psn

I'm bored; lets go deeper.

Why think the man who does not exist exists? why not assume pando made him up, and made the whole story up? The story isn't so implausible that people would doubt it. If anything,the story is toogood - count the number of times the man comes across as a bad guy. Randian of the worst kind? tick. Used to work in wall street? tick. In HFT? tick. Why did he grant an interview if he was trying to keep his business secret? I don't know if the story is made up, but its ringing bells in my head...

I'm cautious about your Latvia story - its sounds to me like the bike was worried about fraud. Thats pretty common - about half the times I go to the US, I have to ring up the bank and get the card unblocked.

That being said, there are countries attempting to control the flow of money. Argentina wants to enforce its price for the dollar. Cyprus wants to prevent everyone taking their money and running. and so on. However, most of these countries see attempts to circumvent their controls as illegal. I feel its unwise to get my hopes up about bitcoin for this sort of transaction for that reason.

I can't help but feel that if someone deletes their comment, its polite to respect their wishes and keep the comment deleted.

To me, this comment is the essence of hacker news. Guy goes around the world. Guy visits tons of dangerous places and miles of border paperwork. One presumes he did a ton of research. And yet, there's a guy on the internet saying "oh, here's this thing you missed".

Sorry if you take the huff.

drive by comment: I don't know what you mean to imply by Oakland (!?!?), but... I took the amtrak south from Oakland, and I was shocked by the level of poverty thats visible from the train.

Hah. I recall antispam companies doing the same thing - once they got big enough, they demanded money from major mail exchanges. I'm sure companies paid out rather than risk long legal cases and poor PR.

"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident "

They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.

I agree with your post generally, but has Snowden said anything about CAs? I did expect to hear that at least one has signed anything the NSA put in front of them, but I don't recall Snowden providing "proof"* of this.

* I'm in no position to verify anything Snowden leaks.

I'm a employee of a large tech company that's being parodied here, and I found this really disconcerting. The scenes with the boss and HR are completely different to my experience. No one cares what I do at the weekend. No one cares about my social media presence. No one cares if I use the company's products or not.

A few clear examples: one of my grandparents passed away, and the company was as supportive as possible. I asked if I could work from my parents house to be with my grandmother, and I got back "You can work from another country for an open ended period. If you aren't getting anything done, let me know, and we'll call it compassionate leave". There are people who go out socializing, but I've never felt pressured to go along. There are people who work long hours or the weekend, but again, I've never felt pressured to do that either.

Edit: When the company was newer, the employees worked very long hours and weekends. They worked, mind you. Everyone I know from that era is remarkably well off. The vast majority of the early employees have retired to spend more time with their wealth. I'm much more concerned, as a person, about either the big companies that do massive crunches (see ea spouse) or the startups that fails despite everyone working really hard, the employees don't get the 100 million dollar payday.

Shrug. The article is mostly a tale of two, uh, causes of excitement. It doesn't make a sweeping claim about getting rid of anything.

"continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation."

I'm amused. Its easy to promote other people not having weapons :). Its worth noting that the US is still the world's largest nuclear power. The RRW program would have featured replacing every existing weapon, probably the US resuming tests, and it was pretty expenvise - are you really surprised it got cancelled?

Can you recommend some books on the topic?

Your comment amuses. On the one hand, its possible that the CIA folks in the article are offering bad advice, either knowingly or unknowingly. For example, I imagine that the CIA has a guy in the basement making fake ids, rather than having field agents make their own. On the other hand, I doubt you know more about it than they do. Of course, you'd never show off your collection of fake ids to win a internet argument...

I see the other pattern - the forgiveness guy grows a rep as the guy who broke stuff, while the "ask permission" guy often finds out people say "yes". The end result is people are happier working with the ask permission guy.

Perhaps I'm an optimist.

Not the OP, but this theme (Germany as economic powerhouse, Germany having a large population, Germany being more organized, than say, Russia) is the main theme in Brendan Simms's book "Europe The struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present). You could read that. Its about 500 pages (about a year a page!) and I'm cautious about some of the points, but I figure it will back up the OP.

Churchhill's post second world war writings also cover this, but don't make the full claim the OP makes.

First thing you might be missing: there are probably a pile of folks on hacker news who don't have money. Students. People who have invested their life savings in their startup. People who work part time and see the world in the rest of their time. People who are spending their money on making sure their mum gets treatment for cancer. For these folks, getting the most out of the kit they can afford is important. And yes, thats a condescending statement aimed at you, but its not more condescending than "why don't you drop a couple grand on this problem?"

Second thing you might be missing: computers have marched forward in spec, yet most of us don't need tons of power in any dimension of the spec. My cheap chromebook ($200 or so) has 2G of ram. I went though uni with about of order of magnitude less ram, and was happy. The 16G ssd it ships with is sufficient for anything that isn't movies, music or photos. The ssd probably has more iops than 2005 era hard drives :). So the chromebook is low powered compared to the desktops of today, but its pretty powerful compared, to, for example, the computers google or facebook used to get off the ground.

Third thing: cloud compute. If I find myself needing thousands of hours of cpu time, I can get that on EC2 or similar. And its cheaper for everyone to rent cpu time when needed on a server in a well cooled warehouse somewhere where power is cheap, rather than have idle cpus connected up to city power grids.

I own a cheap chromebook (and I'm amused by you saying cheap in a negative way :)), and its fine for what it is. Its slim. Its not as sexy* as your mother, but hey. It has a debian chroot with all the normal tools on it. I don't worry about it being damaged or lost as much as I would if it was 5x as expensive. If I spent the money on a macbook air, I'd be buying a machine to run chrome and a terminal window, and all I'd be getting for my extra 800 dollars would be a nicer screen and track pad.

* I do wonder about people who describe computers as sexy.

The article implies that amazon somehow got the law changed, and therefore it only covers reading devices, not laptops etc. I dislike its tone. Before, no electronics of any kind. Now, reading devices. This is strictly progress[1], and we should be happy for all the progress we get. If Marco (or more plausibly, apple) was to start lobbying in a year or so to permit tablets, then being able to point to a year of kindle safe flying would be a good thing. It seems unlikely that amazon (who are in the tablet business as well) choose to somehow limit the change to only reading devices.

[1] Lets ignore the risk to flight safety caused by letting passengers use electronics. Because that risk is so small one needs the LHC to find it.

https://plus.google.com/103382935642834907366/posts/XRekvZgd... is a Chrome developer talking about cache metrics within chrome. He claims the cache is capped at 320MB. Now the graphs in the article never show the cache size hitting 320M, so possibly they are both right. ;)

I would prefer it if the article had more information on how to reproduce their tests. For example, they claim a faulty hashmap implementation. This seems like it would be possible to benchmark. Instructions on reproducing the 100ms delay between button click and network traffic would be cool too - as would data on how much worse that makes facebook's latency. Also, is their cache backed by ssds or spinning disk?

I'm also impressed that the speed of context switches matters on websites.

The jump to claiming that chrome caching is tied to ads is interesting. Perhaps the author could fill in more details.

I work there as a engineer. The engineers sit in another office around the corner.

I really liked this post. His experience - there are folk talking on mailing lists, there are folk actually doing stuff, and the two groups rarely overlap - matches mine. The concern I have with gnome 3 is that there is sufficient change to trip me up when I'm trying to get stuff done ;-)

I found this a pretty interesting read. hackerish reasons: - The scale of the fraud. This guy is making up a race on the internet. complete with other runners, their profiles and so on. Its the sting come to life.

- The data based approach to cheating detection. Random runners can look up, in seconds, stats for any other runner. Not just their times and placings, but checkpoint by checkpoint timings. Its then easy to profile the normal runner and then the cheat.

- The photo aspect. disqualifing a guy because he didn't appear in any photos shows how far we've come in having 100s of photos of every event.

- The lack of on-the-ground cheating detection. This guy presumably left and entered the route of the race, with no one noticing. Runners noticed themselves going from position X to X-1, but not ll of them complained.

- The issues of internet anonimity. We see yet another internet comminity with pseudonyms. This doesn't prevent it being a commumity. it doesn't prevent people spotting strawman accounts.

and less hackerish reasons: - The lack of clear motivation. Why did he do it?

- the weird overreach. Why did he aim for a high ranking? If he'd come 50th no one would have cared. Why did he talk to someone from the new yorker? Why did he make up a whole event?

I work there. Its been four and a lot years. I don't work in mountain view, though.

working hours: I average 40h a week. Which is what all the studies say is optimal. The key perk here is picking your hours. If I'm feeling hungover, I work less. If I'm on a roll, I work more. If I have to wait at home for half a day to let in my landlord or something, thats fine. As long as work get done, no one cares. no one clock-watches. I do think there is a correlation between working hard and getting promoted, but its not that strong a correlation - my last promotion came at the end of working 40h weeks... I can't imagine people feeling like they have to leave because they aren't putting in stupid hours.

boozing: there is a certain amount of company paid for drink. there is a certain amount of people bringing in booze. However, the line has been drawn about having a drink and then working. And really, on the scale of drinking, google is kinda lame. At tgif I think the most I've managed is a couple of beers.

Another twist on the "smart people" thing: its not about everyone being smart, its about no one being stupid. I don't have to spend tons of my time explaining stuff to people. I don't have any co-workers where it would be faster to do their work for them.

grades etc: I do run into people who name drop uni or test results or whatever, but most of the time, no one cares. I work with people who studied a subject completely different to computers at uni. I work with people who never bothered with uni. I do think there a bits of the company where going to mit over random uni still matters, but I don't work with those bits.

My big dislike is that its a big company - there is lots of existing code and systems, some of which is showing its age, its hard to change company policy on the big issues, you do feel like one in X cogs, and there is a lot of internal bikeshedding.

I hate this cartoon. it leads real name requirements on sites, in the hope of removing anonymity. This hurts all sorts of groups (see the google+ real names saga for a long list) but doesn't really slow down trolling. You can and do see people making racist / sexist / whatever comments with their real name. Possibly the trolls know that there are many John Smiths in the world. Its a "theory" thats been disproven by this point.

I suspect that as a result of some out of court settlement with Intellectual Ventures, people are asked to invest. I also suspect that the best lawyers in the world - and apple and google have the best in the world - pick the fights they have a chance of winning. A similar example is http://www.iwf.org.uk/.

https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/commit/33efa5ac62eaf9cf... is the point where I get confused.

In a normal tunnel setup, one tunnels at the IP layer, and dumps all IP packets into the tunnel. At the far end of the tunnel, packets are sent onwards based on the far end's routing table. Things like DNS "just work" because everything happens at a layer below TCP and UDP. In this system, he's making it work for each non-tcp using layer 4 protocol separately, leading to weirdness like rewriting /etc/hosts.

For tcp, he's nating all traffic locally to a local server, which then multiplexes all incoming traffic into the ssh connection. The remote side then unmultiplexes the data. I don't fully understand how this avoids tcp over tcp. Maybe I'm dumb. [edit: yeah, I'm dumb. the tcp connection is terminated at the local server, the contents are pumped over the ssh connection, and the remote side opens a new tcp connection]

I wrote this mostly because I read the readme and went "but how does it work?".

Thanks for posting this - its a pretty good example of requirements creep. I doubt that anyone in the fifties planned out that the president would need 16 cars to go anywhere, but thats whats happened. One can picture the Secret Service holding meetings in which they decide to add "just one more" agent.

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/

Tell me when you've done as much as the author. His point - thats we're giving money to companies that for services that they can't provide for themselves - is valid.

OK, you're running a small non-profit organisation. You get a subset of the records of anglo irish bank, say a truck load's worth. (this is a example, not the current thing they are generating spin about). While most of these documents are in the public interest in Ireland and Europe (Anglo Irish bank have been on life support in Ireland for 2 years now, the money needed to keep it afloat has forced the IMF to bail out the Irish government) some aren't, for example records for customers. At this point, you need to get someone to read though millions of words and decide what to release. If you have money, you ring up the local temp agency and get a load of people to do it for you for minimum wage. However, wikileaks doesn't have money. They have to pick what piles of documents are worth reading though.

I agree that its sucky, and would much prefer a system in which wikileaks had the resources to leak more stuff and were not picking and choosing what to release. However, I understand why wikileaks does what it does.

what we need here is more internet: http://wikileaks.org/media/about.html and search for "Japan".

"was apparently connected to organized crime, even if only through blood"

So if you're the son of the local mafia don, from what age should you followed around by the FBI? 18? seems old - there are plenty of child offenders. maybe 10 or so. At what age, having lived a life free from crime, should the FBI stop following you? 25? 30? 40?

Perhaps we could assume people are innocent until we can prove them guilty.