Minimum Viable Hustle - <AUTHOR> http://patrickwoods.tumblr.com/post/35207924925/minimum-viable-hustle

<comment><USER2> I have a system: I assume that anyone who uses the word 'hustle' non- ironically lacks any form of 'hustle'.

It's an awful, awful word.

To make a point relevant to the article - what if the non-technical chap has deeply relevant domain knowledge and valuable contacts within the industry?

I can't say it bothers me enormously, but I do find the idea that all non- technical cofounders have to be wizards who magically hustle themselves into meetings with people who don't really want to meet them to be both funny and misguided

<comment><USER3> I guess the idea is that non-technical founders' role revolves around persuasion and negotiation. They typically handle the business end, which involves substantial networking, promotion, customer acquisition, etc. Knowing people works for a while, but once you've tapped out your social network, where do you turn?

I would argue that a founder with domain knowledge isn't 'non-technical'. I know traditionally that term refers to people who don't code, but if I was working on an earthquake detector, a seismologist would be a technical founder, even if they didn't code a thing. Same with mathematicians. Domain knowledge in non-science/maths areas is harder to divide, but I would say there's as much weight behind saying a non-technical founder focuses on business dev as saying a technical founder focuses on code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Business guys" are people who can make business happen, i.e. make sales, strike partnerships, raise financing, etc.

What is described in this article are neither "business guys" or founders but hapless/clueless "idea people" - of which the startup community attracts a lot since it's much better to say "I'm working on a tech startup" than to say "I'm unemployed".

As a general rule of business, avoiding clueless, unmotivated, wind-bag'ish people is a good rule - "business guys" or otherwise.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't agree more. What separates an "idea person" from a potential true entrepreneur, is that in order to find a technical co-founder they would begin doing everything else to make their product a reality. Things from having a detailed idea of how their product should work, to preparing mockups and wireframes, to writing website/app copy, etc that you can hand off to your developer and say "Build this"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with most of what Patrick is saying here.

One thing I'd add is that it's not just the non-technical founders job to do a great communicator that can get people to do things. A CTO needs to be able to do this to recruit a team and get them moving forward.

</comment><comment><USER7> Never be waiting around for something to happen.. That's what hustling is.</comment>


Ask HN: Any developer who transitioned from Tech to Quant Trading? - <AUTHOR> As a developer what did it take for you to transition from Technology to Quantitative trading, and how does it compare to your life working in Technology? <comment><USER2> Its bound to be extremely hard because though quants code and there should be many similarities with soft dev - its a different beast. Many scientist make the switch and run major firms, but someone like a front-dev making switch, would be interesting to see. More likely to be smth outside of soft dev role that got him in.

Quant crowd hangs on NuclearPhynance forum, but for what You are asking WallStreetOasis is the place.

But..

1\. Not really PhD, but You have to learn math somewhere.

2\. Start trading crypto Yourself.. there are so many exchanges giving You direct access for free.. fetch a market feed, reconstruct limit order book in real time, backtest some strategies, do deep learning models. They do the same.

3\. You have to be lucky, just like anywhere. There are lots of unsatisfied people in tech though it pays more than ever.

4\. No idea.

5\. Two years or so, but previous roles were quantitative.

I am trying to make transition myself, let me know if You need more info..

www.vladovukovic.com

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you suggest I read up on in quantitative finance and mathematics to get started with algorithmic trading.

My background: I have a computer science graduate with about 5 years of experience building very high throughput consumer facing applications as a backend developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can do it by yourself, if you create any algo that is able to perform above 50% hit, you can get infinitely rich. Why work for a company if you can do it? Or why would a company that does it would exist if somebody solo can do this?

I'm a fundamentalist, so I hardly believe anybody can reliably make money doing this. Maybe with HFT or insider information, which both are fields I don't really wanna compete in, as they both feels like cheating to me(and the second, illegal).

If anybody could reliably make money doing trades of any kind, which doesn't either abuse insider information or latency of systems, they could as well predict the future, the lotto ticket etc.

The people I think work on this field are working for big companies and investing other people's money, which generally got a huge amount and by themselves can sort of try to manipulate the market, usually have a taste of inside information and generally get outperformed in the long term by somebody that just reads balance sheets.

But this is a comment from an outsider, which has been making constantly more gains than S&P(by a tight margin, dunno if this will last, maybe I'll just regress towards the mean) for a decade, just checking balances sometimes. I just invest in companies which are well managed, by my criteria, while I work fulltime as a software dev.

Just try to imagine how many companies with open capital exists, and how bad management can be, if you could find the good management in good markets, also try to understand more how the government will influence it, you could create much more powerful methods.

I've done a fair of trading though, mostly flipping IPO's, but I don't believe somebody can make money doing trades.

</comment><comment><USER4> By Quantitative Trading, you mean full-time trading, right? Like buying and selling stocks. I don't think this designation requires knowledge of algorithms.

<comment><AUTHOR> By quantitative trading I refer to people who do algorithmic trading for a living.

People from tech generally end up becoming quantitative developers(implement trading strategies other people make),and some go even further and make their own trading strategies(which it what traditional quants do. Correct me if I am wrong here).

I would like to know experiences of people who transitioned this field from pure technology. Some key points are:

1\. What did you have to learn as a experienced developer to break into this field(do really NEED a Phd in Mathematics or Finance?!?!) 2\. Whats the work like? 3\. Does it pay as much as it hyped to be? 4\. How does it compare to your life back in Tech? 5\. How long after working in tech did you make a switch?</comment></comment>


Proposal to fix NYC's subway and broader transit system expected to cost $19B - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/nyregion/nyc-subway-byford-proposal.html <comment><USER2> It's a shame that the focus is always on the capital outlay and not on the cost benefit potential to be realized (both economic and non-economic). This sort of spending should always be seen as an investment.

For instance, modern/improved signaling and train control technology will allow you to run rolling stock at greater speeds with more frequency, requiring less on-track maintenance. In other systems, undergoing recent upgrades (for example) you can run a train every 3 minutes as opposed to 6. As a commuter knowing you only have to wait a max (n)minutes as opposed to max 2(n) can be the difference between deciding to take a train or using some other means of transport, especially if you can shave a few minutes off your commute as well.

It gives the operators much more control over how they design services and run their business. It's a key enabler.

<comment><USER3> > It's a shame that the focus is always on the capital outlay and not on the > cost benefit potential to be realized (both economic and non-economic). This > sort of spending should always be seen as an investment.

Every major city hires economists, often from universities, to do cost/benefit analysis of major capital projects. To say the focus is always on cost is nonsense. I've had to do cost-benefit analysis work before on earmarks. One of my professors did cost/benefit in Nashville for bringing the Titans to town in the late 90s. He recommended against it, in fact I think most economists on the board did...but they ignored it because cost is more often ignored or understated (by politicians,) contrary to your post. Look at the "big dig" in Boston for instance, or the California high speed rail, both exploded over 5x their expected budget.

Those are just examples, there are many others. I am willing to bet this number is a low ball, especially when contractors, regulators, etc get involved.

<comment><USER2> >Every major city hires economists, often from universities, to do cost/benefit analysis of major capital projects.

To be clear I was referring to how the greater public are informed on such matters by the media / politicians.

I'm well aware of the projects you mention. I'm a consultant on capital program / project governance but not sure I understand the relevance, I wasn't really talking about the validity of estimates at any stage, just the focus on them.

<comment><USER4> If you're interested in cost benefit analysis of large public projects, Megaprojects and Risk is a must-read.

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

<comment><USER2> Yes, a fantastic read.

If you're interested in how we can avoid this happening, I can't talk to the US, but in other jurisdictions governments and authorities (and some private sector giants) are slowly adopting more mature governance approaches. Implementing a Benefits Realization methodology [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_realisation_managemen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_realisation_management)] in their Portfolio for instance, Alliance contracting procurement models and Integrated Project Delivery to more fairly apportion risk and accountability. I'm cautiously optimistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a developer in the Midwest and my team participated in the signaling contest for the MTA Genius Challenge[1]. I handled gathering the raw data from our hardware and generating visualizations for testing, troubleshooting, and eventually presentation. Using a variety of hardware (ranging hardware on the train and through the subway tunnel, Ulta-wideband[2] transmitters for sending data, ect), we developed a Communications-based train control[3] system that would allow for moving block signaling[4].

It was a fascinating few months of problem solving and troubleshooting. I have fond memories of sitting at a folding table on the 7th Ave platform during a cold week in January.

That said, I don't envy those still working on this project. There are so many problem -- old signaling hardware that breaks down frequently and has to be manufactured by the MTA because no one produces the parts anymore, slower train speeds, track fires, train malfunctions, passenger-related delays... the list goes on and on. I hope they're able work it all out because I really enjoyed riding and working on the subways, even if only for a couple of months.

1 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMjSi0ftLjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMjSi0ftLjA)

2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra- wideband](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband)

3 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications- based_train_con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications- based_train_control)

4 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_block](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_block)

<comment><USER6> why not just use the same signals as the hong kong metro? which is leagues better. This seems like a solved problem.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand why transit agencies seem to reinvent the wheel when it comes to signalling, Caltrain spent $250M+ on a custom CBOSS PTC signalling system.... which I think they recently abandoned in favor of a standard signaling system.

<comment><USER8> The precursor agencies and corporations in New York developed signalling systems that were cutting edge in the '30s, since there weren't a lot of multinational signalling suppliers back then, nor were there a lot of metro systems.

The current situation is what happens when you don't fund a replacement for several decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> $19B for a new signaling system? A true "sweeping overhall" will include a hell of a lot more than that. There was a times article a few weeks ago that sketched out a much more ambitious overhall, and pegged the price at $100B, which still sounded low to me.

I'm a subway commuter, I really love the subway system, and my emotions want to invest in it. And we should plan big. I think the greater NYC area could double or triple in population as the world grows and be more stimulating and productive than it's ever been. I guess my honest question is whether the subways are a prerequisite for that outcome, or if more WeWorks, satellite offices, telecommuting and suburban financial centers are more sane.

<comment><USER10> Genuine question - how could it possibly cost $100B to upgrade a "signalling system"?

<comment><USER11> It shouldn't cost that much, but signalling is surprisingly expensive because pre-computerised signalling systems rely on large amounts of heavy equipment installed trackside, and trains can't run without coherent signalling. So changing it can only be done in small pieces, small parts at a time, yet labour and equipment must be constantly available. For this reason the productivity of railway workers is quite low but unavoidably so; they spend most of their time just waiting for tracks to clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> By contrast, the new Chuo Shinkansen connecting Tokyo and Nagoya, which is 286km maglev line, costs 46 billion U.S. dollars.

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

<comment><USER13> A new above ground track comes nowhere near the cost of updating a subway system below an extremely dense metropolis that will attempt to keep running 24/7/365?

Not much of a shocker there. That's a true apples to oranges.

It is true that corruption has resulted in exorbitant cost over runs by the MTA but I think this is a silly comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Works out to ~$2,111 per resident. About the same cost as a few years of car insurance. That's including babies and stuff though, I'm not sure what it works out to distributed among the regular ridership (which would also include non-resident commuters).

<comment><USER15> <2 years of car insurance in NYC

[https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/cheapest-car- insur...](https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/cheapest-car-insurance-in- new-york-ny/)

But that number is only valid if the project delivers. Big if.

<comment><USER16> Unrelated to the original article, but I find it unusual that young drivers have cheaper insurance. In the UK younger people often pay over 2x more than drivers in their 30s or 40s, mainly due to the 18-25 demographic having high rates of reckless driving.

<comment><USER17> From the link: "Young drivers tend to need less coverage than motorists with families or greater savings to protect, a factor that we included in our analysis."

They are literally correcting for the fact that young driver's drive cheaper cars less distance. It's definitely true in the US that car insurance is more expensive for younger drivers when all other aspects are held fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yeah, expected to "cost" $19B, which means about $7B will actually be spent on improving the infrastructure; while the rest will be back-channeled to the coffers of various construction company executives, politicians, middlemen, gangsters, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> About 1.5 aircraft carriers or 3 bay bridge eastern span replacements. I have various costs in my head to conceptualize how much things cost in terms of what we could've bought. The last aircraft carrier the US bought cost about $13 billion. The bay bridge eastern span cost 6.4 billion.

For smaller costs a good one is submarines: about $2.4 billion.

I did the math once and the war in Iraq directly cost about the replacement value of the nyc subway but can't recall the figures well.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure how the military devices help understand those numbers much. Presumably, the idea is to take something whose impact is large and _intuitively understood_ and identify it with the price, so that other things which are nonintuitive with similarly large prices can be understood. (My preferred version of this is "$1M is about the life's work of a median American", in the sense of being the median salary over a lifetime minus what a human needs to survive. $1M is a lot of money, but I can kind of imagine what a man can build in his life.)

But military devices seem like things whose value is very _unintuitive_. (I've made similar criticism of people who say "oh, $6B? That's just three B2 bombers.") Obviously, we have no real conception of how complicated and expensive such devices are to build. But more importantly, few of us have a good grasp of the value to world stability delivered by rarely-used weapons that play a mostly deterrent role.

<comment><USER19> Actually military figures are fine for this expenditure because they are very large per unit, so easy to conceptualize in small integers. It doesn't matter if you can think about how complicated they are to build or their deterrent role or whatever. Point is you can imagine an aircraft carrier. This is about as expensive as 1.5 aircraft carriers or three bay bridge replacements.

<comment><USER17> If you aren't bothering with an interpretation in terms of value, and are just using the military device as a physical object you can visualize, why not just use "stack of 10 billion dollar bills" as a unit? Then you can think of the subway upgrade as two of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Should we multiply that number by six to be consistent with other infrastructure cost overruns?

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/03/letter-bay-bridge- cos...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/03/letter-bay-bridge-cost-overrun- same-ratio-as-bostons-big-dig/)

<comment><USER21> Don't account for cost overruns, you only make it worse. See Hofstadter's law: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can imagine a world in which basically all of Manhattan's streets are open only to autonomous vehicles. I wonder what sorts of redesigns we would do if all trips were effectively one-way and most cars were the size of a Smart fortwo.

I think we're many years and a couple trillion in infrastructure retooling from this reality. But when my infant daughter is my age, I think this is what NYC will be like, assuming society as we know it keeps progressing, while diffusing the many potential catastrophes we've set up for ourselves.

<comment><USER23> I think that bicycles and other human powered (also with electric assist) vehicles or small electric vehicles like scooters are the best short term future we can ask for. And working public transport - who cares if it's autonomous out not. There are already places that work with these.

I find it strange that you mention Smart Fortwo, which is not particularly small when one compares it to VW Golf for example. Toyota IQ would be better example, it's not much bigger than Fortwo, but has four seats.

<comment><USER22> It was just the smallest car I could think of. Hmm, yeah, the idea of bike and scooter vehicles makes some sense, although you would lose the shelter from the elements, the ability to travel without your eyes on the road, and the ability to travel in groups. So both options are probably needed, although right of ways will be less efficient if heavily shared by autonomous vehicles and human-powered transport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Andy Byford failed in fixing Toronto's transit problems although I don't think it was his fault and more likely a dysfunctional city council and an uncompromising transit union. Hopefully, he can help NYC fix their problems.

I just got back from Tokyo. What an incredible network of trains/subways. I know every city has its own challenges but if there are any questions, ask the Japanese because they seem to have figured it all out. Moving 10 million people a day in Tokyo is a testament to their know-how.

<comment><USER25> There's lesson to be learned everywhere, including Tokyo. But it's hardly a perfect system. The main trains and stations are absurdly busy (to a degree where it won't work in the US). Signage is awful, and many station are confusing.

If you're looking to build something at the same scale of Tokyo (in terms of KMs of track, and daily ridership) I think you need to do better. The system feels like it's bursting at the seams.

On a smaller scale, Taipei's subway is pretty damn impressive. Hong Kong's octopus and airport express are still gold standards in payment and airport link. Finally, in many way's Shanghai takes the cake, in large part because of how it went from nothing to this massive system (largest by distance, I believe), in a relatively short time. I believe Shanghai has roughly the same daily ridership as Tokyo and, although it's also insane at peak hour, it's better than the worst of the Yamanote line.

<comment><USER7> _There 's lesson to be learned everywhere, including Tokyo. But it's hardly a perfect system. The main trains and stations are absurdly busy (to a degree where it won't work in the US). Signage is awful, and many station are confusing._

It's hard to make the case that an absurdly busy transit system is the sign of a transit system that needs improvement. The stations can be confusing at first (especially to a foreigner), but part of that is that the stations are _huge_... though after a few trips it's much more navigable.

The thing that I like best about the Tokyo transit system (and Japanese transit in general) is that it's so punctual and reliable. In the USA (SF Bay Area) I need to take a train scheduled to reach my destination at least 30 minutes before I need to be there to account for inevitable delays. And in the off hours, trains may only run every 30 or 60 minutes, meaning that I might be padding my schedule up to 90 minutes to make sure I get there on time. While in Tokyo, trains arrive almost to the second of their scheduled time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Honestly $19B doesn't sound so bad considering in Boston we can't even build a 3 mile above ground extension to the Green Line for less than $2 Billion.

<comment><USER27> Given that keeping weed illegal is costing New York $2-3 billion per year, it's really not that bad.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure if this estimate includes police and judicial resources as well as missed tax revenues, but it should

<comment><USER27> It does. The New York comptroller estimates that tax revenue alone would be ~1.3B per year. I couldn't find a good estimate on the judicial costs though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> At that price… I've just been watching a video about Launch Loops, and a well- costed design for one of those with existing tech costs only $2bn, which implies it would be nearly ten times cheaper to make a 2,000km long, 80km tall maglev train fling you all the way around the planet (wonder how hard it is to aim for the right spot on the way down?) than to do public transport right in what ought to be a perfect location. From what I remember when I visited, possibly also faster.

<comment><USER30> > ought to be a perfect location

What about NYC makes it the perfect location?

<comment><USER29> It's a densely populated city. Lots of people using the same transport routes, all of which are close enough in one place to where they live and to where they work at another that the doors at each end can be pedestrian rather than motor.

Can't do that when the population is spread out. (Or the workplaces, but IDK if that happens).

<comment><USER31> It's a perfect location to have public transit, but it's an absolutely terrible place to build it because you would have to disrupt so much existing infrastructure and millions of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If this is a problem that money can still fix its worth every penny.

</comment><comment><USER33> A related read:

Andy Byford, who made a name for himself running transport systems in London, Sydney and Toronto, is now in charge of turning around New York's Subway.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-43561378](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43561378)

<comment><USER11> Having read the article, the headline seems like exaggeration. He didn't run a transport system in London. He was a station manager. And he was the COO in Sydney, not the CEO.

Still - that doesn't mean he'll do a bad job. He has worked his way up and spent his whole life working in public transport. And some fresh outside thinking might be what the MTA needs.

<comment><USER34> "station manager" initially but he then ran the Kings Cross + St Pancras group (a pair of large "terminus" stations next to each other in central London plus a single huge underground interchange to connect them both to six different "tube" lines).

It's not New York Subway, but it's already a large sprawling system just for those two stations. In one way it's more complicated than the New York Subway - St Pancras station needs immigration and customs control because it's effectively a border with France. This is definitely a management job, taking personal control over everything, as a station master might, just isn't possible.

<comment><USER35> London Underground, where Byford worked, does not control the surface stations at King's Cross and St. Pancras, so immigration and customs control wouldn't be part of his job. Still, King's Cross St. Pancras London Underground station alone is one of the most complex in the London Underground system, with six lines, three ticket halls, and 95 million entries and exits per year.

<comment><USER34> Aha, yes I see. So that's a smaller job than I thought. Thanks.

<comment><USER35> Yes. But he had other jobs with increasing responsibility in London up to being operations director for a passenger railway before moving to Sydney. I think people are omitting that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> $19 billion for a train signaling system and 50 elevators seems outrageously expensive.

There are less than 1,000 trains in the entire system and their movements are highly constrained. A WiFi based system could both easily communicate with and locate (WPS) each train. Modeling the entire system in real-time seems doable. Lastly there would need a UI for the driver (or eliminate the driver completely) and various hardware interconnections.

The core of the system would appear to be a WiFi network, servers, tables and custom interconnects to train controls, trip stops, switches, etc. Sure it has to be incredibly reliable but $19 billion?!

Seems like a great business opportunity.

<comment><USER37> I don't know why you got downvoted.

I've toyed with the idea of doing a popular subway improvement project where we'd make battery-powered devices (arduino, rpi, whatever -- the biggest cost irl would be labor) to plant on subway cars and stations for tracking trains. A proof of concept could be done with just a few tens of such devices. They'd use the subway wifi to transmit train locations.

Of course, there are complications. There's no such thing as a head train car -- these things get mixed and matched. So ensuring that every train has such a device might mean ensuring that every car has one or that every train gets a car that has one, and this seems difficult. But even so, this could cost just in the millions done right.

<comment><USER38> Obviously the price tag for the NY system is crazy, but honestly so is what you guys are proposing... It's almost completely impossible to certify a safety critical system with WiFi and Arduino/RPi. This kind of engineering is a whole different ball game, and for good reason (train crashes and derailments are really not pretty).

For an informational system (i.e. telling passengers how long trains are away or for statistics gathering), sure. You could absolutely do that like you say. But as soon as it involves controlling the train or anything to do with signalling, it just can't be done like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Will the new signals work when all the track is underwater, I wonder.

</comment><comment><USER40> A self driving car can't beat the subway, spend the money NYC.

</comment><comment><USER41> Fta: Signal system? In 2018 why is the conductor doing anything but pressing a "leave station" button? Who is driving the requirements for this?

<comment><USER42> MTA union, it's an extremely powerful union. The L line for example is set up to be fully automated, but they are still required to have staff for the train.

<comment><USER43> The unions aren't the main reason, it's that the signal system in the NYC subway is decades old and won't allow automated trains. It needs to be upgraded, but that costs money that so far no one has been willing to spend.

From what I understand, the L train is one of few that has the necessary upgrades, primarily because it doesn't really intersect with other lines, which makes it a lot easier to deploy. If I recall, the L functions with only one conductor when the other lines use two. I agree that the union could be more progressive and embrace change... but the big problem is money, and consequently, state politics.

<comment><USER44> The L would function with no conductors, but it requires two per train to press a "keep the union happy" button every 30 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Hopefully they do the job right. My problem with construction is that everyone takes short cuts except where things are inspected (and even then...).

</comment><comment><USER46> How much would it cost to pay a bunch of New Yorkers to move to small towns in the midwest where it's not so crowded? Kidding, I'm kidding.

</comment><comment><USER47> To put this into perspective this is about $2k/New Yorker. Not bad if you think about the cost of car ownership.

</comment><comment><USER48> That is a pretty good deal.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's time for the MTA to release an ICO.

<comment><USER50> Jokes aside, the ability to buy rides with the currency would give it more real world value than most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> _Just_ the same price with a few-megabytes mobile messaging app. I wonder, how much does the app weigh...</comment>


Ask HN: How do you backup your computer? - <AUTHOR> How do you backup your computer? I was wondering whether to go with cloud services like BackBlaze or to use some software to periodically sync data with external drives. I would love to know what people are using! <comment><USER2> Additional box with WD Red drives in Linux RAID5 software raid configuration.

Rsnapshot ([https://rsnapshot.org/](https://rsnapshot.org/)), run via cron, nightly, pulling backups from the other machines that need backing up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Never heard of Rsnapshot before. Thanks for bringing it up, I will definitely check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At the office, we tend to have frequently scheduled sync of any important data from personal devices to a server, and other important data is centrally hosted on servers anyway. Servers have RAID set up. So far none of that is really a true back-up, but it gives us some resilience against immediate hardware failure.

The true back-up is dailies (or on demand if appropriate) from the server to an off-site backup service. All data already encrypted on our side before it leaves the building. We take some measures to ensure consistent snapshots, including for tricky applications like databases and source control repositories where a filesystem-level snapshot may be insufficiently robust.

</comment><comment><USER4> Crashplan for Small Business. Not the cheapest, but with the amount of backup data I have it's roughly as expensive as Wasabi with some backup program (e.g. Cloudberry), and in my experience Crashplan just works. I transitioned from Crashplan Home to Crashplan for Small Business and was able to keep my archive.

IMHO, the most important thing about backup is that it always backs up everything. Too many applications and setups fail silently.

</comment><comment><USER5> Auto-backup alternatively to two Time Machine disks. Off-site backup using Crashplan for a portion of content critical. Manual regular cold storage to S3 Glacier.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Dropbox to sync select directories that are important. So far it is working well for me because there is almost zero maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER7> Time Machine + Backblaze on Mac.

File History + Backblaze on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER8> BackBlaze - hands down!</comment>


JWZ's DNA Lounge now accepting donations on patreon - <AUTHOR> https://www.patreon.com/dnalounge <comment><USER2> I'm really on the fence about this one. I think the DNA Lounge is a great venue, have always been impressed by the creativity of their events (for example, the night(s) he turned DNA into Cyberdelia, the club from "Hackers"), enjoy reading jwz's blog posts, and of course would really like to see the place stick around. As a developer, I also appreciate that they have one of the few night club websites around that's actually pleasant to use; it's trivial to find any event on their calendar, and their ticket checkout process is hassle free.

All of that said, I'm still having a bit of trouble justifying the jump up to giving the place free money. I already feel like I'm being pretty generous with our current arrangement: they provide a venue, and I pay for too many $12 drinks and $7 slices of pizza on top of whatever it cost to get in the door.

Its made a bit worse even by what seems to be an ideological stand that a Patreon patron should get nothing in return (except DNA's continued existence). At least Borderlands put your name on a wall and invited you to a few members only nights.

I'll have to think about it a little more, but so far I'm leaning towards just trying to patronize the club as much as possible. Did anyone else take the plunge?

</comment><comment><USER3> Not surprising. I stopped by one evening to see what it was "wow, THE DNA lounge, started by that guy!" When I showed up the place was empty, looked like the music part of building hadn't been used in a while, and some stoned employees making pizza. Pizza was okay, but worth keeping around? meh.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of great events and talks there. JWZ frequently allows the EFF to use the space. DNA is more than just a dance club, it's an important community space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Post with more details on the financial situation: [https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html](https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html)

It's quite candid and interesting to read. For those of you that don't know jwz, you may know:

\- He was one of the first employees at Netscape and came up with the name Mozilla

\- He maintains XScreenSaver

\- jwz's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

\- Originally maintained XEmacs.

<comment><USER6> Clicking the link leads to some balls.

If he really doesn't want his stuff to be seen, why is it being posted here on this site? There are way too many interesting things made by people who want them to be seen for me to waste my time fighting someone to see the stuff they've made.

<comment><USER5> Ah yeah, forgot about that, sorry. jwz really does not like hn at all. He's clearly a really smart guy, and all of us on hn benefit from what he's done. But at the same time I wish he'd take maciej's approach to criticizing the bad parts of HN (with snarky tweets and great writing, two things HN loves) as opposed to a redirect to a picture of testicles.

Are there a lot of "finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers" here? Yeah. But this is also one of a few places on the open Internet where there are a lot of really interesting, really smart people in one place, and rejecting it wholesale would be sad.

<comment><USER7> I suspect he set up the redirection before HN was opened up beyond the ycombinator set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From [https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html](https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html) (copy and paste link into address bar):

> I know that with this level of transparency and vulnerability I'm setting > myself up for a bunch of wisecracks from people who are all too eager to > tell me what I did wrong and how they totally would have done it > differently, having created nothing of lasting value themselves. How this > situation [could have been avoided] or that was "obvious" [that it would > happen]. Haters gonna hate, I know how it goes.

I really hope this will work out for the proprietor. They're asking for $110,000 recurring donation _per month_ to meet monthly payroll, San Fransisco rent, utilities and unpaid bills (without offering a tangible reward).

While that amount of money ($1.32 million annually) arguably could be better spent on more worthy causes, it will be incredible if the recurring donation business model turns out to successfully fund relatively niche content of this magnitude.

<comment><USER9> Their Patreon goal is $8000 per month. The blog post indicates they are losing $380,000 a year. It's hard to know where you're pulling those numbers from?

<comment><USER8> There are multiple goals on the featured Patreon page. The arrows on the goals box allow scrolling

> $8,000/month -- You paid one month's liability insurance!

> $30,000/month -- DNA Lounge is in the black!

> $50,000/month -- You paid one month's rent and utilities!

> $65,000/month -- If we hit this per month, then in 12 months, not only will > we be in the black, but also you will have paid off all of our unpaid bills > and debts so that jwz doesn't have to!

> $110,000/month -- You paid one month's payroll and payroll taxes!

<comment><USER9> Thanks. I'm pretty sure if they make it work, it won't be through Patreon, but I guess you never know...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> NB: HackerNews-referred requests to JWZ's sites will be redirected to a picture of a man's balls.

Copy and paste all URLs that might be his.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe they should instead consider accepting credit cards, and otherwise being a less customer-hostile venue.</comment>


Show HN: clipboard.com, the best way to save anything online - <AUTHOR>

We are longtime members of HN and this is our only submission requesting feedback from the HN community on our product, Clipboard which we have been developing for the past year. Clipboard is a service to save anything online using a bookmarklet or browser extension (think Dropbox for content on the web). Clipboard is built using open source technologies, including Riak, Redis, NGINX, Node.js, and jQuery.  One of our core differentiators is how we preserve the visual look and functionality of the original source, which is evident in the sample clips from github here: clipboard.com/site/github.com and hacker news here: clipboard.com/site/news.ycombinator.com<p>We are still in private beta but we'd love your feedback. Visitors from HN can access and register on our site directly at clipboard.com/register?token=hn. You can also reach us via email at email@example.com. <comment><USER2> Very slick setup && service! My one question: are there any safe-guards against people sharing sensitive information hidden in the html, e.g. user- auth tokens (like the ones you can find in HackerNews up-vote links: [http://clipboard.com/clip/LQjwmHJQNjxVAYYPgQzmbPAYrMjpkkHdOT...](http://clipboard.com/clip/LQjwmHJQNjxVAYYPgQzmbPAYrMjpkkHdOT5e))? Is this even a practical security concern?

</comment><comment><USER3> For the lazy.

<https://clipboard.com/>

<http://clipboard.com/site/news.ycombinator.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> How much did you pay for the domain, and how was it acquired?

<comment><USER5> Clipboard seems to be what Gary Flake left Microsoft for. If he didn't happen to own the domain already, I'm sure he had the resources to acquire it.

<comment><USER6> I bought it around January of 2011, when I knew I was going to move forward with the concept. It seems kind of tacky to share the amount, but it cost about 5-10x less than what most people guess, as the previous owner was extremely reasonable.

<comment><USER4> What a silly response. It's not a tacky question, and you just don't want to say for understandably selfish reasons.

The rest of the world would still like the data point.

<comment><USER7> No one has an obligation to tell you about their private financial transactions because you want a "data point."

<comment><USER8> Obviously there's no obligation. It was just a smug move to decline to share the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is cool!I really like the clipping interface. I tried everynote before a while back and it didn't feel as good.

Just a side thing, you sent me two emails: An email confirmation and a Welcome To Clipboard email. Would it be possible to join the two together, or forgo the latter? I'm just tired of getting so much email.

It looks really good. You seem to have the potential for the pinterest/delicious tagging stuff, but I don't know anything about that stuff. Another rant: when you delete a clip, it just deletes and displays the empty page, would be better if you went back to Home.

I wish you guys luck!

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the compliment and finding a good bug (deleting from a clip page). I don't know why we didn't fix that sooner. Already rolled out a fix.

Regarding the welcome email and the confirmation email, we saw a hacker news post that shared we'd have better success when the confirmation email had a clear and actionable subject. [http://clipboard.com/clip/LQiJMrYD7dhXX8DWhgOoKa8A2PHm_0fHaw...](http://clipboard.com/clip/LQiJMrYD7dhXX8DWhgOoKa8A2PHm_0fHawLe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure if you guys are still reading this thread, but I've got an extensive collection (3k+ images) that I've already stored up on Lookwork, in addition to hundreds of posts on Snip.it.

Clipboard finally looks like an end-all be-all for these types of services, but my problem with getting involved in yet another curation site is that I have these thousands of posts with their own tags already. Will there be any future efforts to allow the mass-upload / transfer of this content? I'd love to use the site but I can't pull myself away from two other dedicated services I've put years of effort into.

Edit: Actually, upon populating my feed and checking out the public posts, I'm not sure how this is any different from Snip.it and how the content is any better than the regurgitation on Pinterest or Piccsy. Also the layout is really busy and turned me away quite quickly.

Snip.it's primary feed is at least dictated by staff members who have gone through and vetted that the user's posts are substantial enough to warrant showing them on the front page as a means of proving quality. Much like I told the founders in the Piccsy thread, I think it is hard to launch a service like this when so many exist and your content looks the same and is equally unfulfilling. Piccsy's response was that users would do the legwork to enhance their experience, and my retort was that users don't want to bother doing all of this extra work when tomorrow another site like this will launch with higher quality content and a better layout. Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER12> I think that it's a very nicely formatted product. You've done some really interesting things with laying out the content. That said, I have a few issues:

Mobile - I often consume this kind of "clippable" content on a mobile device. It's limited in usefulness since it's just a browser extension (which doesn't exist on my Android)

Clipping UI - It can be frustrating to try and clip just the parts of a page that i want. The clipping box moves around seemingly randomly. I'd expect it to work similar to how a screenshot tool works, (a rectangular square on the screen) but it appears to be scanning for parts of the web page and then offering those parts as suggestions. This makes it difficult to just clip what I want.

Readability - On the "pinterest" board view (sorry - that's how I think of it) - the text is dramatically shrunk, and the headlines are often clipped. So I've got no idea what some of the clipped articles are about, unless I click them.

If there was a way to summarize the text instead of showing a thumbnail of the whole thing, it might be more useful. That technique (thumbnails) seems to work well on pics, but not on text oriented clips.

When I do click them, they appear in a lightbox view. The URL doesn't change unless I click through again to another view. It'd be good to have a linkable URL in lightbox views so I could share easier.

Nice work though, good luck with it. Also, I would love to hear more about developing your site in NodeJS .

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi tarr,

Mobile - we've recognized the need for a mobile app so it's on the future roadmap

Clipping UI - we have heard mostly positive feedback on the rectangular clipping box. You could also use your mouse wheel to select desired portion of the page to clip. Of course, this feature is not very discoverable (yet) but it does make it very easy to clip.

Your points on enhancing readability for text clips and light box are spot on. We have heard similar feedback in usability study and we will see what we can do to address it while maintaining overall consistency and design of our product.

Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A bit of feedback - the first thing I see is a message saying "you need to create your account", which put me off. It would be nice if I could save a few things immediately with an auto-generated temporary account, accompanied by a "sign-up to keep what you've saved" message. Otherwise, it's difficult to know whether it's a service I'd find useful.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't agree more! Here's my feedback:

If I see a big page that tells me "first things first - you need to create your account" before I even know what this site is, you lost me. The next website is just a click away, or in this case, the closing of a tab away.

I've also tried the <http://clipboard.com/site/news.ycombinator.com> link another HN'er posted here, and I get an empty page. Oh, right, that must be because I'm using NoScript, but it would be nice if you had some kind of fall- back for such a case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is this notable? Not trolling, serious question. Whom do you see using this and why would they not use existing alternatives?

<comment><USER16> What do you see as existing alternatives? I can say, there are Instapaper and Pinterest, for example, but they both differ from this one.

<comment><USER17> Pocket (formerly Read It Later)

You need an ipad client, thats where a lot of content consumption happens, especially long form.

One feature which i really like about Pocket, is it saves a parsed copy locally on the ipad.

So i can "save"/ clip a bunch of links/articles, i want to read & then i can read them later, even when i dont have internet access (e.g. on a tarin/metro)

Very impressed with the product. All the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you tuxguy. We currently don't have apps for iPhone and iPad but your feedback is certainly useful and we will consider it for our future product roadmap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pretty cool concept. I love the flowing endless canvas on the public page, it's what I wish Reddit and HN had. If clipboard.com fails, you could always pivot and pitch that component as a SaaS for aggregators and blogs, or something.

Some UX suggestions: I sign up, and I said I wanted to follow music, programming, and tech, but I get to the Home page and I don't see any way to see others' content based on that subscription. Sure, I haven't clipped anything yet, but you already have the content at Public, so why not show me what you can do right away? Also, it's unclear that I need to click the Visit button to visit a post. Think of Reddit Enhancement Suite: it shows inline pictures, but if you click anywhere on the picture or on the link itself, it takes you to the original source. Here, clicking the picture does nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both are good UX suggestions and we will consider them. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Striking resemblance to Slash7's Charm logo: <http://charmhq.com/> ?

<comment><USER6> We worked with the awesome Jackson Fish Market for the logo about a year ago. Someone pointed out the Charm logo to me later on, and I thought it was best to just live-and-let-live, since the two services have no similarity. I know that we came up with logo independently, and I can only assume that given their reputation that they came up with it independently as well. So it goes; stuff happens; you move on.

That said, I like our logo and I think it makes sense in that the union of the heart and paperclip strongly relates to the act of saving. But I don't quite get the Charm logo; for me, it doesn't really connect to what I understand their product to be. In any case, it's all good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been using clipboard in the beta for a while now, and there is a lot I like. I have a few people I work with who also use it, and my biggest piece of feedback is that while it is very handy for me and for creating "boards" of things I can show someone, I still don't feel like I know how to use it in a team or company setting. We end up clipping similar things or tagging almost- but-not-quite the same way, and in the end I don't have a way to coordinate across accounts on a team.

All that being said, I love sharing design samples with Clipboard when I am kicking off a project with a customer. It helps us scan the landscape and discuss the early plan. So it is useful for work, but I'd love if there was an easier way to collaborate. Or are there features I should be using differently?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jenn, today, you can share and collaborate on your private or public clips with your friends by typing "@" in the annotation box and completing on their username. The shared clips will then appear in the "Shared" tab for both of you. I agree with your feedback overall. We do intend to make group collaboration easier and intuitive in the upcoming product roadmap. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER17> This was not clear to me.

@ followed by their fb &/ twitter username ?

OR their clipboard username ?

<comment><AUTHOR> their clipboard username.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the concept and that there's depth behind the glitz. Hopefully users will progress along the path from savers (useful initially in its own right as a bookmarking service) to sharers (more useful as more users join).

Here are some observations on sign-up and initial use:

Sign-up: Feedback for good field input shows check mark with FF 12 but missing font square for IE 8 and Chrome 21 dev.

Sign-up: Too soon to ask me to access my social accounts. We just met. No trust established. At least it's optional, though.

Sign-up: Bookmarklet installation guidance is slick.

Operation: Clipping via bookmark bar works very well. I like the subpage selection interface.

I'll have to play more to appreciate it all but wanted to get an initial reaction out for you. Nice job.

<comment><USER22> What operating system were you using when you couldn't see the check mark? Were you on a native Windows OS or inside a VM?

Also, glad you liked the bookmarklet installation nags. :)

<comment><USER21> Native Windows XP for all three browsers mentioned (which I have to pull up all too frequently during dev myself, unfortunately).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nothing happens when I click the "Request an Invitation" button.

Edit: There it goes, but it took a few seconds. Also, when I mashed the button four times, four "Email Address" boxes popped up: <http://i.imgur.com/Y1s9q.png> At least give me some indication that something's happening if you must delay like that.

Edit 2: Same thing happens when I "Submit" my email address, again with no indication that you got my address except for an unfriendly "Invitation already requested for....." message.

I'm on Luakit (which is just webkit, like chrome)

<comment><AUTHOR> looking into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is excellent, I particularly enjoyed the interactive bookmarklet installation - simple, but really powerful!

This idea (or similar concept) was actually proposed to me my brother a few years ago, looks like you've executed it really well. I probably should have listened to him at the time!

One bug/missing feature: You don't seem to preserve custom fonts in the clippings - which means the formatting isn't quite preserved either.

Eg. Compare the full site, to the clips, at <http://clipboard.com/home/openrent.co.uk>.

</comment><comment><USER25> UI note -- it's annoying to have the annotation box at the very bottom of the page preview popup. Often, I will try to clip only the top potion of a page, however, due to the div structure, I will end up with a really long clip. This means item view is relatively useless at it involves too much scrolling. However, in tile view, I can't edit the keywords. When I click to open an item, I'm stuck with scrolling to the bottom of this very 'tall' clip to get to the annotation box.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there a way to save all the stuff you on your clipboard offline? I am looking for something like this, but in a local software kind of way, not a webapp. These new startups' survivability are very unpredictable and I don't want to lose all my info if the site goes bust. It's the top thing that's stopping me from committing myself to your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently don't have the functionality for users to download and store their clips locally but it's a fair request and we will consider it for our upcoming product roadmap. Thanks for requesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am trying to figure out if this site is any different from del.icio.us (earlier) to pinterest and so.cl (so... yesterday), which consumes a lot of energies on something that was already there some years back. Just a good user interface? It may not be enough to keep us on it longer. Thanks for a bonus to HN users, though.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't think of a comment with any substance cause I'm about to go to sleep, but I'll check back in the morning.

This is something I would like to share with the ~150 journalists I manage if it's any good.

Nice to see you guys here on hacker news!

Goodnight! (from the United Kingdom)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the kind words. My email is shalenATclipboardDOTcom if you want to discuss further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's a beutiful service, but I still can't see how to make good use out of it.

It seems to me a Evernote-ish within your network. I'll keep using for a while and, in the case I come up with any feedback, I'll share with you guys.

Thanks for a bonus to HN users.

</comment><comment><USER30> Impressive!

Every corner I turn I sense the effort, thought and joy things were made with.

a question though, who produced your animation video? I am curious as we are also planning to produce an animation video for promotion for our product.

<comment><USER31> At the end of the video it says animation by Grumo Media. <http://grumomedia.com/>

<comment><USER30> Well, I guess the habit of no staying seated when credit lines start running from the movies theaters affects the way I watch videoclips on the web...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There are so many bookmark services...Something that I'd like to see is a bookmark based in a goal or objective. Something like, I'm learning Lua and I want to save a bunch of links that I won't need afterwards when my goal was accomplished.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clipboard is more than just a bookmarking service. You can clip and save individual parts of the web pages including text, pictures, videos, flash applications and even bookmark. You can also create public or private clip collections for interesting topics using hashtags. For example, clipboard.com/tag/jquery lists all public clips tagged as #jquery. clipboard.com/Mati/jquery lists all public clips by user Mati tagged as #jquery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is quite an awesome app. Although, I've been using Springboard service for quite sometime and has served it's purpose for me. Although the UI components can be a bit clunky at times, it definitely is not that bad...

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been using this service for a couple months now, and I like it. Not sure if it's possible, but a context option (right click) would be really nice.

Also, I want to see what others who saved this web page also saved.

</comment><comment><USER35> Saving a long page gives me the "unresponsive script", like this one: <http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/modeling-users#top>

</comment><comment><USER36> I like it. The interface feels a little laggy to me but that might be because I'm using phone tethering at the moment. I see it as an odd mix of Pinboard, Pinterest, and Evernote; kinda what I was looking for.

</comment><comment><USER37> For storing and remembering stuff I think Evernote is more or less the best option. The social aspect of Clipboard seems to be the same thing as Pinterest too.

I really like the UI however, very attractive.

</comment><comment><USER38> Just a minor issue: The default clip titled "Browsing Clips" lists tabs as "Home, Shared, Publish", where the last one should have been "Public".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing this out. We made this typo and are fixing it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's quite pretty, I like it. Assuming it works sort of like Pintrest?

Huge plus points for the domain name, it's great.

</comment><comment> dc-tech-fan I see you are using Node and Express on the frontend - what other Node modules are you using or found useful?

<comment><USER40> We use a whole bunch, some of the main ones:

\- async => helpful async library <https://github.com/caolan/async>

\- nodeinspector => node js debugging in a nice webkit UI <https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector>

\- riakjs => for talking to Riak: <http://riakjs.org/>

\- knox => S3 helper <https://github.com/LearnBoost/knox>

\- optimist => helper lib for writing command line node apps (no more bash :) <https://github.com/substack/node-optimist>

\- mocha => unit testing node code <https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha>

\- emailjs => email helper <https://github.com/eleith/emailjs>

\- uglifyjs => code minification <https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS>

<comment><USER10> I've actually been curating this set for a little while. <http://clipboard.com/ken/nodejs_modules>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks nice - I'll try to use it and share my opinion in a few days.

</comment><comment><USER41> What about privacy? How do you approach that?

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm using this already and I just love it!

</comment><comment><USER35> support for gravatar would be nice

<comment><AUTHOR> We have had requests for gravatar from other users too so we will consider it for our future product roadmap.</comment></comment>


EtherScripter – a visual smart contract builder - <AUTHOR> http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/713/etherscripter-a-visual-smart-contract-builder

<comment><AUTHOR> There was some confusion on another HN thread[1] a few days ago as to what Ethereum actually is or is aiming to solve.

This visual contract builder is a really cool demo of what's possible with Ethereum.

For more read the whitepaper: [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White- Pa...](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper)

For some mind-bending implications of what might be in store with this technology, see the blog post on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations: [http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/24/daos-are-not-scary- part-...](http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/24/daos-are-not-scary-part-1-self- enforcing-contracts-and-factum-law/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492731)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you like the trend of auto-playing videos on mainstream sites? - <AUTHOR> It seems that today's Internet is full of major sites, news, tutorial, entertainment, and others, that all play videos automatically as soon as you hit the page. This has aggravated me for some time. It is an annoying game I must play with my computer's mute button -- the only easy way I've found to stop the madness, rather than hunting for the Pause button.
Even when paused, the videos typically still buffer. If you are not interested in the video content, you must still waste the bandwidth to load it, despite having never told the page you wanted it (never pressed any Play buttons).
Is it me who stands alone with this grievance? Or are others bothered by this too? I feel like the net is becoming no better than basic network television. <comment><USER2> The net in places is much worse than television. I might open several tabs when researching something or making sure that I read something of interest. Then all of a sudden I hear voices or sounds and have to go hunting them down. I use unlock origin to block ads but now some sites are calling ads within their domain so that ad blocking does not work.

Do the advertisers really think this behavior makes me want to buy their product?

<comment><USER2> Sorry about the typo. UBlock Origin. Not unlock origin. Darn autocorrect on my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's worse. YouTube will autoplay "next", "next", "next" videos once you stopped watching the video of interest and didn't bother the close the browser's tab.

This way youtube will suck your bandwidth and resources to force-run dozens to hundreds videos through your computer and internet connection.

This will allow Youtube to inflate actual view count numbers and defraud both the publishers and the advertisers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hate is not a strong enough word to describe my feelings.

</comment><comment><USER5> In Firefox, you can disable media.autoplay.enabled (false) for html5 video. Flash should be disabled by default I think but you can make it dependent to click-to-play.

I agree with everybody, it's such a lack a respect for the user. People using that trick (like youtube gesman pointed out) don't think of you as individual but as receiver/consumer/goods/idiot. If it uses sound, it can even be dangerous if you are using headphones.

</comment><comment><USER6> Chrome also has options in "Content settings" for "Images" and "Plugins", but there is none for HTML5 video. I think the time has come for introducing one.

</comment><comment><USER7> I absolutely hate it, especially that I use an 8 years old computer and these videos are just eating my meager resources. Then the comes the commercials that you cannot stop, and sometimes I have my speakers turned on and it just a great distraction. Hate it, hate it, hate it!

</comment><comment><USER8> It's trash.</comment>


Nvidia drivers on Linux are trash - <AUTHOR> https://nvidialinuxdriversaretrash.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Honestly, I've had _fewer_ problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers than with nouveau, even on fairly old hardware.

Both of my wife's desktops (home and office) started locking up randomly with a kernel oops due to the nouveau driver after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04. I realized that she had this bug, but in Ubuntu 18.04: [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178). No problems since switching to the proprietary drivers.

I use FreeBSD, and also run the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

<comment><USER3> I'll match you anecdote for anecdote -- one of the machines at work only works with Nouveau and locks up hard if you try the proprietary driver. Another works only with the proprietary driver and locks up hard if you try nouveau. A third one is flaky either way, unless you're running KDE. In which case it locks up hard. We've had no trouble at all with Intel or AMD.

Even under Windows, we've had trouble with NVidia drivers randomly crashing and taking the system down with them.

<comment><USER2> The problems I always had with the Intel drivers in the past is that you often needed to be running a bleeding edge kernel to get support for them. This is less of a problem on Ubuntu now with the hw enablement kernels.

I honestly stopped using AMD for graphics a decade ago when I had a card that was too old for the proprietary flglrx driver, but not old enough for the (at the time) feeble, community supported open source drivers. Maybe I should take another look at them.

Amusingly, I'm typing this from an AMD Threadripper2 running with Nvidia graphics.

<comment><USER4> 2 years ago I've started using Arch Linux for my laptop because of slow nvidia graphics driver updates from Ubuntu... Don't know how things are nowadays

Arch, being a rolling-release distribution, can always get you the latest driver updates with the package manager (but with the cost of being a little bit more work to maintain)

<comment><USER3> I also use Arch, so I can't speak to the Ubuntu situation. I'd certainly hate to have to stay abreast of drivers on any other distribution. For all that Ubuntu promises that it Just Works, it seems like way too much trouble compared to Arch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just purchased a ThinkPad E585 with Ryzen 2700U because the nVidia card in my ancient laptop is no longer supported.

Worked fine with Ubuntu 16.04 and then one day I do an "apt-get update" and hit this bug:

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics- dr...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics- drivers-304/+bug/1737750)

Yes, I should not expect indefinite support for old hardware, but this would not have been a problem if the drivers were open source (hence my move to AMD).

</comment><comment><USER6> I sometimes think Nvidia goes out of its way to screw with Linux users. Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother. They just have crap support for a market that realistically they don't even need to support.

Except for their GPU drivers for machine learning: that's a fairly hot market right now.

<comment><USER7> > Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother.

CUDA

<comment><USER8> I'm curious to know what the bifurcation is between the pieces of the driver used for Cuda, and the pieces used for gaming. I think most people running Cuda are running it on Linux, and I've never had a problem with it. So I'm wondering if all these issues are really targeted at gamers only?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given all the frequent complaints, would Linux users prefer if nvidia just pulled the plug and stopped offering their driver altogether?

Maybe some other long-term Linux users will remember how the situation was with accelerated graphics on Linux before the binary nvidia driver existed... (and personally, it never gave me trouble, but maybe that's just me.)

Here's a different idea: if Linux had stable ABIs for drivers, across kernel versions and distributions, creating a good driver would certainly be easier for third parties.

<comment><AUTHOR> Intel is able to make it work really well. AMD went through a bad time but is now in the Kernel and getting much better. Nvidia seems to be the odd-man-out here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will go against the grain and say that I never had any issues with nVidia drivers ever since I got my first GeForce card more than 10 years ago.

For the first years I manually installed it on Fedora Core, until finally the ak-version were stable enough. Once I switched to Ubuntu, the proprietary drivers always worked without a flaw.

I don't think they read HN but a shout-out to Zander and AaronP, I've spent many hours OpenGL programming and playing games on Linux throughout the years thanks to their work.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was hoping this would have a big picture of Linus giving Nvidia the finger.

An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder.

<comment><USER12> > An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an > encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no > longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder.

This makes no sense, do you understand the actual cause enough to explain it?

<comment><USER13> I had the same problem, it has something to do with Plymouth, if you use the classic console boot it works

<comment><USER12> Oh, so you can still boot, they just don't support (or have broken support for) DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB.

But what does that have to do with encrypted root? Just plymouth not being available for the LUKS passphrase entry?

I'd expect you to be able to get around that fairly trivially by disabling plymouth, LUKS works without it in any initrd I've encountered.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h That effectively is breaking the boot process. Of course, you may be able to tinker with it in order to make things work again, but you have to _do_ that.

<comment><USER12> It's not a breakage specific to whole-fs encryption, which is what didn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not justifying their lack of efforts for Linux users but I can understand why they limit their resources towards creating better drivers. According to Wikipedia(1), the amount of Linux usage worldwide is barely even a blip compared to windows + macOS. From a business standpoint, it's hard to see the benefits of correcting these issues.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)

<comment><USER15> What I don't understand is how come driver for their cards works just fine on Windows AND MacOS then? Maybe it isn't Nvidia at fault alone here?

TBH, I only had problems installing their drivers on Linux, but once they were up and running all was/is good... Except Wayland. But, wayland's gonna way no matter what, so no Wayland for me.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't apple handle the creation of most of the MacOS drivers itself? I'd assume its the case for graphics cards as well.

Windows ofc is windows, it justifies itself

<comment><USER15> Nvidia provides their own drivers on their site for MacOS - you need those for newer cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Curious to know how does that compare to AMD drivers?

<comment><USER18> AMD actively contributes driver code to the mainline kernel. So with recent Linux kernels, AMD graphics cards and APUs based on the GCN architecture (launched about 2011/2012 if I recall correctly) work out of the box with full 3D acceleration, just like integrated Intel graphics.

There was a time a few years ago when the mainline kernel driver was significantly worse performance-wise (mainly due to missing power management), but this should no longer be the case.

There still exists a proprietary AMD driver, but this driver is going to be phased out and only required for "Pro" features.

See this AMD slide deck for more information: [https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/attachments/slides/2251/export/events/attachments/amd_graphics/slides/2251/fosdem2018_amdstack.pdf)

<comment><USER19> And the unlucky owners of pre GCN cards, like the Brazos APUs just get a driver that kind of works, with less features than the fxglr one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nouveau, on the other hand, works just fine! Don't expect to run any games on it, but if you're like me and you're stuck with an Nvidia card on the desktop, nouveau will suffice. Even modern stuff like wayland works well with this driver.

</comment><comment><USER21> The Nvidia drivers are infamous, to be sure, and Linus and others have spent a good bit of time ranting about how terrible Nvidia is.

But I don't think the existence of a bunch of support requests are much evidence of anything either way. It's pretty easy to find similar problems with AMD drivers, for example.

[https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu](https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am pretty active on the Ask Ubuntu stack exchange and to be frank I see many more Nvidia related posts. Also consider that sometimes the request isn't even about Nvidia at all, but then we determine that the Nvidia drivers are causing the problem. A good example would be strange compositing glitches and bugs with KDE or other compositors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The same crappy driver applies to AMD on Linux too. [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261) is open for nearly three months and nothing has been done.

</comment><comment><USER23> From someone quite removed from low level development:

How much effort is it to develop these drivers? I.e what's the breakdown for resources allocated toward hardware vs people allocated for driver dev.

<comment><AUTHOR> For some time their Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) was touted as the solution:

[https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html](https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html)

Its been around since at 1999.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are AMD's any better?

<comment><USER25> The new amdgpu driver (which has been in mainline Linux for a few years now) works really well for me, on X11 and on Wayland, for all applications that I tried with it (for games, that includes Cities Skylines, Civ 5, various other games based on Source and Unity). AFAIK it works with all GCN models, so basically all graphics cards manufactured by AMD after ca. 2012/2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Try AMD just for the lulz</comment>


Crossrail Open House Events Sat 19th Sept - <AUTHOR> http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/crossrail-project-5791520834

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like all of the free tickets are "sold out" already. That was quick!</comment>


Now Accepting Bitcoin on Dell.com - <AUTHOR> http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2014/07/18/we-re-now-accepting-bitcoin-on-dell-com.aspx <comment><USER2> We know that number of blockchain transactions has been more or less constant for a while and in the range of several tens of thousands per day. This means either merchants aren't seeing too many bitcoin sales OR a lot of these sales are happening offchain through coinbase/bitpay.

In the latter scenario, coinbase just looks like a giant transaction fee with nothing changing except an entry in their database. Are they generating enough value to justify these fees? Note coinbase/bitpay makes money when (1) they sell you (the customer) bitcoin (2) the buy/sell spread when you buy btc (3) merchant fees and (4) buy/sell spread again when the purchase occurs.

A big selling point for bitcoin was that you'd avoid credit card processing fees. Has someone done the math on whether this is turning out to actually be cheaper than credit cards after all fees are considered?

And even if they turn out to be marginally cheaper, is it justified from the consumer's point of view given you don't even get the consumer protections that you get for free with a credit card?

<comment><AUTHOR> _" number of blockchain transactions has been more or less constant"_

No: [https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&s...](https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=)

<comment><USER2> From Jan'13 to now, which is when most of this merchant adoption has occurred, I can see an increase from around 40,000 transactions to about 60,000 transactions, which is rather modest and one can easily cherry pick points which show that the number of transactions has actually declined.

ed: And like I said in my other comment to vijay, it's not even clear that much of this represents positive-sum economic activity.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" 40,000 transactions to about 60,000 transactions"_

Exactly. You called this +50% growth "more or less constant", which is why I corrected you.

As to judging how much of this +50% growth is due to increased economic activity, it is impossible to prove due to the anonymous nature of Bitcoin. However indicators like the growth of Bitcoin payment processors (BitPay and Coinbase) very clearly show there is extreme growth. Eg. look at this data about BitPay: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7974197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7974197)

<comment><USER2> The Bitpay numbers are very impressive.

I do think that 50% growth in a year, especially when it is not that clear-cut that it really is 50%, isn't that impressive by itself. Perhaps there's a lot more growth in off-chain activity.

I remember reading an estimate that Bitcoin has < 500,000 users which seemed quite small to me given the hype surrounding it. So I'd be interested in seeing if there is growth in the number of wallets holding bitcoin. If bitcoin is taking off, we should be seeing that number explode, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What I find interesting about all these new merchants accepting Bitcoin is what happens to the Bitcoin they receive. It is a safe bet that all of these Bitcoin are converted to USD immediately as part of the payment processing by someone like Coinbase. The question is, can Coinbase sell these coins as quickly as they receive them? If not, what kind of exposure do they have to the violatility of the price of Bitcoin? Is that exposure high enough that these companies could be brought down by a drop in Bitcoin pricing and would that lead to a collapse of the Bitcoin economy (i.e. are any of these too big to fail)?

<comment><USER4> Impressive. You managed to turn the most positive news for Bitcoin into a post about the "collapse of the Bitcoin economy", through a very flimsily constrcted series of assumptions. There should be like a new version of Godwin's law wherein all positive Bitcoin news will lead to its collapse in three steps.

<comment><USER5> Why don't you try and counter or answer what he is saying instead of attacking him for saying it.

<comment><USER4> Because it smells like a manipulative post. The goal (it seems) is not to discuss the topic, but to deformm the opinion of the readers and the general mood of the thread.

If you want an answer, it is easy: companies like coinbase or bitpay know very well what they are doing, and participate in the market in ways that minimise the exposure risk. OP does not deserve to be top post in a site that is supposed to have quality debate like HN.

<comment><USER6> > If you want an answer, it is easy: companies like coinbase or bitpay know > very well what they are doing, and participate in the market in ways that > minimise the exposure risk.

So the question is: how they do it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Notice how all these big "wins" for bitcoin come in the form of services facilitated by a centralized 3rd party. Coinbase, Bitpay, et al are becoming the de facto gatekeepers of bitcoin in business, it's not hard to imagine a future where these companies are the only practical option for real people interacting with the bitcoin economy. We're building a centralized infrastructure around the supposed decentralized currency of the future and these companies have extremely cumbersome KYC procedures; paypal never required me to scan a passport, take a selfie or submit to social graph analysis in order to use their services.

edit:

As some have pointed out, KYC is for _buying_ bitcoin, not for making purchases with bitcoin, this is a fair point, but I think it's still noteworthy to recognize that _most people_ will endure that KYC process to acquire bitcoins since the alternative is something like localbitcoins (scam prone and considerable effort for a newbie). Additionally, it's still true that for most people, the practical utility of bitcoin is a function of the services that these 3rd party companies are willing/able to provide, if some of these big players went bankrupt, suffered from long term DDOS, encounter legal problems or have their coins stolen by hackers, suddenly your average consumer has lost practical use of their bitcoins.

<comment><USER8> What you're seeing is merchants relying on the expertise of 3rd party payment processors. This is a good thing. Having them all reinvent the wheel would be a security nightmare. You'd be hearing about enormous Bitcoin heists daily.

At the end of the day, these are still Bitcoin transactions and if Coinbase et al started engaging in onerous practices you could very easily switch to another Bitcoin processor without much friction.

Now if you start seeing things like Coinbase only accepting payment from other Coinbase users...

<comment><USER9> It seems there are obvious parallels between Bitcoin:Coinbase :: SMTP:GMail

XMPP:GChat

~OAuth:Facebook

These analogies are only so accurate, but the centralized service seems to try to lock-in users whereas decentralization forces the opposite way.

<comment><USER4> It is way easier to "be your own bank", using free software like electrum or the reference Bitcoin client, than trying to "be you own email" by setting up your own email service and whatnot.

Coinbase or Bitpay are optional facilitators, for people who want to buy or accept bitcins. That is not centralisation, that is just providing a service. Lots of people use Coinbase to buy their coins and then withdraw them to their offline-decentralised cold wallts created in electrum.

<comment><USER10> Is it? If I want to be my own bank I also have to coordinate to sell all income coins on a market rapidly to avoid fluctuations in price. That's a full time job in itself.

Also the risk of failure for a mistake in being my own email service is that some of the mail I send lands in a spam folder. The risk of failure in being my own bank is that I lose all my money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Earlier this week, Shopify integrated with Coinbase to provide 100,000+ online stores with bitcoin checkout. It's really exciting to see bitcoin adoption rising among merchants of different sizes.

<comment><USER12> I feel like merchant adoption is being done for the sake of "looking cool" not because they really care or their users really want it. Actual adoption of bitcoin by consumers has remained relatively flat

<comment><USER13> flat based on what?

<comment><USER12> The number of bitcoin transactions/day hasn't really changed, at all, despite all these vendors adopting it.

[http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions](http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions)

<comment><AUTHOR> You fail at reading a graph (in your defense, the data is noisy). But smooth it by looking at the quarterly averages and it is clear there was a +40% growth from 45k to 65k transaction/day over the last year: [http://i.imgur.com/XJs4V74.png](http://i.imgur.com/XJs4V74.png) (or see www.quandl.com/BCHAIN/NTRAN-Bitcoin-Number-of-Transactions and select "quarterly".)

<comment><USER12> No, I didn't fail at reading anything. The increase is both within the noise of the data and insignificant. 20K transactions is nothing, hell given the number of BTC that are "washed" through pools, one person could easily account for 5K of those transactions.

<comment><AUTHOR> +40% is significant (insignificance would be <5%).

If it really was noise, [http://i.imgur.com/XJs4V74.png](http://i.imgur.com/XJs4V74.png) wouldn't show a relatively smooth exponential-looking curve.

<comment><USER12> Are you really arguing that a pitiful increase of 20K over a year, in a system where every single change in any holdings causes a transaction to occur, is significant for this system? I shudder to think of the reality distortion field you live in.

For sake of argument, let's say that coinbase keeps 100 small, hot wallets around. Every time coinbase rearranges funds in their wallets, they could create between 1 and infinity transactions. If, on average, they rearrange funds daily in such a way that 25 transactions occurs, they would account for 50% of your increase alone.

Given that _all_ exchanges and processors routinely shuffle funds around, and every move is recorded as a transaction, you need exchanges (in total) to make 55 more transactions/day to make up your superduper exponential growth.

20K increase in transactions in bitcoin is no increase in transactions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your math is way off. It is 20k transaction PER DAY. 5.9 MILLION transactions were processed in 2014Q2, up from 4.1 MILLION in 2013Q2. That is an increase of 1.8 MILLION!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Surely many will ask "Why would I pay Dell in bitcoins?". Well Dell wants to promote the currency so much they will be giving a discount:

 _" we'll be offering a special Alienware promotion wherein customers can save 10% off a new Alienware system purchase (up to $150 limit) when checking out with bitcoin"_

<comment><USER14> > Well Dell wants to promote the currency

Maybe. But that's probably just wishful thinking. Someone in marketing probably came up with this as a way to get some free publicity from all the raving bitcoin lunatics and get some sales. Offering 10% off of their Alienware systems, which are pretty well know as overpriced crap, is probably a fraction of their markup.

<comment><USER15> Why wouldn't they want to promote the currency? Bitcoin is win-win for the merchants, with no fees and no chargebacks.

<comment><USER14> And that is a double-edged sword for the consumer. What if I purchase something and the vendor screws up and refuses to fix it? What if the vendor scams me? Having a credit card gives me the chargeback process to resolve a dispute. Using Dunning-Krugerrands... sorry, bitcoin, gives me no real recourse other than to piss and moan on Twitter.

I get using Bitcoin to purchase when it's questionable or you otherwise want something to be anonymous, although with a physical good it is much harder to be anonymous, but why in the hell would I care if someone knows I bought an Alienware laptop or a pack of socks on Overstock? And that is assuming they someone got ahold of my transaction records anyway.

<comment><USER16> > What if I purchase something and the vendor screws up and refuses to fix it?

You tell your friends or post on the Internet that they did so, and more importantly, you don't purchase things from vendors that don't have a good reputation.

What do you do if a restaurant gives you horrible service? You don't sue them, because litigation is much more expensive than it's worth to you. Restaurants don't tend to provide good service out of respect for the law or fear of litigation, but rather out of the desire for continued business from customers.

<comment><USER14> Or better yet, I just issue a chargeback and get my damned money back.

The restaurant is just a terrible retort. I'm physically in a location to receive a service. This has nothing to do with paying for a product and not receiving it.

Of course if I'm receiving bad service in a restaurant I will speak with the manager. If he refuses to speak or help I will demand a check and pay without tipping. Simple as that.

<comment><USER16> > Or better yet, I just issue a chargeback and get my damned money back.

Doesn't work with cash, and might not work depending on how the credit card company's arbitration works.

> The restaurant is just a terrible retort. I'm physically in a location to > receive a service. This has nothing to do with paying for a product and not > receiving it.

Your physical presence is irrelevant to the analogy. The point is that acting legitimately is in the interest of both the company and the customer.

> Of course if I'm receiving bad service in a restaurant I will speak with the > manager. If he refuses to speak or help I will demand a check and pay > without tipping. Simple as that.

Then you're out the cost of your meal. The restaurant gets your 20 bucks, and didn't have to provide good service, which is clearly profitable for them in this isolated case. So why don't all restaurants do that?

<comment><USER14> No, it's just fucking wrong. My point is that Bitcoin leaves the consumer defenseless. Eating at a restaurant Has nothing to do with that. I could in fact refuse to pay.

<comment><USER16> My point is that in most everyday transactions, the consumer's defense is not the legal system of the country he or she lives in (because it's too expensive to litigate most everyday transactions), but rather market mechanics like reputation and competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whatever happened to that crisis where a single party got control of 51% of total network mining power giving them essentially 100% control over the blockchain? [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7890215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7890215)

<comment><USER18> They've voluntarily decided to limit themselves to 40%. [https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/bitcoin-pool- ghash-...](https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/bitcoin-pool-ghash-io- commits-to-40-hashrate-limit-after-its-51-breach/)

<comment><USER19> And that 40% is still enough for lots of attacks.

<comment><USER20> Not really.

For an attack to be possible, the attacker needs to generate an alternate blockchain faster than the honest blockchain. This problem can be thought of as a binomial distribution where the "success" is the honest blockchain mining a block and extending its lead by a block and the "failure" is the attacking chain being extended by one, reducing the gap by 1 block.

p = probability of honest blockchain extension by 1 block q = 1 - p = probability the attacker extends by 1 block

If p <= q, the probability of the attacker catching up at some point in time is 1. This is what makes a 51% attack possible.

If p > q, the probability of the attacker catching up is (q/p)^z where z is the number of blocks behind at the beginning of the attack.

There is a reasonable possibility for small values of z (small number of blocks behind), that 40% control would allow for the creation of an alternate blockchain longer than the honest chain, but this is mitigated by the fact that transactions require confirmations, which extends the number of blocks and makes the likelihood of an attack very unlikely.

<comment><USER18> 51% attack is not the only kind of attack. A "selfish mining" attack can break the system too. [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is- broken/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/) Here's the paper [http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243](http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the articles. I recall reading about this last year when the paper was published, but I had since forgotten about this form of attack. This is definitely interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Acceptance of bitcoin continues to increase, but has a store seen sustained usage? I recall a chart from a few weeks ago after newegg(?) began accepting bitcoins an initial glut of bitcoin transactions quickly dwindled to background noise. It seems once the novelty wears away people find it easier to just pay directly in USD.

<comment><USER22> We added a btc option at Tuft & Needle last November and up until about Feb was about 5% of our sales. btc purchases have been steadily dropping and are now around .01%

<comment><USER23> Do you offer a discount for people paying in BTC? If not, why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A huge win for Coinbase. Congratulations Brian and the rest of the team!

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a question. If business sells something directly for bitcoin (not via 3rd party which accepts bitcoin and proceeds cash), how do they do VAT?

<comment><USER26> If a business sells something directly for USD, how do they do VAT? (Assuming that the company is not in the US since the US doesn't have VAT.)

<comment><USER25> You're right. Question is rather how does one issue a receipt if you're exchanging bitcoins for goods. You can't, since it's not a legal tender. So how do they do it if they're not using 3rd party which proceeds them with cash?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title should be "Dell now accepts USD and doesn't care where it comes from!"

</comment><comment><USER28> What's interesting is that they are limiting this borderless currency to US- only. But it doesn't take much to start accepting from other countries after they get through the legal complications, it probably won't take too long :)

<comment><USER29> Dell isn't actually doing anything with the Bitcoin, they're getting USD payments via Coinbase. And Coinbase appears to be US only and maybe US bank only? Their site says:

"Right now the only supported payout option is USD to a bank account. However, options for other countries are planned."

Which is a bit ambiguous but I think it may be only US bank accounts (or accounts accessible within the US system)?

<comment><USER28> Very good point, thanks for the reply. One remark though:

> "Dell isn't actually doing anything with Bitcoin"

Perhaps not directly, but they don't go and accept any odd currency that comes along. It shows that Bitcoin is an interesting option to look at.

<comment><USER10> Dell will accept any currency at all as long as Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc will convert it to USD first.

<comment><USER28> Tell that to e-gold

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it just Dell.com or all the Dell's ?( dell.fr , dell.de ...)

</comment><comment><USER31> Can I buy a server and only pay after I mine its price in bitcoins with it? :-)

(pretty please with sugar, don't take this joke seriously)

</comment><comment><USER32> Hi all, please for anybody's sake, can you explain me why the world is accepting something that we know is unsecured properly? Sometimes money just disappear etc..

<comment><USER33> Is there any properly secured money? Each type of money has its flaws and its advantages. For one, bitcoin is traceable to a certain degree, whreas a paper bill is not.

> _Sometimes money just disappear_

Are you talking about fiat money or bitcoin?

<comment><USER32> bitcoin

<comment><USER33> Sorry, it was rethorical. I wanted to point out that fiat money disappears all the time. I lose money all the time; it falls out of my pocket, I forget where I put it... However I have never lost any amount of bitcoin.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Download Publicly Available Videos via Commandline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tv-dl/nickelodeon

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what people think of this (and others like it)? On the plus side, it makes automating tasks involving watching videos much easier. On the minus side, you skip out on the advertisements that the vendors use to justify making the content available in the first place. Also, the site could change their "API" at anytime without warning causing it to break.

</comment><comment><USER2> You've hidden the fact in your title/comment that this is only applicable for Nickelodeon videos.</comment>