Serendipity – When 2 people listen to the same song at the same time - <AUTHOR> http://kylemcdonald.net/serendipity/ <comment><USER2> Warning: it starts playing music automatically. Be careful to adjust your volume so you don't bother anyone around you.

<comment><USER3> Cannot upvote this enough. If the creator of this is listening, for Cthulhu's sake require some input from the user before blaring out sound at them. Was interested, but closed as soon as a tab started making loud noises without me asking it to.

<comment><USER4> It's really not that bad. Click the "mute" icon in the top-left of the screen and go on with your life.

<comment><USER5> This is actually a pet peeve on mine, I feel it's akin to people playing music loudly on their phones in public. I like people to respect my silence.

I'd appreciate it if web sites asked me before blurting out music - it seems with HTML5 people have forgotten the annoyance of Flash banner ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While this data is interesting enough on its own, the map animations are even cooler. The transitions from one location pair to the next are mesmerizing, and can provide some really cool perspectives of the globe. Great execution on that.

<comment><USER7> thanks! all credit goes to the developers of d3.js though, i wouldn't have considered these projections if not for the example here [http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3763057](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3763057)

<comment><USER8> i think all the stuff mike bostocks does is absolutely legendary- to the (probably few) people who haven't seen his website, check out [http://bost.ocks.org/mike/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pro-tip: press space whenever you hear something you like and the song will continue playing, and you have a good chance to catch it. Also, clicking anywhere on the screen (while paused or not) takes you to the active song in Spotify.

<comment><USER10> The song also keeps playing when the tab is in the background.

<comment><USER11> It stops playing after ~20 secondes for me. Then a ~5 seconds silence gap and then it picks up something new.

When I select the active tab it cycles through locations every ~3-5 secondes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't this synchronicity, rather than serendipity?

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

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

<comment><USER13> I wonder what you call it when two people listen to Synchronicity (by the Police) at the same time :)

<comment><USER14> It might be ironic, but not Ironic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neat and all.... but with the beauty of "radio" one could basically light up a crapton of folks in any given area all listening to the same song.

I remember back when I delivered pizzas, it was not uncommon for most of us drivers to all be humming the same song as we are getting stuff inside, since we all listened to the same stations.

If it was a really good song ending as I got back to the store, it was not uncommon to find that I waited it out in the parking lot along with at least two other drivers. :)

<comment><USER16> Radio isn't selective though, you don't make the decision what to play. It's more like the coincidence that you hit play on the same song exactly as the radio DJ does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kyle McDonald has a lot of cool projects. Check out this one [http://vimeo.com/29348533](http://vimeo.com/29348533) using the open source Facetracker library (built by Jason Saragih and maintained by Kyle).

Pretty friendly guy, helped me out via email with some questions I had when I was playing around with facetracker.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm finding the pause button doesn't react in time for me to catch the song most of the time. By the time I realize I like what I'm hearing it's already too late to pause it. An adjustment for time per song would be great.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, the dwell time is ridiculously short. A way to slow it down would make all the difference in the world.

<comment><USER7> usability isn't my strength, so this is all very helpful feedback. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool, how about 2 or more people listening to the same audio in sync on their different Internet devices, Spotify?

Together creating a stereo system with friends & or those in the crowd around them.

Anyone else interested in such a feature?

<comment><USER21> That's what Turntable.fm was for. It failed :(

<comment><USER20> huh Turntable.fm did not sync audio playback between multiple Internet devices like i.e. SpeakerBlast does...

[http://vimeo.com/71647538](http://vimeo.com/71647538)

Turntable was definitely a slick site, yet there was a lot of interaction needed and personally I got tired of having need to interact to listen to music. Listening to music for me is more a passive past time.

<comment><USER22> Yes, audio was synced between listeners (devices). If you jumped in a room for example, playback would start at the point everyone in the room is at, and people would comment on various parts of the music at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Every song selected was in English. I'm not sure if this is because it's built so only English songs show up or because English has become the defacto global language for music.

<comment><USER24> There's probably a selection bias because spotify is not equally popular everywhere around the world. The majority of the matches seem to fall in the USA and other english speaking countries as far as I can see.

But even beyond that, American are so good at exporting their cultural products I'm pretty certain that american music is the most popular international music. I mean, even in non-english speaking countries many (most?) new bands sing in english to try and emulate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very annoying that it started playing music by itself.

</comment><comment><USER26> Based on a few minutes of observation, Ed Sheeran is the most popular artist in the world.

Is there any sophistication behind the sound clip selection? Just a certain static point in each song, or some kind of algorithm to get to a recognisable part?

<comment><USER7> the clips are spotify's preview mp3s, which are selected at random from the song. i know at least one very clever person at spotify who is trying to extract the 'hook' or 'recognisable part', and it worked really well last time i listened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As the music started to play I reached to pause the music I already had playing, but then I realized that it was paused automatically by Spotify. That's a pretty cool feature that they have - very well integrated.

<comment><USER28> It's DRM, actually. I agree it's a useful feature sometimes — until you want to leave music playing for your partner in your living room while you listen to music and cook dinner in the kitchen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Off-topic: Could the admins change the link to point to the final, redirected url - [https://www.spotify.com/us/arts/serendipity/](https://www.spotify.com/us/arts/serendipity/) ?

Anyways, fantastic execution! Great visualization. My only super-minor complaint is the fade in/fade out could be a little less abrupt when the songs change :)

<comment><USER30> I'm in Australia, and the link took me to [https://www.spotify.com/au/arts/serendipity/](https://www.spotify.com/au/arts/serendipity/). Not sure what difference it makes, but if it's redirecting based on region, it might be best to leave it as is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've always thought this would be cool for e.g. a cross-country team, or friends running together, to have.

Imagine incorporating a PA system so a coach could talk to and track his athletes on all their training runs...

</comment><comment><USER13> If you want to keep a track playing, just hit ctrl-page up to switch to another tab. It'll play for the track's full 30 seconds.

Or you can click the background to listen to it on play.spotify.com.

</comment><comment><USER32> A missing feature would be to be able to see a list of the songs that were played, I missed a couple of songs I'd want to listen a little bit more.

</comment><comment><USER33> That's nothing, last.fm would show who is listening to the same song _you_ are listening to right now.

</comment><comment><USER34> I call this phenomenon "radio".

</comment><comment><USER35> While listening to this it made me realize how much music is compressed nowadays. I think this is a bad trend.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow, what an awesome project. Would be cool to read how it was made.

<comment><USER7> it was built with storm for processing all the listening data in realtime, node.js for relaying udp messages from storm to websockets, and d3.js for rendering the map along with the spotify web api for grabbing all the artist data, cover images, song previews.

<comment><USER37> Any chance Spotify will provide a realtime API for tracks you have listened to?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Jesus, people have an awful taste in music.</comment>


Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-fintech-blockchain/wall-street-rethinks-blockchain-projects-as-euphoria-meets-reality-idUSKBN1H32GO <comment><USER2> What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? When we are talking about crypto currencies, it is a distributed database with a consensus mechanism that is extremely costly to run. But this is not something you would need or want in most other situations, because there is always some degree of trust with your counterparties (and legal recourse if necessary).

If we strip away the consensus mechanism, all that is left is a trivial data structure that anyone with a CS background could come up with. So, the question becomes where the real value proposition is in "blockchain technology" outside of the realm of crypto currencies. What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology? It looks more like a marketing buzzword than anything that has actual merit for the average use case.

<comment><USER3> This is my question as well. Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency, yes. But where else in the real world is it even applicable?

<comment><USER4> > Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency

It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.

<comment><USER5> Yup being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system.

EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.

<comment><USER6> > it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and > forces you to make a transaction.

No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.

<comment><USER7> But in reality no one has ever held a gun to your head because of taxes.

<comment><USER8> Because there's no point in going through all the steps, but that's exactly where it would end if you absolutely refused to pay taxes and refused to pay fines or go to jail for not paying.

<comment><USER7> I fail to see how having a gun to your head is in any way true. Can you give any examples of this happening?

Tax evasion is a crime and you should go to jail (you are exploiting the benefits you have received from society). But big companies find tax loopholes all the time and they go to white-collar prisons or get away with it anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit.

At what point are the fundamental assumptions going to be questioned?

<comment><USER10> I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus".

What people don't realize is that Satoshi's solution only works if two assumptions hold true:

1\. Mining is decentralized: If mining is centralized than relying on proof- of-work for consensus is waste since the centralized entity controls the blockchain anyway.

2\. Consensus rules don't change: If you see the threat of #1 and so take power away from miners (like Bitcoin has done), then you cannot ever change the consensus ruleset because aside from proof-of-work, Satoshi did not give any solution to the problem of choosing between 2 chains that have slightly different consensus rules. If you change the consensus ruleset (ie. make any changes where 2 nodes disagree on if a block is valid or not), then you need an oracle to tell you which chain to choose. We've seen this when Core developers chose the 0.7 Bitcoin chain in 2013 and when Vitalik chose the forked Ethereum chain in 2016.

At the end of the day, the blockchain's decentralization is a myth because it relies on false assumptions. Satoshi invented a Rube Goldberg machine that is currently using as much electricity as a medium-sized country (and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.).

<comment><USER11> > _Mining is decentralized_

Cryptocurrency mining is as close as one can get to a theoretical free market in the real world. Free markets have known modes of failure [1]. One of these is where first-mover advantage and economies of scale combine to produce a barrier to entry; the result is oligopoly or monopoly.

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

<comment><USER12> Except that so far it remains to be seen if that can work at scale. Bitcoin is moving towards the lightning network which changes things quite a bit, in particular potentially adding some centralization and giving some nodes advantages over others (well connected nodes with large open channels will have an advantage over a newcomer without connections for instance).

Bitcoin cash is trying an other route with bigger blocks but it remains to be seen if it scales well enough to real-world currency usage. And of course there's the big problem of cryptocurrencies being useless as currencies because they're not stable enough. Which itself can be largely blamed on their limited supply and inflationary nature which is necessary to bootstrap them (there's an incentive to get in early) but seems to turn against them in the long run since nobody wants to spend something that's by design supposed to become scarcer and scarcer.

It might be theoretically free but it doesn't work great so far. And of course we could discuss whether a completely free market is a good or a bad thing, but that's a whole different debate.

<comment><USER13> > nobody wants to spend something that's by design supposed to become scarcer > and scarcer.

Except that Bitcoin is (with consensual upgrade) infinitely divisible. (E.g. the network can [vote to] move to 16 decimal places, and so on).

<comment><USER12> That's not the argument. The idea is that if a given amount of bitcoins is set to increase in value as time passes (as is supposed to happen if the currency is successful) you don't have a lot of incentive to invest or spend your money.

If you have $100 on your bank account today then you've got incentives to spend or invest it soon because it's slowly losing value because of inflation, your $100 will probably buy you fewer goods and services in the future that it does now.

Now if you have BTC100 on your wallet and you believe that Bitcoin will succeed as a currency then you know for a fact that these bitcoins will be more valuable in the future than they are now (because the demand will grow but the supply is capped). Ergo you have strong incentives to hoard your bitcoins and not spend or invest them. Your savings gain value without actually being invested in anything. They don't contribute to the economy, they don't fund anything.

I don't understand why most cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't see a huge problem in this. How will you get a loan to start your company in the bitcoin world? Who would want to take such a risk when they'll keep getting richer by not doing anything at all? You'd have to promise them ridiculously high returns (higher than bitcoin's deflation at least). The rich gets richer by virtue of being rich, the poor needs to buy food and basic utilities so they can't save their coins to become rich. Basically what we have today, only worse.

<comment><USER14> I am a big supporter of crypto currencies, and I do see a problem in that. However, the current volatility will level off significantly once there is wider adoption. That will help reduce incentive to hold. I would _never_ recommend somebody give/accept loans in crypto currencies right now. The time will come though (unless governments squash crypto through regulation or outright banning).

That said, there's no guarantee that BTC or any crypto will appreciate indefinitely; in fact quite the opposite. It can (and does) lose value.

This also overlooks the benefits of a non-fiat currency, such as protection against things like hyper-inflation (most of us don't think about this right now, but if you have any friends in Venezuela ask them how important this protection is).

<comment><USER15> Ask someone in Venezuela how useful a Bitcoin is when you have no way to get food.

<comment><USER16> I'd imagine very useful - just sell it for a few thousand and then "Including Venezuela's equivalent of food stamps, the total pay package now rises to 250,531 bolivars, or $32.19 a month" so it should cover that for a while. Or a flight out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful _within a company_ , even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability _across an industry_ , it becomes almost impossible.

I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.

An external _protocol_ that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).

I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !

<comment><USER12> If anybody can enter and add entries to your blockchain, how do you ensure that they don't insert bogus data? If you're tracing a roll of paper what prevents somebody from adding an entry saying "the shipment got stolen" then immediately making a new entry for it with different attributes pretending it's something else? Or simply at the source pretending that something is of a higher quality than it is?

The answer is that you need some kind of vetting and certification of the people contributing to your traceability database. So you need a trusted 3rd party to coordinate all that. So you don't need a blockchain. Instead why not just have the trusted 3rd party issue certificates like a CA on the web for instance? People would digitally sign the paperwork and you could collect the documents and their signatures in a central database. If somebody notices something wrong you can show that somebody made a fake or erroneous document and hold them responsible. Then you can publish dump of the database at regular intervals for people to mirror so that they can see if you attempt to rewrite history. There, problem solved using good old 1990's technology.

>very bullish !

Interesting that you finish your technical argument with trading lingo. Hodl, am I right?

<comment><USER18> Hehe. Thats actually a nice artifact, thanks bitcoin. Now individuals can consider the potential of ideas to pan out and participate in funding them. Sure, sounds good -- I'll throw in 1,000$. Suddenly 1,000 like-minded individuals can satisfy the need of projects. Of course thats not always so popular here ;-). I should just mind my own business and focus on the coding right?

Anyhow. I do think you are right. The integrity of the data has to be questioned. But I question why we have to assume that its useless just because it cannot be trusted? This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable. Future evidence can expose prior lies. Once you know that you have to maintain a lie for life, suddenly you are questioning if its really worth making.

<comment><USER12> Immutability is easy to achieve. Anything distributed widely enough is effectively immutable. Anything published on the cover of Time magazine is immutable. Anything commited to the linux kernel is immutable. Anything distributed on thepiratebay is immutable. Anything put in the Ubuntu package repository is immutable.

You can amend it and publish new versions but you can be sure that somebody somewhere will have a copy. You want to make your paper trail immutable? Sign it and publish it widely using any medium you want. Burn it on CDs and mail them to random addresses. Tie them to balloons and release them.

<comment><USER19> Man trusting paper more at this point is the most backward thing I've heard. You really want us to keep using paper for all contracts, needing to be on site to sign documents, sending documents through fax, making physical backups... when all of it can be done digitally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My question is if your conclusion is that blockchain is a solution in search of a problem, what was all that effort being spent on (not just in finance, but everywhere blockchain is being considered)?

I'm not saying that blockchain is not a valid solution to a problem, but as a veteran of the online industry, I can say I've seen a lot of hype around new technology, actual effort being put into it, and then the realization that the effort was for nothing. Either the solution is no better than the old solution, just different, or the solution is so obscure, that the cost of maintaining it is greater than the value it generates.

In the end, the costs of the choices of these institutions are being paid for by you and I, and I hope they don't go too deep into their project before realizing: "Basically, it became a solution in search of a problem,"

<comment><USER21> My major questions have always been: where is the business value in blockchain applications? what can a blockchain app do that can't be done by non- blockchain (beyond decentralization - bc I don't think this produces much business value)?

<comment> onion-soup Sending money without fees and delay? Have you ever tried a normal bank transfer? How long did it take? Have you ever tried, say, nano? It literally takes seconds and 0 fees. Here is some value.

<comment><USER22> Bitcoin has both fees and delays. You can see what they are now:

[https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin- transactionfees...](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin- transactionfees.html)

[https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation- time](https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time)

Who knows what they would be if bitcoin was actually used to buy things.

<comment><USER19> He's not talking about Bitcoin, do people realize there's literally 1000+ projects (Most irrelevant) with some clear innovation going on. We're already way past bitcoin and PoW as the future of blockchain tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of course banks can do it better with the traditional technologies. They operate in a centralized, trusted and regulated environment. Their consensus algorithm is "settling disputes in courts".

And still, it takes up to 5 days to receive a payment from USA in the EU and the sender pays 40$ for the wire transfer.

The blockchain technologies will disrupt the banks themselves, because they are the intermediaries in this industry. I can receive the equivalent of $1 mil in BTC from oversea in less than 10 minutes and the sender pays fractions of a dollar in fees.

The banks will be in a tough position the more people accept payments for their services and products in BTC. We're not there yet, of course, but who knows where we'll be in 5-10-20 years.

<comment><USER11> > _it takes up to 5 days to receive a payment from USA in the EU and the > sender pays 40$ for the wire transfer_

U.S. dollar Fedwires are "immediate, final, and irrevocable" [1] regardless of from where they are initiated. If your EU bank takes 5 business days to swap between the world's two most liquid currencies, you have a uniquely shitty bank.

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_about...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_about.htm)

<comment><USER24> > In 2008, approximately 7,300 participants made Fedwire funds transfers. The > Fedwire Funds Service is generally used to make large-value, time-critical > payments.

seems like maybe the crux of this discussion is that, all of the sudden the features of banking have been automated. that's definitely not the same as "the features of banks, regulation, etc..." have been automated.

But certainly, we can see that the Fedwire is not a consumer product, where BTC clearly is

<comment><USER11> > _In 2008, approximately 7,300 participants made Fedwire funds transfers_

To be a Fedwire participant you have to be a Federal Reserve member, _i.e._ a bank. Consumers arrange Fedwires through their banks. When I send a wire, I'm not a Fedwire participant--my bank is. If you have a U.S. dollar bank account, you have access to the international Fedwire system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > The project, which had successfully tested with startup Digital Asset > Holdings (DA), was shelved because banks and other potential users believed > the same results could be achieved more cheaply using current technology, he > said.

This is more or less the curse of the almighty blockchain; it's very hard to think of a plausible, actually useful, application which can't be accomplished far more cheaply and simply using conventional means.

<comment><USER26> It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain.

The problem HN has with blockchain is that a lot of HN users _are the problem_ which decentralization solves. The basic startup monetization strategies these days revolve around centralizing user data and then collecting rent (usually in the form of ads) or centralizing transactions and then collecting a percentage. Decentralization is the antithesis of these models: you can't collect rent or percentages if you don't have centralized control of the platform. The problem blockchain solves is that it cuts out a lot of middle men and what middle men it leaves (miners) have to compete.

For the vast majority of HN users, blockchain doesn't solve problems _you_ want to solve, but that shouldn't be mistaken for meaning that blockchain isn't a revolutionary technology that solves a lot of problems. If anything, the technology is important because it affects your future. Data and transaction middle men are the problem that blockchain solves, and as middle men you should be paying attention.

I don't hold any resentment toward people trying to run a centralized business, but I do find it amusing when people are pushing blockchain forward to their own detriment.

<comment><USER27> > It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain.

Then please list some useful, concrete applications of blockchain that would not be solved better and cheaper by a normal database.

<comment><USER28> The first sentence of the Bitcoin white paper describes a problem that can't be solved by a normal DB.

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

<comment><USER29> > "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online > payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through > a financial institution."

Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.

<comment><USER26> > By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve > even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.

1\. This is far from proven. Scaling is definitely a problem, but I don't think it's at all been proven to be impossible.

2\. You still have to admit that bitcoin has solved this problem at a small scale, which isn't nothing. Transactions without a trusted central authority are literally impossible with previous technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Vast majority of projects don't need the complexity of a multi-master geographically distributed append-only immutable database with uncertain transaction finality because other, simpler and better understood solutions already exist. Vast majority of projects don't have to deal with the Byzantine Generals problem that makes it so difficult to create a permissionless distributed value transfer system like Bitcoin.

Right tool for the right job.

</comment><comment><USER31> I get suspicious whenever I read about companies piling on to technology trends, not least because of the damage it does to the rank and file developers who work on it. The short version is: leaders got bamboozled and their subordinates suffered, but it's a little more nuanced than that.

We tend to think of large companies as either these monolithic beasts that act according to their own best interests, or as emergent hiveminds that move in a direction because they smell money. These have the advantage of allowing us to presume that the actions taken by these organizations were vetted by many people and arrived at via consensus.

However, there is a third, less popular, way to view organizations, and that's as an organ of a handful of people, if not one person. This is an important framing because it allows us to consider the actions of these large companies as reflecting the foibles of the individuals at the helm. Viewed this way, Apple under Steve Jobs was an extension of one man's vision and design priorities. Microsoft under Ballmer was an extension of one man's putting the MBA approave above the tech approach.

I can't help but wonder if, within these Wall Street companies as well as throughout SV, there wasn't a single person or a handful of people who swallowed the blockchain coolaid and started these projects. Pitched high hopes to developers. Hired developers. Set goals. Failed to meet goals. Made their developers' lives miserable. Gave up. Blamed their subordinates. Moved on.

This is a tale as old as tech itself, but somehow it just keeps happening. To all young developers deciding where to invest their time and talent: be _very_ careful choosing to follow an individual, because individuals are stupid enough to fall for nonsense like "blockchain for banking."

<comment><USER32> What is the supposed persecution of developers you're alluding to here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been hearing about imminent death of Bitcoin and the pointlessness of blockchain since 2010. I predict that won't change in the future.

</comment><comment><USER33> DTCC is a central authority by definition; there's no amount of handwaving that you can do to make a distributed quorum system fit this particular problem...unless you're just trying to raise VC money.

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't the core still being worked on? Meaning things like the lightening network and proof of stake? There has been tremendous buzz about this tech even in its limited state so imagine when it becomes very friendly/usable/stable/focused/possibly efficient... in use case and where things like Mt. Gox don't happen anymore. I think its a work in progress and we are at the whim of the impatient and non-technical media.

<comment><USER35> It is. These speculation cycles come and go regularly. HN general knowledge of blockchain is similar to HN general knowledge of AI: slightly above average. There are many smart engineers laying down the foundations of the Bitcoin protocol as we speak, and the hype cycle will come back.

<comment><USER36> You bought your crypto in December/January, haven't you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have been trying to see why full p2p decentralization matters, but am unable to find much support for it.

[1] [https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind- abo...](https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-about- why.html)

[2] [https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/blockchains- from-d...](https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/blockchains-from- distributed-computing.html)

The applications of full p2p decentralization are also not clear:

[3] [https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/blockchain- applica...](https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/blockchain-applications- in-supply-chain.html)

[4] [https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/paper-review- ipfs-...](https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-content- addressed.html)

<comment><USER38> [https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization- matters-5e3f...](https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization- matters-5e3f79f7638e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wall Street only cares about money extraction. Blockchain projects are currently milked dry with no where to squeeze out money. It's no surprise that they are "rethinking" it. If it should start growing fat again with lots of opportunities to extract money, Wall street will jump right back in.

<comment><USER40> They're fairly receptive to technologies that decrease their operating costs.

If there was a scenario where blockchain-based solution was cheaper to operate than their current database tech, you'd think they'd be all over it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So that iced tea company that announced it was entering the blockchain space didn't pan out, hm?

</comment><comment><USER42> Ron Conway, early investor in the internet, said recently that the Blockchain is internet 3.0

<comment><USER43> I mostly hear it described as Internet 2.0, or Web 3.0. However, analysts are starting to talk about Blockchain 2.0 now; this could probably fill the role of Internet 3.0.

None of these people have any idea what they're talking about.

<comment><USER42> Trying to predict the future is tricky, however, you can try to see where it's all going without knowing all the details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> At the end of the day there are tons of practical applications for blockchain. There is a lot that is staked on bitcoin and other cryptos and that will probably decline until the blockchain's true value is hit. That being said institutional investors will still want to play this market. JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are still planning to build clearing houses for crypto this summer.

[https://altcoinreport.co/morgan-stanley-clear-bitcoin- future...](https://altcoinreport.co/morgan-stanley-clear-bitcoin-futures- clients-2018/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think blockchain is like 3D movies. It is intriguing enough to put the foot on the door of public imagination so people with vested interests have a crack to keep pushing their agenda through.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've never understood why large companies want to get into blockchain. At best, a distributed ledger (blockchain or not), is able to provide a trustworthy database that anyone can engage with. Large banks also provide a trustworthy database, but which only they can edit. With blockchain, the trust is built upon protocols and technology. With banks, the trust is built upon reputation and insurance. They seem in direct competition with each other.

<comment><USER47> There's probably not a lot of interest for retail use for the reasons you state. Outside of wealth management that is more about the cryptocurrencies than the tech.

But there is still interest in peer to peer usage. When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge.

The most interesting features, in this scenario, are the mutable->immutable and time ordering aspects. The literal blockchain, in other words. The consensus and transparency aspects aren't particularly interesting though.

And the key (excuse the pun) to these useful aspects is the cryptography used in interesting ways. Blockchains didn't invent any of this stuff but they did open people's eyes to the possibilities.

<comment><USER46> > When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of > reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge

I'm not a banker, but I'm not sure I entirely believe this. There is undoubtedly a cost of reconciliation, but is it "huge"? Seems low on the totem poll.

<comment><USER47> 10s of millions per year per bank. More for the really big banks.

Thay have large totem poles.

Edit. That's not including the op risk of screwing up. That has costs too and can easily reach millions

<comment><USER46> A handful of millions for the largest banks, yet most crypto currency companies are valued far out of proportion of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Basically the finance industry is trying to shoehorn their legacy business systems into blockchain, which of course will not make any advantage obvious other than finding out it is much more difficult to reimplement what is already working with a different system. My view on this is that blockchain ought to find a very specific problem (e.g. trust as a service) that cannot be achieve with existing technology.

</comment><comment><USER49> Looking at the history of Wall Street, it should be safe to predict that Block chain technology will be the reason for next global meltdown. They can and will do wonders generating derivates after derivates and make huge bonuses.

I have never understood why financial instruments like derivates like options etc. exists. I understand what they do but I do not understand what value they add to the economy specifically.

<comment><USER50> If you agree with the premise that regular equities markets provide value (in that competitive allocation of capital leads to a more optimal result than centralized allocation), it seems to follow pretty naturally that derivatives and options provide value by allowing participants in the market to turn more nuanced beliefs into a position than they could otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> wall street is buying now from panic selling grandmothers that entered in December. it has always been like that in immature markets.

<comment><USER52> The article is about blockchain projects. Not about people selling their bitcoins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The great correction is here [https://www.coingecko.com/en](https://www.coingecko.com/en) shows total red Everyone needs to start waking up. Blockchain solves transfer of value really well, took years for it to prove that it works. What has the other projects proven?

</comment><comment><USER54> I would take any article like this with a grain of salt. There is not a lot of useful or technical information here, and I believe it is more designed as click bait and FUD to create shock value and hurt the public sentiment about Blockchain technology and investing in crypto currencies.

That said, on the flip side, a lot of people have been considering Blockchain as some kind of magic solution to all of the world's problems, and that is also very far from reality. If it takes an article in Reuters for people to realize this than so be it.

I have believed for a while that Blockchain technology in the context that many big companies refer to it is not very useful. Usually these are the same people who claim that Bitcoin is useless and Blockchain technology is where the real value is. I think they are either mistaken or misinformed.

In my opinion, anyone who plans to build a centrally controlled Blockchain is making a mistake. Even if the data is signed/hashed and distributed, it only takes one bad actor inside the organization who has access to the nodes to alter the Blockchain by performing a 51% attack (changing the transaction data on more than half of the nodes). Therefore the entire idea of a Blockchain being immutable is thrown out the window. You would be much better off using an open source database like MySQL or Postgres or Mongo. Blockchains are expensive to run and operate and are extremely slow.

However, the idea that Blockchains are a solution in search of a problem that the article suggests is also a bit misleading. I think it's more likely that these companies are trying to find solutions for things that aren't problems in the first place which isn't the fault of Blockchain technology itself. I feel pretty strongly that blockchains have already solved a few problems.

\- They solve the double spending problem (the idea that the same tokens can be spent more than once)

\- They allow people to store value without depending on any third party (such as a bank)

\- They remove all the intermediaries required for sending payments/data from one person to another.

\- They make it cheaper and faster to send any amount of money to anyone in the world

To me, those are all transformative properties of blockchains, and anyone who overlooks them is somewhat missing the point. That said, in order to check off all these bullet points, you need to have a peer to peer, decentralized network where peers are rewarded with crypto currencies for securing the network, not just a few servers running inside of a company as a replacement for a centralized database.

Will there be good Blockchain applications outside of crypto currencies? I'm not sure, but to me, there is nothing wrong with that. If, in the future, banks and cash become obsolete and everyone stores their money on their own secure, digital wallets, then I would say that Blockchain technology changed the world for the better.

<comment> 52-6F-62 > _I would take any article like this with a grain of salt. There is not a lot > of useful or technical information here, and I believe it is more designed > as click bait and FUD to create shock value and hurt the public sentiment > about Blockchain technology and investing in crypto currencies._

There's a wave of this sentiment lately— which is funny timing. Goldman Sachs apparently will have an operational cryptocurrency trading desk by the end of June.[0]

The TSX is slated to have a cryptocurrency brokerage desk with backing of the Bank of Montreal over the coming months sometime as well.[1] This came out days after BMO blocked all cryptocurrency purchases with consumer credit and debit cards.[2]

The more cynical side of me wants to guess that they're trying to establish a gatekeeping initiative. Knock everybody about, then when they want back in they have to come through you.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/goldman-i...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/goldman- is-said-to-be-building-a-cryptocurrency-trading-desk)

[1] [https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/tmxs-shorcan- announces...](https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/tmxs-shorcan-announces- cryptocurrency-initiatives-677670313.html)

[2] [http://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/bmo- stops...](http://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/bmo-stops- allowing-credit-and-debit-cards-for-cryptocurrency-purchases)

<comment><USER54> That's a pretty interesting perspective. I have definitely been thinking for a while that they are trying to drive the general public out so that they can accumulate more for cheaper, but I never considered the idea that they want you to use THEIR tools.

It actually makes a lot of sense cause the SEC has also been going pretty hard lately to try to shut down trading of tokens that had ICOs and to make life difficult for current exchanges.

I have always believed that Wall Street does not like the fact that the regular public got first stab at crypto currencies, and they didn't. This could be their way to try to rectify that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If projects we're ever based on the market price of bitcoins, then they were ill-founded.

If projects we're based on the technical features of a block chain architecture then the decline of euphoria is irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER56> So what does that mean for companies like this [https://axoni.com/](https://axoni.com/)?

</comment><comment><USER57> This is part of their learning process. Like with the Internet. Eventually they will figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER58> blockchains have been on their way out since 2009.</comment>


Useful bash oneliners - <AUTHOR> http://finbarr.ca/Useful-oneliners/ <comment><USER2> Something I use quite often, to create a new Maildir under $HOME

        mkdir -p ~/Mail/{cur,new,tmp}

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know that mkdir took flags- thanks for that. That's really handy.

Reference for -p for anyone else who doesn't know:

> -p Will create nested directories, but only if they don't exist already. [1]

[1] [https://superuser.com/questions/165157/what-does-mkdir-p- fla...](https://superuser.com/questions/165157/what-does-mkdir-p-flag-do)</comment></comment>


Should I base my start-up in Chicago, Austin, Portland or Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR> http://feldmanfile.blogspot.com/2011/06/should-i-base-my-start-up-in-chicago-or.html <comment><USER2> You are not giving Chicago a fair shake. I bootstrapped one company in Chicago and raised money from local angels and funds and coastal angels and funds.

Venture funding in Chicago has become significantly easier to come by than a few years ago, and much of your analysis of the city is a perpetuation of rather old stereotypes.

Sittercity, Grubhub, Braintree, GiveForward, Fango, Scholarpro, FeeFighters, Inventables, IfByPhone, BrightTag, PVPower, Centro, Vibes, Groupon and all the lightbank companies, Pawngo, Poggled, SproutSocial, Where I've Been, Local Offer Network, SoCore, TapMe, RedFoundry, yCharts, AnalyteMedia, Appolicious, FutureSimple, RedFoundry, CleverSafe, HoneyApps all raised real money at an early stage in Chicago.

Also, I don't understand why corruption would be a concern at all. If you are a tech company you are never going to need to bribe an alderman.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, I never get these posts about "where should I go to do X…?"

Seems like a funny thing to worry about when you're in the early stages of starting a business.

I've lived in both NY and (currently) Chicago for a number of years, but I'm from Kansas City. When I go back to Kansas City I see two things:

1\. People doing amazing work. 2\. People making excuses for why they can't do amazing work in KC.

In Chicago and New York I see the same thing. People doing amazing work and people complaining about how x, y and z are holding them back.

If you have a great company, you could be in Boondock, Iowa for all I care. Likewise, if you're the type to make excuses, there isn't a city in the world that will make up for that.

It doesn't matter where you are, it's what you're doing that counts.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a current Portland resident, I can say that the rain has one advantage: Your employees will have nothing else to do but stay inside and work. I know I've found myself trudging through work on multiple occasions just because it was so crummy outside. Of course, that's probably not ideal in the long term...</comment>


The quest for the next Journeyman Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-want-new-programming-language.html

<comment><USER2> There is some really good stuff in here, but there is one point on which I totally disagree: operator overloading.

Operator overloading can be abused, yes, but there are many things which don't belong in a standard library and nevertheless lend themselves to adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

See: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415#)

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem that I've always found with it is that I've seen it so horribly abused that I'm just not sure that there's a reasonable subset that you can nail down that won't just cause more problems than it's worth. In the hands of skilled developers, you can solve some really elegant problems with operator overloading. In the hands of someone who isn't as good as they think they are, or is more clever than they should be, it's just too prone to making common statements not do what they seem to do, which is part of the unambiguous syntax part.</comment></comment>


20K Workers Will Be Jobless in Indian IT Sector, Thanks to Infosys and Cognizant - <AUTHOR> https://techtudor.blogspot.com/2019/11/approximately-20000-employees-will-be.html <comment><USER2> It is not really a slowdown. Companies are more than ever eager to hire anybody to do IT projects. The trouble is the level of service provided to customers by vendors from India is pretty shitty and that's why companies are migrating to other countries for IT resources.

I work in banking and payment sector and I had a chance to observe this on a dozen projects.

In one instance Cognizant offered to completely automate a significant application used by hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the world. They were supposed to containerize half a dozen services, Oracle database, configure it to run on AWS and also automate environment creation.

The team put by Cognizant had not a single person knowing how to do basically anything. They spent entire project schedule and more just learning the basics of how to get around. Instead of automating anything they negotiated to be allowed to just order vms on EC2 and install applications there, manually. It took them three weeks to figure out how to copy 400GB database backup (they had space, accesses and networking, they just couldn't figure out how to copy the file). Then they spent another two weeks unable to restore the backup.

The trouble is that for a long time they have been cranking junior devs with no quality culture and no real interest in what they are doing and now this is starting to hurt them.

<comment><USER3> The thing that's consistently baffled me with projects like this is why technical milestones aren't encoded in contracts.

In your example, if they can't demonstrate a PoC container or automated environment creation in x% of the schedule, the contract is terminated. With similar milestones throughout the project.

It's like traditional PM project pacing goes out the window when dealing with contractors.

It's not a secret these shops put the least capable people on contracts they think they can get away with, so why not better incentivize them to bring a more skilled team?

<comment><USER4> I witnessed an outsourcing process first hand, where Cognizant was supposed to come in a handle X, Y and Z tasks (pretty much all IT services) in a large energy company.

By the time it became clear, that they were not able to deliver on their promises at anything that resembles an acceptable level, most people with actual skills were no longer around (FTEs and contractors).

My second best suggestion would be to let an outsourcing partner take over small areas and do a gradual transition as you monitor their performance and quality. The problem is, that these companies have specialized "window- dressing" consultants, that are actually smart and have real skills. As soon as the contract is won, the people with skills are moved to the next contract, that needs to be won - and they are replaced by extremely low-paid resources without qualifications. By the time the company realizes this, it is too late.

I felt quite sorry for these under-qualified people. Imagine going to work every day, barely eeking out a living, while being completely unable to deliver on what you are supposed to do, all while being shouted at by some local slavedriver/manager with a large moustache - for doing your best.

...So the reason I said "second-best" is because I do not believe there is any reason to do business with the Indian outsourcing companies at all, unless you are an exec whos bonus depends on "outsourcing x % to low-cost countries" \- and you do not give a fuck about the company as a whole.

<comment> blaser-waffle > I witnessed an outsourcing process first hand, where Cognizant was supposed > to come in a handle X, Y and Z tasks (pretty much all IT services) in a > large energy company. By the time it became clear, that they were not able > to deliver on their promises at anything that resembles an acceptable level, > most people with actual skills were no longer around (FTEs and contractors).

This is happening to my group right now...

<comment><USER4> Start looking for a new job and leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been a long time coming. INFY and others like them have been slave- driving their staff with huge markups for eons. I'm glad the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

I've worked in wholesale finance for decades and seen how these guys are treated both on- and offshore by their employers. It's frankly despicable.

Let's hope the market in India finally pivots and smaller, more nimble shops take more and more market share.

That being said, I wonder how much of this is embedded in cultural norms that will not be easy to shake. For example: saying yes to your client's every request, even if it's stupid, is not something that comes easily, I suspect, if you're ingrained to just say yes...

<comment><USER6> That particular cultural norm (or way of doing business, in deference to 'flarg' who is better acquainted with this than I am) has got in the way of producing quality work several times in the past, and ruined the productivity we were trying to get from outsourcing in the first place (it was not my decision, I just had to try and make it work).

      "So you understand what you have to do?"
      "Yes"
      "And you have all the documentation and information you need?"
      "Yes"
      "OK great, let's get this thing going, get in touch if you need any help"

Two weeks later -

      "How's progress on the project?"
      "I have not been able to start the work because I could not understand..."

<comment><USER7> With Indian contractors, you can't use questions that require them to give a yes or no answer.

You need to phrase things differently: "What will be the first thing you'll be working on?" instead of "Do you understand?", for example.

<comment><USER8> open ended questions are just better in general.

Describe your next steps...

Please create a step by step project plan in {tool name}...

Another issue is waiting two weeks. Never, ever, wait two weeks. With any outsourced team you need much more frequent check-ins otherwise you run the risk of being blind-sided by huge project delays.

<comment><USER6> Lessons learned I guess!

We assumed that we were dealing with a (semi-) autonomous developer or team of developers, who would ask for clarification or assistance if needed.

We made ourselves available, we didn't expect miracles (it was big product with a team you had years of knowledge about it attached, though they were working on a small, isolated area), but our expectations were just out of line with what we got.

In the end the developer turned out to be able to do the work, though did not excel. The biggest hurdle to cross was this mismatch of expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sad for the Indian IT ecosystem, but the world has been evolving into a more protectionist place for a few years now, and the trend isn't going to stop. Indian outsourcing companies need to evolve into SaaS and cloud companies to compete globally. They are already doing this to some extent. That needs to accelerate. Sadly though, this is not going to help the vast majority of their employees, particularly middle-management folks, whose primary skill -- project management, won't be in very high demand, as the deep hierarchies of these companies are replaced by flatter structures more suited to product companies. They need to re-skill skill themselves. And that is going to take a huge toll on them financially.

<comment><USER10> Also Indian IT companies are overstaffed with followers and understaffed with leaders. Even ICs in a good product company like Google or Apple are entirely capable of self-managing 90% of their work -- you only need to tell them something like "implement smooth scrolling on the iPad mini that matches the iPad Pro." They will come back and evaluate the problem and approaches and say that the current system calls don't support an exact match but that reducing to 30fps can get a match or the OS team can do additional work to expose a lower-level graphics primitive to make an exact match. You'll never get that from your typical Infosys grunt. The vast majority of the Indian engineers with that skill level are either employed in the US on H-1Bs or in India at the FAANG India offices.

<comment><USER11> Nothing you said there suggests that this is an India specific problem. Paraphrasing:

> good developers capable of self managing work at Google or Apple

> the only Indian developers at that level work at FAANG

It's almost like good engineers are attracted to the companies that can afford them, regardless of their nationality.

<comment><USER10> No, there are a lot of good Serbian developers for example but they all work in outsourcing since the FAANGs don't have offices there. So there are a lot of very talented Serbian devs who do contract work. But in India there is a robust export and domestic market for engineers and a HUGE services market so the services firms are mostly populated by crap talent. It is an India specific problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I worked for an oil and gas company in Houston about 5 years ago, and the IT organization was primarily Indian contractors working through a couple companies. I recall Infosys and Larsen and Toubro.

One of the IT contractors supporting the SAP system confessed to me how horribly L&TI treated him, and how if he spoke up about it, they could force him to return to India. He was making $18 an hour btw, although I'm pretty sure his billable rate was far larger. One of his Indian friends found out what he'd told me and ended up yelling at him in their native tongue because he wasn't supposed to speak up, apparently.

I'm sure tons of talent from India absolutely is deserving of their work visas, but there were companies clearly gaming the system.

<comment><USER13> I worked for HCL right out of college.

If I asked people whom I worked with to guess my salary, they couldn't even come close. I made about $180 per month with 48 hour work weeks.

<comment><USER14> I got offered about the same amount last month by HCL,for a position that required a Master's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it a bad take (or a sweeping generalization) to say that the quality of work done by IT service companies in that part of the word is consistently below-par?

<comment><USER16> It's truth. Nothing more than that. Same is true for most developing countries.

The top developers in India and other similar countries have no reason to work there with shitty salaries and sweatshop projects when they can get visa and much better salary in almost any other place like US, Europe, China etc. So they'll end up leaving and those mega enterprise outsourcing-corporations will pick from the ones that stay.

<comment><USER17> > they can get visa and much better salary in almost any other place like US, > Europe, China etc.

In Europe I'm already seeing some pushback against this. In some companies there are so many Indians that it's starting to affect the culture, so they're moving towards hiring more local juniors to train them, because there's less of a language/culture barrier.

<comment><USER18> Affect "culture". You mean Xenophobia ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> On the flip side - [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india- business/...](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india- business/india-may-see-105-unicorns-by-2025-says- nasscom/articleshow/71930457.cms)

<comment><USER20> It is coming from NASSCOM, which is a lobbying arm.

Value bloat is what people want, and NASSCOM does just that.

Take that news with loads of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's storytime

S1. I met a guy who was really passionate about blockchain and python. At some point, he joined a startup. They were using react-native. Within 2 months he left the job. They treated him really poorly, and no one was there to help him. Now he is preparing for gov jobs.

s2. Another young gun, who works in TCS it's been 6 months since he is last wrote a single line of code. At some point, they will throw a project at him and assume he is a top java hacker. That will solve all kinds of crazy problems.

</comment><comment><USER22> It took way longer than it should have, but recently it seems like companies have caught on. I've worked with more off-shore developers in the Dominican Republic / Belarus than India in the past 2 years.

Never understood the need for such large, low individual cost, tech teams anyways... almost always seems like a better idea to pay 2 people 200k a piece to work on something than hiring 8 off-shore developers / managers for 50k each.

</comment><comment><USER23> Average productivity of an Indian IT services employee is as low as $15000 a year. With no uptick in productivity - the only way you can improve margins is to cut the flab - which is there in senior and middle layers. So senior and middle managers who have made themselves redundant without upskilling are now game. Average work life duration of an Indian IT employee might be less than 20 years currently.

<comment><USER4> Trying to understand "average productivity" here. The 15K is what an average IT worker produces per year - for example if they were billed out for 1500 hours at 10$ per hour?

Genuine question, trying to understand. :)

<comment><USER23> That is true. Most companies have bench+overhead and billed resources may be 60% or less of total work force. Average billing works out to $10-15 for the low value high volume work these IT services firms do and that has not changed over the last 20 years or so. What has changed is a bloated middle/senior management which is a drag to the above business model. They did try to move up into consultancy and productised services - which did not really work.</comment></comment></comment>


Motorized reaction-wheel cube that can balance and walk on its edges - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2013/12/20/cubli-motorized-reaction-whee.html <comment><USER2> For those who are interested, there are many sources for this story, giving different levels of detail, and making different claims. You can see some of them here, although there are no comments on any of them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949089) (phys.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946928) (youtube.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946485) (youtube.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946366) (ethz.ch)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943508) (theverge.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6942335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6942335) (thetechblock.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941890) (digg.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5285021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5285021) (robohub.org)</comment>


An SSD Endurance Experiment: They're All Dead (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead <comment><USER2> > " _Intel doesn 't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 > Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself > when the power is cycled._"

I don't understand why Intel wouldn't just configure these drives to go into read-only mode permanently. If I realized my hard drive had become read-only and didn't suspect hard drive failure, my first inclination would be to reboot my computer, not immediately back up all data.

<comment><USER3> The article is wrong on this point, and on Intel's intentions, as far as I can tell. Intel has a "Supernova" feature ([http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data- integrity-in-solid-state...](http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data-integrity-in- solid-state-drives-what-supernovas-mean-to-you/)) which will cause some drive models to brick themselves if certain conditions are met - errors in the control path, for example, which basically mean you cannot trust the drive at all. The supernova feature is only claimed for enterprise drives, and the 335 series is not an enterprise drive.

I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models, including pushing them to the same kinds of extreme that the SSD endurance experiment did, and I have never observed them to self-brick simply because they reached their flash endurance point.

What I have observed is a number of firmware bugs (or possibly just the supernova feature) that caused the drive to brick on power cycle, even for drives in perfect health.

I liked the SSD endurance articles, because they went a long way to allaying fears about SSDs, but I think it's a shame they've left this point in.

<comment><USER4> > I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models

Hey, could I get your help selecting an Intel SSD model? Overwhelmed by the number of SKUs.

<comment><USER3> Sure. Can you see the email in my profile?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Continuous Integration systems can really burn through SSD endurance. If you have a large, compiled code base which rebuilds on every checkin, you will be creating and deleting object code constantly. Use smartmontools or HDD Guardian to keep an eye on endurance.

Our code base creates around half a gig of compilation product on every build. We used up the endurance on a consumer-level Micron SSD in about a year. No data loss occurred.

<comment><USER6> If it's not too big, could you just use tmpfs for compilation, and copy the final results to persistent storage if needed?

Just food for thought; your point remains valid.

<comment><USER7> DevOps here: This is the solution. Its also stupid fast if everything is done in RAM (just ensure you're not swapping out to disk).

<comment><USER8> People keep saying this but compiling seems super CPU bound so im confused.

<comment><USER9> Disk seeks when lopking up the next file to compile used to be a huge bottleneck.

<comment><USER10> At least for C#, it is entirely CPU bound. Faster CPUs and more cores will increase the IO, but not enough to matter anything.

But the point about SSD endurance still stands, a ramdisk solves that problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just wondering how it is compare to HDD: (Here's my calculation base on some assumptions, feel free to correct it if you see any errors.)

2.5PB = 2500TB = 2,500,000 GB

2,500,000 GB / (80MB /s typical HDD Speed ) = 31,250,000 seconds = 8680 Hours = 361 days.

It will take HDD 361 days to write 2.5PB at 80MB/s.

I wonder how many HDD can survive 361 days of 80MB/s non stop?

<comment><USER12> > I wonder how many HDD can survive 361 days of 80MB/s non stop?

I wonder how many _consumer_ HDDs can survive that load. I would be shocked if datacenter-grade drives fail after only 361 days of continuous load.

<comment><USER13> 80MB/s sequential reads or writes is probably something consumer HDDs can survive for several years. The platters are always spinning, the only difference is that now the drive is continuously reading or writing what's under the head. It's the random accesses (and associated seeks) which stresses them.

There are various comparisons out there which conclude "datacenter-grade" is largely a marketing/warranty thing; the drives themselves may be nearly identical in design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I modified some programs of mine that generate a lot of files to read the old version of the file first, compare it with the new version in the buffer, and only write out the new file if it is actually different. This cuts way down on the write cycles to the SSD. It's faster, too!

</comment><comment><USER15> Why do the SSDs all brick themselves when this happens? It seems like a huge mis-feature; HDDs are almost never recoverable when they fail but if you can't reallocate blocks on flash just go into read-only mode.

<comment><USER16> In principle, going into read-only mode should work and it should take a while for read disturb errors to corrupt the data. But there's a trade-off that if you're trying to keep servicing writes as long as possible (and retiring bad blocks as they wear out), the risk rises that an earlier-than-expected unrecoverable error will corrupt the critical data structures that keep track of the mapping between logical and physical addresses. Playing it safe means quitting early and thus giving your drive an endurance rating that suggests it is _less_ reliable than the competition.

And it's no surprise that the aspects of SSD firmware that by nature get the least real-world testing and are the most tricky to design would be quite buggy in practice. Even ZFS doesn't try to avoid catastrophic data loss in the face of unreliable RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a fun article but it would have been outrageously good if say 30 examples of each SSD sourced "randomly" had been tested. OK a bit expensive.

"Over the past 18 months, we've watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need."

They tested six SSDs and got "...far more data than most consumers..." \- that's the takeaway.

<comment><USER18> Would you be willing to pay for a subscription to a quarterly report for that info?

<comment><USER19> For me?

Kind of yes.

Only I have subscription overload. Every newspaper and their dog wants to sell me _subscriptions_ but I generally don't read newspapers daily.

I'd love to have access to this data through some spotify-for-text service or Blendle or something though.

I guess I'm not alone in wanting both to pay researchers, bloggers, journalists etc etc, but based on what I read, not based on a monthly subscribtion to every company that I ever want to read something from?

<comment><USER18> I keep my recurring subscriptions to a minimum too, so I understand. But, funding the procurement of statistically significant numbers of multiple models of SSD drives, running them through to end-of-life characterization, and keeping that all updated as new models come out is a higher spending profile than your typical blogger. It seems more like a business research report or recurring lab test type of service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I loved this series. It inspired us to do similar experiments with SSDs as we were spec'ing out new servers. I highly recommend doing this so you get a feel for what SMART looks like for your specific SSDs. Its nice to be able to monitor that to have some idea when your SSDs are going to die, especially if most of your drives are aging together.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you divide the data written at the point where reallocated sectors _start_ appearing by the size, you can figure out the actual average endurance of the flash. That results in:

        400 Samsung 840 Series
        2344 Samsung 840 Pro
        2400 Kingston HyperX 3K
        2800 Intel 335 Series
        4400 Corsair Neutron GTX

</comment><comment><USER21> its nice when a tech article ends with a song

</comment><comment><USER22> WTF, This a repost of a 2 year old dead article</comment>


Discussing your business idea with other people - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a start-up, and I think it's good. I shared with a couple other people interested in starting a business, just to see if they thought it was viable. They certainly thought so.<p>Now I'm paranoid. To what extent is this justified? I'm aware that the idea alone isn't worth much, but there's really only one or two ways to implement it. <comment><USER2> You're afraid others will steal it? IMHO, I think this paranoia can be harmful. Yes, if you talk to people, there is a "chance" that someone will steal it. This is a risk. But I think you need to take that risk, because the benefit of researching your market far outweights this.

So get out there, talk to people, find out if your idea is SO GOOD, that people are willing to pay for it. Hell, see if they'll pay for it now!

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Since posting the above comment, I've read many other people advocating your approach and I think it makes far more sense. Feeling much better about this! Thanks again.</comment></comment>


Brazil's cancer curse - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/brazils-cancer-curse <comment><USER2> You know what is interesting? In the city I currently live (São Carlos, an inner city in the state of São Paulo, Brasil), there's a 20 years old research that is helping victims of cancer with a new drug. The idea is pretty simple, but unfortunately I don't have a source in english, so the following is in portuguese:

[http://www.jornalciencia.com/saude/mente/5372-brasileiro- ter...](http://www.jornalciencia.com/saude/mente/5372-brasileiro-teria- encontrado-a-cura-do-cancer-mas-estaria-sendo-impedido-de-registrar-o- medicamento)

Here's the interesting part though, the Brazilian government and even ANVISA (Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency) are not giving a fuck about his discovery, thus the researcher is covering the costs of fabrication of drug and giving it away for free.

Thousands of people from all the country is coming to my city for this drug -- people who used it before says it is a miracle, it really works.

I guess the media can help pressing the government/ANVISA, and it is what is already happening (very slowly though). I hope this text I'm writing spread his discovery further and someway reach someone who can help us. I'm here for whatever questions you have and I will do my best in answering them.

Please share.

<comment><USER3> This sounds exactly like every quack scam out there. The mean old medical authorities are ignoring me! They must be jealous. Yeah, that's it.

<comment><USER2> Except the researcher is distributing the drug without charging for it. He's not interested in the money.

<comment><USER4> How does he finance his operation?

<comment><USER2> He has more than one research, he even has a factory where he provides materials to a big company here in Brasil. It is irrelevant for this discussion anyways, since it is completely unrelated.

<comment><USER4> Well it could have been the case that he still makes money from the drug, just not from directly selling it. People could make donations, or he could give seminars where people pay to learn how to get healthy, or whatever. Or people prefer to do business with him because he has such a good reputation. So it's not irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Southeastern Brazil sits most directly under the SAA, which increases background levels of ionizing radiation for those in the geographic area.

If there existed a map of these Li-Fraumeni variant cases, which it seems there does not, it would be interesting to compare that with the position of the SAA.

It seems reasonable that a P53 mutation combined with higher background radiation would lead to increased cancer risk in those with the mutation, so the location in southeast Brazil seems like it might not be a coincidence.

One also has to wonder if the P53 mutation itself is an artifact of high-Z exposure, even though it looks to be identical in all cases, but the genetics may rule that out.

It may be that the Brazilian Li-Fraumeni variant situation gives us our only model of cancer risk in a low geomagnetic field environment, which is very interesting for human space exploration.

<comment><USER6> It's more likely the P53 mutation came from a Founder (individual who had the mutation quite some time ago) that passed it on to many individuals. Whether that original mutation was caused by a higher than average level of ionizing radiation is entirely speculative. This does not rule out increased cancer rates due to unrepaired ionizing radiation damage that went unrepaired to mutant P53, although that is also pretty speculative (I mean, it's a known fact that happens, but it's also not particularly necessary to explain the observations here).

The part about cancer risk models and geomagnetic fields and space exploration are a tangent, and not even a relevant or scientifically plausible one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an interesting article. I knew of a family that was nearly all wiped out by cancer. One family member was my sister's best friend. She had leukaemia and died at 13. Her younger brother and sister both lived into their early 30's but both died of cancer. Their elder half sister(on the father's side) died of cancer along with their mother(thought the cancer gene was on the dad side).

I did think it was like a curse indeed.

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope one day works like the one of Dr. Crescenti come to the light of public.

[http://www.crescenti.com.ar/tratamiento/informacion- general/](http://www.crescenti.com.ar/tratamiento/informacion-general/)

</comment><comment><USER9> > a mutation in a gene called p53

The gene is called TP53 and p53 is the protein it produces: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sad but true. I suppose families with a high cancer rate will die off - evolution.

<comment><USER11> The article mentions that this isn't happening here and that's the problem. It's not so severe that families die off but is severe enough to cause a lot of ongoing casualties.</comment></comment>


Linux Malware "Drovorub" developed by Russian exposed by NSA and FBI - <AUTHOR> https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/press-room/Article/2311407/nsa-and-fbi-expose-russian-previously-undisclosed-malware-drovorub-in-cybersecu/ <comment><USER2> Note that "drovorub" isn't even a Russian word, "drovosek" is. It means "woodcutter".

<comment><USER3> Why would a natively Russian speaking team misspell this word? Is it possible this software wasn't developed in Russia/by Fancy Bear or that it's some sort of play on words that I don't understand as an English speaker?

<comment><USER4> The article says it's a composite of two recovered strings from one of the malicious programs involved. So I wouldn't read too much into it

Edit: sorry, this article, which we on another thread [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/08/nsa-a...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/08/nsa-and-fbi-warn-that-new-linux-malware-threatens-national- security/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <quote> Preventative Mitigations

NOTE: The mitigations that follow are not meant to protect against the initial access vector. The mitigations are designed to prevent Drovorub's persistence and hiding technique only.

Apply Linux Updates

System administrators should continually check for and run the latest version of vendor-supplied software for computer systems in order to take advantage of software advancements and the latest security detection and mitigation safeguards (National Security Agency, 2018). System administrators should update to Linux Kernel 3.7 or later in order to take full advantage of kernel signing enforcement.

Prevent Untrusted Kernel Modules

System owners are advised to configure systems to load only modules with a valid digital signature making it more difficult for an actor to introduce a malicious kernel module into the system. An adversary could use a malicious kernel module to control the system, hide, or persist across reboots (National Security Agency, 2017).

Activating UEFI Secure Boot is necessary to ensure that only signed kernel modules can be loaded. This requires a UEFI-compliant platform configured in UEFI native mode (not legacy or compatibility modes) in Thorough or Full enforcement mode. Once enabled, Secure Boot creates an integrity chain at boot by verifying signatures of firmware, bootloader(s), and Machine Owner Key (MOK). The kernel, initial filesystem, and kernel modules are then verified by this MOK, which is distributed with Secure Boot-ready Linux distributions. Components with untrusted or absent signatures are denied from execution by Secure Boot policy. Enabling Secure Boot may prevent some products from loading, potentially affecting system functionality, and may require custom configuration (National Security Agency, 2017). </quote>

</comment><comment><USER6> > kernel module

If you're running a module-enabled kernel then you were already pwned to begin with; nothing to see here. There is absolutely no need for modules except on live cds and the like. Of course, kernel configuration is another huge headache; don't get me wrong.

<comment><USER7> Can someone explain this? I have DKMS enabled because I use the proprietary nvidia drivers. Also all my drivers are kernel modules. I feel like I'm missing something here, though.

<comment><USER8> If you use proprietary binary code in kernel, it runs with high privileges and can be used to provide remote root access to your system. Don't worry much about it, your computer most probably already runs proprietary binary code with such high privileges before your OS boots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ¿Do they seriously expect us to believe this neocon cyber BS?</comment>


Delegation experiment feedback & looking for a Python dev - <AUTHOR>

I make social apps, but have realized there is a limit to how much stuff I can make just by myself. My app hit/miss ratio is high enough that if I can keep it up, it would even make sense to pay someone to help with my projects.
So I decided to experiment with delegating. If you are interested in helping, I wrote this spec to describe what the app would be like: http://etherpad.com/ZesZbqIR5Z
If you haven't used App Engine before but are otherwise a pretty good dev, this could be your chance to get paid for learning it. I'll monitor the comments here and you can also mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com
If my approach to this seems wrong somehow, do share your thoughts on how I should proceed to get people to help me out. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link <http://etherpad.com/ZesZbqIR5Z>

This is also my first shot at writing a spec for other devs to use. I tried not to be too formal or overspec.

Comment from #startups: "I hate the application already" :)

<comment><USER2> Someone wiped out all your text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That sounds like a cool app. How would you make money with something like that?

Where does the hiring come in? Are you saying someone should build this as a sort of interview question/project?

<comment><AUTHOR> It would make money from offer networks, I have good experiences from those before. Would likely start paying the cost of a developer at around 10k daily visits.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "hiring" so I changed the wording to "delegation". I'm looking for someone to do this as a short project, but there would be other projects from me if it goes well.

I'm still trying to figure out what the best way to structure something like this is.</comment></comment>


10 New PHP Content Management Systems(CMS) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamcss.com/2009/07/10-new-php-content-management.html

<comment> onreact-com Great list, I haven't heard of many of them. I don't need 10 CMSs though. The list does not provide many clues as to which one I should choose.</comment>


How can the iPhone SDK be NDA'd? - <AUTHOR> http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/397721495/how-can-the-iphone-sdk-be-ndad <comment><USER2> It's not the SDK that you pay for, it's the _beta_ SDK that you pay for (along with cert signing and app distribution). The 3.2 SDK is currently only available for paid developers. Everyone else gets 3.1 and the docs are available without a login. I understand it's a moot point when people are violating the NDA left and right, but it's supposed to be that the information in the 3.2 SDK about the iPad is all confidential info.

It's confidential in theory, it's just nearly unenforceable in practice. It reeks of evil because it's only enforceable via fear.

<comment><USER3> It's funny that they go to the trouble of making the SDK available to paid developers early, yet it's still unclear to us if the iPad will actually have a physical GPS chip or not. The tech specs are vague.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're asking how it can be confidential? It's confidential because you signed a contract agreeing that it's confidential.

Sure, if you got everyone who bought your book to sign a contract agreeing not to write bad reviews, then you could potentially sue them if they violate that contract. Indeed I'm aware of several hardware and software products that at least claim that by using them you agree not to post bad reviews or benchmarks.

<comment><USER5> You can't change reality by signing a contract. If you signed a contract saying it was directions to build a time machine, would that make it so?

<comment><USER6> None of the contracts mentioned in the post you're replying to purport to change reality. They just restrict what the signer is allowed to do.

<comment><USER7> I think that the point that was attempting to come across in that post was that just because something is in a contract doesn't mean that it's enforceable.

I can't sign a contract that says that if I don't crack a joke that makes you smile, you get to kill me. I could sign that contract, and you could kill me, but you'll still go to jail for it.

<comment><USER8> I think seldo's comment above captures it. What you said is true, but you also can't force Apple to give you a development environment for their device and let you sell apps in their private store. They have offered to do so anyway, so long as you keep it to yourself. I would bet that many SDKs for closed devices (e.g. game consoles) are under similar restrictions. Can anyone comment on that?

<comment><USER7> To be the devil's advocate, most game console SDKs are sold at a much higher price therefore setting the barrier to entry much higher.

      Apple iPhone SDK = $99
      Sony PS3 SDK = $10,250 [1]

One could argue that $99 is affordable by most anyone. $10K? No so much.

[1] [http://www.betanews.com/article/Sony-slashes-price-of- PS3-SD...](http://www.betanews.com/article/Sony-slashes-price-of-PS3-SDK-to- fix-game-problem/1195491681)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually, I think there is an interesting question here. Please bear with me, because I am not a lawyer and my knowledge of intellectual property law is limited, but here is what I think applies.

(1) There are various sorts of intellectual property, with different standards and rules. For instance, there is patent law: if Apple had a patent on the API of the iPhone then they could tell anyone not to use it except on Apple's terms. They don't have a patent. There are two other sorts of law which might apply: copyright law and trade secret law.

(2) Copyright law would allow Apple to go after anyone caught making copies of the API docs. But it would NOT allow Apple to prosecute anyone for mailing a printout to all their friends, nor could they prosecute anyone for knowing the API _or for writing code that calls it_. On the other hand, Apple clearly has a copyright on the API docs.

(3) Trade secret law is another possible area that might apply. The archetypal example of trade secret law is the "secret formula" for Coke. To be a trade secret, Apple's business must depend, to some extent, on keeping it a secret (I think we can safely assume this applies). Also, Apple must make an effort to keep it secret -- that's what the NDAs are all about. The point that the article raises is that perhaps Apple's willingness to share the "secret" to anyone with $100 bucks to burn weakens this to the point where they can no longer claim the full advantages of Trade Secret protection.

I believe that one of the things Trade Secret protection provides is the ability to constrain 3rd parties. Contract law allows Apple to sue the guy who leaks the API doc -- but perhaps he's a bum with $100 to his name: there's only so much they can do. Trade secret law (I believe) is what would allow Apple to tell OTHER people who got a copy from this bum to relinquish their copy and stop using the information. If Apple's low price and wide number of customers for the iPhone API have weakened this sort of protection, that is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is a simple matter of contract law - it is an exchanged for bargain. In consideration of you getting access to the SDK, etc., you are agreeing to a non disclosure clause and paying $99, among other things. If you don't want to enter into that agreement, don't.

Shrink wrap licenses and related items are generally enforceable.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's Apple. They sue people for spreading rumours, what do you expect?

<comment><USER12> It's Apple. They sue people for inducing trusted people to break their NDAs and publish trade secrets.

<comment><USER11> Is it really a trade secret when the SDK can be bought for $99? It's stupid that's what it is.

<comment><USER12> The "rumors" reference is to the ThinkSecret lawsuit, not to this SDK.

And I'll think you'll find the SDK can not be purchased. There is a way to obtain a license that grants you some rights to use it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Massive Layoffs Coming at Cisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300081750/sources-massive-layoffs-coming-at-cisco.htm <comment><USER2> Next to surprise profits there's nothing investors love more than layoffs.

My impression from hiring IT folks is that cisco was already a bit of a sweat shop... so increasing everyones work another 20% won't bode well for the remaining staff.

</comment><comment><USER3> How can hardware companies seriously believe they can suddenly transition and become software companies? It doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER4> Haven't you heard? Hardware is just software in a little box...</comment></comment>