Ask YC: What do founders do after they have been bought out? - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering what founders do after they have been bought out? <comment><USER2> I once had a contract working with the division of a big company formed after the acquisition of a startup. From my vantage point most of the negative things already mentioned were valid for the founders, so I'll mention what I consider the "perks."

The good points seemed to be: the founders were now VPs of something or other, so in addition to their immediate cashout, they also received VP level salaries, and bonuses.

They had the freedom to say "I'm only coming in for meetings."

The rest of the time they "worked" at home - i.e. they didn't do any work, they hired contractors like me to do it for them.

They had the freedom to be complete assholes in meetings and interactions with staff they deemed stupid.

The guys who had it hardest were the non-founders who worked at the original startup. They had to stick around for four years to receive their 300 grand or whatever it was, but couldn't be assholes or just not show up four out of every five days. They had to put up with all the weird political bullshit that happens in a big company, which was made worse because the founders were busy making everyone at the big company angry. This seemed doubly hard to take, because most startup employees take jobs at startups partially to avoid big company politics and bullshit. Founders, throw your employees a bone and make sure they have an accelerated vesting schedule upon acquisition clause written into their contract.

</comment><comment><USER3> Go to work for their corporate overlords. Slowly become disenfranchised, resentful and restless. Until they give up and resign before their shares fully vest.

<comment><USER4> This is not true. Most stay until they are fully vested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's often less awesome than it sounds: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/460987802/>

</comment><comment><USER6> work for the man. dream about leaving. feel some responsibility to see your product through to success. get frustrated at the bureaucracy and politics. wait for shares to vest. worry that you are getting soft and won't be able to leave when the time comes.

read news.yc to remind yourself of what it used to be like.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want to ask a related question: most of you startup folks dream of selling out to somebody... what do you think it's going to be like? Do you even plan that far? You do realize that after the big liquidity moment, you have 2-3 years of working for the acquiring company, in order to realize your gains?

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh gee, maybe launch another startup or a venture capital firm?

</comment><comment><USER8> If you mean immediately after, kegstands are usually involved.

<comment><USER9> Some of us are too old for those sorts of shenanigans.

This is the point at which I would make a joke about celebrating by having a nice lunch with the other old people at Luby's, but I don't think the valley has Luby's or anything comparable, and I don't know where old people in the valley stereotypically go to eat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> After fulfilling their commitments to the acquirer, and their colleagues, whatever the hell they feel like doing.

</comment><comment><USER11> usually they go work for the company that bought them out

</comment><comment><USER12> Take their payout, quit, and do it all over again!

</comment><comment><USER13> become a snarky venture capitalist?

<comment><USER9> I don't think I've met any venture capitalists that are snarky. I've been surprised by how pleasant most of them are, given the reputation the industry has. I have met a couple of obnoxiously "fratty" VCs, but they weren't partners, and they weren't with a top tier firm.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A minimal stack based VM in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codr7/liblg <comment><USER2> The design section of the README is greatly appreciated!

> The core loop uses computed goto, which means that new instructions must be > added in identical order

> Values are represented as tagged unions.

> Fundamental types are global (as in not tied to a specific VM instance)

What exactly is a global fundamental type? Is there a local counterpart?

<comment><AUTHOR> You may choose whatever storage duration you feel like for your own types, but built in types are globally declared and therefore shared between VM instances.

<comment><USER2> I see, so it refers to the C storage class. There can be several virtual machine instances referencing the same built-in integer type instance. This imposes on users the need to call lg_init() and lg_deinit() before and after using the library. I feel like this could have been avoided by statically enumerating the built-in types instead of initializing a data structure dynamically.

The data type structure contains pointers to functions that implement operations such as addition, subtraction, copying and cloning. An integer type instance is initialized with addition and subtraction functions. The integer value representation is part of the value data structure though. So how could a user of the library define new data types? It seems like it would be necessary to modify the library's source code in order to add new members to the tagged union.

Also, perhaps the virtual machine could be optimized further by using tagged pointers to make integer values immediate, avoiding the need to dereference the pointer.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would either have to reuse one of the existing representations or modify the union atm.

I'll add a void *as_any to the union eventually which means you're just one level of indirection from supporting any representation without touching the union.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For those interested in the subject, another great read is Lua register based VM: [https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc- rio.br/lua/local/source/5.1/l...](https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc- rio.br/lua/local/source/5.1/lvm.c.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> > ideas on how to improve its performance further without making a mess are > most welcome.

One approach would be designing the input language for performance. In particular, having statically typed operations. A specialized iadd instruction for values that you are sure you want to treat as integers would save you a lot of indirecting through function pointers. A disadvantage of static typing is that you need to implement type checks if you want to guarantee well typedness.

Another (orthogonal) approach would be to consider a JIT backend. Not one you write yourself, that could definitely be considered "making a mess". But in the past I've had success using LibJIT ([https://www.gnu.org/software/libjit/](https://www.gnu.org/software/libjit/)) for speeding up a stack interpreter. In that case, it was a subset of Python bytecode (see [https://github.com/gergo-/pylibjit](https://github.com/gergo-/pylibjit), the code has very probably bitrotted).

</comment><comment><USER5> This piqued my intrest. I'm a hobbyist C programmer so forgive me if this is a rudimentary question. What is the rationale/convention for naming a variable "_"? I've never seen this before.

For example:

      struct lg_buf *lg_buf_init(struct lg_buf *_) {
        _->data = NULL;
        _->len = _->cap = 0;
        return _;
      }

<comment><USER6> An underscore is primarily used as an identifier to denote a variable/parameter whose name does not really matter. It's more commonly used when you're not planning on using the aforementioned variable, but it's also sometimes used when the identifier is used but its name doesn't matter.

One such instance is the abbreviated scala lambda syntax, where (x:Int) => x + 2 can be abbreviated to _ + 2 in the same way that kotlin would allow abbreviating it as { it + 2 } with its equivalent default lambda parameter name, "it".

In the example you quoted, the identifier denotes the sole parameter, so in a sense its name does not matter, and as such people from certain programming circles might be inclined to use an underscore instead of taking the time to come up with an appropriate name. It's not like a more descriptive name would help in that example, the type name and function name already give sufficient context for it to be perfectly clear what the parameter is for, and it's not like parameter names have any semantic significance in C.

<comment><USER5> > It's not like a more descriptive name would help in that example, the type > name and function name already give sufficient context for it to be > perfectly clear what the parameter is for, and it's not like parameter names > have any semantic significance in C.

I agree, and I've been thinking about this today. There is also a minimalistic quality to this style, the _ pointer is more prominent simply by not having a real name. I like it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny, I actually have some fib benchmarks for my RISC-V emulator! It uses fib(40), but I added one for 20. Interestingly, that is the one benchmark that LuaJIT crushes my emulator in, so I'm still working on beating it, but i don't really have any plan. :)

        libriscv: fib(20) median 317ns    lowest: 310ns      highest: 356ns
        luajit: fib(20)   median 146ns    lowest: 145ns      highest: 170ns
        lua5.4: fib(20)   median 631ns    lowest: 598ns      highest: 694ns

Running your emulator: $ ./fibrec 567us

Modern compilers used with emulated machines can beat even v8 at times. Cool project! I divided your number by 100, is that correct? Is there some additional overhead in setting up / tearing down something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, all benchmarks run 100 repetitions of fib(20).

There is no additional overhead that I'm aware of except calling a function in a loop, which is intentional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You might want to peruse the C sources for GForth which has been under continuous development for 20 years or so. It introduced a concept called super-instructions that speeds things up quite a bit. I am not an expert on the internals, just a casual user.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the introduction to this. See paper at [http://www.euroforth.org/ef03/ertl- gregg03.pdf](http://www.euroforth.org/ef03/ertl-gregg03.pdf).</comment></comment>


Using the NFC Chip of the Passport to Do Proof-of-Work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@janmoritz_48488/using-the-nfc-chip-of-the-passport-to-do-proof-of-work-b77e1a5343a1 <comment><USER2> There may be some unstated assumptions here that I'm missing, but as presented this does not appear to be a useful idea.

The meat of the idea, as I understand it, is: passports can be easily validated (because they contain a secret key signed by a government's Document Signing Certificate), but they cannot be cloned (because that secret key is in tamper-resistant hardware). So let's prove work by generating preimages of signatures under these keys.

Trusting this purported PoW system requires that you trust the government not to issue fake certificates. Otherwise, they can just use their signing key to generate lots of new certificates and massively parallelize the "proof of work". Moreover, at the point that you trust the government to behave honestly, there's no need for proof of work! Since you're trusting that a passport key is uniquely tied to an individual, you can (for example) just vote---the required assumption already implies that there cannot be any Sybils. (Or use any other mechanism that requires Sybil-free PKI, since that's what the assumption implies.)

(As another practical matter, there does not appear to be any reason to believe that each individual only has one physical passport. Some countries allow people to have multiple passports.)

<comment><USER3> One solution that I have thought of is to have a mining difficulty by country and another one by passport. If the passports of a certain country mine a lot of blocks the difficulty for this country would increase. In this scenario it would take 51% of the countries to go rogue in order to perform a 51% attack.

Another thing to implement as well is to increase the difficulty for a passport to find a new block once it has already found a block. This way even if someone extracts the private key of a passport he will only be able to take a very limited advantage out of it because the difficulty for him would skyrocket, as a consequence the reward of doing this should be lower than the costs of doing the hardware hacking.

<comment><USER4> >One solution that I have thought of is to have a mining difficulty by country and another one by passport. If the passports of a certain country mine a lot of blocks the difficulty for this country would increase.

But countries are a completely arbitrary distinction. Should Liechtenstein mining 100 blocks raise its difficulty as China mining 100 blocks? If not, how should we weigh each country? By population? By GDP? What's stopping countries from gaming their statistics to get more votes?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't matter, mining difficulty is automatically determined by how much mining is being done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A Hammer in Search of a Nail

Proof of Work require no secret information as an input and have to be easy to verify. But most importantly, why would anyone do this?

Passport issuer can act like certification authority, this is not a trustless system where PoW can be used for something. Public key infrastructure is a solved thing with it's own problems, but verification is not one of them if authority is working as it should.

EDIT: Let's not even mention that smartcards have effective lifetime and efficiency.

<comment><USER7> Hacking is not always about useful solutions. It's about experiments that may work out or not work out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the author of this piece has not fully understood the concept of proof-of-work. Hashing algorithms are used precisely because they do not rely on a private key - and thus everyone can verify work that has been claimed to be done.

Passports signing some data would provide a different output for every passport. You could verify that the person doing the hashing indeed is the person who owns the passport if you distributed the public key. But what is the point of this?

Additionally there are other issues on so many different levels with this idea: lack of anonymity, an artificially constrained hash rate (if there's an incentive to increase the hash rate, someone _will_ extract the private key from their passport and mine on dedicated hardware), wearing out the NFC chip through massive use, creative an incentive to steal passports...

<comment><USER9> As I read it, the point is not to authenticate individuals but rather to use the relative scarcity of passports as the bounding factor for executing a sybil attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This offers literally none of the security properties that are required for a secure decentralized currency and betrays a very fundamental misunderstanding of what proof of work is for or its (economic) security properties.

The most obvious problem with this proposal is that it's clearly not secure - if someone manages to make fake passports (either because the cryptosystem isn't secure, they steal the signing key, or they control the passport issuance authority) they fully control the system.

<comment><USER3> I answered a solution to this in another comment, above. If the mining difficulty is set by country, it would take 51% of the countries to go rogue in order to perform a 51% attack.

<comment><USER10> So what you're actually proposing is a blockchain where the mining process is based on e.g. UN member countries voting. Cool, but that's not proof of work, it's not a cryptocurrency, and it's not very useful. They already have something a lot like this - it's called "Banks in the EEA".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I am surprised that so little has been done to combine the NFC capabilities > of passports with the blockchain and hope that this field will be explored > in the future.

If you are surprised about why a technology is missing, sometimes it means that you have come up with something novel. Other times it means that you have come up with another idea that was ruled out by others.

In this case, it's the latter. The utility of cryptocoins is due to trustless, decentralized storage/transfer of value. If it's not decentralized, it's useless. If it's not trustless, it's useless.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, those big projects like btc or eth are NOT at all decentralised, that is just a meme. It is more like proof-of-materialism. That alone is a good reason to keep on searching for other decentralised solutions. Btc is allready ruled out by the majority of people on this planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article never clearly states it, but the goal of proof-of-work, and by extension this protocol, is to throttle access to write privileges on a ledger.

Bitcoin does this by forcing miners grind on a nonce to try to get a block hash below a certain value.

In this protocol, it appears that miners would do the same thing.

The difference is that the supply of passports is considered limited. A given person only gets one. That suggests that it might be possible to avoid the ever-increasing difficulty that Bitcoin has faced.

Bitcoin was intended as a one CPU, one vote system. This new one appears to be intended as a one passport, one vote system.

There are two main concerns with such a system:

1\. security - how easy is it to forge passport identities?

2\. privacy - how easy is it to link a signature to the original passport?

I suspect the actual utility of this protocol revolves around these two points.

<comment><USER14> > A given person only gets one.

Not really. Consider: old passports, multiple citizenship, emergency passports, identity cards which can be used as passports, etc.

<comment><USER15> I generally agree with a minor quibble: There isn't an identity card that can be used as a passport. There are identity cards that are sufficient for limited travel and are unrecognized elsewhere. In the relatively widespread EU++ ID card system, at least in the country I live in, ID cards can't even be used in biometric immigration gates which require passports.

<comment><USER16> Americans can actually get "passport card" which functions like the EU national identity cards, within the United States. It is intended for use within the United States, as ID laws are changing. However, the RFID chip in the US passport card only has the identifying number encoded in it, for lookup in government databases. US biometric passports of course contain all of the traveler's information. Likewise EU national identity cards are biometric, as this is the standard.

With respect to the EU, as you know, there is to be a transition to biometric EU national ID cards, if countries have not already switched to them. The vast majority of countries already have. Some EU national ID cards are more useful than others, giving people online identities, for example.

Although I am culturally an American, I am also Croatian. I hold two citizenships. Croatia participates in the eID scheme [1]. Next time I go to Croatia, I am getting my eID, so I have an official identity on the internet. I am excited, as silly as it sounds.

[1] [https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eID](https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eID)

<comment><USER17> A US passport card is sufficient for entry via land or sea ports only to: Canada, Mexico, The Caribbean and Bermuda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _assume that passport chips are similar enough so that they would provide a > similar signing rate per second. Making it probably the most egalitarian POW > mechanism that could exist._

If you're going to base a system on this, you'd need to be prepared for the possibility of the government passport-issuing service switching to a different chip (different vendor, next gen design, etc.).

It might be equal now, but what happens if everyone who renews their passport suddenly starts getting different hardware? People could even realize what's going on and there might be a mad rush to renew passports.

Basically, when you piggyback on someone else's system, you add a variable you don't control.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of when a new ASIC chip is released. But yes, this could be an issue.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I guess if your goal is proof of computational work, it is hard to really control the ecosystem no matter where you turn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure if proof-of-work is a great use-case here, but leveraging NFC chips in passports could be a great proof-of-personhood in a field where it is extremely hard to do so. If you have proof-of-personhood you can do things like airdrops much more effectively without giving a huge amount of coins to someone with a ton of compute-power.

<comment><USER3> This is what UBIC is doing by basically distributing a continuous airdrop every block to all registered e-passport holders. Q was trying to do the same, both projects are mentioned on the bottom of the article.

<comment><USER19> Oh that's great! I obviously didn't read the links at the bottom. Too bad UBIC isn't on any exchanges yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a variant of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15382911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15382911), but instead of trusting a couple of entities (Intel/AMD), you're trusting 200+ entities, with some being very corrupt?

</comment><comment><USER20> That's not proof of work; it's proof of authority. You can jigger it any which way with randomization and challenge-response: it's still proof of authority. Not that there is anything wrong with PoA; most mined networks end up effectively PoA anyway (because dominated by 1-2 mining consortiums).

And it doesn't matter if you use a passport NFC chip or some other kind of secure element (say, a ledger nano) with strong KYC; same thing.

</comment><comment><USER21> To the best of my knowledge, the electronic signature function in German Personalausweis/eAT/passport documents is unusable due to legal reasons since 2017 (!!) [1], and even before that it was not universally available, you had to purchase commercial one-year certificates. I'd _really_ be interested how the author made the passport digitally sign something!

[1]: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_(Deutschland)#...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_\(Deutschland\)#Qualifizierte_elektronische_Signatur_\(QES\))

<comment><USER22> It seems he's just talking about technical signature, and not a legal one.

It's a chip, with a hard to extract private key. You give it some input, and you get an output which is the signature of that input signed by that private key. The article isn't talking about whether this signature is legally admissable.

<comment><USER21> > You give it some input, and you get an output which is the signature of that > input signed by that private key.

My point is, this is _technically impossible_ at the moment with German ID documents because using this function requires a commercial certificate which have not been issued since 2017.

<comment><USER9> The german national ID card protocol is something completely different from the ICAO standard for biometric passports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I accidentally left my passport in the microwave for 1 second while heating up a pain au chocolat. Now it can't be remotely sidebanded and is no longer Turing complete apparently too. Silly me!

<comment><USER24> This just means you can't use electronic passport gates, so you spend more time at border control and may be targeted for harassment for non-compliance. There's a small chance you could be fined, since the passport isn't actually yours it belongs to the government.

The passport deliberately requires the MRV as input for the NFC data stream, so to get the data out of it a hypothetical attacker has to read your passport (because that's where the MRV is). That's why the electronic gates require you to show them the passport open at the right page with your data on it. They literally need that data to get the exact same data from NFC.

For a machine this is brilliant news, it can now let you through the gate after deciding that you're allowed in. For a human adversary it's not an improvement at all because looking at a photograph versus downloading a JPEG of the exact same photograph is not different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love this idea! Offering $M's for a method to clone passports? Illegal.

Creating a crypto currency that produces $MM's of incentive to clone passports? Totally legit.

</comment><comment><USER24> The feature this talks about isn't free, it requires a bunch more compute capability in the NFC chip, which drives up prices and you most likely wouldn't know if you have it. What's the result?

Passports are expensive documents, but what you'd expect is that even though the document is expensive anyway there's an incentive to cut corner on expensive features that aren't noticed.

Sure enough my actual British passport (issued after it became apparent that idiot Leavers would get their way but before they wasted money having the passports arbitrarily changed colour and removing the words "European Union") does not have the "Active Authentication" feature.

It has the obligatory embarrassing photo encoded, and it carries proof this document was issued by the UKPA, for whatever that is worth, but it isn't capable of "active authentication" and so it would be useless for this PoW trick.

Now maybe the United Kingdom is an outlier. Maybe every other passport authority in the world has been issuing these for a decade. But I'd guess exactly the opposite. One or two security enthusiastic countries have it, or worse, it's available as a demo from the handful of companies that _make_ passports, but the vast majority of people who have a passport don't have one of these.

If you own an NFC reader you can get software that checks for Active Authentication. I'd be a tiny bit interested in the results if you see anything interesting for yours.

<comment><USER24> Aha! I read further, Active Authentication is also disliked because the exact feature this blog post relies on prevents deniability - and that's a Privacy no-no, so some countries like Germany explicitly do not want it.

With Active Authentication you can basically show the passport a nonce, and get the passport to give you signed proof that it saw this nonce. As a result you can show other people that nonce, and the signature, and they know it was a real passport.

But alternative schemes avoid this, you and the passport perform a dance in which either the passport is genuine and you get the answer you expected, or it isn't and you don't, but you don't get a durable proof you can show to anybody else as output.

This latter scheme works more like a physical document while also defeating cheap "clone" attempts and so privacy-friendly countries have no reason to use Active Authentication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this wouldn't cause extra wear on the passport chip. I don't know if it has a counter which increments on every signature (like credit cards have); if it has, then every signature would be another write to the non- volatile memory of the chip.

<comment><USER26> There is no such thing as that. He has no limit on the number of times

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This could be useful for email authentication as an anti-spam measure. Yes, on rare occasions there are fake passports signed by governments, but not in the quantities spammers need.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it solves the basic authentication problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is an amazing insight, very very well done!

</comment><comment><USER26> Using passport verification of the project, can be a real person verification interface.</comment>


First image of particle entanglement - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-48971538 <comment><USER2> For people with more questions: [https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just- unveiled-the-fi...](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-unveiled-the- first-ever-photo-of-quantum-entanglement)

> This particular photo shows entanglement between two photons - two particles > of light. They're interacting and for a brief moment sharing physical > states.

Here's the research paper: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw2563.full](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw2563.full)

<comment><USER3> That's much more informative, I'd almost say it should be the link instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Strange way of throwing Einstein's name into the title for linkbaiting sake. It's not his particle entanglement but John Bell's if anyone's, calling it "spooky" is Einstein's contribution, at least in the context of the article.

I had the BBC as a reference on journalism, but from a quick glance over the headlines at least its website looks like it's lost some decency in that respect.

<comment><USER5> Ok, we've deeinsteined the title above.

<comment><USER6> One more Hapax legomenon just landed on this planet

(For those unmotivated to Google: it is a word which only occurs once in a context, book ... or the whole world)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So what exactly is this a picture of? Two entangled photons? I don't have the background for the full maths involved here, but there's not enough in that article to tell me why it's exciting ...

<comment><USER7> From what I understand it's a lot of entangled photons showing the behavior that was forced onto their entangled counterparts.

In short: \- Create beam of entangled photons \- Split off half of them \- Pass one half through liquid crystal making them behave funny \- Photograph the ones that where not passed through crystal and, lo and behold, observe the funny behavior

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It occurs no matter how great the distance between the particles is.

Well then set up two particles on opposite sides of the planet and send communications via this entanglement at the speed of.. light?

And yes, I have near zero knowledge of particle physics!

<comment><USER9> >

<comment><USER5> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, or snarky ones. That only makes this place worse. Instead, if you know more, please share some of what you know so we can all learn something. You're broadcasting to thousands of people when you post a comment like that, so your audience transcends the user you're replying to.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A depressing lack of details in the article.

<comment><USER5> The paper is discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20428250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20428250).</comment></comment>


A short introduction to Coq - <AUTHOR> http://coq.inria.fr/a-short-introduction-to-coq <comment><USER2> Every time someone points out this tutorial and I see again the even_0 and even_S constructors of the even predicate, I am reminded of the quote where FORTRAN is called a high-level language because, unlike assembly, it doesn't force the programmer to make up names for intermediate expressions.

There are good reasons why even_0 and even_S need to have names, but I sure hope that we will one day look back on Coq as the assembly of computer- assisted proofs.

<comment><USER3> pascal_cuoq said: "There are good reasons why even_0 and even_S need to have names, but I sure hope that we will one day look back on Coq as the assembly of computer-assisted proofs."

For predicates that can be computed in coq, we can do away with the names:

      Fixpoint even n :=
        match n with
          | 0 => True
          | 1 => False
          | S (S m) => even m
        end.

Note that "True" and "False" are propositions (have sort "Prop") with trivial and no proofs, respectively, and are not "true" and "false", which are the constructors of the inductive type "bool". If the return type were changed to bool, "even n = true" (rather than just "even n") would be a predicate meaning "n is an even natural number".

Additionally, your wish is already coming true! For certain types of problems, coq can be hooked up to external solvers (for SAT, for instance) which generate proof terms that are then checked by coq. See <http://www.lri.fr/~melquion/doc/09-calculemus-article.pdf> for an example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, I have to ask -- it's the reddit/adolescent in me. What's the proper way to pronounce the name?

<comment><USER5> I mean, seriously, I'd never specialise in this language because everyone will turn to a teenager when you are listing your skills.

You are really good at _coq_? So, what's your favorite thing about _coq_? Do you guys ever have _coq_ meetups?

Naming is important.

<comment><USER3> maxklein said: "I'd never specialise in this language because everyone will turn to a teenager when you are listing your skills."

Coq is not a general-purpose programming language. People who "specialize in this language" generally work in a field where everyone is familiar with the name "coq" and nobody bats an eye.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure about that? I've seen co-workers suggest the use of Coq, only to see a room full of managers and peers burst out in laughter. Coq won't catch on in many places where it'd be very useful solely because of its name.

<comment><USER3> KERMIT said: "Are you sure about that? I've seen co-workers suggest the use of Coq, only to see a room full of managers and peers burst out in laughter."

I think my claim that "People who 'specialize in this language' generally work in a field where everyone is familiar with the name 'coq' and nobody bats an eye." is sufficiently specific that it is not in contradiction with your anecdote. I used the word "specialize" because I was responding to a claim from the OP. I took it to mean something more than "have used" or "are familiar with". I took it to mean something like "has written more than one substantial project using". Did your co-workers fit into that category? Do you expect that they represent the norm of those who "specialize" in the system? I expect that most people who have written more than one substantial project using Coq work in program verification or type theory, where the name "coq" is not unusual enough that it still evokes laughter.

KERMIT also said: "Coq won't catch on in many places where it'd be very useful solely because of its name."

I am surprised by this. Are you sure? Have you witnessed this? In the laughing case or cases you mention, did the laughter turn into a rejection of the idea because of the name? Do you think Isabelle or HOL get used more often as a result?

I just expect more from technical professionals -- not that they never laugh at a silly dirty joke, but that major project decisions are based on more than programming language's name, especially in a sparse field like the one Coq is in.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin's 3 Fatal Design Flaws - <AUTHOR> http://positivemoney.org/2014/04/bitcoins-fatal-design-flaws/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if it makes sense that stagnant money should lose value (as it does in our current money system). With bitcoin it seems it's the opposite. The article does make a valid point that the fixed money supply of bitcoins would reward hoarders. I'm not certain, but could this potentially lead to financial inertia?</comment>


Response to Netflix's "Node.js in Flames" Blog Post - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/hueniverse/a3109f716bf25718ba0e

<comment><USER2> I want to point out that in the thread here on HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8631022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8631022)) about that Netflix article, the top comment debunks the myth that the list-of- handlers was the issue slowing them down.

While creating a grammar from the combination of the regular expressions (which is why you can't just have a hash) is definitely a solution (quite possibly THE solution), that's definitely not an MVP-type of solution, and is pretty non-trivial.

The actual problem was them constantly adding handlers by accident.

One of the reasons I love and use HN so much (I give almost no other site so much pull on my personal opinion) is that smart (or very careful and well-read dumb people) leave well-thought-out comments like the one I mentioned.

<comment><USER3> This is all true.

However, I can't take a stack seriously as an enterprise or production ready piece of software when it does something like iterate a list _recursively_ in performance sensitive code. It's just bizarre. JS doesn't have tail call optimization and for loops are _just fine_. Being able to blow out the JS stack by having 'too many handlers' is terrifying to me, especially because JS runtimes have catastrophically poor support for handling and debugging stack overflows.

The use of a single array for handlers that can contain multiple items also feels like an architectural red flag to me, but I can understand how that would happen since JS's standard library is so anemic and lacks useful data structures. What you really want is a set (or ordered set, if handler order is super important - it probably is here)

I saw a number of entries in those flame charts that appeared to be V8 compilation internals, which is suspicious to me. But those are probably just debugger/symbol resolution issues, I hope, and not actual JIT recompilation constantly happening during route dispatch? (If v8 were compiling code constantly during dispatch, that would certainly explain multiple-ms pauses...)

<comment><USER4> > JS doesn't have tail call optimization and for loops are just fine.

Not personally familiar with Express's internals, but if this is async iteration nothing's pushing onto the call stack in the first place. Unless you're using generators, but in that case you can just use a for loop.

<comment><USER3> The deeply nested stack in the flame chart suggests that it is recursing, and the netflix article said it's recursing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Worth noting that the person defending express is Eran Hammer - the of one of it's biggest competitors, hapi (hapijs.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> > The criticism about allowing routes to repeat in the express array shows > that even after doing all this work, the Netflix team still doesn't > understand how express works.

Wouldn't a better solution, in this context, be to aggregate values under the same key?

</comment><comment><USER7> It does go to show you that you need to understand the limitations of a hammer before starting to whack things with it. This is true of any framework or library you use. Even more necessary if you are processing billions of things with it.

<comment><USER8> It's not so black and white. In many cases it's faster and cheaper (and more educational) to just start whacking and find out what the limitations are.

Of course when you're operating on the scale of Netflix then, yeah, sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> this is why the express team actively rejects any features or support for dynamically changing middleware and routes during runtime.

<comment><USER10> _this_ is ambiguous. Can you explain what the context of "this" is?

<comment><USER11> From the original Netflix post:

"This turned out be caused by a periodic (10/hour) function in our code. The main purpose of this was to refresh our route handlers from an external source. This was implemented by deleting old handlers and adding new ones to the array. Unfortunately, it was also inadvertently adding a static route handler with the same path each time it ran."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a reason why they don't have a map for static strings, and use an array for regexs?

<comment><USER13> Probably makes it hard to do things in the right order. You'd have a separate array just to keep track of order that you'd be iterating every time.

And express allows for more than one handler even for a static route.

        app.get('/', function(req, res, next) { next(); });
        app.get('/', function(req, res) { res.send(); });

<comment><USER14> This could be solved by having (internally) a map of { path: [handler 1, handler 2]}. That makes static path matching constant time, and static paths with multiple handlers iterate over the requests appropriately.

This can be a little confusing, especially given that you'd be specifying static and non-static paths separately, but it could be argued that that is less confusing than some methods. For example, nginx's method allows you to define paths in any order, but checks routes matching regular expressions first _in config order_ , then picks a static route by _most specific match_ ; IOW the order of your routes in nginx doesn't matter until you have regular expressions, in which case it is surprisingly critical some of the time and irrelevant the rest of the time.

Breaking it up into 'regular expression routes (checked first)' and 'static routes (checked last)' could simplify things conceptually, but doubtlessly raises more usability issues as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Critical Vulnerability Discovered in Evernote Chrome Extension [Jun 19, Fixed]] - <AUTHOR> https://guard.io/blog/evernote-universal-xss-vulnerability <comment><AUTHOR> >As a result of Guardio's responsible disclosure, Evernote has patched the vulnerability and a fixed version has been deployed within a few days.</comment>


Potentially Interesting Site for Bids on Legal Projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2010/02/ebay-meets-the-business-of-law.php

<comment><USER2> With anything that takes any modicum of skill, you get what you pay for. Craftsmanship and intellect are not cheap things.</comment>


Arrow's Theorem (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/ <comment><USER2> So, if some of you have felt despair at the idea that this may indicate that true democracy is impossible, fear not: it hinges on the fact that some preferences can be cyclic: A wins over B who wins over C, who wins over A.

These situations are possible but rare and in such a case, it is arguable that all potential winners are legitimate.

<comment><USER3> Arrows theorem is misleading because it only applies to rank order systems.

Range voting (i.e. 0-5 rating system) satisfies all the criteria. [0] So yes, democracy is theoretically possible.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/e3GFG0sXIig](https://youtu.be/e3GFG0sXIig)

<comment><USER4> Good video, thanks for sharing that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think plurality/first-past-the-post gets an unjustified bad rap. If you focus only on the moment of election, it is not a very good system. But a broader view reveals something else. The process of settling on two options, that each represent a coalition of factions that have come together and compromised on a common platform, is doing most of the work that other systems try to do within the voting system itself.

Proportional voting also solves the problem in a similar way, except that the politicians representing each faction, rather than the faction at-large, do the work of forming coalitions with other factions.

Of course the distinction between the two is a little more blurry, since broad-coalition parties also exist in proportional systems, and politicians do play a large role in the at-large coalition-forming in plurality systems. But nonetheless, they clearly lead to different outcomes.

As for ranked and approval-type voting systems, I'm not really a fan since I think they don't have any hope of representing coherent thought about politics. People have a hard enough time making a principled choice of one party to vote for; asking people to rank them seems likely to produce even less principled choices.

<comment><USER6> I have a favorite article on voting [1]. It has good visual descriptions of how different systems favour different styles of candidates.

Plurality voting is a lot better than not having a democracy; imho at least the worst candidate will be excluded. My understanding is also that democracies of any form (including republics) tend to get much better military results than dictatorships, but I don't have any actual evidence to cite :(.

[1] [http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/](http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/)

<comment><USER7> While good and illustrative, that page is based on the very restrictive view, that of choosing only one candidate. This applies to presidential elections, sure. There can be only one president.

But most countries don't have one-member sized voting districts in their parliament elections, rather they choose 10 to 30 members per voting district.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the cognitive science labs was hiring experts in graph theory, and it turns out they wanted to express Arrow's Theorem -- and the related theories -- in the form of a graph so they could reason about decision making in the brain.

If I recall correctly, the paradox of voting gets represented as a top cycle which leads to irrational decisions. They wanted to come up with mechanisms where they break top cycles. (In these graphs a higher ranked decision was higher on the Y axis.)

<comment><USER9> The paradox of voting usually refers to a different claim: that the cost of an individual voting tends to be greater than the expected benefit to the individual.

Confusingly, the term (and the extremely similar "voting paradox") sometimes refers to the Condorcet paradox, which notes that collective preferences between three or more options can be intransitive. I expect that is the concept you are referring to.

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

<comment><USER8> Yes, the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find this is one of the best videos on the subject:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJag3vuG834](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJag3vuG834)

<comment><USER11> Great video except that it's misleading at the end. Arrow's theorem is only about rank-order voting. But if e.g. you can express your preferences as numbers (e.g. if you can state your preferences as 10% strawberry, 30% vanilla, and 60% chocolate) then it no longer applies.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. It seems that those voting systems too can be proven [0] to have these problems, though.

[0] [https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/14015/does- gibb...](https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/14015/does-gibbard- satterthwaite-theorem-apply-to-all-voting-systems/14245)

<comment><USER11> Holy hell, that is mindblowing. Thank you for sharing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like a car swerving side to side as 2 drivers wrestle for control of the wheel, the 2 party system is an erratic vehicle.

But I have good news: we can steer a more stable course with score voting.

Score voting doesn't violate Arrow's Theorem (because it's not a ranked-choice system).

Here's how it works:

* Each voter gives candidates a score from 0 to 1.

* The highest average score wins. (The average can be weighted to account for abstentions.)

The upshot:

* No political parties are needed.

* It resists gerrymandering because it's non-partisan.

* If there's a bias in the system, it's towards the center.

* Simulations indicate score voting is socially optimal.

* Arrow, himself, expressed preference for approval voting (a variant of score voting)

Further reading:

electology.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

<comment><USER14> It sounds appealing, but I wonder if in practice range voting tends to collapse into first-past-the-post, with people voting tactically to maximize the chances of a popular candidate winning (instead of voting for the candidate they most prefer). This is why systems such as optional preferential voting appeal to me despite their (different) flaws. I wonder if monotonicity and trying to avoid circular electoral preferences are slightly overrated goals. I suspect that a good electoral system might involve a bit of satisficing, of producing great outcomes even when the theoretically best outcome isn't consistently achieved.

<comment><USER15> In fact it collapses into aproval voting, which is like range voting except every score is 0 or 1, or equivalenty like FPTP except that you can vote for more than one person.

But it turns out that approval voting is itself considered a very good voting system (I remember reading an article about how a conference of experts voted on their favourite voting systems and approval voting won, but I can't find it because "voting system vote" isn't a very good Google search).

<comment><USER9> I think The main theoretical problem with most approval and range voting methods is that they fail the Condorcet and majority criteria. A candidate who is preferred over every other candidate by a majority of voters can lose, which sucks, but in practice it is debatable how common such an occurrence would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Am I the only one who finds that the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy is generally less clear than the matching Wikipedia article?

<comment><USER9> I almost always scroll down for the Wikipedia article when Google puts sources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Investopedia or WebMD or IMDb first.

For me, it's less about which source I trust more, and more about my familiarity with and enjoyment of the writing/organizational style of Wikipedia articles.</comment></comment>


Open Science: Michael Nielsen TED Talk - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnWocYKqvhw <comment><AUTHOR> The speaker wrote a book about this topic [1]

[1] [http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9517.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9517.html)</comment>


Universities Are Leveraging H-1B Visas to Fuel Startup Hubs - <AUTHOR> https://news.crunchbase.com/news/how-universities-are-leveraging-h-1b-visas-to-fuel-startup-hubs/ <comment><USER2> Where to begin?

1) Universities, and I mean through official channels, are not great at creating startups. I'd rather they focus on basic research. No, Google was not started 'by' Stanford, etc. The biggest company I know of to come out of a university (founded by a professor) is Broadcom in 1991. Anyone know of a bigger one?

2) Be skeptical of the "$416,442,265" in funding claim. How many of those companies would have gotten funding anyways? This is a tactic incubator programs use: claim affiliation with a successful startup that's about to get a lot more funding. Then the startup gets to employ a "co-founder" for peanuts.

3) I don't think universities do a great job of protecting the rights contingent labor. See: grad school. I can see this program as being very abusive to participants.

Further, this is _exactly_ the type of thing that H-1B critics would point to as an abuse of the system. Honestly it's odd seeing this done out in the open and celebrated.

<comment><USER3> H1B is abusive in nature. Most of the times it's a take it and shut up Visa. Sometimes you get a "mm we might start a naturalization process, but if we don't like you probably not".

A lot of H1B workers ended up with quite a bit of issues, a lot of them never got the Green Card process started. So, I don't see how this could be worse. At least they claim that they will help you so you might be more inclined to put it in your contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This point is glossed over in the article but H1B visa workers cannot start their own companies and employ themselves. The best case scenario for anyone on this program is spend 2-3 years in university while building a network. You can't work on your startup during this phase. Get a GC and then start working on your startup idea. For some countries like China and India GC takes more than 10 years so this program is not an option for people in those countries.

<comment><USER5> > "Get a GC and then start working on your startup idea"

Practically speaking for many foreign tech workers, a visa such as the H1-B is pretty much the first step to getting a GC eventually, so advising they skip the H1 and go "get a GC" isn't going to be all that helpful for many.

It's pretty hard to go straight to a GC for most foreigners, even among those with excellent academic qualifications. How hard this is also often depends entirely on your passport lottery result - be unfortunate enough to be born with an Indian one and you are easily looking at a minimum 10 year wait times in a great many cases, and to live and work in US during that period you are likely going to need some kind of work visa like the H1.

Even for the best case scenarios (passport from a country with a current GC priority date etc) it still realistically often takes at least a year to complete the GC process.

<comment><USER4> I think you misinterpreted my comment. I never suggested skipping the H1B. I was actually laying down the sequence of steps needed in this program. Join Program on H1B -> Wait till GC approval -> Then start working for your startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is quite brilliant. If quality of tech remains good, few interesting results can be expected in years to come.

There are few challenges for the founder(s) - 1. splitting time (and focus) between university duties and startup work will be tough. And 2. if a startup fail to get traction within 1.5-2 years, and its founders are unable to secure GC/extension, you can expect further dilution of focus.

<comment><USER7> According to the GEIR website, it only requires founders to spend 8 hours per week on university duties. One day a week does not sound to bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lol, with so many legitimate H-1Bs getting denied, I doubt USCIS will approve these visas.

Right now, US is bleeding talent either by losing H-1Bs (especially ones that are educated in the US) and future university students.

Guess what this mass of population would do in their countries in the years ahead?

</comment><comment><USER9> "the program invites foreign entrepreneurs to work part-time at a school, either as a mentor or an adjunct professor. In return, entrepreneurs may get a cap-exempt H-1B visa that gives them the latitude to work on their own startups"

Seems like the bar to get accepted is pretty high

<comment><USER7> Here is the official eligibility. Does make sense to set the bar high initially and loose it slowly afterwards.

Eligibility

-You graduated from a US university or participated in a US acceleration/incubation program, entrepreneurial boot-camp, etc.;

-Your company is underway in terms of incorporation, financing and corporate governance;

-Your company has been accepted as a member of the VDC; and

-You possess the necessary skill, experience and talent to qualify for an H-1B visa.

<comment><USER10> Why not EB-visa though? H1B is completely useless or even dangerous for startup founders. It's easier to live in e.g. Canada and incorporate in Delaware, than work in the US as H1B and be prevented from incorporating anything, effectively ending up as a high-performing slave wasting best years on somebody else's success.

<comment><USER7> there is no EB-visa, only EB green cards. But you need to get H1B first before you can jump through the EB hoops.

<comment><USER11> > there is no EB-visa

Citizenship and Immigration Services thinks there's 5 different subcategories of them.

[https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent- worker...](https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-workers)

> only EB green cards.

Nope, Green Cards don't have categories, they require you to be currently admitted in an immigrant visa category (EB-1 through -5 qualify, as do a number of others, but not H-1B or other non-immigrant visas.)

> But you need to get H1B first before you can jump through the EB hoops.

No, you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No.

<comment><USER13> Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?</comment></comment>


Show HN: KnowWeather, a nice open weather app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SilenceDut/KnowWeather <comment><USER2> I love what's on the screenshot, but without an English version I uninstalled it immediately because I don't understand anything in there and couldn't figure out if I can switch the language.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any way to get it in English? At least the description?

And what is the source api of the weather data?

</comment><comment><USER4> How did this get to the front page when no one even seems to know what it is or the platform?

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree that English is the lingua franca of software industry. Also it is kind of stupid fo Shown HN that's not written, or pre-Google-Translate-linked, in English. But at the same time, it shouldn't take a person a minutes to figure out that's an Android project.

</comment><comment><USER6> More info about the project would be helpful. Translation would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER7> A description in English would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER8> doesn't even say the platform :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do people keep adding projects without any description in English. I'm sure there are Chinese technology related forums.</comment>


Adam Savage Meets Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 Spacesuit - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2esyN4fuiA <comment><AUTHOR> I love this video, because it's an in-depth look on what it takes to preserve a piece of history - the first spacesuit used to walk on another heavenly body. Apparently, preserving something with 25 layers is a lot more complicated than anyone anticipated.</comment>


Polyglot stacks, alternative databases and performance fails - <AUTHOR>

Polyglot programming is the focus of this issue of the digital magazine JAXenter. From Shutterstock's gradual evolution from one to many languages, an intro to polyglot IDE Komodo from ActiveState, plus intros to HBase and RethinkDB (both big salary-earners according the recent Dice.com survey), as well as JavaFX and Vaadin web applications. Also: valuable lessons about how to avoid performance failures on websites. http://jaxenter.com/jax-magazine/issues/jax-magazine-may-2015-polyglots-do-it-better <comment><AUTHOR> [http://jaxenter.com/jax-magazine/issues/jax-magazine- may-201...](http://jaxenter.com/jax-magazine/issues/jax-magazine- may-2015-polyglots-do-it-better)</comment>


Unfunded? Unless your credit is totally in the toilet, you can probably get a business credit line to launch on your own - <AUTHOR> http://www.work.com/getting-a-business-line-of-credit-7/ <comment><USER2> 2 things to keep in mind:

 _It is in the interest of seed funders to encourage you not to fund yourself with debt. They want to ride the gravy train if you succeed.

_ It is in your interest not to fund yourself with debt. All probability suggests that there is no gravy train for you, just debt.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a really bad idea.

<comment><USER4> It's a bad idea for a typical Web 2.0 startup but it's a great idea if you have a clear path to profitability.

<comment><USER5> Debt is only reasonable if you already have enough positive cash flow (not positive revenues.. more money in than money out) to finance that debt.

But even if you have positive cashflow, it generally makes sense for young companies to reinvest those earnings instead of taking debt investment.

If your business fails, then you still need to pay off the loan. So that's what you get for not giving up your equity.

<comment><USER6> "But even if you have positive cashflow, it generally makes sense for young companies to reinvest those earnings instead of taking debt investment."

Not necessarily - or rather, it's often rational to do both.

It's rational for a business to take out a loan if the interest rate of the loan is less than their expected return on capital. Interest rates for business loans are what, 6-8%? It's not uncommon for a well-run, growing business with a strong franchise to earn a ROC of about 25%.

Debt lets them grow faster, sooner, and then they can pay off the debt from future earnings. It's often far more capital-efficient than floating an equity offering, where the investors would get a share of all those additional profits.

It doesn't work for web startups because web startups often have far lumpier earnings. It's not uncommon for a web startup to be bought for multi-millions before they earn a dime of profit. That's because their real "customers" are big companies, who are paranoid about losing their market to an upstart. A web startups users are effectively an advertising expense: spend a few thousand on bandwidth to show that if you wanted, you could take over the world, and then get a big company to buy you to prevent that from happening.

There are some web startups that employ debt financing very effectively. For example, Akamai floated close to $300M of convertible bonds to fund its expansion. As a result, it effectively acquired a lock on the content-delivery business, which has allowed it to grow by leaps and bounds over the past 5 years. Without that debt financing, they'd either have to forgo their thousands of datacenters in strategically-placed locations, or they'd have diluted their equity so much that it wouldn't be worth it for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your company goes south for any of a million reasons, who gets stuck with the bill? If you've sold equity, you've spread out the risk according to who's willing to take it. It's likely the founders opted to risk time more than money, so they're not out anything huge. If you get a loan, somebody's gotta pay it back at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unlikely, unless you have some idea that makes sense to a business loan manager. You're relying on a non-tech person to see that your idea is a really solid idea, which may or may not fly.

The other thing is that even if your credit isn't in the toilet, banks might also want to take a lien on something valuable of yours, e.g., your car or your house, since you essentially have no assets in your company when you start. This is not always in your best interest, especially if your company goes belly up. Liquidating a house or a car that might normally be protected by bankruptcy is probably not going to be fun for you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not applicable for young web startups. Banks like lending to people and businesses with assets and revenues not ideas. Plus, if you take on debt you it makes it harder to cut and run if your idea doesn't pan out the way you planned.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm no expert but I distinctly remember Rahoul Seth say at Startup School NOT to fund with debt in the early stages. Fund with equity and try to stay debt free until after the seed and 1st VC round.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminded me of the supposed quote by Trump to his daughter upon seeing a homeless guy...it went something like "Technically, he is richer than I am."

</comment><comment><USER12> Go for open source tool, learn them..use them, develop a solid business model and use this as a starter to showcase your skills. If its rock solid, you will get the recognition. Use this fame to seek out "real funds" to kick start your dream projects. Atleast thats what we are upto. Embracing open source and low cost solutions ensure you dont need a businesss credit line

</comment><comment><USER13> Might as well fund your start-up with scratch off lotto tickets while you're at it.</comment>


Edward Snowden says he would like to return home - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/edward-snowden-nsa-cbs-this-morning-interview-today-2019-09-16/ <comment><USER3> Edward Snowden being treated like a criminal instead of a hero really opened my eyes. He's a patriot who tried to warn us about a government agency reaching far beyond the powers granted to it by the people...and he is called a traitor? It's the most outrageous thing I've ever witnessed in this country. We need Snowden back. He put his life on the line for the people of this country. I can't say I know anyone in Washington with an equal commitment to the people.

<comment><USER4> While I agree Snowden did a heroic thing, he is very visible due to being a whistleblower. There are potentially lots of people doing selfless and principled things that stay secret, since secrecy really is important in that business. There is a tension between citizens need to keep their government from going astray and the government's need to outwit its adversaries. It's pretty clear to me we have gone too far in the direction of a surveillance state, but those agencies still serve a good purpose, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't fucking believe that it's come to this. Every top social media company was (is?) funneling private data into a search interface presented to an agent with no need of warrants.

The trial should be the other way around - The People Suing the US Government. The top lawyer representing the people? Edward.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to believe there's an alternate-universe America where it's Ed Snowden who is filling stadiums to hear him speak, and Donald Trump who has been exiled to Russia. It feels more like the America I grew up believing in.

<comment><USER6> Having attended public elementary school in the 1970's, it would seem we were fed a very optimistic, filtered version of American politics.

Schoolhouse Rock's presentation was very selective.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry Schoolhouse Rock did not give you a complete and definitive understanding of human political order...

<comment><USER6> To be fair, it did give me great clarity on the topic of conjunctions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering what Russia did or did not get.

Assuming we trust that Snowden acted based on the motivation he stated, it's plausible that he destroyed his copy of the documents before traveling to Russia.

However, once there, and stuck in that holding cell for weeks, completely in the hands of Russia, I can't see how he'd withstand the pressure to give them what he still had and couldn't get rid of - the knowledge in his head. (But keep in mind that the US brought the "Snowden in Russian hands" situation upon themselves by cancelling his passport.)

I also can't see how the newspapers would be able to keep the documents secret from a foreign intelligence agency. Such a high-value secret stored and handled in a dozen different places, by people who only have a short opsec training, limited understanding, and few resources and little support to establish effective security...

Not saying Snowden shouldn't have done it; his revelations showed massive illegal spying by the NSA, and triggered (some, not sufficient but better than nothing) reforms. But claiming no harm seems a stretch.

<comment><USER9> Unless the US has someone from inside Russian intelligence willing to go on the record that Snowden provided actionable intelligence, this seems like a moot point. Certainly this kind of circumstantial evidence (or, really, lack of evidence) wouldn't be allowed in a proper, legal trial.

<comment><USER10> We already know that he divulged detailed lists of Chinese targets in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong. That would be allowed in a trial, and would lock him away for sure. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1260306/edward-s...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1260306/edward-snowden-classified-us-data-shows-hong-kong- hacking-targets)

<comment><USER9> This seems like a mis-characterization of the information in the article. According to the piece, Snowden provided this data to the South China Morning Post directly, not the Chinese government. This article also makes no mention of this information being used as an attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER10> > According to the piece, Snowden provided this data to the South China > Morning Post directly

A newspaper that must hand over any data it has to the Chinese government upon request but is already fully surveiled by that government anyway, as anybody (even a high school dropout) can figure out.

> This article also makes no mention of this information being used as an > attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong.

He made it clear that he was attempting to gain asylum in Hong Kong ([https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/12/edward- snowden...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/12/edward-snowden-us- extradition-fight)). What reason does he have to divulge details of the NSA's (not illegal) hacking of Chinese infrastructure other than to try to help his case?

<comment><USER9> The Guardian article mentioned doesn't state that he provided the information on NSA cracking attempts of civilian Hong Kong and Chinese targets as an attempt to gain legal asylum. On the contrary, Edward Snowden maintains that he provided the data as further evidence that the NSA was targeting civilians, a claim that the NSA at the time contradicted.

> Snowden said he was releasing the information to demonstrate "the hypocrisy > of the US government when it claims that it does not target civilian > infrastructure, unlike its adversaries".

<comment><USER10> That is a ridiculous excuse. The US has never claimed that it does not target civilian infrastructure. Snowden made that claim up out of whole cloth to justify his actions.

<comment><USER9> Edward Snowden has been hitting on this point for a long time. This is from an article from 2014[0]:

"It's no secret that we hack China very aggressively," he says. "But we've crossed lines. We're hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that's a real concern."

I don't think that you can in good conscience argue that the NSA has been open and clear about their attacks on foreign civilian targets. The Obama administration repeatedly attempted to draw a line between the sort of hacking the US performed, for national security reasons, and the kind of "cyber espionage" that China and Russia were undertaking.

[0]: [https://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward- snowden/](https://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/)

<comment><USER10> Nowhere in your whole comment have you given any evidence for Snowden's ridiculous claim that the US has said it does not target civilian infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the two most relevant pieces of law to this case are 18 U.S. Code § 798[1] and the First Amendment[2]. I think having read both of these is a minimum prerequisite for having an opinion on how the law should be enforced: you can't say how the law should be enforced if you don't even know what the law is.

I also think that the following are two very different questions:

1\. Is what Edward Snowden did legal?

2\. Is what Edward Snowden did ethical?

It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

[1] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution)

<comment><USER12> There is nobody who questions whether his actions were legal, they clearly were not. Snowden acknowledges this. So to that end, he could have a completely fair trial and still be found guilty and sentenced to punishment.

The follow on question is whether the law is constitutional.

So far the government hasn't agreed that it is unconstitutional, and the USA Freedom act is a result of the interpreted language, see:

ACLU v Clapper

Klayman v Obama

Jewel V NSA

<comment><USER13> > There is nobody who questions whether his actions were legal,

A number of people have suggested that at least some of the programs he revealed were illegally classified to conceal their own illegality (and at least one was found to be illegal in one of the court cases fueled by the revelations), and that no lawful prosecution can proceed for revealing material illegally classified in that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reporting [0] yesterday had him give an interview where he suggested he would love to find asylum in France instead of returning to the US. I get the feeling he just wants something like a life back.

[0] [https://www.leprogres.fr/france-monde/2019/09/15/le- lanceur-...](https://www.leprogres.fr/france-monde/2019/09/15/le-lanceur-d- alerte-edward-snowden-aimerait-obtenir-l-asile-politique-en-france)

<comment><USER15> Another scenario is that extortion of Julian Assange made him realize that sooner or later Russia will use him as a leverage in a negotiation and send him to the U.S.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Snowden should be brought home, given a medal, and put in charge of the NSA.

—Richard Stallman

<comment><USER17> Just because Stallman said a thing doesn't lend much credibility to it. See also: his defense of Epstein.

<comment><USER18> Mate... I recommend you read on the matter before making such wild claims. It was basically a hit piece on him.

<comment><USER19> They're hardly wild claims.

Here's ([http://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov- feb.html#04_January_20...](http://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov- feb.html#04_January_2013_%28Pedophilia%29)) him in 2013:

> There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing > participation in pedophilia hurts children.

and 2006 ([https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may- aug.html#05%20Jun...](https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may- aug.html#05%20June%202006%20%28Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party%29)):

> I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children.

Defending someone like Epstein is hardly off-brand here.

<comment><USER20> Had no idea he'd said something like this. It's deeply disappointing - <USER2> always seemed analogous to a software Jesus or the like.

<comment><USER21> If it matters he has apologized for those statements, said they where made in ignorance and claims that he's completely changed his mind now.

Still it shows, at best, questionable judgement to have said those things in the first place.

<comment><USER19> Could you link to that apology?

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure if he apologized, but here he at least recognize he was wrong

[https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul- oct.html#14_September...](https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul- oct.html#14_September_2019_%28Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong%29)

> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex > between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.

> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand > how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind > about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the > conversations that enabled me to understand why.

<comment><USER23> The reason he requires state actor threat level privacy on all of his devices is now stunningly clear to me. I used to think it was tin foil hat paranoia, but the government has good reason to look at the computers of people who have spoken in the manner shown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Obama should have pardoned him

<comment><USER25> Yeah, especially since open government and whistleblower protection was a part of his campaign for president. He is a liar.

<comment><USER10> Does it count as whistleblowing if 99.9% of the documents you leak don't describe anything illegal the US government did (the only one being phone metadata collection) and if far more of the documents leaked describe compromised foreign systems that will then be patched?

Obama is way smarter than anybody asking for clemency for Snowden.

China: [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1266777/exclusiv...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1266777/exclusive-snowden-safe-hong-kong-more-us-cyberspying- details-revealed)

Pakistan: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/docum...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/documents-reveal-nsas-extensive-involvement-in-targeted-killing- program/2013/10/16/29775278-3674-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_print.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if he is seriously considering returning, or if this is just to generate some renewed interest, or perhaps offers from countries more comfortable to him than Russia.

While I respect his motivations for doing it, smuggling classified info out of a secure facility on a memory card hidden in a Rubik's cube is a crime. A fair trial won't change that.

He can do a lot more good staying free and sharing his viewpoints, versus rotting in a Federal facility for years.

</comment><comment><USER27> He wants the jury in his trail to be made aware of jury-nullification.

<comment><USER28> But are you suggesting the laws that penalise stealing classified information are unfair and should be abolished (like slavery laws in the past)? I think these laws must exist.

If I was a jury (but keeping in mind I am not even a US national), a fair sentencing would be to recognise him as guilty but to sentence him to a short term / time served.

There were many ways in which he could have blown a whistle without releasing wholesale everything he could find on the internal network to some foreign newspapers.

<comment><USER29> > "But are you suggesting the laws that penalise stealing classified > information are unfair and should be abolished (like slavery laws in the > past)? I think these laws must exist."

Where did OP suggest that? Jury nullification is specifically a case by case judgement, not a broad statement.

<comment><USER28> I am referring to the wikipedia definition (I had to look it up, I had not heard the term before) [1]

 _Jury nullification (US) or a perverse verdict (UK) generally occurs when members of a criminal trial jury believe that a defendant is guilty, but choose to acquit him anyway because the jurors also believe that the law itself is unjust,that the prosecutor has misapplied the law in the defendant 's case,or that the potential punishment for breaking the law is too harsh._

I don't think the law is unjust or misapplied, just that the sentence should give him credit for the public interest aspect of the revelations.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Talk about an adversarial interview. It reads like a higher brow version of the game of 20-questions you play with the cops when you get pulled over for a fishing stop. They're constantly trying to trip him up and get him to say something harmful to his case.

<comment><USER31> Call me tinfoil, but I got the feeling the interviewer was fed questions by the government.

<comment><USER32> Not necessary. TV media networks have been sucking up to the government basically since the beginning of TV news. See also, TV news' furor to hype up the Iraq War, even as many newspaper journalists and politicians were crying foul. Or the news' complicity in covering up the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, widely reported in foreign news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It is technically impossible for the government to guarantee that he can present a "public good" defense. The most they could agree to is not opposing him presenting such a defense. The judge presiding over the trial would determine whether he could actually present such a defense and could decide to forbid it even if prosecutors don't object and could also decide to allow it if they do.

<comment><USER13> > It is technically impossible for the government to guarantee that he can > present a "public good" defense

It is quite possible for the President to guarantee that he will not face any charges for which he is not allowed to present such a defense.

<comment><USER33> The President can't guarantee he won't face any charges. The President could grant a pardon for any crimes the judge rules he cannot present a "public good" defense for but before a judge makes such a ruling he would have already faced the charges.

Getting a fair trial would mean going through the same process that others charged with a crime must go through. If he is asking for a promise of a presidential pardon based upon a judge's decision then he is not asking for a fair trial but a trial which is slanted in his favor.

<comment><USER13> > The President can't guarantee he won't face any charges. The President could > grant a pardon for any crimes the judge rules he cannot present a "public > good" defense for but before a judge makes such a ruling he would have > already faced the charges.

I would argue that he won't have faced the charges until and unless he has gone through, or waived, a complete trial on them.

> Getting a fair trial would mean going through the same process that others > charged with a crime must go through.

Only if you assume that the process others charged with a crime must go through in THE US federal system is always and without exception fair in all circumstances.

Really, it seems like you have confused "routine" with "fair".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So Snowden here claims there has been no evidence whatsoever he caused any harm. Is this true? I realize I personally haven't heard any cases where the info Snowden leaked was linked to the death or bodily injury of persons of interest or their friends/family. Which is like, hm, ok, is there something I missed here?

If no one's been hurt, and the US has long upheld the need for law breaking when the law is unjust (the unlawful action of a black woman sitting in the white section of the bus) then I don't understand why his asking for a fair trial where established cases of just law breaking are brought up is contentious.

EDIT: I should clarify since I think there might be some confusion- I'm not saying that Snowden broke no laws. I'm saying I don't understand why his law breaking is contentious, given we have cases in the past of people breaking laws for just purposes that are generally accepted as just behavior. If Snowden wishes to make that argument, why are people scandalized about him wanting to go on a fair trial about it?

<comment><USER35> Rosa Parks was arrested and convicted.

[https://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/was-rosa-parks- convicted/](https://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/was-rosa-parks-convicted/)

> Parks' conviction seems to have stood despite the unconstitutionality of the > ordinance she was convicted of violating.

While she did do a lot to effect change, your statement that "the US has long upheld the need for law breaking when the law is unjust" is untrue.

<comment><USER34> Sorry, I should clarify-

The US has upheld, culturally, that what Rosa Parks did was just. Snowden isn't asking not to go to jail, he is asking if he goes to jail that he be given a fair trial where the cultural impact is also implicated in his law breaking. Thus, I'm confused why his position is so contentious.

<comment><USER36> what in this context is a "fair" trial? the quote is a "public interest defence", which I think would require the NSA to come clean and the gov to acknowledge more than they're willing to. so if he's indirectly asking for that, good luck.

it's the same with asylum. implicitly, another country giving him asylum sends an interesting political/diplomatic message to the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The plausibility of a fair trail in the shadow of the Assange debacle is 0.

</comment><comment><USER38> Video here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlllv-m79k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlllv-m79k)

</comment><comment><USER39> I wish news sites would stop omitting that in addition to the information he leaked about what was going on in the USA, he also leaked a lot of classified information that had nothing to do with the USA. I don't know how he'd argue that providing classified intelligence about China to the Chinese government is in the public interest.

<comment><USER40> Can you be more specific, or provide a citation?

<comment><USER39> Here's a news article where they say that he showed them classified information about computers in China that the NSA had access to.

[https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1260306/edward-s...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1260306/edward-snowden-classified-us-data-shows-hong-kong- hacking-targets)

<comment><USER41> That seems related to the US. Is there anything where he leaked memos between other countries, etc? I faintly remember something like ambassador of A stationed in country B reporting that the government of B had a problem with country C.

<comment><USER39> By "had nothing to do with the USA", I meant things related to collection in the USA. It's not like he needed to leak information that the NSA was spying on other countries, that's pretty much their entire job. I don't see how he could argue that leaking classified information about NSA operations in China is in the public interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> He'll be executed as a traitor by the US government.

</comment><comment><USER43> Not to tread too much into political territory, but if Warren or Sanders is the next US President I'd assume he will receive a full pardon.

<comment><USER44> That seems like an interesting assumption, given than Snowden had to escape the country when Obama was the president.

<comment><USER45> That was a disappointment. Obama ran on restoring the rights retracted by the Patriot act, on closing Guantanamo, etc. After taking office though, things went in the other direction. There were new abuses and more National Security Letters issued than ever before.

It makes you wonder if new presidents get "read in" on what the "puppet masters" are expecting of them (/s) or is each simply more corrupt than the last, regardless of Party.

<comment> nappy-doo Or, it makes you wonder what Obama learned when he took office that were extenuating circumstances he didn't understand while running for office.

<comment><USER46> > that were extenuating circumstances

Or that seemed like extenuating circumstances. There was very interesting commentary on this I heard somewhere from someone who'd been through similar experience. If memory serves - and it very well may not - it was Henry Kissinger on the extras for the Doctor Strangelove DVD.

<comment><USER47> There's no good reason to believe that people are honest with the President. Even if you give everyone the most generous assumptions, someone still determines what makes it into reports that reach the President and what doesn't. That takes things to a whole different dimension of impossible to unravel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> He should be protected.

</comment><comment><USER49> He could have gotten pardoned by Obama, but he preferred to remain under the protection of Vladimir Putin.

<comment><USER50> The only reason Edward Snowden is in Russia right now is that the US cancelled his passport while he was in transit, leaving him stuck there.

<comment><USER49> That prevented him from returning back to the US?

<comment><USER51> It would, yes.

<comment><USER19> The US Embassy in Moscow would _happily_ take him in and provide travel documents, tickets, and an "escort". It's clear Snowden doesn't want to take that approach. (I wouldn't, either.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think what Snowden did was treason and if he were to return to the United States he should be put on trial. There were better ways than defecting to Russia. A true patriot would have never defected and run.

</comment><comment><USER53> Then come home. I'm not really on his side here. If he thinks what he did was so morally correct then he should have stayed.

</comment><comment><USER54> Honestly, I'm pretty over Snowden.

The moment he fled to a foreign power, he should have known he would never be a free man in America. Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted, but Snowden will never have that opportunity because he fled. Furthermore, since the day he fled, he has literally done nothing but try and shame our government and our system through media.

There's a chance the motivations behind his actions really are what he says they are. There's no doubting that his leaks were a good thing for Americans to know about. But at this point I'm more inclined to believe he's a foreign asset working on a campaign to kill trust in American government and American intelligence.

He's been working this "fair trial" thing for years now. He's just another marketing tool as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER55> Whistleblowers in the US are almost universally abused by the system. If the US wants whistleblowers to stick around, it should consider treating them with the kind of respect they deserve.

It's crazy to me that in all the talk of punishing snowden, there's never a mention of punishing those who betray the country by spying on their own citizens.</comment></comment>


"Artificial Intelligence" has become meaningless - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/what-is-artificial-intelligence/518547/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I would compare the current state of AI models to a catatonic toddler.

Able to scream out 'train!' or 'cat' when it sees one. Somewhat muddy understanding of language. Can pick out basic patterns here and there.

I believe that there is no technical barrier for smarter AI, just need bigger/better datasets and better neural net architecture.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've thought about this somewhat and I'm inclined to agree. The crux of the issue with the general public is people think of it as being 'intelligence' in the sentient human sense and take 'artificial' to mean a computer. So a sentient intelligent computer. Whereas really artificial is referring to the simulation (of intelligence), especially when it comes to something like machine learning.</comment>


The worst CMS ever seen - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BrainStormDevel/verysimplecms <comment><USER2> Have you try it first or u are the usually hater that talk only because the Modules aren't in MVC/OOP and the code is a developer preview? Test the code first, after u talk.

</comment><comment><USER3> To save us the trial of installing it... Why is it the worst?

<comment><USER4> It is simple and it is encrypted with ionCube</comment></comment>


AirBnB for Driveways - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/homeowners-rent-out-driveways-for-money/

<comment><USER2> For cities, especially home owners who have a deeded parking spot, but doesn't have a cart - this is genius! Airbnb for parking, going to be big!</comment>


A short rant at the intersection of data, privacy, identity and culture - <AUTHOR> https://chrisbolman.com/future-data-privacy-alone-again/ <comment><AUTHOR> one of the reasons I wanted to post/share this here is I'm really interested in thoughts and feedback from others working on the front lines of this. I've had some really interesting conversations in the past few weeks with ML experts, in the blockchain community, while also working on designing/building a data (analytics) pipeline for my new app (all while reading the news and generally losing my sh*t). it really feels like a lot of the forrest is being missed for the trees, and the rate of change is happening at a pace where security is having a hard time keeping up.</comment>


About MathWorld - <AUTHOR> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/

<comment><USER2> Sometime in the early 2000s I found myself reading MathWorld the way some people read Wikipedia -- just start on some random article, and follow links to anything I don't understand. It helped to rekindle my love of mathematics and I eventually went back to school and got a math degree, which is one of the most satisfying things I've done.

<comment><USER3> Coolest comment I've read today. Way to go!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And why is this being posted now?

MathWorld is great, but there was the CRC Press fiasco [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathWorld#CRC_lawsuit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathWorld#CRC_lawsuit)

MathWorld was more important before Wikipedia came, today you can find similar content in both sites

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it because:

1\. MathWorld is informative and useful.

2\. I think it's cool how Weisstein followed his passion and found a way to share it with others around the world.

3\. My personal opinion is that its better written and better cross referenced than Wikipedia. I believe the consistency is the result of one person taking responsibility, the project having direct funding due to it's relationship to Wolfram Research's commercial interests, and it's narrow domain focus.

The _CRC Encyclopedia of Mathematics_ is $450. I'm curious as to why someone would consider resolving the lawsuit in a way that allowed MathWorld to stay online a fiasco?

<comment><USER4> Oh I'm not attributing the fiasco to Eric, and I it seems that something happened, I didn't see the copyright notice on the site

Mathworld is a great resource, I just think that Wikipedia took the lead for most (less deep) topics, but your point n.3 stands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this page could serve as a textbook example for how _not_ to write an about page. I didn't know MathWorld before, but the first paragraph is so high-level that after reading it, I had a very vague idea at best.

Then follow three paragraphs about how MathWorld came about -- for someone like me who'd just like to know _what the heck this is_ a complete waste of space.

Then finally, in the middle of the page, you get the bullet points that contain concrete information.

And then, in paragraph five, you get some technical background in that it is based on Mathematica. Okay, perhaps the URL could have let me guess that ;-)

One a positive note, they do invite feedback, so I may contact them with a similar note to this one (perhaps more politely phrased).

The last paragraph of the page, I could do without. It really doesn't contain any "about" information anyway.</comment>