"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out" - <AUTHOR> http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that <comment><USER2> Sometimes C++'s evolution reminds me of the quote from Antoine de Saint- Exupery: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." [0]

When the topic of C++'s huge and growing complexity comes up, opinions mostly fall into two groups: (a) the language is way way too complex, and (b) ... yeah, but _modern_ C++ is really clean and you can just ignore all the complexity that's been retained for backwards compatibility.

I don't find (b) persuasive because every line of C++ code is interpreted by the _entire_ language standard. If (b) really is true, then I'd be interested in seeing a new language that has only the subset of the C++ standard considered "modern". If that language was actually useful, I'd eagerly use it in practice.

[0] [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/antoine_de_saintexupery_1...](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/antoine_de_saintexupery_103610)

<comment><USER3> The problem is that everyone's ideal subset of C++ is different because everyone has different requirements!

"A lot of software developers are seduced by the old '80/20' rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%."

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/)

<comment><USER4> C++ is probably a little different. There's a lot of ways to do things due to accumulated cruft, for example. I'd wager at least a good 20% of C++/STL is to some degree redundant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> «"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out". Yes, that quote can be found on page 207 of The Design and Evolution of C++. And no, that smaller and cleaner language is not Java or C#. The quote occurs in a section entitled "Beyond Files and Syntax". I was pointing out that the C++ semantics is much cleaner than its syntax. I was thinking of programming styles, libraries and programming environments that emphasized the cleaner and more effective practices over archaic uses focused on the low- level aspects of C.»

</comment><comment><USER5> The small clean language wasn't really there. Not having sum types is why exceptions are like they are. Not having had first-class functions until recently is why control flow is like it is. Not having a proper type system is why templates are like they are. Those things between them are why concurrency is the way it is. You can't remove things from C++ to get a nice language - you need to start with a better foundation.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's not just language: it's support, tools, compiler etc.

I just spent a day trying to get C++ working properly for a specific project in MSVSCode, surprisingly, it won't work, there are arcane and cryptic bits of help on StackExchange, and the sheer amount of inclusion variables, paths, special cases, compiler settings etc.. is beyond bewildering.

It takes far too long for someone to develop the competency just to manage anything more than a trival build and this is a failure of the language because there's simply no reason for it - it's 'arbitrary complexity'. We're wasting serious chunks of our lives solving problems that shouldn't exist in the first place.

<comment><USER7> As [https://blog.plover.com/Unix/tools.html](https://blog.plover.com/Unix/tools.html) says:

 _The bizarre mishmash of weirdness exists because so many different people invented so many tools over such a long period. And they wouldn 't have done any of that inventing if the compositionality hadn't been there. I think we don't actually get to make a choice between an incoherent mess of composable paraphernalia and a coherent, well-designed but noncompositional system. Rather, we get a choice between a incoherent but useful mess and an incomplete, limited noncompositional system._

I agree that C++ development can be a mess. But it is often a mess for good reasons, not bad.

<comment><USER6> Yea, I agree. That's a good quote.

I also would really like a 'strong agent' to just come along and do a 'new C++' without the cruft, kind of along the lines of the 'go' philosophy without necessarily inventing a new language.

Maybe Rust is de-facto that. Or maybe D is it and we're not playing close enough attention.

I guess your point is further validated by the hot mess of the web as well: javascript is a monster, somewhat tamed by TypeScript ... and I don't think Dart or anything else is poised to replace it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We are actually seeing it gradually, but not as the smaller-cleaner language. Rather, as cleaner idioms channeling the spirit of that language - within an ever-widening C++.

<comment><USER9> > _spirit_

I think it would be a good name for the new language (if it ever shows; it will probably be a lisp).

<comment><USER10> That's like saying Rust will turn into Lisp.

There is _way_ too much around memory management to be Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favourite Stroustrup quote on the design of C++ is probably from "How can you be so certain?":

> One of my fundamental aims for C++ is (from the very start in 1979) to > provide equally good support for user-defined and built-in types. For > example, I'd like to be able to build an integer type that is as good as the > built-in int in every way

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be kind of neat if there was a definition of different levels of the language and you could specify which level you allow in the file. This would be stronger than running a code style analysis tool. Not sure how viable this is but it would be nice to somehow phase out things like auto_ptr and others in projects.

</comment><comment><USER13> The problem is no one can agree what that language is.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's not really true that "the semantics of C++ aren't that complicated".

Once you take into account undefined behavior --- which you need to, so you can avoid it --- it's so complicated that _researchers haven 't yet figured out what those semantics are_.

</comment><comment><USER15> ...and that "smaller and cleaner" language is C. ;-)

I'm only half-joking, of course; but while I see the beginnings of C++ were humble and practical, as a way of simplifying common idioms in C, it seems that lately the emphasis is more on turning the abstraction level to 11 with things like deeply-nested deeply-parameterised templates and writing otherwise "opaque" code that is short at a glance but entails considerable and often needless hidden complexity. I think Stroustrup himself is somewhat aware of that, given that he even references the infamous "fake interview" on that page --- and while that was a fake, the sentiments expressed in it certainly have a basis in reality.

<comment><USER16> That's pretty much the opposite of the point he was making. His context is:

> I was thinking of programming styles, libraries and programming environments > that emphasized the cleaner and more effective practices over archaic uses > focused on the low-level aspects of C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why do we need to try to streamline C++ here? What's behind the urge to "cut out the fat"? Would doing this make C++ an even better performing language? What's the upside of gutting the language?

I don't understand the impulse here. Yes, the semantics of C++ are more elegant than the syntax. But that doesn't mean that the syntax is actually cumbersome.

<comment><USER16> Having so much syntax makes the language more difficult to learn, and you have to know the edge cases of each.

It's universally recognized that, since C++11, you should use the `nullptr` keyword to create a null pointer. `nullptr` solves problems like not being implicitly convertible to integers, so you don't get the wrong overloads or template specializations.

However, it's still perfectly valid to initialize a pointer to the NULL macro, etc. There's no benefit, but it's still all throughout codebases, so people will keep using it. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just one way to initialize a null pointer in new code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > What is "legacy code"?

> "Legacy code" is a term often used derogatorily to characterize code that is > written in a language or style that (1) the speaker/writer consider outdated > and/or (2) is competing with something sold/promoted by the speaker/writer. > "Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually > working and scaling.

Oh? To me legacy code is code that's been put into production. The moment it's in production, you have to maintain it, you have to worry about backwards compatibility and interoperability. The moment it's in production the field is no longer green.

Perhaps production code is only legacy code the moment you want or have to change it, but since that almost always ends up happening, so the moment it's in production, it's legacy.

</comment><comment><USER19> That smaller language is basically the C++ described in the _Annotated C++ Reference Manual_ (a.k.a. Brown Book) by B. Stroustrup and M. Ellis, published in 1990.

I landed into my first C++ job not knowing C++. Friday was my last day on the previous job. I helped myself to a stack of paper and printed out the entire ISO C++ draft standard. I also got that ARM. I read the ARM over the weekend, then went to the new C++ job Monday. I was C++ "answer guy" a month later.

This one: [http://www.stroustrup.com/arm.html](http://www.stroustrup.com/arm.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> "... and we will find that language, and we will kill it."

</comment><comment><USER20> If they take the C out of C++

Call it ++

Basically get rid of everything that the legacy of C brings.

If you want those things you probably should be coding C.

Get rid of the headers .h etc. Build that from the source .pp files

Make a standard package library that works properly on all platforms.

Standardize the internal symbols.

Make templates / everything easier to use, make standard internal map and vector types.

Change auto to var.

Kinda like the way go did it.

Sorry, too late!

<comment><USER8> > Basically get rid of everything that the legacy of C brings.

This is actually happening, but not literally. That is, most of the things you used to write in a C-like fashion - you no longer write today:

* References or plain values instead of pointers.

* std::arrays or other containers instead of plain arrays.

* std::variant's instead of unions

* std::expected instead of returning error codes (although error handling is a really complex issue)

and so on.

> Get rid of the headers .h etc.

This will start to happen in C++20, with modules.

> Make a standard package library that works properly on all platforms.

The standard library works well on many platforms. If you mean package management systems - that's never part of the language; but you can check out [https://conan.io/](https://conan.io/)

> Standardize the internal symbols.

Sort-of happening with modules, if I understand what you mean.

> Make templates / everything easier to use,

C++ features are actually easier to use as the standardization progresses.

> make standard internal map and vector types.

Whaaat?! Ha ha ha, certainly not. You really don't want that.

> Change auto to var.

That is rather inconsequential...

> Kinda like the way go did it.

What you suggested is in no way specific to Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use what I call "C+" which is C plus classes, basic templates, and light polymorphism when it is absolutely perfectly suited. I'd like to explore a lot of the later features but I haven't had the drive to do it. I write a ton of embedded C for money and learning C++ has lifted my C skills tremendously. It forces you into certain paradigms that you can easily do in C if you have the discipline.

<comment><USER22> As a primarily C++ developer, I absoloutly hate maintaining code that is written like this. C has it's place in the world, but despite the fact that the language has a large amount of overlap in syntax, they are very different languages. Trying to write one in the style in the other will, at least from me, earn you some very bad thoughts.

<comment><USER23> I agree. The more code looks like C or early '90s C++ (not to say Java), the worse it is. The newest language features exist because the language is better with them, and code is better when it used them.

That is not to say that every function, or every program, has to use every obscure feature. Many features are there only to support very specialized use cases (which absolutely exist, and are important!). But things like new-style loops, generic lambdas, structured bindings, and little helper templates make writing and reading code enormously more pleasant.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Writing technical articles  - <AUTHOR>

I've been meaning to start posting technical articles to my blog (posterous) and even writing a technical book has crossed my mind and was wondering about more experienced writers manage code samples, graphics and etc, meaning, what tools do you use to write (if so) the articles? Bundle text and samples on OpenOffice/GoogleDocs and post format the final result on-line?<p>Also do you have an suggestions on writing technical books, tooling and guide lines? <comment><USER2> Personally, I've always started with the main text, using just a text editor (Vim, being my preference).

What I usually do (and I'll admit it seems archaic) is just put placeholders in the text where I'll need a picture/graphic or a code sample, and then add those later in whatever final tool I end up using for publishing the article (example: Windows Live Writer, for posting to my blog).

Works fine for me, because it lets me concentrate more on the text than on the format/appearance or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, seems the way to do it. Not that i was particularly worried about format/appearance but mostly managing artifacts / embedded code samples, as in also, resistant to changes, because i've edited an article or two in online editors and in particular to embedding code, it can be a pain to edit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Currently for jsmag and groovymag, authors use an openoffice template. It's one of the few things that is cross-platform, but still allows for an editor to come in and make visual comments/notes/etc. We may move to another process in the next year, but OO has been a decent balance of functionality, cross- platform, and ease-of-use between multiple parties.

Even though it's just _you_ right now, you may consider making sure you use something that others would be able to use - OO fits that bill. GoogleDocs - there's some appealing parts to that, but I'm not sure I want Google having that much access to my docs right now. :/

What sorts of technical topics are you planning to cover?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently outlining an article about Dojo Toolkit features, think it's a great tool with not enough coverage online.

<comment><USER3> A bit OT, but if you'd be interested in writing something for jsmag, please ping me at firstname.lastname@example.com and/or register at <http://webdevpub.com/wdp> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've mostly written technical articles in-place in the Wordpress editor (backing up the raw html manually as even I don't have that much faith in The Cloud).

Longer-form, I've only ever used LaTeX, as the sort of articles I write are more equation-heavy and it's the only way to get them to look anywhere near decent. I had to submit an article once in MS Word format to a magazine and it broke my heart.</comment>


Things I didn't know about Google - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2013/09/21/ten-things-i-didnt-know-about-google/

<comment><USER2> Why remove the first word of the article? "Ten Things I Didn't Know About Google" provides a better explanation of the article anyways - it's a list of 10 factoids about Google.

<comment><USER3> HN disallows the "x things ..." title template.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Accessing confidential content stored online. Best security practices? - <AUTHOR> In my company we distribute media content to be accessed through a mobile app to several clients. Right now the workflow is to build a separate version of the app for each client (functionality is 100% the same, the embedded media content changes) and distribute it confidentially via testflight. This, of course, is very slow and cumbersome.
I have built a proof of concept where the media is separated from the core application. The content is hosted online and when the client inputs a request code, checks if matches with any content and downloads it to the device. Right now the workflow is:

  * the user enters a code
  * a json file hosted online is downloaded read to see if the code matches any entry
  * if so, it gets the online address of the media content from that entry and downloads it
 It's a very basic and naive system. My supervisors, however, loved it and want me to push this system to production level and use it with clients.
Thing is, we deal with extremely confidential content and could get in lots of trouble if any of it leaks out or if the clients were to access the wrong content. Right now everything is hosted publicly on a server of mine to test the proof of concept. My knowledge of web security is limited to SSL and that's it - I am slowly piling up resources to read and hope to educate myself enough to make a functional product out of it.
If you were me, what steps would you take into making this process as secure as it needs to be? <comment><USER2> To me, the place to start is a risk assessment. Part of the risk is replacing a field deployed proven technology with a prototype. Part of the risk is securing information accessible on the web versus securing information embedded directly on the device. Part of that assessment is the risk associated with developers working in an area in which there is less experience and expertise.

Once the risks are identified, a business model can assign costs to each, for example assigning a monetary value to one customer having access to another customer's data. Monetary values can also be assigned to mitigating each risk and these should be assigned based on levels of mitigation, for example the cost of reducing the likelihood of one customer accessing another customer's data from a 1% probability to a 0.001% probability. Once that's done, the business decision about where to expend energy becomes a more informed business decision.

Presenting the risks and suggesting a cost analysis probably won't keep the development team from being scapegoated if and when things go sideways, but it might form the basis for a long term plan...e.g. staffing up with web security experts.

In the end, my first approximation is that if it's on the web it's insecure and even banks assume some losses.

Good luck.</comment>


Ask HN: If I accept only Google login for my site, how many users will I lose? - <AUTHOR> The benefit is it will be easier to stop spamming, since Google requires a valid phone number for every new registration. But I'm not sure what percent of people do not even have a Google account and not willing to create one. <comment><USER2> Most non-US users. Many tech savvy US users. (Biased answer from tech savvy us citizen.)

Even with an account, I would absolutely not use it for 3rd party auth. The perception of Google with normal people is still good, but it has sharply shifted with techies. It is only a matter of time before it becomes a liability.

Sample size of one, and all opinion. Take with a nicely proportioned grain of salt. As you should any and all responses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Highly depends on what your site is. If you're making tools for an industry where everyone runs on Google business accounts it'll be different than if you make something for a general international market, something where people do not want to link their real identity, ...

Personally, your thing would have to be really important or deeply integrated with Google for me to use Google login.

</comment><comment><USER4> Security conscious users will run away from your site.

<comment><USER5> And privacy conscious as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> On HN you'll get a lopsided response to this because smart guys think Google is evil.

I'm not that smart, so I think Google is far more trustworthy than the other sharks out there.

Even though I trust Google more than most, and I don't think using Google auth is a security or privacy risk, and Google auth is almost certainly more secure than bespoke auth, most regular people probably aren't clear on how this works.

They might be reluctant to type in their Google password on what looks to them like a third-party site.

<comment><USER7> The HN objection is more likely to be the privacy/tracking implications of logging in with Google than that Google is evil, in my experience</comment></comment>


How to upload files using Meteor JS with HTML5 Image Previews - <AUTHOR> http://georgeinenglish.com/upload-files-meteor-js/ <comment><USER2> I'm getting "Error establishing a database connection" \-- does that need fixing?</comment>


Can we stop writing "smart" applications? - <AUTHOR>

I have a question to my fellow programmer friends : Can we stop writing "smart" applications ? I'm asking it because obviously we suck at this. Two examples :
Google : Just because i'm in Germany, it doesn't mean you have to redirect me from google.com to google.de and bring me a German page. Yes, there is a link on the right bottom corner ( "Google.com in English" ) but if i type google.com, it means i want to visit google.com, not google.de Believe me, people are not stupid as you think and can type google.de also the google.com => google.de => google.com trip isn't funny.
Gnome's wireless network settings : In Ubuntu / Mint, if you look for wireless networks and click one of them accidentally, you fucked up. You will be asked two times in every 5 minutes about the password of the wireless password. Yes, i made a terrible mistake and i'm an idiot but stop punishing me. And, why did you saved this connection in first place ? There is no reason, I didn't even entered the correct password for this wireless network.
We are trying to make our applications smart by prediction but it doesn't work. So please, stop doing it. Just make a boring configuration process smooth/painless and then go back to your cave, so user get it's things done.
ps : yes i'm a programmer and yes i'm "not" a linux newbee, i know how can i fix this network thing but none of them is what i'm talking about. <comment><USER2> The wifi thing is just plain bad design. But the language detection... it amazes me that this complaint has ever come up.

I experience this a lot and have for years during my travels. It's impossible for me to even care about the mild inconvenience because the population is _almost exclusively_ people from the country I'm a guest in. It's not even worth checking the headers to better "guess" what language or destination a person wants on the off chance they're a tourist, visitor or expat, it'd probably be wrong _more of the time_ from pirated copies of Windows in English.

The country extension of the domain is, like the rest of the domain, an irrelevant detail - why make them google for facebook.dk or twitter.com.ar and remember what site uses country extensions vs .com when in almost all cases they don't need to?

<comment><USER3> I'm okay with it as the default, but I'm baffled why Google seems to (at least sometimes) do it even when I'm logged in and have English as my preference. Just because I'm in Denmark doesn't mean I want the Google Books interface to override my settings and become Danish!

It'd also be nicer if more sites supported changing languages (in any direction) _without_ logging in. If it's possible to do on Blogger or MySpace, for example, I have no idea how.

<comment><USER4> _I'm baffled why Google seems to (at least sometimes) do it even when I'm logged in and have English as my preference_

I was as well, until searching for local things like restaurants. Polish Google gives _way_ better results than the "Google.com in English" site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can think of a bunch of examples on iPads and iPhones as well. It amazes me how utterly broken some web sites become once they figure out that I'm using an iPad. Guess what, web developers: _I don't want you to force one font size and layout on me just because I have a portable device_. It is actually really frustrating when spread-zoom doesn't work at all.

<comment><USER6> Hacking the user agent string often helps, if your browser supports it.

<comment><USER5> Sadly, I think it's gotten to the point where we need a way to lie about the screen resolution as well.

I can make my iPad browser pretend to be anything, and it's not enough. I imagine web sites are also checking, e.g. for a 768x1024 browser window and adapting accordingly. It is actually relatively easy to do this with "@media" in CSS, for instance.

All this extra "smart" code takes site developers more time to write, it's more data to download, and more work for the browser to do. Funny that the result would be to _damage_ the user's experience after all that effort was put in.

<comment><USER6> Yeah...certain CSS tricks are "use with extreme caution" e.g. the ability to hide all overflow with no scroll.

In general, if you don't know how to do it right, you should start by doing it simple. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the impulse to add all the features you possibly can. We've outgrown putting blink tags on everything (mostly), but the underlying impulse is still there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think the problem is so much contextual logic as it is failing to make errors easy to recover from.</comment>


Academic Torrents – Making 27TB of research data available - <AUTHOR> http://academictorrents.com/ <comment><USER2> I find it fascinating how difficult it is to find geological data. The combined datasets of oil and mining companies plus government data has a huge amount of Earth mapped. And yet, this data is extremely hard to find in a computer-consmable way. Most of it is locked up in pdf or image scans of maps, or locked in proprietary MapInfo/Autodesk formats. It seems to me that a large dataset of all human knowledge of Earth would be massively valuable to humanity. Unfortunately, oil/mineral maps are a cornerstone of a lot of very powerful companies. So I don't think we'll see them any time soon.

Organizing this data would also be a hell of an effort because the maps use different projections, are from a huge variety of times, and are often inconsistent (overlapping areas with different mineral deposit analyses).

I suppose I can dream, though.

<comment><USER3> Most US government maps are available in a single clearinghouse. [https://nationalmap.gov/](https://nationalmap.gov/). State governments and counties also have websites with geological (need it for a septic permit) data and land plots. The data is just getting more open, which is awesome. It may be in different formats, but nothing a few lines of python and a PostGIS database can't handle.

<comment><USER2> This is definitely the right direction. But the thing I really want is a map of minerals, faults, and topography. I am finding topography, but not the other two. Perhaps I'm just not seeing them? Imagine how much better our earthquake predicting abilities might become if we could couple global seismic data with a full map of Earth's fault lines. I know thin is pretty unlikely, but humanity would be better off, and most importantly, it would be really cool (we could learn a lot of stuff)

<comment><USER4> The reason some geological maps are almost impossible to find is because they are treated as a national safety item. In some countries the law forbids companies from making these available. So an oil company that created the map can only use it and in a pretty controlled fashion.

More that that, even if the map can be used more freely in the country (by multiple parties) it may be illegal for the map to cross the border in any form. This also means electronic signals over the internet if they cross the border.

I guess the reason some of them are getting out in the open is because they are no longer considered "critical".

Disclaimer: My work intersected the oil and gas domain at some point.

<comment><USER5> > __ _The reason some geological maps are almost impossible to find is because > they are treated as a national safety item. In some countries the law > forbids companies from making these available. So an oil company that > created the map can only use it and in a pretty controlled fashion._ __

/ THE/ reason.

Also, this is why some believe the war in Afghanistan was even waged - was to get the "boots on __ground __* " == on-top of the $1T in mineral deposits.

While we kvetch constantly about stupid political distractions, there are, in fact, many government-corporate entities that are in the long-game.

[https://www.livescience.com/47682-rare-earth-minerals- found-...](https://www.livescience.com/47682-rare-earth-minerals-found-under- afghanistan.html)

Look at even the completely obvious:

[https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Year-Marathon-Strategy- Replac...](https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Year-Marathon-Strategy-Replace- Superpower/dp/1250081343#customerReviews)

and even as openly published ten years ago:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036105/How- Chinas-t...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036105/How-Chinas- taking-Africa-West-VERY-worried.html)

\---

The point is that we are already in the long war for resource control. And sadly, I would say that the US is not in the upper-hand at this time, aside from building up the military...

<comment><USER6> Who has the upper hand, China?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the Chinese Africa is going to be an interesting war zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Weird to think this was what the internet/www was designed for from day one..

<comment><USER9> I think that is an urban legend, along the lines of "the Internet was created to survive nuclear attacks." AFAIUI the Internet was created to unify various predecessor networks (NSFNet, ARPANET, etc.), and as an experiment in computerized communications. Sharing research data may have been an early application of the Internet or its predecessors, but I am not so sure it was the driving purpose of the project.

<comment><USER10> In fairness they did also mention the www as well as the internet. Tim Berners Lee definitely had sharing academic data in mind with the web. So they were half right.

<comment><USER10> I shoulda said 'research data' instead of 'academic data'. Fits better with the discussion topic and TBL's purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a list of at-risk torrents? Basically, if I wanted to donate X GB to help seed, what is the single most important torrent I could seed?

I imagine the relevant metric would be "importance / current number of seeders".

<comment><USER12> You can browse collections and then order by seeders. Here are some collections I think should be mirrored:

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/deep- learning?sort_fi...](http://academictorrents.com/collection/deep- learning?sort_field=seeders&sort_dir=ASC)

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/medical?sort_field=se...](http://academictorrents.com/collection/medical?sort_field=seeders&sort_dir=ASC)

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/joes-recommended- mirr...](http://academictorrents.com/collection/joes-recommended-mirror- list?sort_field=seeders&sort_dir=ASC)

<comment><USER13> I'm assuming those globe icons means there's a web seed (HTTP server) involved? If so, I'd prioritise the ones that don't have that backing.

<comment><USER12> Yes. But webseeds also go away over time when a department shuts down a server or a student account expires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Distribute your public data globally for free to ensure it is available > forever!

What steps are in place to ensure this over reasonable timescales (20-50 years)?

<comment><USER15> What would the Millennium Clock[0] version of a data storage device look like?

[0][http://longnow.org/essays/millennium- clock/](http://longnow.org/essays/millennium-clock/)

<comment><USER16> It wouldn't be a single device. That's far too subject to attacks. Instead, let's picture a decentralized system like BitTorrent, but with the goal of data resiliency.

I picture a system where a person adds themselves as a node to a certain group of files- like BitTorrent- but instead of downloading everything, they choose how much space and bandwidth they're offering and the system grabs the "best" pieces. Best in this case is about spreading the data out to improve resiliency, like any dates storage service would. It's not a human choice but an optimization problem.

If 250 people each offered 100MB of space, a 5GB file could be maintained with quadruple redundancy. Nodes come and go, and the system would minimize data transfers while aiming to maximize redundancy. Try to spread the files far and wide geographically, to put popular pieces of the data onto nodes offering more bandwidth.

Hmm. This sounds like a fun project to try...

<comment><USER17> If you're going to build something like this, especially when the data sets are typically large, this is a _very_ strong case for erasure coding.

If you split a 5GB file into (20) 250MB chunks and then mirror each of them four times, there is a nontrivial probability that one of the chunks loses all four mirrors. Especially when you're using notoriously unreliable volunteer hosting.

If you split the same 5GB file into (20) 250MB data chunks and (60) 250MB erasure chunks, you consume the same amount of total storage but have to lose 61 chunks (>75% of _all_ the hosts) before you lose any data.

<comment><USER13> Offtopic: Have you looked at PAR2? I seem to recall it being really good but having some critical bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Curious if a potential solution would be having open, read only databases, that you could query directly, vs everyone copying the same data over and over. Kind of how you don't download Wikipedia but access what you need. I realize there are a lot of things to consider. But not even a rest api/etc, an actual database.

Realize it wouldn't scale, would cost money etc, but could be interesting

<comment><USER19> Google BigQuery does this though. They host huge public data files and then only charge for the queries.

<comment><USER20> Also 'requester pays' on Amazon S3 buckets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps I'm going off tangent, but the social dynamics associated with torrenting are pretty darn interesting.

On one hand, they seem to converge towards a consensus with most seeded and downloaded files and popularity as a trust factor. On the other, they also promote the dissemination of ideas the knowledge of which poses a threat to the status quo that is, the state towards which a society was coerced to.

On one hand, Torrents are about rejecting the Publisher and Big Media status but on the other they are about arriving to a democratic status about which films/books/... are the best or most useful.

And don't even get me started about the constant ethical dilemmas associated with sharing and who should control or own the data.

To link all that threads into a broader topic, we could associate the torrent subculture to the Dionysian archetype which Nietzsche wrote about.

<comment><USER22> I work with a slowly changing dataset that's about 100GB to download in full. A few people a week download it.

I've considered adding a torrent download, because it includes built-in verification of the download. A common problem is users reporting that their download over HTTP is corrupt, but I'm not sure if they'd be able or want to use Bittorrent.

(Also, for many users the download is probably fine, but they can't open it in Excel. Bittorrent won't help that. )

<comment><USER23> For 100GB of important data I'd be willing to buy an extra hard drive.

I'd expect your users to be willing to set up a torrent client. It's not even difficult.

<comment><USER24> It's not that difficult, but it can be scary.

The few times I've published files over bittorrent I've had to reassure people that torrenting itself isn't any more illegal than other download methods.

It's also not clear ahead of time how difficult it's going to be.

If torrenting is the only way, some people won't bother.

<comment><USER22> That's what I'm concerned with; tarnishing a good reputation with a "scary" word.

Bandwidth is no problem for us, we have a faster connection than all the users. Users in Africa and Latin America would probably benefit most, but I'd need to research whether they'd be prepared to use Bittorrent before implementing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> All the .torrent files are served over http so with a simple MITM attack a bad actor could swap in their own custom tweaked version of any data set here in order to achieve whatever goals that might serve for the bad actor's interests.

I really wish we could get basic security concepts added to the default curriculum for grade schoolers. You shouldn't need a PhD in computer security to know this stuff. These site creators have PhDs in other fields, but obviously no concept of security. This stuff should be basic literacy for everyone.

<comment><USER26> > _This stuff should be basic literacy for everyone._

Arguably, one compromised PKI x.509 CA jeopardizes all SSL/TLS channel sec if there's no certificate pinning and an alternate channel for distributing signed cert fingerprints (cryptographically signed hashes).

We could teach blockchain and cryptocurrency principles: private/secret key, public key, hash verification; there there's money on the table.

GPG presumes secure key distribution (`gpg --verify .asc`).

TUF is designed to survive certain role key compromises. [https://theupdateframework.github.io](https://theupdateframework.github.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perfect use case for [http://datproject.org/](http://datproject.org/). It has git versioning on top of bittorrent, so if something gets updated in the dataset you only download the diff (unlike torrent).

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this statement:

> We would like to avoid the blind mirroring of all data.

Found at [http://academictorrents.com/about.php#mirroring](http://academictorrents.com/about.php#mirroring)

<comment><USER12> Sometimes people upload 1TB files which are not intended to be mirrored or not of interest to many people. We don't want people who donate hosting to mirror this content unless they really want to. But we also want to make it easy and automatic to mirror content. Using collections, which each have an RSS feed, content can be curated by someone you trust to decide what should be mirrored. I curate many collections including videos lectures, deep learning, and medical datasets.

<comment><USER28> Got it. Not trying to knock the hard work put into this, I'm actually thrilled to see this initiative and only intend to be constructive. Personally, I would rather be asked to trust that site admins were auditing each torrent to ensure it at least looks legitimate, before passing final legal responsibility on to me as a seeder. Leaving users to identify contributors they can trust to never include "Pirated Movie 2018" into their donated seedbox sounds like quite a hurdle to attracting new seeders willing to participate in a "legitimate bittorrent use case" project.

<comment><USER12> We perform our own audits of all data and request a justification why it is academic data if it appears to be "Movie 2018". We think the collections model is the best balance between a walled garden and zero censorship. You can be assured that no collections curated by me will have a bad torrent in it! Here are a few:

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/medical](http://academictorrents.com/collection/medical)

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/video- lectures](http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures)

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/joes-recommended- mirr...](http://academictorrents.com/collection/joes-recommended-mirror-list)

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/computer- vision](http://academictorrents.com/collection/computer-vision)

[http://academictorrents.com/collection/deep- learning](http://academictorrents.com/collection/deep-learning)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are the datasets all legit? For instance, this looks like a quarterly scrape of Reddit in full:

[http://academictorrents.com/details/85a5bd50e4c365f8df70240f...](http://academictorrents.com/details/85a5bd50e4c365f8df70240ffd4ecc7dec59912b)

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure all the twitter datasets violate the twitter TOCs.

<comment><USER31> On a quick pass of the Twitter datasets, they all seem to conform to Twitter's developer Terms.

<comment><USER30> Like the requirement that you have to delete tweets in datasets that have been deleted on twitter?

<comment><USER31> As far as I could tell, none of them actually contain tweets (e.g. any JSON), just IDs, and mostly user IDs at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My browser reports the "create an account" page is not secure, so maybe best not to use this as an uploader at least until they fix that. For the creator of the site: pages that collect passwords should be served over https.

<comment><USER32> All pages should be served over HTTPS. It's not only about keeping secrets.

<comment><USER25> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its good that more than one way exist for something like this, though I personally prefer something like zenodo, were every record automatically gets a DOI attached.

(Zenodo is limited to 50GB though)

</comment><comment><USER34> "gta_full_dist.tar" seems to be one of the biggest "datasets" featured on here. funny this data business.

<comment><USER35> Did you actually check it? It has nothing to do with piracy or video games, as you seem to imply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have been wondering why this hasn't existed for years! Thank you guys for making this. Long awaited.

<comment><USER37> This has existed for years.

<comment><USER36> I have wondered for years... apologies for the poor grammar

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can't find any info on how the data is hosted from the website, so I am wondering whether it works like pirate bay or it also hosts data itself? If the former is the case, it will be hard for researcher to use and share. One reason is that academic institutions nowadays has tightened control on net access, which definitely hinders hosting large amount of data shared with BT protocol; second, because researches are often fragmented which by itself will limit interests of possible users, then the sharing falls on a few people's goodwill.

<comment><USER39> It's in the name - Academic 'Torrents'. They just host the torrent files which are only a couple hundred kilobytes. I feel like your sorting of missing the point of a service like this, it's not to provide potentially the fastest download available, but it's to ensure data is accessible, even if the original download source is unavailable or is inaccessible for certain people or locations.

As long as you're not downloading copyrighted data there should be no issue with using the BT protocol on a company or academic network, providing their is no outright ban on the protocol in your network usage policy. The BT protocol itself actually lends itself quite well to large datasets such as what is hosted here due to its inbuilt error checking (so no more spending hours downloading a huge dataset only to find your connection did something silly for a second and corrupted the whole file) and can provide much faster download speeds on popular files due to the number of peers available, instead of a normal hosting arrangement which would likely provide slower speeds on popular files due to network congestion and file access speeds.

<comment><USER40> P2P is banned in the French academic network. I expect the same in neighboring countries, although I didn't get to review their terms of service.

<comment><USER41> I'd guess if a researcher has to use P2P there's probably a way for them to get the data / get whitelisted. I'm pretty sure the "P2P is banned" is mostly aimed at download copyright infringing content.

<comment><USER40> It's more than copyright infringement. Once you start having a few students or researcher deploying P2P, it's going to saturate the dedicated 10 Gb links very quickly.

P2P will consume any amount of upload bandwidth available. It's horrendous to have inside your network, as a university or research center.

<comment><USER41> It's not much different than any other service, if you don't limit it or use in moderation it'll saturate the network. If someone would host some linux ISO's over http like some universities do for Linux distributions it'll have the same effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have some very big concerns about this.

1\. It appears to be sponsored by seedbox hosting companies -plus- a google ad. This is misleading (no, it is -not- directly sponsored nor endorsed by Salesforce, which is the Google Ad I see).

2\. Many higher education institutions will block BitTorrent on their firewalls to prevent/reduce copyright infringement.

3\. How legitimate is the data? Is there any vetting of the content to ensure that it doesn't violate copyright or that the data was legally obtained eg, the site scrapes? A DMCA takedown is too late if we've already accidentally seeded infringing information and could harm our reputation.

4\. The site claims to be "used by" a group of very big names (Stanford, MIT, UT Austin etc). Did they ask/give permission to be cited? Do they endorse the use of this service?

5\. HTTPS. Please?

It's a great idea but it needs a bit more polish before I could even suggest this to my management.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone know why they opted not to use Webtorrent for this? Obviously straight Bittorrent is more battle-tested, but the extra friction of having to know how to work a BT client is non-trivial.

<comment><USER44> I'd call it trivial. My 60 year old uncle who shouts at his computer uses BitTorrent. Anyone who wants these files will be able to figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> the search on this would be better if you could browse by subject. on my firefox, the checkboxes (for type of resource) don't highlight

</comment><comment><USER46> I can see some overlap with Internet 2.

</comment><comment><USER47> great resource, thanks for the link

</comment><comment><USER48> papers section is full with Trivedi Effect. gets tiresome to filter it out

</comment><comment><USER47> great resource!

</comment><comment><USER49> I see this is a centralized service. Is there protection from DMCA takedowns?

For example, if someone uploads a bundle of 50 N64 ROMs, and someone tries to DMCA that link so that this service no longer provides an index to it, is there censorship resistance?

This is almost exactly what I need: A distributed index of massive datasets. I've been building a web browser that can source from such content. The idea is that you write a website which refers to some resources by SHA256, and anyone else running the browser will transmit the resource to you if they have it.

That would let you build an emulator which can play any ROM in history, without having to explicitly download the ROMs. It's equivalent to clicking on a link to "Super mario brothers" and then seeing it play immediately in your browser. No explicit downloading.

From a long term standpoint, the vision is that you can build whatever games you want, using whatever assets you want, and nobody can tell you that you can't.

So it was funny to see this service pop up, because it's nearly an identical use case: "I have some data (ROMs), I want to make it available to everyone else (people running the emulator), and it's decentralized so no one can say no (bittorrent)." But that raises the question of scope, or whether such use cases would be welcome.

<comment><USER50> Rather than building your own browser, take a look at Beaker Browser.

<comment><USER49> Thanks! Unfortunately Dat doesn't provide any anonymity.

<comment><USER50> That's true, and a worthwhile consideration if you're doing illegal things. If you route your connection through Tor you'd be good to go, right?

<comment><USER49> Yes, but users can't be expected to know how to do that. And my users are the ones who want to play ROMs.

Maybe it's possible to bundle tor with the executable though, and have the network connections automatically route through tor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I was hoping for the whole 18TB Google Open Images in one torrent, but alas, they only offer metadata for download, same as Google itself. What a bear of a dataset it is to obtain and work with.

</comment><comment><USER52> FINALLY, the inability to browse was my biggest issue with scihub.

All these sheltered academics were heralding it as the best thing ever, without even the basic user experience expected this decade.

Yes, I know about the chrome extensions.

<comment><USER53> Because browsing is provided by other services already. The usual use case for sci-hub is: find an article you're interested in, find it's super expensive, copy the doi into sci-hub.

It would be cool if sci-hub came with a catalogue, but it's very usable without it. And it's not just sheltered academics (or even just academics) that are using it.</comment></comment>


A Brain Built from Atomic Switches Can Learn - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-brain-built-from-atomic-switches-can-learn-20170920/ <comment><USER2> I think there's a chance we'll build an AGI within the next few decades. But I doubt we'll understand much better how it works than we understand today's human brain.

It will be an enormous advance, of course. It'll probably perform better than humans, it'll probably live indefinitely, there's a chance we'll figure out how to clone it, and we'll have much more ethical latitude to experiment with it. But I'm not sure we'll be able to explain how we built it; rather, the best we'll be able to say is that we helped it happen.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.. the more i think about it the more it seems there may be nothing meaningful to "understand" past a certain point (not to say we are at that point now). If understanding is reducing complexity but the brain turns out to be a huge network, there may be an irreducible complexity to it.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the AGI will itself be what helps us pierce that veil of complexity, like an ELI5 that can dumb down its own mechanism for mere humans.

Just imagine where we'd be today if we'd had a clone of Richard Feynman in every high-school math and physics class for the past 40 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm oddly reminded of Asimov's "I, Robot", where the positronic brain was basically described as a silvery (platinum and iridium) device that Just Worked. And nobody knew why.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> This is IMO a strong indication of "emergent complexity" and that consciousness isn't a thing but rather a whole system with no specific center of origin.

The interesting questions is whether any system can become aware as long as the feedback loop involves some interpretation of a pattern-recognizing feedback loop with memory and as long as it reaches big enough complexity.

I am aware that this isn't proving anything about consciousness but it's in line with some of my one pocket-philosophical thoughts.

<comment><USER6> For consciousness you need embodiment and goals. Goals shape attention, which shapes perception, which generates consciousness. The environment and its dynamics are essential in creating representations and learning behavior. So I think that in order to have consciousness you need a loop made of environment + agent + reward, not just a recurrent neural net with memory.

<comment><USER5> Yet here we are, a product of the blind watchmaker. If we can develop embodiment and goals, why shouldnt it be possible for other systems?

<comment><USER7> Embodiment and goals sort of preceded intelligence, not the other way around. A lizard has them. A dragonfly has them. A flatworm has them.

<comment><USER5> Exactly we are just aware of ours.

<comment><USER7> Sadly, not always.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was one of the most interesting quotes in the article:

"The way to do this is by training the device: by running a task hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, first with one type of input and then with another, and comparing which output best solves a task. "We don't program the device but we select the best way to encode the information such that the [network behaves] in an interesting and useful manner," Gimzewski said."

Since the "weights"/connections in their network are not easy to modify, they must instead figure out what kind of machine they have made by feeding it data and looking at the results. This does seem limiting in that the encoding might have to be arbitrarily complex to get the desired output.

<comment><USER9> So ... a large part of the intelligence is actually coming from the user's decision of what encoding to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Applying voltage to the devices pushes positively charged silver ions out of the silver sulfide and toward the silver cathode layer, where they are reduced to metallic silver. Atom-wide filaments of silver grow, eventually closing the gap between the metallic silver sides. As a result, the switch is on and current can flow. Reversing the current flow has the opposite effect: The silver bridges shrink, and the switch turns off.

makes me wonder if there is any potential as a non-volatile memory chip.

<comment><USER11> I think that this is the same basic concept as a memristor; current flowing one way probes the state, enough current flowing the other way changes it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _The silver network "emerged spontaneously," said Todd Hylton, the former > manager of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program that > supported early stages of the project._

I'm torn as to whether the article was intentionally editorialized to be mildly disconcerting, or if it actually is.

Setting aside the seemingly perfect Skynet quote for a moment: this a substrate that self-organizes itself in response to electrical input—it displays emergent behavior in similar fashion to the human brain—and it does so while consuming an amount of power that's far closer to the brain than modern integrated circuits computing the same task.

I have a couple of questions:

1\. The research sounds like it's been ongoing for quite a long time. What's preventing the creation of larger-scale silver nanowire meshes? Or networking many 2x2mm meshes together at ridiculous scale?

2\. What's the latency like between the artificial synapses? As far as I'm aware, synaptic latency in the human brain is on the order of milliseconds. Meanwhile latency in traditional ICs is on the order of nanoseconds if not picoseconds.

<comment><USER13> My guess is that even if they built a bigger mesh, they wouldn't know what to do with it. Having a smaller mesh lets you explore applications a bit better.</comment></comment>


Sway Finance (YC S16) Automates Accounting for SaaS Companies - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/sway-finance/ <comment><USER2> Hey guys! One of the co-founders of Sway Finance here. We did a ShowHN a couple months ago when we had just built our Slackbot ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162283)) and are excited to now be in YC and building more full-fledged financial products for businesses. Happy to answer any questions here!

<comment><USER3> This looks great, and automated revenue recognition straight into Quickbooks is a great feature. Do you have a Braintree integration yet, or soon? The integration section suggests not quite yet...

<comment><USER4> Is the Quickbooks integration with online or desktop or both?

<comment><USER2> Right now, Quickbooks Online only. We can help switch to QBO if you're open to it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the big issues I see with accounting/reconciliation systems (automated or even if managed by an external bookkeeper)is that if there isn't good oversight there's a significant cleanup cost usually at a pretty inconvenient time (e.g. just before a due diligence or audit). It's a pretty painful form of infrastructure debt.

How are you guys making sure people remain involved in overseeing and understanding the financials your software's feeding into?

<comment><USER2> Super good point that we've found with our customers who are migrating from outsourced bookkeepers.

We're using our Slackbot as a friendly way for companies to get their financial data, the idea being that if the numbers are accessible/convenient and ones they want to know (revenue, burn rate, bank balances). Then, we can use the same Slackbot to provide other necessary financial details.

We're still working on this, but we think Gusto does a great job of communicating necessary (and not so exciting) info in a way that engages us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, is it safe to say that you are providing a better rules engine than Quickbooks provides? What about all the other stuff - A/P, A/R, GL, Financial Reports etc?

<comment><USER2> For categorization, we're using ML (which learns over time and isn't rule based like Quickbooks' suggestions, which uses regex).

For the other pieces of bookkeeping, we're using integrations to automatically match invoices/payments (especially disjointed ones, eg invoice through QBO but pay separate via Stripe on client's website). We're also doing stuff like adjusting journal entries programmatically, like payroll accruals. For now, QB is providing the financial reports, we're doing the bookkeeping so their automated reports are accurate!

We're basically doing the services that a bookkeeper would provide on top of a client's Quickbooks software. QB is a tool and we aim to be a service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where does the machine learning come in?

The way article is written it doesn't even hint what the machine learning is being used for.

<comment><USER2> We're using machine learning (supervised learning) to categorize transactions, generally expenses. We're using our users' past months' books as our training sets of correctly labelled data, so that we can use that data to train is really exciting for us!

<comment><USER8> How is this better than what say Xero does for reconciliation?

<comment><USER2> Xero and Quickbooks just use basic regex to match transactions, which doesn't make much sense if the transaction category isn't static, eg Amazon. We also learn categories on an aggregate level, so if your bank statement's never seen a transaction from, say Tommy's Tacos, but someone else has, we'll be able to categorize it correctly immediately.

<comment><USER8> Interesting stuff. Good luck with it!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Donald Trump a fascist? A historian of fascism weighs in - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/is_donald_trump_a_fascist_an_expert_on_fascism_weighs_in.single.html <comment><USER2> There's a famous joke that "fascist" in politics just means "I don't like you"

It's just an ill-defined insult at this point. George Orwell had interesting things to say.

[http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc](http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc)

<comment><USER3> I've seen more than a handful of presumably right-wing commentators on Reddit of late arguing that the Nazis were actually socialists or 'communists' rather than a right-wing group. The ensuing (typically unresolved) argument comes down to how fascism is defined for each person. Fascism is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

<comment><USER4> Nazi is national socialism. Fascism was in Italy and Spain.

<comment><USER5> The Nazi party was socialist in much the same way the DPRK is democratic.

<comment><USER6> Weird that they put the word in the name of the party when they didn't know what it means.

<comment><USER7> They knew what it meant. I think putting that word in the name was a cheap way of appealing to the disaffected working class early on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The essential difference between totalitarian state and military junta seems to be popular support. With junta, you can trust that almost nobody is loyal directly to the dictator, they just want money and stay alive. So you can bribe anybody. In totalitarian state you can never be sure who will take "cause of the party" as his own. So lives of normal people are affected in totally different way.

There has been two types of totalitarian popular movements so far: nationalistic and international. Fascism falls in the first category, Communism in the second. The problem of communist is that it never has been able to spread the revolution as originally intended. So they have fallen back to "Socialism in one state" policies everywhere.

Given the similarities, it's not surprising that the left usually tries to paint fascism as "far right" or "ultra nationalist". The first is simply incorrect, the latter on the other hand is kinda misleading. Nationalism is also the basis for all systems of _national_ governance, so you can be ultra nationalist while supporting democracy, monarchy or pretty much anything else. Even Stalinism when that dude was still alive.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a political story, but it's also unusually interesting in HN's sense, so we've exempted it from the usual penalties.

If you're going to comment, please be sure you're doing so out of intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Partisan boosting and bashing is off topic.

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

</comment><comment><USER9> Obligatory: [http://www.alternet.org/files/story_images/bo151216.png](http://www.alternet.org/files/story_images/bo151216.png)

<comment><USER10> That's genius!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fascinating stuff. As ever, the answer is "it's complicated". We can see Trump adopting (presumably unconsciously) some of the tropes of fascism; the business with the plane, for example. This doesn't, of course, make him a fascist in itself.

I suspect that he would qualify as an authoritarian nationalist on some level, but whether he is interested in the kind of martial law usually associated with fascism seems less certain to me.

<comment><USER12> The plane example was a weak cherry pick in a weak article overall.

Trump is a bigot, but it's too early to say whether he's a fascist.

FDR forced Japanese citizens into internment camps, but history does not remember him as a fascist.

I'm not being an apologist for Trump's comments. But they're just not enough to classify him as a fascist.

If he advocates for more foreign wars, additions to the Patriot Act, or nationalizing entire industries, then we're getting warmer. Though, maybe he can claim one or two of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couple of thoughts:

The greatest relative strength of USA was right after the WWII when US GDP and industrial capacity was more than the rest of the world combined, had unmatched military capability and nuclear supremacy. Since then in geopolitical terms US is in decline.

The peak of US economy looking from the point of the middle class was 1969 - after that there were oil shocks, stagflation, outsourcing and hollowing out of the middle class. with a short blip upwards in the late 90s when US was reaping the benefits of winning the cold war and the computing boom.

And right now US is in a almost decade long depression if you exclude the SV,Wall street, and some landlords.

So there is both relative and real decline for big parts of the US public.

I don't think Trump is a fascist. Or even a particularly authoritarian hard liner.

And he has so far respected the letter of the US constitution. All of his vitriol has been towards people that are not US citizens. And the Supreme Court has made it clear that if you are not a US Citizen being in US is privilege, not a right.

</comment><comment><USER13> He says that he thinks trump never read a book on Hitler, but he at least owned a book of his speeches, according to his ex wife.

<comment><USER14> Owning a book and reading it are two different things. We all own books we've never read.

<comment><USER15> Why on earth would you own a book you've never read?

<comment><USER14> I tell myself I'll get around reading them eventually. Although the backlog well is in to the hundreds now, so I don't imagine I actually will.

<comment><USER16> There's a word for it: tsundoku

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's funny how many people oppose Trump on the basis of his "Mexican wall" idea, while supporting Hillary.

Meanwhile, the "Mexican wall" already exists (Google it!), and Hillary voted for it:

> I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a > barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in

[http://www.latintimes.com/hillary-clinton-bragging-about- bui...](http://www.latintimes.com/hillary-clinton-bragging-about-building- border-wall-keeping-out-illegal-immigrants-352631)

</comment><comment><USER18> This article on the Atlantic is, I think, a bit better and more interesting:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/don...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/donald- trump-fascist/424449/)

(Pretty much the same conclusion, though).

</comment><comment><USER19> He looks like the bad guy in Dead Zone:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_%28film%29)

But he is more a populist than a facist.

</comment><comment><USER20> Setting aside Mr. Trump...

"The trends are not downward unless you were offended by the presence of a black man in the White House."[3]

Except we are still expected to live in a 'post-911'[1] state[2] of fear.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQu_mYI3Vxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQu_mYI3Vxs)

[2] [https://cryptome.org/2015/09/potus-15-0911.pdf](https://cryptome.org/2015/09/potus-15-0911.pdf)

[3] Wow. Talk about painting the people you disagree with.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. Populist candidates like Trump and Sanders have as much clout as they do exactly because the country is in decline. And the public is tired of the elitist run media telling them otherwise.

The harder the media pushes their delusional reality, the harder the public pushes back, and the stronger Trump becomes.

Not that I hope for such a thing. But it's entertaining to see the media's propaganda continue to backfire on them. And they act totally oblivious as to why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Trump is not a fascist. No way

He is a narcist. He spent like first 8 minutes of his first speech after winning New Hampshire saying things like

I love you. You love me. I have lots of money. You love me.

Actually Hitler was a narcist so maybe Trump is a fascist.

</comment><comment><USER22> Aren't racist, sexist, and xenophobic enough?

Because I'm sure I can think of plenty more adjectives that I can apply objectively. I disagree with the article that 'fascist' is one of the worst things to be in today's world and those three things above (as well as the rest that could've gone there) are __much __worse.

<comment><USER4> Not at all. Calling something or someone racist, sexist or xenophobic does not by itself means much or invalidate. A policy may be such and still effective or optimal.

Lets take Europe migration crisis - 70% of the incoming people are single, young and male - that is the demographic that is impossible to integrate and they skew gender balance which is sure way to create social tension. A policy to exclude them and only let women, children and families will be all of those 3 (and couple more isms), but i think it will lead to better outcome for Europe than the current situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Trump doesn't believe in anything, but he is mining the writing of the paleoconservative movement (the traditional right) for popular appeal.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hilarious

</comment><comment><USER25> The things Donald Trump says (such as "stop Mexicans from coming into our country illegally" or "ban Muslims from immigrating to our country until we're confident in our terrorist screening process") offend a LOT of people. People who don't believe such things should be said, or even talked about. People who, when someone says these things, viciously attack them, saying they are morally wrong for thinking those things. People that band together as a group to silence those who dare utter what they deem "inappropriate" or "politically incorrect" or "shouldn't be said, it's racist!"

In other words, I'd argue that Donald Trump, rather than being a fascist, is a reaction against fascists. Liberal fascists who squash the dissent against their group think with social media lynch mobbing.

<comment><USER3> You're misusing the word fascist. You probably mean something more like 'hard- liners' or 'extremist'.</comment></comment>


Japan plans new driver's license system for elderly as accidents surge - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/11/national/japan-plans-new-drivers-license-system-elderly-accidents-surge/#.XQFIh8opCf0 <comment><USER2> My grandmother in the US has severe dementia and an active drivers license.

My grandfather doesn't let her drive, but legally there is nothing stopping her. It terrifies me when I go to visit their retirement village because any car I pass could be a similar story.

Unfortunately there is no solution because no politician in Florida is ever going to propose legislation that limits the elderly in any way.

<comment><USER3> Want to be really scared? Look at how many blind people are out there driving. Being legally blind does not automatically mean you forfeit your license. Of course, this is florida. Fully blind people (aka "black-blind") are allowed to buy, own, and use guns.

<comment><USER4> Read up on Carey McWilliams, he uses a sound based targeting system, is blind and is a really accomplished marksman and hunter with the technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _In the wake of a slew of fatal accidents involving elderly drivers, the government plans to create a new driver's license system that limits senior citizens to cars with safety features such as automatic brakes._

This seems like a feel good story for the papers and a way to further penalize drivers who don't have the proper car for their license, but I wonder how this works in practice to actually _prevent_ accidents, given the parameters of what's being reported. On your 75th birthday, do they repossess your current car and make you buy a new one?

Otherwise, there are still going to be a lot of dangerous autos on the road.

<comment><USER6> It will probably work, thanks to some Japan-specific quirks: every two years, cars are subject to a "tax and inspection" fee that can run up to $1500, which causes a lot of people to just buy a new car instead when it comes around. Also, Japanese tax law encourages frequently buying company cars and letting employees use them as their main vehicle, in lieu of additional salary. So Japan already gets old cars off the road very quickly.

(Note: I don't think this is a great system, and it's pretty obviously a hidden subsidy for the Japanese auto industry, but it does have the helpful side effect of ensuring that almost all cars on the road in Japan are fairly new and have the newest features)

<comment><USER7> Seems to have worked great for the Japanese auto industry: they focussed on resale value (aka: long term reliability).

<comment><USER8> Specifically, most Japanese used cars are exported abroad, since the inspection criteria are quite stringent when it comes to condition and features. So the cars are basically broken in by Japanese drivers, and then live the rest of their lives in Indonesia or China.

<comment><USER9> Or in Western Europe. I imported two top of the line cars for a very low fee in the past from Japan. Both had super low mileage and were a fraction of what I'd pay for the same vehicles here. The websites typically look super sketchy but they're legit, you may have to twiddle headlights and other details to get it to pass inspection locally.

Important to check if there have been recalls that have not been applied to the car you are interested in and to make sure that you have a good idea of the tax and registration fees in your intended country of destination before pulling the trigger.

Luxury European cars (MB, BMW, Audi) in Japan are typically LHD so no problem there, but beware of buying Japanese vehicles there, there is a good chance they are RHD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >> In both cases, it is believed that the drivers may have mistaken the throttle for the break pedal.

No. That is either a translation error or an overly-polite way of putting it. They did not "mistake" one for the other. Loss of coordination in the legs is a normal symptom of old age. It is why old people shuffle, why they use walkers. They did not make the mental mistake of forgetting which pedal is which. They suffer from a physical condition, one unrelated to cognition, that limits their ability to quickly and accurately move their feet.

Automatic brakes might help, but won't necessarily protect every kid walking through a parking lot from being trampled by someone accidental slamming on the accelerator. What might be needed is a combination of automatic brakes and throttle limiters, devices that interpret someone slamming on an accelerator as a mistaken attempt to stop.

Similarly, rapid acceleration in reverse should be disabled. That has killed in many parking lots. So too rapid acceleration with the parking brake applied.

<comment><USER10> > [...]throttle limiters, devices that interpret someone slamming on an > accelerator as a mistaken attempt to stop[...]

If there's a perceived need to install that sort of device the driver in question simply shouldn't be driving.

Installing this sort of thing is just a recipe for disaster, now they'll cause some horrible accident on a highway instead as they legitimately slam the accelerator on an on-ramp, which the car will then auto-translate to slamming on the brakes.

<comment><USER11> Perfectly healthy people without dementia have confused the brake and acceleration pedals. It's a design problem, not a competency problem.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehic...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle_recalls)

Maybe your point is that people shouldn't be driving in general?

<comment><USER10> No, the premise of this discussion is not that humans are infallible up to a certain age, but rather that at some point the elderly become more prone to causing accidents.

I'm pointing out that what might sound like a sensible mitigation for that can backfire. The control mechanisms of cars should not be messed with lightly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could we get a filter for HN that drops articles with hyperbole in the title? E.g. Surge, slew, flock etc. usually indicate bias.

The article is based around this:

> there were 460 fatal traffic accidents in Japan last year caused by drivers > aged 75 or over. The proportion of such accidents among all fatal accidents > increased from 8.7 percent in 2008 to 14.8 percent in 2018.

But what it doesn't say is how many fatal accidents there were overall in 2008 (what if the total number of accidents for the age group has gone down, and the number of accidents in other age groups has just gone down by more), nor does it talk about the number of accidents in any other year (what if 2008 was an anomaly). There's no way of knowing if this % change is statistically significant.

It also doesn't say whether the apparent rise in this age group is caused by the age group being older, or if there are other factors at play (eg are older people more likely to drive older cars?)

I don't understand how anyone can form an opinion with articles like this, there's no fact base to start from and any discussion is moot.

<comment><USER13> The way to do it is to assume it's correct for the duration of the article. That way you can think about it in the way the author intended, but afterwords you're not holding on to a fact or conclusion that isn't actually true.

Basically, play by the author's rules so you can benefit from the article, but follow up with your own bit of research to ensure the author's premise was sound. If it is, keep the information. If it's not, move on with your life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My grandad luckily fell, broke his hips, and become hospitalised until his death before he managed to drive over any innocent pedestrians or crash into other cars besides when parking.

I'd venture to suggest retaking the standard driving test at 65, 70, and 75, and then every two years if an elder wishes to retain his license. You can only figure out if someone is fit for driving by observing how he drives. A doctor can't do it from his office, and relatives are too close. An independent, objective driving test examiner would fail or pass elder people by the same criteria he fails or passes young new drivers straight from the driving school.

Basically, anyone on the public roads should be fit for passing a driving test at any time, the elderly people included.

</comment><comment><USER15> Massachusetts lets you turn in the driver's license of people with dementia, which is good. However, if you want them to then have a non-driver's state identification, that is a whole separate process. One of my coworkers just went through a Kafka-esque process that chewed up a whole day at the DMV where he turned in his elderly mother's license, then was unable to get the other ID because this nonagenarian didn't have a copy of her birth certificate, from some rural county in the South, where the original was destroyed because the courthouse burned down decades ago, and they wouldn't accept the just-turned- in driver's license as proof of her identity.

</comment><comment><USER16> if the elderly cause more accidents, then why are their insurance rates lower than for young people?

<comment><USER17> My guess: they account for miles driven. If the elderly are driving less frequently and for shorter distances you can probably assume no long daily commutes during rush hour, and less driving during evenings and inclement weather when accidents are likely to occur.

Here's some data on the subject matter: [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm)

65+ drive roughly the same amount as 16-19 year olds. Driving peaks in the 35-54 cohort and drops sharply from there. I imagine drivers who are pushing 80 are driving significantly less than their cohort overall.

<comment><USER18> I agree with your reasoning, but the comparison to 16-19 year olds in the last paragraph doesn't really make sense to me. If both groups are equally dangerous on the road and drive about the same amount, why are insurance rates for 16-19 year olds (talking about the US, because that's what I have the context for) are through the roof, unlike the elderly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In BC Canada, you dont need a medical exam for license till you are 80!

<comment><USER20> In the US, you never need one ever.

<comment><USER21> Various states have various requirements. For example mine requires an eye test.

<comment><USER20> I think every state requires an eye test, but that's at every age.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sites Like Twitter Absent From Free Speech Pact - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/technology/07rights.html

<comment><USER2> I always wonder that with the fast past of innovation and the emphasis on being first to market to "win", so to speak, companies may not think of their responsibilities in society or if they even have any responsibilities to society. The movements in Libya and Egypt have noticeably demonstrated the immense impact and social good that services such as twitter or facebook can bring, yet the companies themselves are noticeably absent and are not proactive in promoting a commitment to free speech. Is there a role for corporate social responsibility in technology? Or is it possibly a hindrance to progress?</comment>


Greedy Hospitals Fleece the Poor - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/155013/greedy-hospitals-fleece-poor <comment><USER2> Hospitals fleece the insured. Or their insurance companies. (But insurance companies are not a magic pile of money in the sky, everyone's premiums are affected.)

A poor, uninsured person visits the ER. They can't pay. The hospital writes it off.

An insured person visits the ER. Their insurance pays. The hospital charges outrageous prices to make up for the uninsured.

It seems like insured people are subsidizing uninsured people. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Since the uninsured pay more than the insured for the same proceedure, wouldn't that make it the uninsured who are subsidizing the insured?

Joking aside, tt is near impossible to find good numbers for this, but the research I read indicates that most of the money for uncompensated care ends up coming from government and any impact on prices of care for the insured is negligible.

<comment><USER4> So does that mean hospitals with low number of privately insured (instead mostly uninsured and medicare/medicaid) will perform just as well as those with high percent privately insured patients?

<comment><USER3> As I said, good numbers appear hard to find. Good luck even finding a good estimate of what percentage of uninsured care is paid for by the uninsured. The closest thing I found is that the insured and the uninsured tend to pay about the same amount out of pocket but the uninsured have consistently lower incomes so are spending a higher percentage of their income.

As a point of reference, I am uninsured and pay all my medical bills out of pocket. I have never received any uncompensated care (because I can afford it). I suspect that the uninsured pay for a much higher percentage of their care than people assume.

<comment><USER4> Yes its hard to figure this out. I've happened to find this interesting link. Not sure how unbiased it is. [http://truecostofhealthcare.org/hospital_financial_analysis/](http://truecostofhealthcare.org/hospital_financial_analysis/)

I have a pretty good private plan right now but being that I'm on dialysis, I'll be forced onto medicare soon enough because 30 months after starting dialysis, we have to switch to medicare as primary coverage. I just hope I don't end up paying more out of my pocket.

<comment><USER5> That sounds rough. I had a kidney scare earlier this year due to creatine. Luckily I recovered by being off of it. Can you tell a bit more about how your kidneys got to their current state? Could help me or somebody else out.

<comment><USER4> Mine is an autoimmune disease called IgA nephropathy. One day when your body is fighting a cold or something your immune cells decide your kidneys are a good place to attack. The immune cells are big so they damage the filtering capacity of the kidneys. And you don't even notice it until your GFR (level of kidney function) drops super low and you start feeling crappy.

There is not a lot you can do about IgAN except get lucky to catch it early and slow its progress. However mine was a quick progressing one and happened between doctor visits. Only thing I can say it get a baseline comprehensive metabolic panel blood tests (its very cheap) and do it periodically to monitor your health. The medical system tends to be reactive but you as an individual should be proactive. If you think about it people get their cars checked out more often than themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arizona sues Google for tracking users' location even when it's turned off - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/arizona-google-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> Has this type of Google tracking without consent behavior changed recently? I recall it being a hot topic in 2018.

<comment><USER3> > The lawsuit stems from a 2018 Arizona probe into Google's location tracking > practices.

This is the latest development from that same topic.</comment></comment>


There's already a website for that  - <AUTHOR> http://samrat.github.com/blog/theres-already-a-website-for-that.html

<comment><USER2> I had the exact same experience (with <http://www.rrrather.com/>) last night!</comment>


A feud in wolf-kink erotica raises a deep legal question - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html <comment><USER2> Archived page: [http://archive.vn/2siUk](http://archive.vn/2siUk)

> But they struggled to find a prior case that addressed whether fan fiction > tropes could be protected by copyright.

All they had to do was ask Disney.

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisneyOwnsThisTr...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisneyOwnsThisTrope)

The copyright world is no stranger to ludicrous concepts like these.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole present state of intellectual property law seems fucked. We need some kind of intellectual property protection, since so much work is all just bits and bytes these days. But we really don't seem to have gotten it right yet.

Side rant: "intellectual property" is a terrible name for it. The regulations are about copying implementations of ideas, rather then the ideas themselves. Regulating usage of an idea is less self evidently good.

<comment><USER2> > We need some kind of intellectual property protection, since so much work is > all just bits and bytes these days.

It's precisely because everything is bits and bytes that intellectual property is absurd. All data is fundamentally just big numbers. We can even calculate how big these numbers are:

      decimal_digits = ceil(bits * log10(2))

For example, a 20 kiB picture is a number with 49,321 decimal digits.

Intellectual property is an attempt to limit people's ability to know and tell each other these numbers. Certain numbers have been declared illegal.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it makes IP fundamentally absurd. Amazon shouldn't be able to copy the big new Disney movie and sell it itself, cutting Disney out, for example. Even if they convert it from .mp4 to .mkv format or something making it a brand new number. That movie is "just" a big number, yes, but we're "just" meat and everything's "just" a big wave function and at some point we have to decide that higher level concepts are the more useful domain to work in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been tracking this case along with around a hundred others where people have been sued for submitting infringement complaints to online marketplace platforms.

[https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.213269...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.213269.1.0.pdf) here's one that's similar in that it involves copyright on books, although it was dismissed fairly quickly.

[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17189170/the- antitrend-...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17189170/the-antitrend- llc-v-patagonia-inc/) here's the most recent one, filed less than a week ago, alleging harm to an Amazon storefront after false DMCA complaints.

Here's a relatively recent decision dismissing misuse claims in a case where allegedly false DMCA claims were sent to Amazon. [https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.519412...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.519412/gov.uscourts.nysd.519412.104.0.pdf)

[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes- solutio...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutions- inc-v-tp-link-usa-corporation/) and here's a case I'm involved in, which involved false counterfeit complaints to Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER5> It can't be true that there are no precedents for this in intellectual property law. Sure, Internet fan fiction is a modern phenomenon, but there are plenty of examples where multiple authors draw from the same folk sources. For example, I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to make an adaptation of _Snow White_ , the famous story told by the Brothers Grimm among others, and ignore letters from Disney's lawyers. But if I call my supporting cast Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful and Doc, Disney will win in court. Of course there are grey areas and Disney could overreach, or I could be scared out of staging a legitimate production, but I refuse to believe there is no precedent at all here.

<comment><USER6> Those old stories are in the public domain since they predate 20th copyright law.

<comment><USER5> Is that so different from the Omegaverse case? The earlier authors aren't claiming copyright infringement there (that might actually make for a novel case), the case is being fought between two authors both inspired by the same source material.

<comment><USER6> Even if you don't "claim" copyright, the work is still copyrighted. It is not possible to release work into the public domain prematurely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what I don't like about the common law. The copyright law of my country, for example, explicitly defined what is copyrightable and what is not. It's the expression that is protected by copyright law, not the mere idea. Not by a bunch of existing case laws.

An mere idea like a man was bitten by an irradiated spider and got some super natural power, or turtles by the age of 13-19 somehow mutated and become a ninja is not protected, but the expression of such idea is.

<comment><USER8> Ideas aren't copyrightable. But certainly things are used to determine it a story is a copy of another story

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How are "deep legal questions"? There must be more data than just this and a bunch of examples that don't really give a better explanation of the question.

</comment><comment><USER10> A knotty situation, to be sure.

<comment><USER11> I'm afraid you are infringing on Ms. Cain's copyright with your comment; only she could possibly be so knowledgeable about canine reproduction as to make such a joke.</comment></comment>


Aliens Riding Meteorites: David Dobbs on the Journal of Cosmology - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/aliens-riding-meteorites-arsenic-redux-or-something-new/

<comment><USER2> Reporters typically say "interesting" when they're afraid of being sued for saying "nutbag crackpot".

</comment><comment><USER3> I just hope those scientists are careful about introducing alien bacteria to Earth's ecosystem.

If we find an alien bug via a meteorite, then that bug was one of the reigning champions in terms of ability to survive and subdue its opponents. It would have the capability of subduing our entire ecosystem leaving humans scrambling to try to remove it, contain it, then adapt to protect against it.

<comment><USER4> The traits that allow something to survive extended periods in space don't automatically grant it the traits that would allow it to thrive on Earth above all else.

Look at Earth's extremophiles, the bacteria that can survive near thermal vents on the ocean floor, extended trips in space/vacuum, intense radiation, sub-zero temps, etc, there's no evidence that they're taking over the non- extreme locations. Even if they do survive outside their "home" environment, that doesn't automatically make them the top dog that will edge out everything else.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pokemon GO: Do I own the virtual space of the physical space I own? - <AUTHOR> Just some lighthearted food for thought..
Yesterday while entertaining a guest(avid Pokemon go player) in my house I got informed that my house if full of Pokemons!
So my question to you is: Is Niantic allowed to spawn virtual creatures in the coordinates of the land I own? <comment><USER2> >Is Niantic allowed to spawn virtual creatures in the coordinates of the land I own?

<pedant>Those creatures aren't actually _in_ those coordinates. They appear onscreen when your _device_ is at a certain set of coordinates, but they never actually 'leave' the app in any meaningful way. Since there's really no such thing as a "virtual space of a physical space" for them to reside in, the question is moot. </pedant>

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. Now my next question is, do I have a claim on the Pokemons spawned in the coordinates my land?

I am happy to claim ownership on anything that grows on the coordinates of my land. There have been a lot of suggestions recently that our universe is just a simulation, in which case anything that grows on the coordinates on my land is just information stored on the server that run the simulation.

Why would it be different with the Pokemons?

Let's say I was a Pokemon player as well. I imagine I would be quite aggravated if somebody would come in my land and try to catch _my pokemons_.

Isn't that how we can imagine that the notion of ownership for the physical world started?

People fighting for the control of land, because of the resources contained in the coordinates of the given land.

<comment><USER3> First off, the Pokemon aren't only catchable by one person in a given location. Anyone with the app open can catch the Pokemon, so there is no exclusivity to having one appear on your property.

Secondly, if our universe is a simulation, do you really own the land you claim to?

<comment><AUTHOR> > the Pokemon aren't only catchable by one person in a given location.

Oh.. Didn't know that..

> Secondly, if our universe is a simulation, do you really own the land you > claim to?

We have to go back to the root of what ownership is.

The way I see it ownership of land evolved somehow like this: During stone ages or somewhere along that time, a group of humans decided that anything that grows or walks around that land was theirs to claim. Hence if another group of people tried to catch or collect something on that land they would start a fight. In essence this means that ownership of the land => ownership of the resources on the land.

Back to the Pokemon, and again I thought that only one person could catch the Pokemon that spawn in a location. A Pokemon is a resource that is only available on a specific location, even if it needs a smartphone to see it and catch it. Assuming that this resource has some value, how is it different than a buffalo that lives in a specific location. It too needs tools to catch it.

Therefore I cannot see why I cannot claim ownership on a Pokemon that spawned in my land, the same way I claim ownership on a tree that grew in my land.

Edit: BTW, just making very lighthearted discussion.

<comment><USER2> >Therefore I cannot see why I cannot claim ownership on a Pokemon that spawned in my land, the same way I claim ownership on a tree that grew in my land.

Because it didn't spawn in your land, it spawned in the app on your phone. Unless you're claim ownership over the app on your phone because the phone is "in your land," you've got nothing to claim ownership of in this case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it matter where it's state of is saved? The point is that in order to catch it you have to have a phone AND be in my land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think so. It's just an RNG on a server somewhere. Physically, they aren't putting anything in your house. Heck, I'm not sure if the RNG is centralized or not. Pokemon locations may be generated locally. Given the server load, I'd certainly do it that way.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

<comment><USER3> I believe it is centralised, as I'm pretty sure the same Pokemon can appear on multiple players' devices in the same location.

See here for consequences: [http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Pokemon-Go- Players-Stam...](http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Pokemon-Go-Players- Stampede-New-York-Central-Park-387303572.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's their database. We're just living in it.

<comment><USER6> This is the kind of meta comment that really gets you thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you own any virtual space corresponding to your physical space? No.

But you can sue someone over the effect they have on your physical space.

</comment><comment><USER8> You might not even really own the physical space. What would happen if you didn't pay land tax (or your local equivilent)?

</comment><comment><USER9> It's space in a parallel universe not your universe.</comment>


Amazon is Terrifying - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mikeal/amazon-is-terrifying-7333422ec40d <comment><USER2> "Story for Medium members only"

Is this a thing medium does nowadays?

<comment><USER3> I discovered that you can read Medium's "members only" articles by googling them and fetching the cached copy:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UsYheN...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UsYheN7LwN4J:https://medium.com/%40mikeal/amazon- is-terrifying-7333422ec40d+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)</comment></comment>


The Front End Architecture Revolution by David Nolen - <AUTHOR> http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/61483785

<comment><USER2> One of the best talks I've ever seen. Thank you so much David.</comment>