Behavioral Profiling: The password you can't change - <AUTHOR> https://paul.reviews/behavioral-profiling-the-password-you-cant-change/ <comment><USER2> Well, yes you can change your behavior, and no, this is not a good idea.

We worked in biometrics like 4 years ago or so. It is trivial to defeat this "security mechanism".

We had snake oil people trying to convince us to invest in this(we are a software company), so we made a bet: If we could defeat their marvelous thing on a test they will pay all of our tester team a dinner(and go away and don't bother us again).

It was as easy as creating a prototype trainer. You record a person typing with a webcam. You make some statistics and then in 10 minutes you could train ANYBODY to copy the same behavior signature.

It took us like 2 hours to create the prototype trainer. After testing it we realized the webcam WAS NOT EVEN NEEDED, the microphone is enough.

So we used a single hidden microphone to record the people chosen by the snake oil team and ALL OF US(10 people) were able to defeat the system. Really fun for us, extremely humiliating for the snake oil people.

BTW: This man is proposing a complete keylogger of all your actions in the computer, what could go wrong?

<comment><USER3> Although you are of course right there is something underlying interesting about what could be done to track us in order to build a unique "ghost" of us that can can be used for many purposes beyond logging in.

But given I am not an expert in this field I would like to turn around and perhaps ask you, what is the bigger vision?

Surely biometrics in all sorts of shapes and forms comes with it's own issues and shortcomings.

Isn't the idea to make it good enough not necessarily 100% airtight (although I do understand that the scaleability of technology makes it the requirements many times higher than between people)?

<comment><USER4> This concept was used in __The Dosadi Experiment__ , by Frank Herbert. The Dosadis would input all available information on an adversary into a computer, and build a personality model of them. They would then run game scenarios against the model to find the optimal strategies to achieve some desired goal.

If you can assemble an AI copy of someone, you have an almost unbeatable weapon against him. You can make him do things that he thinks are his own ideas, just by adjusting the input parameters.

If you want someone to walk on one side of the street, and you know he avoids panhandlers, you put a fake panhandler on the other side. If you want him to slow down or stop at a certain point on that side of the street, and you know he likes motorcycles, you park a custom chopper there. And while he's gawking, you pick his pocket, or bag his head and shove him into a van, or stab him with a drugged needle, or whatever other spy movie crap you might have in mind.

If you have a detailed enough model to authenticate someone, you may also have a good enough model to impersonate them, or to influence their behavior for your own ends.

<comment><USER3> Agree, the question I guess is if there is any research into finding a way to make the ghost "part of your dna" in some way so that it's tied to you and you to it?

I know this is probably naive sci-fi but I have heard crazier things. I guess at the end of the day it requires that the interfacing is not just digital but also somehow biological/genetic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a huge nightmare waiting to happen. Sites already give me shit for changing my location, making me jump through additional hoops because my browser signature changed, refusing to let me purchase something because I don't access them from my home country. The last thing I need is a behavioral profiler that insists it has determined I'm not me and there is nothing I can do to prove it wrong.

<comment><USER6> True - I was thinking "what happens if I burn my finger while cooking?" It does seem like a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER7> Or, what if I've had a few beers and my typing is getting sloppier.

<comment><USER8> If it's trying to prevent you from doing bank transfers while inebriated, I'd say it's working as intended.

<comment><USER9> I think there's a whole industry being ignored here - "Are you _sure_ you want to post this to Facebook? Your typing is all over the place." or "Maybe we'll just delay sending that text message for a few hours to make sure future you really thinks it's a good idea."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope these services have an opt-out. I know, I know, this will get infinitely more accurate at an arbitrary point in the future, and that I won't have complaints then.

But I get screwed constantly while travelling to other countries, getting repeatedly locked out of Gmail. Again, most users won't face these issues. But I don't want to live in a world where if you're not a nominal case, you're screwed.

The people who think passwords are hard will keep getting older and will be washed away. The generation coming in thinks paper is a broken iPad. So exactly, why do we need to solve the problem of passwords, when even slightly savvy users can handle it. Is it so hard to figure out that not too long in future, you can expect all your users to be comfortably savvy?

Also, passwords are deterministic and are a better UI. The Android Lollipop's on-body smart lock, for example, is pure non-deterministic headache. Haven't we gone through this with automatic sliding doors already?

<comment><USER11> > The people who think passwords are hard will keep getting older and will be > washed away.

I wonder if younger generations use more secure passwords. I'd guess that the typical user does not.

<comment><USER12> Nope. Passwords used by them young folk just fit the requirements, and nothing else. Now, geeky XKCD readers probably use a variant of correcthorsebatterystaple, so we've got that going for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are- user...](http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names- not.html) bears repeating. If you can't change it then it doesn't make for a good passwords as there's no revocation.

This sort of thing is useful as a signal when deciding if a user is who they say they are, but it's not sufficient on it's own.

<comment><USER14> After reading about this post, I was theorizing about using this kind of system in an enterprise system to help with intruder detection.

It would be another thing an intruder would have to bypass, and it could be constructed loosely enough to not interfere with a normal work day. Essentially just a flag, rather than a lock-out if it detects a failure.

I imagine a suite of behavior heuristics would be something of interest to a big enterprise company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't Google's recaptcha already doing this?

[http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-one-click- recaptcha/](http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-one-click-recaptcha/)

<comment><USER16> Yes. It's annoying, because it taunts me with efforless click once or twice a day while it wastes my time with the annoying image matching for the rest of the day.

<comment><USER17> I blocked the domain. If the site presents me with a re-captcha, I don't even have to think whether to use that site.

<comment><USER18> That's a pretty dismissive attitude. We recently added reCAPTCHA to our sign up flow at Codecademy and it helped combat spam a lot. The site was harder to manage and moderate before we took that little step.

Assuming all websites using reCAPTCHA are not worth using seems ridiculous to me.

<comment><USER17> Captchas are dismissive towards users.

You throw humans and robots in the same basket and tell all of them to solve a puzzle or you won't talk to them.

<comment><USER19> I understand your point, but do you have a better suggestion to solve the spam problem? It's a really hard problem, and CAPTCHAs do a reasonable job of solving it at low cost to the end user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you can't change it, it's a username, not a password.

<comment> tom-lord There are plenty of sites that allow you to change your username!

<comment><USER21> The observation that some usernames are changeable, doesn't contradict the claim that passwords must be changeable, nor does it contradict the claim that usernames need not be changeable.

<comment> tom-lord > the claim that [...]

What are you talking about? The comment I replied to didn't make any such claims!

> passwords must be changeable

Not necessarily. What about fingerprints?

> usernames need not be changeable

Not necessarily. What about National Insurance / Social Security numbers?

<comment><USER20> Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords, even if some people use them as passwords.

What's the point of a password you can't change? Once it leaks, you're screwed forever.

In the autenticaion realm, there's three main things used: a) who you are ("username") b) what you know ("password") and c) what you have (smartcard, various kinds of dongles). Biometrics of any kind only fit in the first category. The other two must be changeable, or there's no point to them, since they become aliases for the username. Any authentication system needs to assume the password or the what-you-have thingy leaks or is stolen. If they can't be changed, it becomes rather difficult to lock out an attacker while still allowing the legitimate user access.

<comment> tom-lord > Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords, even if some people use them as > passwords.

This doesn't make sense. You cannot "use a username as a password".

Fingerprints, retina scans, DNA samples, etc are biometric passwords. They are unique identifiers to your identification, and cannot be changed for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER21> Please reread this thread. The reason 'liw and I are on the same page, and you literally denied that 'liw said what we can all read 'liw saying three inches above, is that you simply haven't thought deeply enough about this topic.

The entire concept of "biometric passwords" is flawed, because as you see, they "cannot be changed for obvious reasons". One of the _most_ important things about passwords (and passphrases!) is that they may be changed at any time. Every time there is an unauthorized data dump, we get lists of thousands of passwords or hashes thereof. Therefore, anyone who protects important assets with passwords should change them regularly. Anyone whose biometric data is stored in a database will eventually have that dumped as well.

The day is quickly approaching when none of these biometric measures will be private anyway. With that in mind, they could perhaps be used as public identifiers, "usernames" if you will. In that sense they might be similar to the SSN, another datum that is clearly unsuitable as a password, even though hundreds of stupid organizations have used it as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if it makes sense to disable some of that information in JavaScript. You couldn't disable it for js videogames, but I see no reason for most websites to be able to track your behavioral profile.

The problem is that behavioral profiling will get better. How long you stay on a page, which links you prefer, and potentially a lot of the metrics that companies routinely use to A/B test their page would also reveal your behavioral profile.

It's a similar problem to rhetorical analysis. It's difficult to publish a paper anonymously if you have other publications because the rhetoric is likely to have your fingerprint plastered all over it.

Privacy is rapidly eroding and it's not clear the trend can be reversed.

<comment><USER23> These sorts of techniques have widespread applicability. Who needs facial recognition when you have kinematic behavioral analysis? Just imagine the trove of data you could pull from existing information sources if you had unlimited analytical time and computational power? As computing power becomes even cheaper and various analytical techniques become better our "effective privacy" window in our partially-anonymous society will grow ever smaller.

<comment><USER24> That's why I'm still entertaining the thought that we may be a "privacy vs. progress of mankind, chose one" type of situation. "These sorts of techniques" are the first scraches on the Great Web of Causality. I don't see a way to prevent it short of banning general-purpose computation. But are we going to deny ourselves all the advances in medicine, disaster relief, energy efficiency, etc. to protect ourselves from some future governments that may get funny in their heads? Maybe it's time to embrace that our "effective privacy" was only a temporary state of affairs, a historical abberation of the industrial age. I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but I suspect we'll learn to live with it and proper social customs will develop around snooping on your neighbours.

By the way, it's funny how often the discussions turn into "we need to stop technology X because evil advertisers will use it to do their evil things". It's not technology X that is the problem, it's evil advertisers that are assholes, and we need to find the way to get rid of the latter, not the former.

<comment><USER25> _progress of mankind_

At this point we have to drag out the heavy philosophical tools and ask: what do we mean by progress? The "Whig view of history" is one of incremental improvement towards better states, but it's reasonable to ask what we mean by "better" and how the progress itself affects our view on what is better.

We also need to bear in mind that it's not just future governments but present governments in various parts of the world that will weaponise technology for control purposes. Behavioural analysis as part of the Great Firewall of China?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious how much the ergonomics of your computer play into this...

Log in from your laptop vs desktop and you're (presumably) going to have to have 1 profile for each.

<comment><USER27> Also, when logging into my bank account and I'm anxious to see if that big deposit has been made, my behavior might be different than when checking at the end of the month if there's anything left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Would that work if the user changed keyboards? I used Apple keyboards of various types for the last five years, and recently bought myself a new gaming pc with a gaming keyboard — and while WASD feel is great, typing is a nightmare, and I feel that my WPM count is three times smaller than on keyboards I'm used to.

</comment><comment><USER29> We already know that places like Facebook monitor our every keystroke and store them for posterity. Yes, they hang on, also to the text you regretted, backspaced, and never published. It would seem utterly unprofessional, and potentially detrimental to shareholder interest, for them to not also keep track of timings and typing rhythms. Which makes me wonder how much mood analysis, lie detection, and other psychometrics they really have collected on us all over the years, given the right kinds of algorithms to run the lot through.

<comment><USER30> That would be... disturbing. Fortunately it's not true, as you can see for yourself with the chrome developer tools.

<comment><USER29> It was true at one stage, according to official acknowledgement form Facebook. There's a discussion somewhere here on Hacker News. Can't find the link right now.

<comment><USER31> Not quite. Here's a blog post from someone who read the study, and quotes from it:

[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/16/1263165/\--Facebook-...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/16/1263165/--Facebook- tracks-what-I-don-t-even-publish-No-No-it-doesn-t)

<comment><USER29> I stand corrected. Thanks.

<comment><USER31> I didn't realise either until I read that, fwiw :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If this doesn't get implemented into browsers as a default option or usage of extension doesn't get popular people using this are going to be easy to identify. It's like someone using just normal http and suddenly using https and Tor. You are going to stick out.

<comment><USER17> I wonder how popular are NoScript/AdBlock percentage wise these days?

<comment> why-el I tried NoScript for a bit. Obviously most social networks stopped working, but I liked how NYT became free again (since they track you by a cookie) and obviously HN remained solid. Essentially NoScript just means no online socializing, which I think I might grow to become ok with.

<comment><USER17> Don't forget that you can whitelist domains, or disable/enable them per session.

<comment> why-el Yep, I actually just learned that a minute ago. Thanks for the tip. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yet another reason not to enable JavaScript in the browser…

And then there's Rowhammer ([http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/03/exploiting- dra...](http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/03/exploiting-dram- rowhammer-bug-to-gain.html)).

</comment><comment><USER34> > Most (if not all) behavioral profiling systems check your mouse movements > too. However in my experience, mouse movements do not provide sufficient > metadata to accurately identify a user

I would love to know more about this. Online ad networks have access to mouse movement patterns on web pages, but users (usually) don't enter data through keyboard on such pages. And I would expect they already use this mouse movement data to catch fraud... I wonder if it can be used to identify users?

</comment><comment><USER35> I might not get everything right, but aren't they proposing "kind of" a keylogger as a security solution? Even the idea of using a technology for which others build products to fight against seems a bit strange.

Now, admitting that everyone will use it in good faith, I'd like the fact that, by itself, it does not add another thing you need to do as a user to authenticate. But, as Paul said in his article, I only see it used as a trigger for other security measures.

<comment><USER36> I don't see why you find the idea that strange, an anti-virus is already running on your computer, hooking all your programs, and sniffing on your connections. Offense & defense have always used virtually the same techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Imagine the behavior profiler learning enough to notice trends and even changes in groups. Imagine if it could identify enough to determine people who had previously been sexually victimized. I wonder how much that type of data could sell for.

My problem with all of this prfiling/bio-metrics is an extension of the problem with retinal scanning. It isn't a question of if it works or not, but of what information other than identity does it leak.

</comment><comment><USER38> It sounds great and much more protective than passwords. You can't copy/imitate behaviors. However, I am wondering if the system still works if you are tired or sick. Your behavior might change in this case and therefore the system would not recognise you.

<comment><USER17> I think you misunderstood the intention of this feature. The goal is to identify and/or profile users that themselves use just a regular log-in. This can be then used to improve targeted marketing, selling that information to third-parties for example.

Note how the article mentions that the gender can be determined after a few keystrokes, even though the user never entered that specific information. This is certainly not the only metric that can be identified. The point of the article is to develop a solution to prevent leakage of private/personal information.

<comment><USER39> > Note how the article mentions that the gender can be determined after a few > keystrokes, even though the user never entered that specific information.

Research got median 88% accuracy testing subsets of 98 males and 35 females.

Note that I got 74% accuracy on that data set by guessing male, male, male, male, male...

<comment><USER17> By knowing in advance what the ratio is. Such a great system will do really well in the real world.

( You have a very ironic username given the circumstances. )

<comment><USER39> The original researcher knows in advance what the ratio is, yes, that's my point. I'm illustrating that the research is not very good. They couldn't even identify women to take part in the study. Given the numbers involved, it certainly isn't Facebook-ready.

In general, I don't believe it is possible to distinguish male and female typing patterns.

What you might be recognising is how people learned to type combined with the size of their hands - that might partly but not exactly break along gender lines. Bucketing people on that basis is just a recipe for awkwardness.

<comment><USER17> Fabricating facts and using ad-hominem is not a very good way of backing up your arguments.

Quote from the paper: _We use the public GREYC keystroke benchmark database for this work. It is one of the largest databases (in term of number of users and sessions) in keystroke dynamics. To out knowledge, no existing database contains more individuals. In order to reduce the bias due to this high quantity of male information, we only kept the first n male samples( where n is the number of female samples)._

( Don't bother with your response, I won't be reading it. )

<comment><USER39> >We use the public GREYC keystroke benchmark database

Yes. That's their own database which they're talking up, the one that they made to do this research. That's what I was talking about.

>In order to reduce the bias due to this high quantity of male information, we only kept the first n male samples( where n is the number of female samples).

It happens that I didn't read this part.

On reflection, what I understand now is far worse than what I originally understood:

\- They have 35 females and 98 males, they take many handwriting samples from each.

\- Since the participants provided many samples, these samples appear both in the training set data and in the test set data.

\- I use the training set data to figure out if I can recognise the handwriting of the 35 female participants.

\- Then I look through the test data to see if I can identify those participants again.

Basically what you've shown is you can identify the handwriting of 35 people if you've already seen it - 88% of the time.

Splitting groups into 'female' and 'male' is a red herring. This method would presumably work, even if I split them into two random groups.

If I'm right, this is not even state-of-the-art. In 2006 they could have been scoring 96%: [http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97978&page=2](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97978&page=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> How is the profiling data supposed to be used theoretically? I hope not as a full login. I'd count it as a "what you are" type of item like a fingerprint and would just only want to use it as a username. I think session expiration could actually be an interesting use case. Instead of/in addition to "session expires after X minutes" you could expire the session after the behavioral delta is big enough. But I'd assume a different login mechanism. Could be good session hijacking protection, especially for applications that require regular interaction anyway.

Love that there's countermeasures already. Well written article, too :)

<comment><USER17> Practically speaking, you will get advertisements, that have a measurably larger chance of you following up on them, i.e. targeted adds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Will it really work on a large user base?

There are a lot of approaches around (big data, profiling, machine learning, ...) based on the assumption that people usually behave in the same way. And they really do.

This thing is quite the contrary.

</comment><comment><USER42> Cool tool but kinda ironic that someone built a privacy tool for Chrome only

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how effective this would be on mobile keyboard. I can type fairly well on a desktop keyboard but on mobile it's more complex since you can have plugin keyboard enhancers.

</comment><comment><USER44> This means that if I break a finger playing volleyball, I will need to go through extra verification steps to access an app.

</comment><comment><USER45> It'll only last until web APIs take over and the new hotness is third-party clients for everything.

</comment><comment><USER46> My typing speed waries from 70 to 120 words per minute.. Cant imagine this working

</comment><comment><USER47> Walk without rhythm/and it won't attract the worm...

</comment><comment><USER48> Please stop. You're getting your panopticon all mixed up in my internet.</comment>


Runcible. A smart pocket watch for the post-smartphone era - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/runcible--2 <comment><USER2> Seriously cool. Just preordered</comment>


Brain Computation: A Computer Science Perspective [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://igi-web.tugraz.at/PDF/LNCS-10000-Theories_006_v1.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> From the abstract:

'The brain carries out tasks that are very demanding from a computational perspective, apparently powered by a mere 20 Watts.This fact has intrigued computer scientists for many decades, and is currently drawing many of them to the quest of acquiring a computational understanding of the brain. Yet, at present there is no productive interaction of computer scientists with neuroscientists in this quest.'</comment>


David Byrne: If the 1% stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/new-york-1percent-stifles-creative-talent <comment><USER2> I think New York should welcome the uber-rich with open arms. NY's history is all about 1%ers, like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Bloomberg.

But what is deleterious to the feel of the city, in my view, is the Dubai- ization of the real-estate market. Entire buildings are empty. Apparently the global elite buy and sell New York real-estate like they do oil futures: not to use but as an investment. These folks aren't citizens, like the Billionaires I mentioned above, but transients.

The New York Times had a good article on these empty buildings earlier this year: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/nyregion/paying-top- dollar...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/nyregion/paying-top-dollar-for- condos-and-leaving-them-empty.html)

> "I was living on the 16th floor, and I was pretty much the only one there," > said Charlie Attias, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group who > rented an apartment at the Plaza for three years and has handled many > transactions in the building. "We had the occasional visitor — I mean, the > occasional owner — once in a while. Actually, when we saw somebody, it was a > big thing," he added. "Oh wow, somebody's in my hallway!"

<comment><USER3> >NY's history is all about 1%ers, like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Bloomberg.

Not New York's creative history, which is largely based in gradual urban decay and eventually the default. Affordable housing for artists near affordable venues for art are what creates art (if that's not too obvious.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _which is largely based in gradual urban decay and eventually the default._

Indeed. NYC in the '70s and '80s was a dangerously magical (and magically dangerous) place.

Some good resources:

VH1's (no, seriously) "NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell" ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1080761/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1080761/))

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever ([http://www.amazon.com/Love-Goes-Buildings-Fire- ebook/dp/B005...](http://www.amazon.com/Love-Goes-Buildings-Fire- ebook/dp/B0051O9YCU/))

I'd be interested in anyone can recommend good books or movies about the NYC art scene of the late '70s or '80s. (I've seen Downtown 81; it's good, but not a documentary. It does capture the downtown NYC of that time, though.)

The whole loft scene was a result of squatting in empty industrial facilities, thanks to economic downturn.

<comment><USER4> "In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally."

Luc Sante, Low Life.

Interview here: [http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_sante](http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_sante)

<comment><AUTHOR> He's _almost_ correct. :)

Perhaps surprisingly, there's a golf course in the Bronx, up in Van Courtlandt Park.

[https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Van+Cortlandt+Park+Golf+Cours...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Van+Cortlandt+Park+Golf+Course&num=50&fb=1&gl=us&hq=van+cortlandt+park+golf+course&t=m&z=14)

It's not new:

"The Van Cortlandt Golf Course opened on July 6, 1895, as the first public golf course in the United States."

[http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/X092/highlights/11046](http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/X092/highlights/11046)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Queens is still here and as ethnically diverse as ever. The Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn West and South, and Manhattan North of 110 Street are all places where people live. You don't see many pied-à-terres on Grand Concourse.

These complaints are from one warring faction of the wealthy. One faction wants total isolation in their neighborhoods and the other wants a sprinkle of the right kind of poor person as scenery. To me it's an irrelevant debate. I couldn't possibly care any less whether young bankers or young artists dominate the East Village.

Let them have their whole foods and their dog walkers and their prestigious addresses. We have an income tax -- they are contributing tax money for the rest of us. Even the absentees are paying property taxes while not consuming any services.

All of this strikes me as the rich complaining about the richer, while trying to couch their complaints in populist rhetoric.

</comment><comment><USER6> Towards the end of the article, Mr. Bryne touches on a topic that is at the heart of a city devoid of culture --- people who buy large swaths of property and then do not live here. We don't need rent control, but we do need to build affordable housing instead of luxury condo after luxury condo for people to use a few weeks out of the year. The least expensive average rental price for a studio is $1481/month. Landlords require you to earn 40x the monthly rent. That's $60K a year. That's a nice living in most places in the US. In NYC, it's just scraping by. [http://www.mns.com/manhattan_rental_market_report](http://www.mns.com/manhattan_rental_market_report)

<comment><USER7> I really think that New York City needs to institute _massive_ tax penalties for people who don't reside in their apartments as a primary residence. I know that our property taxes are already high, but just about everywhere else has big incentives for residing in your property.

There's a lot of apartments in manhattan that are only lived in ~4 weeks a year and aren't rented out otherwise. I wouldn't be opposed to a higher tax rate for those properties. They're effectively jacking up other people's rents and making them have to commute from farther away.

<comment><USER8> Would such tax penalties stop the rich from renting/owning in NYC? I doubt it, they _are_ rich after all. Would those tax penalties convince them to declare those homes their primary residence? Maybe, if they were American. But would declaring those homes to be their primary residence actually get them to spend more time in them? No.

Is it really a problem that rich people aren't living in all of their homes simultaneously? No. That is their own business, don't worry about what they do, worry about what _you_ do.

What is next, complaining that middle class families often leave one car sitting idly in their driveway?

<comment><USER7> It could put some tax money into subsidized housing to offset their market effect of increasing other peoples' rents and commute times.

It really kind of is a problem because of the effects that it has on the housing market. It's completely different from somebody having an idle car in their driveway because nobody else could park on their property. This is a situation where this is an apartment somebody else could rent and live in and decrease sprawl.

<comment><USER8> If the objective is just to raise more money for subsidized housing, there are more ways to do that than just whining about rich people having underused apartments. Hell, tax caviar; a tax for cheap housing doesn't have to attack rich housing. The only reason to that is pandering to the envious.

And I stand by my car analogy, a car a rich person has is a car that a poor person doesn't have. Artificially high demand for cars ('artificially high' in the sense of people buying more cars than they _need_ ) increases their prices. If you want more cheap cars for poor people, _then get_ more cheap cars for poor people. Don't complain about how many cars rich people have.

<comment><USER7> These arguments don't work when you have supply limitations, which with housing and cars we kinda do.

It's not about taxing the rich. It's about taxing where appropriate to get the market effects you want.

This is the same reason we have such high tax on cigarettes.

<comment><USER8> Taxing rich people more for having multiple homes isn't going to make them give up those homes (we _are_ talking about "1%"ers, right?), all it is going to do is increase your tax revenue. If you plan is to use that additional revenue to provide housing for the poor, the knock yourself out, I think that is a swell plan. However focusing on where that money comes from is a distraction.

Rich people having multiple homes is a distraction that is engineered to tug on irrational anti-rich sentiment. Tax them if you want, but don't mistake them for the actual problem.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if taxing is the right idea. I just know that a city void of actual residents is a city without a soul. NYC is becoming like parts of Florida, except at least in FL, the residency is tied to a season, so you get a critical mass of people together in one place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a book of jokes from the 1970's. One of the jokes is "if it weren't for the muggings, there would be no human contact in New York." I remember reading it recently and finding it so anachronistic. The idea of getting mugged in Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn seems so alien to me today (though I remember as a visitor in the early 1990's the same areas seemed quite post- apocalyptic).

My point is... take off the rose colored glasses.

<comment><USER10> Quote from the article: "I don't romanticize the bad old days. I find the drop in crime over the last couple of decades refreshing. Manhattan and Brooklyn, those vibrant playgrounds, are way less scary than they were when I moved here. I have no illusions that there was a connection between that city on its knees and a flourishing of creativity; I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit. But I also don't believe that the drop in crime means the city has to be more exclusively for those who have money. Increases in the quality of life should be for all, not just a few."

<comment><USER9> What he fails to raelize is that the drop in crime is the result of the "Disney-ization" of New York City. All that "1%" money has been funneled into policing, redevelopment, etc.

Contrast: Philadelphia. In the 1970's, New York and Philadelphia were pretty similar. But New York was fortunate to be host to the financial boom of the 1980's, 1990's, and early 2000's, while Philadelphia saw its core industries continue to decline. Today, the per-capita murder rate in Philadelphia is more than 4x higher than New York's.

<comment><USER8> Philly is _way_ better than it use to be, it just hasn't improved nearly as rapidly or dramatically as NYC has. The blight of urban decay is being pushed back, but that push isn't driven so much by the ultra-rich as it is by college kids and yuppies getting a tad more 'adventurous' in where they live. (I think the effect of universities and their students is most noticeably around Temple in north Philly, though I would still refuse to live there.)

The result is that you don't get articles like this one complaining about rich people (since they basically just aren't there, compared to NYC) but renewal is taking _much_ longer as well. No rich people means that a student can afford to live anywhere in that city that they want, but they are more likely to be killed as well.

In other words, Philly is exactly what the author seems to want, but he doesn't really seem to understand what he is asking for.

<comment><USER11> I think you're a bit delusional about crime in Philadelphia. It's intolerably bad by all reasonable accounts.

It makes zero sense to put a business in Philadelphia as opposed to surrounding areas because of the tax and regulatory situation. The city of Philadelphia is a financial basket case, just like Chicago, LA, and Detroit. All these cities are getting closer and closer to the inevitable precipice. New York is not.

<comment><USER8> Chicago and LA perhaps, but there is no way in hell Philadelphia is in the same basket as Detroit. Philadelphia is improving (slowly), Detroit is _rapidly_ decaying.

I'm not accusing Philadelphia of being clean or safe, I am asserting that it is ( _slowly_ ) improving. I think you are delusional about just how bad crime in Philadelphia use to be.

 _(And to be clear, there are extremely livable portions of that city, but the presence of those areas are obscured in course metrics by north and west philly which, to be honest, do bear some resemblance to what you would expect of Detroit. However those boundaries are being pushed back every year, street by street.)_

<comment><USER9> My wife and I just walked from 10th street to 38th street along mostly Walnut/Chestnut/Market yesterday. It's great except for the portion of Market after 37th street. It's a continuous strip of gentrification now, which wasn't the case 10 years ago.

That said, I think gentrification is happening faster in Chicago. I haven't seen a construction crane yet in months of living here (I rarely leave Center City/University City, to be fair), but I can see half a dozen at any given time in River North/Loop. But Chicago's economy is still largely finance driven (and derivative industries: insurance, consulting, accounting, law).

I guess my point is: you can either embrace the 1% and be New York or San Francisco, or reject the 1% and be Baltimore, Detroit, or any of the other American cities in decline.

<comment><USER11> Both Chicago and Philadelphia will go bankrupt and all bets are off. They are heavily corrupt municipalities. The pension obligations will not be met. New condos here and there don't really enter into it.

<comment><USER9> What does that have to do with my point about gentrification? The finances of the local government are related to but not coextensive with the economic health of the surrounding region. At the end of the day, changes in the $500+ billion GDP of the Chicago metro area are going to have a much bigger impact on gentrification in Chicago than the deficits in the $3 billion Chicago city budget.

The danger is, of course, that pension obligations cause a rise in taxes that push out wealthy people and businesses, hitting GDP. That's a concern, but I think at least Chicago will fight to reneg on pension obligations before raising taxes. Rahm may be corrupt, but he's corrupt in the right direction. He sounds like a republican these days. Controlled bankruptcies may be the smartest course of action for cities like Chicago, allowing them to avoid the choice between raising taxes and cutting crucial services. The key thing to watch is whether Detroit's bankruptcy results in significantly reduced pension liabilities.

Which circles back to my point about embracing the 1%. The way to see continued improvement in your city is to keep your 1% where they are, and ideally attract new 1%. Those few condos here and there are upper middle class/rich people moving into Chicago and spending money and paying taxes. Since major U.S. cities have a dearth of middle class people (who mostly live in the suburbs), and poor people don't really pay much taxes, it's these folks that keep the show going. You can't afford to let writers like the OP push for policies that encourage these people to move out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think he really proved his thesis. It seems like NYC is churning out artists at a faster rate than ever before. Most of our finest amenities and cultural institutions are thoroughly available to the 99%. I was at Brooklyn Bridge Park this weekend and it just felt like the pinnacle of urban society. The underpriveleged get cheap lacrosse lessons ([http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/adding- diversity-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/adding-diversity-to- lacrosse-in-new-york-city.html?pagewanted=all)), Smorgasburg was grillin' up maple bacon, the hibachis in the picnic area were firing, kids were swinging on tires, there were soccer teams and amateur anglers pulling in East River bluefish. It was utterly spectacular.

</comment><comment><USER13> The only way to fix the crazy housing market of NYC is to make more places _like_ NYC. As long as NYC remains a completely unique singular jewel of successful urban living while the rest of the country embraces suburban sprawl and terrible transit, NYC will remain almost comedically expensive.

<comment><USER14> Causing a problem to spread to more areas so the original area's problem isn't as bad _relatively_ isn't a solution.

That's madness.

<comment><USER8> Being a desirable place to live isn't a "problem" it is a feature.

Being the _only_ desirable place to live might be problematic to some people who want to live in that desirable place cheaply, but the solution to that is not to tear down the desirable place to the same level as other cities, "Harrison Bergeron" style.

<comment><USER3> Being a desirable place to live for the boring rich, driving up the prices so that the interesting poor all leave, is a problem for both the rich and the poor.

Taking away money isn't the plot of Harrison Bergeron, taking away ability was. Ability is spread throughout the population, not just (or even mostly) the rich part. The rich tend to pay people with ability, rather than to be people with ability (other than the ability to figure out who to pay.)

<comment><USER8> > _" boring rich"_

This anti-rich "occupy" shit is getting real old. We get it, you don't like people who have more than you; give it a rest already.

> _Taking away money isn 't the plot of Harrison Bergeron, taking away ability > was._

Harrison Bergeron is about equalization via crippling. If you want to make it just about muscles and brains, then fine, but you are only taking away a very limited message from it. Stripping NYC of it's primary asset over other cities like Philadelphia and Chicago is one way to make NYC resemble those cities in terms of _' housing for poor people'_, but it is absolutely the wrong approach to take. Don't smooth inequality by tearing people or cities down, smooth inequality by building people and cities up _(figuratively and literally, in the case of cities)_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has there ever been a time _without_ massive inequality in NYC? It's been a standard theme in TV and films for as long as I can remember that Manhattan is stunning wealth right next to Harlem's grinding poverty. Look at Eddie Murphy films from the 80s, Coming To America, Trading Places, etc. What's different now?

<comment><USER16> There's a vast difference between an NYC that has massive inequality and the NYC that's being created today -- one where gentrification that squeezes out not just "crime" but anyone below an upper class income status. That's the trend and future that Byrne describes:

> If we look at the city as it is now, then we would have to say that it looks > a lot like the divided city that presumptive mayor Bill de Blasio has been > harping about: most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual > walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich (which, full disclosure, > includes me), and aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our > niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types. > Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about > emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small > business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are > being eliminated.

He goes on to describe a number of elements that contribute to these trends:

> The talent pool became a limited resource for any industry, except Wall > Street. [...] any businesses that might have employed creative individuals > were having difficulties surviving, and naturally, the arty types had a hard > time finding employment, too.

Environment drives out creatives -> creative industries have hard time hiring (start moving elsewhere) -> Environment gets even worse for creatives.

<comment><USER15> Right, but gentrification is nothing new. Look at London. All the creatives (how I hate that term, as if everyone else _isn 't_, but I digress) clustered around Old Street because it was cheap. They were edged out by hipsters with trust funds, like vampires sucking out the cultural blood. Earlier Islington was where the creatives lived, but they weren't edged out, they gentrified the place themselves, getting jobs in "the meeja"! But London is still a vibrant city. Now all the low-budget art is happening in formerly rough area Dalston.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's he want, more rent control? To put "the 1%" 'up against a wall'?

What is this article other than a whiny complaint, pandering to the envious masses?

<comment><USER7> Rent control is <40,000 units citywide. Rent control is not the problem. Floor-Area Ratio zoning and parking requirements are. Both are keeping more dense housing from being built which is keeping rents up.

Who do you expect to do for service workers? Honestly. Do you expect those people to live in squalid conditions 20 to a room like we did 100 years ago?

Are you aware that that rents even within a 2hr commute distance do not decline enough to be affordable (except in a declining number of bad neighborhoods)? You can live on the Metro North/Amtrak routes as far up as Poughkeepsie and still pay $1200-$1600/mo for a studio/1br. Commuting is also expensive on its own with monthly passes often costing ~$400/mo. Plus having to have a car and car insurance in those areas on top of that.

Where do want to put people who do low-wage jobs that can't be automated? What's your plan?

<comment><USER17> That 40k number is flat out wrong.

"But even in Manhattan, nearly half of all rental apartments are rent- stabilized."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/realestate/rent- stabilized...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/realestate/rent-stabilized- apartments-ever-more-elusive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

<comment><USER7> We're talking about two different things here. I'm talking specifically about rent control.

I know what I'm talking about, I live(d) in a rent controlled apartment since birth.

<comment><USER17> But that's not what the OP was talking about. He was surely using the phrase "rent control" in its colloquial sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having lived in both NYC and Los Angeles for extended periods of time, NYC for the last 3 years and LA for the previous 7, I was surprised by how little of the underground creative DIY energy is left here. When I first moved to Brooklyn 2 years ago I was invited to some loft parties and underground art events, but compared to LA they felt "manufactured" \- as if trying to nostalgically reproduce something that was lost - rather than the unabashed fuck all mentality of the downtown LA underground art scene. Which is bizarre, because everything I had known to date had told me it was supposed to be the other way around.

From my perspective NYC has already begun its final transformation into total yuppie assimilation - it takes a good half hour subway ride from Manhattan before you can run into any genuine 'starving artists' any more. Even places like Bed-Stuy are now loaded with wine bars and upscale restaurants. A loft space even deep into Queens is a coveted piece of real estate.

There's really not much compelling left for someone who spends their nights being creative while squeaking by day on a coffee shop barista salary. While there are ample opportunities there isn't much of a way to invest the time into making them work - anyone squeaking by can't afford to live here without spending their evenings and creative time working a second job, and the living space that they have to work in is in many cases literally a creativity- stifling closet with no windows. Thats why so many people in this situation are migrating to rural suburbs or cities like Portland or Philadelphia where the low cost of living allows you to have both affordable workspace and some free time for art.

There really isn't a way to undo this situation unless the cost of real estate in NYC drops precipitously, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER19> i've been a fan of david byrne for some time and so i may be a bit biased in saying that i think he is spot on.

as an artist myself, it's refreshing to hear someone who has 'made it' be honest and authentic in his representation of struggling as an artist. it's comforting as well that he isn't disillusioned about his success, his talent, the luck, the struggles. and he wants to use _his_ success to help the current/next generation of artists and creatives get a foothold in the city? cheers to him!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty on point. I already left but I'm coming back to give it another shot.

After 25+ years in the city, those hardships really do take their toll though.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a good time for a plug of William Dean Howells' "A Hazard of New Fortunes", a 100+ year old book about the difficulties of starting a new creative endeavor in NY. It features a countryish financier who made his fortune in natural gas and lots of anecdotes about apartment hunting in NY of the 1890s.

<comment><USER21> Available for free download or reading online at Project Gutenberg:

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4600](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4600)

Or, if you prefer, here's the tl;dr version:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am not a huge fan of this thread but I am compelled to comment being a native New Yorker. The 1% clearly refers to a "post-Guiliani" New York which has both positive and certainly negative sentiment from most who live here. However, to better understand the creative complexities of the city is to think of it as just that, a city... with 5 boroughs not just certain areas of Manhattan and certain areas of brooklyn but also Bronx, Queens, Washington heights and all the other areas that still blossom with creativity that once were clearly visible in the now over commercialized areas of soho and tribeca. Don't fret, creativity still abounds just not in plain-view, but in those areas that are less frequented by the "rag & bone" set...

</comment><comment><USER23> Well you could always move to New Jersey, Not much better but for me I have no plans to move away from the east cost.</comment>


That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs <comment><USER2> How accurate is it to say that WhatsApp's ability to scale is mainly a function of it being written in Erlang?</comment>


Apple overtakes Lenovo in China sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/af5dbc86-c977-11e0-9eb8-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1VhcfNcZm

<comment><USER2> How do you clone Steve Jobs? Joking aside, can his genius be replicated? Does he have a protege? If not, I volunteer.</comment>


Life After PHP - <AUTHOR> http://s3.amazonaws.com/Blogger-log/index.html <comment><USER2> As someone who also made the jump from _primarily_ using PHP to Python a while back, I have to say that a lot of this is very trivial stuff.

Maybe my experience was different because I was already heavily using ORM's (SilverStripe in particular) to build complex apps very rapidly, and moving to Python+Django was a far more natural process.

> _"the fact that Django makes most of the decisions about how the database > will be structured just baffled me"_

You define your structure with your model, so this is baffling to me. If you're worried about trivialities like column or table names, you're worried about the wrong things.

Anyway, I think that a bit of time with Django and you'll never want to go back. I certainly don't.

<comment><USER3> I thought I was the only one who used SilverStripe!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So far I'm proficient enough in php to be able to do almost everything I want. Your article is very honest. I never understood the php bashing. If you don't know how to use a type of screw driver use a different kind, at the end of the day the screw will be driven.

<comment> jmcdonald-ut I became interested in computer science initially with PHP. It had a low barrier to entry and worked rather well for solving the problems at hand. Now that I've worked with C#, Java, C++, and Ruby I can say that PHP still very much exists in my toolkit (and is used), but has become a tool that I rarely reach for. The bashing that PHP gets, it often deserves. However, I've come to accept that all languages have their pros and cons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting my experience was very different when i switched from PHP to Django 5 years ago.

Everything just felt easier, many task where you had to repeat yourself got abstracted away (forms) and the documentation was just awesome one of the main selling points at the time and it still is.

The ORM took me a while to get used to it but after the initial hump i learned it was very powerful and easy to use.

Overall my efficiency went up a lot i was able to prototype in days instead of weeks for feature rich applications. It made me able to toy around with ideas and the first time in my life i had this experience that i hadn't had to fight the framework to get something i wanted.

And you can express yourself so much better in python than php and till today i enjoy the community which is nice and helpful across the board.

<comment><USER6> Why is it that half of everyone says that PHP docs are so much better?

<comment><USER7> Python docs have no clear indication what kind of parameters function takes, what values it returns and what happens when it fails:

[http://docs.python.org/3/library/binascii.html#binascii.b2a_...](http://docs.python.org/3/library/binascii.html#binascii.b2a_hex)

<http://php.net/bin2hex>

<comment><USER8> It clearly mentions that it returns a string and that data is binary data. As everywhere in python, when it fails, it raises an Exception.

<comment><USER7> Sure. Either it says it or it can be inferred from something. But it doesn't have a consistent format. When I'm checking unknown function in PHP I know exactly where to look for descriptions of behavior (also how it fails when it fails and why) and information about type or arguments and return values. And if I need real life use cases I can take a look at the bottom of the page.

In Python function description is often just unscannable short blob of prose.

<comment><USER8> Like for example <http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ming-keypress.php> :P

edit: I feel like the real life examples in the PHP docs are very nice, but not really missing in Python (there are a lot examples in the Python documentation but not for such trivial functions). In python you just start the interactive interpreter and do "import module", "module.function(xyz)" and you see exactly what's going on. It's then a copy&paste away from your shell to your editor.

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying that PHP docs couldn't be better or more complete. Some (not only but usually less commonly used) modules are barely documented at all.

It's bit strange strange that you gave undocumented function as an example of how PHP functions are documented. :-)

This difference between Python docs and PHP docs is just the thing I noticed when I started having fun with Python which is btw awesome language though finding which lib to use for given task sometimes is hard.

Good thing to do to find out what python function does is running help(module_name.function_name) in interpreter.

<comment><USER8> I'd say both documentations are very complete but take a different approach. Very often the python standard library is very self-descriptive and it's just doing what you would expect. If you're in doubt you can always start up bpython and have an autocompleted shell. That python has an interactive interpreter really is very convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      > Moreover, the fact that Django makes most of the decisions about how the database will be structured just baffled me – why does Django know better than me what the database should look like?

If that is really true (I don't have any Django/Python experience) the simple answer is "It doesn't". In the long run, relying on the ORM to provide high scalability is not a sane choice and I'm pretty sure Django must be able to allow some flexibility on how tables and columns are defined according to your needs.

The thing is that lately I'm finding myself unhappy with the idea of ORMs and how they handle things. When I see that a framework has a lot of dependency to some ORM, I get instantly unmotivated to learn more about it.

<comment><USER10> "If your app is simple enough, you don't need an ORM. If you think your app is complex enough to use an ORM, it probably doesn't do much good."

<comment><USER11> Source please?

<comment><USER10> Source: I'm a developer. :-|

<comment><USER12> "If you want to sound credible, wrap it in quotes."

\-- Me, a developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This entire article reads more like "my first Django app" then it does any impressionable reason for discarding one particular language or framework for another.

The lessons learned from this article don't really apply specifically to Django or Python, but seem to represent an overall learning of how programming languages can work in general.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're going to be doing serious django development it would do a whole world of good to learn about the tool chain to make dependencies and deployments super easy.

Use virtualenv, pip, and Python's own built in scripting tools (check out the OS and sys modules of the Python standard library). Try to learn some of the best practices before complaining about dealing with dependencies.

<comment><USER15> yep south , fabric , the django console ,etc ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Strange read. That guy used PHP for years and seemed to have fully ignored modern web development, he was baffled by using an ORM?!

To be honest, i would never contract this guy to do some web work for me (he's is some freelancer of some sort? He mentions making tons of money with PHP). Or any work. Really, who developed web stuff for quite some years and finds it strange that not to write pure SQL statements? Or dependencies? He find's it hard to deploy Django or node.js?

It reads to me like he has been living under a rock for years. And that's probably the worst thing you can do in the fast paced IT sector. You need to catch up and constantly learn new stuff to be up to date. I strongly believe that to be a good developer/IT guy the most important skill is to be eager to learn new things, to strive to improve yourself and learn, read, learn, learn, learn.

I always hate talking to overpaid contractors/freelancers about technical stuff and see how many people don't even know basic stuff. Talking about node.js or NoSQL or puppet or ansible or other "new technology" and be greeted by ignorance. And then i think "And this guy earns 100$ an hour and has a dozen certificates!?".

<comment><AUTHOR> I make more money in one week with my full-service IT firm that you could imagine in one week of development.

Don't even come in here saying that I have been living under a rock. I am the owner of my company, on the board with three more technology companies and also a director for a non-profit.

<comment><USER8> Probably all true, but based solely on this blog post i still wouldn't hire your IT service super company, blabla.. (to be clear, i have seen enough guys calling themselves CEO of a one man limited or whatever, i don't care for titles or how you are on "the board" of three firms, i'm a tech guy, not someone that is impressed by titles or certificates.).

Edit: Still kudos to you, for running a business at that age, respect for that!

<comment><USER16> I doubt he, or I for that matter, would want to do work for you anyhow, so there's that as well. There are those who don't gauge the quality of a product by the number of buzz words the technology stack contains. You should re- evaluate your techno-elitism for your own sake.

<comment><USER8> It's nothing to do with techno-elitism, it's to do with the fact that, as an engineer, the most important skill you need to have is to know the right tool for the right job. If you only know about a very limited subset, you're doing it wrong. There is nothing wrong with using PHP for the right job, or whatever else. You still should make an educated decision and not just use something because you don't know better. I give a damn about buzzwords and find many things very questionable when it comes to the latest and greatest in the interweb.

Edit: In the end i feel like i have to justify my post more then i want to. It's not that i hate that guy or that i think he is a bad programmer or a bad person or whatever. I was just surprised to read that someone who has been coding PHP for 7 years never used an ORM. I imagine that most people that want to learn "web programming" start with a framework that includes an ORM. He surely has a big benefit over "competitors" who only know ORMs and never cared about the underlying SQL. That's surely not good as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems to me that CodeIgniter to Django is a much bigger leap than PHP to Python.

Or even in general, unless you're dealing with a language that has a fundamentally different approach, frameworks constitute a much bigger learning curve.

Especially if you're coming from a simple, lightweight framework like CodeIgniter to Django. Much of what the author describes would also apply if you go from CodeIgnitor to Symfony, even though it's still PHP.

</comment><comment><USER18> > [Cloud hosting] leaves me helpless in the case of an outage

Not if you design your application correctly. HA is really not that hard to do, in the cloud or otherwise, so that single points of failure (e.g., vm or dyno outages) do not result in service unavailability. Also, consider that if you're not building HA into your apps, you are still at the mercy of things beyond your control with local physical servers. What if your upstream network provider accidentally publishes a BGP route that sends all your traffic into the void? Or, in a timely example, what if your authoritative nameservers get DoS'd? Build HA apps, aim to physically separate key redundant infrastructure pieces (built in to most big PAAS services and configurable in most big IAAS services), and you'll have no worries using a cloud service.

<comment><USER11> Can you go into more details? This has always worried me about hosting in general - for sites that can't justify multiple servers, or the complexity of setting up MySQL replication, what's the best approach for HA? There's a lot of businesses that fall into this 'important and profitable but not that profitable' range...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Django from CodeIgniter

Life after CodeIgniter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I started with PHP, so I felt necessary to say I was moving on from that.

<comment><USER19> The point isn't where you started, it's where you are leaving from. Leaving from CodeIgniter says a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seemed like I was reading the story about myself. I started to code very early too! It was PHP and MySQL. First — no frameworks and libraries. Then — CI (later Kohana, Fuel etc.). Then I was bored and I started to learn Python. Time went by and I were a Django developer. So here we are. :)

P.S. Python is totally ready for web development. Django was released in 2005 and it's stable. There are other frameworks too. YouTube and, of what I'm heard, half of Google is using it (maybe they are rewriting some things to Go now). Ton of popular sites uses Python and Django too! When it comes to deployment, I stick to Nginx that serves static or sends request to gunicorn. It's stable and fast. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> By the time he started praising Tank auth I was looking for the parody button. And praising PHPMyAdmin? Has he ever once looked at the steaming mess that thing calls a codebase?

<comment><USER16> I think people are giving the guy a much harder time than he deserves, but the praise of phpMyAdmin made me scoff. I hate that program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> PHP was my first language and it helped me stay interested enough in programming to stick with it. I commented on this a few years ago, and it's now an ancient thread, but there's some good stuff in the history books: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324578>

</comment><comment><USER23> Why does this site look like a knock-off of Svtle.com, more specifically dcurt.is?

<comment><USER12> It's using a WP theme called 'wp-svtle', so I imagine that's probably why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Laravel!

</comment><comment><USER25> In some ways, Python is the new PHP :)

</comment><comment><USER15> great thing about NodeJS Ruby and Python is their interactive cli , which is just mandatory imho , for testing language features , framework features ,etc ... The PHP interactive cli is too poor and something really should be done about it. there are a few php-shell out there but they are not up to the task. I hope php core developpers will do something about it.</comment>


Evaluating startup offers - <AUTHOR> http://www.excitingrole.com/how-to-do-startup-due-diligence/#.h/ <comment><USER2> Gonna add my personal .02 based on multiple startup experience.

Enjoy the ride. Most startup fails, so everything in evaluating an offer has to take that in account.

Make sure you bargain for a great experience to put in your resume for the next gig. Make sure something survive out of the startup when it fails, like keeping a blog on the side talking about your challenges is a great way to ensure your portfolio endures.

When you evaluate your stock options, the right ratio to which consider it is.. zero. If you are a provileged employee and truly believe in the project, go for equity. Company will be limited lyability anyway early stages and stock options will likely never vest.

If you are a side project junkie, try to bargain stock options for a relaxed non compete so you can keep your midnight coding exploits profitable.

Make sure the tech stack is marketable. Both in technology terms (java node whatever) but also in direcion: intelligence and analytics go always well on any resume.

Do try and engage anyone involved in the startup, from ceo to customers. Idea can be had for free and learning a businnes space with it's workings and pain points is always worth it. Be helpful to anyone and grow your network. You gonna need that always.

Last, don't let the starup consume your life. It's just not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't worry too much about trying to estimate a startups chances unless your a domain expert. The more literature you read the more likely it is you'll begin to be over/under-estimate their chances of success.

In my experience the challenge of working in any stage of organisation is fighting its disfunction. If you love your field of work, then this will be likely your only nemesis. A prime benefit of working in a startup is your relative power to do this. So embrace it and use it as a place to learn how to get stuff done. This will serve you well wherever you eventually end up and expose you to people and functions well outside your domain.

Given that:

1) Is what they are proposing reasonably sensible? Ask someone normal if unsure :P

2) Is it interesting to you?

3) Do they seem like intelligent, friendly people?

4) Challenge them on a product/architecture decision they have made and see how they respond.

5) Ask how much runway they have and be comfortable with it

Finally, you only live once, take a chance, really try to do something new. When your there, speak up. If your lucky you'll have a good experience with good people and learn a hell of a lot.

<comment><USER4> Spot on, minor add:

I start with #4, it gives many clues about #3 and may reveal things about #2. For #1, don't ask friends, ask prospective customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the major thing this post fails to emphasize is how the CEO and other executives/managers interact. I would specifically ask:

1.) Tell me about a situation where you disagreed with your team, but trusted them and was convinced. 2.) Tell me about another one of those. (There's always one canned answer)

In other words: Who can tell the CEO "No" and do they know when to listen and when to push. If the CEO doesn't know how to do that well, I think the company is doomed, and it's incredibly hard to do well.

<comment><USER6> There are plenty of successful companies where telling the CEO "no" doesn't really happen.

<comment><USER5> Maybe so, but how many of them stay that way? How many of them are startups? How many become less successful because of it?

My guess is that this is especially dangerous for startups. Think about it, you're a founder and you've been told "No" by investors, experts, customers, thousands of times. Now all of a sudden you've proved them all wrong, you've built a business and it's starting to show promise.

But to scale, you're going to need some of those experts who told you "No". If you're building a car, you're gonna need to hire some people that have run a car factory or managed a complex supply chain. You're gonna need to trust them when they tell you, "I need 6 months, 3 months isn't doable". Or not. Maybe you're right, you can push beyond the possible. Maybe you're wrong and you can't, breaking your team and product in the process. Which one is right? You choose. But don't screw up, it's all on the line.

I think this is one of the least appreciated traits of the giants. Musk, Jobs, they pushed their people to the breaking point, but clearly they also knew what to drop and what to insist on to get things out the door. Quoting Jobs, "Real artists ship." Jobs famously argued against an app store, then was convinced and then pushed on it as hard as anyone.

I could go on, but the point is this kind of decision is fiendishly hard, and I think it separates the great from the mediocre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like I just got content-market'd. They get me every time!

<comment><USER8> Got me too, but quite refreshing to see something published with Ghost.

<comment><USER9> I moved my blog to Ghost a couple years ago and the one thing about it I really like is that it never gets in my way. Way back when, it was feature- bare, but I could write markdown and publish easily. There are more features now, but it's not bloated and still feels like it enables me more than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bottomline is, always protect the downside. Startups do offer a shot at becoming rich, but they are more likely to fail than not, so in the event of the business going down you still want to show something for the years spent.

Basically: make sure to get a fair salary down the road, or at least make sure you learn something that you otherwise couldn't (and makes it easier to find a better paying job in the worst-worst case scenario).

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd add "is the technology they use interesting" which for me is similar to their "is the team worth it". If I assume the company will fail but I got to hack some Lisp for a couple of years instead of writing Java code that might be worth something (languages picked just to make the point).

<comment><USER12> However, there is always: "the company will go through the roof, allowing me to hack on Lisp for the rest of my life". :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the 'you have more to lose' advice is wrong. It's still a sellers market for technical talent. As long as you're getting paid reasonably and working on interesting things, you'll be fine after N months at a failed startup.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your side project? (June 2020) - <AUTHOR> Please post a link to your project. But more importantly, share a story behind it. I think that's the more interesting part! <comment><USER2> Fruition ([https://fruitionsite.com](https://fruitionsite.com)) - Build your next website or blog with Notion, for free.

Notion has taken over the tech/design industry by a storm, and many people have used it to create web pages. However, Notion doesn't allow custom domain and the page URL contains a long uuid (for example: [https://www.notion.so/The-Beauty-of- Notion-4663b221fd154c07b...](https://www.notion.so/The-Beauty-of- Notion-4663b221fd154c07bb6f826b537bfcd4))

I built Fruition to solve exactly that. You can use a custom domain and add pretty URL slugs like [https://fruitionsite.com/showcase](https://fruitionsite.com/showcase). You can also add custom font and scripts like Google Analytics. It's all free and open source.

I shared this on a couple of Notion communities a month ago, and 30000 people have checked it out since. Hundreds of sites have been built with Notion and Fruition.

</comment><comment><USER3> Contextualise ([https://contextualise.dev/](https://contextualise.dev/)), a personal and collaborative knowledge management tool. It's open source: [https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise).

With Contextualise, I am really scratching my own itch. That is, I am developing Contextualise for my own needs: I am using the application to structure and document the development of Contextualise itself but also as a tool to organise and document my other hobbies and research projects. Although, as mentioned, I am developing Contextualise for my own needs, I really do hope that other people find it to be useful for their own purposes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Portfolio generator for developers ([https://www.profiled.app](https://www.profiled.app)). It pulls information from your GitHub account and generates a good looking, well organized portfolio site that you can deploy in a few clicks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> dang mentioned in this thread[1] about a monthly side project thread. But I haven't seen one for June, so I thought I'd post one.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof](https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)

Polyglot tool for making dev life easier with ephemeral envs, meta testing framework, code gen, multi-lanh scripting better than bash, make the cloud work like k8s... and much more

Sort of my Swiss army knife for dev'n</comment>


Men's Wearhouse is missing a major business opportunity (Never throw away data.) - <AUTHOR> http://moultano.blogspot.com/2010/06/mens-wearhouse-is-missing-major.html

<comment><USER2> I could be completely wrong here, but I would guess that the majority of MW's customers purchase or rent suits infrequently; old measurements are likely to be inaccurate by the time a customer returns for a new suit.

More generally, I really don't see the point of paying for custom-fitted clothing without first confirming that the clothes are going to fit.

<comment><USER3> this is true, although most people won't get taller, they'll get wider, and most rentals have adjustable waists, and coats won't change size that much.

a neat alternative would be, imo, to have them keep your old measurements, but store them online where you can see/edit/update. old ones prompt for re- measurements

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Props to Men's Wearhouse for being one of the few companies around that treats my personal information with respect without me even asking.

</comment><comment><USER5> You _should_ be measured every time you rent or buy a suit or tux. Men's Wearhouse would be doing their customers a disservice if they just handed out suits based on 6+ month old data.

</comment><comment><USER6> They'd need to have people opt-in, otherwise privacy nuts would be complaining that "MW is holding on to my personal clothing sizes for years without my consent!".

Opt-in would be fine, but I have to say as someone who is in the process of aging, I'm not the same shape I was 5 years ago. 6 months probably, but I doubt for many people the data is actually _usable_ without a refit after, say, 3-4 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd expect they use the data in aggregate to figure out what sizes of clothing to stock where to keep latency and transportation lower.

It doesn't seem that much of their variable cost would get shaved off by already having one's measurements, which makes me think this wouldn't help them with a lowest-price strategy. Maybe a higher-end market focus.

But as other have already said: body size data can be expected to expire often. I'm an edge case, but my weight has oscillated between 195 and 165 a few times in the last year.</comment>


The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224) (252 points, 228 days ago, 152 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, cheers.</comment></comment>


TSA apologizes for forcing 4-year-old to remove leg braces at airport screening - <AUTHOR> http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2010/02/tsa-apologizes-for-forcing-4-year-old-to-remove-leg-braces-at-airport-screening/1 <comment><USER2> 4 years ago while i had a severely sprained knee, denver tsa made me hop about 20 feet total without my crutches. that was awesome fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bastards. That's not without risk, if you had fallen your sprained knee might have turned a lot worse. Reflexive response to a fall is not something you can overrule even when injured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> TSA is killing tourism to, from and through America.

<comment><USER4> What evidence do you have of that? (I'm genuinely curious)

Anecdotally, while agree that they are a complete joke, I certainly haven't flown any less recently.

<comment><USER3> I didn't provide any evidence because I haven't got the research to back my claim up. The only way to gather real data would be to publicly proclaim some random blocks of calendar dates to be TSA free and see how much tourism changed during that time. I'm sure it would be interesting to see how much terrorism changed over that period (any effects would probably be exaggerated).

I can tell you it affects my personal travel plans (I try to avoid a stopover in the US on the way from NZ to London for example) and it makes me feel more negatively about the US overall. It doesn't take much to tip the balance from "I'd love to go" to "I'd like to go, but xyz location seems easier / more fun"

Since I live outside the US, I have an actual choice - if you lived inside the US you are pretty much forced to tolerate the TSA whenever you fly. I read a lot of horror stories online, and I don't like being near people with sidearms.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. I suppose, being already inside of the US, that I don't really have a choice in the matter if I need to go somewhere. I certainly haven't thought twice about flying instead of driving, in fact I'd definitely prefer to fly if it's more than a couple hours drive. Being a fairly frequent flyer, I guess I've just gotten used to their "process".

I'm reminded of a post from a little while ago about Israeli airport security. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it before - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850>

<comment><USER3> Yes, that is how security should be done. I read that report and am simultaneously amazed that this system is being embraced and disgusted that it isn't more widely adopted.

All the TSA does is turn people off US travel - it is 'letting the terrorists win' by having huge effects on the USA's standard of everyday living.

Once again, all rhetoric, no evidence. I keep waiting for the TSA to realise that this is all security theatre and change to an invisible, but effective security system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An apology in this situation is like giving the kid a towel rack. Giant corporations apologize to cover themselves, that does not make up for what they did and it's not going to change the way they act in the future.

<comment><USER3> Especially since they said "I'm sorry, we should have done xyz demeaning and frightening testing in private instead"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Rubin writes that the TSA, in its apology, said Ryan should have been taken into a private area and swabbed for traces of explosive materials."

How is wearing leg braces probable cause for terrorism?

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean you haven't heard about the new wave of disabled child terrorists?

This is so sick it makes me pretty upset. That poor kid has a lot in life to deal with already, these people have turned a brief rest from those issues in to a nightmare of humiliation and fear.

A letter of apology ? After a year ? And only because of media pressure ? Disgusting.

<comment><USER7> Because terrorists would NEVER use children in their attacks: [http://www.literaturejunction.com/showthread.php?8100-Iraq-i...](http://www.literaturejunction.com/showthread.php?8100-Iraq- insurgents-used-children-in-car-bombing) (sorry about message board link, the linked yahoo story is down). As you allow one group to bypass security, you have two problems. First, you open yourself to discrimination charges by people you don't let bypass security. Second, you run the risk that terrorists will recruit someone in the protected group to carry out an attack.

<comment><USER8> Your damn right there smallblacksun. The IRA started a "proxy bombing" campaign in the early 1990's (the 1st modern terrorist group to do so). If they can do something like that, you can bet yer arse that the people who send suicide bombers wouldn't hesitate to do the same.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bomb>

<comment><AUTHOR> Right... because it happened in the past we must now and until eternity take away the dignity of handicapped children all over the world, even those who aren't even close to fitting any profile whatsoever, and do so in the most coarse and rude way available.

<comment><USER8> Your absolutely right that they shouldn't have treated the kid that way. But, to ignore the possibility that terrorist group will follow tactics of other organisations isn't very sensible.

But, to exclude any section of the population from security checks is inane (that assuming the security checks are worth the trouble in the first place).

The only reason the IRA stopped "proxy bombings" is because of the public outcry. Do you think someone on a jihad will have any qualms at the public outcry of using a 4-year handicapped child's family hostage and forcing the kid to do something pretty nasty.

Read some of the quotes here: [http://www.palacebarracksmemorialgarden.org/Royal%20Irish%20...](http://www.palacebarracksmemorialgarden.org/Royal%20Irish%20Rangers.htm)

"A man was told to drive where the soldiers would be and if he did not comply his two sons would be shot. He was to tell the soldiers they had forty minutes to get clear but within seconds of reaching the check point the bomb exploded."

And this is in nice civilised Ireland. Don't think it could happen here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't believe it! The TSA I know would never apologize for anything or to anyone :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> My daughters got "Junior TSA" stickers at the Burbank airport: <http://img124.yfrog.com/i/ts1q.jpg/>

Dream big!</comment>


Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1755691291326688/introducing-facebook-surround-360-an-open-high-quality-3d-360-video-capture-system <comment><USER2> 360 video is cool but feels a little gimmicky for personal use.

180 degree 3D video, on the other hand, is AWESOME - that's the true-life look/feel that I think is going to be game changing and sell another 100m units for GoPro or whomever comes up with it.

So far the players I know are:

[http://vuze.camera/](http://vuze.camera/) [https://webeyevr.com/](https://webeyevr.com/) [http://lucidcam.com/](http://lucidcam.com/)

Or some combo of kit that you can cobble together: [http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero- system/AHD3D-001.h...](http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero- system/AHD3D-001.h..).

Or run a DIY game: [http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar...](http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar..).

Anybody have any experience to share on a good consumer balanced solution?

<comment><USER3> What's notable about this announcement is that it claims to be 360 degree _3D_ video. The article talks about this. That means it's like a 180 degree 3D video in every direction.

That said, I'm a bit skeptical about how well their method works. If you close one eye and rotate your head, you'll notice parallax effects, and I'm not confident that what Facebook has described will be able to reproduce that. But I'd love to be proved wrong.

<comment><USER4> They generate depth using optical flow and then generate separate images for each eye.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this compare to Jump for Cardboard & GoPro Odyssey from 8-10 months ago?

[https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/](https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/)

[https://gopro.com/odyssey](https://gopro.com/odyssey)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620224)

<comment><USER6> As far as I understand this Odyssey is GoPro building the actual hardware and Google Jump is the software technology that powers it. In terms of goals, it's pretty much the same as Facebook's new camera.

Other players in this space are Lytro [1] (they have pivoted away from consumer cameras to professional VR capture hardware) and Jaunt [2].

[1] [https://www.lytro.com/immerge](https://www.lytro.com/immerge) [2] [https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/](https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone correct if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're using the Grasshopper3 camera, which retails for about $3k, and there are 14 of them in the pictured array. That's $42,000 just for the cameras. I know professional video shooting equipment is expensive, but that's more than double the price of a top of the line RED Epic-X camera that a professional 2d film crew might shoot on.

</comment><comment><USER8> So far as I can tell from the scant technical details, this isn't a true 3D 360deg video solution. It seems like this camera will provide stereo 360deg video for horizontally aligned left-right eye positions, which is not the same as 3D 360deg video that supports any head and eye poses (that requires full light field capture or reconstruction). This means any user viewing a video that rolls their head left or right several degrees will get a headache pretty fast. I'm sick of people claiming '3D' 360 video is the same as full 6DOF tracked VR - it is not. </high horse>

</comment><comment><USER9> It's hard for me to get excited about stereo 360 when we have light field capture coming soon.

This feels like the era of 640x480 digital cameras... It's easy to see the potential, and the current gen is still valuable for niche uses, but it's clear the next generation is what will really deliver on the promise of immersive video.

<comment><USER10> Light field capture coming soon? I'd like to learn more.

<comment><USER11> Check out Lytro Cinema:

[http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving- film...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving- filmmakers-400-gigabytes-per-second-of-creative-freedom/)

[https://www.lytro.com/cinema](https://www.lytro.com/cinema)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't find the link for all the specification about how to build one at home. Is it really open source ?

<comment><USER13> It is not open source. In the article, it says,

> later this summer [Facebook] will put the hardware designs and video > stitching algorithms on Github

I do think it will be open source eventually, but it doesn't seem to be right now. We'll see.

<comment> TD-Linux Hopefully it doesn't come with homegrown not-actually-free-software license that their other 3D video repos had. [https://github.com/facebook/transform](https://github.com/facebook/transform)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> 360 video is cool but feels a little gimmicky for personal use.

180 degree 3D video, on the other hand, is AWESOME - that's the true-life look/feel that I think is going to be game changing and sell another 100m units for GoPro or whomever comes up with it.

So far the players I know are:

[http://vuze.camera/](http://vuze.camera/) [https://webeyevr.com/](https://webeyevr.com/) [http://lucidcam.com/](http://lucidcam.com/)

Or some combo of kit that you can cobble together:

[http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero- system/AHD3D-001.h...](http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero- system/AHD3D-001.html)

Or run a DIY game:

[http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar...](http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/software- a-hardware-tools/3493-a-vertical-3d-rig-for-360-3d-video.html)

Anybody have any experience to share on a good consumer balanced solution?

<comment><USER14> Is there a VR headset out there that already allows you to experience 3D?

<comment><USER15> Depends what you mean. 3D/360-degree? It's _sort of_ doable using cameras and software to stitch and interpolate all the different angles but you're still viewing from a fixed perspective. That works in the current crop of VR headsets. Same with 3D/180-degree (or similar wide angle but not 360 3D stuff). I've watched several on my Rift dev unit.

Getting into "real" 3D, like being able to view from any angle is trickier but there are experimental and in-development methods of doing this. The easiest works for CG stuff (just look at your 3D content in your headset). The more realistic it gets, the closer to a "movie" in 3D. Combining video footage with CG environments is a nice little "cheat" that's already been played with as well.

But the real challenge and (as I see it) the ultimate goal in this space is being able to use something like multiple light field cameras or RGB+depth cameras (think Kinect) arrayed around a room or environment and capturing both live video and the 3-dimensional structure of the surroundings and any objects or people. The depth data from the various angles needs to be combined and "textured" with the video data in order to create something approaching a real 3D recording of something over time (so maybe they'll need to advertise as 4D movies).

Even cooler is when you can compress all of this data and stream it over networks to be decoded on the other end. The result will be like 3D telepresence where you're all but transported to another location.

Microsoft has been working along those lines and it makes sense since they have Kinect and Hololens. This is the sort of thing that will be the real "killer app" for VR/AR as far as I can guess: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0)

<comment><USER16> The challenge, as you said, is the data compression. Well, that and optics; it's hard to grab all the photons someone might see if they moved around....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Even though this is purely to fuel VR content creation for Oculus, at least the invention is in the public domain (pending OS license and patent grant)

<comment><USER18> Agreed. Really looking forward to the stiching code being made available on GitHub. I wish that Google would at least release some kind of an API for their Cardboard Camera (e.g. allowing you to pass in a bunch of photos and get a stitched 360 out), but if Facebook makes good on this, it could be even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why so many cameras?6 or 8 aren't enough?

<comment><USER20> I would imagine the stitching required a good bit of overlap of a video with its neighboring videos.

<comment><USER21> Also for the 3d every direction needs to be visible by at least 2 cameras.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to see something that takes a depth map with lidar and then actually lets you explore the photo.

<comment><USER22> Lidar isn't needed. Light rays themselves contain enough information to rebuild the scene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Which cameras are they using. Is this pointgrey grasshopper3? Is there a cheaper way to do this well? :)

</comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare with the theta [https://theta360.com/en/](https://theta360.com/en/)

It's much cheaper and available now.

<comment><USER24> Theta isn't 3d, it's like looking at the world with one eye closed.

<comment><USER25> Maybe a better analogy is that it's like listening to mono audio. Your analogy would be like putting one earbud in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great news for Point Grey.

</comment><comment><USER27> Works only if live feed is sent to FB servers. /s

</comment><comment><USER28> Facebook is the last company I would want to buy this from.

<comment><USER29> Completely agreed. Their bottom line is to collect all your personal information.

<comment><USER30> I feel like there's a group of people who have a list of these sentiments that they just copy and paste into any thread mentioning Facebook, adding absolutely no original thought or insight.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Search engine for Instagram Influencers - <AUTHOR> http://www.moju.io <comment><USER2> Interesting! I'm working in this space as well if you ever fancy a chat. My email is in my profile :)</comment>


Cisco Rumored to Make Offer for Skype - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/cisco-rumored-to-make-offer-for-skype/?src=twr <comment><USER2> makes sense, otherwise skype or whoever buys skype can give tough competition to Cisco's Webex.</comment>


Get deeper Analytics of any YouTube video & Channel - <AUTHOR> http://vidooly.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Guys, we just released the ugly version of Vidooly. Currently we provide intelligent analysis of any YouTube video & Channel. We have some advanced features on request. Need some valuable feedback to shape the product in next version.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this like an Alexa for youtube?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, on front end it is Alexa for YouTube channels & videos. You can get stats & performance of any YouTube channel, videos. We have some advanced features for content creators, brands & MCNs to grow & optimize their channel organically. You can request access to get our advanced features!</comment></comment>


Why Watsi Fundraises in Rounds as a Nonprofit - <AUTHOR> http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/why_fundraising_in_rounds_works

<comment><USER2> This approach was instrumental to our early success & the way we worked with investors/donors. Chase and Grace worked so hard at raising our philanthropic round but being a small team it took a huge chunk of time away from product, operations, marketing, etc.

I hope other nonprofits can give this a try and have similar positive experiences.</comment>