Hacking the iPod: How I Earned $65K in High School (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5906616/hacking-the-ipod-how-i-earned-65k-in-high-school <comment><USER2> So, if the article is to be believed Apple didn't want him buying broken iPods that were under warranty and sending them in for warranty repairs. How the hell is that OK? The warranty is transferable. What grounds could an Apple lawyer stand on if the products are under warranty?

<comment><USER3> I'm still trying to get past the idea that any significant number of people would rather SELL a broken iPod that was still under warranty, rather than get a warranty replacement themselves.

<comment><USER4> I return at least a few hard drives that have failed for customers that are still under warranty per year. I tell them they can send the unit back or can pay me a little to send it back. Quite a large percentage of them just give me the drive and don't worry about it.

People, in general, hate dealing with warranty returns. For many items you have to follow pretty specific instructions to avoid your warranty being declared void.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huh, I did exactly the same thing for a few years. At one point I had about 25 iPods (almost all 3rd gens) in various states of functioning. I made a little money, but nothing crazy.

The one and only 3rd get I still have and use daily I bought on ebay listed as "completely dead, doesn't do anything" for something like $30. The day I got it, I turned it on, and it has worked perfectly every minute I've had it.

<comment><USER6> "Completely dead", until you plug it in with FireWire, which will force-charge it. USB's request-charge system still bugs me.

It's awesome that you're still using an iPod daily. Did you mod it at all?

<comment><USER5> Actually I never did plug it into Firewire.

I've never even opened the case on my 3rd gen iPod - it works perfectly, no mods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I also did exactly the same thing, and I'm the same age! I now have a small collection of old iPods. I didn't make much money, but I collected a large amount of music, and made friends. In fact, the iPod & iTunes were a major part of getting things started with all 5 of my ex-girlfriends, and a major part of holding those relationships together long-distance. I did make a little money from an iBook repair business when I was 15, but then I spent it all to upgrade one of the iBooks with an 80GB disk and 640MB of RAM.

These days I'm using an iPod Video 5.5G with a Tarkan iFlash-Dual SD adaptor, with a PQI Air Card for integrated WiFi.

Check out the thread of iPod collectors on MacRumors: [http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/calling-all-ipod- collect...](http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/calling-all-ipod- collectors.387358/page-70)

And of course, the Head-Fi modding thread: [http://www.head- fi.org/t/566780/official-ipod-video-classic-...](http://www.head- fi.org/t/566780/official-ipod-video-classic-5g-5-5g-6g-6-5g-7g-ssd-mod-thread)

I was a moderator on the iPodLinux forums back in the day, and I've kept in touch with a couple of guys from there. Say hi if you remember Podzilla!

If you're a developer and can help me patch Rockbox to add serial Rx, I want to turn my iPod into a USB HID keyboard. I'll get around to it, but these days I'm busy with work. [http://hackaday.com/2015/06/27/keymouserial-solves-your- rasp...](http://hackaday.com/2015/06/27/keymouserial-solves-your-raspberry-pi- keyboard-problems/)

"Nanos? Forget about it." \- Watch this space. I now work for a flash memory manufacturer in Taiwan.

<comment><USER7> "These days I'm using an iPod Video 5.5G with a Tarkan iFlash-Dual SD adaptor, with a PQI Air Card for integrated WiFi."

I'm curious - are you using SD card(s) mainly to:

A) Increase capacity

B) Decrease weight

C) Decrease power consumption (??)

D) Use wi-fi

?

<comment><USER6> A) Sort of. I have a SanDisk 512GB SDXC card, and it formats correctly. But the iPod's iTunesDB library is limited to 35000 songs. So for most people, there's no point in having more than 128GB. Rockbox is not my music player, because I want my play counts to sync back to iTunes. I still want more capacity, but see my explanation in D) WiFi.

B) Weight is not an issue for me (I started with a 1G in February 2002 - everything else seems light).

C) Battery life is longer with SD cards than hard drives, but that's not a big issue for me. Sync speed is also faster, which is a small bonus.

D). WiFi is the big feature that put the iPod back in my pocket. (It was gone from October 2011 when I got a 64GB iPhone 4S until March 2015).

My iPhone's got a lot of space, but 10GB of Wiki2Touch (offline Wikipedia), 2GB of Galileo Offline Maps take a toll, before I even start to sync my 85GB main music library (my external library is over 300GB, but it isn't duplicate- sorted; it's the backups from friends' iPods).

When I had an old iBook with a 10GB hard drive, and a 30GB iPod, I backed up my entire disk to my pocket. That was awesome. If my bag were stolen, I'd lose my laptop and external hard drive but not my pocket-sized backup.

Now I have a lot more data, and I want to access it from my phone. The 512GB SDXC lets me backup my laptop. The PQI Air Card only supports microSD, but I use an SD female to microSD male ribbon cable adaptor. Power to the card comes from the iPod through the iFlash.

My "WiPod" is therefore effectively an AirStash (SD to WiFi) and iPod in one. It's also useful for copying photos from friends' cameras.

During many of my iPod-less days, I had a Raspberry Pi in an iPod shell in the belt clip case. That had host USB, so I could also mount iPhones using libimobiledevice and copy music from friends. Most of the time I just used it for photos, though. I'm still trying to find a way to get host USB into my iPod, though. The CoreWind WiFiG25 is my current favourite (it's small enough to fit in the iPod's case). But CoreWind still didn't finish the WiFi driver for Debian.

If backup is so important, why didn't I use mSata for 1TB instead of 512GB? Because I only have 512GB of data, and accessing the files is as important as carrying them. Everybody uses SD, and sharing over WiFi to my phone is super useful. And I can backup my laptop to the SD card (only 2 USB ports) while my iPhone and mouse are plugged in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi all. I wrote this 3+ years ago. This wasn't a crazy operation but it was a pretty lucrative and fun side gig in my teenage years. Happy to answer any questions here or on twitter @teddy.

<comment><USER9> I'm just wondering what did you do with the money? This was a solid source of income for someone that age, did it make any massive changes or just increased your quality of life?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMO this is not really impressive. He bought iPods that were still under warranty, transferred the warranty and paid the price of shipping. There is no hack about this, he's following existing policy laid down by Apple.

<comment><USER11> That's what he did _after_ his legitimate iPod repair and parts selling business became untenable due to shrinking component sizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> small clarification - that was $65k gross, not nett. sounds like a lot of it went back into broken/spare part purchases.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if they paid tax?</comment>


How Apache Kylin Is Rapidly Changing the Way We Approach Big Data - <AUTHOR> https://kyligence.io/blog/how-apache-kylin-is-rapidly-changing-the-way-we-approach-big-data/ <comment><AUTHOR> Q&A with Apache Kylin Committer, Kaige Liu

<comment><USER3> Very cool, thank you for sharing. I've been a part of the Kylin community for over a year now and it has been a great experience. The project is really pretty cool. I know some people think of it as just another OLAP engine - <USER2> it is way more than that.

If you're part of a team working with huge datasets, take a look at it, and if you're looking for a great open source project to get involved with, join us!</comment></comment>


Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war - <AUTHOR> http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/16223/james-moore-eternal-war-a-decade-of-civilization/ <comment><USER2> Hacker News discussion from the original reddit post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4100032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4100032)

</comment><comment><USER3> It has somewhat died down, but a lot of the strategies people came up with and other information have been collected at [https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar](https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wtf? I clicked that link expecting some screenshots.

<comment><USER5> Here's some screenshots from the original reddit thread

[http://imgur.com/a/rAnZs](http://imgur.com/a/rAnZs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR

Man plays a single Civ II game, locked in a 3-way stalemate, for 10 years (2000 in-game years).

He asks reddit for advice on ending the stalemate, posting his savegame. Quickly a community forms around it. Fans post not only strategies but also art and fiction.

The game and related discussions have also been added to collections in the Stanford University Libraries.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for this. The signal-to-noise ratio of the article was dangerously low for my attention span ;)

<comment><USER8> It's a human interest story, and a very interesting one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love how this sim makes you a tyrannic psychopath.

As if one man was the Nation and that people had no rights on their own lives and could not have a free will.

These games are wrong on so many level.

Some RPG can transform your psyche, like the jail experiment in SF has proven. Civlization/colonization have let me with a bitter taste in the mouth as a player once I realized how it was making me think, in the real world.

Since then, I uninstalled all of these games.

I think this article about muv luv is right on spot : [http://tay.kinja.com/why-the-muv-luv-saga-is-the-greatest- st...](http://tay.kinja.com/why-the-muv-luv-saga-is-the-greatest-story-ive- ever-ex-1544334468)

<comment><USER10> Have you tried Crusader Kings 2? It's a strategy game which tries to simulate all the people from courtiers to kings all with their own motivations.

<comment> a-priori Last night, I was playing Crusader Kings 2 as the Byzantine Empire. I had just conquered Jerusalem in a holy war (after the Catholics failed to take it in a crusade, ha!) and everything was good. I had tons of money rolling in, I was secure in my realm with a son groomed to inherit, and I was thinking about expanding further south to take Alexandria. I figured it was a good time to call it a night at about 11:30pm.

I was just squashing a peasant uprising before going to bed when suddenly the Shia caliph -- the same guy I just stole Jerusalem from -- declared a jihad for Anatolia! Their armies start moving north into Armenia and Anatolia and while I was trying to get enough of my troops in one place to fend them off, some vassals decided to shift their votes and nominate the Exarch of Greece as heir to the empire instead of my son. Stupid elective succession.

I had to get rid of him, because I was about 45 years old and sick with pneumonia. If I lost the empire then my son would just be a random duke with a few counties. It'd probably be a generation before I could retake the empire. But my council wouldn't let me revoke his title because too many of them owed him favours. I had him excommunicated, but that didn't help, and I couldn't imprison him because I'd almost certainly fail and I couldn't have him rebelling while I'm fighting the Muslims.

So I spied on him until I got a chance to abduct and imprison him. Great, now what do I do to get rid of him without angering all my vassals? Executing him would incur tyranny. Should I blind him? That's a big deal to Greeks; they wouldn't vote for a blind emperor right? Or just throw him in the Oubliette and hope he dies before I do?

Next thing I know it's 1:30am and I have to be up in the morning.

<comment><USER11> That sounds fun. Can i play it on linux?

<comment><USER12> Yes

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_Kings_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_Kings_II)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


$500 AWS Credit for $47 - <AUTHOR> http://bundle.betalist.com/

<comment><USER2> I signed up for this. The AWS thing is for "AWS Activate", which you need to apply for using the code they provide after you buy. Not sure yet how it will play out, but figured it was worth a shot for $47.

</comment><comment><USER3> AWS has a free tier that's more than enough for most startups - [http://aws.amazon.com/free/](http://aws.amazon.com/free/)</comment>


Ask HN: What's Faster than Redis - <AUTHOR> Is it even possible to create a faster data structure server? Redis is written in C and made the design choices to be very, very fast. <comment><USER2> _Is it even possible to create a faster data structure server?_

It's probably not reasonably possible to make a faster general solution, but you could implement something that maps your specific needs to memory in a faster way, essentially removing the cases that Redis needs to handle that don't apply to your data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, [https://github.com/fastio/pedis](https://github.com/fastio/pedis)</comment>


Training Deep Neural Networks Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://upul.github.io/2015/10/12/Training-(deep)-Neural-Networks-Part:-1/ <comment><USER2> Off-topic, but your article's design looks beautiful. What did you use to generate it, e.g. a converted IPython notebook, or homemade CSS plus MathJax? And what did you use for the figures?

<comment><USER3> I found this in the code, [https://github.com/poole/poole](https://github.com/poole/poole).</comment></comment>


Win a Free Pass to Gradle Summit in Palo Alto June 23-24th - <AUTHOR> http://gradle.org/ <comment><USER2> > Automate and integrate your DevOps toolchain with a concise and expressive > build programming language.

That build programming language is Apache Groovy -- why didn't you mention it?</comment>


Why Microsoft can Blow-Off with C#? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alenz.org/mirror/khason/why-microsoft-can-blow-off-with-c.html <comment><USER2> Clojure's Rich Hickey is clean shaven :-(

I can't find a picture for Qi's Mark Tarver....</comment>


Nimbus.io: Open-source alternative to Amazon S3 - <AUTHOR> https://nimbus.io/

<comment><USER2> Is being 100% open-source really the motivating factor to use this over S3? I would think the only factors vs using this over S3 would be price and reliability/performance.

I could care less if this is open source, if I'm going to offload my data to a 3rd party, open source or not and I'm worried about privacy I'm going to encrypt it. I honestly could care less what happens on the back-end, just commit to a data loss and reliability SLA and I'm happy.

If you can support my use case, or have reliable performance near 370k requests/sec ([http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/10/amazon-s3-566-billion- obj...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/10/amazon-s3-566-billion- objects-370000-requestssecond-and-hiring.html)) and be cheaper than S3 then we'll talk.

<comment><USER3> Yes, being opens source is motivation, because you can create your own cloud with your own hardware when you need it.

And it's additional assurance that you'll be able to deploy your system even if they go out of business.

<comment><USER4> Is there anyone, anywhere, who considers that as a plus? Who would actually consider rolling out their own cloud infrastructure?

<comment><USER5> Actually, many people consider it. Some are simply cautious about hosting their data with a third party. Some are prevented from using a third party for compliance or regulatory reasons. Also, it's generally more cost-effective for extremely large datasets to be self-hosted rather than hosted by a third party.

<comment><USER4> Aren't the bulk of customers who turn to the cloud rather small operations, who are trying to "outsource" as much of their infrastructure issues as possible? And aren't these customers much more concerned about pricing, rather than possible future growth?

Note: I don't mean to ask this sarcastically. I'm actually asking.

<comment><USER5> From my experience working with Rackspace Cloud Files, customer sizes are all over the map. Some customers are very small. Some are very large. I know that S3 has a similar variance in customer size.

From my experience talking to users (and potential users) of Openstack (<http://openstack.org>), there again is variance. Most people are relatively small (a few hundred GB to a few hundred TB). Some are much bigger (several PB). The most exciting thing I heard was that CERN is evaluating Openstack swift (<http://swift.openstack.org>) for their storage needs. A researcher from CERN gave a keynote at the last Openstack design summit. CERN generates 25 PB / year and has a 20 year retention policy. They have vast storage needs. The storage needs vary greatly.

I've seen that outsourcing infrastructure is great to a point, but the largest users can generally get substantial cost savings by bringing their infrastructure back in house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is already a 100% open source version of Amazon S3: Openstack swift (<http://swift.openstack.org>). Swift is in use by many companies, and it is the software that runs Rackspace's Cloud Files product, storing petabytes of data and billions of objects.

Swift's code is available on github (<http://github.com/openstack/swift>) and devs and users are almost always available in #openstack on freenode. There is a wealth of info available and more available to anyone who asks.

I'm all for encouraging many people to solve large-scale storage problems. However, as others have pointed out, nimbus is claiming to be open without providing much detail.

<comment><USER6> (SpiderOak / Nimbus.io cofounder here)

Thanks for your interest! Nimbus.io will have public git repositories, "developed in the open" before we ever charge money to use the service. We just haven't posted the links yet. :)

We admire OpenStack and Ceph as great examples of open source S3 alternatives. Also, Riak+Luwak isn't protocol-level compatible with S3 but offers similar capabilities and an truly elegant design.

Nimbus.io takes a different approach than the above options in that it focuses on space efficiency using parity instead of replication, allowing the storage of a little more than twice as much data using the same hardware. It's a tradeoff of cost vs. latency. For long term archival storage, while throughput matters greatly, latency less so. That's why the price is $0.06/GB.

<comment><USER5> Great to hear. I'll look forward to looking at your implementation and exploring the tradeoffs you are making. I'm especially interested in how you solve durability in the face of multiple, simultaneous hardware failures. I'm also quite curious about how you are handling object metadata.

You are absolutely right that these things are greatly dependent on the use case. I'm happy to see other people trying to solve these problems too.

Can you describe your API? Do you have your own? Are you reimplementing the S3 API? REST-ful? xmlrpc? How do you handle authentication and authorization?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So it stores data using RS encoding on multiple pieces.

I've had a quick look around the website, and the most information i could sort of squeeze out was from the blog.

The arch page <https://nimbus.io/architecture/> is devoid of architecture.

I don't see any mention of compression or dedup.

I don't see any mention of network level failover/redundency.

I don't see any mention of high level CNC functionality/db arch (ie. swift's notorious file replicated SQLite database....)

I don't see a download source button. Is that just me?

Overall, sounds very interesting and rather promising. Who are the people behind Nimbus.io?

<comment><USER8> _"I don't see a download source button. Is that just me?"_

Says right there on the front page: "We are currently in private beta. Please sign-up and we will send you an invitation as soon as we are ready!" Presumably, the download is behind the invite-wall.

<comment><USER9> I think someone's confused about what "100% open source" means.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. I think open source is just a buzzword for them. There is still money concerns behind this service. I was quite disappointed since I was expecting a "Source" link that goes to github or somewhere.

<comment><USER11> Wrt. their Spider Oak backup service, from [https://spideroak.com/faq/questions/35/why_isnt_spideroak_op...](https://spideroak.com/faq/questions/35/why_isnt_spideroak_open_source_yet_when_will_it_be/)

"Our founders and engineers have a strong open source background and we consider a contributory relationship with the FOSS community as the normal course of business. Thus, our plan all along has been to make our entire client-side code base open source; however, as anyone who has worked with such issues knows, it is often not quite that simple."

So they say they want to be good, but not quite yet. I've posted a question about nimbus.io on that page.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. If they only open source their client side libraries it would be a rather sad development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Storing 50TB on Amazon S3 (US-EAST) Premium costs ~ $6,264

Storing 50TB on Amazon S3 (US-EAST) Reduced Redundancy costs ~ $4,160

Storing 50TB on Nimbus: $3,000

Is Nimbus's fault tolerance closer to the Premium S3 or the Reduced Redundancy S3?

(for completeness, Nimbus's transfer out is $0.06 per GB vs Amazon's $0.12 per GB).

<comment><AUTHOR> They say[^1] that they can tolerate destruction of any 2 nodes without data loss. I don't know how many nodes Amazon S3 premium can tolerate.

[^1]: <https://nimbus.io/architecture/>

<comment><USER13> Amazon doesn't talk about their numbers either. The only thing they do say is that RRS (reduced redundancy storage) _'stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage, and thus is even more cost effective.'_

This is at the main page: <http://aws.amazon.com/s3/> (search for RRS)

<comment><USER14> Amazon says that S3 provides eleven nines (99.999999999%) durability of files. So if you have 100 billion objects in S3, you should expect to lose on average 1 per year. Or, if you have 10,000 files, you should expect to lose 1 per 10 million years. In addition they say it can tolerate the simultaneous failure of two datacenters. Nimbus, with 3 copies total, appears much less redundant... but nobody knows how Amazon calculated their eleven nines claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Eucalyptus project provides an Open Source alternative to EC2 and S3 as well, with a compatible API.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a bit misleading. A big advantage of an "Open Source Software" solution as opposed to a "Propriatary" solution is that you don't have to worry if the original provider goes bust or doesn't release patches or discontinues the product, and you don't have to worry about how many licences you have etc. i.e. Open Source gives _you_ , not the people who made it, the power & control.

With cloud hosting, like Amazon S3, where you store all your data (or servers) on a 3rd party's servers, there are legitimate concerns about control & access (i.e. how much control do you have to do things, how much control do you have to stop someone else doing things (i.e. privacy)). So an "Open Source Alternative to S3" sounds like a good thing that would not have any of these drawbacks.

If someone thinks "Open Source S3" thinks that they, not the hosting company, have power & control, then they would be dissapointed by Nimbus.io, since it has all the drawbacks of S3.

</comment><comment><USER17> Their blog post from yesterday describing nimbus...

[https://spideroak.com/blog/20111107183539-spideroaks-new- ama...](https://spideroak.com/blog/20111107183539-spideroaks-new- amazon-s3-alternative-is-half-the-cost-and-open-source)

</comment><comment><USER18> SpiderOak is a mix of proprietary and open source according to Wikipedia. Does anyone know how much of SpiderOak is open source?

I wonder if they considered OpenStack that several companies including Rackspace, NASA, et al, uses?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not much of SpiderOak is open source, see <https://spideroak.com/code>

However they are considering open sourcing more and more of their code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "The server and client components are all free and open source software."

Can't find any link to the source. _Are_ they opensource. Or is it only planned to release the source eventually?

</comment><comment><USER20> Please note that, if you are not going to use 100GB for a project (for example, storing your own stuff) you are better off grouping them as it is $6 per 100GB (not $0.06 per GB) for stored data. Transfer out is $0.06/GB though. So if you have 101GB (I think the GB is is Giga _Byte_ right?) it should cost you $12 a month.

But if you are just wandering with personal backups they have plans $10 a month for 100GB+ (with affiliation program to earn up to 50GBs of data, but that part are given to free users as well) so that is pretty close to $6 for 100GB, and $4 for 40GB of transfer-out. Since they claim they are using very similar or just the same system for their service in SpiderOak, you can bet they are just the same thing.

Or just go with free account and grab 2GB + whatever I get from affiliation.

On the other hand, since they are saying it's a trade-off of low-latency for price. If their data about s3 is correct, that it should be slower than s3 in the way that s3 has 3 drives to read from versus 3 drives but parity shared so effectively just one fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Build by SpiderOak on the same proven backend storage network which powers hundreds of thousands of backups"

This concerns me slightly, backup storage is a whole different world to real time data storage. Backups are write once, read occasionally, some people use S3 as a make-shift CDN, so constantly reading data.

Parity based repplication is great for backups, but would it not have performance implications if every request is reading from multiple disks/servers/nodes? I'm not an expert on hardware, but I would have thought being able to read an entire file of one disk is faster than having to put together pieces of data from multiple disks, anyone want to correct/inform me?

If you can offer me a serious alternative to S3 at a cheaper price, and open source software, I can't wait to try it out. I might sound negative but I just wanted to put across my first thoughts on having a look around the site.

<comment><USER22> This is exactly what they said on their blog post:

Long term archival data is different than everyday data. It's created in bulk, generally ignored for weeks or months with only small additions and accesses, and restored in bulk (and then often in a hurried panic!)

This access pattern means that a storage system for backup data ought to be designed differently than a storage system for general data. Designed for this purpose, reliable long term archival storage can be delivered at dramatically lower prices.

<comment><USER23> Their architecture page seems to confirm this. It seems that their service is explicitly designed to have different performance characteristics from Amazon S3, so maybe they aren't quite a _direct_ competitor to S3, but there are probably a lot of people using S3 for the use cases that Nimbus.IO claims to do better on, simply because S3 was available at the time.

<comment><USER6> Yes exactly. Nimbus.io is designed for long term archival storage at more affordable prices. We think it's a great time to be competing on price.

We may compete with S3 for low-latency service later on (latency can be made arbitrarily low by spending enough money on caching.) Initial calculations suggest we could be almost as low-latency as S3 and still under price by a good margin.

<comment><USER7> Latency may be able to be made low through caching, but depending on the distribution the point at which additional cache is uneconomical may be well before the edge of your performance envelope.

How are you calculating your latency? Also, what distribution do you assume your file accesses will come from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have submitted my email twice and did not get any confirmation, neither on page, nor in my inbox. Not sure if this is by design or bug, but confusing in either case.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had that too. I mailed them (email@example.com), let's see if the behavior is normal.

<comment><AUTHOR> They replied to my email. The registration got through, but the confirmation did not work (at the time?). So if you submitted your email, they'll be in touch when it's time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think that there should be more open source systems that do parity across serves versus replication. So to me this is great! AFAIK, something like swift suggests keeping 5 copies of everything, so if you want 1PB usable you need 5PB raw. But with dual parity spread across servers, like in Nimbus, you could probably get 80% usable vs raw. This would be similar to Isilon.

I wonder if Swift may support something similar in the future.

</comment><comment><USER26> See also: ceph.newdream.net

<comment><USER7> Ceph is a very interesting project. RADOS, their distributed block store is now mainline I believe and the project is coming along in leaps and bounds.

I'm unsure if anybody has a large scale RADOS based blob store though. It would be interesting to see how it holds up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Since the nimbus.io page has only little information, you can take a look at the spideroak dyi archival storage page[1], which seems to be the predecessor of the nimbus.io offer.

1: <https://spideroak.com/diy/>

</comment><comment><USER28> How is this open source?

</comment><comment><USER29> And there you have your answer for why NuoDB.com used to be NimbusDB but then changed all of the sudden.

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure that bad to do with Nimbus Data, not this project. I'm pretty sure that this project will get a cease and desist too if it becomes popular.

Counting down to a name change in 3... 2...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's not open source. The code is not _currently_ available. Given that the code for SpiderOak itself has been "coming real soon now" for a year, I'm not going to hold my breath. Even if/when that day does come, it will be "thrown over the wall" open source rather than "developed collaboratively" open source. At least Swift, for all of its alleged technical deficiencies (which don't seem to prevent it being used to billions of files already), hasn't been guilty of false advertising. Alternatively you have Walrus, tabled (from Project Hail), Elliptics, Luwak, Gluster's UFO, and probably more. Practically all of these have solved the harder problems of cluster management, API implementation (including the security that nimbus.io seems awfully quiet about), OS integration, etc. Without source, nimbus.io can't credibly claim to have reached parity in all of these other areas, or that it would take less for it to reach parity than for the others to add the one feature (erasure coding instead of replication) that they crow about.

<comment><USER6> (SpiderOak / Nimbus.io cofounder here)

Note that this is just an announcement and invite site to show the pricing at $0.06/GB. Nimbus.io will have public git repositories, "developed collaboratively in the open" before we ever charge money to use the service. (And this is a wholly different project than the SpiderOak backup/sync software.)

FYI, you can see the git repos for the prototype we built of this awhile back, when we called it our storage "DIY API". <https://spideroak.com/diy/> Note that the code and the rest of the information on that page is way out of date since it was an early design and prototype.

I'm not sure erasure coding vs. replication is a simple change for other distributed storage projects. It effects the whole architecture. We researched pretty heavily before building. If it had been simple to modify any of the alternatives, this project wouldn't exist. I'm more than happy to be proven wrong though!

* Edited for pricing info.

<comment><USER31> "I'm not sure erasure coding vs. replication is a simple change for other distributed storage projects."

It depends on a few factors: how modular the architecture is overall, whether the existing replication is synchronous or asynchronous, etc. I'm working on the GlusterFS replication code right now in another window (OK, I _should_ be but I'm typing here). I can assure you that it would be possible to replace replication with erasure coding just by replacing that one module, without perturbing the rest of the architecture. I've also been through the tabled code and I think it would be possible there too. I suspect the same would be true for Elliptics, but probably not Swift. Can't tell for Luwak; that would require more thought than I can afford to put into it right now.

This is something we've actively considered for GlusterFS/HekaFS, and might still do some day - though it's more likely to be on the IDA/AONT-RS side than RS/EC. The downside is that, while these approaches do offer better storage utilization, they also consume more bandwidth. Also, queuing effects can turn a bandwidth issue into a latency issue. This is especially the case for read- dominated workloads, where you just can't beat the latency of reading exactly the bytes you need from one replica. For these reasons I don't think either full replication or redundant-encoding schemes will ever entirely displace the other. Each project must prioritize which to implement first, but that doesn't mean those that have implemented replication first are precluded from offering other options as alternatives. It's really _not_ an architectural limitation in most cases. It's just timing.</comment></comment></comment>


Behind the wheel of a Tesla Model 3: It's a giant iPhone – for better and worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/02/behind-wheel-tesla-model-its-giant-iphone-better-worse/ <comment><USER2> I just can't get past the idea of replacing all the instruments and switches with a single giant touchscreen mounted in the center of the dash. This seems like a _terrible design_ to me.

Physical controls don't move around, so you can find them without having to take your eyes off the road, and they respond exactly the same way every time you use them, so you can interact with them without having to do context- switching in your head. On a touchscreen controls can be there or _not_ be there, or respond to input differently from one moment to another, depending on what mode the touchscreen happens to be in (here's Jef Raskin complaining about this very problem, 25 years ago: [https://www.wired.com/1993/06/1-6-guis/](https://www.wired.com/1993/06/1-6-guis/)).

And then Tesla takes that single touchscreen, which is bad enough all by itself, and moves it to the center of the dash, so now you can't even check your speed without looking down and away from the road. Aircraft designers have known for _decades_ that you can improve pilot performance by presenting important information front and center via a heads-up display ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head- up_display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-up_display)). It's like Tesla took all this research and practical experience and set out to design the _opposite_ of what it cries out for: the world's first _heads-down_ display.

And of course every other car manufacturer will rush to copy this terrible design, because (1) Tesla is cool and (2) people _loooooove_ touchscreens. So the more touchscreens the better, right? Jam those touchscreens in everywhere! Soon you won't be able to flush your toilet without swiping through four levels of user interface (and eventually, three auto-playing video ads jammed between those levels). Sigh.

<comment><USER3> My wife owns a Model 3 and I had the same thought going in, but after using it for a couple months it isn't a problem at all and actually I prefer it FAR more than my 2018 Audi A4 interface for example. Almost all of what you want to do in the Model 3 is one or two taps away. It is very rare to have to dive down deep into menus (except mirrors!)

I paid attention to how I drove for a while and realized the most common things I do are just these:

1\. Look at a map to navigate

2\. Adjust the AC/Heat (temp, speed, vents)

3\. Adjust the radio (volume, change station, next track)

4\. Check speed

#1 & #2. These first two are worse cognitive load in my Audi. The Audi navigation system and map are atrocious and the maps are horribly cluttered. The voice navigation is awful unless you only ever tell it to "navigate home". All of the AC controls are physical buttons but with digital displays that you have to look down at anyway to see what they are set to.

Navigation in the Model 3 is Google Maps. It is clean and the voice navigation is excellent. I can speak a street address to it and it'll get it. The AC is just as much cognitive load as my Audi (high).

#3 Radio: The model 3 has steering wheel controls for volume and next/previous just like other cars. Same cognitive load unless you go to browse for content and then both are high.

#4 Speedometer. I notice I rarely actually check this. Most people drive by feel. When you have to check it is only momentary and it is just slightly off to the right of your eye line. In other cars I often have to move my hands out of the way to see it. Also every dash in modern cars is loaded with garbage I don't care about. I would guess that 98% of people never look at their tachometer and yet it takes half the dash. Why is my speedometer even a dial? I just want the number in big font and easy to see.

<comment><USER4> > #4 Speedometer. I notice I rarely actually check this. Most people drive by > feel.

On what do you base that assertion? It's funny also that modern cars IMHO have far less "feel" than older cars.

And it must be nice to live somewhere with no speed cameras! "It felt like 30" while doing 37 is not a valid excuse round these parts :D

<comment><USER5> I drive by feel. You have a lot of visual, auditory and mechanical cues as you drive faster. You also have other cars on the road so you know if you're going faster or slower. If you drive everyday, you also notice other aspects of the car and when anything is slightly different the driving feels "off".

I would argue this intuition happens for any activity you do regularly after several years. Like accidentally putting your fingers on the wrong keys in the home row.

It's also different per car, so I rely on the speedometer more when renting. Older cars definitely feel faster than newer cars, and I think that is mostly due to weight and improved shock absorption. These things throw off your cues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On one hand, the connectivity is awesome.

But on the other hand, I haven't kept a phone in my possession for more than 3 or 4 years. And these are wayyy more expensive than phones.

I think there's a real market for "regular" cars powered by electric motors. Just take my truck, rip out the drivetrain and put in electric motors and battery. Same old door handles, same regular window buttons, same regular radio.

I'd drive that thing until the battery catches on fire (er, I mean the wheels fall off).

<comment><USER7> I have the opposite fear: that we're entering the age of car interfaces that have to be constantly updated. Like my grocery store changing its layout, I don't want to re-learn how do the only 4 things I do with my car's interface: change the A/C, Turn on NPR, set my destination, reject a phone call. If I could teach it to do all of these automatically, I'd turn the display off....

<comment><USER6> No question it's nice... But I can't seem to keep a mobile phone over a long period of time without it feeling more slow and buggy. I think the updates have everything to do with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unlocking with the smart phone? "Smart" keys are terrible but this is just multiplying the troubles in the name of the coolness factor.</comment>


Debian is switching back to GLIBC - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aurel32.net/175 <comment><USER2> I was unaware that drepper had left redhat (and glibc).

He's now at Goldman Sachs.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichdrepper](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichdrepper)

<comment><USER3> Such great news. He was single handedly impeding the project.

<comment><USER4> So, does glibc provide strlcat() yet?

<comment><USER5> I also wait for strlcpy. In cases when I need it on Linux I just take OpenBSD implementation:

* [http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/string/st...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/string/strlcpy.c?rev=1.11;content-type=text%2Fplain)

* [http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/string/st...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/string/strlcat.c?rev=1.13;content-type=text%2Fplain)

<comment><USER6> We use the linux kernel implementation at neovim. But a libc (and possibly asm optimized) implementation would be nice too (it could avoid two runs over the data). Not that it's likely to be a big improvement, strlen and memcpy are usually some of the most optimized functions there are.

<comment><USER7> In that case you need to change the license of neovim to GPL, as that is the license for Linux kernel code.

<comment><USER8> Only if the implementation details (aside from what is dictated by the spec) of strlcpy meets the originality threshold of a copyrightable work, no?

edit: Also depends on the jurisdiction, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Exampl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Examples_by_country) \- and you don't necessarily have to change your own license, a valid resolution is also to stop distributing versions of your program that incorporate GPL'd code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a very similar situation to egcs and gcc: a fork created because the original project proved too painful to work with, and folded back in after sorting out the project governance issues that caused the fork in the first place.

<comment><USER10> It's not quite as drastic: with egcs they basically just killed gcc and renamed egcs, while here it was more of a merger of the projects. Very similar, though.

<comment><USER11> They are in a funny way opposite (and I certainly know whereof I speak: look at who wrote this message [0]).

It's hard to remember, but back in 1997 forking was considered really terrible and to be avoided at all costs. When we split off to form egcs the main resistance was to the idea that there would be a fork at all. Gcc, and a bunch of other programs, had a single person who controlled the "official" release. The fact that Cygnus maintained its own release tree for its customers (it was still free -- it simply wasn't identical to the mainline, and in fact advanced a lot faster) was the cause of much angst and even some mistrust.

My reason for making this fork was because the mainline was so far behind us, and we had a commitment to folding all our changes back into the main line. Since the gcc maintainer was the bottleneck, we simply declared our tree a new fork with the support and participation of other major developers. We were trying to be the opposite of exclusivist. But even so it took me months of mailing, calling and negotiating. Many hours on the phone with rms who of course predicted the doom of free software if we went ahead.

And we developed a steering committee, the first as far as I know for a free software project.

In those two ways egcs was a watershed; plenty of developers thankfully now know no other way.

So last year glibc went the opposite way: it decided it no longer needed a steering committee. Cool!

[0] [https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html)

<comment><USER12> rms was (is?) probably still traumatized from the emacs/xemacs split, which is still there and, as far as I can see, does impede emacs development.

<comment><USER13> as an outsider, how does the (x)emacs split impede development?

It seems emacs has been steadily, if somewhat slowly, improving (new releases etc).

<comment><USER12> Well, it was a bit of a hunch, based on the slowness of development. Other commenters have maybe given better explanations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some strong comments against Drepper. What's the back story here?

<comment><USER15> He was the lead maintainer for glibc that people ended up needing to work _around_ rather than _with_ :

[https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4403](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4403)

[https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5070](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5070)

[https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5531](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5531)

<comment><USER16> This one too: [https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980)

<comment> vezzy-fnord And yet none of these hold a candle to _this_ masterpiece: [https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12701](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12701)

I dare you to top that.

<comment><USER17> The reporter didn't provide enough detail to begin with, and was rude as well.

No excuse for rudeness, but I understand why he may have gotten that way.

Can you imagine the number of silly bugs the glibc maintainer has to go through? Year, after year? Especially when people don't give enough evidence.

That is bug twelve thousand seven hundred and one. Developing a way to deal with all of those badly reported bugs quickly would be to do it like this. Just tell the people they are wrong, and have them provide more detail to prove their case. If you say, "Can you please provide more information", often bug reports just sit there.

Again, I don't condone the behaviour personally, since I would put people above the software. But I can see how maintaining glibc for many years would warp a person.

<comment><USER18> I am not sure why you've been so heavily downvoted, other than "lots of people disagree".

Perhaps if bug-lists are so awful to read (and I have no doubt that they are) then the people reading them need more [close] buttons.

[close - no ref to standard]; [close - no test example code]; etc, and these provide templated replies that ask people for correct reports.

"We closed this bug. You MUST provide a clear reference to the specification showing how $THING is non-compliant.

AND

you MUST provide a test example code snippet".

This would help de-stress people reading the bugs, and might prompt people providing bugs to provide correct information.

I agree that templates are often hateful nasty things - templates on Wikipedia are really nasty approach. But here the alternative is, well, also pretty unpleasant for some people.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, the more information you require the less likely people are to fill it in.

I've been a fan of "search" not categorise for bugs for this reason. People are more likely to blog about, or tweet about a bug than put it into a bug tracker.

The role of an issue gardener is a really useful one too. A person whose job it is to go into issues, and make them useful for developers. To communicate with all sides, and enhance the process for everyone.

A great example of this is when @pyalot tested out various webgl implementations on different browsers. Then he went to all the bug trackers, and made notes. Then linked to various specifications, and pointed to test cases.

[http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with- app...](http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-apples-ios- webgl-implementation/)

This one guy through this has done a massive service to WebGL and the web. I've seen too often various bugs and issues go through 2-3 browser iterations because that's how long it takes for people to seriously test out features and report bugs.

The collaboration going on now because of open bug trackers in web browsers is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Odd. I had always been convinced that they switched back to glibc again a while ago, but it seems they're beginning to do it only now.

A lot of people are against forks that they deem frivolous or unnecessary, but I think it's one of the most pragmatic and important parts of free software. It's a failsafe, a Second Amendment, if you will.

</comment><comment><USER19> Drepper's is a caustic personality. IIRC he's the reason that Linux has pre- linking instead of Solaris'direct binding, and so on.

<comment><USER20> Can you share some details about this - like pros & cons once vs. another?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) has been using eglibc for five years and I haven't noticed?

I even compiled new versions of gcc + glibc (and installed them into $HOME, to run new binaries on older installations). You think I should have noticed that there was no glibc on the host system to begin with. But actually, the only thing I noticed is that the glibc (and gcc) build system is a bit crazy, and that it definitely will benefit from a new project lead.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would not notice because it's practically the same. All files have the same names (afaik) for example. They are compatible, and eglibc was like a drop-in replacement. I believe they share nearly all code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone got another link? I'm getting "Error establishing a database connection"

<comment><USER23> Here's a screengrab: [http://i.imgur.com/XUNBIh1.png](http://i.imgur.com/XUNBIh1.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VrGJCG7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VrGJCG7MXq4J:blog.aurel32.net/175&client=ubuntu&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER25> whats a debian?

<comment><USER26> I think it's a type of penguin?</comment></comment>


How Tumblr uses \0 in the output of meta tags - <AUTHOR> http://dudewheresmybackslash0.tumblr.com/post/61255168547/how-tumblr-uses-0-in-the-output-of-meta-tags

<comment><USER2> I am constantly surprised by the level of quality programming @ large companies. Especially those who only seem to hire "The Best".

<comment><USER3> That should be a lesson in whether "the best" consider it important to every last thing 100% right, or to move quickly and maybe make a small number of mistakes along the way.

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is- better.html)

"It is slightly better to be simple than correct."

<comment><USER4> Well, they've certainly got "simply not correct" nailed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And it's only worth a billion bucks?!

</comment><comment><USER6> Tumblr has weird bugs that seem to involve character escaping. Searching for tags that have slashes in them seem to end up parsed as URL segments and will return 404s, for instance.</comment>


Lisense plate recognition - <AUTHOR>

Is there a way to access the DMV database? There are a bunch of websites advertising they can give you information on car owners. I only know of one legitimate company offering access to an up to date database, Vigilant solutions. I'm trying to access an up to date database for my parking service, Fetch Park. Any idea if there is an actual database or if it's just from information compiled by these companies not the gov? <comment><USER2> I am not 100% positive on this, but if I remember correctly, the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act (I believe that is what is called) has strict regulations on who can access what information based off a license plate number. In most cases you will, at minimum, need a private investigator license in each state you want access to that state's database. Even then many states have even stricter laws that limit the amount of information that is available directly to a individual. And even still many states do not offer direct access, meaning that you would have to go down to the DMV office in person, fill out an information request form, and get the information direct from them.

Many of the databases you see online, while saying they provide complete information, offer limited information as well. You may check with a company like Checkr.com or GoodHire for more information. Both offer API access to their databases at a cost. But again, you have to have a valid and legal reason for accessing their API.</comment>


WikiLeaks Has Morphed from Journalism Hotshot to Malware Hub - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/wikileaks-has-morphed-from-journalism-hotshot-to-malware-hub-1bdd68cc560#.xzzsmg7ay <comment><USER2> I hate to blame the client, and I think it is a valid problem but maybe the Malware is also an important part of the content.

That email can give your windows machine Malware is not Wikileaks fault tbh.</comment>


The fight to publish Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' - <AUTHOR> https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/09/the-fight-to-publish-allen-ginsbergs-howl/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty incredible how recent many of our seemingly inalienable rights (actual freedom of speech, de jure racial equality, right to representation, prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence, etc) have actually only been around a few decades, mostly thanks to the visionary Warren and Burger courts.

They were considered dangerous activist judges by many in their time.

<comment><USER3> With the US standing almost alone among developed nations and even the ACLU backing away from its policy of defending impolitic or hurtful speech we can probably expect this recent anomaly of free expression to be relatively short lived.

I'm glad I got to live now and not some other time.

<comment><USER4> Could you briefly outline how you think the USA has benefitted from this freedom, in a way that other rich Western countries haven't? I guess I'm specifically thinking of Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, as all have broadly similar legal systems and robust judiciaries / policing, but not the singular focus on free speech.

<comment><USER5> How about a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for expressing their opinions? The UK has gotten positively absurd. You can be forced to talk to cops about un-PC tweets. Example: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man- investigated...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated- police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/)

I'm against transphobia, but not being able to vocally dissent on a certain politically loaded topic... that shit is bad.

<comment><USER4> > a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for > expressing their opinions

To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the example you gave, and presumably what you're referring to) is hate speech, which the US allows[0].

What advantages have accrued to the US through hate speech being protected, in your opinion? You say "a lot fewer people being jailed", but a quick scan of, say, UK cases prosecuted as hate speech[1] don't show examples of people being jailed for it. Do you have some statistics for "a lot [of] people being jailed or otherwise punished" for hate speech?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States)

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

<comment><USER6> From The Times[1]:

> More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called > trolling on social media and other online forums

13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing.

As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies would support it, like China, by using a historical chart.

Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you tried to show that with some statistics.

[1] [https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine- peo...](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day- in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d)

<comment><USER4> > As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated > with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an > ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly.

I suspect you have not done your research

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?

<comment><USER7> >What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?

I think it's non-trivial to try to quantify the effects of free speech.

Freeform opinions off the top of my head:

the definitions of 'hate speech' are too fluid, allowing argument opposition to massage the definition until your protest against them is considered to be hateful -- which then allows legal options to silence the opinion.

The United States has been the culture leader of the Western world for some time, and the position seems to be ever-increasing. The United States is , and has been, the largest media producer _ever_ . This allows the United States to own the most effective propaganda engine the world has ever seen.

New branches of media genre and topic since the 1900s are almost entirely US- centric (Pop art, Beatniks, Flower power, hip-hop and rap culture, jazz, blues, etc) -- many of them included topics like public dissent and negative opinion of government that would've been entirely illegal in the majority of the rest of the world. They are all now ubiquitous throughout the world, spreading US-centric culture to all reaches.

I think that freedom of speech helped to facilitate the role the United States now holds within 'Western Civilization', related to the above mentioned points.

 _In my opinion, in our world, owning the world 's biggest propaganda engine seems to be the most dominating weapon yet._

Some questions :

If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? The United States is that example, at the moment.

At what point is a parity reached between damages of false-imprisonment, and actual damage accrued from the results of hate speech?

What _are_ the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with?

Why do we attack social problems with less communication, and enforced communication, rather than with care for the ill individuals who display behavior outside the social healthy norm? Will macro actions help problems that stem from individual issues?

And most importantly : _Who_ gets to define our speech? Who holds the keys to the kingdom? Who deserves that trust?

<comment><USER8> >What are the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with?

Not only the actions of the individual (we must remember concepts such as stochastic terrorism) due to hearing hate speech, but also the harm of the speech itself. There's substantial work done on this concept, i.e. that speech itself at least has the potential to be actually harmful, and that there is no meaningful rigorous distinction between "speech" and "action" \- metaphysical or otherwise. In this way, regulating speech should be just like we regulate any other kind of action. As Brison has said:

"although this relational account helps to explain why the right to speak and to receive others' speech is important, it does not yield a defense of the view that speech is special, requiring greater justification for its regulation than is needed for the regulation of other conduct."

This[0] is a great paper to read for the argument. There are also more 'traditional arguments arguing that Mill's ideal (and the principle that free speech is based on) has become obsolete in the face of the ever-shortening distance between speech and action (which was observed during the rise of the Nazi Party), along with the function of mass media which dulls critical thinking[1].

[0] SJ Brison, "Speech, Harm, and the Mind-Body Problem in First Amendment Jurisprudence" (1998) [http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...](http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindbody_problem_in_first_amendment_jurisprudence.pdf)

[1] "Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc." (Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965))

<comment><USER6> Thanks for those links. Much as I disagree if your summary is correct, I'll definitely give them read, they look interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The excerpt in the article is misprinted (2019-05-13-0118 GMT). It should read: _"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix"_

In the article _angry_ and _negro_ are transposed.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fans of the movie Hackers (1995) will recall Dade Murphy reading the first line of Howl in his advanced English class.

The Beat culture of the 1950's was absolutely the predecessor to the hacker/cyberpunk culture of the 1990's.

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny, I just bought a collection of Ginsberg's poetry after seeing a reference to 'Howl' in the "Academe's Extinction" article posted here the other night.

</comment><comment><USER12> On a tangent: If you were alive during the counterculture movement of the 1960s/1970s and have strong thoughts about it, I would love to do a short interview via email (email is in my profile bio) - it's for a history paper.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a Ginsberg related aside I often think his poem "I Am a Victim of Telephone" could be refreshed as a comment on modern life.

        [...]How are you dear can you come to Easthampton we're all here bathing in  the ocean we're all so lonely

        and I lie back on my palette contemplating $50 phone bill, broke, drowsy,

           anxious, my heart fearful of the fingers dialing, the deaths, the  singing of telephone bells

        ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing up midnight ringing now

           forever.

</comment><comment><USER14> These days, long form poetry is dead.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think many here learned to appreciate this poem from HN postings of this analysis of Howl:

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

SSC is a great site, and if you haven't, please do have a look^. Do please, however, be aware that spiked-online is pretty alt-right and politically extreme, and although this is a decent historical piece, most articles there are of the ultra-neocon and angry cable talkshow style opinion, dressed in intellectual wording.

<comment><USER16> On HN, it's the article that matters. Most primarily-political sites have a downweight on them, but we turn the downweight off when a good article comes along. Or try to, at least; it depends on whether we see it or someone points it out to us.

<comment><USER17> Are you saying that they're algorithmically downweighted and that you manually turn that off when it seems appropriate?

Interesting, I thought the feed was just based on chronology + votes! How quaint of me. Is there anything written anywhere about how the feed algorithm works generally?

<comment><USER16> Correct.

The feed has always been based on more than just time and votes. For example, flags. Another factor is HN's anti-abuse software, like the voting ring detector. Then there is moderation. For example, moderators downweight certain kinds of stories, such as sensational ones or indignant ones, that routinely attract many more upvotes than others. Another example is the boosting system that was discussed recently here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19871809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19871809).

There's no article or essay about it, but I've posted many comments to HN about all of this over the years. None of it is secret, and we're happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER17> That's helpful, thanks for the reply!

Are all sites deemed political down-weighted equally? Is this a manually curated list or also algorithmically determined somehow?

Are there other categories / topics that sites might be placed in that affect their ranking?

The problem of trying to apply weights to domains and/or specific submissions based on some idea of how well they fit the ethos of the site seems like an interesting one!

<comment><USER16> Yes, primarily-political sites are downweighted equally. And yes, there are other kinds of site that get penalized. For example, most major media sites produce more lightweight articles than substantive ones, so are marked that way in our system. I should mention, though, that there are plenty of ways for such penalties to be overridden, besides moderators turning them off manually. For example, they don't apply to submissions by users who have a track record of submitting solid stories.

Some of this is algorithmically determined and some of it is manually curated. The more complicated a decision is (e.g. is site X primarily political), the less likely it is to be algorithmic.

<comment><USER15> Thank you for this enlightening addition. I certainly was not complaining about the article's presence here, but rather instead warning against the rest of a particularlyedangerously truthy political site. Your context really helps us in general not worry too much, knowing that you have your human eye on submissions. Nonetheless, since people often look around a site after reading a first article, i think such a warning is warranted most times such a particularly egregious site posts a rarely decent article.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


4 ways I've fucked up as a designer - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/talk/4-ways-ive-fucked-up-as-a-designer <comment><USER2> The owner of the blog post can now add a fifth reason to their collection of "fuck-ups":

Placing a webpage that contains text and some images into a web-framework that requires javascript running locally in order to render said text and images.</comment>


WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of WireGuard. But it gives a bad taste in the mouth to know that the author banned a WireGuard fan and user from the IRC channel just because he took time to code and release a free Windows client for the protocol. And that the WG author spend time to talk shit about this client whenever he has a chance, for example when the Windows client author announce it here.

The protocol is quite easy to get into, it is well documented to the extent that it is easy to believe that it is in WireGuard's interest that more people develop software that supports the protocol.

Maybe the WireGuard homepage should make an official statement that anyone who implement the protocol and release a client is no longer welcome in the community to discuss the protocol or listen when other people discuss the protocol.

The WG author mentioned in the mailing list that he has reverse engineered Tunsafe and found security flaws. I would like to see that he presents these security shortcomings in order to legitimize his claim instead of keeping it secret. As he is a representative of a security company, it might be a good tactic to not hurt his reputation as it is practice in the security industry to share such information.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little off-put by the creator's attitude towards clients he didn't have a hand in making[0]. And the fact that 5 months ago he said we'd have a windows client around the corner, and yet after taking a cursory look at the two projects, development on one appears to be stalled, and the other still can't support windows, doesn't bode well.

I'm insanely impressed that he's come up with something so good, and I have no knowledge of cryptography and writing truly secure code, so I don't like to complain like this... but it would be nice to have a real timeline so that we can make our own decision about whether we want to use the closed source alternatives.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515637](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515637)

<comment><USER4> Your comment is very misleading. Reading what you linked to, creator has the (extremely legitimate) concern of users relying on closed source implementations of WireGuard. Which is not at all the same as "clients he didn't have a hand in making"

<comment><USER3> I read that based on his ignoring tunsafe's author's comments, and the fact that he apparently unilaterally blanned the author from the wireguard subreddit.

I don't know either person at all, I only found out about tunsafe and the "controversy" a few hours ago after seeing this post and googling for the windows alternatives that "are not recommended" but are mentioned on the wireguard site.

I admit I did editorialize a bit more than I should have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a bit unsure about the fact that Wireguard has no negotiation capabilities whatsoever. On the one hand this feature makes the configuration of tunnels dead simple as opposed to e.g. IPSec but on the other hand it also means that all participating systems are extremely tightly coupled. If one system updates to a kernel that contains a Wireguard version with crypto changes then all peers _have_ to update their Wireguard versions at the exact same time or the tunnels break. This is easy if you have point-to-point tunnels where you control both ends of the connection but could potentially be a nightmare for tunnels to other companies or road-warrior setups. I fear that in these cases many will be forced to stick with IPSec due to these constraints.

<comment><USER6> No. If a new version of WireGuard comes out with new capabilities it would be done by having that new version understand the old system and you can make a choice if you support it or not.

However that will not really be an issue for a many years and there are many ways how that can be handled in the future.

<comment><USER5> You cannot really predict this because you don't know when a weakness in a cypher is discovered. Yes it might never happen but it might also happen three days from now. Any piece of software that involves cryptography must be able to change the used primitives quickly in case they are compromised.

Where do you have the information about how Wireguard would handle such a transition from? Looking at [https://www.wireguard.com/protocol/](https://www.wireguard.com/protocol/) I can see no protocol version or other means to distinguish between an old and new version of the protocol. Also this would introduce additional configuration and a negotiation step which seems to run counter to the motivation of the project.

Not preparing for for this inevitability seems foolish which leads me to believe that this was not an oversight but a deliberate design decision by the creators of Wireguard.

<comment><USER7> The discussion in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690815) is meaningful. There is, apparently, some disagreement about how the protocol versioning should be interpreted: zx2c4 (J.Donenfeld, wg creator) refers to the "v1" string used in the construction as the version identifier; tptacek refers to the primitives and the separator strings; I consider the whole thing.

Regardless, it is clear that there are numerous ways that can be backward compatible to extend wireguard into v2. IIUC, the deliberate design decision is that "we are not baking any specific one-true-way". It's not "not preparing for the inevitability", it's "the way protocol agility has been done so far has failed, we defer this decision closer to the time we need it".

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the pointer. I couldn't find any (semi-)official information about this and seeing that the developers indeed care about this puts my concerns at ease to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previously on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326438)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596963)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17659983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17659983)

The last one highlighting the last blocker for any serious adoption.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://bitbucket.org/mihailp/wireguard- pil/src](https://bitbucket.org/mihailp/wireguard-pil/src)

</comment><comment><USER10> Still awaiting for the official Windows client.........

</comment><comment><USER11> Looking at the design of WireGuard it seems relatively obvious. Is there a reason it took this long to get such a basic solution?

<comment> orbital-decay Simple is harder than complex, as always.

<comment><USER12> I really wish more people understood this. Over-engineering is the plague of modern software.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook employee says he was fired for speaking out about his colleague suicide - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/facebook-employee-i-was-fired-for-talking-about-colleagues-suicide.html <comment><USER2> At first, I thought "he protested, of course they fired him". However: if someone dies of suicide within an organization, there is likely a serious (and deadly) problem within that organization. If the workers do not speak out, such a problem would go unfixed, and may cascade.

Therefore the workers _must_ speak out, for the safety of themselves and their co-workers.

The discourse around mental health is in a sorry state. Everyone says that they care but it is usually backed by non-action - and in this case, action in the retrograde direction. I want to hope that things will change but it is hard to do so. Maybe the conversation will change as the depression epidemic continues to grow.

<comment><USER3> > However: if someone dies of suicide within an organization, there is likely > a serious (and deadly) problem within that organization.

People can commit suicide for any reason, it doesn't have to be due to the organization that they work for.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google Analytics spam out of control, looking for an alternative - <AUTHOR> Month after month Google Analytics spam is getting bigger and I don't want to spend time fighting it. I'm looking for an alternative that can support campaign tracking and conversion analysis.
People often talk about Piwik but I'm a bit reluctant to add PHP to the stack.
So, what do you use for website analytics ? <comment><USER3>
        Admin -> Account -> Property -> View -> View Settings

        [ ] Bot Filtering

        Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders

It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

Note: Enabling it doesn't work retroactively, just from that point forward.

<comment><USER4> Thank you! I think I understand why they couldn't enable this by default, but I really wish they had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've also gotten absolutely swamped in Google Analytics with things like:

Language:

      Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!
      o-o-8-o-o.com search shell is much better than google!
      Vitaly rules google *:。゜゚・*ヽ(^ᴗ^)ノ*・゜゚。:* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯(ಠ益ಠ)(ಥ‿ಥ)(ʘ‿ʘ)ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ヽ(゚Д゚)ノʕ•̫͡•ʔᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ(=^ ^=)oO
      Google officially recommends o-o-8-o-o.com search shell!

Google Analytics needs to address this. What can we do to prevent this type of spam?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I'm talking about this, fake lifehacker and reddit posts and referers like "Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!"

Since two months my analytics are useless. I spent a lot of time configuring filters against older spammers (like darodar or IloveItaly) and I don't wan't to do it every three months or so.

It's a bit strange that spam is a solved problem in Gmail and that Google can't address it properly in Analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a blog post [0] on using the API for Google analytics to create a filter to block most of the referrer spam.

tl;dr for the post is: You setup 2 filters one for the hostname, and one for the language. (The language part is not added yet I'm still writing that update, this is a new spam technique in the last couple months where the data is coming out of Russia)

You then have to create a referrer blocker on your webserver which returns 444 if the referrer contains (list if sites).

I also use piwik personally and have found it's definately lacking compared to GA in what you can do but it is quite adequate for my own personal blog/projects.

Piwik can do campaign, goal and event tracking. Which sounds like it has what you want. You could go for the hosted version and pay X amount if you want someone else to worry about it.

[0] [https://blog.slowb.ro/programmatic-blocking-referrer-spam- pa...](https://blog.slowb.ro/programmatic-blocking-referrer-spam-part-2-the- correct-way-for-seo-companies/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This solves it (for now anyway)

[https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant- tr...](https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-traffic-in- google- analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=OhowSocial)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @siquick for anyone reading this post and looking for a solution : it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I gave up last month. Using free tier at W3Counter and pretty impressed; [https://www.w3counter.com](https://www.w3counter.com)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your input. May I ask what about it impressed you?

<comment><USER8> I looked at a number of other sites using it [0] and found it was very easy to use. I don't go too far into things though, just really interested in hits, uniq, referers etc.

[0] [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Astats+inurl%3Adas...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Astats+inurl%3Adashboard+site%3Aw3counter.com)

<comment><USER9> It does look very clean. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Campaign/conversion tracking isn't quite similar to web analytics.

1\. web analytics capture everything/anything hitting your site and only filters which should be constantly updated should allow you to visualise/read your data. Surely, you have in GA and most other analytics platform a section where you'll identify your campaigns performances, but that's about it.

2\. Campaign/conversion tracking from a marketing perspective starts from the campaign management, which itself starts with a campaign link. A campaign link is by definition a unique link which will redirect to your site/landing page. This link shouldn't be discoverable/indexed by search engines, and consequently only hits coming from the actual campaign URL, are counted. Tracking/campaign management platforms - unlike google analytics - <USER2> specific rules/geotarget/redirect etc.. which allow to build funnels and marketing flows, while url's with utm parameters are static url's which load a page, which can be responsive or not.

Google analytics is a very powerful platform which should provide very granular insights on how your site/business is doing. But those analytics should be used from a very high level perspective as they take into account the entire traffic flow.

But campaigns are different. They are keyword, country, language, device specific and frankly, after running thousands of campaigns one will realize that general trends can be identified through google analytics, but campaigns themselves are generally speaking fairly different one from an other. Which is why a separate software should be used to run/analyze the campaign's performances.

I know you wanted a different answer, but I'm seeing more and more companies/agencies shifting their workflows to address more accurately their campaign performances via campaign management platforms rather than their Google Analytics.

I hope that helped anyway.

disclosure: i run trackingdesk

</comment><comment><USER11> Even if you host your own Piwik instance you'll see these results; they're coming as referer-spam, or as user-agent strings.

It's frustrating, but it isn't a problem you can avoid by changing analytic- provider. (Although some might allow you to blacklist/ignore some particular terms.)

<comment><USER6> Piwik has its own updatable referrer spam blocklist. So you should get near 0 referrer spam

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Don't be reluctant because of PHP. It's going to be hard to completely avoid, and the upside is that it's a rather mature platform. Piwik works fine in a read only chroot (FPM brings this to PHP).

As a product, Piwik is excellent. It won't give you target audiences that GA can, since it doesn't have Google's knowledge behind it, but the core product is solid. You can track campaigns and events and there are decent report and alerting engines.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have exacts problem as nodesocket in language section of analytics, right now solve through filter and view setting, but need permanents solution, can anyone have??

</comment><comment><USER14> Open Web Analytics</comment>


Ask HN: How to find people for startups? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
Recently, a friend and myself have been working on what will be (hopefully!) a decently vast project. We have experience in the field (Python, C#, and browser code) but it just becomes too much for two people to handle, and a lot of our friends don't seem up to the task!
Are there any good resources for these types of things online, or are people like us mostly stuck to friends and family? Of course, there isn't any money involved at this stage.
I'm sure there are others in the same boat, and others that have moved on from similar situations.
Thank you! <comment><USER2> See this post on a related topic:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694664>

</comment><comment><USER2> Sites like FounderDating maybe? Area Tech Meetups or incubator programs? Just my guesses...</comment>


Ask HN: Tips on securing a MacBook Air? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I'm trying to learn more about computer security. I just bought a MacBook Air and would any security tips the HN community might have to offer.<p>Thanks for your help! <comment><USER2> Good and detailed guide: [https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy- Guide](https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks:)</comment></comment>


The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics" - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion104.html <comment><USER2> From the article: "Sure enough, the best invited talk was Michael Kiessling's talk that used the ancient technology of _overhead projector_ , and it would have been even better if he only used the _blackboard_ , and it would have been better still if he didn't use _anything_ , just told us a _story_."

Exactly this. The fact that all of the mathematicians I've been around to date (except for one, but he's a ham, so he doesn't really count in this statistic since he already counts as a hacker :) have treated their overall field more like a science than an art has really disenchanted me from it. Yes, mathematics is regarded as the queen of all sciences, but I don't really buy entirely into that. It has applications there, and that's probably as far as it goes as far as science is concerned. (Disclaimer: I studied applied mathematics at a small state university at the undergraduate level.)

Math is beautiful not because it is full of intricate logical machinery and full of useful computational tools and full of pretty pictures; rather, math is beautiful because the intricate logical machinery can take different forms (how many different proofs of the FTIC are there? Pythagoras' theorem?) and because it's an imaginary world inside one's head where there are arbitrary -- even infinite -- dimensions and fungible axioms.

The point of these meetings is to inform (and even pique the interest of) your colleagues. If they have no idea what's going on and don't even understand the fundamental notions, what's the point? You're wasting your time, keystrokes, breath, and energy, not to mention the money provided to you by some grants.

<comment><USER3> It would be nice if it were treated more as an art, but don't you think whoever is paying for the grants would rather the effort be put into digging deeper into specific research topics that may eventually be of use to science rather than finding beautiful proofs and relationships between things we already know to be true?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is essentially a critique of specialization, applied to the field of mathematics. I think that this trend might be inevitable, not just in the field of mathematics. The total amount of knowledge that humanity has accumulated continues to grow. If the amount of science that a single person can understand is finite, then individual scientists will understand an ever smaller percentage of it. In some ways that makes me sad.

<comment><USER5> I don't see why two specialists couldn't link their specific knowledge when necessary by explaining it in the context of the fundamental knowledge they should all share. That is to say, as a person specializes more and more in mathematics, there's no reason to think they should forget the earlier lessons they've learned.

<comment><USER6> I visualize the situation like a search tree. As you travel down the tree away from the root, you become increasingly isolated from other branches of the tree, and you can't even talk to distant leaf nodes because you lack the same vocabulary and shared set of theorems.

Yes, we share some parent way up the tree, but we can't go all the way back to that as a starting point because it'd simply take too long to progress from there back down to the interesting leaf node.

This vision makes me wonder when mathematics will reach a point where mastering the material required to understand a leaf node will take greater than the average life span.

<comment> loup-vaillant > I visualize the situation like a search tree.

I disagree. I observed that, until up to graduation, the situation is like a search _graph_. When I studied, I noticed many interdisciplinary connections. Fields like mechanic, electronic, logic, automatic, programming, often look like two sides of the same coin.

However I also noticed an inability from others to see the damn connections. If you present the same thing from another angle, they often fail to see it as the same thing, while I factor the obvious pattern like you would code (I've seen it in the case of 3D vision).

The consequences are quite catastrophic: the languages (jargon) used to describe each discipline diverge, making it even more difficult to notice the similarities. This convince even more people that there _isn't_ any connection. That the situation is like a tree. At this point, they don't even bother to seek the connections, and we end up with a disconnected mess.

> This vision makes me wonder when mathematics will reach a point where > mastering the material required to understand a leaf node will take greater > than the average life span.

That can't happen: more time to study relevant material means less time to push further. It will take many geniuses to be able to learn and push fast enough. But this is pointless. If it takes you a lifetime to learn a particular field, that field will simply fall into oblivion. So, the geniuses (at least the one worth mentioning) won't push further. They will simplify their field, _reducing_ the time required to learn it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The programming world is like this too, only worse. Programming techniques transfer between languages, but nobody seems to realize that. Instead, you see each new language community "discover" something every other language community had known for years. "Those languages suck, so we ignore everything they do."

It is depressing, and I have nothing more to say about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The programming world is like this too, only worse_

Much worse. I think the problem is magnified by our obsession with languages - overlapping subsets of syntax features that have highly intricate relationships with programming techniques (making certain techniques easier to implement, others-harder, regardless of problem domain).

<comment><USER8> Would you say that focusing on programming _paradigms_ , rather than language implementations, would help to counteract this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think so. The big ones I know of being:

\- dynamic object oriented (Smalltalk)

\- homoiconic for compile-time metaprogramming (Scheme, Lisp)

\- dynamic for runtime metaprogramming, like continuations (Scheme, Ruby, Smalltalk)

\- functional (Scheme, Haskell)

\- strongly typed (Haskell, Scala)

\- logical (Prolog)

These are the ones I've come across, but there are more on wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm>

<comment><USER8> There's some overlap, as well as actor/message-passing concurrency (Erlang), dataflow (Prolog, Oz, etc.), constraint, vector-oriented (APL), etc. Probably a dozen more, depending on where you draw some fine lines. (See CTM for a good overview.) FWIW, Prolog is just as homoiconic as Lisp, and has compile and runtime macros.

Still, I was more wondering about _teaching methodology_ , not enumerating paradigms themselves. What could be done to counteract the "standing on the toes of giants" effect?

<comment><AUTHOR> _I was more wondering about teaching methodology_

If I understand correctly, I'd imagine teaching everyone to implement languages using a system like Ian Piumarta's COLA might do the trick. The point is to break open these black boxes of abstraction (even though black boxes are good sometimes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My general understanding is that the last person to be well-versed in basically all of mathematics was Euler. When he got through with it, the field was too broad for any mortal to obtain a working knowledge of most of it. It seems that now, given the above, hardly anybody tries to broaden their horizons after a certain point in their career. (It feels like every course I take these days, I end up making a connection between a topic and another branch of math or computer science, but my instructor doesn't know enough about the other field to appreciate what I bring up.)

While I don't think the problem is quite as severe as Zeilberger claims, I do feel like conference talks should strive to be more accessible to specialists of other fields and to students. Particularly for a conference like the Joint Mathematics Meetings, it would be cool if speakers prepared their talks to be more like TED talks: just technical enough to make sure that the audience can understand the really interesting aspect of the research.

<comment><USER10> One of my college professors put that suggestion like this: Write to an audience of intelligent 17 year olds. Ignorant of your topic and unwilling to put up with confusing writing, but curious and capable of understanding complex ideas.

When I followed that advice my writing was clearer and better balanced. I also found that the narrative in every piece (even technically orientated stuff) became stronger.

I don't write essay's any more, but it's still the standard by which I measure every email and comment I write.

<comment><USER11> I'm in the process of writing my thesis and one of my advisors asked me: "Who are you writing this for?". I had a few ideas, but I answered, "For him and our collaborators."

"Wrong! - You should be writing for the graduate student who will be picking up your work."

Any graduate student or even many professors will be on a similar level when exposed to something new. By explaining stuff at a relatively simple level, with enough intermediate steps to outline the method, most people can grasp how you did what you did.

Maybe not 17 year olds, but aimed at people well versed in mathematics, but not necessarily in that field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doron Zeilberger is a pretty clever mathematician, so at the very least, any of his opinions are certainly worth thinking about. I think as a comment about the state of modern research culture, he also recently had one of his paper's published in Rejecta Mathematica

</comment><comment><USER13> _For the good of future mathematics we need generalists and strategians who can see the big picture._

Older mathematicians probably already see the big picture -- well enough anyway.

Younger mathematicians need to worry about tenure and can't waste their time on big picture things that are not likely to pay off.

<comment><USER2> I would go as far as to say that we need _generalists_ who will take the time to _chronicle_ and _revive_ works from the past to make them relevant again.

Better still, we need the mathematics community at large to become more accustomed to seeing papers published in journals that do this so that a larger contingent can be made aware that these papers/ideas/theorems/corollaries/lemmata/definitions/people/pictures/etc. exist.

Note also that this doesn't necessarily preclude anyone in mathematics from adopting a specialization. In my eyes, the younger mathematician is in the same place as the startup founder: in the position to take a big risk and do something that sounds like a stupid idea (e.g., avoid publishing results anywhere but freely and openly on the WWW; see also: Daniel Bernstein) in order to have it pay off (e.g., earn tenure).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Math has always relied on a few geniuses to set things straight, the rest is just noise.

<comment><USER15> Sources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some or most of this may be related to how complicated modern mathematics has become, I know at my college there are 6 undergraduate mathematics degrees to choose from (in regards to specialty) and only grows when you move into graduate school.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems what the 'Kingdom of Mathematics' really needs, is a good toastmasters club!

<comment><USER18> Yes, very much so. Mathematical expository talks are, in my experience, of appallingly low quality.</comment></comment>


PyCon 2011: Behind the Scenes - <AUTHOR> http://pycon.blogspot.com/2011/02/pycon-2011-behind-scenes.html <comment><USER2> Really wish I could go this year. I'd love to be able to network my new startup and learn new things about Python.

Its my favourite event of the year so hopefully I'll be able to go next year.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another 'behind the scenes' peek into PyCon: How the audio/video is done. Roll the credits!

<http://blip.tv/file/3353433/></comment>


When women are needed (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/07/19/when-we-are-needed/

<comment><USER2> Too rambling. Seriously... 8000 words, and in a fairly stream-of- consciousness/unstructered style. Sometimes I came to a new paragraph and it felt so disconnected that I was wondering if I was reading a new entry.

But maybe the attention span of Web users was longer in 2005.</comment>