feelings about English in engineering in general: everyone should just learn English.

I see it as a remarkably good thing that engineering (and to some extent science) has standardised so much on English and I can only hope that all other walks of life will as well.

It would be so nice if everyone on earth spoke excellent English.

<comment><USER29> My dad (that is a excellent programmer, and tried very hard for 20 years already to learn english and failed) disagree with you.

<comment><USER30> And your dad's alternative would be what? To balkanize science and engineering? To create dozens of separate islands of knowledge? To slow the spread of knowledge, because everything deemed significant has to be translated to and from 20 languages to gain general currency?

How is one or even a thousand persons' inability to learn another language an argument for how science should be practiced?

<comment><USER31> The assumptions, the arrogance, the blame passing, the lack of understanding of contexts not your own... You are basically impling all non-english speakers should be so very ashamed that they are holding back broad human progress with their stupid insistency in continuing to use their native tongue. Which I find absurd. (Btw, I only speak English).

As technologists, maybe we could find solutions that, ya know, don't force massive, life altering requirements on billions of people?

<comment><USER28> Not ashamed, they may not have had the resources or opportunity to learn English. But as flawed as the language is, it has won.

It's not hard to speak at least two languages and one of them should be English.

There is no solution as good as the whole world being bilingual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am an immigrant from China and I came to the States after finishing sixth grade so I can still read and write in Chinese. Perfectly excellent. The advantage of that is I can utilize more resources that are only available in Chinese. You'd surprise how often Chinese programmers leave useful code snippets or tips in Chinese. So knowing a foreign language can definitely help.

While I agree having a non-English version helps growing the community (as pointed out in the article it could help a young girl to get started), but I am worrying about fragmentation. Also, SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit. I don't know - it is as if I want people to take the hard route because it can benefit them in the long run.

I really have a mixed feelings about this too.

Side note:

 _That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian..._

Hmmm it's Chinese since people write in Chinese characters. Mandarin is a dialectic.

<comment><USER33> This is odd, but I've noticed that technical Chinese blogs auto-translate _really_ well. I used to follow erlang-china.org, and rarely had a problem with understanding.

I have no idea how well it works the other way though, so my comments were all bare links.

A Chinese friend of mine guessed that it has something to do with how most Chinese words are built from other Chinese words, and the specificity of technical terms made the translations really easy and unambiguous. He explained it better than I just did:)

<comment><USER32> Yes the translation is not bad at all, but to search that content in the first place? You probably want to know how to type Chinese :) and know how to master search in Chinese.

If you are from HK, people often write with cantonese slang words (it's like someone writing ya'll instead of you all - that sort of thing). Translation is not as good as translating formal Chinese writing :) but that's a minor thing.

I can understand 1/3 of the Japanese websites by knowing Kanji. And if you know English then you have the door to any language share the latin root.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> instead of starting a brand new stack overflow in another language they should think of some way of letting people translate questions & answers and earn karma for that. this way, like wikipedia, you can always go from one language to another for the translation

<comment><USER35> That's basically what they are doing.

If someone asks a question on the Portuguese then it would be easy for an English and Portuguese speaker to search the English site for the answer and then post to the Portuguese site and earn their karma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is AWESOME! I even get emotional about this and here is why.

TL;DR: I am a Brazilian and it would have been much easier for me if I had the resources I needed available in my mother language.

Long story:

I am a Brazilian. I was born in a small town in Brazil (population: 13k) and I only had access to public schools. Public schools in Brazil do have English classes, however all I remember was them teaching the verb "to be" in every single grade. When I was 15, in 1998, my mom found a way to finance a cheap computer for me. My first access to a computer. Everything was in English. I did not have access to internet initially, but the computer came with a few softwares installed. At the time I also asked my mom to buy me a translation dictionary, so I could learn English. Translating most of the things I was seeing on the screen did not make sense at all, so I just assumed them as part of my vocabulary giving them meanings, but not translations, like "software", or software names... Later, with access to internet (long distance dial up after midnight), it was really, REALLY, hard to search for stuff related to programming because there was almost nothing available in portuguese. I had to learn how to translate properly what I was looking for before I could even do the search. Not sure native English speakers understand this part. So what I tried to do instead was to learn English. I did that by finding lyrics of the songs I liked online (they were easy to find since no translation was needed) and translating them with the help from my dictionary. And this is basically how I learned most of the English that I know. (In fact, I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at this point by reading this). But dude, I was able to do this because I put _A LOT_ of effort and hours, and nights, doing this, day after day, because I really wanted to learn. (It paid off... I am a H1B living in Miami today)

Learning English is not for everyone. Learning another language is not for everyone. Learning how to code IS WAY MUCH FUN than learning how to speak another language.

While I always tell people to try to learn English, because they're going to have better chances, I believe this should not be a barrier for the average people to learn programming. Or anything, really. You have no idea of how many great developers in Brazil do not speak proficient English.

So, thanks to the guys at Stack Overflow for doing this. I'll make sure I share this with everyone I know that always wanted to learn programming but had English as a barrier.

I am confident that the IT industry in Brazil will be thankful for this in the long term.

Thank you guys.

<comment><USER37> > I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at > this point by reading this

No, I couldn't. You give yourself too little credit. Except for "way much fun", everything you wrote was perfect idiomatic English.

I actually think a lot of us native English speakers are kind of jealous that we have little incentive to become proficient in a foreign language since so much of the worlds information and communication is in English. I know I am. I'm trying to learn Portuguese right now, just for fun, but I know I will never be as fluent in it as you are in English.

<comment><USER36> Obrigado :)

<comment><USER37> De nada

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Unintended consequence #1: duplicated questions.

[http://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/4021/numero-de- vezes-q...](http://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/4021/numero-de-vezes-que-um- documento-ja-foi-visualizado-no-amazon-cloudsearch) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21550842/amazon- cloudsear...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21550842/amazon-cloudsearch- show-the-number-of-times-a-document-has-already-been-seen)

Corollary: answer "arbitrage" (translating existing answers for duplicated questions).

<comment><USER39> Completely intended, by my read. It wouldn't make any sense if you couldn't ask a question that was already asked in a language you don't know.

FTA: "we expect almost every question asked on the Portuguese site to also be asked (and answered) on the English site."

<comment><USER38> It was the same user asking the same question, and the English version may or may not be machine translated.

It feels spammy, specially since the English version isn't up to par. I'm not sure this is what they had in mind with that quote.

<comment><USER39> Ah, I missed the identical users. That is an interesting situation, especially if a user might be fluent in both languages (which may or may not be the case in this situation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 I see nothing wrong about programmers who want to discuss or exchange experience etc. in their native language. I'm one of such guys... English is not my first language, either.

The thing is that the SO format is not suited for extended discussions. Its power lies and shows in brevity.

Like it or not - good working knowledge of English is a must if you consider yourself a professional. (In this field, of course; it's very specific).

If your English doesn't allow you to freely elaborate on the caveats of system architecture, working culture and whatnot, it's perfectly fine in my opinion and nothing to fret about.

But if you can't ask a brief technical question, or you stumble trying to answer one, that's a shortcoming that should be addressed. For your own good, nobody's else

</comment><comment><USER40> A really bad idea. Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on the 'regular' stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown, on a 'pt.overflow.' That is one drawback. Another drawback, an English only stackoverflow helps a Portuguese speaking person to learn another language that is, now, more universal. Yet another, it fractures an otherwise more unified community.

My mother tongue is Spanish, yet I have no issues with an English only stackoverflow, at all.

<comment><USER41> > * Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on the 'regular' > stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown*

This assumes that, had the Portuguese site not existed, the question would have been answered on the English site. There is also the possibility that the question would not have been answered at all.

<comment><USER40> Sight. Sorry, I really can't explain it well.

Have you ever encountered something, sometimes, that you know doesn't click, but can't explain why? I really think this is a bad idea, and somehow, a waste of resources, a repetition of things. But...

It will affect me little if I pretend it doesn't exist and continue using stackoverflow as I have been until now. Just ignore 'the news' and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I struggle to imagine a developer who is _talented_ (in actual real sense of this) in programming yet cannot ask/answer a tech question in English (I am not a native speaker). Has anyone met a person like this?

<comment><USER43> There are many forms and degrees of _talented_ , and many of them are perfectly possible without being able to write in English comfortably.

<comment><USER42> Ever met?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> They are spreading thin.

It used to be StackOverflow, I'd go search for something and ask if the search would yield nothing. Now they have a thousand sites and I don't know which one to look at, or ask questions on.

<comment><USER45> I believe the solution to that is to not aim for a specific site and use its search; use a regular web search instead and trust that SO and gang make their sites indexable. That certainly seems to be the case. I have a particular SO question I often reference in order to link to it in answers and comments; I always just google two words to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> With a few friends, i've been running a ruby bulletin board in german and found that there is a definite need for localized assistance.

While quite a few people can read english docs okay, it is far harder to ask proper questions and interact with people. There is always need for clarification. Assistance is far easier without a language barrier.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have been in Portugal two years ago and everybody, I mean EVERYBODY told me that all Portuguese people speak English, because every movie comes with subtitles only (no sound translation), and most of the films are English. They only translates cartoons for small kids. I mean, is Portuguese the best language to start with?

<comment><USER48> I think the idea of starting with portuguese is because of the large brazilian community that struggles with english. In portugal most programmers speak english fluently. I, for one, will continue to use english.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is great, and I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated developers. I mean, it's not like we don't already have to learn a variety of languages already.

I personally get a kick out of communicating with people in other languages. It almost seems like a super power.

<comment><USER50> > I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated > developers.

Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in the history of humanity. How can you build knowledge together if you can't even communicate with one another beyond drawing a square rectangle in the sand? We finally got around to doing counting in, well, mostly one universal system, but languages are still a major PITA for everyone involved.

Sure it may be fun and great for you that you get a kick out of it, but the existence of different language for the sheer fun of it is about as useful as forcing entire nations to play violin.

> I mean, it's not like we don't already have to learn a variety of languages > already.

Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that most of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the Dutch language can die a quick and silent death.

<comment><USER51> > Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in > the history of humanity.

A language not only express the ideas of the speaker, it also carries a lot of historical and cultural data, I love learning new languages even if I don't become proficient in that language. Being said that, I don't think it's a good idea for non-native Portuguese speakers to ask/answer questions in pt.so

> Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than > enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that > most of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the > Dutch language can die a quick and silent death.

I'm a native Spanish speaker, being the second language with most native speakers in the world only behind mandarin, why would I settle just with English?, Spanish is more useful for me in all other activities of my life, I only use English on the Internet, even my Brazilian boss is a fluent Spanish speaker.

<comment><USER49> I've never explicitly studied Spanish, but apparently I've been exposed to it enough in the US that I was able to get through a recent trip to Ecuador without _too much_ trouble. It was easier to read than to try to speak, as I could generally figure out the context of sentences based on key words and shared Latin influences with English. I actually found billboards to be the hardest to understand, which I guess makes sense. Billboards tend to use incomplete sentences and made up words to try to get their point across quickly.

It was just a lot of fun. Several months ago, I started learning Russian. Once I got over the hurdle of the alphabet (again, I had actually once studied it in grade school), I realized that I could figure a lot of things out as I went.

It feels like being Sherlock Holmes or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Was anyone else expecting the post to detail their plan to "translate" non- english Stack Exchange sites to English to continue content centralization?

<comment><USER50> Not me at least.

Was I the only one expecting some comment about planning a bot to translate non-English StackExchange sites to English when glancing over the comment thread and seeing your comment? (I was!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This originally had the same title as the article, namely, "Can't We All be Reasonable and Speak English?"

It's apparently been edited by a mod. But why? HN's title guidelines state:

"If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway...Otherwise please use the original title..."

I can understand an edit which moves a title in the direction of compliance with the title guidelines, but in this case, the edit actually increases the number of title guideline violations by two: It changes the title to be different from the title of the post, and it also inserts the name of the site into the title.

What's up with that?

</comment><comment><USER54> Recent research in four universities in Brasilia (federal capital) area has shown that 50% of students are functional illiterates.

As I said before, we g(b)razilians can't write or understand or own mother tongue, imagine doing it with English.

</comment><comment><USER55> Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just use Google translate? (or some equivalent)

If you don't know any English and you were to auto-translate your question. I think the vast majority of the time you'd get the answer you're looking for. You don't even need the result to be very grammatically correct or to sound natural. Most of the time you just need to get the gist of it and get a code snippet.

It'd be helpful if there was a translation scheme that was targeted towards the programming field so keywords were translated appropriately (so like, whatever the Portuguese equivalent of 'namespace' would translate accurately to 'namespace' etc. etc.). I feel like creating of map of terms would be relatively easy.

In the grad scheme of things I really really hope knowledge is consolidated in English. It's the lingua franca of the world, and it's also one of the most expressive languages. I spend some time working in Japan, and they had so much knowledge squirreled away from the world b/c they were effectively too lazy to learn English. (they're large enough, and advanced enough that they can afford to maintain trade journals and online technical communities in Japanese)

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd _love_ to be able to take all the info we have, and make it available in every language. But here's why it's harder than it looks:

`This is probably a dumb question , but why Google Did not translate simply use ? (Or equivalent ) You do not know English , and if you did, I will automatically convert to your question . I think most of the time , and want to get the answer you are looking for. It grammatically correct is very , or not require a result , you also , to sound natural . Most of the time , you need to and get the gist of it , to get the code snippet you . (Such as , what so that you will translate well to etc. ' space ' Portuguese equivalent of ' space ') because it was translated properly , keyword if there is a conversion method that targets the programming field I think that can help . I feel like the creation of the map of the term would be relatively easy to me. The graduate scheme of things , I hope knowledge is connected in English really . It is a common language in the world , and it also , it 's one of the most expressive language . I spend some time working in Japan , and the knowledge of many , they were crowded world away from the B / C was trouble they will learn English very effectively . ( They are large enough , they're advanced enough that you can afford to maintain the online technical community and trade press in Japan )`

I translated your text above to Japanese and back. (To be fair, that's two "lossy" transfers, not one, but it's pretty clear that you couldn't possibly have a two way discussion that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> (Here's the comment I posted on StackOverflow, I wanted to share it here too.)

I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I'm just repeating the same stuff (on another note, I hope I am).

This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will always be language barriers.

English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about "making people speak their language". I have seen this many times. But it's just ridiculous. We don't need more than one language. Having more than one language:

1) Creates a language barrier, thus slowing down advancement. 2) Gives people a reason for discrimination, just like nationalism, racism, and religion.

When you say that "If just one little girl in Brazil sticks with programming because an answer on this site helped her finish her first project, well… that's not good enough!", it sounds like a really humble thing to do, but it in fact is the opposite. You are overlooking the fact that there's a lot of information regarding programming and many other things in many different languages already. I'm not a native speaker of English, and I learned English thanks to my interest in programming. First I started with reading stuff in my own language, then I realized that I could learn much more if I read stuff in English. And that's how it should be.

I don't care if it's English or any other language, but we only need one language, not three, not two, only one. The rest is just noise.

To wrap it up, disguised by a seemingly humble thing, you are supporting language barriers, by supporting languages. I'd expect better from you guys.

<comment><USER57> I totally agree with you. It's not because it's English per se, it's because we need one universal language. English is the better choice because all the code that we have to write is based in... English. "while", "for", "if", "switch", "return", those are all English words that weren't picked at random: they have actual meaning on what you're doing. If you are programmer and don't know English, you'll never be a great programmer because you'll never understand the basics of the programming language you're working with. By the way, I'm Brazilian. You want to start programming? Great, learn English first. It's not hard and it's gonna make more good than harm to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is fantastic! Congrats to Stack Overflow and here's to more languages in the future.

We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool.

As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly, meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same conversation! It's so cool to see.

We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more in-depth one, shortly.

[0] [http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating- loomio-2/](http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-loomio-2/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Most Russian programmers I know speak enough English to get by in most situations. I can't speak for other countries though.

</comment><comment><USER60> > Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia.

Yukihiro Matsumoto. Rasmus Lerdorf. Guido van Rossum.

<comment><USER61> Would Satoshi count? (I'm not even a programmer!)

<comment><USER62> The most plausible candidate I heard is actually called Mike.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 There's a Polish clone of StackOverflow: [http://devpytania.pl/](http://devpytania.pl/)

The reasoning behind it was more or less the same. It's not very active though and a good number of questions wouldn't meet SO standards (subjective ones, "list" questions etc.)

</comment><comment><USER63> So why start a duplicate place for knowledge? Seems much simpler to integrate a translation system into the canonical English database. Existing entries can be translated into other languages and then improved upon. Hell, you could automate the entire first step and then crowd source the improvements.

<comment><USER64> If the only goal was to present what exists in other languages, this would be a great idea. Your suggestion results in translations for all the people searching for content in a language other than English. But it doesn't allow those people to participate in return. You need the community of PT speakers to succeed (which is the whole reason we have separate sites for different topics, and the reason why we believe our model is better for expert answers than Yahoo Answers, Quora, et al).

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> When I tell someone I work at Stack Exchange, my absolute favorite response is:

        "I basically learned to code from posts I found on Stack Overflow"

\---

While I've never had anyone tell me that, I don't think I'd be happy to hear that in an interview.

<comment><USER66> Because knowing not to write a bubble sort or fizz buzz implementation in Modula-2 without googling for some language reference makes you so much better.

SO is a part of a developers every-day life, like it or not. This is not the 90s anymore, we have knowledge at our fingertips, we should access it and deliver that product or whatever is we're working on faster, without getting stuck in stuff that can be solved with one google search.

edit: spelling

<comment><USER67> Stack Overflow is great for reference or solving specific problems. It's pretty awful for learning anything in depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> It would be pretty sweet if they have some process of linking duplicate questions between the two, or if bilingual folks could ask questions in multiple languages. Translating questions and/or answers could be as valuable as answering questions.

</comment><comment><USER69> Their explanation would be good in static world - we give non-english speakers opportunity to be a part of global SO. But I'm afraid that in the future it will hurt main SO, since core community of each language will move to its own *.SO, leaving english section for native-only speakers. Of course, maybe that won't be the case and I hope they will watch for negative effects. English language as an intermediate for all programmers is a bliss. Imagine how it would be nice if all people had one language and there were no communication barriers (damn Babylonians :) It's not possible in common case, but with programming we almost have it.

</comment><comment><USER70> This is one of the few situations where I side strongly with ESR: [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker- howto.html#skills4](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4)

<comment><USER71> Even if he happened to be right about his contention, this isn't the point at all. The question here is, "Should a programming service be offered in a language other than English?" Whereas ESR is claiming, "Programmers should learn to write English proficiently."

Imagine, if you will, that Silicon Valley is THE place to live if you want to be a programmer. Alice has job advice: "Move to Silicon Valley."

Now imagine that Bob wishes to open a hackerspace code+cafe in New York. Should we really tell him that this is a bad idea? Is it somehow a terrible idea to help programmers who chose to ignore Alice's advice to be productive? Is it somehow undermining TheGrandPlan™ to support a programmer in New York City?

Are we "fragmenting the hacker community" by opening a cafe in NYC?

I can't think of any good reasons not to make Stack Overflow available in Portuguese. And any or every other language. An argument to keep SO English- only might as well be accompanied by an argument that there should be no conference talks in any language except English, no programming books in any language except English, and no help or online documentation in any language except English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I think this is a very good idea. The point about being interested in programming way before you ever considered learning English is the selling point for me. Portuguese seems like a good starting language as well, well done (I'd like to see German added to the list though).

As long as it doesn't lead to more native language (from people that actually speak English) code I'm 100% on board. I come across code in German and French somewhat regularly and...yikes (unfortunately I know of quite a few universities that actually teach programming with native language class and method names and the like)

</comment><comment><USER73> > 10% of the world's programmers are in China

> 1.4% of our visits come from China

> Only 4.8% of our visits come from China, Japan and Korea combined

> So, if the data tell us that we're getting roughly 80% less activity from > Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints, why does it feel > so obvious that all serious programmers speak English?

That data says it's less. It doesn't say the reason why is language constraints.

p.s. With or without this data, sure, it's obviously false that "all serious programmers speak English", and obviously true that _some_ more people will participate using their native language.

<comment><USER74> When I first started, I used to hang out and ask questions in one of the major Chinese programmer forums.

I knew some English back then, but looking at a wall of English text was daunting in itself, now imagine a wall of English text that is not easy to understand even for native English speakers.

<comment><USER73> Oh I'm totally sympathetic and think it's great to have it in more languages.

I just didn't understand their logic. They seemed to say, the only thing holding back those 80% is the language barrier, and once we break it, the numbers will shoot up. Well maybe. But it reminds me of circa 1999 market math: "If get just 1% of the Chinese market..." says someone, followed by investors taking a haircut as a result of lame business plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's one:

Because any language other than English is brainfucked in string support.

There, I said it.

<comment><USER42> No, let's use other languages for naming stuff in programming languages that support Unicode sources!

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I like it. I wish there was a reference to Orkut worked in there. That social network thrived for a long time purely because a couple Brazilian open source celebs latched on to it.

</comment><comment><USER76> Odd that they waited two weeks to write this blog post. Should have been out on day 1, because obviously people are going to have questions about it. Instead they just had an explanation blog post in Portuguese:

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo- announcing-s...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing- stack-overflow-in-portuguese/)

</comment><comment><USER77> I think it's great to see North American developers reach out to their South American brethren. We spend so much time thinking about Europe and Asia that we often forget about our next door neighbors.

South America may not have such a high GDP, but they are also a lot more receptive to partnership. Europe and Asia mostly want to be left alone to do their own thing.

</comment><comment><USER78> > we're getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the > absence of language constraints

Bit of an assumption here: absent language constraints, Chinese and anglophone developers would use Stackoverflow at the same rate. I'd say it's pretty likely that China has a popular programming QA site of its own.

</comment><comment><USER79> Solution to this idea should be reconsidered in my opinion.

Instead of creating pure language specific sites, smarter approach can be more helpful to everyone in the community. Let's give it a try;

      'Argument is not numeric (ArgumentError)'

What is there to write/ask differently about it in English or Portuguese? If a subsystem to stackoverflow is created for each language, you might be able to see the answers written by other native speakers. An accepted answer will always be in English but for the ones that can not understand what is going on, they can click on their preferred language button and see the explanation in Portuguese.

This would also give better overview of which country actually has more involved to specific topic and so on.

To keep in short, every question asked in stackoverflow has a localization button to see answers from different languages. If someone is not comfortable writing the answer in English then they can write it in Russian. Then, when an American checks the question in english with no answers, he/she can try to translate the answers from other languages. Which is a win/win for both parties

</comment><comment><USER80> "That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish. "

Apropos of nothing but the sheer size of the language community, I am quite surprised that Arabic doesn't feature in this list.

</comment><comment><USER81> This post will not be complete without mentioning Claude Piron [http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9](http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9)

</comment><comment><USER82> As Portuguese I congratulate SO. Now I just hope it means all Portuguese variants (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe) and not just Brazil.

<comment><USER83> Written Portuguese has very little variance now. That's what last year orthographic change was all about. Most of the difference are on names, and on IT we use a completely different lingo anyway.

<comment><USER82> Yes, now imagine a discussion thread on SO using multiple speakers from all Portuguese speaking countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Is it going to be Portuguese from Portugal or Brazil?

<comment><USER82> I imagine this is a rhetoric question.

<comment><USER84> How is it rethoric? Portuguese is a language that mutated a lot between the countries that use it. For more informations check [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographic_Agreement_of_1990)

<comment><USER82> Because if you bothered to read the article you would have seen it is Brazilian Portuguese, assuming you are Portuguese native speaker like myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I think this is not the correct way to tackle the problem. Build a website in Portuguese will only divide instead of stimulate the participation of users which doesn't have English as native.

I'd like to propose a different approach:

For the users that speak Portuguese natively, make the questions, answers and comments all written in Portuguese FIRST, and, a English version MANDATORY afterwards (which would be the standard language).

The Portuguese-spoken users would see all this items also in Portuguese, and the remains in English.

The same for users of other languages. For those who speak only English, it would be no difference.

This approach has several advantages:

* It makes the user __think __in their native language, giving much better answers.

* The user is forced to make a second review in the answer when it was translated to English.

* The user will identify their language peers easily.

* The user will be more comfortable to participate, because the barrier to write in English is tremendous (much bigger than a lot of people think).

This way, I think you are able to keep a single website for ALL developers, stimulating participation.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Same comment in Portuguese (my native language, just for illustration)

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Acho que isso não é uma forma adequada de tratar o problema. Criar um site em português irá dividir ao invés de estimular a participação destes usuários que não tem inglês nativo.

Gostaria de propôr uma solução, que no meu ponto-de-vista, seria bem melhor:

Para os usuários que falam Português nativamente, façam que todas as perguntas, respostas e comentários no site sejam escritos em Português, primeiramente, e adicionada, OBRIGATORIAMENTE, uma versão em inglês (que seria a língua comum).

Os usuários que falam Português nativo veriam automaticamente estes itens também em português, e o restante em inglês.

O mesmo para usuários de outras línguas. Para aqueles que falam apenas inglês, não teria nenhuma diferença.

Essa abordagem tem várias vantagens:

* Estimular que o usuário __pense __em sua língua nativa, fornecendo respostas muito mais precisas.

* Força o usuário fazer uma segunda revisão na resposta quando for traduzir para o inglês.

* O usuário nativo vai identificar os seus pares rapidamente.

* O usuário vai ficar mais confortável em participar, pois a barreira de escrever em inglês é enorme (maior do que muitos pensam)

Acho que desta forma poderia fazer um único site para TODOS os desenvolvedores, estimulando a participação.

<comment><USER86> This is an interesting idea, but I wonder about the practicality. When you say something is MANDATORY, whose responsibility is it? The question writer, who may not have English at all? Someone else? Who?

<comment><USER85> The question writer. The user still has to have some ability to understand the standard language of the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Very poor idea, if you're a coder you've got to speak decent English. There is no way to get around that, period.

</comment><comment><USER88> printf ("Olá, mundo!");

</comment><comment><USER89> is there is any major open source project that is being developed by Portuguese-speaking people only? i.e. mailing list, bug tracker and comments all in Portuguese.

</comment><comment><USER90> Nein!

</comment><comment><USER91> I am afraid that stackoverflow has become a very hostile environment for the sake of some delusive over optimization as a code bank for every single question out there. The thing about questions is that although there are similarities, they often are not placed in the same context, stackoverflow mods zealously flag even relevant questions like "what libraries should I use for X" because it's not a really answerable question but they are forgetting that this optimization by downvoting (negative user experience) and censuring the question asker leaves a very bad taste in new comers experience.

Even I, as an old timer on stackoverflow get harassed (the usual passive aggressive and cold hearted engineer style) with time to time by people who otherwise do not have any reason to be commenting on the question itself such as "if OP doesn't know this, it's a miracle that he does X" or other ad hominem remarks.

Stackoverflow really has become a hostile place to ask questions provided they don't censure you for variety of subjective rules.

These days I find Ask HN to be far better user experience.</comment>


Engineered Band Gap Pushes Graphene Closer to Displacing Silicon - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/nanotechnology/engineered-band-gap-pushes-graphene-closer-to-displacing-silicon <comment><USER2> I wonder what kind of pressure we're talking about to achieve that EV gap.

<comment><USER3> ~2.3 GPa, the max mentioned in the paper, equates to around 20k atmospheres of pressure or around 300k psi.

<comment><USER2> That seems like an enormous amount of pressure. Can you put that into perspective, please?

<comment><USER4> Imagine 80 full sized SUVs stacked on top of each other, balanced on a 1" square metal rod.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why they insist on fooling with carbon, when phosphorus forms nice sheets like graphene that are naturally semiconconducting.

It probably has a lot to do with appealing to the prejudices of grant committees.

<comment><USER6> Black phosphorus sheets are great but they are pretty hard to fabricate and they degrade very quickly when they come in contact with air (in a matter of hours). There have been various attempts to solve this, some of them successful (as far as we can tell from lab experiments, at least), but all solutions are in pretty early stages, and most of them seem pretty difficult to implement on an industrial scale. Basically, exposing the damn thing to anything but inert gases for more than a couple of hours destroys it. That's not too feasible today.

<comment><USER7> Can the computer in high pressure helium: better thermal conductivity then air. Or space applications.

<comment><USER8> The topic was replacing silicon. I'm sure there are niche applications for it, but having to seal everything helium-tight won't work for all use cases that are served by silicon chips.

<comment><USER9> The silicon is rarely exposed to air though. This is just a manufacturing issue, isnt it?

<comment><USER10> I suppose so, but it's easier to have your factory with ultra-clean air than have it with inert gases.

<comment><USER11> With submersion litography and the silicon wafers being in inert gas chambers for annealing to prevent oxidation faults I'm not sure that's actually the case.

You usually don't want to expose anything to oxygen especially something that is only a few nanometers thick so even if the base silicon does not oxidize (which afaik it does) once you begin the doping process not to mention laying down the metal layers oxygen is a big no no, the oxide layer that form on say copper coins is thicker than the copper layers in most ICs so I really don't see oxygen as being viable medium during manufacturing.

Based on this it seems that when Oxygen is used it's used as a purge gas [https://www.globalspec.com/learnmore/materials_chemicals_adh...](https://www.globalspec.com/learnmore/materials_chemicals_adhesives/industrial_specialty_gases/electronic_semiconductor_gases)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Duh, the article speaks of Van der Waal forces instead of Van der Waals forces.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there plants that can open a window? - <AUTHOR> There are genetically engineered bacteria that can send a signal when the water gets polluted: http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/engineered-bacteria-send-a-signal-when-water-gets-polluted-150811.htm
Are there genetically engineered plants that for example emit light in a particular part of the spectrum to directly control valves/actuators in greenhouses to provide them with more or less water, nutrients, etc.?
At first this actuator that is artificially encoded in their genes will not be used as such by the plant itself. However, through evolution the plants that incorporate this genetic circuit in such a way that they can control the lights/water/nutrients will be selected for. <comment><USER2> There are glow in the dark plants ([http://www.glowingplant.com/](http://www.glowingplant.com/)) but there are not plants genetically engineered to produce photosynthetically useful light that I know of. And they definitely don't exist in anything close to a commercially useful form.

I'm not really sure how the text of your question relates to the headline though. There are plants that can open a window as they grow over time, but there isn't a plant that can just do it in response to stimuli.

I'm not sure how useful this technology would be when it's already so easy, low cost, and sustainable to incorporate it mechanically without the added regulatory, r&d, and cost hurdles associated with genetic engineering. I would also mention GE issues with patents and environmental damage.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know the answer to your question but it would be fascinating if some type of plant or organism could evolve to use some type of man-made tool. Like a plant or fungus or something that could trigger a flow of water or sunlight.</comment>


Arrest of WannaCry researcher sends chill through security community - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/345337-wannacry-hero-chills-security-community <comment><USER2> I've read a few articles but I feel like I'm missing something. What's with the sensational quotes like "I had folks afraid that their own involvement in investigating WannaCry would get them arrested."?

Everything I've read points that he created banking Malware "Kronos" which was sold on various "underground forums" (whatever that means). What's with the WannaCry conspiracies? He wasn't arrested for being a security research, he was arrested for being a malware creator selling malware. Why is this "sending a chill through the security community"?

<comment><USER3> The concern is that a lot of behaviour that a security researcher would do in the course of their research, taking over C&C server addresses such as with Wannacry, soliciting for samples of malware, such as Hutchins did with the Kronos trojan, and having contacts with black-hat hackers, might look to the DOJ as if he is the culprit who created the malware.

People think that an innocent white hat hacker could get swept up in this kind of arrest, and there has been so little evidence released, nobody knows what actually happened.

<comment><USER4> Hutchins is accused of _creating_ the Kronos trojan, and of working closely with someone who _sold_ the trojan. The lines the DOJ is saying were crossed are pretty bright.

<comment><USER5> It bears mentioning that accused does not mean convicted. The DOJ record as far as accusations turning out to be grounded in reality is not unblemished.

>Hutchins is accused of creating the Kronos trojan, and of working closely with someone who sold the trojan. The lines the DOJ is saying were crossed are pretty bright.

You say that as though you are contradicting NateJay.

But the fear NateJay is highlighting is exactly that a white hat is being accused. And that (whether ultimately borne out in this case, or not) this kind of thing could happen to people who are conducting innocent security research.

<comment><USER6> A white hat is being accused of black hat behaviour. There is no indication that the government is seeking to charge him with any activities related to behaviour that could be interpreted as "white hat" in any way. He's accused of creating and distributing malware. He may be found innocent of that, but the crimes he is accused of are very definitely crimes, and he shouldn't get a pass just because he's been publicly acting as a white hat.

If the government has evidence, he should be charged and tried. And that appears to be what's happening here.

<comment><USER7> > There is no indication that the government is seeking to charge him with any > activities related to behaviour that could be interpreted as "white hat" in > any way.

There is only the thinnest of lines between the two.

White hats have to traffic in malware and exploits because it's necessary to understand a threat in order to defend against it, and in order to test that your defenses are effective. In may even be necessary to infiltrate black hat collectives.

The clearest way to tell the difference is that a real black hat will be breaking _some other law_. Committing credit card fraud or misappropriation of trade secrets or something like that.

But that doesn't appear to be the case here. And the fear is that because the law around this is so uncertain, if the government is going to use it in cases like this without any independent bad acts then nobody knows where the line is supposed to be.

<comment><USER4> "White hats" do not in fact routinely sell software intended almost solely to harvest financial information from botnets.

People on this thread have a lot of strange ideas about what infosec people do in their jobs.

<comment><USER7> > "White hats" do not in fact routinely sell software intended almost solely > to harvest financial information from botnets.

The indictment doesn't allege that the defendant sold it, only that he wrote it and someone else sold it.

And as you know, white hats create proof of concept code all the time. And give it to various people (including, in the end, anyone) for various meritorious reasons.

<comment><USER4> For the Nth time in this thread: watch the video of the software we're talking about. "White hats" do not build things like that all the time.

<comment><USER5> So, to make an analogy representing your position:

Watch the video of this horrendous deadly baseball bat attack. Baseball players do not bludgeon people to death with bats all the time. Therefore, baseball players should never worry that they might be falsely accused of an attack. Oh, and the crime was horrible, so that means the evidence must be pretty good. Q.E.D.

<comment><USER8> That's not analogous as the Bat was not developed for Bludgeoning. This was software designed to steal money / cause issues regardless of whom sold it. I don't know anyone in infosec that regularly creates fully functional and marketable platforms. It's also different than exploit proof of concepts, as again, this is designed to steal.

<comment><USER5> We don't know that he created the malware. He is accused of creating it. How hard is it to understand the difference between being accused and being guilty? It's been explained to death here that they are not the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like no one here remembers when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested under similar circumstances. The US government has no obligation to seek out every potential arrestee no matter where they are in the world for every single crime that the US has laws for. But if the target of an investigation (whether they know it or not) sets foot in the US, then we shouldn't be surprised when they are arrested. And this is just another case with Def Con (so no, it's probably not moving out of the US, it didn't 15 years ago), I'm quite certain that these sorts of things happen frequently for other crimes of (relatively) low priority that are just outside our primary focus on this forum (technology).

And is the US any worse for this than other nations? Probably not. They just get more publicity when it happens. But every nation that has a legal system will do the same thing. If the Russians or the Brits or the Germans or the Swiss decide that Jtsummers is a suspect in a crime, and I visit and they realize it, I shouldn't be surprised to find myself arrested and barred from leaving the country.

[0] [https://www.cnet.com/g00/news/russian-crypto-expert- arrested...](https://www.cnet.com/g00/news/russian-crypto-expert-arrested-at- def-con/) \- may not be the best article, it's the first one that came up on Google for me.

<comment><USER10> Iceland would be great place if you want freedom, but I doubt the willingness from the current majority of attendees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Realistically, DEF CON should move to the Caribbean.

Marcus Hutchins is a British citizen. Extradition before the event was feasible and would have been a far more honorable path than the snatch and grab that transpired.

British security experts might insist on Grand Cayman for any further conferences in the Americas.

<comment><USER4> You think the FBI is going to interdict a computer criminal _before_ they spend a week in Las Vegas associating with computer security professionals, any of whom could be criminal co-conspirators?†

That would be exceptionally nice of them, but also extremely poor investigative practice.

I will say, though, as one of the many people in my field that is bone-tired of schlepping out to the worst place in the United States every damn year for these events, _any other location in the world would be fine for me_ , and I endorse the actual suggestion you're making.

† _(Yes, obviously, I know virtually nobody who attends Defcon is a criminal)._

<comment><USER12> You forgot to mention having the opportunities to electronically surveil his activities while he's physically located in the United States, to attempt to possibly catch him soliciting a plant, bragging to a stripper while drunk, or attempt to catch him in some other questionable activities that they could use as the basis of an arrest or further warrants without having to play their hand as to what they think he's actually guilty of (and therefore being able to possibly turn him as an informant).

There's a brazillion reasons not to arrest someone the minute you think you've got them.

<comment><USER4> "Basis of an arrest"? They had an arrest warrant. The complaint I'm addressing is "why did they not arrest him sooner???".

<comment><USER12> I'm agreeing with you (go figure?).

The point I was making RE: "basis of an arrest" is that if you wait for him to do something stupid, like get arrested by local LEO for drunk and disorderly, that gives you cover to approach him in an interrogation and threaten him with prosecution over the malware... unless he agrees to be a witness/informant. Because he's in with local LEO for something innocuous, there's cover.

In the end, they indict him for the malware, which pretty much ruins him from that perspective. Or, perhaps, they already figured he wasn't worth using and it's not above a US Attorney to go after someone well known in order to further their own career...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If your code is used in an exploit and that is now a punishable crime, maybe next the NSA will be in the hot seat since the code that was used in wanacry was their own. Or perhaps Israel for their effort in Stuxnet. I hope he takes it to trial and we find out what is really happening here. Pretty suspicious that this happens years after the fact and only weeks after he helped prevent the further spread of wannaCry. WannaCry being created on top of the leaked NSA exploits they held on to instead of responsibly disclosing to Microsoft.

<comment><USER14> Yes, take this for an example, if someone were to deliberately sell firearms to someone that they knew would attempt to murder someone with their firearm, do you think they should be partially liable for the murder?

<comment><USER15> Yes, the seller would legally be an accessory to the murder, having had knowledge that the crime would be committed and having helped the murderer commit it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_(legal_term)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_\(legal_term\))

<comment><USER16> Then shouldn't Hutchins legally be an accessory to uses of the malware to steal money, surveil unsuspecting victims, etc. if it is true that he knowingly sold it to people who do such things?

<comment><USER15> He might be able to get out of it by arguing that he didn't know about any particular crime they would commit, or that he thought they had good faith reasons to buy the software despite being criminals in general. I think this hinges on exactly what he knew.

<comment><USER16> Yes, absolutely. The burden is on the government to prove he knew who he was selling it to and that he knew what they were very likely going to use it for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone who's not sure where I stand on this, I feel like Hutchins supporters are doing themselves a disservice by overly-conflating this with WannaCry. I think there's potentially a good argument to be made along the lines of "Hutchins good work w.r.t. WannaCry is the _only_ reason that anyone (including law enforcement) is aware of semi-historical Kronos, so going after him for Kronos is equivalent to going after him for WannaCry." Additionally, there may well be other arguments in his favor that I'm not even thinking of.

But those arguments need to be _made_ (and the one I outlined would need decent factual details). That said...maybe glossing over (or even totally ignoring) Kronos is the best way for Hutchins supporters to go...but if it is, that seems an unfortunate reflection on society.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's what these researchers are saying. I think they are saying more along the lines of: "Hutchins has shown that he is a security researcher through his work on wannacry. As a security researcher, he probably has researched other problems as well, possibly including Kronos. The fact that he was arrested with little to no evidence could be showing that the DOJ is willing to arrest people who have copies of virus source code on their computers, even if they only accessed it for research purposes. In fact he may have updated Kronos code or written some part of Kronos as part of research to validate a hypothesis or test a theory. Such actions are ordinary actions for researchers, so this puts at risk most computer security research across the world."

<comment><USER19> > The fact that he was arrested with little to no evidence

How do you know what evidence does or doesn't exist? The case hasn't even been brought to trial yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another piece of information that seems very shady from the US is they tried to say he was breaking felony gun laws going to the shooting ranges on the strip and using that as a reason to stop his bail

[https://twitter.com/ChristyNews3LV/status/893603855266492416](https://twitter.com/ChristyNews3LV/status/893603855266492416)

</comment><comment><USER21> Why? The arrest of a mall cop who was also doing burglaries wouldn't send a chill through the security guard community, except perhaps for those who were moonlighting as burglars.

<comment><USER22> If he was arrested for burglarizing a mall he worked in, though, and you didn't have any evidence other than the claim of the arresting authorities that he wasn't merely _present_ in the mall (as security guards are wont to be) where a burglary had taken place, you might be somewhat concerned.

<comment><USER21> Fair enough, but I don't think that the FBI conspires to frame people for crimes all that often, nor that many security researchers believe that they do. Also, the fact that a grand jury handed down an indictment indicates that there _is_ evidence that will be shared at trial. Unless the grand jury is also part of the conspiracy, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The indictment does not say Hutchins designed Kronos or sold Kronos. Rather, > it says that he provided computer code to a second party to update Kronos.

> Overt Acts in Furtherance of the Conspiracy

> a. Defendant MARCUS HUTCHINS created the Kronos malware.

[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3912524-Kronos- Indic...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3912524-Kronos- Indictment-R.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Lot's of comments about moving DEFCON out of US jurisdiction. DEFCON officially flaunts the fact that both criminals and law enforcement attend the event.[0] If that is the approach of the con, this interaction is built-in.

This isn't about DEFCON.

[0] [https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-faq/dc- faq.html](https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-faq/dc-faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> > It is unclear from the indictment if Hutchins would have been aware his work > was being used maliciously

The indictment specifically states he sold the malware. Unless he was completely convinced the buyers of Kronos were using it for research into browser malware, it's pretty damned obvious.

I'd be interested to talk to malware researchers that are genuinely scared about this.

<comment><USER26> We dont know what was actually sold, or what was paid for, or who paid for it.

Of course the government in a government indictment will states "he sold malware" but the government is known to lie, exaggerate, and use terms incorrectly or out of context when talking about technology.

Taking the indictment at face value is IMO extremely naive

<comment><USER25> Don't get me wrong, I'm not taking the US government's word here. I just disagree with a journalist stating that the indictment is unclear. It's very clear what the FBI are trying to argue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Individual known for benevolent acts arrested on charges of other, malevolent acts chills community of benevolent actors?

</comment><comment><USER28> Why didn't the FBI ask for an extradition to the UK? If the case was solid they should use the proper channel to deal with foreign (supposed) criminals.

When you use this strategy, you deprive the arrested of the right he would have in his country and you add the crazy cost to defend yourself in a US court. So it's possible that the case is not that solid or need some Parallel construction. It's pure speculation but it seems fishy to me.

I can understand the use of shenanigans to arrest previous dictators or very powerful crime lords as a last resort for Justice but here it seems very unfair.

I think we may see a drop of attendee to US conference and/or a drop in tourism.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's so much strange hand-wringing in a loud subset of the security community. The DoJ has a 93% conviction rate because they pursue strong cases that usually end in a plea-bargain. The FBI aren't spooks. The evidence will become public. If this guy profited off of banking trojans then I, for one, hope he ends up in the clink.

<comment><USER30> The DoJ has a 93% conviction rate because they pressure any target into a plea bargain so they don't have to pursue strong cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think one factor not being accounted for is cybersecurity is a fairly big priority for law enforcement yet in a very large number of cases they are never able to find or prosecute people responsible. So they need to "make the numbers" to show that they are being effective and the easiest strategy is to go for easy targets.

</comment><comment><USER32> I guess I get the concern but it seems clear the accusation are unrelated to WannaCry and his involvement in another event.

We've seen bumbling investigations and misguided legal threats before... that didn't stop people and this one doesn't seem to yet be either of those.

</comment><comment><USER33> No need to do any malice in order to be arrested on Def Con

[https://www.cnet.com/news/russian-crypto-expert-arrested- at-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/russian-crypto-expert-arrested-at-def-con/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Sad to see it confirmed that it's not worth the risk going to America to visit DEFCON. I hope they'll host it in Europe someday.. To see no statement by DEFCON on this whole thing is almost equally sad.

<comment><USER2> Can you elaborate? Have you been creating malware (banking trojans) and selling it online?

<comment><USER34> No I haven't created or sold malware.

But i have this; A middle-eastern last name, I use Tor, I use Linux, and I use Telegram, I am active in the field of IT and especially enjoy IT security.

I know that I can be held indefinitely if I visit the USA. In the USA you're guilty until proven innocent, unlike the rest of the western world. Simply going to the USA is more risk than it is for practically every other country. Well, for me, and a lot of people like me.

That's what my comment was about.

EDIT: How is it relevant to the article? Well, he is an IT security specialist who wanted to visit DEFCON. Yes, I understand what he did was wrong, it was his own risk.

<comment><USER35> You're commenting on an article about how the FBI arrested someone for creating malware. If you haven't been creating malware, then I don't see how this article has anything to do with the issues you face as someone with a middle-eastern last who uses privacy tools like Tor. Hutchins wasn't targeted because of CBP's stance on things it associates with terrorism. He was targeted because the FBI believes he authored malware.

<comment><USER36> Believe it or not, it's possible to be suspected or even accused of something you didn't actually do, whether through a misunderstanding or otherwise. And factors such as ethnicity and personal associations can influence the chance of this occurring.

<comment><USER35> Hutchens is a British man, not someone of an ethnicity that makes people wary. The arrest of Hutchens shouldn't have any relevance whatsoever to worries about being flagged for ethnicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The lines between security researcher and malware creator is becoming increasingly murky.

When is it research, pretending to be a bad egg to get more info or actually being one?

As long as its was fun and games no one really minded, but now malware is used to hold schools and hospitals to ransom. Even criminals don't go after schools and hospitals. Extreme greed and criminality can't be minimized away as 'hacking'.

The infosec community likes to be edgy but they need to clean up their act and not give airtime and cover to criminals, and its difficult to believe they don't know who these are.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is it me or the DOJ so the flight manifest and then went to a grand jury to indict? He did what he did in 2014-2015 and the charges were filed in July 2017, a couple of weeks before Defcon...

<comment><USER39> If that is the case, it would not be remarkable. Prosecutors have a responsibility to only pursue cases that are likely to result in conviction. If extradition was considered impossible, then there would not be much point in pursing an indictment.

<comment><USER40> I honestly assume that there's a "list of foreigners we'd like to prosecute" that the US gov't checks visa applications against.

<comment><USER38> I totally agree, and I think it's in different categories, depending on the crime. This guy might have escaped unless he came to USA for example, as extradition might mean a lot of work, for another they will leave no stone un- turned.

USA probably gets all the flight reservation data and take it from there. If you're a Russian criminal mastermind dying to spend some of that cash in Greek islands, they'll find out. (Better stay in Russia and pay Igor @ Russian Gov his share :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Please read his indictment application, there is clearly a reason why he was arrested. If 'researchers" are allegedly selling malware then yes they should worry. Simple

</comment><comment><USER42> The article is light on details and leave an important question's answer very vague: Did Hutchins sell his product in an underground market to an unknown identity? How much was the compensation?

These questions answered would make the case a "clear-cut".

And there is a big difference between selling your code in an underground market for $250k* with bitcoin, and open sourcing it for free.

*I come up with this number as an example.

</comment><comment><USER43> Leaving aside the particulars of this case, I must say that anyone who does anything that might plausibly be prosecuted ought to remain anonymous, and practice good OPSEC. In researching an article about such issues, just about every bust was the result of carelessness.

</comment><comment><USER44> I hope they go easy on him. He's done some bad, but recently some good.

</comment><comment><USER45> Time to move the conference out of the United States to somewhere more Neutral. Canada would be a good suggestions. Montreal is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER46> what bothers me actually is how these correlations were made, and by what process of deduction, if its not a snitch related frame

</comment><comment><USER47> It's a bit odd you can make a knife or gun and sell it but if you sell malware that's illegal.

<comment><USER48> What? This makes no sense: you can write software legally & sell it too. But conspiracy is a completely different matter. If you made a gun with a feature to make it a full auto weapon & just assumed people knew what it was, then sold it THAT is more akin to selling malware that was intended to do harm. The bits aren't the issue here, the conspiracy to cause damage with the bits is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Isn't he arrested for selling illegal key logger software?

</comment><comment><USER50> I would not be shocked if Defcon moved out of the US.

<comment><USER51> To where?

<comment><USER52> Germany!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Shouldn't it be "Arrest of malware creator sends chill through security community"?

</comment><comment><USER54> I hope it goes to trial, and he is not found guilty. Should be a relatively easy case to win.

<comment><USER55> Based on the information to be found in this article it's not at all clear whether it will be an easy case to win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wonder if the location of the arrest influenced the prosecutors' decision: "We 'caught' him at a _hacker_ convention where they broke a voting machine!"

</comment><comment><USER57> He's not indicted for doing security research, he's indicted for stealing people's bank accounts.

The indictment may end up being bullshit, but it has not been for any of his white-hat, or grey-hat activities.

<comment><USER58> I don't defend him in any way but he is not indicted for stealing people's bank account just for writing software that does that, please don't spread disinformation about this.

<comment><USER59> and also selling that software</comment></comment></comment>


Speeding up SSL: ECC 279% faster than RSA - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.98.778

<comment><USER2> If your SSL handshaking is a performance-limiting step, you're doing something wrong. Yes, ECC can be faster than RSA... but it really doesn't matter for SSL.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is from 2004.

The problem with ECC is (has been, rather) that it's covered by patents, and OpenSSL didn't have ECC APIs until very recently. I believe the implementation in the latest versions of OpenSSL are based on the work of the same authors. Unfortunately, with so much deployed code using RSA-based handshakes, it seems tough for ECC to gain traction all that soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2325>

Also, the lawsuit that certicom made against Sony for ECC infringement was thrown out.

Here is a GPL implementation that claims to be patent free:

<http://point-at-infinity.org/seccure/></comment></comment>


Trans athletes make great gains, yet resentment still flares - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trans-athletes-make-great-gains-yet-resentment-still-flares-n975646 <comment><USER2> The framing here is really disingenuous. Being concerned about men who "identify" as women being allowed in women's sport is completely reasonable and not mere "resentment". There are real physical differences between men and women, such as bone density, muscle density, lung capacity, heart size, etc that are not undone by hormone therapy or reassignment surgery, and certainly not by self-identification. Navratilova is completely correct, and I'm really shocked that anyone could portray her comments as "transphobic".</comment>