IOTA: A tangled mess - <AUTHOR> http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2017/12/iota-tangled-mess.html?m=1 <comment><USER3> >The IOTA source code is written in JAVA instead of C++ like most professional cryptocurrencies are. That did not instill me with confidence.

This made me lose any confidence in a person's capabilities in evaluating the coin. If anything, Java is way more (or any language with modern memory management) robust choice than C++ where security is concerned.

In any case, I am highly skeptical of the IOTA as well.

<comment><USER4> Me too. He may well have valid points but, as someone who has written mission critical software systems in Java, this destroys the credibility of the article for me.

<comment><USER5> He may be biased, but you may be too. Are you a Java developer (or android)?

That said, I know some great software can be produced in Java, ElasticSearch been one on top of my mind.

If Security is the goal, nor CPP nor Java is great. Proven Haskell or Rust might be more of a valid option.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK Cardano (ADA), which is booming (passed IOTA and became the 6th largest coin this week), is implemented in Haskell.

<comment><USER7> A coin "booking" doesn't imply technical strength- that's the problem here.

<comment><USER7> *booming

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IOTA is the only big cryptocurrency that seems extremely fishy to me. The trick is that even a fairly technical person (like me) cannot easily refute it based on the whitepaper, because the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable, and does not have enough information to evaluate the project anyway. The average person sees such a whitepaper, and is amazed by the complicated scientific formulas. A good engineer/scientist on the other hand gets uneasy about it I think. I don't understand how a huge network of full nodes, nodes which are small indusrtrial devices can scalably reach consensus in a fast way. Even storing the full state is impossible, not to speak about history. It is independnet on whether we use the DAG or blockchain. That is why scalability plans on other networks go into the direction of sharding, or have a smaller number of powerful nodes, or use layer 2, etc...

Crypto communities fight each other (BTC vs. BCASH, DASH vs. Monero, Ethereum vs. EOS) but these are all serious projects. The whole community should speak up about IOTA instead.

<comment><USER9> >the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable

I decided to see whether this statement is justified.

      Before starting
      </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language.

I have these examples in mind:

1\. We have many examples from marketing. If marketing just doesn't want to answer a question but does want to write a response to something.

2\. There are examples of nonsense. I have in mind this one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator) This reads:

>The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated aluminite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented

This is intentionally indecipherable, yet seems quite serious. It's a good example to bear before us.

3\. There are times that important technical facts are deeply obfuscated. While I don't have a specific example, I think if you think of white papers on deeply unpopular features, you will get a sense of what I mean.

4\. Because you add the word "intentionally" we don't need to include crank science in this judgment. That relieves us of a HUGE burden, as we will be evaluating a white paper possibly outside of our experience, and it is very difficult to tell the difference between crank and real science, totally outside of our domain.

Okay, so the above are the standards I have in mind. How will I evaluate whether the white paper is "intentionally indecipherable"?

      "Intentionally indecipherable" criteria, selected before reading paper
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

1\. Does it use words that simply do not exist? For example, having zero Google results, and not being decipherable from their stems and construction of the word. Does the author offer definitions in these cases?

2\. Does the author appear helpful at any point? For example, are there simplifications, or "other ways" to think about something offered? Do tricky points appear to receive careful attention?

3\. Are there any clear jokes? Intentionally indecipherable writing does not contain clear jokes, because the author is "on edge", using all of their mental capacity to keep from accidentally communicating anything.

4\. (a big one): Are multiple synonyms used for no reason? The intention of the indecipherable author is to keep from passing on any knowledge. If the author can use 4-5 syonnyms, that greatly reduces the chance that the reader accidentally looks up the word in question. On the other hand, landmark papers use the same terminology consistently, rather than reaching for synonyms: the author wants to convey something about concepts, and goes to great lengths to talk about it. Papers that are decipherable have high repetition of key words. Papers that are indecipherable have very low repetition (to keep from communicating.)

5\. Are there vague references which are avoided being mentioned directly? This is common in marketing spin, but also in case of wanting to keep from communicating something. If something is included by reference without taking a parenthetical two words to explain what will be included there, this is another good indication of intentional indecipherability.

Okay, now I've set up the standards. Let me dive in and read the white paper!

      Reading the paper
      </comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

I am using this link:

[https://iota.readme.io/v1.2.0/docs/whitepaper](https://iota.readme.io/v1.2.0/docs/whitepaper)

Oh, I forgot to add but clicking that link reminded me: if it seems that sentences are made more tricky by editing after the fact, i.e. if they are not a natural way to form a sentence but seem specially edited for greater complexity, that seems a good indication. (This will be criteria 6.)

The whitepaper is linked with the words:

> The IOTA Whitepaper which describes the main technology behind IOTA - <USER2> > Tangle - is available to read online. It goes into greater detail about the > structure as well as the security of the Tangle.

This seems extremely focused on imparting real information. It is written in an extremely accessible, simplified style (failing indecipherability criteria 1 & 2). It does not seem unnecessarily complicated (failing indecipherability criterion 6). It actively mentions something rather than alluding to it, by mentioning "the Tangle" within dashes -- failing indecipherability criterion 5. It seems to fail criterion 4 as "the Tangle" is already mentioned twice. This sentence is written in an extremely simplified style, containing no jargon at all. It does not seem to contain any joke or lightheartedness, though it is only two sentences.

On to the paper! I clicked "[http://iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf"](http://iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf") to read the paper.

I did not need to read more than 2 pages to arrive at a judgment. My judgment based on the criteria selected beforehand, is that it is absolutely clear that the whitepaper is not intentionally indecipherable.

The author goes to _extreme_ lengths to impart knowledge. The entirety of the Introduction goes to very carefully convey real knowledge. The author repeats himself again and again:

>The genesis transaction sent these tokens to several other "founder" addresses. Let us stress that all of the tokens were created in the genesis transaction. No tokens will be created in the future, and there will be no mining in the sense that miners receive monetary rewards "out of thin air".

There is a measure of humor, such as the naming of the word "an iota". But the discussion is extremely serious, the author is extremely earnest. Not only does the author not use any made-up words, but goes to extreme lengths to enable the reader to read them.

See footnote 26, for example:

>This is a consequence of the so-called Large Deviation Principle. See the general book [13], and Proposition 5.2 in Section 8.5 of [14] for a simple and instructive derivation of the upper bound, and Section 1.9 of [5] for the (not so simple) derivation of the lower bound.

It is heart-breaking that the author goes to such incredible lengths to attempt to convey knowledge, they are doing everything physically possible, only to have someone who does not understand them fail to apply the principle of charity and claim that it was "intentionally indecipherable."

      Concusions
      </comment><comment>----

My conclusions, with the above methodology.

1\. We set out to judge whether your statement was justified when you stated the paper is "intentionnally indecipherable." It is absolutely not a justified claim. We thought carefully about judgment criteria before we ever opened the paper. The paper failed every crtiterion for "intentional indecipherability" that we could think of.

2\. More to the point, I feel you should have started by applying the principle of charity. Rather than saying "I could not follow the paper" or "I found logical inconsistencies", you made the claim that it is intentionally indecipherable. This goes too far. It's, in fact, heartbreaking, when it is clear that the author put so much time and effort into making the presented work accessible. This included finding footnotes to instructional concepts that the author felt there was any chance would not be understood.

We can go farther. This claim that a lovingly crafted paper that was read, reread, and reread, with an acknowledgment section reading:

>The author thanks Bartosz Kusmierz, Cyril Gr¨unspan and Toru Kazama who pointed out several errors in earlier drafts, and James Brogan for his contributions towards making this paper more readable.

would be "intentionally indecipherable" shuts down science and progress.

On a personal level, it makes me question whether I would ever publish anything under my own name and for a wide audience, when no matter how much effort is put into it, even the best communities on the planet will have someone come forward and say that my careful work is "intentionally indecipherable."

So we have completely rejected your statement. It fails every criteria that I carefully set up to evaluate it. You should not make such statements in the future, about anything.

(Please note that when I started this comment, I was prepared to write the opposite opinion, and agree with you.)

-

[EDIT]

\- I lightly added the above

\- In addition, just to be clear I have absolutely no relationship with the project or white paper. I haven't evaluated it besides deciding whether it is intentionally indecipherable.

<comment><USER10> > I only read 2 pages.

So you are evaluating the quality of a 28 pages paper by reading only the introduction ?

Are you intentionally retarded ?

<comment><USER9> I didn't evaluate the quality of the paper. I only evaluated whether it's intentionally indecipherable.

I did glance through some more of the paper, though I did not read it carefully.

I didn't find anything that tripped any of my criteria, mentioned beforehand, for whether it's an intentionally indecipherable paper: did you see anything like that?

Please note that this is not an endorsement of the paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IOTA wallet is full of really bad bugs, just look how bad it is on first pages, the more pages you skip, the worse it is. It still doesn't work on Linux, for many users wallet crashes or shows green screen and nothing more. Doesn't work through Wine either. [https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues](https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues)

Issues on github have no responses from developers since early November and there were no commits since than, what's surprising, there were a lot of blog posts on their domain and many subreddits how great they are (!!??)

BitFinex two week ago had problems paying out IOTAs, payouts were cancelled without any reason. Didn't try again since that time.

A lot of domains explaining how to buy IOTA look dodgy, like they were made by 14yo in '90s. There are dozens of domains like supportiota, forumiota, iotasupport.com, howtobuyiota.co.uk ? Why do they all exist and duplicate content?

Watch out out there.

<comment><USER12> As far as I know there are no bugs in the wallet it's just not completly self explaining. tbh from my view there are just the wrong people in the whole space... 95% of the people are here to get rich quick and not for the developement and it's excatly these people who have problems with Key reuses and so on.. the people have to do their research in such a young space..

<comment><USER11> >95% of the people are here to get rich quick and not for the developement

You're saying that application and developers came completely unprepared for the market?

<comment><USER13> No, the market was unprepared for an application that is still in alpha.

<comment><USER14> Still in alpha but accepts real-money deposits in the tens of thousands. I think the market was unprepared for anyone being that brazen.

<comment><USER13> Who is accepting deposits, and why tens of thousands? Real money is deposited into exchange accounts to buy crypto assets. No one is making fiat deposits into an IOTA organization.

You should examine your reality if you think developers of alpha software have any obligation to provide non-technical folks with a way to use it. It's open source, nothing is stopping you from building your own wallet if you want something better. But they don't owe you anything on the basis of the protocol simply existing. Ask yourself, why do you expect that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why do people persist in the idea that a deliberately deflationary _currency_ is a good idea. It might be a good investment, but as a currency, it doesn't promote commerce and trade, it just promotes hoarding.

Much of crypto-currency holders today either seem to be people seeking to get in at the top of the ponzi pyramid and sell before collapse, or people who need to avoid some legal issue, be it capital controls, drug laws, etc. Many people are using it as an investment vehicle mainly, and rarely as a exchange of value mechanism for payments, except where they actually need to. But would pay Uber with BTC, or buy a coffee? Why? if you simply way a few days, you'll make a lot more money not spending it.

A deflationary currency to replace fiat currency or centralized banking and credit seems like a contradiction. I mean, if my cash is growing at 10%-1000%, but my Visa fee is 3%, and my inflated USD is 2% inflation, I'm gonna go with the fiat currency or Visa fee.

<comment><USER16> The deflationary aspect is the number one reason I've never bought into a crypto currency. I have serious ethical and moral issues that prevent me.

In addition to hoarding, deflationary currencies (like gold) cause people to spend lots of money and effort trying to get other people to buy into them too. For me, it's a very sad thing to watch unfold. It's like when the 'buy gold' commercials started appearing on Fox News, and I saw my grandparents buying gold.

If someone has to spend lots of time and money advertising how useful something is, it's probably more useful to them than me.

<comment><USER17> I don't understand why that's an ethical dilemma. Do you not have a problem with disproportionately increasing the cost of living for the poor[0] or forcing the mddle class to subsidize big corporations [1] or creating an economy where corporate survival is tied to consumption, leading to innovations in "disposable product strategies"?

[0] let's say you're spending 90% of your income on cost of living and there's 10% inflation. That's way worse than in you're spending 20% of your income on necessaries and there's 10% inflation.

[1] in order to preserve wealth in an inflationary regime, the middle class is encouraged to put money into the stock market, which basically becomes a mechanism to socialize the costs of corporate r&d while the Lions share of the gains go elsewhere (the scraps are thrown back at the middle class, enough to keep them from seeing the inherent problem with the system)

<comment><USER14> What you did is point out a few real problems in our current economic reality of which _inflation_ is one part. In no way does this say anything about how _deflation_ solves any of them, or even leads to worse scenarios.. Think about the issues you mentioned - wage stagnation, unsustainable expectation of growth in corporate profits, systemic inequality etc. - Now ask yourself "how will removing monetary inflation and replacing it with monetary deflation affect these systemic issues, in which direction will it drive them, how and why?" If you still come out on the pro-deflation side, I'd be happy to hear your perspective.

<comment><USER17> real wage stagnation is a social policy, not an emergent phenomenon. Politicians are concerned about unemployment numbers, and there is this bogeyman that "sticky wages" of lower classes gets in the way. The prescribed way around this is to decrease the real value of money and incrementally dislodge the liability of employing lower classes.

Systemic inequality is generated, by deliberate inflationary policy[0], it is not a "universal constant of the universe".

[https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for- hi...](https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-higher- inflation/)

"Even in the long run, it's really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."

[0] I do, for what it's worth, think that liberal economists aren't acting in bad faith, they're just _clueless_ , mostly because if you're a liberal economist (or almost any economist, really) you've probably never been poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been tracking the IOTA controversy in the LinkedIn 'IoT Security' group in this thread[¹]. The centralized nature of the technology is a worry especially because they position themselves as a decentralized solution for IoT.

Many other currencies suffer from implementation problems (buggy wallets, etc) but at least in BTC the used cryptography is well tested. In IOTA's case they managed to both reinvented the crypto (e.g. "Curl" / "Kerl" hashes) in a broken way AND made some very dangerous assumptions in the meaning of "decentralization".

[¹] [https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4807429/4807429-634451121504...](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4807429/4807429-6344511215041015812)

</comment><comment><USER19> As I understand it, the problem with IOTA is that — in order to execute an attack — attackers just need to verify more transactions than all honest participants combined.

So, in other words, honest participants have no incentive to verify more transactions than required (because they don't profit from it) while attackers have an incentive to verify more transactions, in order to successfully double spend.

<comment><USER20> And to deal with this problem, they have "trusted supernodes", with a promise to turn them off when the network is self sustaining.

It introduces a high degree of centralisation - and we don't know the how network shapes up as a consequence.

And the second problem is obviously the unaudited,"quantum resistant" function.

<comment><USER21> > And the second problem is obviously the unaudited,"quantum resistant" > function.

Don't forget the ternary SHA-3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I went to the IOTA meetup in Chicago, which was hosted and presented by the IOTA team.

Never before did I see an entire audience be wowed by a women engineer.

They ignored the whole Microsoft partnership idea; anyone that asked just was given the answer "it'd be explained in a future PR release."

The drama was IOTA lied about microsoft partnership and deemed hosting on azure == partnership with microsoft. In talks with different microsoft teams == sending support tickets on azure for different services.

<comment><USER23> >Never before did I see an entire audience be wowed by a women engineer.

What do you mean?

<comment><USER22> Whenever she talked, the crowd went "wow!" sort of like the laugh track on a 90's sitcom.

The crowd was 99.9% men. I'm a man too, and I will admit she is attractive. But what she demonstrated was nothing new, about the Tangle network which was discussed in the whitepaper, on youtube, bitcointalk, 4chan /biz/ and reddit.

Seeing IOT devices communicate by sending and receiving packets is nothing new or that exciting.

It was the same as if someone was showing you a bitcoin transaction. Literally, some tech babble, look at the pretty picture (girl in this example) and go wow.

When someone took a picture of her,a public figure of the IOTA team, other men with dates decided to white knight and tell the guy off "Don't take her picture." It almost escalated when one white knight went for his phone. Guy in question was taking pictures of presenters all night long yet no one complained.

I'm not an expert in any of these matters, but just witnessing the crowd reaction was really depressing as it goes to show Cryptocurrency is now mainstream (Good), alot of gender bias still exists (bad) and people do judge intelligence/authority on gender and age (double bad.)

Still the IOTA team is blah for lying about the MSFT partnership and the audience that night in which I was able to witness was double blah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe the best strategy for designing a cryptocurrency today is actually to make it really stupid? It's kind of like the scam logic, where you only want to get good marks in the door from the start.

If your cryptocurrency is really stupid, then only the true believers buy in, and then they all hodl. You don't want anyone too influential, and you definitely don't want people to say "okay I was tricked, I fodl".

</comment><comment><USER25> The new UCL wallet is even worse. It's supposed to be launched within the next few weeks. It made me lose $2000 worth of iota because of a loop in the code that resent transactions if you put the app in a background state. You know, a violation of the one canonical rule of using iota, I.e reusing an address.

The iota foundation is a nefarious and bad intentioned bunch of crooks.

<comment><USER26> One of the developers for the UCL wallet here. Can you elaborate more on how did you lose money using a wallet that is not released publicly yet and is available only for a closed group of alpha testers who all have been instructed not to use the wallet with their accounts holding significant amount of iotas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's pretty understandable that fanboys are badgering skeptics on social networks. If I had a few hundred thousand pop out of the blue from a cryptocurrency fad, maybe I would be doing it as well. And that's a big problem, because mainstream journalists are guilty of that as well.

MIT Technology Review, to pick one example, wrote an article about IOTA, mentioning their partnerships with mainstream companies, even though IOTA refuted the partnership notion the same day. Clearly, the author didn't reach out to any of those companies for confirmation.

I can't help but think that many of those articles are written by people, influenced by their own cryptocurrency assets. In fact, this conflict of interest for journalists could be one of the key driving forces of the bubble.

</comment><comment><USER28> Bruce Schneier had this to say about IOTA:

> In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential > cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre > analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system > secure is low

<comment><USER29> How is it vulnerable to differential analysis?

<comment><USER30> Google "MIT finds vulnerability in IOTA".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> While I agree with the majority of the criticisms of this post (I also posted a criticism here[1]), one has to recognise that it's perfectly possible that a cryptocurrency requires no-address-reuse. This may not be a bug but a limitation which is a consequence of its design. I know other cryptocurrency that suffers this problem: Mimblewimble. But I sincerely hope the wallet developers of mimblewimble are smarter enough to never expose addresses, in order to prevent the user to make this mistake (yes, it can be done requiring QR-code-pairing everytime you want to both send and receive funds).

To finish, let me state that I'm not defending IOTA, which I still think is a joke. Maybe I'm wrong but I cannot tell if I'm wrong or not until they shut down the coordinators (the very thing that makes IOTA centralised).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15860046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15860046)

<comment><USER32> Mimblewimble doesn't have addresses [1]

[1] [https://github.com/ignopeverell/grin/blob/master/doc/grin4bi...](https://github.com/ignopeverell/grin/blob/master/doc/grin4bitcoiners.md)

<comment><USER31> Well, see? mimblewimble developers hid this characteristic in a "no addresses" fashion, because they are smarter than IOTA devs. When they say "transactions have to be built interactively, with 2 (or more) wallets exchanging data with one another" this is what I meant when I mentioned QR codes for every amount reception/sending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > as if this was a JavaScript some 12 year old was writing for his homebrew > website.

Who can tell the difference?

> Look, let's be very clear. IOTA is a live cryptocurrency with a market cap > in the billions of dollars. Real people have large amounts of value tied up > on that network. It is hosted on several exchanges.

This is a naive misconception, and one of the most dangerous aspects of cryptocurrencies right now - these are NOT FINANCIAL ENTITIES, there are no bank guarantees or fiduciary rules, no technical standards or oversight, no clear liability (especially when authors/network owners may just be virtual characters). There is 100% risk involved and nobody to blame but yourself.

<comment><USER34> I'm missing what the misconception is in this quote? I don't see him saying they are regulated / guarenteed or anything like that, only that people have poured a stupid amount of money into this thing.

<comment><USER33> He implies that being "live" with "real money" and a billion dollar market cap means something. It doesn't. He says:

"You do not release financial software to the general public in such a buggy state. You do not blame the victims for your software failing to function."

When in fact, you do _whatever the hell you want_. This is not "financial software" in the original sense. The fact that people put significant amounts of cash in these altcoins is astounding. You only have [some] guarantees where the system itself enforces them, like BitCoin, and even then no one entity is liable for your losses because of de-centralization.

I own bits of four cryptocurrencies, and take the risk of 100% loss as a real possibility.

<comment><USER35> There's still no misconception, and you can't redefine "financial software" on the fly. He didn't state anything about there being a regulation against it, he's just implying an ethical "can't release in a buggy state".

I'm not sure why you're arguing with him though, you seem to be in agreement!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I also recently wrote an article about IOTA and got a crowd of negative flak.

[https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply- al...](https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply- alarming-99d4f2da3282)

<comment><USER37> There is an army of trolls connected to IOTA. You can find them very easily because they cannot defend their position. Here in HN there are plenty also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The post mentions the psychology today article but I'd like to say it's actually a pretty okay article:

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-in-the- machine/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-in-the- machine/201712/how-fear-is-being-used-manipulate-cryptocurrency-markets)

(Author should disclose if he owns IOTA however)

<comment><USER39> That's an interesting article into the psychology and mind-tactics of crypto fans.

Not sure why you've been downvoted but the article is worth a look.

<comment><USER13> I think this is so much more interesting than all the yelling about these currencies that are not even being used like currencies. Why do people feel so personally and emotionally invested?

I mean here in this thread l'm running around trying to correct toxic misinformation, but what's making me doing that? And what's making the guy who brought up Cardano casually mention the rankings on coinmarketcap as if that means anything except to instill FOMO. I hope we see more articles on the psychology and sociology behind fear cycles in crypto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> From the white paper:

"As a transaction receives additional approvals, it is accepted by the system with a higher level of confidence. In other words, it will be difficult to make the system accept a double-spending transaction. It is important to observe that we do not impose any rules for choosing which transactions a node will approve. Instead, we argue that if a large number of nodes follow some "reference" rule, then for any fixed node it is better to stick to a rule of the same kind4. This seems to be a reasonable assumption, especially in the context of IoT, where nodes are specialized chips with pre-installed firmware."

Is this for real?

</comment><comment><USER41> These days it's absolutely impossible to get any serious conversation about any of these cryptocurrencies. Maybe you can do something with Bitcoin and Ethereum, but for any of the others all the foruns and chats are just flooded with crazy people.

<comment><USER42> Tell me about it. I need to follow the tech and communities as part of my job, and sometimes it's seriously hard to have any discussions e.g. in IOTA's Slack channels.

On the contrary, Monero uses IRC for their communication and maybe because of that I've seen more adult discussions in their community. Of course lots of money being on the table, things can get pretty sour everywhere.

<comment><USER43> It's a shame, quality conversation can help a coin project in the long run. But it's clear that right now IOTA is in the pump-or-you're-a-fud-shill phase and communication is impossible.

<comment><USER26> Communication is possible if you talk to the right people. Keep in mind that the people who are actually working on the technology itself or it's adaptation and implementation are not hanging all day around on reddit or #speculation channels. I'm running an iota network statistics page, so people assume i'm more educated about iota and I receive clarification, technological or simple development questions on Slack on daily basis. I do answer all of them as best as I can, a lot of them have been evolved in pretty long discussions and I have received the same attitude from other iota community members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I can just totally agree with the author. I had more or less the same experience.

IOTA is totally immature in terms of development, technology and PR (see fake partnerships and absence of public statement for the network status).

Apart from this it just look like a nice and interesting white paper but that does not actually work in reality yet

</comment><comment><USER45> Honestly this article tells more about crypto currency investors in general than about this particular crypto currency.

</comment><comment><USER46> > RULE 3: ALWAYS wait for a transaction to be confirmed before sending > anything else.

> Rule #3 is just another admission of a broken network. Really not much else > to say.

It sounds like an admission of vulnerability to double-spending.

<comment><USER35> Not really. This isn't an actual vulnerability of the network to double spending, it's just a wallet (or wallets) issuing multiple transactions for the same coin (he may actually just mean the same address rather than the same coin, so that you don't come a cropper of the private key issue). This is possible in pretty much all cryptocurrencies, and their mechanisms for dealing with it (ie only honouring one of the transactions) is one for the core functions of any cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER35> Perhaps the downvoters can explain why that isn't the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Heh, this article barely even touches on the full insanity of IOTA. [https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in- io...](https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in- iota-9a6a9ddc4367) has a decent rundown on some of it. It's centralized on a central coordinator because it fundamentally can't work in a decentralized manner. It used a homebrew hash function that was vulnerable to trivial attacks. It uses ternary math just-because of some extremely doubtful efficiency claims for a lot of things, including the mentioned hash function. (Some fun not mentioned in the article: They later replaced the homebrew hash function with SHA-3 ... wrapped in ternary.) Also, it's centralized. That means it has the downsides of a centralized service (entirely halts if the central authority server has connectivity issues, including from DDOS attacks, or if the company ever decides it's not worth it to keep running; central authority could also censor transactions) without any of the upsides of a centralized service (centralized service could work with dollars instead of an artificial currency; centralized services don't need to broadcast transactions to the entire network to work; no kind of mining at all needs to exist; basically think Paypal) because it's a weird frankenstein made somewhat in Bitcoin's image.

When the obvious vulnerabilities about their homebrew hash function came out, the responses on many cryptocurrency forums were disturbingly cult-like. Plenty criticized the people making the announcement as biased. There were many posts calling out people involved with other cryptocurrencies for spreading FUD because they're supposedly scared of competition from IOTA's "innovation". Apparently no one recognized _Bruce Schneier_ ; I saw posts calling him out as a small-time snake oil salesman. I've had at least a half- dozen people try to explain to me how IOTA is paving the way forward with ternary computation, optimizing their software for future ternary hardware. ... Man, if you thought general fandom sites were bad with blind frothing fans, then you should see what it's like when money is involved like this.

>My next step was to go to the GitHub repository and take a brief look at the source code. The IOTA source code is written in JAVA instead of C++ like most professional cryptocurrencies are. That did not instill me with confidence.

Heh, this is probably the only positive thing about IOTA I'd agree with. Using a memory-safe language like Java makes it exponentially harder for developers to accidentally write remote-code execution vulnerabilities, and makes it harder for malicious developers to hide remote-code execution vulnerabilities. Most cryptocurrencies are in C++ because they're forks of Bitcoin, which so far thankfully seems to have developers that can keep those issues out and review each other's work. (Granted, if IOTA were just a Bitcoin fork, they probably wouldn't have gone through the effort of making so many insane design choices of their own.)

<comment><USER24> > Using a memory-safe language like Java makes it exponentially harder for > developers to accidentally write remote-code execution vulnerabilities, and > makes it harder for malicious developers to hide remote-code execution > vulnerabilities.

Weeell...In currencies like Bitcoin it's crucial that everyone have the most efficient implementation. Otherwise nobody will bother mining, if they can't do it efficiently.

I guess IOTA doesn't depend on the proof of work in the same way. But then again, IOTA seems hopelessly broken?

As I was reading the article and the "promises" of IOTA, I was thinking, "Okay so they must not be using Satoshi's solution to the consensus problem". It's not surprising to hear they don't _have_ a solution. Sure this means the software might not have to be efficient. But that's cold comfort if it doesn't, you know, work.

<comment><USER47> >Weeell...In currencies like Bitcoin it's crucial that everyone have the most efficient implementation. Otherwise nobody will bother mining, if they can't do it efficiently.

Parts that have very critical performance, especially proof-of-work code, can be in native code. (And if it's modularized well-enough, that code could be sandboxed to contain the damage of any vulnerability, so any remote-code- execution exploit can only corrupt the mining process with nonsense without being able to get to private key data.) Or a safe-and-performant language like Rust could be used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> " _IOTA is deflationary (has a fixed number of tokens, there will never be any more, and has no inflation at all, no issuance schedule for new tokens). All tokens which will ever exist were created on day one and pre-distributed to people who signed onto the project very early._ "

Yeah, I'd push that pretty hard, too.

</comment><comment><USER49> What about the other DAG technologies like the one used by ByteBall? I'm not crypto-intelligent enough to analyze them but could DAG be a credible replacement for the blockchain? Iota is just a very well marketed option in that space. Their execution seems shoddy.

<comment><USER50> disclaimer: I own some of these so I'm not without some bias.

Thus far I've been pretty impressed with Raiblocks (XRB). Near instant (1-5 seconds depending on the wallet in my tests so far) and fee-less.

I'm pretty keen to check out the other DAG projects after this one.

<comment><USER51> The whitepaper ([https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pd...](https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pdf)) is actually very readable, I really like it. Too bad it's almost impossible to buy right now.

<comment><USER52> The author is also a LLVM engineer who's worked for Qualcomm, Dell and AMD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> why would you dump $2,000 dollars into a crypto coin you don't understand

<comment><USER54> The author dumped a lot more than $2,000 into IOTA.

They mention buying 26,000MI at $0.85, which would be a $22,100 investment. Just 5,600MI was worth $28,000 at $5/MI.

Why anyone would put that amount into a cryptocurrency they don't find trustworthy is beyond me.

<comment><USER55> > Why anyone would put that amount into a cryptocurrency they don't find > trustworthy is beyond me.

The richer you are, the more likely you'll consider 5k small change. Same reason why the big bet poker tables have non-experts sitting there.

<comment><USER43> There's a dead reply here that mentions a very, very good point.

There's a HUGE sum of money out there that people made as early bitcoin investors. For various reasons, large portions of it are being gambled in other cryptos. The nature of cryptoexchanges make this easy to do, and it's without question inflating other coin markets.

It's been this way since forever, but now BTC is worth so much that the effect is much more prominent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is possibly the best bug report of all time.

[https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/762](https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/762)

</comment><comment><USER57> Pardon for off-topic, but the arguments he makes about double-spending (the third "rule" from that linked forum post) made me realize I have some gaps in my understanding how Bitcoin handles overlapping transactions.

Suppose I have an address with 0BTC balance. (i.e. I have the private key of it on my PC. There isn't yet anything about that address in the blockchain.)

Some other person sends 100mBTC to that address. I can see that the transaction has spread through the network but it hasn't been added to a block yet.

Because I'm overly trusting and/or in a hurry, I _don 't_ wait until it's confirmed but I immediately send another transaction that sends the 100mBTC to some other account.

If a miner first picked transaction #1, added it to a block, then added transaction #2 to the following block, both transactions would be valid. However if a miner tried to process transaction #2 first, it would be invalid.

So what would happen? Would miners bring the transactions into correct order and validate both, only validate #1 and reject #2 or reject both?

<comment><USER35> Bitcoin transactions aren't as simple as "send X BTC from address A to address B". What's actually happening is that each transaction contains a number of inputs and a number of outputs, all of which have unique hashes (used to uniquely identify them in the system). Each input must either be a previous output, or the special case of no input in the generation transaction that each block miner gets to create (this assigns the bitcoin generated in each block and any fees accumulated from the other transactions).

So, if I send you 2 BTC to a single address, the transaction will probably have a single output. If you then try to send somebody 1 BTC your transaction has to use the entire 2 BTC input (which was the output from my transaction to you), but will have two outputs, 1 BTC with an output for whoever you're sending it to and another 1 BTC to an address your wallet controls.

So your transaction in the above example has to refer to the 2 BTC from my transaction by unique hash, it's not simply saying "send any 1 BTC from this address". This is all dealt with by your wallet.

Due to this, if transaction #2 was being processed first it would be using an input that didn't exist on the blockchain and would therefore be invalid.

<comment><USER57> Thanks for the explanation. This clears up a lot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > You do not release financial software to the general public in such a buggy > state

and there it is, the inherent confusion between public expectations and programmers WRT cryptocurrencies.

</comment><comment><USER59> Great post, I was wondering why transactions were disabled to binance...appreciate the info. And the warnings.

</comment><comment><USER12> the recent network issues are really annoying but if you run your own full node tx are confirmed in max 20min. something that should be kept in mind IOTA is in early beta and was always promoted as that. when people start to pump it and without reading an announcement right, why should that be iotas fault? and about the usability of iota, when have you started with cryptos? go back to 2011 and look for a good usable wallet (hint: you won't find anything). iri is a reference implementation a C and Rust Version is in developement.

IOTA is clearly about to proof that their protocol works, here some brain food: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05385.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05385.pdf)

<comment><USER60> They are about to prove their network works after making unreasonable assumptions as prerequisites to the proof.

<comment><USER12> can you spot me to this unreasonable assumptions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> BTW, administrative issues: I wonder why my previous post with the same link less than 1 day ago was not reused for this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935601) is this a HN bug? Just today I tried to post an article already posted three days ago and I was directed to the first post thread.

<comment><USER61> There is a query parameter "m=1" at the end of this URL. I guess that's why it wasn't marked as duplicate.

<comment><USER37> That is a HN bug since the canonical page is without that suffix:

      <link href='http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2017/12/iota-tangled-mess.html' rel='canonical'/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I think that there are still problems with the algorithm. The tangle was in a bad shape a few days ago and I considered selling my IOTA but I decided to hold because based on my understanding of how the tangle works, these problems are fixable.

Until I find something fundamentally wrong with the idea of the tangle, I'm going to hold.

</comment><comment><USER63> Where did this post go? Did the author get a takedown?

<comment><USER64> I am also curious about that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> This guy is blaming the Iota founders because he doesn't understand computer science? Their whitepaper is organized like any other publication in computer science. As for the Java vs C++ comment, he's simply uninformed. Not to mention there are many ports in various languages. I wish he'd done some research before posting bogus rhetoric.</comment>


Paged Out – experimental (one article == one page) free zine - <AUTHOR> https://pagedout.institute/?page=issues.php <comment><USER3> The articles are interesting but the distribution is awkward, PDF. Reading PDF on a phone is not convenient. Am I supposed to print it out? And how to link to an article? I really wish they turn the zine in a set of web pages.

<comment><USER4> This is a good point, which I gave quite a lot of thought when trying to decide the format. But in the end I decided to go for paper-size to have a fix space limitation - sadly this has the consequence of not being readable on a phone.

While there are plans to make the PDF pages available as web pages (so you can link them), they would still have the same layout. But actually now that you mention it, there might be a way around that - I'll give it some more thinking :)

Hopefully there will be some podcast recordings of some articles btw - <USER2> would make it easier to "read" while in motion / having only a phone at hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The website seems to say absolutely nothing about what the zine is about, not one word...which I found strange.

<comment><USER4> Uhm, that's actually not true at all - if you enter the main page of the website, the very fist sentence says:

`Paged Out! is a new experimental (one article == one page) free magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.`

EDIT: DevOpsiarz on our discord pointed out to me that you might mean things like excerpts from articles, "screenshots" of the zine, etc - i.e. typical marketing content one might find on a magazine's website. In that case you're right - I admit I'm bad at marketing. I'll try to make some changes based on feedback - thanks!

<comment><USER5> Ah ok sorry, maybe some stuff isn't showing up on my rather old computer. By main page you mean pagedout.institute? Which doesn't sound like a main page, but it seems to be.

No, I do really mean I can't see one word about what the zine is about, at all. I count 174 words, but not one about that. Hopefully that's just me. Good luck!

Edit: I clicked both PDF links, they both said "The requested URL /asdf was not found on this server."

Edit2: Ah, in my old browser the '\-- Gynvael -->' line of HTML didn't end the comment, which went on for another page! Weird. Tried a different browser and can see it fine. Sorry.

<comment><USER4> yesenadam now I'm curious - what browser are you using? Sounds like something that might be used on AmigaOS or sth?

<comment><USER5> haha I'm ashamed to admit it but Camino. Also Opera and OmniWeb as alternates. Life with os x 10.4!

<comment><USER4> Oh. I admit to not have expected that answer ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Pays Chief Marissa Mayer $36 Million for First 6 Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100692281

<comment><USER2> I would think these CEOs are gods of some sort judging by the kind of money they get compared to the lowly every-day employee of the company. Did Yahoo's earnings even justify that sort of salary? "Yahoo's shares have risen 24 percent since the start of the year..." I guess...maybe?

But how much of that stock increase is based on judgments of her abilities, rather than on "HEY new shiny ceo we all win big now!"

<comment><USER3> At least she's getting the cash for making the stock go UP - compared to banking/finance where CEO's give themselves billions for flattening the stock price, I would have no problem with this as a stockholder.

<comment><USER4> hahahahah :D you made my day!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If everyone got $36 million dollars a loaf of bread would cost $36 million dollars. If no one got $36 million dollars there would be no bread.

</comment><comment><USER6> OK I admit I am jealous :(</comment>


Show HN: Spyglass, computer vision made simple in Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andremedeiros/spyglass

<comment><USER2> I'd suggest adding some documentation or at least some basic examples before submitting. I have no idea what the library does or how to use it, so I really have no idea if it's interesting to me.</comment>


Bad News for Aspiring Gurus? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/bad-news-for-aspiring-gurus/69156/ <comment><USER2> "In 2003 he published a paper arguing that when people study success stories exclusively--as many avid devourers of business self-help books do--they come away with a vastly oversimplified idea of what it takes to succeed. This is because success is what economists refer to as a "noisy signal." It's chancy, fickle, and composed of so many moving parts that any one is basically meaningless in the context of the real world. By studying what successful ventures have in common (persistence, for instance), people miss the invaluable lessons contained in the far more common experience of failure. They ignore the high likelihood that a company will flop--the base rate--and wind up wildly overestimating the chances of success."

</comment><comment><USER3> Regardless if you normally like history or not, I'd point to the Sengoku Warring States Era of Japanese history as worth studying for almost anyone who wants to be successful at anything.

All cohesive authority broke down into basically a 30-sided civil war. Thus, there's surprisingly large amounts of data about tactics, strategies, diplomacy, troop movements, alliances and betrayals, etc, etc, etc. Trying to make sense of why this guy won or that guy won goes a long way towards learning how not to make mistakes.

Here's the era -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period>

Here's "the three great unifiers" - originally the latter two fought on the side of the former, until he was betrayed by one his own generals.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oda_Nobunaga>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyotomi_Hideyoshi>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu>

Particularly, if you can understand why the Tokugawa wound up ruling Japan for 250 years and not the Toyotomi, I think that goes a long way towards learning how not to be overexpansive. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was more impressive than Tokugawa Ieyasu through his whole life... Hideyoshi probably had 10x or maybe even 100x more excellent victories and innovations and insights.

But Ieyasu was always able to avoid the large fatal mistakes, whereas Hideyoshi made a couple of those - invading Korea shortly after conquering all of Japan but before power was consolidated, and putting his nephew to death for poor reasons.

Really, in many respects Hideyoshi was a much smarter, stronger, better man than Ieyasu, but Ieyasu avoided the overexpansiveness mistake, and thus his family went on to win in the end.

Check out Sengoku. I think most people here would find a lot of fascinating lessons from the era.

</comment><comment><USER4> ...and good news for those of us who are generally skeptical of "gurus".</comment>


LevelTool - A Level in your Browser - media-upstream http://mediaupstream.com/sandbox/level/ Just playing around with the Device Orientation API, try this with a supported browser (Chrome, FF, etc) on a device with an Accelerometer such as a MacBook Pro. <comment><AUTHOR> the bubble floats the wrong way on my macbook... if I lift the left side, the bubble moves right ...

if i lift the track pad side, the bubble moves away from me ...</comment>


German teen Shouryya Ray solves 300-year-old mathematical riddle posed by Newton - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/german-teen-shouryya-ray-solves-300-year-old-mathematical-riddle-posed-by-sir-isaac-newton/story-e6frfkui-1226368490521

<comment><AUTHOR> The story is developing.

Math.StackExchange is following it here: [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/150242/teenager- solv...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/150242/teenager-solves- newton-dynamics-problem-where-is-the-paper)</comment>


Ask HN: Are you selling your stock? - <AUTHOR> With the stockmarket as volatile as it has been recently, are stock savvy HN'ers on the buying or the selling side? I have no dog in the race at the moment (fortunately), but I can't help but wonder how people here respond to the daily dose of the roller-coaster. <comment><USER2> Mostly no, though I am doing some loss-harvesting: selling stocks to take a loss and buying highly-correlated equivalent stocks or ETFs, so that I don't lose out on gains (because timing when to buy back is a bad idea). e.g., selling INTU and buying XLK. Something like [http://www.sectorspdr.com/sectorspdr/tools/correlation- track...](http://www.sectorspdr.com/sectorspdr/tools/correlation-tracker) is useful to find high (0.7 or greater) correlations.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a fake sell off. Good time to add was today, but I didn't. Still looking to find a follow through tomorrow/Friday.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nope. I just want to keep buying. Companies that provide value will always have lows, and those are the times to get in.

</comment><comment><USER5> No. That doesn't mean I won't be surprised if it goes down more, just that I am sure I'd do a bad job deciding when to buy back in.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nope. Buy and hold long strategy</comment>


Tokyo-based myGengo raises $5.25 million from London VCs Atomico - <AUTHOR> http://mygengo.com/about-us/blog/mygengo-raises-5-million-from-atomico-500-startups/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how this will work.

I know from translating my own iPhone app in 4 languages that it's hard to capture the idea of what you want to say from one language to the next even when you're intimately familiar with the topic at hand.

Outsourcing translation is hard. It'll be interesting to see how they pull it off.</comment>


Show HN: SimpleGeo Replacement (SimpleGeo will shut down March 31) - <AUTHOR> http://www.geocoda.com

<comment><USER2> I support the idea (and your post got my upvote), but for a "Show HN" post it would have been nice to be shown more than an announcement and a waiting list signup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We actually agonized over just that, as we didn't want to violate the spirit of the "Show HN" postings.

However, Urban Airship has put their customers (and us) on a very tight schedule. We decided that it would be helpful for SimpleGeo customers to know of a forthcoming alternative before March 30, to help with planning.

The extra lead time will also allow us to take suggestions as to what parts of SimpleGeo mattered to their customers, so that we can get as much of that in as possible before SimpleGeo goes dark. So if that's you, please reach out on Twitter: @GeocodaHQ.

<comment><USER2> I'm not a SimpleGeo customer, but I can speculate what the number one priority feature would be: a migration path. Even if you haven't launched yet, design it, document it and share the steps for migrating. That would be a great "Show HN" post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks pretty interesting.

Annoying that UrbanAirship cancelled SimpleGeo. Good for you for providing an alternative. I hope the migration path is simple. Do you have any details?

</comment><comment><USER4> Can't wait</comment>


Liveblog: All the News from Apple's September Event - <AUTHOR> http://live.arstechnica.com/apples-september-10-2019-by-innovation-only-event/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm watching the livestream from Apple's website and following this liveblog. Interestingly, Ars is able to get photos up before they hit the "live" stream. I wonder what the latency is — must be at least 30 seconds, based on the text update differential.</comment>


English is Just Easier - <AUTHOR> http://blog.martinsvanberg.com/english-is-just-easier/

<comment><USER2> I think this is increasingly true between Scandinavians as well: conversations that have both Danes and Swedes in them often end up switching to English, rather than muddling through with Dano-Swedish, because English is just easier.</comment>


SF Nerds Can Now Impress Dates with UberSELECT - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/09/shallow/#.6qjorz:HPXL <comment><USER2> Is the standard Uber Black really a Mercedes S-Class now? What happened to the Town Cars?

I'm not sure who the market is for riding in the back of a BMW 3-series is though. People who prioritise a fancy badge over legroom, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting URL slug... someone changed the title to the published one to late in the process?</comment>


Ask HN: Where can one find Github's source code? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> GitHub is not open source.

</comment><comment><USER3> They use an api called libgit to interface with all the repos that you can find here <https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2>

</comment><comment><USER4> If they dogfood, then it would be in a private repo on github. You could get a job there or, for the impatient, just wait until the next RoR exploit.

</comment><comment><USER5> GitLab is an open-source alternative: <http://gitlab.org/>

<comment><USER6> I have tried GitLab and its stable to an extent - but not as feature rich as GitHub. But, still for smaller teams that want a hosted solution, I can second to use it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Self-hosting websites? Good or bad idea? - <AUTHOR> So I have some Saas idea I want to test out. But I don't want, nor have money to host them on a VPS or something for now. So I thought about about hosting them at home as I have an old DELL Optiplex laying around. My internet is fiber 1gb down/500mb up. What are the downside? For those who has done it, any tips? Are you satisfied? <comment><USER2> I have done it a long time ago.

I think you will spend more on electricity than a cheap VPS at Scaleway, OVH (kimsufi), or Hetzner.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I started my company, we used to host our own stuff but I found the security aspect to be a nightmare. Unless you want to be in the business of supervising a bleeding hole to the outside world (which is what a server basically is), I'd have to recommend letting someone else do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Digital Ocean is like $5 a month. If that's too much money for you, then hosting at home is probably your best option. Downside is that you're going to spend all your time figuring out how to manage your own server.

<comment><USER5> And even cheaper is Amazon Lightsail starting at $3.50/mo, pretty hard to beat. I think for the amount of time spent managing a server and DNS things at home, these options may be more desirable.

<comment><USER2> It's beaten by many European cloud providers.

3.5$ for 512mb of ram and 1 slow vcpu is not competitive at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you have that budget constrain. Just go on.

Been running many enterprise applications in-house. in-office on variety internet providers from 10/10 to 100/100.

Your connectivity is superior.</comment>


Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/google-now-censors-the-pirate-bay-isohunt-4shared-and-more-111123/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> I said this before last time around on this non-issue:

Google are not preventing people reaching tpb results.

They are declining to actively push these results unbidden upon people.

The massive, fundamental difference between these two things should be obvious.

Do we really think it's unreasonable for google to decline to actively point it's users towards largely illegal material which they had not explicitly requested?

Google is a publicly traded, for-profit corporation. They have every right to do whatever the hell they want, within law, to make their business as successful as possible. If you don't like it, go use DuckDuckGo, or start your own engine. There's a public domain page index available now, have at it.

<comment><USER3> > They have every right to do whatever the hell they want, within law, to make > their business as successful as possible. If you don't like it, go use > DuckDuckGo, or start your own engine. There's a public domain page index > available now, have at it.

Google has built its business on other people's content, is that simple. But then it started to gradually "steal" more and more of said people work, until it became the giant corporation that you mention.

And before people start down-voting me, just imagine a giant like IBM (let's say) building a search engine that steals other people's content (because that's what things like Google Places have become) and then making tons of money on the back of it. Hell will break loose.

<comment><USER2> I agree that Places and other similar parts of google's business are highly ethically suspect, far more so than the user profiling and data retention that are more often talked about.

I don't understand how it's related to this particular issue though.

<comment><USER3> > I don't understand how it's related to this particular issue though.

Because when it first started I think there was a mutual, non-spoken agreement between web content-owners and Google, sort of "I give you our content for free to use it on your search engine and you bring me back visitors by trying to be impartial in your SERPs; but I don't expect you to compete against me, not now, not ever".

That didn't last long, to say the least, but said content owners are now prisoners of Google (yes, it's a big word, but that's the fact). If my personal experience counts, I let Googlebot crawl my website like crazy, at speed rates for which I would certainly ban any other potential search engine bots, and that's because Google brings in 98% of my search engine traffic. And I'm sure I'm not the only one banning strange-looking bots, which could belong to potential new, wonderful search engines, but which at this rate will never see the light of day.

And, unfortunately, things like DuckDuckGo are sub-optimal outside of the English sphere of influence, at least that's what I could see in my case.

<comment><USER4> If you want to build a search engine, there's no need to crawl the web. Just crawl Google. That's what Microsoft did.

The inequities of crawling are in my opinion a huge issue with the web that receives relatively little discussion.

If a majority of websites were to ban Googlebot, Google would be brought to its knees. Slowly.

Their index would go stale.

I like Google. But I do think crawling, who gets to do it and who does not is an underappreciated issue. Google is very lucky.

<comment><USER5> How are we blocking Googlebot? If we're using robots.txt then they can simply ignore it. Googlebot can begin to identify itself differently. There are a million ways to get around a Googlebot ban and I wouldn't be the guy who thinks he's smarter than Google. You'll lose that one. They'll find a way.

But anyway, this isnt really relevant. Can you tie it in for us?

<comment><USER4> Blocking is not done via robots.txt. It would more likely be IP-based.

Impossible to block Google? Probably true. But only because they have been allowed to grow so large as to be indefeasible. And the reason they've been able to do that is because of what the commenter said: websites allowed them to crawl, fast and hard, year after year. This is not true for all bots.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to the article and the specific issue. I don't disgree with what Google is doing in this case. And I understand why and where Google is headed.

The issue of who is allowed to crawl and who is not is something the commenter raised. It's a huge issue that people take for granted, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This doesn't really explain the back story. Google's _autocomplete_ used to suggest searching for torrents (e.g. type "the dark knight" and it would autocomplete to "the dark knight torrent" because so many people have searched for that). While this was certainly a boon to certain sites, Google has no obligation to provide it (considering that autocomplete didn't even exist for many years). Google's new policy for pirated stuff is the same as for porn: if you're explicitly looking for it they will find it for you, but they won't suggest it. This particular article is just complaining about some new fine- tuning of the same policy.

<comment><USER7> This is true, but by Google's filter is not as smart as you would expect and the filter is too broad.

Why include the word "BitTorrent" as it's the trademark of a fine US tech company?

Why include ALL variations of searches with the dictionary word "torrent"?

These decisions appear to be quite arbitrary, which is dangerous when we're talking about censorship.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure the "bit" in "BitTorrwnt" is used because people don't know the difference as use the brand name as if it were the same as the technology. Do like Rollerblades? I much prefer inline skates. See what I'm saying?

The real solution would be to solve the piracy problem and have the BitTorrent protocol go back to being widely used for its intended purpose. It wasnr intended as a piracy tool, it was intended to be an efficient, decentralized file sharing tool like p2p networks. If those protocols were being used to share the newest office memo in the company network or just non piracy related files in general then there'd be no need to the restriction and it's unintended consequences and we could revert the autocomplete policy.

It's the rule breakers that made it this way and that's where your frustration should be directed. But I'll admit that's pretty hard these days. I'm only 25 and I'm the exception but the rest of my generation and younger seem to think piracy is fine and have this sense of entitlement about it. That needs to stop.

It's pretty clear this isn't arbitrary just like the Rollerblade example I gave before. Typical users often think you have to type in a URL into the search engine. They never use the address bar! They get from site to site using a 3 step process. 1) Go to search engine of choice. 2 Type in desired URL 3) Click the first result. Those people are the reason the filter is so broad, but in the end it's the pirates who created the need for a filter to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see no problem with this.

It's not "censorship" as TorrentFreak wants to linkbait. All results are still indexed, even sites that are obviously piracy related.

All Google is trying to do is cover their asses when it comes to contributory infringement.

If they were ever sued search engines are USUALLY safe. The exception being when sites actively push users towards pirated content - as we've seen through cases such as the isoHunt case where having a "Top Torrents" list that had mainly studio IP condemned them to heavy losses.

I think the last thing anyone wants is Google to lose a copyright infringement case. The precedent would be the gold standard against search engines and would be enough to start knocking out indexers and torrent sites all over the place.

If they see cause to do a bold move such as this to protect themselves, I say all the more to them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Extremely inaccurate title, torrentfreak should be ashamed.

The results are "censored" only from autocomplete, not from the index itself.

<comment><USER7> TorrentFreak here...

They do censor these words right?

The title is correct but we can't always include all nuances. We hope most of our readers will take the time to at least read three sentences :)

I considered " Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More From Their Autocomplete and Instant Services Until A User Types In The Complete Term" but that seemed a bit too much.

But yeah, I'm very ashamed.

<comment><USER9> Suggested title:

"Google no longer autocompletes The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More".

Or.

"Google no longer suggests The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More in search bar".

<comment><USER10> "Title generates fewer outraged upvotes and pageviews".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd certainly like to see less pirated stuff in search results that aren't explicitly asking for it. Several times I've been trying to find reviews or discussion of relatively obscure math books, and the top several pages of search results have all been for pirated copies of the book.

The funny thing is most of those don't even actually work. The sights are often just directories linking to the alleged downloads and the links are bad.

</comment><comment><USER12> Searching for "torrent" lists tpb as the first result for me, as does "tpb" and "thepiratebay". Similarly, "isohunt" returns the expected site, and isohunt.com ranks third for "iso". It doesn't seem to matter whether or not I'm logged in.

<comment><USER13> The search results themselves are unchanged, but the instant suggestions are. From a couple quick tests, this seems to be the case for me as well, though it would be easier to be sure if I had results from a year or so ago to compare against.

For example, "the pirate ba" returns "the pirate balthasar", "the pirate bar", and "the pirate bar" in several different cities. Amusingly, "bittor" doesn't complete to bittorrent, but does include at least one "piracy" related term. It also has a torrent client as its top result.

Spelling suggestions don't seem effected for now. "bitorent" suggests "bittorrent". "thepirtebay" shows results for "thepiratebay".

<comment><USER12> Well I don't see what the issue is, then. They do the same thing for porn or anything else that could be remotely offensive. I don't have a problem with that. They aren't blacklisting torrent sites; they're just not suggesting them.

<comment><USER14> BitTorrent is a trademark of a legal company that's trying to make money to pay employees. Google is censoring their name because they've decided they're involved in illegal activity, not because they _actually are_.

If Google decided to censor your business would you be happy about it?

<comment><USER12> >If Google decided to censor your business would you be happy about it?

The millions of porn webmasters out there don't seem to be complaining too loudly. They're just as legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see the problem. They're only blocking the terms from suggestions and requiring you to hit return to finish your search for these. As long as you can still get the same results, I'm happy.

This post should probably be retitled to "Google no longer suggests or instantly searches for..." or some variant.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm fine with this move, but I hope this is as far as they are about to go. I really hope this isn't a precursor to much more aggressive censorship, like removing those sites from the index or giving them a much lower priority in the search results even when you're specifically looking for them.

I know Google is the easy target for RIAA/MPAA and their politician allies lately, but Google really doesn't have to "give in" at all here. At least not until a law like SOPA gets passed. But until the ink is dry on a passed law like that, Google doesn't have to do any concessions.

The only reason I could see them doing this anyway is by trying to appease the content industry when making content deals with them for their own services, but for Google's sake, I hope they won't be going that road, because there won't be any turning back. They will just ask for more and more censorship in future deals. They just need to tell them that's absolutely off the table in negotiations, and not even agree to start the negotiations before they acknowledge that.

<comment><USER17> or just stop using google - at least that would be an option if they took more agressive steps at censorship, which I don't think they will, these seem obvious.

The key is that it is not written into law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My people have a saying, "it is from clapping that dancing begins."

I specifically do not have a problem with this. However, each 'moral' step Google makes takes it nearer to dancing and wanting to be the conscience of the web. One day Google might go SOPA and decide to stop linking to sites that America decides support terrorism.

I am afraid of when US embargos will mean country domains will stop being indexed. It is dangerous the way Google is so powerful that they can determine the success of other sites.

In the words of PG "I worry, I worry". Not for now, but the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> <https://torrentfreak.com/googles-anti-piracy-filter-110712/> astonishes me. The autocomplete stuff actually matters that much? I would not have guessed it, which is just another reminder that I am a geek whose Internet usage differs considerably from much of the population.

</comment><comment><USER20> Recently I noticed that Google Chrome has a custom search built in for what.cd (a huge, exclusive music sharing website). When logged in, typing in the URL "what.cd" and hitting space brings up "Search What.CD Artists:" Autocomplete also continues to suggest "what.cd faq" as the first result for "what."

It makes sense though. What.CD is a tacit community, much less known about than any of the more "mainstream" file-sharing networks mentioned in this article. I wonder if Google is consciously just leaving it alone because reckons it can afford to. This move is no doubt a PR move and a legal precaution (understandably). It's just funny how they've been selective against the public networks.

<comment><USER21> Chrome adds sites that you visit to your list of search engines [1]. It's not built in.. typing in what.cd and hitting space does nothing for me.

[1] [http://superuser.com/questions/276069/google-chrome- automati...](http://superuser.com/questions/276069/google-chrome- automatically-adding-websites-to-my-list-of-search-engines)

<comment><USER20> Whoops, you're right. My bad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Possibly related:

I sell a shareware app. Google has been helpfully suggesting the suffixes 'crack' and 'keygen' for years. Today it isn't - wonder if it's related to the original topic or if it's just a blip.

</comment><comment><USER23> The title is misleading. Google still indexes these sites and they still appear in the sites search results.

All Google is doing is saying they don't want sites like this to be found quicker or stumbled upon using search helpers like auto-complete. If they want to make it so you need to explicitly hunt down sites which make copyrighted material easily accessible to be download then what is the problem?

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't find this to be particularly surprising or outrageous. If someone types in "thep", what are they supposed to suggest "thepiratebay.com - download free..."? I think it's a little misleading to say that Google is censoring anything. They're just modifying the Instant algorithm so that they're not suggesting infringing content to their users.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't agree with the terminology, it's not "censorship", the sites in question are still indexed the keywords don't get autocompleted is all.

<comment><USER5> These people are abusing the terminology. They know they are supporting piracy. They know it's illegal. Theyre counting on ignorance, exaggeration, and this new Sense of entitlement to free music, movies, and software that's infected the younger generation (at least in the US, and I'm only 25 but it applies to my peers too). They're using these great ideals like freedom as shields and in the end they're going to hurt all of us because of it. They want to act innocent as if they're being persecuted unjustly. It makes me so mad that the freedom of the web might be restricted and it's these same people who say they love freedom so much who gave law makers the excuse to be able to do it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if some of the reaction to this is with a consideration in mind, of Google's search being essential for finding things... and the threat of censorship from them affecting discoverability and cohesiveness that Google enables.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yeah, if you just start typing "isohunt " and watch the Instant suggestions, you can see what they mean. Try typing "youtube " or "yahoo " and Google knows just what you mean, right away. Isohunt? Not so much. Typing "torren" gives me suggestions for the Torrens system, apparently a system of land titles in Australia. Who knew? But I'm guessing the number of people who complete that word with a "t" rather than a "s" is in the ratio of tens of thousands to 1. Unless the Torrens system is a lot more popular than I think it is.

Oh, Google. Do we have to fight about every little thing?

Here's what's best for users and arguably, best for Google in the long run:

"Google search tries to find what the user wants to find"

Here's what best for Google in the short run:

"Google search tries to find what is most profitable for Google, Inc."

I'm pretty sure you want to do the first one, not the second one, to maximize the long-term advantage to your company. Companies that intentionally make their product shittier do not actually do well in the long run. None of them. And frankly, trying to "compromise" with the RIAA/MPAA/etc. is foolish. They're paid to push toward a position which is untenable for Google. No matter how much you compromise, they'll be back next year with a further demand. In the end the RIAA/MPAA do not want to co-exist with you; they want the internet to consist of two buttons, one labeled "Buy Music" and one labeled "Buy Movies". So in the end you can't satisfy them. Why try? Nobody at the MPAA will thank you for this.

<comment><USER28> Google gets sued by organizations all the time. They don't censor the results -- except when commanded to by law enforcement. They can't "compromise" with the police. And note that this filtering applies only to suggestions, not to actual results.

Google wants to make the internet free. Organizations like the RIAA/MPAA/BSA want it to be their own private AOL.</comment></comment>


IllumiRoom: Peripheral Projected Illusions for Interactive Experiences (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=191304

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6598144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6598144)</comment>


React TO-DO App with the newest approach to state management (DDD) - <AUTHOR> https://codesandbox.io/s/xrnjpqjjxz <comment><AUTHOR>  Why Effector?

Effector is a reactive state manager. It is decentralized, declarative and efficienct.

Effector was created to manage data in complex applications without danger of inflating a monolithic central store. It provides events/effects and reactive storages. It has explicit control flow, Flow and TypeScript type definitions and sufficient API

Here are some principles:

\- application store should be as light as possible - you should not be frightened by the idea that you need to add another store for specific needs

\- stores should be freely combined - the idea is that the data that the application will need can be distributed statically by showing in advance how the data will be transformed during the operation of the application

\- it should by design eliminate the need for "reselect", notifying about changes only those who need them. This allows you to not worry about the fact that you will have the entire application triggered if you want to exctact the state of modalwindow from React. Concurrently, this means that applications are spared from the problems with performance such as "react-redux" encountered when switching to context

\- give opportunity, place, and way to remove any desired business logic from the view, making the components as simple as possible

\- independence from controversial concepts - no decorators, no dependencies from reactr/ rxjs, the need to use classes or proxies - none of this is required to manage the state of the application and therefore the api library uses only functions and plain js objects

\- predictabile API: a small number of basic principles are reused in various cases, reducing the burden on the user and increasing awareness. Knowing how .watch works in events, you can guess what the .watch function does in front of it.

\- the application is easily built from a combination of basic elements and the ability to build new ones

\- there is no point in trying to pass everything off for streaming, for reducer or observable. Effector offers a solution to manage the data structure rather than hide it

\- the most efficient way to manage state reliably is to describe the interaction of the data declaratively and provide all the dirty work to the automation

<comment><AUTHOR> Effector is just more effective.

Modern tools for managing the state solve some problems, but they have problems themselves to a greater or lesser degree, because of which the developer sometimes has to strain more than he could.

Effector is an integrated approach to solving a problem, an attempt to do everything at once. And the attempt is quite successful.

In a nutshell: the speed of work, the size of the bundle, static types, the modularity and, at the same time, the composability of the states in the compartment are better than those of analogs. And, most importantly, api, which does not impose, but gives out of the box enough to solve the total majority of tasks.

In principle, tried to use the approach "the library helps to write good code and does not help writing bad code."

Total: yes, you need to try to understand, you need to compare yourself. But in simple terms - the effector is simply more efficient than other STMs, in a complex way

Author of this message: @artalar (translated by google-translate)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good gift ideas for this holiday season? - <AUTHOR> It's that time of year again for many people... to prepare a gift list of things you want and solicit ideas to buy for others!
I realized that I am most excited these days by the type of things that other HN readers might be: tech gadgets, software subscriptions, DIY kits, books on  technical topics, you know what I mean :D
So, what are you all hoping to get for the holidays? <comment><USER2> A while ago a built a little website in my spare time to help make lists like these.

Here is my personal list if its of interest to you: [https://iwantdis.com/collections/jbZbqeUX](https://iwantdis.com/collections/jbZbqeUX)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very pretty site, I like it! Nice stuff, you have good taste :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We don't gift adults in my family, only the kids, and it's a relief because it tends to get expensive for even small items for a large number of people, and you rarely get anything you really want.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's totally true about the cost, good call. However, I can at least address the "rarely get anything you want" problem if I figure out some very specific ideas to request by asking here ;)</comment></comment>