This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41164 <comment><USER3> > Disney have a fundamental, core company value of "No Gambling"

> For a concrete example: Every cruise line has an onboard casino – except for > Disney cruise ships.

Wow that puts some teeth behind this debacle. I was under the impression this would be a lot of noise and battlefront 3 would sell a billion copies.

<comment><USER4> I was totally unaware that Disney so vehemently stuck to their "No Gambling" value. Searching for further reading I found an interesting blog post [0] which explains how new (Marvel, LucasFilm) Disney IP is (was) being removed from slot machines and gambling games.

[0] [https://www.onlinecasinoselite.org/post/disney-claims-the- ri...](https://www.onlinecasinoselite.org/post/disney-claims-the-rights-on- star-wars-and-marvel-slots)

<comment><USER5> There was also a PC game, Marvel Heroes, that had their contract pulled recently for no apparent reason.

Some in the player community has claimed that the CEO had a rap sheet and Disney was pull out because of the whole Metoo thing, but pulling out over the heavy use of loot box mechanics may make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's astounding to me how these articles and videos get passed around without some cursory fact-checking.

EA's revenue at the end of the last fiscal year was nearly five billion dollars. I do believe the $800m quote about FIFA is correct, but that puts it at around 20% of total revenue, not the 80% or so this article asserts.

Don't ever assume that Some Random Guy On Youtube has his numbers correct. If CGP Grey (or someone as respected) does a video about this, he/they will probably get it right, but I don't trust many others to do this kind of analysis without getting the numbers wrong.

To further highlight the silliness of the original video, it includes some assertions about the cost of game development - EA has claimed it's going up, the author notes that EA's publicly available R&D expenses have gone down in the last four years, therefore the cost of developing games has gone down. This is a completely false claim, because the number of games EA has released has gone from 20+ per year to less than 10. The cost per game has gone way, way up.

(I'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate right now.)

<comment><USER7> _(I 'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate right now.)_

And yet, that's the core of the piece, and that core is pretty well articulated and damning.

Edit: I just want to add that on a personal level, I avoid any game with these manipulative elements in them. I love the _idea_ of for example, _For Honor_ , but the mechanics are perfectly tuned to abuse the player. Who has time in their life for that nonsense?

I'll just play another CDPR game.

<comment><USER8> CDPR mistreats it's employees to such a degree, I can't support a company like that. I cannot comprehend how someone can be okay with abusing employees by not okay with "abusing" a willing customer offering money for something.

<comment><USER9> Is it worst there then in other gameDev companis?

<comment><USER8> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Loot boxes come from Japan, where they are extensively used in mobile games and all sort of products. In there the concept is known as gacha.

[https://www.serkantoto.com/2012/02/21/gacha-social- games/](https://www.serkantoto.com/2012/02/21/gacha-social-games/)

In Japan, gambling is illegal and the games industry looked for ways to bypass this regulation. Gacha is what they found.

But after gacha was perfected into its ultimate addictive form, Kompu Gacha, the government had to take action and regulate it. Now Kompu Gacha is illegal. The legal alternative is Box Gacha, and that is what all westerners are copying.

The idea is to not sell you what you want, but rather to sell you a low probability of getting what you want for a lower value. This causes people to underestimate and lose track of what they're spending.

But Box Gacha is not the only thing, there are millions of other ways in which those guys have perfected the art of taking money from addicted gamers.

Pay to win is a race to the ground. Some players won't mind throwing $10,000 to win, you will never beat them. And if you do beat them, you are a chump.

<comment><USER11> "They copied it from Japanese games!" is kind of a cop-out. It implies that the loot box concept would not have developed in Western games in isolation, which I don't believe at all, and this article, which highlights how EA was developing the concept well before smartphones went supernova, lends more weight to that non-belief.

<comment><USER10> Before smartphones the Japanese still had feature phones, and games with micropayments and gacha ("loot boxes") in them.

Btw you are talking with someone who worked in the games industry so unless you've got certain credible source to refute what I am mentioning here just concede the point.

<comment><USER11> > Btw you are talking with someone who worked in the games industry so unless > you've got certain credible source to refute what I am mentioning here just > concede the point.

Wow.

Well, I'll turn it back on you. What evidence do you have that loot boxes would not have come about in something very close to their current form if the Japanese game industry did not exist? And "because I work in the games industry" is not an answer.

I mean, this is a ridiculous hypothetical in the first place. But the broader point is that the fault for the current condition cannot be blamed solely or even primarily on the Japanese industry alone. "The merchants and the traders have come; their profits are pre-ordained."

<comment><USER10> The gacha formats are very specific (e.g: how the probabilities are distributed).

In many countries it is required by law to specify to the user what is being purchased. Because of this, it is very easy to track / verify that one system is equivalent to a specific form of gacha.

Then, it is widely accepted that loot boxes are based on gacha. The Wikipedia article for loot box has more context in this regard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bad title for great article, it's an excellent analysis about EA's commercial missteps in implementing loot boxes in new games threatening their golden goose of FIFA.

</comment><comment><USER13> Loot boxes are amazingly well done in Clash Royale despite being totally linked to the core progression system.

It's a PVP game that all players get points for winning and loose points for loosing. Power of your deck comes from lootboxes you get at decent pace for playing or can buy for real money.

The great thing is that thanks to the ranking people are matched with players of the same strengh (either skill or money/time investment) so you are always facing challenging but not impossible opponents.

Getting higher in ranking just makes few new cards available when you are above respective ranking thresholds. Those cards are not obviously stronger than others because units are well balanced.

All this makes the game fun for all players no matter what is their time/money investment.

My take is that it's not worth spending money on this game but I recently found out that TotalBiscuit came to that conclusion only after he spent few thousand dolars on this game. So it's a great game for everybody, rich, poor and the game developers themselves.

<comment><USER6> Clash Royale's system is set up so that the more money you spend to progress, the more money you need to spend to progress. That's because the cost to upgrade cards increases as they level up, so [purely as example because I don't know the actual numbers behind this] a dollar can get you to level 3 but it'll cost a thousand to get to level 10.

Most loot box games have this as a general concept because pure randomness ensures that the chance of getting a new unique item from a finite set decreases for each new item you get, but Clash Royale compounds this by geometrically increasing the number of each thing you need to get to upgrade it.

<comment><USER14> They also don't use pure randomness. They very finely tune the way the drops come out. If there's a card you don't have (or that you don't have much of), there's a MUCH higher chance of finding it than a card you've maxed out, or that is at similar level to the rest of your cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The mention of Mass Effect 3's loot boxes (...which were also in Andromeda, for the twelve people who bought that game) is a little different, and I think the difference is important. In both ME games, it's a co-op player team against computer-controlled enemies. Yes, you could pay real-world money to buy loot boxes to gamble and hopefully get better gear, but doing so doesn't hurt any other player. If player A has amazing gear while player B doesn't, it's pretty much a non-issue, because they're always on the same team. That's very different than the PvP modes of both FIFA and the Star Wars game.

<comment><USER8> The argument is that loot boxes are gambling. The contents are not important. Either loot boxes are gambling, or they are not.

<comment><USER16> The contents are important. For years I've been hearing about how people hate these kinds of systems but put up with it because "at least it's only cosmetic".

If Battlefront hadn't made it pay to win, the gambling conversation wouldn't be happening yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The loot boxes of Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 came after this point, and > their designs were much more friendly. They were focused on cosmetic > items[...]

The cosmetic items were the rarest and most valuable items in TF2 crates, but gameplay-affecting weapons and equipment were the bread and butter.

> Once in power he announces his vision for the future: Marshmallows in > everything, without regard to flavor or the intended market.

It was before my time, but didn't this actually happen? In the 1950s, the industrial process for the modern marshmallow was developed and recipes put marshmallow in all sorts of inappropriate dishes.

</comment><comment><USER18> >A clever CEO would have rolled out an optional new game mode built around Wilson Boxes, waited until players were used to the idea, and then tried to encourage players to engage with this new mode of play by quietly neglecting the original mode and focusing their free content updates on the mode driven by Wilson Boxes. That would be scummy and money-grubbing, but it would at least be the cunning form of scummy money-grubbing.

GTA 5 comes to mind, single player has nothing to do once the main quest is over and unless they fixed in the car spawning uses a seed based on mission completion (I suspect) so it gets stuck spawning the same 3 bad cars over and over. No DLCs no extra missions no nothing but cosmetics and events for GTA:O

</comment><comment><USER19> A friend who works at PopCap (now an EA subsidiary) once told me that the Plants Vs Zombies slot machine has made more money for EA than the entire rest of that franchise. Yay gambling.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looking at the situation from the point of view of the business angle is the correct way to understand the actions of large publishers, and it's refreshing to see someone doing so. I'm not sure that the numbers are interpreted in the same way by the author and by the executives at EA, though. When they see $800 million from loot boxes in FIFA, they don't see just 'hey this can work, lets try to make it work elsewhere.' They see 'hey, this is what gamers actually want.'

Also, I'm a little unsure about some of the things said because I don't have a ton of knowledge about the performance of the different games discussed. Like at one point the author mentions "The SimCity backlash."... I do know a bit about that one. That SimCity game that got all the backlash? It immediately became the best-selling game of all time on the Origin service right after its launch. There is simply no way to classify that as anything except a resounding success from a business perspective. It is a fundamental mistake to listen to online talk from gamers as the audience has proven themselves to be their own worst enemy. They shovel mountains of money at the things they claim to hate, and withhold money from anything that deviates.

It's not like there aren't games that don't follow these predatory practices. There are tons of them. And they don't make very much money. How can you back up a claim that gamers actually do want those different practices followed if every game which follows them languishes miles behind the titles which don't? If the public pronouncements of gamers actually mirrored their actions, listening to backlash might make sense for a company. But as it is, when the gaming community lights up with anger and "boycotts", that is the most reliable indicator of stellar sales. There really isn't a solution to this problem outside of gamers doing the one thing they seem constitutionally incapable of - not playing the games. Not preordering them, not buying them after release, not even pirating them, straight up not playing the games. (Buying the game and then stopping playing it shortly after release is actually the ideal situation for any publisher, it enables them to more rapidly reduce their spending on server resources and even piracy drives other sales.)

I'm not sure why videogames have such a different audience compared to all other forms of media. In other forms of media, the audience vehemently defends their chosen medium, combatting censorship, responding to exploitative practices with substantial actions to back up their complaints, fighting for the rights of the audience over those of the publishers, etc. But we see no significant amount of any of that when it comes to videogames.

<comment><USER21> > That SimCity game that got all the backlash? It immediately became the best- > selling game of all time on the Origin service right after its launch. There > is simply no way to classify that as anything except a resounding success > from a business perspective.

I heard a second-hand account that Paradox Interactive (the publisher of Cities: Skylines) only greenlit Cities _because_ of the Sim City debacle. And Cities went on to become a big success, which probably wouldn't have happened without the Sim City debacle. So if this is true, then it cost EA their monopoly in that particular genre.

<comment><USER22> A monopoly in a periodically spaced genre isn't that lucrative. In fact, Cities: Skylines probably will increase sales of the next SimCity due to more attention to this genre.

There's a point where saturation occurs, like away FPSes today, but city builders aren't there.

<comment><USER23> > Skylines probably will increase sales of the next SimCity due to more > attention to this genre.

Maxis is gone, I'm not sure I care to play another city sim made by EA without the creative team that made SimCity 1-4 such a joy.

It bugs me that the video games industry (both production and consumption side) seems to have a looser relationship with creative talent than, for example, the movie industry. A Quentin Tarantino or Guillermo Del Toro can get all kind of pet projects greenlit within the movie industry and on the consumer side fans of these directors will show up to anything with their name on it (I know I will). That doesn't happen as much in games where even a hit- maker like Kojima gets treated pretty poorly by his studio meanwhile the franchise he's known for shambles on like a zombie after his departure - <USER2> making money. See also: Call of Duty after Vince Zampella and Jason West.

<comment><USER24> It's interesting that movies put their stars'/creators' names everywhere, while many gamers only see that info on a credits screen after finishing a game. Is that because actors/producers/etc have such powerful unions?

I'd like games to be more like movies in this respect. I can imagine spending a lot of time browsing an IMDb for games....

<comment><USER5> EA got started with the idea of creating stars out of game devs, it flopped spectacularly.

[http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing- farther/](http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing-farther/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thanks to the author for transcribing the video! He made an important point and I likely wouldn't have read the article if I had to watch a video for that.

<comment><USER26> he mentions that this is _not_ a transcript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The impact of these things on in-game cheating is eventually going to make them not worth the trouble in my opinion. They make cheating profitable in the real world, destroying the fun for regular players which at some point will impact the value of the game.

The simple fix - other than eliminating them - is to eliminate the possibility of rare items that become valuable.

</comment><comment><USER28> Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /twentysidedtale/ on this server.

\-- im getting this error</comment>


San Francisco Is Burning - <AUTHOR> http://www.gq.com/story/san-francisco-is-burning <comment><USER3> I lived in San Francisco for a year. The first week in, I realized what a mistake it was.

The problem is that city laws unreasonably favor the tenants, putting an unreasonable amount of pressure on landlords. It was so bad that my landlord couldn't afford to fix problems in her building; nor could she evict a problem tenant who threatened us all.

When we (the tenants) tried to work with the city to stop the aggressive tenant's behavior, the judge just threw it out. (This tenant was mentally ill and needed to live in a home with proper supervision.) Ultimately, all of us left, except the family who lived there for 20 years and paid almost nothing for rent. *

I don't have a lot of love for landlords; but San Francisco treats tenant protection as a win-lose negotiation. It puts landlords in a clear loosing situation of the negotiation, and then drags down anyone who wants a safe "no frills" apartment at a good price.

* San Francisco's rent control is unreasonable. If you live in a rent-controlled building for more than a few years, you can effectively live there for free. The landlord then can't keep up the building, because the rent for the open apartments needs to stay low to compete with luxury apartments without rent control. That's partly why San Francisco tenant protection puts landlords on the loosing side and drags down everyone else.

</comment><comment> J-dawg > _This man, let's call him Frank, was in trouble for some financial > infraction. Frank cut a deal with the authorities. They'd go easy on him if > he'd wear a wire and lure Gideon into plotting to burn down his building._

Is it common practice to take someone who is in trouble for an unrelated crime, and use it to coerce them into being what amounts to an unpaid undercover police officer?

I mean, I understand the idea of arresting someone from a criminal gang and then getting them to wear a wire to catch the big boss. But the way this is written it sounds like the two men didn't know each other.

Am I missing something here? Because that sounds incredibly unethical and I'm surprised if it's legal.

<comment><USER4> Here is a particularly disturbing example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman)

<comment><USER5> "The officers involved in the operation were suspended with pay" So they made a pothead buy coke and guns and get murdered, and got punished with a paid vacation...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Gideon sighs. "Violation of civil rights. Habitability. It's all bullshit. > They'd shit on the floor and take a picture of it. I had a guy who glued > bologna sandwiches to his wall and sued me because his room had roaches."

> "I'd close my eyes, and my mind wouldn't stop all night long. I don't mean > not sleeping. I mean _not sleeping_. You go to bed and you're up all night. > And then, the next day, you go to work…"

> I think Gideon's answer to that last question reveals some narcissism

> I appreciate Gideon's candor, but our conversation demonstrates just how > contemptuous San Francisco entrepreneurs can feel about the residents who > aren't rich or hipsters or tech workers.

This bit stood out to me because it's like... you're asking for empathy in the same breath as showing very little yourself. It shouldn't be this hard for this reporter to see how a guy can be without much empathy for people he dislikes. After all, he's doing it right there.

<comment><USER7> The reporter is being extremely disingenuous. There is a huge difference between "residents who aren't rich or hipsters or tech workers" and the kind of residents that end up at places like Gideon's. My wife's uncle is a landlord. One of his tenants let her dog shit and piss all over the floor all the time. To the point where he had to cut out the lower part of the drywall because of all the dog piss that had soaked into the wall from the floor. My wife could still smell it even after it was renovated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article really buries the lede:

> The numbers cited by Campos and others—45 fires in two years—also weren't > necessarily as suspicious as they seemed. _It turns out that 25 fires a year > is about average for the Mission._

<comment><USER8> It's more than buries the lede. It starts with a cold open, which is plays up and up... and it turns out it was a borderline entrapment scheme, where a criminal on a plea deal offered to burn the place down while wearing a wire.

So, a big fat pile of nothing, plus a narration of the (very real) inter- ethnic and inter-class tensions in the Mission intended to make the story sound more plausible.

Also, can I just add how irresponsible David Campos's role has been in all this?

> "I'm not saying there is arson," he said. "The fire department tells me > there isn't. They haven't found evidence of arson."

> "Have you come across any clues?" I asked.

> "Nothing's come up," he said.

> "Are there rumors?"

> "There are comments," he said. "Like with that fire that happened at the > car-repair place."

> He meant the Rolling Stock tire-shop fire of November 8, 2015. It destroyed > the shop and two adjacent apartment buildings, displacing 21 people. Fire > investigators ruled this one an accident as well, most likely started by an > electrical fault or, again, discarded smoking materials.

> "The owner [James Albera] was sort of, 'Hey! Now I guess we can go and build > condos,' " Campos continued. "It was an odd comment that fed into the > speculation."

> Later, I found Albera's verbatim comments to the media: "It's terrible. It's > been in the family since 1960." And then, when asked what he planned to do > next: "I'd like to go residential, with stores on the bottom."

> I e-mailed Albera several times to ask him about what Campos told me. > Personally, I didn't find his response to the fire suspicious. Even so, he > didn't reply.

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth, the reporter is the a fairly popular author; he wrote "The Psychopath Test" and "So You've Been Publicly Shamed." He writes the you've shown to serve an argument he's making in his books. I wouldn't be surprised if this article is actually a chapter or a passage from an upcoming book of his. He isn't following proper journalistic writing standards, but he also isn't trying to be a journalist. GQ probably wanted to drive readership to their site and their July 2017 issue, so they asked if Ronson had anything in the works and paid him for the rights to publish an excerpt from his manuscript.

<comment><USER8> My thought was actually that the editor had reordered intermediate material in order to make things look worse than the author did :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's see...

Can't increase supply because NYMBY? Check. Can't increase rent because rent control? Check. Removing tenants next to impossible? Ok, this is true anywhere.

Gee, I wonder why the incentives are all screwed up?

<comment><USER11> So what's the argument here? We shouldn't take any measures to try and keep rents within reach for city residents, because arson is a natural, unavoidable consequence?

<comment><USER10> No, it's that when you abandon healthy markets and try to impose artificial constraints that fly in the face of basic economics you wind up with horribly perverse incentive structures. Can someone find that article about the landlord who took a 2-family house, knocked down the 2nd unit and then was able to increase rent on the remaining unit 4x?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a software developer from the southeast, my two visits to San Francisco taught me one thing: you couldn't pay me enough to live there.

It's overcrowded, it's overly-expensive, and it's jam-packed with two kinds of people: naive overpaid tech-startup people who are convinced _their_ selfie app will be the one that saves the world, and the most aggressive homeless people I've ever met -- that is, the world that needs more than a selfie app to save them, but who are effectively "pigeons" (to borrow this landlord's crass terminology) in the eyes of the self-styled superheroes on their way to an overpriced bistro or a meeting about how to reinvent the bus system but with a prohibitively-high price tag.

The city reeks of marijuana smoke, and spending more than 20 minutes at Fisherman's Wharf left me lightheaded. You may scream loudly about your right to smoke this medicinal herb, but what of my right not to be compelled to feel its effects just because I dared to walk down a public avenue?

It's nigh-impossible to get around any way other than just walking for miles -- including to overpriced grocery stores and back -- or paying for another app startup's glorified taxi service, gallantly offering highly-priced "solutions" to a problem they helped create. This may be an unfair criticism, though; my own hometown has notoriously-bad public transit. It's a hard problem to solve, just made harder by the sheer crowded density of San Francisco.

There are no trees, except in tiny parks. At least one of those few parks is comprised of artificial turf (the plasticky kind), and would take about 1 full minute to leisurely stroll from end to end. If you combined all the parks, you might get something roughly the size of New York's Central Park. Maybe. The city has decided that the natural ecosystem which it boasts so loudly about protecting has no place within its boundaries. And so, you have nothing but cement, asphalt, and concrete as far as the eye can see.

As much as people talk about the "Bible belt" and how it's so hard to be left- leaning or atheist there (because you're considered "odd"), it's much harder to be right-leaning or Christian in San Francisco, where the assumption is that people of that ilk are knuckle-dragging trogdolytes to be scorned or ignored until the commonly-shared blue-tinted dream vision of history renders such people somehow obsolete. It's an attitude of "we respect all people, just...not you."

There's lots of talk to be found on street signs and in meeting rooms about celebrating cultural diversity and indigenous peoples, but in practice the people who are celebrated are rich CEOs or incoming tech workers riding in on H1Bs to displace the "indigenous" people of the area, crowding them out and motivating the kind of hostility mentioned in this article.

My business travel to San Francisco felt like I was walking into a foreign country; one that was on the decline, one that had some deep-rooted enmity for my own homeland (the "rest of the country"), like you might find between India and Pakistan.

<comment><USER13> After visiting San Francisco a couple of weeks ago for the first time in years, I couldn't agree more with everything you just said - <USER2> regarding the homeless and the persistent smell of marijuana.

To add to that point further, the drug problem in San Francisco seems to be absolutely enormous. I can't even tell you the number of times I saw someone literally shooting up right on the sidewalk in broad daylight. It was very disconcerting to say the least. I get the need for access to clean syringes, but it seems to go beyond disease prevention and almost into the realm of enabling. I say all this as an expert of nothing, just my observations after 48 hours in the center of town.

<comment><USER14> > I get the need for access to clean syringes, but it seems to go beyond > disease prevention and almost into the realm of enabling.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Most harm reduction programs of this type are needle exchanges, they're not just giving them away. It seems obvious that it won't enable the person to use if they obtain a clean syringe, because otherwise they'd just use the dirty one they already have. Exchange programs also incentivize people not to leave old syringes lying around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> such brutal criminality. landlording has always been shady business, especially when the rent is low, however this is pure insanity. SRO is not very different from the rooms i rent out. it is perfectly possible to do this well and make a lot more than the price you bought it for. you mainly need to keep a cool head. let's hope sf landlords get their sanity back.</comment>


DIY Liquid Nitrogen Generator - <AUTHOR> http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2008/08/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generator.html <comment><USER2> Just be careful about doing this without the nitrogen separation membrane. Because liquid nitrogen boils before the liquid oxygen (or alternately it's easier to condense liquid oxygen), you will end up with a container full of liquid oxygen.

Now, while that can be fun to play with, it's pretty dangerous if you are not expecting it.

<comment><USER3> _Now, while that can be fun to play with, it's pretty dangerous if you are not expecting it._

That's kind of an understatement when it comes to liquid oxygen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Information regarding these membrane units is easy to find on the internet, but good luck buying one! They are nearly all produced for huge industrial installations, and those manufacturers will not even return phone calls from interested hobbyists."

I look forward to seeing the equivalent of sparkfun for homebrew cryogenics.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, though, for DIY, I was expecting him to do it the way Linde did, back in 1894, that being:

      Compress some dry air.
      This will heat it up, so cool it down.
      Return it to atmospheric pressure.

While expanding, it, of course, gets even colder still, and condenses. Liquid nitrogen is old tech, older than you might think.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool. I love seeing people cobble together high tech/complex equipment in their garage.

This could come in handy for the insane overclocking crowd and the arguably insaner DIYBio crowd. The advantages of being able to store cell/other cultures in LN should not be underestimated. Countdown to Homeland Security/FBI overreaction in 3, 2...

</comment><comment><USER7> What would you do with the liquid Nitrogen you generate? What is the hello world app of cryogenics?

<comment><USER8> _What is the hello world app of cryogenics?_

Making ice cream.

<comment><USER9> I thought it was desiccating flowers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> safety tip for storage is a pressure relief valve on the tank and beware of suffocation risks during/if a LN2 spill, gas volume of N2 may displace enough air for asphyxiation to occur - good labs have O2 sensors in their LN2 storage areas. never transport a thermos of LN2 in your car or a lift etc

</comment><comment><USER11> seems like he got very lucky/spent a very long time searching ebay to find the right parts to make this work. I don't think you would easily be able to replicate this.

<comment><USER6> Very true, but just remember "what the eye of man can conceive, a cheap factory in Shenzhen can achieve".</comment></comment>


Is your site provocative enough? (i.e. competing for attention) - <AUTHOR> http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/09/be_provocative.html Summary:
Be Visual Be Different--Break Patterns and Expectations Be Daring Change Things Regularly Inspire Curiosity Pose a Challenge Be Controversial and Committed Be Fun Be Stimulating. Be Exciting. Be Seductive Help them have Hi-Res Experiences
All good things to remind oneself when developing a product (or at least the homepage/brand). <comment><USER2> Damn, and here I thought Sierra was posting again.

Good post nonetheless.</comment>


How working on gross, violent games can mess with developers (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/252241/How_working_on_gross_violent_games_can_mess_with_developers.php <comment><USER2> In a few years we will let the animators of Doom out of their cells again.</comment>


Knowledge Graphs - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02320 <comment><USER2> We are working on an open-source Knowledge Graph called Cayley ([https://cayley.io](https://cayley.io)) including a browsable web interface ([https://github.com/cayleygraph/web](https://github.com/cayleygraph/web)) and a new query language improving on the work done by Google Knowledge Graph (formerly Freebase) and the W3C's Semantic Web project.

<comment><USER3> That is very cool. You mention some RDF support, but no SPARQL query support if I understand your first linked web page.

For what my opinion is worth, I encourage you! I have been a fan of the semantic web since day zero, and I worked with their Knowledge Graph while working at Google. In order promote the tech, I am working on an app (for iOS and macOS) that will walk new users through using SPARQL against endpoints like WikiData and DBPedia. My email is in my profile, contact me and we can set up a phone call sometime.

<comment><USER4> Where can we find information about how Google is using KGs? All I can find is pretty old info (freebase etc). there are details of what they do with it (those boxes in searches, but no technical explanation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two of the paper's authors wrote up a helpful history of knowledge graphs that would be interesting for those who enjoyed this submission - [http://knowledgegraph.today/paper.html](http://knowledgegraph.today/paper.html)

<comment><USER6> Here's a less comprehensive and certainly much less academic, but nevertheless potentially interesting, related post: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/knowledge-graphs-end-user- pro...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/knowledge-graphs-end-user-products- from-cyc-ai-part-daniel-kornev).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whao, great resource. I just skimmed it, but I like they define and categorize knowledge graphs (annex A.3) because this is something that wasn't properly done.

<comment><USER8> I'm so glad I read your comment because it motivated me to actually click into the PDF and read further. It truly is an incredible resource. Really a tour de force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone point to a place where knowledge graphs are used effectively in industry/research/personal hobby?

<comment><USER10> Current consulting project involves strategy for patching 8000 vulnerabilities, across 300 OS images, hosting 500 applications, managed by 50 branches, in 20 divisions, where about 40 people are accountable at a business level for the applications.

I'm using neo4j to integrate this set with HR and financial allocations data to show the direct exposure of business applications to their budgets, and provide a rough value at risk on a per branch basis, and create big scary graph viz clouds of vulnerabilities that all point to the person responsible for them, mainly to get people to get off their asses and patch their shit.

I'm also using queries of the graph to auto-generate hierarchies of jira epics and stories and assign them to the business owners so we can track remediation across the whole enterprise in both jira and azure devops.

It has produced a navigable organization map and we can run queries like, show me the vulnerability exposure of this division based on the aggregate risk of the applications deployed by its branches, and show me who is responsible for fixing it. Show me the sr. manager who has the most vulnerabilites roll up to them by their jr. managers, etc.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that mostly a database problem? I have loved knowledge graphs for a while until I realized they were just a way to obfuscate complex problems, not solving them.

Here, what part of your problem wouldn't be solved by a DB with a table of vulnerabilities, a table of branches and divisions, and a table of people?

A query can fetch the images and apps used by a division, then use that to query the vuln database.

I mean, I understand the problem is not super simple, but I fail to see what knowledge graphs bring to it?

<comment><USER12> Aren't knowledge graphs just a buzzword way of saying "graph database"?

So yeah, the types of problem a db system solves are db problems, even if its using a semantic network model instead of a relational model

<comment><USER13> Graph databases can hold totally bespoke data that makes sense only to the consuming application or they can hold data that has been factored and connected to outside terminologies and external datasets. One holds data, one holds knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The paper reads like an index into a number of related research fields. One running example, very concise explanations, maaaany references.

</comment><comment><USER15> For anyone interested, there's a (virtual) knowledge graph conference going on in May (www.knowledgegraph.tech). Ignore the pricing, since it reflects the original in-person event. I'm organizing an investor pitch session for this conference and am looking for early (A, seed, or pre-seed) startups interested in participating - let me know if interested!

<comment><USER16> I'm interested in the online event. I don't have a KG-related business to pitch though. Is that an issue?

<comment><USER15> Sorry for the delay! You should definitely just attend the conference: [https://www.knowledgegraph.tech/](https://www.knowledgegraph.tech/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very strange question, but can anyone identify the serif font used in the body? The two-story characters are very nice and the serifs are not distracting.

<comment><USER18> It would appear to be this: [https://www.dafont.com/linux- libertine.font](https://www.dafont.com/linux-libertine.font)

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

<comment><USER19> If you have poppler (and maybe xpdf) installed, the "pdffonts" command will list the fonts referenced in a pdf file (and whether they're embedded or not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found causal loop diagram much more effective

</comment><comment><USER21> The paper looks like it will be a nice resource to direct AI students towards; however, the Reviewer 2 in me is stirring, I'm sort of concerned with the lack of Betty's Brain citation in the paper, as that is one of the studies on knowledge graphs in education.

</comment><comment><USER22> .

<comment><USER23> No. Its year=2020, Month=03.</comment></comment>


Amazon workers left out in the cold - <AUTHOR> http://articles.mcall.com/2011-11-05/news/mc-allentown-amazon-cold-20111105_1_warehouse-workers-amazon-s-lehigh-valley-warehouse-managers

<comment><USER2> Sounds about right, unfortunately. The usual policy is to have you evacuate to the designated area (or the backup thereof) and to remain there until an okay is given.

I'm surprised the managers were even allowed inside, really. They wouldn't do anything because they didn't want to lose track of their workers and they never planned for this. They're usually too afraid of legal problems to take any initiative at all. The only good thing is that a lawsuit like this might make them and others plan for such things in the future.

I doubt this is the place where people have been stuck outside in inclement weather during an evacuation.

<comment><USER2> Upon reflection, I'm guessing that the managers _weren't_ technically allowed back inside per the policy, but were the only people there safely able to ignore that policy and stay warm....

Though I guess they could've been helping the fire department locate the fire or something; I'm sure it'd take quite a while to check for fires before giving an all clear.

<comment><USER3> "Though I guess they could've been helping the fire department locate the fire or something; I'm sure it'd take quite a while to check for fires before giving an all clear."

As a firefighter, I can -guarantee- that would never be the case. Depending on the severity of the alarm, we have our own tools for a) finding the fire - thermal cameras, etc, and b) getting to them - there's a reason forcible entry is taught in Fire Academy. :)

No, they were just putting themselves above their employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What exactly happened with regards to the claims of excessive temperatures in the Amazon warehouse (which seems to have led to this recent episode)

FTA, OSHA claimed the heat issues were resolved December 14 2010, but I'm pretty sure there were more complaints this year ...

<comment><USER2> I don't know, but my guess would be that they did whatever OSHA told them to and called it a day. Factories aren't the kind of environment where people take the initiative to improve things, generally. And I bet they told the workers that they comply with all OSHA guidelines (no matter how inadequate they might have been in this instance...) and had a meeting with anyone who had been grumbling.

At least, that was about my experience in very similar circumstances, though I took a bit more initiative to prevent heat-related injuries in the first place. Then we had some slightly uncomfortable meetings where I was told to keep up the good work.

Legal fears largely dominate both common sense and initiative, I fear. It would be nice to be able to just do the right thing without so much worry, but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

<comment><USER4> If you are not bound by a gag order, could you go into more detail about your situation? I'm curious about how OSHA responds to worker complaints ...

<comment><USER2> I've never had to deal with OSHA. I managed to get them to consult some of our former safety guy's recommendations that they had apparently forgotten about and find some stuff that addressed the heat issues. So they spent a few grand or so on swamp cooler fans to cover areas they should have a long time ago and they got some of those cheap necklaces that absorb water. Those work much better than fans, BTW, though it can be hard to get people to wear them (ironically, I had to badger the one guy who needed one the most and he benefited more than anyone).

A lot of things were forgotten, I guess, because the guy responsible for safety was laid off back in 2008 or something like that, which is probably what made them seem so nervous.

Anyhow, no one got sick from the heat, and this was a downright miserable summer, even by Arizona standards, and we did pretty good from the look of things. Nobody has anything to sue over that I know about. I'm not the type who'd sit back and watch someone get hurt if I could prevent it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Would You Rather Get Into YC, 500 Startups, TechStars, or HBS? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemaddalone/2012/03/28/would-you-rather-get-into-y-combinator-500-startups-techstars-or-harvard-business-school/ <comment><USER2> FYI: HBS -> Harvard business school.

Reminds me of the lyric, "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things, doesn't belong."

</comment><comment><USER3> I think if you are asking you probably wouldn't be attending HBS.</comment>


XML: The Angle Bracket Tax - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001114.html <comment><USER2> XML isn't used for its readability, it's used because it's a good standard format for exchanging data between different pieces of software. I work in the web shop business and for us standardization on XML is a god send: We no longer do have to maintain (or write!) parsers for product data supplied in all sorts of different insane CSV-like formats. Instead we can simply throw a well designed off the shelf XML parser at the data and when a data file is corrupt, it saves us from having to spend hours on the phone with a partner company trying to figure out whether it's their data, their output software or our own parser that is broken. With XML it's either valid XML or it's not.

<comment><USER3> Your point is that XML is good because it is standard. That is valid.

The OP link, however, was pointing out that while this is true, it's _also_ true that XML is a very bad choice for that metadata format. Look at things like JSON or YAML for saner, simpler and more readable alternatives. We ended up with XML because it looked like HTML at a time where "web stuff" was all the rage, not because of its inherent value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For some new work, I originally fought against using XML for storing data. Good ol' "key = value" would have done the trick, mostly, although as we kept adding data it might have been handy to impose more structure on it. Nonetheless, it was explained to me that the customer would have to be able to deal with these files, and we absolutely could not rely on them to touch the files with Notepad without screwing things up (CRLF vs LF, accidentally scrambling key names, etc.). What we can rely on, though, is XML:

1\. Whipping up a web interface for editing the values in the files is trivial

2\. If the customer or a less computer-savvy rep needs to tweak the files manually, we can tell them to use XML Notepad to minimize the risk of clobbering something.

I found that by using one layer of nodes and putting the data in attributes instead of their own nodes, the structure is roughly equivalent to INI or Apache config files, and not much more verbose. Maybe it's the Python in my blood speaking, but I appreciate having one obvious solution to a recurring, mundane problem -- organizing and storing small amounts of simple data in a way that anyone can retrieve it.

<comment><USER5> > use XML Notepad

If the format gets unwieldly that you require special software then the benefit of it being a human-readable text format is lost.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, but in this case the readability of the text format is only a minor benefit.

I didn't want to go on a tangent, but the problem is that vanilla Windows XP (not sure about Vista) does not make it safe to play with plain text files, especially those meant for a Linux system. Notepad is not safe. So to protect the unaware, we need another layer between the user and the raw data to make . Any format would be fine, as long as there's a free tool available that the customer and their paranoid IT support would both be comfortable with, which preferably might already be installed, and Windows knows not to open it with Notepad by default. Since other products on the same network already use XML, the customer is OK with staring at this format, expects that .xml files will pop up read-only in Internet Explorer, and knows that the angled brackets mean serious business.

If any other format met all these needs at once, I'd jump for it -- but I haven't seen anything else that does. Any suggestions for other formats that work well on both Windows and Unix?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the comments: Seems to me that far too many people reach for the 'silver bullet' that is XML, then end up with a big pile of mess.

The same happened with OO. It has uses but it is generally overused.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Wouldn't it be nice to have easily readable, understandable data and configuration files"

No, not really

How many times do people actually read XML data, or configuration files? Once in a while I suppose, when performing some configuration tasks, or debugging some data operation. But 99% of the time, your programs are the ones reading the XML. And this is exactly what XML is designed for - being easy for machines to read.

XML is easy to parse, because you have hundreds of available XMl parsers. In many languages you don't even need XML parsers, they're included in the language (actionscript and scala come to mind). It's easy to query with xpath, it's easy to validate with xsd. Most databases can store it natively. There's a whole ecosystem of xml tools that help you work with the data. It would be hard to trade all that for something slightly more readable.

<comment><USER3> Most of us would submit that people might read XML data more often if it didn't look like crap. If all we wanted was a metadata format that was easy for machines to read, we wouldn't have specified it in text.

If you're not reading your XML, you're probably using it wrong. And even if you personally don't care, we're still at the mercy of all the developer out there specifying their configuration formats in XML. If you're not reading your _configuration_ files, you're definitely using them wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read somewhere that Javascript was originally implemented in Lisp. Wouldn't it be so much better if they stuck with Lisp as the basis for extending Firefox (Netscape at the time)? Maybe in that alternate history it would have seemed obvious to use Lisp as a common data format instead of XML, it being the clearest and cleanest syntax for complex nested data/s-expressions. Easy to read and better than XML as a common format. As is, Javascript eventually matured into a pretty damn good language (though not as good as Common Lisp, not even as good as Emacs Lisp), but XML is pretty lousy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I used to use XML, until i finally got around to learning how to write parsers myself. Atthat point the lightbulb went on, and I realised that I could produce formats that are much easier for humans to read/edit, much smaller, and much quicker for the parser to analyse.

XML knows nothing about the structure of your data. This is intended, but it means that you have to describe the structure of the data along with the data. Seeing as the software that is going to use the XML has to know about the stucture anyway,if it is going to do anything useful, this just means that you end up specifying the structure in the software and in the XML. Blech!

Go and read up on what yacc and all of its decendants can do for you. It'll open up worlds for you :-)

<comment><USER9> I've done both, and I regret the mini-parsers I wrote. It was for stupid stuff, like config files. The main problem is that nobody else could do anything with the code. XML is at least a common denominator. Not the lowest, but pretty low. :)

I've found it easiest to deal with xml in a very focused way. In my case, I always define a schema and use a code generator to get things in/out of memory. From there on, I don't care about the xml anymore. This is fast and reliable. The only real downsides are (a) ugly xml syntax, and (b) having to remember how XSD works every time.

Where I really object to XML is as an internal construct in a system. It's useful for putting things on disk, and it's useful for interchange with damn near anybody because of the ubiquitous libraries. But you don't want to be keeping your core application state in a DOM. Or using it as an inter- component interface. I've seen more than one person do that, and it made me very sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Before I read the article, I thought "angle bracket tax" would refer to how much bulkier (both in terms of storage & bandwidth) xml can be.

In some cases, the trade-off between larger data streams and semantic descriptiveness is not compelling.</comment>


How do I politely decline building stuff for relatives/friends? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/3624875/222908

<comment><USER2> Oh, this is easy:

"I've done work for relatives/friends before, and it usually doesn't work out well for either of us."

Almost everyone knows that mixing business and pleasure is a bad idea. Those that don't will take it as a polite brush-off and go away. The few that remain are real jerks in business and you really, really don't want to work for them anyhow.

Or, if you didn't really want to say 'No', do as the answers on SO say: Charge money.

</comment><comment><USER3> IF it is a good friend / family member I offer to teach them how to do it. This does one of two things, they bow out because they wanted you to do all the work, or it creates an environment where you get to spend quality time with someone you care about. As well by the time it is finished they are in a position to support their app.

</comment><comment><USER4> Simple - say you already have more things that you want to do than you have time. If it's important enough to them, maybe they'll be willing to make it worth your while.</comment>


What You Didn't Know about the Stanford Prison Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4102 <comment><USER2> These all seem like issues that should have been caught in the original peer review a long time ago. Is this still a groundbreaking study, or did it just get caught up in a media frenzy?</comment>


The Obama Doctrine - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> He got amazing access to Obama for this article. I haven't read it all, but the question about when intervention is justified and correct is one I find interesting because it creates strange bedfellows. When an old-fashioned liberal like Obama can be an admirer of the cautious Bush I and Brent Scowcroft, it's interesting.

As another example, reading George Kennan's reflections ([http://www.amazon.com/Around-Cragged-Hill-Political- Philosop...](http://www.amazon.com/Around-Cragged-Hill-Political- Philosophy/dp/0393311457)), one is struck by how cautious Kennan is, and how he needs to see how something affects American interests before intervening. It's not _realpolitik_ a la Kissenger, it's just a modest understanding of our limits.</comment>


Ask HN: Would Obama Veto SOPA? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> _we're going to aggressively protect our intellectual property. (...) That's why USTR is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses, and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements, and moving forward on new agreements, including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement._

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks- president...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president- export-import-banks-annual-conference)

Seems pretty clear to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given that he has only vetoed two bills, and that his administration has generally been content to accept the trend towards corporatism and overall erosion of civil liberties that existed before he took office: No, I doubt he'd Veto SOPA. Similarly, I doubt that McCain would have vetoed SOPA, had he won, and I doubt that most of the current crop of Republican candidates would veto SOPA.

I do wish he would use his veto, if it, or something like it passes, but really, I hope nothing of the sort ever reaches his desk, acknowledging that my hope is very likely in vain.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, MPAA is pretty deep in his pocket I think...</comment>


Show HN: My competitive Fundraising App for Android Burn Your Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.burnedmoney.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, i'm the developer of the app.

tl;dr: burnedmoney.com gives you a profile that displays the amount of money you've donated via the app, which is designed in a stare-down contest style, so you can challenge friends to see which one of you can or wants to donate more. It's mainly for fundraising parties but could be used anywhere else too.

I started the project for the PayPal Android Developer Challenge but since then i've grown really fond of it and learned much about really shipping a product.

Please give me some feedback as i've just launched the app wednesday.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah awesome, a mexican stand-off for millionaires :p

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice Idea: "Oh I feel sad... let's burn some money!"</comment>


Show HN: Random Wikipedia browser extension - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-wikipedia/kanbdekniajhfdofkbikiclgccplhfjg <comment><USER2> can't you just set the new tab page url to the wikipedia random page link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually not, the only way to do this is using an extension. The source code is here: [https://github.com/tarla/random-wikipedia-chrome- extension](https://github.com/tarla/random-wikipedia-chrome-extension)

<comment><USER3> If my memory is right it was possible in old versions of Chrome.

I see it's possible in current Firefox, but only for new windows :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat idea, but why exactly does it need to read my browsing history?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't! the real code is pretty much one line in the background.js here: [https://github.com/tarla/random-wikipedia-chrome- extension](https://github.com/tarla/random-wikipedia-chrome-extension)

the other parts are just to add a donate button that redirects to Wikimedia Foundation page

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the sole feature of this extension is pretty trivial and can be easily replaced with a bookmark, I would be honestly worried about some "hidden features".

The barely two sentence description and low resolution preview picture also don't inspire much confidence.

<comment><USER6> Oddly, the only way to change the new tab page is with an extension.

<comment><USER7> With Firefox, you can add a link to your new tab page (and everybody else's) just by paying Mozilla a hefty sum!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your overview page appears to have two copies of the same image.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll fix that and add a pretty description, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That really looks like a lot of work, congratulations!</comment>


WikiLeaks and NSA committee: document could reveal informants - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/wikileaks-und-nsa-ausschuss-dokument-koennte-informanten-verraten-a-1124153.html <comment><USER2> "document could reveal informants"

Lets not forget this is the same talking point that has been pushed by the US government from the beginning. For some reason I expected Germany to be more honest, but clearly I'm just naive.

<comment><USER3> They are talking about the whistleblowers, not about others affected by the leak. So it is not the same talking point at all.

<comment><USER2> Oh... In that case I misunderstood the text. Google translate isn't great.

Could you expand on why the documents could reveal the whistleblowers?

<comment><USER4> The document package contained a document not available to the NSA commission but to some foreign affairs commission. Only very few people have access to documents of both commissions.

The more interesting part is: this leak was completely useless. Although the documents are not for the public, they're also not rated as a secret. This means that every politician with access is allowed to tell the press about it, only publishing is not allowed. As we have a useful opposition in Germany there was nothing new in the documents...

<comment><USER5> This makes me think that the claims to pursue informants/leakers is false. It also makes me believe that the purpose of the leak was to create an alibi to conduct a procedure that looks like a prosecution to intimidate potential leakers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 Startup Ideas That Never Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-ideas-2011-4?op=1 <comment><USER2> Funny how the article knocks Hunch as a startup that never works, then, in their own recommended article they link to at the bottom, call it a "Hot NYC startup you need to watch" [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-new-york- city-startups...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-new-york-city- startups-to-watch-2010-3#hunch-knows-everything-about-you-7)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess not all of their writers agree. Their headlines tend to exaggerate too.

Number 1 in Top Eleven Weird Things About Business Insider: They have way too many lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They mention music startups. Is Grooveshark profitable?</comment>


"If You're Building a Startup You Need to Move to Phoenix (Not Silicon Valley)" - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtcatalog.com/daehee-park-jt-marino/2016/04/if-youre-building-a-startup-you-need-to-move-to-phoenix-not-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> Sage advice.

It's hot enough in Phoenix summers that homeless people can't survive there. So unlike SF you won't have tent cities popping up on the sidewalk in front of your office. Whether that is a pro or a con is up to you.</comment>


Ask HN: Cloud server vs. custom PC for running machine learning algorithms - <AUTHOR> Hello all,
I have been pondering the pros and cons of building a high-end PC vs renting a high performance instance from a Cloud provider (e.g. a P2 instance from AWS) for running Data Science/Machine Learning algorithms.
Has anyone faced the same dilemma before, and if so what were the deciding factors for you? <comment><USER2> I'm biased (Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud), but having a single GPU in your local machine for testing and then doing real training on a cloud provider seems best.

If you load your workstation at home with the best GPUs money can buy today, you've spent a big pile of cash and in six-to-twelve months it's no longer the best (see our announcement about bringing P100s to Compute Engine in the next few months). Moreover, your single awesome machine can only train one thing at a time. By renting several such VMs (on us or other providers), you can use distributed training to iterate more quickly on your models or explore totally different problems in parallel.

Doing so at home multiplies your cost for each machine. With the pay as you go model, if you were going to compute the answer, it costs the same (roughly) to do it all at once versus serially. So why wait?

Again, big disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, and have ML Services and GPUs to sell you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that provided your own desktop or laptop is powerful enough I would just use that for testing and development. Cloud wins out over a custom PC build due to the flexibility you get.

Want to run an algorithm on 10 nodes for 5 hours? No problem. Want to leave something running for days connecting to the twitter firehose? Sure.

However building PCs and your own clusters is quite fun! Check out these [https://www.picocluster.com/collections/cubes/products/pico-...](https://www.picocluster.com/collections/cubes/products/pico-3-odroid-c2-cluster- cube)

</comment><comment><USER4> Curious what hardware you have currently available and what workloads you are considering running and for what purpose. I mean:

1\. Today's low end hardware is the high performance hardware of just a few years ago.

2\. Most data isn't big and if the data is big then moving compute to the data is usually a better practice than moving data to the compute.</comment>


Female computers of world war 2, and first programmers of ENIAC - <AUTHOR> http://www.topsecretrosies.com/Top_Secret_Rosies/Home.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The producer of this documentary was at the Computer History Museum in CA today. She was saying she could use help from anyone who would like to create interactive educational materials, especially to demonstrate fundamental concepts in programming. Also, please consider buying a library copy for a school near you, or (if in the US) ask your local PBS affiliate to screen it - PBS are just the distributors but this project is the work of a truly independent producer who spent seven years working on it.</comment>


Newegg Now Owned by Chinese Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.techpowerup.com/226777/newegg-now-owned-by-chinese-company <comment><USER2> "55.7% owned"

Reading this, I realized that I've pretty much stopped ordering anything from Newegg and purchase those things from Amazon instead.

With Amazon Prime, I'm almost certainly assured that I'll have my items in two days. At Newegg, it can take three to five days for my items to arrive -- even when I pay extra for two-day shipping (due to "order processing").

In addition, for several months out of the year, Discover gives 5% back on Amazon purchases.

The only time I can recall ordering from Newegg in the last three years or so was one evening when I suddenly "needed" another SSD for a project I was working on. I had a pair of Samsung 850 PRO SSDs I had purchased from Amazon but decided at the last minute that I should get one from a different vendor (in the hopes of minimizing the chances of a failure affecting both simultaneously). Newegg has a warehouse/distribution facility about an hour away so I ordered another one from them and picked it up the next afternoon.

Several years ago, they were the "go to" for my techs friends and I but it seems like nowadays pretty much everyone I know just goes to Amazon "by default".

I do applaud them for fighting back against patent trolls and appreciate their efforts.

</comment><comment><USER3> A few years ago when they were contemplating an IPO their business practices(marketplace, irregular ship times, price creep) started feeling like the IPO had gone through despite it not happening. Their patent troll slayer attitude revived my usage for a bit, but irritants prevailed and they have been a simple reference resource for a couple years now. So far to fall, so sad to watch.

<comment><USER4> So who is the new favorite?

<comment><USER3> Good question. I don't care much for Amazon, their spurious sellers and their scant descriptions. I buy from Monoprice, Microcenter, Mouser. Ebay if I have to, Amazon lastly. Have found a few smaller, boutique(?) shops over the years, but they come & they go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With new ownership (i.e., different investors) I wonder if they will be as combative when it comes to patent trolls.</comment>


Show HN: word suggestion engine from partial input using trie - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chris-kuo/Autocompleter <comment><AUTHOR> A partial word suggestion engine based on trie. This is an one evening project after discussion on ways to implement such an engine. Handles up to two input errors (misspelling/missing letters). Dictionary is based on word frequency list from Mr. Norvig. Includes simple terminal based interactive demonstration based on Python 3 ncurses module.</comment>


Show HN: Openly Annotatable Edition of The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling - <AUTHOR> https://hc.selectedintelligence.com/ <comment><USER2> Well, that's a good idea.</comment>


Crowdsourced database of Augmented Reality developers and makers - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11HRSn4UFf4IUWVOXiy5K8H1EQBYyaO3gB2PT6oyTCxc/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm considering creating an overall database where AR developers and makers will be presented. Plus, I think it will be great to share contacts with each other so that AR community can grow.

For now I've created and shared a simple online Google Spreadsheet where everyone can add their own information. Please, feel free to add your information [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11HRSn4UFf4IUWVOXiy5K...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11HRSn4UFf4IUWVOXiy5K8H1EQBYyaO3gB2PT6oyTCxc/)

P.S., Later we might be able to create some new cool project based on this data.

Best, Dan</comment>


A VC's advice for working moms - <AUTHOR> http://goop.com/newsletter/112/en/

<comment><USER2> Well thank you, if I even need advice on how to fit in my acupuncture and pedicure appointments to my busy day, I'll remember to look this up.

Sheesh.</comment>


China has confirmed it is on track to land a rover on the Moon later this year - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/31/china_confirms_plans_for_first_moon_visit_later_this_year/

<comment><USER2> I'm hoping China's efforts would ignite a new "space race".

<comment><USER3> Nice idea, but we can't afford to join the race without an ideological incentive. If China were an ideological Marxist state, that might help, but they aren't any more, an apt commentary on the intelligence of the Chinese people and their leadership.

Pretty soon now, the Chinese will be looking down on us in a literal as well as figurative sense.</comment></comment>


Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2018/02/12/picture-single-atom-wins-science-photo-contest/ <comment><USER2> David Nadlinger, the photographer, is an avid contributor to the D programming language[1]. He works on LDC compiler[2], the LLVM backend for D.

[1] [http://klickverbot.at/](http://klickverbot.at/)

[2] [https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc](https://github.com/ldc- developers/ldc)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an insanely cool picture.

Some quick napkin math (please let me know if I'm way off base here): in the second pic, the electrodes are ~74 pixels apart and the strontium atom is ~2 pixels wide.

The electrodes are ~0.078 inches apart, so these 2 pixels represent ~0.0021 inches (or ~0.05334 mm).

Google tells me that the Van der Waals radius of a single strontium atom is 255 pm.

So the diameter of the actual atom is something like 10,000x smaller than the space represented by these pixels. Crazy!

<comment><USER4> Analyze this photo instead: [http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f...](http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f7f7c86b-dc52-4355-a622-9e3cb9a876fc.jpg)

<comment><USER5> While the manual for my DSLR doesn't specifically refer to this use case, reading between the lines it sounds like using a jpg encoding for atomic-scale image capture isn't recommended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> View it here in actual life size on your display. [http://beta.lifesizer.com/view?user=5&ref=_59&h=1080&w=1920](http://beta.lifesizer.com/view?user=5&ref=_59&h=1080&w=1920)

Edit: based on seeing it in actual size, I would say it would be hard to see it with the naked eye, that said as pointed out in other comments, I suppose not impossible if a human eye can detect a single photon.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link. Very cool. What are some use cases for this service?

<comment><USER8> Mostly dickpics

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Photographer here. The amount of attention this has received has caught me a bit off guard – this is really just a somewhat pretty picture of what is a standard technique in physics by now.

I'm putting together a short post with answers to some of the most commonly asked questions, but in the meantime, check out this great comment by a well- informed Redditor:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7x4o27/p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7x4o27/picture_of_a_single_atom_wins_science_photo/du5pn7t/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Why does the atom look so big in the bicture? Atomic radius of Strontium is 219 pm, so that small spec there in the picture should be about 438 pm across.

I'm assuming the two ball-pen nib shaped structures on both sides of the spec in the picture are "two metal electrodes placed about 2mm (0.078in) apart". So, the space between the left tip of the electrode and left edge of the spec is about 1 mm. Based on some "visual calculation" (zooming in the picture and doing some approximation), the spec seems to be closer to about 0.03 mm across, which is orders of magnitude larger than 438 pm that it should be. What gives?

<comment><USER11> You're not looking directly at the atom itself (which is impossible... atoms are smaller than light's wavelength).

You're looking at the photons emitted by an excited atom, as collected over an extremely long exposure by the camera's sensor. Which will resolve to ~1px in size... the smallest unit the camera can image.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't appear that the atom is 1 pixel, but is in fact quite a bit larger than this: there are lots of elements in the image which are significantly smaller than it. So what gives?

<comment><USER13> I used to work on trapped ion experiments, and the limitation of the atom size was always the diffraction limit, which is limited by the NA of the lens (f-stop in camera terms) and the wavelength of light. In this case, the optical system (I'm guessing a camera lens) is designed for multiple wavelengths, so it might not reach the diffraction limit at the emission wavelength, which is like 400nm. In that case, the limit would be the aberration of the camera lens, which can be wavelength-dependent. Most camera lenses aren't designed for 400nm light, which is marginally visible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This makes me think of Voyager 1's pale blue dot photograph. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blu...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png)

I find the parallel awesome.

<comment><USER15> I did wonder if it was a Sagan reference: "... I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot."

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this possible? For an atom to stand out, are all the atoms around the area cleared out using electricity so it's pure, empty space? Is that possible? Also, as other people mentioned, I imagined atoms to be MUCH smaller in scale than anything like what seems to be visible here.

<comment><USER17> My guess is they made that atom very, very, very bright, among other things...But I'm no scientist

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome picture!

Could someone explain to me how a DSLR camera can capture an image of a single atop? I thought atoms were very very small, like so small only an electron microscope could "see" them. Maybe this device has been misrepresented and it is holding a small amount of atoms rather than a single one?

<comment><USER3> From the article:

> When illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet color, the atom absorbs > and re-emits light particles sufficiently quickly for an ordinary camera to > capture it in a long exposure photograph.

<comment><USER19> That explanation doesn't really satisfy. Perhaps, based on a large body of experimental evidence, it is known that the number of atoms present can be determined by the apparent brightness. Perhaps it's something totally different. Regardless, it would be helpful if the author/photographer/somebody explained the rationale that makes them confident that this is only a single atom.

<comment><USER20> Isn't hard to figure out when you've only got one ion in the trap: [https://www.physik.hu- berlin.de/de/nano/lehre/quantenoptik09...](https://www.physik.hu- berlin.de/de/nano/lehre/quantenoptik09/chapter13)

Heck, you can line up ions in a row and take pictures of those if you'd like.

<comment><USER21> Just because my previous comment is now gone: It's nice to mark PDFs

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Years ago, someone created a similar picture with a single atomic _nucleus_. I'd like to find it again.

Normally, nuclear transitions are invisibly-high energies. X-ray and gamma. But a couple of nuclei have multi-step spin isomer decays (or was it shape isomer?). One step of which is visible. So someone trapped and fully stripped a nucleus, and bombarded it to visibility. Naked-eye visibility. And took a picture. Of vacuum vessel window, with a green(?) fluorescence dot.

I saw that picture years ago. Likely a cover photo on something.

 _I would very much like to find it again._ For use in educational content. A lot of time has been spent looking for it, both by myself, and a couple of MIT science librarians. If anyone has a clue, I'd very much appreciate it. Here is a mockup[1] I gimped for user testing.

Why use it in education? To make the concept of atoms more concrete. Atomic _electrons_ are too small (and slow and fragile) to see with your naked eye. But (a couple of) nuclei you can (under hard-to-contrive conditions). Absent concrete, students build their understanding of materials on muddy misconceptions. For example, one failure-mode in teaching high-school stoichiometry, is students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects.

And to preempt a common response... one professor complained "you aren't really seeing the nucleus - it's only a diffraction dot"... right before they headed out to a star party, to apparently "not see" stars. ;)

[1] [http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/2017-Atoms/assets0/wk/...](http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/2017-Atoms/assets0/wk/ChamberWindow --fake.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER23> I love what I assume is a winking "pale blue dot" reference in the quote at the end.

<comment><USER24> It's the same idea, isn't it? A single pixel with a whole lot of meaning added to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article is about seeing a single atom; it's possible to see a single photon too, as was previously discussed on HN:

 _People can sense single photons: Experiment suggests that humans are capable of perceiving even the feeblest flash of light_ [1][2]

[1] [http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single- photons-1...](http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single- photons-1.20282)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163109)

</comment><comment><USER26> Is the light refracting to make the atom appear bigger than it actually is?

<comment><USER27> The laser light is absorbed by the atom and is released at a different wavelength. While the radius of the atom is 200 x 10^-12 meters, the wavelength of the light being emitted is in the visible spectrum, so between 380-500 x 10^-9 M which is why it is visible at the scales you can see.

A scanning electron microscope, or an x-ray crystallography based machine, uses items with much smaller wavelengths, .01 - 10 nm in the case of x-rays and so they're able to peer inside an atomic structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm imaging that the process of "magnifying" objects through photography has to degrade the true representation of the object. Kind of like expanding 1 pixel to cover a 500x500px space. In that sense I wonder how clearly we can ever hope to see an atom.

Obviously the technology and intent is impressive, but will we ever be able to see an atom more clearly or is it simply too small to be seen without Photoshopping in the details?

<comment><USER29> The internal structure of an atom is vastly different from the impression that most science books give you with their illustrations to the point that the question of us being able to clearly seeing an atom is almost nonsensical/doesn't make sense.

Atoms are much more nebulous than the concept of small indivisible balls of matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious to know how they managed to get a single atom there in the first place. I'm assuming it's not with atomic tweezers?

<comment><USER31> I don't know in this particular case, but in the late 80s, IBM figured out how to move individual atoms (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_\(atoms\))).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For the folks wondering how a single atom is showing up on a DSLR CMOS, try taking a photograph of a head of a metal pin with a very bright light shining on it. You'll see lots of glint and reflection, and it'll look larger on the camera - basically a single point reflecting light into multiple pixels of the camera sensor.

</comment><comment><USER33> How do they know it's a single atom?

<comment><USER34> I followed ion and atom trapping a long time ago, when it was still fairly new. (i.e., a couple decades ago) That was a valid question from the git-go, and there were a number of techniques. One way is that the trap is less stable when there are multiple atoms, so the extra atoms will eventually evaporate away, and you can measure the diminishing intensity of the scattered laser light. A paired atom will also interact with the light differently, for instance having a different spectral signature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is just great. Two great photographs in such a short span. SpaceX launching a Tesla car and landing the rockets back for reuse on the macro level. An atom on the nano level. Evidence that humanity's progress in the field of physical sciences is well balanced.

</comment><comment><USER36> How does this not violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Unless the explanation is that the atom moves around a lot in that tiny space, so we haven't actually determined its exact position and momentum.

</comment><comment><USER37> this takes the cake for great desktop backgrounds.

<comment><USER38> For a while I used the "opposite" of a single atom for my desktop background. Quite a few atoms in that picture! 5500 galaxies worth.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Hubble_E...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field_%28full_resolution%29.png) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra- Deep_Field#Hubble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra- Deep_Field#Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Gorgeous photo in so many ways. I'm unable to dig up a high-res version. Anyone else having more luck?

<comment><USER40> [http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f...](http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f7f7c86b-dc52-4355-a622-9e3cb9a876fc.jpg)

<comment><USER41> Awesome, thanks! Do you know where I can find the other submissions? Particularly "In a kitchen far far away..."? It looks astounding!

<comment><USER21> Scroll to the bottom and click around the slideshow. It's in with a number of others not mentioned:

[https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/single-trapped- atom-...](https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/single-trapped-atom- captures-science-photography-competitions-top-prize/)

<comment><USER41> Sadly those aren't the high-resolution photos. If you look at the link abainbridge shared you'll notice the image is a LOT higher resolution than the ones in the link you shared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Awesome pic - and just as mind blowing. Is there a 4k version of the pic?

</comment><comment><USER43> Are they using a Rydberg atom?

</comment><comment><USER44> Lame. This is an optical illusion. Call me when you actually image an atom at the atomic scale.

That's what I was expecting, when I read the title description: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

Like, the helical structure of DNA. I want to see how an atom looks like in reality, on the atomic scale. Along with the protons, neutrons, and maybe the electrons flying around it.

Zzz.. going back to sleep now..

<comment><USER45> > Along with the protons, neutrons, and maybe the electrons flying around it.

That is not how reality works. Stuff is quantum mechanical and has no analog in the macroscopic world.

All one can ever see are consequences of interactions. This is what we are seeing.</comment></comment>


NIMBYs in the twenty-first century - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/03/wealth-inequality?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/nimbysinthetwentyfirstcentury <comment><USER2> I am confused by the way the Economist phrased Mr. Rognlie's argument. The crux of Piketty's argument is that when global returns on wealth (r) is more than global economy growth (g), capital will start snowballing into the hands of the few very quickly.

The mechanism of r getting bigger than g is not an increase in r, but a decrease in g. The increase of the global economy is dominated not by increasing technological efficiency, but by population growth. There is an upper limit of the number of people we can fit on this rock (whether 9 billion or 100 billion, we will hit a limit at some point). Once we bump into that ceiling, growth will slow dramatically, and those who have already managed to create a sizable stash, or who have the talent to regularly beat the market, can accumulate wealth to no end.

In short, as I understood Piketty's book, the fact that r might not increase if we put the right limits on housing development, doesn't change the overall hypothesis made by Piketty.

<comment><USER3> You seem to be under the assumption that the population is going to grow towards infinity. The UN projects that we will stay under 10 billion ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth)) and even the highest only have us at 16 billion at the end of this century (compare that to the growth in the 20th century).

So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.

<comment><USER4> > So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, > we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the > limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.

But even in that case, you can only have at most polynomial growth (human habitat spherically expanding with speed of light) instead of an exponential one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Modern forms of capital, such as software, depreciate faster in value than > equipment did in the past: a giant metal press might have a working life of > decades while a new piece of database-management software will be obsolete > in a few years at most.

Those rotting bits ... outside of consumer software, the life of software is easily measured in decades.

<comment><USER6> I think it's tremendous confusion on their part about what "obsolete" means.

If people upgrade software every few years it's because the new software is much better (or at the very least perceived as such). Even most consumer software keeps on working almost forever (although this is starting to change now that so many things depend on external services).

Imagine if the giant metal press had a new version come out a few years later than was twice as efficient. You could keep operating the old one as long as you wanted, but paying for a new one would be well worth it. The old one is "obsolete." But the value of the old one, in terms of what it does for your business, is unchanged! If you wanted to sell it, the price on the secondary market will take a big hit, but that's less important.

Rather than demonstrating that return from capital is declining, the rapid obsolescence of software demonstrates that return from capital is increasing! If businesses were buying new giant metal presses every few years even though the old ones worked fine, would you say "oh, the return must be decreasing," or would you say, "wow, those new presses must be a huge improvement to be worth such a quick turnaround"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Housing is a euphemism for land. The value of locations is determined by the quality of the surrounding community and the environment.

This value winds up in land because it is claimed for exclusive use by individuals, enforced by government. Yet, claiming ownership over any part of the surface of this ball of space rock is arbitrary, and no principle of justice can truly legitimize it.

Instead of Piketty's blunt "wealth tax" we should be taxing land value, which as the cited MIT/Brookings report shows, is responsible for nearly all the new growth in inequality.

<comment><USER8> Who isn't paying taxes on their land value? Maybe there are some states that do not, but every year I pay a pretty large tax bill based on the value of my land/house.

<comment><USER9> Arguably, we should be taxing based on the value of only the land itself, and not considering improvements (buildings, etc.) made to the land, in order to not (mildly) disincentivize making improvements to land one owns.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that a large fraction of our land value is in cities and most of them have zoning restrictions that don't match classic notions of owning land. It's easy for otherwise identical pieces of land in the same neighborhood to differ in price by a factor of ten depending on whether it comes with the right to build a house on it. Well, I suppose that means that the land tax just has to incorporate different gradients of "owning" land but that's probably still simpler than trying to determine the value of improvements.

<comment><USER11> You are right that assessments are based on the highest and best _allowable_ use, but actually land assessments are the easiest part. Pennsylvanian mayors are on record that assessment changes (both technical and legal) almost completely evaporate from shifting from buildings to land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Modern forms of capital, such as software, depreciate faster in value than > equipment did in the past: a giant metal press might have a working life of > decades while a new piece of database-management software will be obsolete > in a few years at most.

Is software even capital? Isn't this part of why we've been arguing against software patents for years now? Obviously software and other forms of intellectual property have value, but to me capital is something used to _produce_ valuable products, not the products themselves. Maybe the firmware for some CNC machine is capital?

Are books capital because you can make movies out of them?

<comment><USER12> The economist is taking the position of the buyer (not maker) of software -- the prototypical business that buys a CRM tool to manage its customer relationships.

Seen as a good that increases the productive capacity of a company or the economy more generally, it seems software very much _is_ capital.

<comment><USER9> Do they buy a CRM tool, or do they just license the use of one? My understanding is that it's almost impossible to really "buy" and "own" commercial software, you can only acquire a license to use it.

<comment><USER10> If the license lasts any period of time then it's still capital, albeit capital that depreciates quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Conventional wisdom says that homes are bad investments compared to equities, conventional wisdom looks to be wrong. Maybe loading up your 401k instead of buying a home isn't such a good idea. The right answer is probably to rebalance a bit towards property.

<comment><USER14> Yes, which is always why I always cringe when I see how many people in their 20s and 30s believe that home ownership is a bad idea. The willingness to rent for life in order to live a high density, urban lifestyle is going to come back to haunt them when they get older. It's good for me as a landlord but I hope people my age start rethinking their position on home ownership.

<comment><USER15> I don't rent for the urban lifestyle. I rent because it gives me tremendous flexibility when it comes to where to work. If I bought a house somewhere, I would be stuck in that place for close to ten years. Sure I could do remote work, but that is still not as common-place as regular in-office work, so I would be shooting myself in the foot in terms of job prospects and therefore earning potential.

Home ownership was a no-brainer back when people got a job out of high school or college and worked at that job for decades, got regular raises, then retired with a pension. Nowadays though? Job hopping is the only reliable way of increasing one's income, and "right to work" is very common which means you can lose your job one day just because someone decided they no longer want you.

Not to mention the economic downturns. What did we see during the most recent recession? People lost their jobs first, then they lost their houses because they couldn't pay mortgage anymore. Barely six years have passed and yet people are already losing their minds again about home ownership.

Does home ownership have its advantages? Absolutely. Is it the right choice for everyone? Hell no.

<comment><USER16> Not to nitpick but the distinction is important: "at-will employment" is what means your employer can fire you at any time for any reason (or no reason), "right to work" refers to the idea that in some states unions cannot force non-union members to pay fair share fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Paywalled... Does anyone have a mirror?

edit: They removed it, thanks The Economist!

<comment><USER18> Economist lets you read a limited number of articles free of charge each month. The link gave me the full article so perhaps you used up your quota, or their rules are different in your territory?

<comment><USER17> It says I've used up my number of articles for the month, but I can't remember reading any in a long time, which my browser history confirms. Weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The weak point of democracy is the phenomenon of _cheap votes_. On any high stakes issue, there are still a large number of people who don't give a damn and will sell their vote for $25 if they legally can. This undermines the democratic process, as power accrues to those who bundle cheap votes together and deploy or sell the packages. This leads to a "democracy" (or, in Silicon Valley corporate-speak, a meritocracy) that can readily be used to validate the will of the existing elite, while posing no threat to it or check against its greed.

In elections, we prohibit explicit vote selling. But marketing is also about cheap-vote buying. Pepsi advertises because a large number of people just don't care which cola they get. Wal-Marts destroy small towns, but they're profitable because a large number of people will (with no ill intent, or cognizance of this being what they're doing) "vote" against their own communities to save $25 on Christmas shopping.

In culture, the term for very loud or passionate cheap votes is "useful idiots". Startup cheerleaders and the tech press (regulatory arbitrage! so visionary!) are useful idiots for the venture capitalists. The 22-year-olds who work 12 hours per day because they believe their 0.03% slices are just "teasers" and that they'll be introduced to VCs inside of 6 months are cheap votes.

NIMBY is two problems come together, because it's a cheap-vote dynamic on both sides. Among the renters on the losing side, most people don't get involved in local issues, and _not_ voting is a vote. They're selling their vote for the benefit of not having to put time in, and perhaps because they consider the NIMBY problem helpless. On the other hand, the NIMBYs are also cheap votes. They know what's good for society and the rising generation, yet they push for the opposite because they'd rather jerk up their housing prices and get artificial money they don't need (and can't use unless they sell their houses and move to a cheaper place) than do the right thing. They're easily bought.

The story of the "first world" 21st century, in terms of the breakdown of democracy, capitalism, and meritocracy at the hands of a corporate elite, is the story of cheap vote aggregation. Nowhere is this more evident than in venture capital, where passive capital (cheap votes) from teachers' and firefighters' pension funds from Ohio and Nebraska and Montana is siphoned off to the career benefit of well-connected rich kids in California. The people who should care, don't, because it doesn't affect them _enough_.

<comment><USER20> Why bring new terminology to replace "concentrated benefits and dispersed costs", which is well established?</comment></comment>