Yik Yak Systematically Downvotes Mentions of Competitors - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/17/yakgate/#9iOEGk:wzA <comment><USER2> While their response is pretty roundabout, my experience with moderating/owning several community sites is that advertisements for competitors really _are_ one of the largest categories of spam, and I wouldn't default to reading an attempt to mute them as a "shady tactic."

Think about the point of view of a founder-developer. You have a list of bugs to fix, a bunch of people to meet with, etc., all while manning a pool of servers to make sure they stay up. Someone says to you, "hey, we're getting a lot of spam from/about this company called Fade." I'd bet a lot of programmers would just write "if 'fade' in message" before getting back to work on other things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fade was viciously spamming yik yak, on the other hand. It's pretty ludicrous of them to pretend like they're being oppressed (and to compare Yik Yak to North Korea!) for retaliation against that.

<comment><USER4> How do you viciously spam a localized anonymous message board?

\- Your posts a limited geographically \- The app knows your device ID \- The servers should be able to easily detect location hopping

With all of that in mind, limiting SPAM posts should be simple.

If, instead, your goal is to suppress mentions of your competition, well that's a whole different problem set and you see how the implemented solutions works.

<comment><USER5> First rule of networked application security is "Don't trust your inputs."

It's relatively easy to deceive an app about it's location; easier if it's running in an emulator environment. And that works just as well for iOS as it does for Android.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I know that. That's why I specifically mentioned location hopping. You can also fake device IDs. To fight that you'd have to do even more. The point being, a simple word filter is not how you fight SPAM, it's how you silence something you don't want discussed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had never heard of Yik Yak until today (and the mentioned competitors). I tried Yik Yak out, 5 minutes after it was deleted.

I can't express how disgusted I am by the contents/comments within the app. It's full of hate speech, insults, sexism, etc. I find really disturbing that these sort of apps get vc money, really disturbing.

<comment><USER7> You should know that Yik Yak is an amalgamation of whatever the users say around you... If it's filled with hate speech, that would be your surrounding environments fault and not Yik Yak.

<comment><USER8> Although the anonymous nature of Yik Yak encourages people to share things they wouldn't normally share in the analog world.

<comment><USER9> True, but not every area has a lot of users that feel compelled to post things like that, so seeing a lot of hateful content is still a reflection of the people around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The podcast "Reply All" had an interesting episode about dealing with hate speech in Yik Yak:

[http://gimletmedia.com/episode/9-yik- yak/](http://gimletmedia.com/episode/9-yik-yak/)

I like how Colgate University dealt with the problem, but it's unfortunate that it's still there. On the upside, it allowed the conversations about the hate speech to happen in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really the thing that is/was cool about Yik Yak is how unfiltered it was. Facebook has all these algorithms to see who sees what and when, but Yik Yak just worked like a localized 4chan with simple voting. This doesn't really help that image (but also come on what an awful way to "prevent spam")

</comment><comment><USER9> If this gets enough coverage, we'll see a Streisand Effect for the competitors

<comment><USER11> True - I had heard of Yik Yak, but not Fade.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I went to the yikyak website and viewed their blog and this was the first paragraph from an article written last month.

"When Yik Yak was created it was intended to give everyone an equal voice. No one user would have an advantage over another based on followers or popularity and posts would be judged exclusively by their content."

[http://blog.yikyakapp.com/bullying-isnt- cool/](http://blog.yikyakapp.com/bullying-isnt-cool/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hi, CEO of Fade here. Just wanted to jump in and add a bit more color. I'm not trying to pretend that my app wouldn't benefit from not having its mentions blocked on a popular platform used by a similar demographic. But I do want to make the case that there are serious ethical questions about a platform removing its users' speech in a way that misleads them into thinking the content was removed by their peers rather than a bot. And Yik Yak's claim that this is an anti-spam tool is simply disingenuous.

Every account on Yik Yak is associated with a unique device ID. And each post can is visible to only people immediately around you. So spamming any meaningful percent of users on Yik Yak would be very difficult. You'd probably need thousands of accounts. If it ever happened, it would to easy for Yik Yak to detect and stop.

Under my direction no one on my team has posted anything at all to Yik Yak in many months. So afaik, 100% of the posts being auto-downvoted with the word "fade" are from ordinary Yik Yak users with no connection to the company. This is exactly the sort of organic "buzz" that the Yik Yak CEO Tyler Droll claims not to want to suppress in the statement he made to TechCrunch.

Yik Yak must know this because of its unique device IDs. Yik Yak can easily see that the posts that mention Fade are coming from regular users rather than spambots. That's why they are downvoting these posts rather than deleting accounts.

Yik Yak's downvote bot is new. Previously they just deleted posts with words like "fade." Why would they do this? In the GigaOM article just published, Yik Yak CEO Tyler Droll claims that the one-downvote-per-minute bot was implemented to "give people a chance to upvote [posts], which would keep them from disappearing." This is flatly contrary with the way their platform works. As the GigaOM article goes on to point out, even popular posts on Yik Yak average less than one upvote per minute, so everything getting a system downvote every minute is quickly deleted; nothing is "given a chance" to stay on the platform. Yik Yak must understand its own platform well enough to know this.

The only plausible reason for Yik Yak to switch from a simple block to a minute-by-minute downvote bot is to obfuscate to its users why their content is disappearing, to make it seem that their peers don't like it rather than a bot removing it.

</comment><comment><USER13> The 'tool' seems stupid (every minute if post contains 'fade' downvote), but im genuinely curious - are there any rules against this kind of censoring? The article made it sound like this was a bit of scandal, but is there anything more to it than bad form?

Also Fade's notYikYak thing seems pretty juvenile.

<comment><USER14> There are no "rules" against it. YikYak isn't the federal government, and it has no such obligation to protect your free speech on its platform. If YikYak wanted to soft-censor -- or even hard-censor -- any mentions of the words "potato," or "HBO," or "Facebook," or "America," or what have you, it could do so.

That said, it's a shady thing to do, and while not illegal, it's certainly generating controversy and bad publicity. Time will tell if users vote with their phones against it. That's the recourse here: not the law per se, but the market.

Now, this would be a different story if YikYak had an overwhelming share of the market, and the DoJ were to view something like this as anticompetitive. But YikYak isn't a putative monopolist in the chat space. At least not at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I posted "Time to fade away unseen" got -2 downvotes exactly at 60 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER16> The right way to test this is easy: just park your car between major cities and make a similar post. If it is in a place where there have only been a few yaks for the last month, then a robot vote would be the only explanation.</comment>


WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wework-ipo/wework-says-will-file-to-withdraw-ipo-idUSKBN1WF1NS <comment><USER3> I'm just impressed by how well the fallout has been predicted by Scott Galloway[0] and Matt Levine.

Has been an incredible learning experience for me on the unicorn class in general. Looking forward to unicorn report for 2019 [1].

[0] [https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf-part- deux](https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf-part-deux)

[1] [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/03/20/the-unicorn- ipo-r...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/03/20/the-unicorn-ipo-report/)

<comment><USER4> Galloway always predicts that every tech company is a bubble. Every now and then he's right.

<comment><USER5> Right, maybe not every tech company but he is wrong more often than he is right.

For example, he predicted both Amazon and Google would be 'losers' back in 2015.. oops:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/04/09/the- fut...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/04/09/the-future-of- amazon-apple-facebook-google/#2b1b2dc6172e)

<comment><USER6> From the article "For Galloway, the winner will be Macy's, which has successfully gone online,"

Macy's Stock [https://g.co/kgs/8KZ1Kj](https://g.co/kgs/8KZ1Kj)

Prediction is a hard business.

<comment><USER7> Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. - <USER2> Bohr

<comment><USER8> I had previously heard this attributed to Yogi Berra, so I had to check. Apparently[1], it's an old Danish proverb.

[1]: [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no- predict/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/)

<comment><USER9> So non-future prediction is also difficult it seems!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is almost too perfect but SoftBank is, at the moment, trying to hire a valuations director:

[https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=cf0378114e63aeb4&from=tp-s...](https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=cf0378114e63aeb4&from=tp- serp&tk=1dld0iag1430g802)

Sort of a "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" kind of thing . . .

<comment><USER11> In their defense, Masayoshi Son made much of his fortune by applying the greater fool theory (and lost much of it that way as well). There's a chance they really just took a calculated risk here, and with many of their other investments too. The risk being not so much the success of the company like normal VC investments, but explicitly a "maybe we can profitably push this through an IPO, let's see if the sheeple fall for it" kind of thing.

<comment><USER12> Hypothetically, if he was _really_ good at this he'd pick a highly leveraged market segment, attempt to crash it with a ridiculously implausible high- profile failure at the tail end of a bubble, and benefit by shorting everything that wasn't nailed to the floor.

Or maybe he's just a bit gullible. It's hard to be sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow what a huge rise and fall in the past few weeks! What I don't understand is how the S-1 filing ever saw the light of day? How could nobody reviewing that see any of the red flags that were obvious?

I think this just shows how hard it is to be objective when there are so many cultural/financial/etc influences affecting your judgement. Obviously their team bought the hype (and as a sad Browns fan I can totally sympathize with buying into hype then being disappointed!)

<comment><USER14> > Obviously their team bought the hype

or nobody wanted to rock the boat. If you had pointed out this as a legal grunt or rank & file finance guy, you would have looked bad for "ruining" the exec's payday. Better to let the market decide and just keep your head down and receive your pay check.

<comment><USER15> Especially if it turned out the market loved it. Then you're truly screwed. When you're working for a regular paycheck, better to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Waiting for Stripe's new API that adds GET/POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE functionality for your companies IPO.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cannot understand how they can restructure this. Even one new building in London which isn't anywhere near structurally complete WeWork has taken 18 floors on a 25 year lease (I think due to open 2020 or 2021).

Is there a way they can walk away from all these commitments? I understand they have a SPE structure which potentially allows them to do that, but I imagine there must be some costs or downsides to it, otherwise it isn't much of a lease commitment from WeWork's PoV.

<comment><USER18> Pay whatever cost is in the lease in order to break it or go bankrupt and pay out creditors first. The building management will then either find a new tenant and/or enforce other components of the lease and sue for their money per the contract agreement.

<comment><USER19> I had also thought that they had set up some leases through their own legal structures so they could limit some of WeWork's financial liability from the lease.

<comment><USER20> The leases through the special purpose entities are still (supposedly) guaranteed by parent WeWork. To shed the leases would require wiping out some component of the equity through bankruptcy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This whole thing has been nuts. It's clear no one who invested late ever actually believed in the valuations -- matt levine says it better

"We came to market and public investors informally expressed some skepticism and its private backers were immediately like "wait this company isn't profitable, why did no one tell us, burn it all down." I am not saying that the public markets are wrong, but I kind of wanted there to be a difference of opinion; I kind of wanted the people who bought WeWork at a $47 billion valuation to act like they meant it."

<comment><USER22> Even simpler: it's fraud and they got caught. Hopefully it doesn't paint other great IPOs in a bad light.

<comment><USER23> In order for something to be fraud there has to be deception. This was never the case with WeWork.

<comment><USER22> I think the shenanigans they were pulling (crazy governance, conflicts of interest enriching the founder and wife, bad acquisitions) were obvious to the HN and analyst community, but possibly they hoped it would be over the heads of retail investors.

Now obviously, in this case, it was too blatant and stunk bad enough that even retail investors shied away.

<comment><USER23> The vast majority of shares purchased at IPOs are by institutional investors writing very large checks, not retail investors.

Retail investors shying away had nothing to do with the IPO getting pulled. And even if this wasn't the case it's still not fraud: if retail investors have all the data (which they did) but still want to buy something, it's not deception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So this is what I do not understand: they burn through money like crazy. For them IPO was not a path to liquidity for stock holders, rather it was a way to do the next raise. The large market basically said "Nah, can't get that money on those terms. Sorry". Their only private source of funding is Softbank.

How are they going to raise more money for opex? Go back to Softbank and get another pile of cash at even higher valuation? Because it would be incredibly dumb for Softbank to do that as they have no serious competitors on the next round. So is softbank going to say 'This will be the down round and, we will now own 95% of the company and all of you, previous shareholders, get whatever is left? It is a down round with a wipe out, take it or leave it?'

<comment><USER25> WeWork's plan was to raise at least $4Bn from IPO which would unlock $6Bn in bank loans, before the end of the year. Now they have a $10Bn hole in their budget which coincidentally is almost exactly the same size as SoftBank's investment in them. They are in _a lot_ of trouble if SoftBank doesn't double down, and do it soon. Q4 starts tomorrow! And $10Bn may be more than the entire company is worth!

<comment><USER24> Which brings a question - could it be that this entire thing was Softbank's play to control the entire company?

$6B to get the seat at the table.

$10B now as a down around for a wipe out?

<comment><USER26> $16B is a lot to pay for a turkey, even if you wipe out all the other shareholders in it.

<comment><USER24> True, but consider:

1\. They want some turkey.

2\. WeWorks is a turkey that already exists, in a good enough form and, should non-wanker management be installed, fat trimmed and the co being returned to real estate business rather than technology business, it seems to be a pretty tasty and immediately available one.

3\. Buying it outright would have been a lot more expensive.

Is it any different from Softbank investing in Sprint? They could have invested in smaller company and built it themselves but instead they dumped money into someone who was already there and slowly reshaped the management

<comment><USER25> WeWork is not worth $16Bn. IWG is only worth $3.6Bn and is many times the size by sq ft under management. I don't believe that WeWork is even worth $1Bn using similar valuation.

<comment><USER24> Err... that's not an accurate comparison. If Softbank gives WeWork $10B for 100% of the company then its book value will skyrocket as its liabilities won't increase even by a penny but it will get 10B on its balance sheet. There's not a single company in the WW lines business that has this kind of a prospect. Regus simply can't raise this kind of money -- if they could, they would have.

<comment><USER25> Well sure but why would they pay 10x as much as it's worth? Remember they have _already_ invested $10.5Bn. So they would be paying a grand total of $20.5Bn and what would be their exit strategy from that?

<comment><USER24> Lets presume that for some reason Softbank wants to play in this space. What are the plays that are at its disposal?

1\. It can buy Regus. Regus does not need money to survive, has poisoned pill and does not have a brand recognition. With 3B yearly revenue. Anything below 8x the revenue probably won't get a board's automatic stamp of approval and anything below 10x won't get a board's enthusiastic "Yes, please!". So that's 35B. Regus with Softbank money would definitely crush everyone. It will take a _long_ time just to get the 35B back.

Pro: Definitely a solid play Con: Really expensive.

2\. They can create their own competitor - it will take 3-5 years or longer to assemble the entity comparable to WeWork with the same level of name recognition. It will also cost more than WeWork already burned. During that time Regus may restructure and become a real competitor ( they are in a different market now ) and whoever picks up a corpse of WeWork could become a competitor in the juciest markets.

Pro: cheapest Con: longest, and most unclear -- Regus may pick up WeWork corpse making it the undisputed leader.

3\. Basically do a hostile takeover of WeWork. If that was the play, it seems to have worked very well. It was as if a biker was taking candy from a baby: neither VCs nor C-suite, not ibankers seemed to have caught on.

Pro: No WeWork corpse for Regus to pick up cheap, no other competitors show up from it. Cheaper than buying Regus. Con: ~10B spent already + 10B to buy the rest.

> what would be their exit strategy from that?

They may not be looking for an exit at all. At those sizes cash equivalents without good investment prospects aren't a good asset.

<comment><USER25> _They may not be looking for an exit at all._

But they have to. Like all VC funds Vision Fund has a set lifecycle. In their case they have 5 years to invest (starting on the day the fund closes to new investors, which has already happened) and then 7 years until maturity at which point it dissolves and returns capital to investors. The clock is ticking.

<comment><USER24> It depends on how their fund is structured. Based on what I have read the minimum life of their LPs is 12 years. At the scale it operates, and considering from whom it raises money it does not make much sense to structure it as a typical VC fund.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is WeWork considered a tech company?

And what exactly is wrong with their business model? That's not clear to me from the article. It says they take long-term leases and sell short-term leases. That seems straightforward and potentially lucrative if they're adding value, making it easier to find suitable short-term office space, etc. Is it just that they're not making money doing this? Why not?

<comment><USER28> I think the reason you don't get an answer to this is because this is article number 100352752. WeWork isn't a tech company because there's no unique technology they use to rent out office space- which is how they make money. Their business model is "Sign long term contracts cheap, rent out to short term tenants expensive". Which is fine, but it doesn't justify their valuation (which is predicated on them 'disrupting' the office rental industry) and isn't fine - because so far they spend more money renting the office space than they do leasing it out to their tenants. So their real business model is "Rent $1 worth of office space out for 50 cents". They had no compelling path to profitability.

<comment> streb-lo Isn't airbnb similarly disqualified under your definition?

<comment><USER29> AirBnB is convenient. WeWork isn't really more convenient than existing competitors. It just has the wow factor.

<comment><USER30> The wow factor being embodied primarily in a Charismatic Young Narcissist (CYN) CEO. See Elizabeth Holmes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I see lots of cheering which, to some degree, I understand given the public persona of Adam Neumann.

I'm more interested in the ramifications, and I don't just mean the obvious ones like "potential tech recession" (maybe, who knows) or "more due diligence" (unlikely, or if so likely to swing completely the other direction).

Given that "private markets are the new public markets" I wonder if this will just encourage more companies to stay private either indefinitely (e.g. MailChimp though obviously I realize they are an exception) or for a period far beyond the norm (AirBnB) to wait for a more favorable time to IPO. Maybe we'll see companies switch to RSUs instead of ISOs as this becomes more common.

<comment><USER32> Staying private longer in the face of capital markets skeptical of money losing businesses isn't much of an option. Eventually, in order for the private investors to make money, they either need to get profitable or go public. AirBnB is a poor example of staying private longer in these circumstances because they are profitable. [0]

[0] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/15/airbnb-sustains-profit-as- it...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/15/airbnb-sustains-profit-as-it-heads- toward-ipo.html)

<comment><USER31> > Eventually, in order for the private investors to make money, they either > need to get profitable or go public.

Most (but not all, obviously) unicorns could easily be profitable if they chose to be. It would come at the expense of growth and R&D, but they would be profitable nonetheless. Growth is just valued much more heavily in the current market.

If you look at S-1s or even recent public unicorn earning statements, most of their losses stem from outsized increases in R&D/etc. expenditures despite healthily increasing revenues. The most recent example I can think of off the top of my head is Dropbox.

<comment><USER32> Yes, the thing is that profitability in that way would cost them their IPO, whose value would plummet. And private investors that bought in at 10x or 20x revenue would not be happy with 0.2x profitability. More or less what happened with WeWork once they issued their offering & the CEO's behavior caused scrutiny on the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm just curious about something ... do WeWork employees work in their co- working spaces? Or do they have their own office?

<comment><USER34> I recently interviewed with them. They have their own regularly leased office spaces like the rest of us.

<comment><USER35> There are full-remote companies too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Incoming layoffs... between wework and uber the market will be "flooded" with talent.

I wonder if having wework on your resume is a good or bad thing.

<comment><USER37> How many engineers does WeWork actually employ though? From everything I've read on here they're not really a tech company. I can't imagine that, even if it all goes up in flames, there will be many SWEs looking for new jobs from this.

Uber is another story. They've got a sizeable engineering force.

<comment><USER38> WeWork has done a significant amount of hiring in New York City for SWEs with very generous compensation, and honestly hasn't really had much for them to do.

<comment><USER39> Should have made them get their realtor licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Here is the "how I built this" for 'we work'

Listen to this, to compare to the current state of WeWork

[https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public- radio/how-i...](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i- built-this/e/50511717?source=post_page-----3e13e479e672</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----)

<comment><USER41> Oh nice find! This is going to be an interesting listen.

Sounds like from the intro blurb that this was potentially recorded in June 2017 and this is a replay of that episode Sep 2 2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What I don't understand is how do things get this far down the road before a good old fashioned sanity check happens? I have got to think that Soft Bank knew/knows the valuation was off. The fact that they pushed on means they either intended to try and get away with it/take the money and run as I cant believe incompetence is the reason here. How did this get so far along???

As for Adam N, I have to think some part of him knew that it was a bullshit valuation and all the hand-wavy "we are a tech company that also happens to do real estate" doesn't pass the smell test to me. He has personally enriched himself quite a bit so even if the whole thing falls apart he will be ok. I don't know if there is a bubble in SV or not, but it seems that the last couple of really huge unicorn companies have all been based on BS(We Work), Fraud(Theranos), and untenable business models (Uber). I'm far removed from that whole scene so maybe I'm showing my ignorance by stating this. I am, however, very curious to hear about any startup unicorns that are profitable or at least have a clear roadmap to profitability and not based on a business model that will be outlawed in a few years.

<comment><USER39> "There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."

-Margin Call

SV ran out of the first two because they are much harder. We are left with the dying gasps of companies trying the third way.

<comment><USER43> > or cheat

This is called "Being disruptive." Basically, just ignore the law, but make sure you get enough workers and customers that love you so that they turn against politics when you break the law.

<comment><USER44> This gets called "being disruptive" but it's possible to be disruptive without ignoring the law. For example see SpaceX: successful disruption of the launch industry, without breaking any laws.

The issue is that not every industry is so inefficient as to be possible to legally disrupt profitably, so people try to do an end-run around the law.

<comment><USER45> The CEO of SpaceX did commit a couple crimes in the same podcast.

Uber's autonomous car fatally collided with a woman, raising questions of negligence and liability in automation.

Uber acquired some of Alphabet/Waymo's trade secrets when they aqui-hired one of their former engineers who apparently kept a bunch of Waymo's IP he worked on. That engineer himself is now facing a federal indictment, and Uber and Waymo have settled.

E-scooters are facilitating a number of city-specific crimes (it's usually illegal to operate a vehicle, bike, or skate on a city sidewalk and the e-scooters do not provide helmets but neither do the riders). To say nothing of the legally dubious use of public property to deploy them.

Move fast and break stuff indeed.

<comment><USER46> I guess I'm not sure what Musk smoking pot on Joe Rogan has to do with SpaceX's unquestionable success in a market dominated practically since its inception by pork-armored incumbents.

If anything, I'd expect it to work against them.

What was/were the other crime(s)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Its been interesting reading the various takes on WeWork. I have my own casual rating -- I walk past a very fancy WeWork space in Levi Plaza and I rarely see people in it. I often wonder how they manage to survive given the high rent.

</comment><comment><USER48> WeWork withdrawl letter [https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-19-258913/](https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-19-258913/)

</comment><comment><USER49> At their current burn rate they only have enough cash on hand through early next year.

</comment><comment><USER50> Literally an office landlord. What a joke.

</comment><comment><USER51> During late 1990s it was common for IPOs without much revenue and no profit. After the crash, Google and Facebook didnt go IPO until there were profits. This year there many IPOs with big revenues but no profits. The market isnt buying that.

</comment><comment><USER52> I feel bad for the stary-eyed kids one year out of college that are going to get mass fired. They're all really young and naive :/

<comment><USER53> > _They 're all really young and naive_

And now they'll be a little less of each.

The lessons they can learn from this experience could put them ahead of the pack. We have an entire generation that knows nothing but post-crisis bull markets. When the next downturn comes, those tempered by bad experiences have the opportunity to position defensively and react nimbly. (Or at least more defensively and nimbler than their peers.)

<comment><USER26> Could you define: "Position yourself defensively and react nimbly" means to an IC?

<comment><USER53> > _Could you define: "Position yourself defensively and react nimbly" means to > an IC?_

Depends on specifics. Broadly speaking, having been an IC, the lessons I learned the hard way were:

(1) Pay your taxes early and often. Keep your credit and channels open fixed- cost obligations low. (Nimble and defensive.)

(2) Save aggressively. Rule-of-thumb liquidity advice doesn't apply to you; I learned to keep 2 years of cash in Treasuries _et cetera_. (Defensive.)

(3) If you can't do (2), favor full-time offers, even those with lower face- value economics. (Defensive.)

(4) Don't over-negotiate. (Nimble.)

(5) Don't feel overly committed to your current gig(s). You can keep grabbing drinks with old colleagues from your new job. When the ship goes down, the captain gets commended for going down with it; everyone else just drowns. (Nimble.)

<comment><USER54> How does an Individual Contributor (IC) have to worry about paying taxes? I've never worked at a company and had to worry about the timing of my taxes.

Save enough for 2 years? Only a very small percent could actually save 2 years worth of salary. For a family I'm not sure if anyone able to do this. The standard advice is 6 months.

<comment><USER26> > Save enough for 2 years? Only a very small percent could actually save 2 > years worth of salary. For a family I'm not sure if anyone able to do this. > The standard advice is 6 months.

You don't need to save 2 years of salary.

You need to save 2 years of your expenses.

As a SWE, you make _at least_ ~3x what lower-income people in your area make. If you live with the same expenses as those people, you should be saving 2 years of expenses, every year that you work. It's clearly possible to live that way - most people do it just fine.

If, however, you are a good participant in the consumer economy, and spend every dollar that you make (and two pennies besides), a downturn may be tough to weather. You might even have to... not renew the lease on that second Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> There is already talk of fraud in mainstream publications: [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing-expert- scot...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing-expert-scott- galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html)

</comment><comment><USER56> The page barely loads on decent hardware. These large news sources are making themselves irrelevant.

<comment><USER57> Reuters.com isn't usually that bad. At least they don't have screen-wide popups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Am sure the Wall street bankers who gave glaring $40B - 75B valuations are crying for their bonuses..

<comment><USER59> Depends if they bank the fees before or after the IPO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I just wonder if We is being used as a scapegoat here, or if it s an actual turning point for "tech" investments

<comment><USER61> It's not a tech investment though.

<comment><USER60> Then why is it here?

<comment><USER62> It acts as a tech company, so it gets treated as a tech company, but financially it isn't actually a tech company and doesn't deserve the valuation of one.

<comment><USER60> Yeap thats what i m trying to say. The herd thinks/thought of it as part of the tech ecosystem

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> All that Saudi money down the drain.

They raised ~11bn from what I've read.

</comment><comment><USER64> Sorry, but this is hilarious. No schadenfreude lost here.

</comment><comment><USER65> Is this another Theranos/Bad Blood kind of situation?

<comment><USER66> Not quite. I'd say Theranos was fraud while WeWork is a pile of BS that finally imploded under its own weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Think of this as an example of the rationality, or lack thereof, of modern stock exchanges as sociali resource allocation mechanisms.

Also of what financial institutions' investment-loan money goes towards.

</comment><comment><USER68> Wow this is terrible!

</comment><comment><USER69> Next up: every body fired!!

</comment><comment><USER70> WeWorks appears to have cooked their books. Those responsible are, in my view, trying to avoid further scrutiny.

<comment><USER71> Man, if that's what their books look like _after_ they were cooked, they should fire their accounting "chef".

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Well, that escalated quickly!

</comment><comment><USER73> I don't understand why we are talking about real estate on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wonder at what point the fraud charges come out. As opposed to Theranos, in this case some insiders did very well.

<comment><USER74> Theranos didn't go public, for good reason. WeWork OTOH doesn't appear to have committed fraud. On the contrary, they've been extremely forthcoming in their S-1 about how rickety their business model is.</comment></comment>


Controlling electric signals in the body could help it heal - <AUTHOR> https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2018/controlling-electric-signals-body-could-help-it-heal <comment><USER2> > _We took the early eye structure from one frog embryo, and implanted it onto > another embryo's back. We were interested in two things: First, would the > recipient be able to see out of that implanted eye on its back? Is the brain > plastic enough to be able to actually see out of it? Second, we wanted to > know, what is this eye structure going to do without a brain nearby? Where > is it going to connect, and what are the neurons going to do?_

Oh my. This is both amazing and a cliché straight from a cheap horror movie. The actual results are even more surprising - apparently yes, the implanted eye can be made to sort-of work.

Is anyone here aware of more research in this area?

</comment><comment><USER3> I find regrettable that the reasoning is still explained/oversimplified in terms of "electric potential tells body to do this". This is utterly nonsensical determinism, unhelpful when trying to understand hugely complex and dynamic systems. To say that ions interact with their environment and affect it, through their electrical properties (and maybe chemical too), would be much closer to the reality being described here.

To make an analogy of why determinism is not helpful in biology, consider a white blood cell catching a few bacteria that would otherwise have tried to attack the lungs. Determinism would have us say this white blood cell is protecting the lungs, as if it were its goal. But a white blood cell is just that, a single cell, with no idea that things such as lungs exist or that they need protecting. A white blood cell is just a hunter that recognized something it could eat, and ate it.

If interested in the topic, I was paraphrasing "neither god nor gene" there, a book by Kupiec and Sonigo, and the one read that changed the way I understood biology when I was an undergrad in the field.

<comment><USER4> I find it incredibly fascinating how we human beings are essentially huge networks of autonomously operating cells, and somehow; that gives rise to a sense of self and consciousness? What?

<comment><USER5> Theres an interesting book about this "I am a Strange Loop" written by Douglas Hofstadter

<comment><USER4> Oh haha, I had no idea I am a strange loop was about that topic. I'm familiar with Douglas Hofstadter, as I've attempted to read GEB (while playing along with his examples and exercises!) but had to give up because it took so much energy, effort and time to get even just a bit further, while I never really had the idea I was moving towards anything, unfortunately.

I've heard that that book is similar in its topic, but way less arcane, so I might give it a try when I have some more free time, thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has this been widely known? I always wondered how cells know what structures to grow into, especially those at the fringes of tissues. I also wonder what taking things like calcium channel blockers do to our bodies, or how that relates to photobiomodulation, which is known for regulating calcium channels.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a lot of research in this field which occurred in Russia and the eastern bloc and is still practised there.

The Scenar device for example is popular for reducing pain and allegedly speeding healing: [http://www.scenar.com.ru/en/production/](http://www.scenar.com.ru/en/production/)

Not posting that as proof but as an example of the sorts of devices Russian health care use.

From what I understand most of the research is untranslated and often ignored here in the West so it's good to see some headway occurring on the effect of electric signals in cellular growth.

<comment><USER8> Another example: the US military uses a device to treat anxiety. It is commercially available.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/7918685/Trea...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/7918685/Treating- anxiety-the-Alpha-Stim.html)

[https://www.alpha-stim.com](https://www.alpha-stim.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested in this sort of thing pick up a copy of "The Body Electric" by Robert O. Becker and Gary Selden. [1] Describes investigation of regeneration among other things. YMMV

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_\(book\))

</comment><comment><USER10> For some reason this reminded me of the research on how EMFs can affect the nervous system [0]

[0]: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089106181...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891061815000599)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hope Pence doesn't get any ideas.. (joking)</comment>


Creating the Hennessy Hammock - <AUTHOR> http://www.hikinginfinland.com/2010/06/interview-tom-hennessy-from-hennessy.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me of Agile development, but for camping gear:

 _In the morning, I would cut out an improved model, in the afternoon I would sew it, assemble it and then sleep in it that night. Each morning I would make a note of all the little adjustments to make it a little more comfortable or a little simpler or lighter. Then I would start again, cutting, sewing, sleeping in the hammock. I did this every night and day for two weeks straight._</comment>


Immutable URLs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/strong-opinions-lightly-held/91925a8c9373 <comment><USER3> Freenet's Content Hash Key URIs are one example of this idea in practice.

<https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Content_Hash_Key>

BitTorrent's "magnet" URIs could be seen as another. I always liked the idea of using torrents to host static web content. There are downsides, but they would be worth it in many cases.

If you used the torrent info hash as the primary identifier of the web content, but also embedded an HTTP URL that the data could be served directly from, you could have secure immutable content with the almost the same performance as a regular website. The torrent data could be used to verify the HTTP data, and the browser would fall back to download from the torrent network if the website was unavailable or served invalid content.

(This would probably require a bit of original design, since I don't think there's an existing convention for getting the actual torrent data over HTTP instead of from peers (DHT), but that's minor.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, the article is basically talking about turning the web into something it currently isn't. In a strange way, this was what the web was when it was very young; a bunch of inter-linked documents written in static HTML that rarely moved around.

But now we have something of a hodgepodge bazaar. For URLs to truly not move around and survive the creator and his/her circumstances, there needs to be a distributed repository. I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the one time I tried it, it was glacially slow). Maybe Bittorrent's Sync project will pave the way to create a truly universal, persistent, content repository with permanent URI(L)s.

<comment><USER5> > I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the one time I tried it, it > was glacially slow).

Freenet is only slow because of all the indirection it needs to do to guarantee anonymity. You could get the same distributed-data-store semantics "in the clear" for a much lower cost, and then layer something like Tor on top of them if you wanted the anonymity back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This cuts against the nature of real life.

I regularly speak with groups of high school pupils about privacy and one of my main points to them is that once they commit their latest brain-fart to the internet, there is a very real chance that it becomes immutable - should it go viral, for instance. If it were absolutely guaranteed that it would become immutable though, that would be a game changer.

Can you imagine if everything that you had ever said at any point in your life was permanently journaled and indexed and searchable? I personally find that to be a horrific concept from a privacy point of view.

From a purely technical point of view I can see the benefit of this idea - <USER2> hate it when an old article that I've bookmarked doesn't exist anymore (even when by article I mean, a gif that made me chuckle) but seriously, there's a very different world to a newspaper article being permanently available and a myspace profile, Facebook post or tweet being there forever.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it is better to warn the young about the potential permanence of online expression... or let them take those risks, and then as they grow, manage the world that results.

They might negotiate new norms, of forgiveness and understanding towards prior selves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds lovely in theory...

I have to say, a service I would love would be a website that mirrors content but only if the original source went down, and otherwise redirects to the original site. Imagine something like a URL shortener, but the URL it gives you will redirect to a cached copy of the original page in the event that the original page disappears. That way, you can link and give credit to the people who made the content, but if something happens it isn't lost from the internet for good. It would, in a sense, be a "permanent URL" service. It'd be great for citations too, e.g. wikipedia, academia, etc. I'm not sure if that's what the OP is getting at here, or if he's suggesting something else?

Either way, too bad rights issues would probably stop something like that ever being made.

<comment><USER9> W3C's Permanent Identifier Community Group maintains <https://w3id.org/> which performs a similar service.

<comment><USER10> Does anyone know the current status of this effort? I love the idea, but the mailing list has no activity and I didn't see any evidence that w3id URLs are currently usable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thinking of the first content I published on the web as a teenager some 15 years ago, I'm happy it's gone now.

<comment><USER12> Sure. But wait, you might change your mind in the future. Nostalgia perhaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "A cool URI is one which does not change." <http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI>

<comment><USER14> Once upon a time, I drank this koolaid, but no more. Many things in life are ephemeral, including information. To suggest that a webmaster's responsibility is to hoard data for eternity is both scatological and counterproductive. As the Web matures, it is threatened far more by the growing mountain of obsolete information that must be ignored in order to find anything timely and relevant. I would much rather see these pages deleted if they aren't going to be updated, even if it means broken URIs, which will eventually fade away.

<comment><USER5> I think people have been confused for a long time about what the Cool URIs essay means by "change".

This is a particular _resource_ :

        http://example.com/latest/

It has _representations_ that change over time, because the conceptual resource "the latest thing at example.com" itself changes over time. This is perfectly fine: the _resource_ that the URI refers to stays the same, but that resource's _state_ is mutable, and the changes in this state are reflected by changes in the resource's representation (what you get by retrieving it.)

This is another resource:

        http://example.com/2012/01/02/news/

This representation at this resource probably shouldn't change _very much_ ; not nearly as much as the one at /latest/. It's still allowed to be mutable, though! If there's a typo, or a retraction, you're allowed to reach back through time and fix that resource, to make it "the way it should have been" at that date.

A webmaster's responsibility is to make sure his URLs continue to refer to the same things they originally referred to. Conceptually, if you only want to store "the latest news", then you should only have a /latest/, and not a /2012/01/02/news/. Creating the latter is creating a promise that it will stick around, continuing to refer to "the news at 2012-01-02"--a _permalink_ , in the real sense.

<comment><USER15> I think another important aspect of this is that the (relatively unchanging) resource at /2012/01/02/news/ shouldn't be moved to /archive/2012/01/02/news/ without at least a redirect.

The point being that if the resource still exists, the old URI would preferably still point to it. If you, as the arbiter of the resource, decide to remove it, of course the URI will break.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is basically the idea that Julian Assange was putting forth in that article a few weeks ago about his secret meeting with Larry Paige.

Its interesting to see that people are already saying this is a bad idea but was praising his version of it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like a bad idea. People think that once something is on the internet it's there forever but that's simply not the case. Hard drives develop errors, servers get shut down, backups get corrupted, etc. etc. Your stuff may be around for a long while but there's no guarantee that it will be permanently accessible. If you want the contents of a web page to be available to you then download said page to your computer and do proper backups, etc. This will increase the likelihood that said data will survive. This is not a problem with URLs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like the same kind of idea from this Assange interview - he presents an idea for a naming system where something's name (url) is intrinsically tied to its content: [http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange- Schmidt?noca...](http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange- Schmidt?nocache&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews)

</comment><comment><USER19> Didn't Julian Assange suggest this? There was an interview published last week with Eric Schmidt, where this was suggested.

I've since started work on a side project that does this - to be integrated into Fork the Cookbook - since our target audience seems to be very up-in-arms about original recipes.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've had this thought before but it seems like the natural key for a web resource has to be the URL (location) plus the time that the resource was accessed for practical reasons.

Pages are expected by the end user to change over time, but they also expect to access them at the same location each time.

<comment><USER5> > I've had this thought before but it seems like the natural key for a web > resource has to be the URL (location) plus the time that the resource was > accessed for practical reasons.

These are called Dated URIs/DURIs: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-masinter- dated-uri-10>

No browser currently implements them, but a viable resolution mechanism probably involves keeping a default store of Memento Time-Gates (<http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/>) and querying them to see if any of them have a copy of your resource for that date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a cute, facile idea, but not thought through. It's not a problem of technology per se - content itself doesn't want or need to live forever. I reserve the right to alter or remove content that I publish.

It's trendy to think of the web as completely stateless, distributed etc, but the reality is that it's not. The state of resources changes over time because the world changes - and URIs are only around to reflect that.

The problem with HTTP is that you mostly can't tell the difference with a 404 between 'It's not there (and was never there)' and 'It's not there (but used to be, and has gone away)'. Servers should send a 410 to reflect that.

</comment><comment><USER22> After that I thought: I _have_ to reinvent the web someday. Another engine, another software, not even called "web". The web structure is so old-fashion. Did you already think about how much different a page is from each other? It is bad for the final user! Think again: Android, Windows, Mac, the SO usually try to make a standard to help user don't think again to make repetitive tasks. Different layouts makes an unnecessary brain effort. I know that this is the beauty anarchy from web, but it is not practical. It is possible to be beautiful and follow minimum standards. iPhone is there to prove that.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's very interesting that an immutable web could make current real world immutable objects (printed books, etc.) appear more flexible, more mutable. With a book, you can write in the margins of a particular copy, every copy could be lost, but a distributed system of permanent content would persist without marginalia or utter destruction.

The web is amazing because of its participatory potential and it's archival abilities. What might be more interesting than simply having immutable content is palimpsested content where the original object always exists beneath additional changes and additions.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Immutable URLs" already exist, they're called URNs [1] and it's a standard since 1997.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name>

<comment><USER25> A URN is still a pointer. An ISBN is not the book.

<comment><USER24> "Immutable URLs " Is a poor headline then.

It should read instead as "immutable content" since the OP intends to never have the _content_ a URL points too to never be lost or changed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> URIs are pretty much immutable. My impression is that what the OP suggests is a guaranteed lifetime of the content associated with the URI.

As for this second part, "once it's published it should always remain out there", I'm not very sure it's a good idea. In many cases I'd actually like to be able to say that a piece of content has expired (the content is not relevant anymore).

</comment><comment><USER7> There's an interesting proposal for a 'duri' URI scheme, that means "what this URI was at this date":

<http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-masinter-dated-uri-07.html>

It doesn't actually freeze the contents... but it provides a language/key for talking about permanent URI+content bindings.

</comment><comment><USER25> This reminds me of Van Jacobson's Google Talk several years ago: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM>

Basically a sketch of if the entire HTTP-based web worked like bittorrent.

</comment><comment><USER27> The memento project (led by Herbert Van de Sompel) attempts to solve some of this: <http://www.mementoweb.org/>

</comment><comment><USER28> If there aren't enough interested readers to encourage a maintainer to keep the content available, is it really worth the effort to auto-archive all of it?</comment>


Finding the lost city: Does the Amazon jungle conceal a vanished empire? - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/22/finding_the_lost_city/?page=full <comment><USER2> Some people might think that this is non-related to hacker news and boring but I'd like to make the case that it is related.

These archeologists in the amazon searching for ruins are the 'hackers' of the field. These people where all told that no civilization could exist in this forest and they all proved them wrong and did it their own way.

They do it for the love of the hunt, the excitement, the same reason why we love to code.

<comment><USER3> I worry about people using the work 'hacker' so broadly that it becomes meaningless. Is a football player a hacker because he's 'hacking' his body to optimize the actions that would lead to a touchdown?

Please let's stick to 'hacker' as a person who creates innovative technology.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Hacker is a word that only a small subculture of computer programmers would call themselves, despite what attributes they might project on others. This article was interesting to hackers, I haven't met a hacker yet who wasn't at least peripherally interested in archaeology, architecture, psychology and history.

<comment><USER5> But does it mean we should include in this aggregator everything every hacker considers interesting (but is NOT hacker news at all)...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought this was going to be about S3!

</comment><comment><USER7> i love stories like this about ancient civilizations and lost cities, can't get enough of it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just as (un)interesting to non-hackers as it is to hackers.</comment>


Kitchener receives $175k for patio-like permeable parking lot - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/kitchener-permeable-parking-lot-1.3549125 <comment><USER3> _The city is set to receive $175,000 through the FCM 's Green Municipal Fund, meant to help cities tackle climate change and increase environmental sustainability._

And they built a parking lot.

<comment><USER4> I live across from the nature reserve. The parking lot was already there and regularly used.

But the irony is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somehow funny that this needs to be marketed as a climate project. That impact is probably marginal, and energy/material cost of the surface material - <USER2> covered here - is more important.

Probably it has more positive effect by reducing flooding, which tends to get worse in built up areas with lots of pavement. When rain and melting snow can bw absorbed to the ground, flooding risks go down.

<comment><USER6> One effect of climate change is increased flood risk in areas not previously prone to flooding, which is something that Kitchener has been dealing with for several years now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are plenty of parkings / pavements like that in Europe. In fact I was surprised why pavement in USA/Canada is solid concrete and not those small pavement bricks.

<comment><USER8> The ones we have (in the UK at least) are not usually permeable though.

<comment><USER7> I seen pavement construction from the same type of bricks in Brussels and Warsaw and there was drainage underneath for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ""This permeable parking lot will help us understand how effective permeable pavers are for managing impacts to our water quality," Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic said in a press release."

So it seems like a study, but this area is surrounded by (a growing number of) commercial properties with regular concrete. I wonder how they'd measure the effect while controlling for this growth.

<comment><USER10> Considering that we've been doing this for decades[1], it's a bit odd to see this hailed as something new. Though it's nice to see low impact development[2] get some press.

1: [http://www.millermicro.com/porpave.html](http://www.millermicro.com/porpave.html)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- impact_development_(U.S._a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- impact_development_\(U.S._and_Canada\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure of the cost comparisons but there's permeable concrete as well, some even let plants grow in them.....or they could have just fine will a Simone solution such as a gravel lot.

</comment><comment><USER12> woo my city is on HN! this is cool, and like others have said Europe got this down ages ago</comment>


MacBook Pro 15 (2018) – Beware the Core i9 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8J125s4cg <comment><USER2> This is unacceptable, sure, other Core i9 throttle (like the XPS 15), but not this aggressively. What is even the point of offering this if it can't keep it at even base clock?

Is this the fault of thinness, aluminium chassi or something else?

<comment><USER3> It still provides a performance benefit for peaky workloads. Want to speed up your local compile? This will probably be faster than the i7 - it'll take 15 seconds instead of 17 seconds. But what do people expect? Don't do hour long renders on your laptop.

<comment><USER2> So basically, professionals are using their professional-grade laptop wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a 2013 MBP user before getting a Lenovo I was tempted by the 6 cores until I saw this. Although fridges are on special at the moment mmm...

</comment><comment><USER5> I really hope this isn't really a cooling limitation but instead something that Apple can fix via a firmware update, otherwise it puts their hardware construction (that many consider a bastion of quality) into question.

<comment><USER6> Uh, very obviously a cooling limitation. You only do thermal throttling if the CPU would otherwise overheat. What would they fix in firmware, exactly? It's not like you can permit the CPU to overheat, and it's not like you can run the fans faster than their maximum speed.

<comment><USER7> Undervolting is a possibility, you can change the duration of the boost clocks, fan curves, etc. Theres a lot you can do software wise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A withering takedown, presented dispassionately

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I personally like his style. He does not get overly dramatic and simply presents his opinion. I much rather prefer this over fake emotions of people like unbox therapy or Linus tech tips

<comment><USER2> Unbox Therapy, can't stand that guy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> More discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554902) , which is a later post, but the same topic.</comment>


Radiation emerges as an intriguing – and divisive – treatment for Covid-19 - lame-robot-hoax https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/16/an-old-idea-ignites-new-debate-with-clinical-trials-testing-radiation-for-pneumonia-in-covid-19-experts-remain-divided-on-its-merits/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sounds expensive, like they need to make up for the lost revenue in cancer "treatment" since "non-essential" visits were frowned upon for so long out of worry that we might run out of capacity.</comment>


An open letter to Trump from the US press corps - <AUTHOR> http://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump_white_house_press_corps.php <comment><USER2> I had an odd thought while reading this. If you replace "Trump" with "Saudi Arabia", news with oil, and press with OPEC, then the weakness of their position becomes rather clear.

They can't NOT cover his administration because they are trying to act as a cartel, and the first one who cheats to cover him wins.

Not saying this as a political statement, but rather how cartels work. I think they need a better model if they are going to take on the biggest megaphone in the world (the us Presidency - thinking of the term "bully pulpit" from Teddy Roosevelt).</comment>


Big Stars and Paid Subscriptions, Luminary Aims to Be the Netflix of Podcasts - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/business/media/luminary-media-podcast-app.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Well it took a little longer than I expected, but it's all happening. The golden age of podcasting is over. The new era of podcasting, brought to you by branded corporate gatekeepers, has arrived." \- Mike Duncan

[https://twitter.com/mikeduncan/status/1102638379940892673](https://twitter.com/mikeduncan/status/1102638379940892673)

</comment><comment><USER2> 70 employees, of which 40 are engineers, is a huge red flag for a podcasting company. That doesn't sound like they're focusing on content, and what do 40 engineers even do?

Even with enough people to build and maintain a fantastic native app, that team size is huge.</comment>


NoScript and other popular Firefox add-ons open millions to new attack - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/04/noscript-and-other-popular-firefox-add-ons-open-millions-to-new-attack/ <comment><USER2> ... once you've downloaded a trojaned extension.

This attack is cross-extension. So you can't drive by or anything.</comment>


Show HN: Pattern Recognition Engine - <AUTHOR> This is a video of a pattern recognition engine I've been working on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHNdIuBJHTo&feature=youtu.be
It is able to learn new patterns even if there is a lot of noise. Currently because of the lack of computer power it is only able to learn very simple patterns. With enough computer power I think I could use video to train it.
About the architecture: The pattern recognition engine is a hierarchy of nodes. Each node is responsible for a small field of view, similar to a neuron. Because the input image can be broken up into smaller pieces for processing it is very easy to process it in parallel with multiple computers, which should make it quite fast. Unfortunately I do not have the resources to build a cluster of computers to test the speed so right now this part is just a theory.
I was going to submit this as part of my application to y-combinator but unfortunately I did not complete this prototype on time. I may try to apply for the next one or even do a kickstarter if I can drive enough interest.
Please let me know what you guys think. <comment><USER4> These hierarchy of nodes looks to me like a CNN, that is trained on noised image data to try to seperate noise from signal. In what way are the nodes different from neurons?

It would be beneficial to highlight the differences to NN as I fail to recognize them.

Using neuralnet software infrastructure like tensorflow and the like, the parallelization of that task should be trivial. E.g. you could throw some money at a few AWS instances and see where it takes you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose CNN means Cortical Neuron Network?

>>It would be beneficial to highlight the differences to NN as I fail to recognize them.

You make a good point. I tried initially to use traditional machine learning techniques for pattern recognition but it really bothered me that the whole thing seems like a black box so I decided to write a pattern recognition engine from scratch without using any of the current machine learning techniques.

There is no linear algebra in my algorithm, I still have not yet discovered why it would be needed. My algorithm is not the typical NN (Neural Network) because I'm not assigning weights to each node like it is traditionally done. The only similarity to an NN is just the hierarchy shape. Instead each node is just a pattern recognition engine. In fact, that is the main thing about my algorithm: I have a pattern recognition engine (PRE from now on), and this PRE is used recursively within each node).

A single PRE learns and recognizes patterns as a hierarchy of patterns within its field of view. If you watch the video you will notice how it initially is breaking the 'a' into multiple colors even though it still does not know what an 'a' is nor does it know that an 'a' is there. That is because at the beginning it is just learning the smaller pieces of the 'a'. As it continues to learn it realizes that all those pieces form a bigger piece that has the shape that we humans recognize as the 'a'.

I decided to design the whole thing into a hierarchy of recursive PRE's because during testing I realized that that architecture was able to better handle noise and as a huge bonus it allowed me to make the whole thing a lot more parallelizable.

By the way, this is just the first part. I have another program in the works that I call the Temporal Pattern Recognition Engine. This is what recognizes a pattern in a span of time as a single pattern. i.e. A person jumping up and down would be a temporal pattern. This uses the PRE for the initial recognition and then it does its own work to do the temporal pattern recognition. Still in the early stages though, I will require massive computer power for some real testing.

<comment><USER5> > I suppose CNN means Cortical Neuron Network?

CNN == Convolutional Neural Network

> I tried initially to use traditional machine learning techniques for pattern > recognition but it really bothered me that the whole thing seems like a > black box so I decided to write a pattern recognition engine from scratch > without using any of the current machine learning techniques.

That...is not a good approach.

Don't get me wrong - learning this stuff is hard, and implementing it (on your own - that is, a completely from-scratch not-using-any-libraries neural network) is even more non-trivial. You need to know and understand linear algebra for this; knowing a bit of calculus (derivatives mainly) can also help, but isn't absolutely necessary.

Trying to build it yourself, while admirable, will likely only lead you down paths already traveled and found wanting (if you are lucky). Once you understand the basics of neural networks and other machine-learning tools (gradient descent, state vector machines, etc) - and have implemented them yourself - you'll have a foundation on which to build with tools like TensorFlow, Keras, and others, without them feeling like such "black boxes".

Remember: Abstraction is a good thing. If you are doing any kind of programming that isn't hand-assembly or plugboards - you are using an abstraction to the machine. One thing I have learned in listening to people like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun - is that even they rely and use those black-box abstractions, and don't have a "not-invented-here" attitude. There's nothing wrong with wanting to look under the hood for understanding, but don't let too much hubris get in the way of thinking that you can do it better without understanding what has come before.

You can take this advice or leave it - it's up to you of course; but if you want to have a better base on how all of this works, then my suggestion would be for you to gain an understanding first of linear algebra (just the basics - vectors, matrices, mathematical manipulation and calculation, etc) - <USER2> Academy or other resources can help there.

Then, go to Udacity, Coursera, and/or some of the other MOOC providers, and find a class or two on machine learning, and take them. Most will take (if seriously studying, and depending on existing work load) about 6-8 weeks - <USER3> you can usually go at your own pace (so shorter or longer learning terms are possible). I'm partial to Coursera's and Udacity's courses, mainly because in 2011 I took Andrew Ng's "ML Class" MOOC and Norvig/Thrun's "AI Class" \- from both of which Coursera and Udacity (respectively) were founded.

Later, in 2012, I took Udacity's CS373 course (it was titled differently than today's offering, but I highly recommend it regardless). Today, I am enrolled in and progressing through the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree (so I am a bit biased, I suppose).

The tough thing about learning this stuff on the internet, without going thru a well-known MOOC or other vetted source, is knowing what you're learning is valid to learn. There is a ton of information out there purporting to teach you about neural networks or other "AI" tools - and they are actually teaching out-of-date technologies and techniques. But without having a grounding in the long history of machine learning (and AI) as a field, you wouldn't know this. It can be very confusing. There have been some good postings here on HN that have given some details on good resources, so you might want to check those out. There's nothing wrong with learning historical methods (in fact, I encourage it - I believe that one can't really understand a subject until they understand the paths that were taken in the past - whether they led to failures or to success for the period). But you don't want to learn something that is actually sub-optimal for the task.

Finally a couple of other points: Do you know what MNIST or ImageNet is? If not, then you need to learn about datasets and where to get them. Also, for a real CNN, look into the history of character recognition using the MNIST dataset - eventually, you will find a guy named "Yan LeCun" \- who is one of the original people who led us down this whole CNN and Deep Learning path (along with plenty of other names).

There is so much out there (much more than I can summarize here) - you have the interest, I can see that. Take the time to properly learn this stuff, and you'll be rewarded with some interesting results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the the advice. It is very informative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately youtube has removed my video, twice. The first time I thought it was because of the music I used, the second time I have no idea why. If I were paranoid I'd think that I'm on the right track towards the path of artificial intelligence and some existing AI (like the one in Person of Interest) doesn't wan't me to publish this. :)

Edit: Never mind, it seems to be up now.</comment>


Get a TLS/HTTPS certificate using GSuite single sign-on - <AUTHOR> https://smallstep.com/blog/easily-curl-services-secured-by-https-tls.html <comment><USER2> I didn't find a quick answer when searching for the benefits of smallstep vs letsencrypt. What's your take?

<comment><USER3> My brief read led me to believe they're trying to bring the convenience of LetsEncrypt to private PKI.</comment></comment>


FSF awards: Matthew Garrett and Gnome Foundation's Outreach Program for Women - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-award-winners-announced

<comment><USER2> Go go mjg59! :D

<comment><USER3> CRSids never die.

<comment><USER4> I got in the habit of not using mine since some of my past employers' email schemes didn't allow numbers. :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well deserved! GOPW ftw!</comment>


Show HN: LibreOffice in AWS Lambda (Demo) - <AUTHOR> https://vladholubiev.com/serverless-libreoffice/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know this is kinda crazy, but nowadays people run in Lambda Google Chrome and Tensorflow. So maybe this can be a viable idea as well?

Sources on GitHub: [https://github.com/vladgolubev/serverless- libreoffice](https://github.com/vladgolubev/serverless-libreoffice) Post on Medium: [https://medium.com/@vladholubiev/how-to-run-libreoffice- in-a...](https://medium.com/@vladholubiev/how-to-run-libreoffice-in-aws- lambda-for-dirty-cheap-pdfs-at-scale-b2c6b3d069b4)</comment>


Seattle Startups: Personify selected as one of first seven at Fledge - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2012/07/30/fledge-class/ <comment><AUTHOR> Seattle takes the lead in social innovation</comment>


The Sophist and the Open-Source Baking Farce - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/09/mattson_open_cookie/print.html

<comment><USER2> I had to look up the word sophist, and I found this:

 _In modern usage, sophism, sophist, and sophistry are derogatory terms_

Yet another smear piece by The Register on Malcolm Gladwell. Not that I'm saying it's undeserved (or not) but the vitriol in this article is palpable.</comment>


Ask HN: Any paying NomadList users here? - <AUTHOR> I've been a digital nomad for over 3 years and I check out NomadList every now and then but never joined as a premium member.<p>There's a black Friday lifetime membership deal currently for $74 that I'm considering but I'd love to hear from actual users whether you think it's worth it and what value you get from your premium membership? <comment><USER2> As someone who has been on it on 4 years, I believe it is probably the most indispensable tool for any frequent traveller.

Being able to talk to people in realtime who are living in, or have been living in the places you are interested in visiting provides a value I haven't really seen elsewhere.

Ask a question on virtually any topic and you will get either an answer or direction on where to find an answer. Visas, budget travel, restaurants, relationships, cat appreciation, travel/tech gear... you name it.

Just a lot of genuinely funny and insightful people in the community that certainly help to make the nomad life feel less lonely.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just joined with a lifetime membership a few weeks ago (wish I had waited for Black Friday - didn't anticipate a deal), but I can say that already I have gotten a lot of value from the community and don't anticipate ever feeling bad about my purchase. If it's on sale, I say definitely go for it. The Slack channel in particular has been a great resource - I've gotten lots of advice on visas, travel plans, gear, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I joined a year back and started the digital nomad lifestyle (with a small family in tow) about 5 months ago. I find myself utilizing the service at least once a week if not more (researching potential destinations, getting tips from others on the slack channel and forums, etc.) I think it's a bargain if you are a digital nomad or are seriously considering becoming one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lifetime member. It's a great community and really great having a network of people to meetup with while travelling. There's often impromptu meetups organized on there in the popular nomad destinations like Bali or Chiang Mai. I've met a bunch of great people on their over the last two years.</comment>