Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066 <comment><AUTHOR> The paper abstract:

> This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to U.S. > dollars, influences Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the > recent boom. Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that > purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in > sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy > Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin > and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, > induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete > Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by > investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based > hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate > cryptocurrency prices.</comment>


Ask HN: Why did you become a manager? - <AUTHOR> Why did you move from being an individual contributor to an engineering manager?<p>I am considering the move myself, what I enjoy about my job now is working with stakeholders and mentoring junior devs (as well as the coding). I'm trying to decide if this a good reason to move into management, or should I stick to what I am doing with added focus on these areas. <comment><USER2> I went from individual contributer to manager, then back to individual contributer. But I believe the decision is dependant on the quality of work and the team you're managing.

For the latter transition, I got some sideways looks at first from people asking "you realize your taking a step back in your career, right?" My reply was twofold:

A.) I replied "I'm still getting the same pay and benefits, right?" The answer is yes.

and

B.) As an individual contributer I don't have to waste my time (which I could be using to actually work on creative and interesting projects) trying to fix the work/quality of complacent and mediocre engineers.

So, for me, if I get to manage a team of highly competant engineers, then I will gladly take that management role because the team actually extends my ability to accomplish more than if I worked independantly. However, if you want me to manage a group of half-ass engineers who have little-to-no passion for pushing the envelope, then I'd much rather work independantly as an individual contributer.

Life is too short to waste on menial tasks that do little to improve the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> I became a manager in October 2018, because my manager quit and he recommended that I take over.

I'm on my way to going back to IC. I learned a lot about myself. According to my new manager, I am/was doing just fine as a manager. My reports like me and think I'm tough but fair, which is the perfect review of a manager. However, I've since learned that I honestly just don't care to do anything a manager is supposed to do. I love being in 1x1s. I love talking to my manager. I thought hosting 1x1s with my own reports would be fun to do, but (and maybe this makes me a bad person) I've just discovered that I can't get emotionally invested in any of my reports. Maybe one day I'll get to that point but as for right now, I'm just not at that point.

So I'd ask you, are you ready to fix people problems? The amount of coding you'll get to do will drop significantly, and the metrics by which you're evaluated will become completely different. Your job will now be to defend your reports from anything above you. This was something I have problems with as well. It's really hard for me to defend my reports when they make mistakes.

I'm working to becoming a better, more empathetic person, but I'm just not there right now and it's a disservice to my reports to stay their manager when I just don't believe in them, and I can't convince myself to believe in them.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me, it was a default choice: it was the only career path that didn't suck (the alternative was to become an expert which, in that company at that time, meant plateauing after a few years). So it took me a while to become a competent manager, and to start enjoying it.

All this to say that if you want to become a manager only for the added responsibilities / perks / title, chances are you'll be a lousy one. To enjoy being a manager (and be a decent one rather than a PHB), you need to care about people.

In your case, enjoying mentoring junior devs is obviously a good start; try to extrapolate that to how you would coach on non-technical topics (people skills, career choices, giving negative feedback, etc. ). Another good point is the relationship with stakeholders. Just keep in mind that as a manager, you often get the shit part of the relationship: you break the bad news and cover your team, but you let your team get the credits for the good stuff. On the other hand, I would advise you to forget about coding: even if you can keep writing some code, it is absolutely not your job as a manager. You also need to consider the impact on the rest of your team, especially if you're not the most competent developer in the team. (Imagine being the coach of a sports team and putting yourself in the lineup to play every game)

</comment><comment> throwaway-43752 I'm considering the same thing and interested to hear answers.</comment>


How to Make the Most of Apple's New Privacy Tools in iOS 13 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/technology/personaltech/privacy-tools-apple-ios-13.html <comment><USER3> I hate clickbait that leads to Paywalls.

<comment><USER4> Please, someone, do the needful.

<comment><USER5> To get the latest security protections against viruses, exploits and whatever other nasty stuff is out there, it's wise to keep the software for our devices updated.

For iPhones, that's especially true now. That's because Apple's iOS 13, the most recent mobile software for iPhones, arrived last week. Similar updates to the operating system for iPads, iPadOS, was released this week. And they offer many new tools that help safeguard our digital privacy.

Apple walked me through a list of the new privacy features. Among them is a shortcut to automatically create a burner email address for signing in to apps. The software also has a call-silencing feature to shut down robocallers. And there are new buttons to minimize sharing of location data with third parties.

In an era when digital privacy is in the spotlight, these tools are more than welcome. So I tested iOS 13 for a week to figure out which of the new features are easy to use and how best to take advantage of those items that are buried in the system settings. (Android users, stay tuned for a similar how-to guide on Google's new privacy tools soon.) Interested in All Things Tech? The Bits newsletter will keep you updated on the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry.

One word on when you should adopt iOS 13: New operating systems are typically chock-full of software bugs, and this one is no exception. So it would behoove most iPhone owners to wait a few weeks for those glitches to be fixed before installing the free update.

For now, bookmark this column to find out more about iOS 13's top new privacy features. Then return to it after you download the update.

Unlock more free articles. Create an account or log in Signing in to apps with a burner email address

Apple's most significant new privacy tool in iOS 13 is a button that lets you use an Apple ID to sign in to apps and websites. It's called Sign in with Apple.

Versions of this already exist elsewhere. Google and Facebook, for instance, let you use your Google or Facebook accounts to log in to different websites and apps. But Sign in with Apple has a special privacy-centric twist.

When you use it to register for a website or app, iOS 13 will present you with an option to hide your email address that is linked to your Apple ID. If you choose to use it, Apple will create what is essentially a burner email address so that you can sign up for the app or website while hiding your real email address from the third party.

Whenever the website or app then tries to contact you, it will email the burner address and not your real email address. Apple will forward the note to you so you are aware of it. Then if a business starts sending spam to the burner email address, you can easily delete your account and the business won't have your real email address.

I tested Sign in with Apple with a few apps like the travel-booking app Kayak. It worked smoothly. Here's how: When I opened the Kayak app, the button labeled Sign in with Apple showed up. After clicking through, I saw the option to hide your email address. From there, Apple generated a random string of characters as a burner address and automatically set a password for the account.

Sign in with Apple then made logging in and out of the Kayak app a breeze. I didn't have to memorize the burner email address or password; after signing out of the app or website, I signed back in by scanning my face and using Apple's Face ID biometric system.

There are some downsides. If you try to sign in with the burner email account on, say, a web browser that lacks Sign in with Apple, you will have to manually enter the email address and reset the password.

So this feature is most convenient with apps and sites that you plan to use primarily on the iPhone, to spare you the hassle of jotting down strange email addresses and their passwords.

Shoo, robocallers

Robocallers can make random calls to you throughout the day, which is invasive. But a new option in iOS 13 lets you silence calls coming from all unknown numbers. I had mixed feelings about this tool, which I'll explain in a bit.

To turn on the feature, you open the Settings app, open the Phone menu and toggle on the switch for Silence Unknown Callers. When an unknown caller then tries to call, you will see a notification on your screen, but the phone won't vibrate or ring. The caller is sent to voice mail.

This is a brute-force approach to shutting out robocallers, which makes it imperfect. When I tested this feature, I blocked six spam calls — but also missed several important work-related calls from people who were not yet in my address book.

Still, Apple's tool is a decent temporary solution compared with several robocall-blocking apps that I have tested over the last several years. All of those were ineffective and let plenty of scam calls through.

Stop apps and people from following your location

Unbeknown to many of us, thousands of apps have been collecting our location data and selling the information to advertisers, retailers and hedge funds.

New buttons in iOS 13 help address this issue. In the past, when opening a newly downloaded app that wanted access to your location, you had the option of always sharing location data, sharing it only when the app was in use or never sharing location. Now when you open an app that is asking for your location, you can tap "Allow Once."

If you tap it, you are explicitly giving the app permission to share your location that one time. That eliminates the app's ability to continue pulling your location data in the background when you are not using it.

The annoying part of this is that if you tap Allow Once, you will be asked how you want to share your location data every time you open the app. But it's worth using for peace of mind if you don't fully trust an app that wants your location — a weather app from an unknown start-up, for example.

Similarly, iOS 13 now requires that apps ask for permission to gain access to your Bluetooth sensor, the chip that you typically use to wirelessly connect to accessories like earphones. That can stop many retailers and brands that have deployed Bluetooth-sensing beacons throughout their physical stores from knowing when you have entered their location.

For apps that clearly don't use this sensor for anything other than detecting your location — like the Macy's app — you may choose to reject access.

Image

CreditBrian X. Chen/The New York Times There's one more important new feature in iOS 13 related to location sharing that has to do with your camera.

When you take photos, the camera records metadata by default, including where the photo was taken. Photo apps use this feature to automatically organize your photo albums by place. But if you share an image containing location metadata on social media or in messages, you could give away sensitive information like where you live or work.

With iOS 13, you can strip metadata from a photo before sharing it. In the Photos app, you choose the photo and tap the icon of a square with an arrow pointing upward. Then click Options, and for the option that says Location, switch it to the off position. Then you can share the photo without revealing your whereabouts.

Bottom line

Over all, these are thoughtful additions to iOS. Although some of these features feel overdue, Apple's software system is better equipped to protect our privacy than its main rival, Google's Android.

Most important, Apple's descriptions of the features are written in plain language for casual users. For example, when Macy's asked for access to my Bluetooth, Apple's notification warned that the app could use the sensor to know when I am nearby.

It's disturbing to realize by getting all these new privacy tools now that our data was ever exposed like this to begin with. These are all features we have desperately needed in the constant struggle to protect our digital privacy.

<comment><USER6> > With iOS 13, you can strip metadata from a photo before sharing it. In the > Photos app, you choose the photo and tap the icon of a square with an arrow > pointing upward. Then click Options, and for the option that says Location, > switch it to the off position.

I _thought_ that previously, location metadata was stripped on export - <USER2> that this is a new option to retain it. But now I've realised that I might have been wrong. Shows how difficult it is to keep track of pribacy issues these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reads like an advertorial. Nothing about all the ways that Apple is violating privacy unknown to the majority of it's users. Eg.

      - all numbers called go to Apple, no way to stop them spying on you
      - stopping iCloud sync/backup is elaborous and error prone
      - WiFi and Bluetooth emit their presence at all time
      - etc, etc.

<comment><USER8> All numbers called go to Apple? Is this true?

<comment><USER9> No, of course not. All numbers _texted_ do, when you start a new conversation thread (to check if the number is enrolled in iMessage), though.

<comment><USER7> A quick search came up with this.

 _iDevices that share the same Apple /iCloud ID will have content synched amongst the devices, and will "ring" once a call is received if the Handoff/Continuity feature is enabled and therefore you will see calls on the log of both phones._

[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7053494?answerId=282888...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7053494?answerId=28288813022#28288813022)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 7 Lesson School Teacher (John Taylor Gatto) - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

<comment><AUTHOR> "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It's heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me. When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we've been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference."</comment>


ComiXology Security Breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.comixology.com/ This is the email I received:
Dear Comics Reader,
In the course of a recent review and upgrade of our security infrastructure, we determined that an unauthorized individual accessed a database of ours that contained usernames, email addresses, and cryptographically protected passwords.
Payment account information is not stored on our servers.
Even though we store our passwords in protected form, as a precautionary measure we are requiring all users to change their passwords on the comiXology platform and recommend that you promptly change your password on any other website where you use the same or a similar password. You can reset your comiXology.com password here.
We have taken additional steps to strengthen our security procedures and systems, and we will continue to implement improvements on an ongoing basis.
Please note that we will never ask you for personal or account information in an e-mail, so exercise caution if you receive emails that ask for personal information or direct you to a site where you are asked to provide personal information.
We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please contact us by sending an email to firstname.lastname@example.com
Sincerely,
ComiXology <comment><AUTHOR> Dear Comics Reader,

In the course of a recent review and upgrade of our security infrastructure, we determined that an unauthorized individual accessed a database of ours that contained usernames, email addresses, and cryptographically protected passwords.

Payment account information is not stored on our servers.

Even though we store our passwords in protected form, as a precautionary measure we are requiring all users to change their passwords on the comiXology platform and recommend that you promptly change your password on any other website where you use the same or a similar password. You can reset your comiXology.com password here.

We have taken additional steps to strengthen our security procedures and systems, and we will continue to implement improvements on an ongoing basis.

Please note that we will never ask you for personal or account information in an e-mail, so exercise caution if you receive emails that ask for personal information or direct you to a site where you are asked to provide personal information.

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please contact us by sending an email to email@example.com

Sincerely,

ComiXology</comment>


Apache Arrow 0.12.0 - <AUTHOR> https://arrow.apache.org/release/0.12.0.html <comment><AUTHOR> > _Apache Arrow is a cross-language development platform for in-memory data. > It specifies a standardized language-independent columnar memory format for > flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic operations on > modern hardware. It also provides computational libraries and zero-copy > streaming messaging and interprocess communication. Languages currently > supported include C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, > and Rust._</comment>


Show HN: Tech jobs with salary range - <AUTHOR> https://pewa.site/ <comment><USER2> What does this offer that other job boards don't? The statistical ranges offered by say Glassdoor show you an estimate which is more than good enough for most cases, as you should be negotiating your pay anyways. And the salary range on some of these listings is so massive that I can't say it provides me any information at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is mostly an aggregator for a specific niche. I'm still trying to see if it will be useful for the public. Thank you for your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing. Where do you take projects?

Why did you create the website?

I mostly use this job aggregator service ([https://periodix.net/](https://periodix.net/)). Because it shows me projects with my chances to be hired. I like this feature the most.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, the one I'm trying to build is also an aggregator. I would like to make it as automated as possible. This is something I just built for the heck of it. Periodix looks really cool and has a bigger scope than my site. Thank you for the comment.</comment></comment>


The Curse of the Cargomaster (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/the-curse-of-the-cargomaster-2241392/ <comment><USER2> > "Ken Kozlowski, a former C-133 crew chief who served as chief mechanic and > flight engineer on a privately owned Cargomaster that flew until 2008. > Through monastic devotion to understanding every system on the C-133 and by > developing his own maintenance procedures, Kozlowski kept the civilian > Cargomaster flying as a bush airplane—and slamming onto remote Alaska gravel > runways—nearly 40 years after the Air Force let it go."

My favorite part so far.

EDIT: Adding another interesting bit:

"Was the Cargomaster dangerous? Ten had crashed, and 61 men had been killed. In 1964, the C-133's accident rate per 100,000 flying hours stood at 2.7, while the C-130's was 1.9. The overall Air Force rate was 7.7."

7.7 is higher than I would have expected. I wonder what planes are pulling up the numbers? The article makes this plane sound like a mysterious and dangerous machine, but 2.7 is well below 7.7...

<comment><USER3> Fighter planes. Today, we have few accidents, but during the Cold War, it was common. "F-100 Super Sabre fighter had an average of 21 Class A mishaps per 100,000 hours"

<comment><USER4> [https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Airc...](https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Aircraft%20Statistics/F-16.pdf)

F-16 Flight Mishap History (1975-2018). Lifetime Class A rate is 3.39. (" _Class A Mishap. A mishap resulting in one or more of the following: 1. Direct mishap cost totaling $2,000,000 or more ($1,000,000 for mishaps occurring before FY10). 2. A fatality or permanent total disability. 3. Destruction of a DoD aircraft. NOTE: A destroyed UAV /RPA is not a Class A mishap unless the preceding criteria in "1" or "2" are met._")

See [https://www.safety.af.mil/Divisions/Aviation-Safety- Division...](https://www.safety.af.mil/Divisions/Aviation-Safety- Division/Aviation-Statistics/) for the whole shebang.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link! Haven't gone through all the historical data, but a data point that stood out: F-100 hit 1724.1 in '85\. I suppose numbers like that could bring averages up in a hurry.

<comment><USER4> Well, yeah, 1 destroyed in 58 flying hours will do that. But the F-100 lifetime rate is 21/100,000 hours. Ick.

I personally like the U-2 ([https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Airc...](https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Aircraft%20Statistics/U-2.pdf)). '63-'69: 4 totally destroyed, 1 pilot death, 0 flying hours. Lifetime Class A: 4.84/100,000hrs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Acquired under a new system of concurrent development and production, an Air > Force attempt to limit procurement costs and delays, the C-133 program had > no prototype phase; the aircraft had gone from drawing board to production > line.

I see this done for software, and some forms of hardware. But for a plane, back then, wow. Seems totally crazy. Or maybe they didn't have prototypes but lots and lots of scale models and wind tunnel testing.

<comment><USER6> I suppose it was a time where you had continuous aircraft development since 1939, so designers could have got a good feel for what would work, and what wouldn't.

I'm not convinced by the idea, but its plausible they could have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "We had to redesign all the sections of the airplane three times," Isaacs > recalls, "and we had to lighten [the airframe] and get the weight down to > accommodate the engines. Consequently, it made the airplane have a bunch of > problems. That engine is the downfall of the C-133."

Immediately reminded me of the current problems and workarounds in the 737 Max 10. The changes and kludges were in part to compensate for its larger engine's effects on the 737's flight characteristics, warped by Boeing's need to not require crew retraining.

</comment><comment><USER8> That was a fascinating read. Up there with the SR-71 stories.</comment>


[Android]RecyclerItemDecoration-ItemDecoration for RecyclerView - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/magiepooh/RecyclerItemDecoration <comment><AUTHOR> RecyclerItemDecoration allows you to draw divider between items in recyclerview with multiple ViewType without considering items' positions!

When using recyclerView with different ViewType, you either have only one simple divider or different types of dividers. When you want to draw different dividers between recyclerView's items, basically you must consider items' position; often you need to have separate ItemDecoration's behaviors declared in your code using switch cases or if statements. For example, each time items' position changes happen, you must rewrite ItemDecoration's behaviors.

You don't need to think about items' position! You need to care about their ViewType!!</comment>


Ask HN: Why do you work so hard? - <AUTHOR> Is working hard an excuse for asking the real questions, like "Why am I here" or "What do I want". Or is it because you want to establish safety and recognition. I'd love to hear from you. <comment><USER2> It is the only variable I can control in my life. Of all the great people I have met, diligence followed by honesty have been their most memorable and admirable traits. You can have a great work ethic and ask existential questions too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I work hard when I enjoy it (when the work is interesting).

Otherwise I have a certain tolerance threshold for boredom - if it crosses that (I know it when I feel it) I'll find another job.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't. I never work till the point of exhaustion, or I'll usually end up hating it. I also never work when I feel that need to take a rushed decision.

I work only because I like to work. And If I have to work long hours doing things I like, I would not be working hard.

</comment><comment><USER5> I try not to ask existential questions it seems to only lead down the road of deppression and nihilism. I work hard, because it seems to be one of the only things that makes me satisfied. Video games, tv, etc. may be pleasurable in the moment, but it is definitely not satisfying for my own life.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work hard so that the end of my life, nobody can attribute the things I accomplished to 'being lucky' or 'being privileged'.

I acknowledge that those I have luck and privilege. Everyone does. But I don't want my biggest accomplishments to be "he was in the right place at the right time."

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I'd like to contribute something that's just good in quality. The world has so many poor quality "MVP" products and solutions out there, I'd like to do something solid. Of course, it requires much more work than the hacked together MVP approach - hence the requirement to work hard.

<comment><USER8> MVP isn't about not working hard, it's about getting something out sooner to validate that there is a market. You then put the hard work into a product that is more likely to succeed.

<comment><USER7> I don't want a product that just "succeeds" (in monetary terms). I want to make something that is not of questionable/poor quality. I guess it's about the difference between a craftsman and a businessman. Businessmen are happy selling poor quality products to customers, as long as the hit to reputation does not endanger their profits. Craftsmen won't be happy doing it, even if they can get away with it.

And I get the fact that, if you're making a product that's never been done before, then MVP releases are partly about market research. Not all software is innovative though, and often you just want to produce a good contender on the market that's already established (say, like the Sublime Editor). In such case, there's no need for the MVP approach.

The fact of the matter is that there's tons of successful products, that are way past their MVP phase, which never stopped sucking from technical standpoint. Heck, I'm watching Netflix on its Windows app right now, and the app has serious issues.

<comment><USER9> Nature works with MVPs, that's why you have fingers on your feet and an appendix that has a tendency to inflame.

Perhaps by the time your solid, perfect solution is out, society will have moved on. Solutions aren't permanent - we want artificial organs now, but if you take too long to get them into market, by the time you do we'll all have robotic organs already.

Reality moves fast and everything is an MVP, a means to an end.

I know by solid you don't mean perfect though, just trying to give a different perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I somewhat enjoy creating half-baked / just okay / MVP things (product), but I get a ton of enjoyment by making really great things. Polishing to greatness is like compounding dividends to me.

At a higher level, my answer would be intellectual curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER8> I try not to work too hard, you can't run a marathon by sprinting every mile.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't. I've found (survivorship bias incoming) that I get better results if I don't work hard. More money, more recognition, better conditions, etc

</comment><comment><USER12> Because I feel bad about myself if I'm not completely exhausted in every way by the end of the day. Probably a less than healthy habit.

</comment><comment><USER13> I didn't understand why until I saw one of Jordan Peterson's videos where he described the hyper industrious people. He said there's a small portion of the population who just work because we enjoy it.

If you put me in the forest with an axe, I'd just cut down trees non stop.

I think it's because we humans are beasts of burden - without a task (or more specifically without - mastery, autonomy and purpose) we whither and die, and it's natural in a healthy population that there's variance in the desire for work (burden) and I just seem to love it.

It's nof for everyone, and I don't look down or resent those who do not work - because I'm doing this by choice. I truly enjoy working to the limits of my capability and pushing myself, not for fame, recognition or ego, but ultimately the desire to help others.

This seems to be the best explanation so far...</comment>


Show HN: Bistro Streams – A light-weight column-oriented stream analytics server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asavinov/bistro/blob/master/server <comment><AUTHOR> Bistro Streams [1] is similar to Kafka Streams in how it is supposed to be used - it is implemented as a library which can be part of an application (including IoT analytics) or run at the edge, for example, on gateways or devices. However, Bistro Streams is based on different principles and has the following major distinguishing features:

o [Column-oriented logical model] Bistro Streams describes its data processing logic using mainly column operations as opposed to set operations [2]. It is a unique feature of this system: no joins, no group-by, no map-reduce.

o [Column-oriented physical model] Data within the system is represented in columns (in-memory). It is apparently not new and widely used in column stores but it is new for stream processing. In the case of long histories (which is needed for complex analysis) and complex analytic workflows it can provide higher performance. It is also important for running on edge devices with limited resources.

o [Separate injection, processing, retention] Bistro Streams separates the logic of (1) triggering the processes for appending, evaluating, and deleting data from the logic of (2) what to do during evaluation (data processing itself). In particular, the frequency and conditions for starting evaluations are specified using a separate API. The same for retention policy where deletion time is determined not by the windows used during its processing (say, for moving average) but separately.

I am the author of Bistro Streams [1] and the underlying Bistro Engine [2]. I will be glad to answer questions and any feedback is welcome. In particular, what are possible application areas for this system.

[1] Bistro Streams: [https://github.com/asavinov/bistro/tree/master/server](https://github.com/asavinov/bistro/tree/master/server)

[2] Bistro Engine: [https://github.com/asavinov/bistro/blob/master/core](https://github.com/asavinov/bistro/blob/master/core)

<comment><USER2> Thanks - I would love to know the possible application areas. Specifically where you think Bistro Streams make sense and where it doesn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is based on a quite general (and novel) technology so it can be applied to many different data processing tasks like data integration, data migration, extract-transform-load (ETL), big data processing or stream processing.

But I would like to narrow this list down with the purpose to increase probability of success (degree of adoption). Therefore, currently I focus on edge computing and IoT. But maybe I am wrong and therefore I would like to ask the community about potential uses of this kind of technology – fail early fail often :)

For simplicity, it can be viewed as Kafka Streams but implemented on completely different principles at all levels of the architecture.

<comment><USER2> There could be many use cases within my industry of financial services/retail banking but a fantasy one of mine would be to automatically optimize capital risk levels :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york I get the impression that Bistro has a lot of thought put into it, but after quick skim through the docs and examples I still am not sure what Bistro is except "Like Kafka streams but different".

The example code is spread under core and server and very sparsely documented. It is not clear what is going on.

If you had a walk through of the examples that would go a long way to conveying what Bistro is and how to use it. If there already is such a document apolgies, I must have missed it.</comment>


Launch HN: Cloud Optimizer – Find the cheapest compute at eight cloud providers - <AUTHOR> https://cloudoptimizer.io <comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Last year I supported an open source AI project and spent considerable amount of money on GPU training at AWS. Only then I learned that I could get same compute cheaper at Google Cloud and even cheaper at Azure. That wasn't obvious, so the idea for Cloud Optimizer was born.

There is ample opportunity for arbitrage between cloud providers and often you can find same compute cheaper at other place. Cloud Optimizer helps find these opportunities.

The data comes directly from cloud provider APIs and is updated every 4 hours. Would appreciate feedback, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> Make this a product on its own with an API that could be easily integrated via libcloud or so into existing automation toolchains.

Companies might happily pay for this service by saving huge amounts in return.

BTW: what about integrating HetznerCloud? Provides a lot bang for the buck and quite good performance.

<comment><USER3> Been hearing a lot of good things about Hetzner. Any personal reviews? Since they're from EU unless I am mistaken, any "stricter" regulations with respect to GDPR or such?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice little Webapp! Has all the features I wanted, it was a little tedious to select number of CPU's and Memory, but still very cool. Does it update manually or automatically with prices?

<comment><AUTHOR> It updates all prices every four hours.</comment></comment>


DConf 2013 Day 2 Talk 4: Web Development in D by Vladimir Panteleev - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zs8O7MVmlfw

<comment><AUTHOR> Abstract: With its speed, safety, and expressiveness, D excels for web development. However, D is not yet thought of as a compelling choice in that area. The best D tools and techniques for web development are young and not well known at this time. This talk will fix that by providing an overview of the web development libraries, solutions and techniques available to D users today.

Benefits: A thorough Introduction to D web development and related technologies.

Speaker Bio: Vladimir Panteleev (a.k.a. "CyberShadow") is a D enthusiast from Moldova (Eastern Europe), best known within the D community for DFeed, the web newsreader (and IRC bot) running on <http://forum.dlang.org>.</comment>


Efficient Logistic Regression on Large Encrypted Data - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/662 <comment><AUTHOR> > In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for logistic regression on > encrypted data, and evaluate our algorithm on real financial data consisting > of 422,108 samples over 200 features. Our experiment shows that an encrypted > model with a sufficient Kolmogorov Smirnow statistic value can be obtained > in ∼ ∼ 17 hours in a single machine.

</comment><comment><USER2> I need an eli5 for this, attempt at reading makes it sound like i would be able to infer an approximation of encrypted data in the examples that they provide.

Basically, if this works as the headline suggests, and my poor understanding of the paper implies we can take their example of competing financial institutions:

Two banks share data, that is intended to be secret, and they use this technique to compute some property over the data. Each bank can then do the same computation over there data alone, and compare the resulting model over their data and the result over their competitor's. From that they can infer the properties of their competitors portfolio, which seems to be leakage of data that is not intended to be possible.

Hence I am clearly missing something, which isn't unexpected as HE is unintuitive to me.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you can apply the model (with unencrypted outputs) without all the decryption keys.

<comment><USER2> The point of the paper was to operate over data without decrypting, the exact scenario they gave was competing finance companies, that are clearly not going to share keys.

Also if you had all of the decryption keys you'd just decrypt the data and use the raw data. They explicitly state that it is only fast in the context of HE problems - being multiple orders of magnitude slower than techniques you can use on raw data (they actually said "fast" - complete with the quotes, which I appreciated)

<comment><USER3> I agree the example is weird, but that's literally what the paper says:

"In the training phase, it takes as input an encrypted training data and outputs an encrypted model without using the decryption key. In the prediction phase, it uses the encrypted model to predict results on new encrypted data." Figure 1 further implies that the results must be decrypted.

This is the typical operational setting of homomorphic ML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My understanding of this paper/space is patchy-at-best, but I am I right in thinking that this could only ever work for models where both the outcome- variable and the predictors are entirely categorical, and the input data is always encrypted with the same key?

(E.g. so that the value 'male' in the 'sex' column has the same ciphertext across subjects/observations).

If this is the case, then couldn't a standard logit model be used? (It needn't know what it's categories 'mean', either x or y).

These properties would be fulfilled by, e.g. the MNIST example in the paper (and it wouldn't take 17 hours to train!). Does anyone know where the technique in the paper would work but the one described above would fail?

</comment><comment><USER5> The authors should do a comparison with recent work on HE for inference on other model types. Logistic regression is a subset of neural network inference, and there is significant prior work that appears to be competitive with their results.

Recent work [0] shows that MNIST, for example, can be done in a model secure/data secure way with online 30ms inference latency. For ~500,000 samples, evaluated sequentially, that's roughly 5 hours, which beats their time by about 3x. Perhaps I'm missing details in my read of the paper.

[0] Gazelle: A Low Latency Framework for Secure Neural Network Inference [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05507](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05507)

<comment><USER6> Gazelle paper uses an interactive protocol ("combination of homomorphic encryption and traditional two-party computation techniques") compared to thread paper.

<comment><USER3> It's also just inference, not training.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The encryption procedure doesn't seem to be salted.

<comment><USER2> Oh? Is that how they do it? I recall getting confused about the security guarantees of some HE paper the was on HN a while ago, and someone finally explained that you only get the security guarantees if you have randomness injected.</comment></comment>


Sourcehut Q1 2019 financial report - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com%3E <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, Robert! For those interested, I also posted the monthly "what's cooking" today, which should give you an idea of the pace of feature development and cool stuff since you last checked out sr.ht:

[https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- announce/%3C201905151603...](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- announce/%3C20190515160338.GA6166%40homura.localdomain%3E)

I'm always available to answer questions, either here or at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER3> I have a question! What's with all the preformatted widescreen text? Why not just use plain text and let it wrap?

<comment><USER4> The text is formatted as it comes in. Most plaintext emails are hard-wrapped at 72 columns and SourceHut doesn't molest them. However, there has been some research into format=flowed, where the sender can opt-in to having their emails reflowed on Sourcehut, but that hasn't been implemented on our side yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the transparency that this report brings. An honest report of what happened, and what to expect going forward. Wish this was more common, especially for companies that run a lot of the infrastructure for open source and free software developers to use.

It seems to be a excellent start to a platform. But what worries me is the way how the funding of the entire platform need to be sustainable, otherwise all of the services within will eventually close and be lost. Instead of where each service could have it's own funding, and people can vote with their wallet which service to keep.

<comment><USER4> Hey diggan! The cost of each service is marginal compared to the collective cost of running everything. Services which don't receive much interest are run at a reduced cost by way of simply not being worked on, and the smaller volume of traffic they receive reduces costs further - so it's a self correcting system. If anyone wants to revive them, the code is open source and you can send along patches to improve anything you're interested in. So far I think this has worked pretty well! I also keep a line of communication open with the users to make sure that I have feedback on what people like and where their pain points are so I can prioritize my own work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FWIW: sr.ht is pretty cool, has a nice no-nonsense UI, and the build system is really simple and powerful. It's not "done" but it works and is going in the right direction. It's a very nice corner of the Internet. I've been using it for personal repos and I'm really happy.

<comment><USER7> I support sourcehut, because I would like to see it evolve, and hopefully keep the no-nonsense UI approach. Having a nontrivial site with a usable interface running without JS in 2019 is beautiful on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I first saw this project, I thought it was interesting and signed up. But I've never gotten around to using it. I don't remember what I thought the name was when I read about it, but for some reason it got stuck in my head that the sr.ht domain stood for "Sir Hat". And that's how I've always read it in my head whenever I see it anywhere.

Sourcehut makes more sense.

<comment><USER9> I call it "Sir Hat" too, and I can tell you what made me read it like that: the author/owner is 'Sir_Cmpwn on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm actively using[0] sr.ht with a paid membership. I really like the service and the build system is super simple and easy to use, while fulfilling everything I need for my private development. The owner has been super responsive to feedback/issues. I encourage other people to try it out as well and I am looking forward to see how this service grows.

[0] [https://git.sr.ht/~rukenshia/](https://git.sr.ht/~rukenshia/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a great service but honestly the pricing is too low at $20/year.

You should change your professional plan, probably Mark it up 3-4x at least. If professionals are using the service (ie they're making money themselves from it) some will pay $40/month for it. Just a few of those subscribers will let you hit all your goals, work full time on it and let you keep the $2/month plan out there in the long term.

<comment><USER4> Once the alpha ends and the beta begins, I'll have a chance to reconsider these price points, and with data like this to back it up. It's expected that payment will become mandatory at that time as well.

<comment><USER12> Chaos Communication Congress had (has?) a model where regular tickets were priced very reasonably, and there were special "business tickets" that were marked up by a factor of 5 compared to regular ticket prices. The only difference is that you only get an invoice for a business ticket, so attendees who have their costs covered by a company need the business ticket, while individual attendees benefit from lower prices.

I don't know how invoicing works for a web service, but maybe that would be a model to consider? Keep the low price point for individual users, but use a lever like this to add some considerable markup for companies purchasing your services.

<comment><USER13> A while back the (large) company I worked for was evaluating two web service companies, one was ~4 times more expensive than the other. They both had all the functions we needed and from a practical point of view neither was better than the other. However the cheap one could only be paid for by monthly billing to a credit card and the expensive one was happy to send us quarterly invoices. We went with the expensive one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stock-trading app Robinhood scraps UK launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/07/21/stock-trading-app-robinhood-scraps-uk-launch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Email received...

An update on Robinhood UK

Hi there,

We're saddened to share that we've made the difficult decision to postpone our UK launch indefinitely. We'll be closing our waitlist and taking down our UK website shortly.

The world has changed a lot over the past several months and we're adapting with it. On a company level, we've come to recognise that our efforts are currently best spent on strengthening our core business in the US and making further investments in our foundational systems.

Since we announced our intent to launch in the UK, we've been fueled by your excitement for Robinhood and humbled by your response. We're sorry that we cannot deliver the product we promised you this year.

Although our global expansion plans are on hold for now, we will continue our work to democratise finance for all and we look forward to the day when we can bring this mission to the UK.

Sincerely, The Robinhood UK Team

A note about your privacy: We will be deleting email addresses from the waitlist and removing them from our systems to help protect your privacy.</comment>


Call for Submissions: ICML Workshop "Climate Change: How Can AI Help? - <AUTHOR> http://www.climatechange.ai <comment><AUTHOR> We invite submission of extended abstracts applying machine learning to the problems of climate change. There will be three tracks (Deployed, Research, and Ideas).

Date: June 14 or 15, 2019

Location: Long Beach, California, USA

Website: www.climatechange.ai

Submission deadline: April 30, 11:59 PM Pacific Time

Notification: May 15 (early notification possible upon request)

Submission website: [https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CCAI2019](https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CCAI2019)

Contact: email@example.com

Summary

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Climate change is widely agreed to be one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. We already observe increased incidence and severity of storms, droughts, fires, and flooding, as well as significant changes to global ecosystems, including the natural resources and agriculture on which humanity depends. The 2018 UN report on climate change estimates that the world has only thirty years to eliminate greenhouse emissions completely if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Many in the machine learning community want to address climate change but feel their skills are inapplicable. This workshop will showcase the many settings in which machine learning can be applied to reducing greenhouse emissions and helping society adapt to the effects of climate change. Climate change is a complex problem requiring simultaneous action from many directions. While machine learning is not a silver bullet, there is significant potential impact for research and implementation.

About ICML

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

ICML is one of the premier conferences on machine learning, and includes a wide audience of researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. It is possible to attend the workshop without either presenting or attending the main ICML conference. Those interested should register for the Workshops component of ICML at [https://icml.cc/](https://icml.cc/) while tickets last (a number of spots will be reserved for accepted submissions).

Call for submissions

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

We invite submission of extended abstracts on machine learning applied to problems in climate mitigation, adaptation, or modeling, including but not limited to the following topics:

\- Power generation and grids

\- Transportation

\- Smart buildings and cities

\- Industrial optimization

\- Carbon capture and sequestration

\- Agriculture, forestry and other land use

\- Climate modeling

\- Extreme weather events

\- Disaster management and relief

\- Societal adaptation

\- Ecosystems and natural resources

\- Data presentation and management

\- Climate finance

Accepted submissions will be invited to give poster presentations at the workshop, of which some will be selected for spotlight talks. Please contact firstname.lastname@example.com with questions, or if visa considerations make earlier notification important.

Dual-submissions are allowed, and the workshop does not record proceedings. Submissions will be reviewed double-blind; do your best to anonymize your submission, and do not include identifying information for authors in the PDF. We encourage, but do not require, use of the ICML style template (please do not use the "Accepted" format).

Submission tracks

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Extended abstracts are limited to 3 pages for the Deployed and Research tracks, and 2 pages for the Ideas track, in PDF format. An additional page may be used for references. All machine learning techniques are welcome, from kernel methods to deep learning. Each submission should make clear why the application has (or could have) positive impacts regarding climate change. There are three tracks for submissions:

DEPLOYED

* Work that is already having an impact *

Submissions for the Deployed track are intended for machine learning approaches which are impacting climate-relevant problems through consumers or partner institutions. This could include implementations of academic research that have moved beyond the testing phase, as well as results from startups/industry. Details of methodology need not be revealed if they are proprietary, though transparency is encouraged.

RESEARCH

* Work that will have an impact when deployed *

Submissions for the Research track are intended for machine learning research applied to climate-relevant problems. Submissions should provide experimental or theoretical validation of the method proposed, as well as specifying what gap the method fills. Algorithms need not be novel from a machine learning perspective if they are applied in a novel setting.

Datasets may be submitted to this track that are designed to permit machine learning research (e.g. formatted with clear benchmarks for evaluation). In this case, baseline experimental results on the dataset are preferred but not required.

IDEAS

* Future work that could have an impact *

Submissions for the Ideas track are intended for proposed applications of machine learning to solve climate-relevant problems. While the least constrained, this track will be subject to a very high standard of review. No results need be demonstrated, but ideas should be justified as extensively as possible, including motivation for the problem being solved, an explanation of why current tools are inadequate, and details of how tools from machine learning are proposed to fill the gap.

Organizers

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

David Rolnick (UPenn)

Alexandre Lacoste (Element AI)

Tegan Maharaj (MILA)

Jennifer Chayes (Microsoft)

Yoshua Bengio (MILA)

Karthik Mukkavilli (MILA)

Di Wu (MILA)

Narmada Balasooriya (ConscientAI)

Priya Donti (CMU)

Lynn Kaack (CMU)

Manvitha Ponnapati (MIT)</comment>


Show HN: Timeops, a fake API for testing or educational purposes - <AUTHOR> https://timeops.io <comment><AUTHOR> I'm sharing a side project made by a close friend of mine here, if there's any question, I'll ask him and answer them here.

Timeops is a small mocking API you can use in your code to either test some logic in your code or create fake errors to see how your code reacts. If you enjoy the project, don't hesitate to give any feedback on what could be added.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you implement Authorisation/Access Control for your SaaS product - <AUTHOR> I have been tasked to implement access control in a multi-tenant SaaS product. Would be really helpful if you can share your experiences in implementing RBAC/ABAC/etc and also point to relevant articles or OSS projects to understand it better. <comment><USER2> There are a couple of components that make up Auth.

* Authorization - How do I confirm who this person is?

* Identity - Everything about the person. Think name, email, address, tenant_id

* Permissions/roles - What can this person do?

I'm going to discuss this with the assumption that you're using some sort of relational database. If you're using something else, you should be able to adjust accordingly. Keep in mind that your web framework probably has libraries for all of these and standard practices since every app that requires you to sign in had this..

Let's start off with roles and permissions. Typically, most companies will want at a minimum an admin user and a regular user. This usually ends up expanding to include specialized roles such as accounting, who would only have access to billing information, auditor, which would be a read-only role.

Identity - Unless you're just starting a project, this has probably been implemented already and may be called users, customers or employees. This can be one table or a set of tables and would include the relevant information about the person logging into your system. At the very least this includes name, email, and tenant_id.

Authorization - Typically this will start out with username/password login combinations, but is often expanded to include 2FA-login flows, single sign on (OAuth flows using SAML or Active Directory/LDAP authentication). That there can be multiple auth workflows is a good reason to keep these as separate tables from your user table(s).

A good open-source example is Discourse ([https://github.com/discourse/discourse](https://github.com/discourse/discourse)). It's a good case because it does have SSO options</comment>


The Complete Guide to Know the Difference Between Epithelial and Endothelial Cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.creative-bioarray.com/filter/epithelial-cell-and-media-11.html <comment><AUTHOR> 2.The differences in the function Endothelial cells covering the blood vessel wall can regulate blood flow in blood vessels, which can release NO - <USER2> vasodilator factor that promotes blood circulation and helps to control blood pressure. Endothelial cells can also secrete a variety of proteins leading to blood disorders, but involving Hemostatic function. Such as the role in Glomerular internal is to filter the blood.

The epithelial cells that make up the skin protect the subcutaneous tissue from damage, bacterial ingress, dangerous chemicals, and avoid excessive loss of moisture. Epithelial cells of skin will secrete sweat to regulate body temperature if necessary. The epithelial cells that cover the pancreas secrete enzymes to promote digestion. In addition, epithelial cells on the surface of the small intestine absorb nutrients from digestive food. The epithelial cells on the surface of the respiratory tract form mucosa, which can secrete mucus to prevent inhalation of bacteria from entering the lungs with the virus. Skin, nose, tongue, eyes and other organs exposed to nerve endings on the secretion of specialized epithelial cells, they can identify the sensory stimulation. In short, the main function of epithelial cells involves the secretion, absorption, protection.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 3.The differences in the structure Endothelial cells are monolayer structures, and water molecules with oxygen molecules are easily passed through endothelial cells into the tissue surrounding the endothelial cells. In addition, endothelial cells lack packed endothelial morphology, the gap between cells contribute to the passage of liquid and material diffusion.

Epithelial cells have a variety of structures to protect the body from external environmental damage. Epithelial cells are tight integration to each other like the bricks, there is little gap between the cells.

4.Other differences

A.Endothelial cells are supported by intermediate filaments to constitute the cell structure, it contain vimentin filaments, while the structure of epithelial cells is supported by keratin filaments.

B. The surface of endothelial cells is non-thrombogenic soft surface, blood will not solidify in the normal blood circulation process. Epithelial tissue in different types of epithelial cells presents irregular papillary projections.

C. Endothelium is one of the epitheliums, which is distributed on the inner surface of the blood vessel. In the lumen, the endothelium constitutes the interface of the circulatory system or the lymphatic system and the rest of the blood vessel.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> While mentioning about epithelial cells and endothelial cells, it is not very easy to distinguish them clearly. Here are some features about epithelial cells and endothelial cells that can be used for further understand about this two cells.

Endothelial cells cover the inner surface of the blood vessel, while the epithelial cells cover the inner surface of the internal organs and the outer surface of human body. If a large number of epithelial cells was found in the urine, it indicates urinary tract infection. The endothelial cells and epithelial cells which can constitute the tissue both are derived from the epithelium, but they differ in the position, structure, function. In addition, both of them constitute an interface between the inner and outer environments. Endothelial cells are located within the "internal" of the body, such as the interior of the blood vessel, and the epithelial cells are usually described as covering the "outside" of the body, such as the outer layer of the skin (epidermis).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 1.The differences in the position Endothelial cells constitute endothelium, which covers the inner surface of the blood vessel. In simple terms, the cells are close to the vessel wall. So the entire internal circulation of the circulatory system is covered by endothelial cells. These cells form the interface between the vessel wall and the blood. The ventricle tissue which is close to the inner surface is a layer of single cells thick tissue.

Epithelial cells that form epithelial tissue not only cover the outer surface of the body, but also cover the outer surface of all the internal organs of the body. For example, the outermost epidermis of the skin is epithelial cells. So the surface of the skin covered by epithelial cells, it provides a protection for the body. Epithelial cells also cover the surface of internal organs, such as the liver, stomach, intestine, lung, urethra, bladder and so on. In other words, epithelial cells cover the surface of the body and internal tissue.</comment>


Show HN: I Found the Way How to Control My Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://duefocus.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Greetings, my name is Artem, and I am a Product Owner. Throughout my career, I have been concerned about my efficiency. I understand that this problem is not unique because many people are familiar with the feeling of constant burnout and the pressure of an inexhaustible stream of tasks. These factors affect the workflow, plunge into the procrastination doom loop, and ultimately reduce productivity. In this case, I wasn't able to activate my inner potential and successfully achieve my goals at work and in life. Even when I thought that I was effectively managing my time, in most cases such management was diminished to the accomplishment of minor priority tasks and simulating violent activity.

Similar activities led to:

the inefficiency

stress increase

lack of career growth

the impossibility of enhancing the internal potential

trampling sensation

Realizing this, I tried to find ways to increase productivity by diving and testing various methodologies. Also, having shared my problem, I found a team of like-minded people with the same pain-points, and we decided to create an application that could help us.

At first, we tried to increase productivity through time management but often didn't achieve the desired result. The catch was that productivity isn't about time management, it's about attention management. Our attention is the most valuable resource we have. We should audit it daily and make sure it reflects your purposes.

We dreamed about a tool that can manage not only time but also focus, attention. Show how, and on what actions people spend time during the day, and whether these actions are productive or not.

Our team asked this question and subsequently took up the solution to this problem. We set ourselves the goal of finding a way to manage current and over priority tasks with maximum efficiency, completely dependent on the psychology of a person, person's needs and behavior. 2 years passed and, finally, we have found it.

Now we would like to share it with you. Based on the research, the first step on this path is the unification of time management, as well as the definition of norms and rules for the effectiveness of each person's actions.

Our team was inspired by the work of Cal Newport, who outlined the basics of his ideas in several books, in particular in: "Deep Work — Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World". However, we decided to dive deeper by projecting his theories and parallel studies in the field of human labor into everyday workflow and to implement a tool for calculating these norms. Having developed our algorithm, we succeeded in measuring how deeply and for how long a person can plunge into his Deep focus during the day, i.e. give maximum efficiency in the process of fulfilling intellectual or creative tasks, despite such distractions as parallel tasks, corporate culture, authentic business processes, and so familiar to us Social media, communication with colleagues, etc.

Thanks to your participation, we create analytics of intellectual labor to determine the individual capabilities of each role and its standards. These standards help to establish not only a personal balance in the work but also a balance in the relationship between the contractor and the employer. We believe that we are creating a product that is useful both for self-management and for teams.

The product that currently has:

multivariate scenarios of time and efficiency tracking

real-time analytics of all actions

accurate and easy to read reporting

proof of work

personal metrics of Deep Focus (KPI & AMP (Autonomy Mastery Purpose)

API integrations with the most popular and familiar task managers

time management as a habit

embedding in business processes

Our tool suggests periods of rest and indicates periods when it is worth to focus because the key to productivity is the balance between effort and break time, between deep and shallow work. We are positive that our daily activities form habits that impact success. In the future, based on the data, we would like to classify all roles according to Newport's Deep Work Scheduling Philosophy (Monastic/Bimodal/Rhythmic/Journalistic) to accurately identify the most effective periods for each person and the best time of interaction for teams. Also, we will determine the appropriate type of workload for each role. Our team wants, knows how and builds a smart application that already helped us and we are convinced that will help you.</comment>


Microsoft sends Internet Explorer into retirement - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bb68306c-ccc8-11e4-b5a5-00144feab7de.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fcompanies_us%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct

<comment><AUTHOR> [Text for those who will hit the paywall]

It was once used by nearly 1bn people, making it one of the world's best-known technology brands. But even Microsoft, its maker, has been forced to admit that it is deeply unloved.

Internet Explorer — the software that launched the browser wars of the 1990s and became a symbol of the Seattle company's former stranglehold on the tech world — is about to be ushered into retirement.

The group confirmed this week that it would not use the IE name for the new browser that it plans to ship with the next version of its Windows operating system, due later this year. The revised software, codenamed Project Spartan, is intended to catapult Microsoft beyond the Web 1.0 world for which IE was designed.

Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the then-head of the IE business, confessed at an industry conference: "We messed up."

With Spartan, Microsoft hopes to vault past IE's weaknesses to produce a browser that is more suited to a digital life lived on multiple devices — part of the strategy of new chief executive Satya Nadella to break the company's reliance on its old PC monopoly.

Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency owned by WPP, said the 20-year old brand was long past its sell-by date. "In the war of the future, which is mobile, they're losing," he said. "Nobody's going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser."

Microsoft has admitted that it failed to make IE a more loved part of daily life over the years. It even resorted to self-mockery in some of its advertising, referring to it as "The Browser You Loved To Hate".

"It's been a product problem for a long time," said Dan Brewster, a senior interactive designer with Wolff Olins, the marketing agency. "People don't like it," he added, but used it only because it came pre-installed on their computers or because they were required to by their employers.

IE's historic significance was sealed in the late-1990s. Designed to counter the rise of browser pioneer Netscape at the dawn of the internet, it was shipped free with the pervasive Windows operating system — a tactic that later made Microsoft the target of an antitrust investigation.

It overtook Netscape within three years and went on to dominate access to the online world, accounting for an estimated 95 per cent of browser usage soon after the turn of the millennium. But a combination of complacency and the failure to anticipate the shift to mobile sealed IE's fate.

First the open-source Firefox browser and, more recently, Google's Chrome ate into IE's market share, using faster technology and slicker design to win users. Microsoft's share of browser usage has fallen to around 20 per cent, similar to Firefox, while Chrome has risen to nearly 50 per cent, based on online activity.

Although being pushed into retirement, the IE name will live on, if only for a short time. A new version of IE will be included in the next Windows launch as well as the Spartan browser, to make life easier for companies that have developed software to work with the browser.</comment>


Programming with Abstract Data Types (1974) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.cs.iastate.edu/~hridesh/teaching/362/07/01/papers/p50-liskov.pdf <comment><USER2> I just have the feeling that the author is trying to explain OOP with the vocabulary of 1974.

What did you find interesting in this paper?

<comment><USER3> Some of those ideas are also in OOP. But I think that might just be seeing what you are used to. The paper's ideas fit eg OCaml's ideas of modules and abstract types just as well.

<comment><USER4> A key difference from OCaml's modules (besides the lack of type parameterization) is Liskov's data types have associated data. So it's more like Rust's structs. Also, like in Rust, there is no support for multiple implementations of a single signature.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

Though couldn't you associate data with your OCaml modules, too?

<comment><USER4> It's been a while since I played with OCaml, but I'm pretty sure that modules are stateless. A quick googling shows that you can use global state, but it's not the same as one instance of state per one instance of struct as in Rust.

<comment><USER3> I should have been less tentative: you can add values to modules, and you can add mutable values to modules. And that state is not global at all. (Though you might be able to ask for global state.)

They are often used without mutable state, but the language doesn't make them so.

See eg [https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/first-class- modules.ht...](https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/first-class-modules.html)

<comment><USER4> Then you were right, I should've checked before answering.

<comment><USER3> No worries. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not entirely on topic, obviously, but whatever: there's a strange emphasis on the male pronoun in the first paragraph of this, that at first seems like a kind of horrible hiccup from the past, but then, through its repetition, becomes more clearly a sardonic gendering of the programmer-user from above, which is excellent (if true)

<comment><USER6> Maybe you are referring to some material from the opening like:

> _The programmer is initially concerned with satisfying himself (or proving) > that his program correctly solves the problem. In this analysis he is > concerned with the way his program makes use of the abstractions, but not > with any details of how those abstractions may be realized. When he is > satisfied with the correctness of his program, he turns his attention to the > abstractions it uses._

I can imagine how to a modern reader the usage of the male pronoun here might sound excessive, but I think it's useful to note that this would be standard academic writing for the time. If I'm not mistaken, the switchover—away from using the male pronoun as a gender neutral pronoun—began (very slowly) in the late '70s. I remember reading an article Douglas Hofstadter wrote about how it bothered him once he became aware of the issue, but he'd mostly been oblivious until it was brought to his attention. The article also discussed various solutions to the problem, many of which are now common place (but if I'm not mistaken were fairly novel at the time). I think that article was from '79.

Edit: I was looking for the actual date Hofstadter's article was published, but I'm not sure since all the references I can find to it are from his '85 book _Metamagical Themas_ whose contents was mostly (but not all) re-printing stuff he'd written starting in the late seventies. I noticed (just now) his article was included in a bunch of academic histories of gender in language, so it may be a decent reference point after all. So it looks like the idea to not use the male pronoun this way was pretty novel even in '85, probably.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html)</comment></comment></comment>


DoorDash Ordered into Individual Arbitration with 5k Workers - <AUTHOR> https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/doordash-ordered-into-individual-arbitration-with-5-000-workers?context=search&index=0 <comment><AUTHOR> Key quote: CONCLUSION For decades, the employer-side bar and their employer clients have forced arbitration clauses upon workers, thus taking away their right to go to court, and forced class-action waivers upon them too, thus taking away their ability to join collectively to vindicate common rights. The employer-side bar has succeeded in the United States Supreme Court to sustain such provisions. The irony, in this case, is that the workers wish to enforce the very provisions forced on them by seeking, even if by the thousands, individual arbitrations, the remnant of procedural rights left to them. The employer here, DoorDash,faced with having to actually honor its side of the bargain, now blanches at the cost of the filing fees it agreed to pay in the arbitration clause. No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration. Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers, to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed, at least by this order.</comment>


First Bitcoin Hedge Fund Launches From Malta - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/03/08/first-bitcoin-hedge-fund-launches-from-malta/

<comment><USER2> The hedge fund deploys Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm:

"The private key itself is AES-256 encrypted. After exporting Bitcoin private keys from wallet.dat file, data is stored in a TrueCrypt container on three separate flash drives. Using Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm, the container password is then split into three parts utilizing a 2-of-3 secret sharing model. Incorporating physical security with electronic security, each flash drive from various manufacturers is duplicated several times and, together with a CD-ROM, those items are vaulted in a bank safety deposit box in three different legal jurisdictions. To leverage geographic distribution as well, each bank stores only part of a key, so if a single deposit box is compromised, no funds are lost."</comment>


Save the Emoji – Augmented Reality Adventure - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/bg/app/save-the-emoji/id1349104545?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> From their humble beginnings as punctuation marks hastily repurposed to look like smiley faces, emojis have evolved to become a fundamental part of our daily communication. And when we say fundamental, the emphasis is on fun. Emojis may just be a way of getting your point across, but they're also characters in their own right, brought to life in Save the Emoji, a cutting edge location-based AR game. The great thing about Save The Emoji is that the emojis are fully 3D, so that as you change your vantage point your view of the emoji changes too, as if it's really in the room with you.

But Save The Emoji isn't just about pointing your camera at surfaces around your house. The app has its own geolocation gameplay, so you can -- and should -- put on your shoes and explore the world in search of emojis to save.</comment>


The CoSMoS Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.cosmos-research.org/about.html <comment><AUTHOR> Project Aims

Our project will build capacity in generic modelling tools and simulation techniques for complex systems, to support the modelling, analysis and prediction of complex systems, and to help design and validate complex systems. Drawing on our state-of-the-art expertise in many aspects of computer systems engineering, we will develop CoSMoS, a modelling and simulation process and infrastructure specifically designed to allow complex systems to be explored, analysed, and designed within a uniform framework. CoSMoS will comprise: a modelling and analysis process, based on computational concepts such as class, state, behaviour, and communication, and on complex system emergent properties, expressed in part as rich argumentation, modelling, analysis, and refactoring Pattern Languages; a massively parallel and distributed simulation environment, based on CSP and system modelling technologies that encompass a wide range of process granularities, targeted to the specific properties of complex systems: vast numbers of (relatively) simple agents interacting and communicating in parallel, in an (often stigmergic) environment. The development of CoSMoS will be case study driven, to ensure that it contains the necessary generic components, and so that several iterations of the method and toolset, of increasing functionality and applicability, can be produced and validated.

The detailed project aims are:

to design pattern languages for: abstract computational representations suitable for modelling complex systems; analyses of their collective and emergent properties; refactorings, both of composed models, and for targetting simulations; argument structures, to reason about validity

systems, as instantiatable code frameworks in occam-pi, Handel-C, and JCSP, targeting multiple processors

to bring these together in an integrated process, that guides the tasks of probing a complex system in order to build suitable abstract models (modelling pattern language), mapping a model to the simulation framework (refactoring pattern language), instantiating the framework to produce a simulation, arguing the validity of the simulation against the original system (argumentation pattern language), and using the simulation in a predictive manner (analysis pattern language)

to model and simulate a range of complex system case studies, both for driving the initial development and for performing the eventual validation of the entire CoSMoS process (modelling, mapping, instantiating, validating, predicting).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Engineering Simulations as Scienti c Instruments: A Pattern Language

[https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01938-9](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01938-9)</comment>


Multiorders – Shipping Made Easy - <AUTHOR> https://Multiorders.com <comment><AUTHOR> Integrate all sales channels and manage Your orders with Multiorders - multichannel inventory and shipping management software - a perfect workflow optimising solution. Connect all of Your shipping carriers and print labels with just one click, manage pricing and stock levels of all sales channels from the same place.</comment>


DeepLog: Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis from System Logs (2017) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p1285-duA.pdf <comment><USER2> I am skeptical of anomaly detection since in my experience anomalies are common and diverse and don't actually matter, so I expect these systems to basically inundate people with false positives.

Their offline training accuracy is garbage: 16% precision, so all of the real work is basically being done in the online training portion, which gets it to a respectable 82%+ precision.

But they don't tell you how many alerts they had to label to get those numbers. Maybe over the long run you get those numbers, but you really want to know if it takes 10 or 10,000 examples to get there.

Also, their dataset distribution is very different to reality: they have 7% of their dataset annotated as real anomalies; I don't think anyone in the real world wants 5% of their log entries to get flagged as anomalies. So I expect their precision numbers to be far worse on more realistically distributed logs.

<comment><USER3> It's a good time to make some money baffling people with bullshit in the cybersecurity space.

Of course if you let an ML-powered "anomaly detection" engine run rampant on your logs, it's going to find anomalies...just like if you hire a ghost hunter, you'll be informed that your house is haunted. In the end, ghost chasing is all this anomaly nonsense turns out to be-- the justifications for conclusions by ML practitioners and ghost hunters alike tend to be equally mumbly and hand-wavy.

Me working from home is technically an anomaly, and one these systems are all too eager to flag. We get random logins from overseas VPSes-- it's an anomaly! Oh, wait, no, we onboarded a client application. Oh, look, a random login from China for a US-based employee with no history of foreign logins! Yeah, that guy just started in a new position with travel requirements. Hey, this IP just tried to log into 5000 user accounts! Congratulations, you just alerted me to the existence of carrier NAT.

None of this saves any time and usually wastes it, since it stirs up paranoia where none was otherwise warranted. It's a fun toy that gives the appearance of being productive when all it's actually doing is generating literally endless busywork. Good for justifying your SOC budget I suppose.

But in the end nobody wants to pay a quarter-million dollars for a black box that just sits there quietly-- if it's not constantly drawing attention to itself and all the badness it's pretending to find, you're not going to have any reason to renew the license.

"Renew it? Why? This thing didn't find anything at all last year."

<comment> noir-york So what does your organisation use for intrusion detection? Humans eyeballing logs doesn't scale. Rule-based approaches?

<comment><USER4> Mostly user complaints...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do, with others, a lot of ML anomaly detection in the cyber security context. Deeply has interesting ideas, especially the encoded logs via lstm. The work was presented at a workshop at NIPS 2017.

One of the interesting facts we ve been able to measure empirically over the past few years is that the statistical anomalies' scores magnitude as reconstruction error are uncorrelated with the criticality of the anomaly in terms of security / threat.

This means that in practice SOC operators need to label on top of the anomaly detection and a supervised model can do the reranking after a while.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting paper, but it sort of sidesteps one of the harder problems in generalized machine learning for log analysis:

> As shown by several prior work [9, 22, 39, 42, 45], an effective methodology > is to extract a "log key" (also known as "message type") from each log > entry. The log key of a log entry e refers to the string constant k from the > print statement in the source code which printed e during the execution of > that code.

So if you're looking for a way to apply this to log data that varies wildly, like site access logs, you still have the difficult problem of converting the URIs to the numeric vectors needed by ML algorithms without losing the significant parts of the input.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is another generic approach to anomaly detection from event data which has been used for analyzing logs received from automatic lawn mowers:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323971244_Detecting...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323971244_Detecting_Anomalies_in_Device_Event_Data_in_the_IoT)

It allows for using different algorithms like one class SVM or MDS (including custom algorithms). It also allows for defining custom domain specific features as integral part of its analysis engine. In particular, for log analysis, frequencies of various event types have been generated.

</comment><comment><USER8> Once you discard type structure, it's a fruitless task to try to reconstruct it.

It's much easier to make sense of logs when we don't discard that type structure.

[https://github.com/Morgan-Stanley/hobbes#storage](https://github.com/Morgan- Stanley/hobbes#storage)

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you mind explaining what is the primary use of Hobbes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here are some slides [https://github.com/charles-typ/DeepLog- instroduction](https://github.com/charles-typ/DeepLog-instroduction)

</comment><comment><USER10> The authors are using their own Spell[1] tool to parse syslog files into patterns that represent the fixed part of printf-like log statement. Is the source of that available? At the heart of this is a tree-based construction that is not well explained.

[1] [https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/spell.pdf](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/spell.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Would be interested to see the results on a benchmark dataset for online anomaly detection, comparing to those approaches used in practice: [https://github.com/numenta/NAB#the-numenta-anomaly- benchmark...](https://github.com/numenta/NAB#the-numenta-anomaly-benchmark-)

</comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone in real production systems benefit from anomaly detection of logs ? I have usually converted some of the important events in logs to metrics and alerted users based on simple moving averages / spikes etc. I have usually started with alerts from system level metrics and then checked the logs. Applying Anomaly detection to logs directly hasn't worked for me yet.

<comment><USER13> O yes.

Applying K-Means clustering across different features of online traffic always shows some weird and often malicious stuff:

[https://imgur.com/a/qWMgUo0](https://imgur.com/a/qWMgUo0)

<comment><USER14> Care to share more about what kinds of features you cluster on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was wondering, has anyone here applied cluster analysis techniques for anomaly detection?

I read a paper that used it for insurance fraud detection, but I don't know what other fields are using clustering to detect frauds and abnormalities?

I'd be grateful if someone can help.

<comment><USER13> Yes, tons of that.

See this - using K-Means clustering for anomaly detection in web traffic:

[https://imgur.com/a/qWMgUo0](https://imgur.com/a/qWMgUo0)

Using DBscan clustering for anomaly detection in healthcare claims data (detecting doctors who anomalously prescribing opioids). Using public CMS data set from 2015.

4 out of 8 top anomalies (doctors) were later actually convicted of crimes or gone into all sort of troubles with DOJ:

[https://imgur.com/a/6wFWTg5](https://imgur.com/a/6wFWTg5)

[https://imgur.com/a/f721ndb](https://imgur.com/a/f721ndb)

(Splunk Enterprise + free apps was used to ingest data and build all this logic and dashboards)

<comment><USER15> Thank you so much, it really was helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a github for DeepLog?

<comment><USER17> I had contacted the first author in March and the answer was that "our source code is currently not available because of a pending patent application".

<comment><USER16> that's lame...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Elastic.co X-Pack has machine learning for log anomalies and people buy and use that stuff. Has anybody direct experience with that?

<comment><USER19> I don't but I was researching the space and [https://www.anodot.com/](https://www.anodot.com/) has the most feature-rich product - though they only discover anomalies in numeric time-series.

<comment><USER20> Check out www.loomsystems.com for a spot on AI log analysis

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pure trash

<comment><USER22> This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to post shallow dismissals. Better options would be either to factually explain what the problems are, so that people can learn something, or not to post.

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


Show HN: Prism is an HTTP and WebSocket API Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://retransmit.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

I've been working on this for the past three months. I started this project because many clients I work with (as part of my consulting gigs) have switched to Micro Services and needed an API gateway in front of them (to do response aggregation, rate limiting etc). There are options out there like Kong, but some of them prefer a simpler (and free) tool extensible using JS. Hence Prism.

Aside of regular API gateway features, some capabilities in Prism are unique. For instance, Prism can receive messages on Redis channels and forward them to specific WebSocket clients. This allows multiple services to asynchronously send messages to WebSocket clients.

Prism is in Beta, but good enough to start trialing with. Over the next few weeks, I plan to add more tests and improve the documentation. In particular, the documentation around WebSockets needs more attention.

Happy to handhold anyone who wants to try Retransmit. If you run into problems, please file an issue on github.</comment>


On the New Republic - <AUTHOR> http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/new-republic

<comment><USER2> If one reads this, one should make sure to read the comments, and perhaps even follow the links in those comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is possible to sustain oneself as a "public trust", TNR simply refused to do so what was necessary. In terms of surviving as a public trust, many of the good examples right now come from right-leaning political organizations. The National Review provides an example, and so does Rush Limbaugh. I disagree with these people and organizations on nearly all issues, but I think they do a good job of serving their base.

Let's define "public trust" broadly, as anyone holding a public platform from which it is understood they hope to represent the views of a particular constituency. Rush Limbaugh does this, very profitably, and he provides several services that his constituency finds useful: encouragement, talking points, lines of defense for conservative principles, etc.

Though I disagree with Rush Limbaugh in almost all things, I do think he has demonstrated an awareness of holding a public trust. I'm thinking in particular of the time in 1993 when President Clinton worked out a budget deal that involved all stakeholders, trading some tax increases for some budget cuts. Allan Greenspan felt that this budget compromise was crucial to shore up the long-term health of the American economy. The conservative grass roots were implacable in their opposition to this deal, so Greenspan called Limbaugh and asked Limbaugh to promote the deal on his radio show. Limbaugh refused to do so, using the argument that he had no loyalty to the Republicans, but rather, his loyalty was to conservative principles and he had to be loyal to those faithful conservatives who listened to his show everyday. He felt that this budget deal was in violation of those principles. And, in my opinion, this is the correct way to defend a public trust.

How does The New Republic compare to Rush Limbaugh, in terms of respecting its public trust? Very badly.

Martin Peretz owned and ran the company from 1974 to 2012, and he refused to identify with the progressive movement that existed in the country during those 38 years. There was, for instance, his unwillingness to hire blacks and women. A simple Google search will reveal how many times he has been accused of racism and sexism. More so, he has often been overtly hostile to other magazines that are broadly part of the same progressive alliance that the TNR was nominally a part of of. Consider the tone of contempt that he uses to describe the TNR in 2013, after he has sold it:

"The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation."

He might find Mother Jones and Nation predictable, but they are doing the hard work of finding an audience. I personally think the food sold by McDonalds is predictable, but that is exactly why McDonalds is profitable. Running a business, even in journalism, is not about having heterodox opinions, it is about offering a predictable service to a constituency that wants that service. That does not always mean telling people what they want to hear, but it does mean understanding who your audience is, and talking to them directly, about the concerns that you know they have (if you don't know your audience, or you don't know their concerns, then you will fail).

The phrase "heterodox tradition" is a nice way of saying that he did not want to be identified as a leftist. And that is fine, of course, for any individual — each person has a right to their own unique view of the world, and their own unique opinions. But is it a public trust if you refuse to identify with any particular constituency? If you denounce all of the known factions in your society, and you come up with your own unique opinions about things, then you are one guy with some unique opinions; you do not represent the views of any larger group, and therefore you have no constituency and you have no public trust.

Peretz is known to have supported a few Old Left concerns (labor issues) but he rejected most New Left concerns (racism, sexism, etc), and he was fanatic in his defense of Israel. As an individual, he has a right to his unique opinions, but as an institution the TNR was adrift for a very long time — it was not conservative, and it also denounced the whole modern movement of the progressives. (There was a brief moment in the 1970s when members of the Old Left were looking for a way to justify the deregulation of the economy, and for this brief stretch, TNR operated as a public trust, representing a real public constituency which, for a brief time, had real power and was having a real debate about the future. This was the peak moment for the TNR under Peretz. It's been coasting on its laurels ever since.)

How popular would Rush Limbaugh be if tomorrow he decided he was pro-abortion and pro-big-government? His fans would be angry, and he would lose most of his audience. And that is exactly what happened to the TNR over the last 30 years.

Some people have suggested that TNR can save itself by committing itself to the Internet. I don't see why this should be true. Maybe it should instead be on the radio, since radio has emerged as the platform where most Americans listen to political talk? This is true on both the left and the right: there is stuff like NPR for the left and stuff like Rush Limbaugh for the right. Or we can conclude that all possible forms of media should be involved in the project. Older people, who have money and influence, still prefer paper, the younger crowd wants the Internet, and many busy people can only listen with their ears while they do something else, so they want radio. My mom loves MSNBC, and watches the political shows every night.

Radio played a huge role in American politics during the 1930s, but then for a long time it died out. There was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when it was possible to think that television would replace radio, but then the rise of the suburbs, and therefore long commutes to work, revived the radio as an important form of media, and set the stage for the big political mega-stars, like Limbaugh.

TNR did not die because it is printed on paper. TNR died because it systematically and deliberately broke all ties with any faction that might have been its constituency. In particular, during the last 40 or 50 years, women and racial minorities have become central to the progressive movement, but TNR ignored their concerns. There is a limit on how often you can express contempt for all possible customers, and then still have any customers. I believe that back in the 1950s and 1960s and even 1970s it operated as a real public trust, but it stopped doing so 30 years ago. For 30 years it operated as the personal journal of one guy who has an eccentric set of opinions that are completely out of touch with any of the larger political movements in the country. Again, he has a right to his own opinion, but the rest of us have a right to ignore him. His unwillingness to represent any political faction that exists in the USA today is what lead to the demise of TNR.</comment>