Amazon Blocks Sellers from Using FedEx Ground for Prime Shipments - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-blocks-sellers-from-using-fedex-ground-for-prime-shipments-2019-12-16-15103614 <comment><USER2> Related: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/12/analyst-amazon-delivering- ne...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/12/analyst-amazon-delivering-nearly-half- its-packages-instead-of-ups-fedex.html)

via [https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon- logistic...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon-logistics- prime-air-fedex-ups-package-delivery-more-than-50-percent)

via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21807021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21807021) (but no comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's to the point where I can't blame Amazon for actions like these.

The consumer has come to expect guaranteed overnight or 2 day shipping. When they don't get that, they get really upset.

Amazon doesn't want its customers to get upset, and it can't trust its shipping partners because they don't have the burden of the consumer sentiment. No one blames FedEx for their late package these days, they blame Amazon. Heck, you don't have to look hard to find product reviews that only gripe with the shipping time or condition.

Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn't dumb, so he'll build and sell this capacity to others.

Amazon is reaching further and further into the economy, and I don't see much stopping them.

<comment><USER4>
        Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn't dumb, so he'll build and sell this capacity to others.

It AMAZES ME how unreported it goes that they are doing this right now. They are doing it hilariously upfront and clearly. They bought massive amounts of Sprinters for Amazon Delivery to non urban areas, they are rolling out (classically urban only) Amazon delivery to areas near warehouses right now.

And then.. then. They went out and made an order for 100K Rivian delivery vehicles, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND. The headlines were all focused on the Tesla factor and how they are electric and nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'. That's like the number of trucks UPS Owns, PERIOD. That should have been the headline 'AMAZON ORDERS OWN FLEET TO REPLACE UPS, FEDEX' But nope 'Bezos bets on electric with Rivian order'

<comment><USER5> > It AMAZES ME how unreported it goes that they are doing this right now.

It don't think it's a secret. Why do you think it'd be a major story?

> nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'

Because they're doing logistics... everyone knows that. Have you never had an Amazon logistics person deliver you parcel?

<comment><USER6> "Doing logistics" for one's own shipping, is a bit different than "trying to subsume the role of FedEx/UPS in the economy." Certainly it's "only" a matter of scale, but logistics-as-a-service (the business FedEx and UPS are in) is as large a market as the one Amazon's already in, and you'd think clear signs of them being ready to suddenly add another few hundred billion dollars to their market cap would be reflected in e.g. investment people issuing new guidance about them.

<comment><USER7> I'm not seeing how these dots are hard to connect, since "for ones own shipping" in Amazon's case seems equivalent to "for most consumer shipping".

<comment><USER8> Amazon packages supposedly account for less than 10% of packages shipped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is so strange.

\- FedEx is slated to report its latest quarterly results on Tuesday (17 December 2019). [http://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/upcoming- events/d...](http://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/upcoming- events/default.aspx)

\- FedEx ended two big contracts with Amazon earlier this year. [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/06/amazon-blames-holiday- delive...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/06/amazon-blames-holiday-delivery- delays-on-winter-storms-and-high-demand.html)

Edit: I see many unhappy comments regarding FedEx here. In the UK we have Parcelfarce, which has achieved meme status.

<comment><USER10> Fedex is the absolute worst. They're never on time and I can't even go to a Fedex location to pick up my own fedex packages. They more or less simply get returned to sender if they require any kind of signature.

I'm glad Amazon is finally putting a stop to it.

<comment><USER11> Fedex has gotten to the point that if I see a merchant that has an exclusive arrangement with them (mainly suppliers for material I need to buy for work) I try somewhere else.

Whenever I don't have a choice, they disappoint me.

Just last week, I had a Fedex shipment that was late. One of the reasons it was late was that it passed through almost two dozen Fedex locations.

Seven in three days.

My package spent three days traveling from Coal City, IL (9:11am 11-Dec) to Swatara Township, PA, (10:59pm 13-Dec) a distance of 741 miles, on an EPIC UNFORGETTABLE 12-day adventure on its route from California to Maryland.

61.75 hours to travel 741 miles is an average speed of 12 mph.

Just a taste of the epic journey: [https://i.imgur.com/C0NlH9K.png](https://i.imgur.com/C0NlH9K.png)

Anecdotes are nice but this happens so frequently I've given up on Fedex and will only use them as a last resort.

I live in an area where Amazon Prime delivery is so fast that I swear that sometimes they deliver the damned thing I order before I actually order it.

<comment><USER12> That's nothing - last week I had a package take 4 business days to travel a total of 10 miles, as part of a longer 14 day journey.

It was most likely just sitting at their sorting center, which I can see from my back window.

I don't know if there is something especially going wrong in my area, because there was a news story about how bad FedEx has been - people needing medical equipment and stuff that has been sitting for weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Funny thing, though. If it were possible, I'd have Amazon block _their own_ shipping service, for the same reasons. I've asked, and it isn't permitted. In my area, USPS/UPS have been rock solid, but ever since they largely switched to their internal FBA, I've had late packages at least monthly.

It's clear they're buckling under the Christmas load, too. I've had over a dozen items delayed thus far.

<comment><USER14> I've had some utterly ridiculous situations, like having an CCTV capture a package being delivered, the driver taking a picture of the delivered package for tracking, and then the driver leaving with it.

I've also had them deliver packages to the wrong apartment numerous times, taking pictures of floor mats that don't even exist within a mile of me.

<comment><USER15> Yeah it's pretty clear the pictures is so Amazon can shrug when you say something wasn't delivered. Like it's smart of them as I'm sure package theft costs them a boatload of money.

But boy do their delivery people suck. The number of times they've called me asking where I live... that's their job to figure out, not mine.

Kinda laughed the other day as my amazon delivery person was also delivering postmates at the same time. No wonder they're not hitting their deadlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazon, that also runs its own competing package service ([https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon- logistic...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon-logistics- prime-air-fedex-ups-package-delivery-more-than-50-percent) ), pressuring others to not use the services of a competitor.

Ah, remember when monopolists still feared the Sherman Act? Good times, eh?

</comment><comment><USER17> If Amazon made it possible for a customer to pick (and pay for the presumed incremental cost of) alternative carriers, they'd have a gold mine of data on customer WTP and carrier quality at the local level.

<comment><USER18> I suspect that Amazon does not want to put additional cognitive load on the purchaser right at the most critical point of the conversion funnel.

As a customer, I want a delivery time/date and let Amazon figure out how to do it. They're presumably way better at it than I am. If Amazon fails at that, I want to be able to complain without feeling like "oh, it was my fault because I picked Rickshaw Bob as the carrier".

When Amazon would willy-nilly give away a month of Prime when a guaranteed package was late, I would frequently _wish_ I could get a package over to Mail Innovations or SurePost. Both would pretty reliably be late and for most packages, I'd rather have the $10 credit.

<comment><USER19> > I suspect that Amazon does not want to put additional cognitive load on the > purchaser right at the most critical point of the conversion funnel.

> As a customer, I want a delivery time/date and let Amazon figure out how to > do it.

The big problem here is that Amazon no longer offers you the ability to pick the delivery date. They'll tell you when your package will arrive, and you'll suck it up.

It's a huge step backwards from the old system, where slow shipping was free, two-day shipping was moderately priced, and one-day shipping was expensive. (Or, with Prime, two-day shipping was free and one-day shipping was $7.99.)

Under normal circumstances, I don't care which delivery company drops off my package. I might develop a preference if one of them is chronically late, or usually damages the package[1]. But I _always_ care what the delivery date is!

[1] Guess what! Amazon's also stopped shipping individual books in boxes with bubble padding. Now they come in manila envelopes. And they usually take damage in transit from being squeezed by the envelope.

<comment><USER20> > The big problem here is that Amazon no longer offers you the ability to pick > the delivery date. They'll tell you when your package will arrive, and > you'll suck it up

But this isn't true. You can choose which day you want your package delivered. That's the point of setting your "Amazon delivery day". What am I missing?

<comment><USER19> You're missing that I'm talking about delivery speed, not about scheduling deliveries for a day when I'll plan to be at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Makes sense. Now I understand why UPS is delivering so late in my area, including having guys hanging out of UHaul trucks.

FedEx ground is a dumpster fire, unless they are doing the smartpost thing where USPS delivers. In my area, they are almost as bad as Laser.

<comment><USER22> Egads! I thought nothing could approach the uselessness of LaserShip. I'll pray for packages good sir or madam.

<comment><USER23> The only time I ever had a package stolen was LaserShip

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I worked for Fedex ground for a while and I can't blame Amazon for this decision. Fedex contracts their ground delivery out and the quality of service is greatly affected by that. Some areas are great and some are awful. My experience was working under an awful contractor who was near abusive in his work requirements. If anyone has any questions I'm open to answer.

<comment><USER25> Tbh I'm not sure Amazon is better wrt work requirements.

<comment><USER24> They probably aren't. The reason distribution companies like Fedex and Amazon contract their ground delivery out is the margins are too slim and they don't want to deal with vehicle maintenance. So corners are cut by contractors to actually make money in the deal. If there was a reasonable amount of money to be made Amazon would be using regular employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good riddance. FedEx Ground has a 0% success rate for actually delivering anything to me -- and when I complain, they tell me that if I want my package I have to drive out to the airport to collect it (~45 minutes away).

UPS is only slightly better at delivering packages, but at least they drop off my stuff at a pick-up location a few minutes away.

I would pay extra for an Amazon Prime Actually-Get-Stuff-Delivered service which only uses Canada Post and Amazon's own delivery people.

</comment><comment><USER27> FedEx ground is the worst; they aren't the same company as FedEx Express, they are locally operated instead (according to drivers I've talked with), and quality varies by region. I've had drivers fake signatures and dump packages at the door.

My last 3 shipments bounced around Chicago for 6 days, traveling 19 miles total, and were finally delivered late

<comment><USER28> Actually Ontrac is the worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm surprised there isn't a comment yet about how this seems like monopolistic behavior and Amazon should be look out for anti-trust probes for stuff like this (at least I'd hope).

</comment><comment><USER30> We had to switch to FedEx this year because Amazon overloaded UPS so much they couldn't get their overnight deliveries to the destination in time.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand how amazon can contract a local company to drive amazon branded trucks, wear amazon branded clothing, and deliver exclusively amazon packages, but somehow they are not considered an amazon company and do not have to provide amazon level pay and benefits. Part of the cost of USPS/FedEx/UPS are the good union protections. This is a large part of why I am moving as much of my spending as possible away from amazon.

</comment><comment><USER32> As I sit here waiting for my new ultrawide alientware monitor, should have been here Wednesday, now its Friday. Somehow they thought that going from Whitefish, Montana, to Kennewick, WA, and then to Troutdale, OR, was faster than just stopping in Spokane, WA.

</comment><comment><USER33> FedEx has misplaced 3 packages in the last 3 weeks. One made it "on truck for delivery today" before being sent to Ohio to replace a barcode. So weird.

<comment><USER34> I had 3 Amazon delivery ones get screwed up within a week (one of mine go missing and two delivered here that weren't mine), so Amazon's in-house service certainly can't be called 'better'

<comment><USER35> I once had an Amazon delivery to an Amazon Locker in an Amazon Store fail 3 times before they gave up.

<comment><USER13> _That 's_ an email chain I'd have fun forwarding on to firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This should bring monopoly abuse scrutiny upon them.

</comment><comment><USER37> Queue the anti-trust trial. Only a question of mechanics now, especially since Trump hates Bezos.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think Amazon is very stupid and they should not only complain about blocking that other company but that they should do their best and their promises of package arrivals</comment>


Towards a world without Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/25/towards-a-world-without-facebook/ <comment><USER2> The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts.

For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.

If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it _simpler yet_ , and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage.

So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".

<comment><USER3> When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database?

There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

<comment><USER4> I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

<comment><USER5> I expect that is exactly the point, no more "censoring overlords" :-)

<comment><USER6> "People are stashing irrevocable child porn links, dox, copyright infringement, and leaked state secrets in the blockchain" \- [https://boingboing.net/2018/03/19/cant-block-the- signal.html](https://boingboing.net/2018/03/19/cant-block-the-signal.html)

Sometimes it's not about Big Bad Censoring Governments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them.

The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics.

Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding.

I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.

<comment><USER8> > You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of > engineering manpower.

I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.

<comment><USER9> Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.

<comment><USER10> Not really a problem though is it. Compare with DASHs DAO that spend around 30M$ a year on improving and building the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendors" can create clients.

I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by adding unnecessary complexity.

<comment><USER12> That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.

<comment><USER13> Then sign up on a Mastodon instance, make some new friends, and set up a cross-poster.

 _Edit: I 'm getting down-voted - let me expand ... I've set up a Mastodon account, started to integrate, and made new connections. I've also set up a cross-poster, so I can work on either, and I'm finding that my more valuable connections are_ also _migrating to Mastodon. So although it 's playing the long game, that's a strategy._

 _If you don 't start, it will never happen._

<comment><USER12> on the first point - I'm not looking for new friends or to promote any of my own views. I'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme from my existing friends and family. Like most people I think - I post pretty rarely, but like to comment from time to time on other people's posts/content.

I agree it's a chicken-egg problem. But there has to be enough value in it for people like me to be worth the pain of transition.

For me there's very little incremental value in another solution. The privacy benefits of using a different service are nebulous - I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all.

I'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people that's been a reasonable trade.

I actually _wish_ there were more competition in this space, and a way for these social graphs to be more transferable in some way, but I haven't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth the cost of switching.

[edit] for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you :) the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation.

<comment><USER13> > _... I 'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme > from my existing friends and family._

Noted. Mastodon really is a twitter substitute, not a FB replacement. For these things you're right - there is currently no FB substitute (at least not that I know of, I'd be happy to be proven wrong).

We wonder if Mastodon can become that.

> _I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy > settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by > volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all._

People are reporting that their FB data contains all their cell-phone call details - are you also happy with that?

> _I 'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know > something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people > that's been a reasonable trade._

But it's not just the things you are explicitly saying are "your public face."

> _... I haven 't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth > the cost of switching._

... or indeed, at all.

> _[edit] for what it 's worth, I didn't downvote you :)_

You can't downvote a reply to your own comment or submission, so I know you didn't downvote me.

> _... the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation._

Cheers.

<comment><USER12> > "Mastodon really is a twitter substitute, not a FB replacement."

That's interesting, because I'm one of those that never really 'got' twitter. I _think_ the main difference is the distinction between the relationships - 'follower' is different than 'friend'. Following seems to be more impersonal, and so Twitter seems to be more about public information feed from people that think they have something interesting to say (like an rss feed on a blog). Facebook seems to be more about sharing things/stories/events with your friends/acquaintances, although it does have the extra layer there of corporate and celebrity accounts that are followed as well. For me the second category of stuff has been in the 'nice to have' category; it's not why I log on a check my FB feed. I just never found any content worth consuming on twitter - I go to other communities (like HN) or use rss (Feedly) for that sort of stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have no idea how blockchain helps social media. If my details, my posts or other "my thing" end up in one they're indelible, no? So how does that help me exercise my right to be forgotten? Besides the perf question of syncing blockchains, or the design hit of federating them, or apportioning by some yet-to-be-defined traffic/post/data taxonomy...

<comment><USER15> Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain- verified pointers would be useless.

<comment><USER16> Blockchain doesn't store data themselves. We would end up with petabytes of new blockchain data every day otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring out how to replace them all at once.

So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes.

I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too.

I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.

As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.

<comment><USER18> I don't get what the difference between Facebook and Twitter even is supposed to be. One for people you know and one for people you don't? You can solve that in something like Mastodon by just having two independent content feeds (and you can already set that up).

It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters.

That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make it work better as an Instagram replacement as well.

The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share / communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives (soon to be a web standard) data types.

Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix protocol revisions to make that work, though.

Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you can have the social media site with the popup chat frames.

The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave.

Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

<comment><USER21> Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our friends.

<comment><USER22> No need to be dismissive. I'm in my early 20s, and most of my life has seen the use of social media as the core mode of communication. Can you imagine moving back to a world where you could only talk to friends in person after you'd experienced talking to friends over the phone? Or shifting back to phone calls only after you'd gotten used to text messages? Like it or not, a paradigm shift has occurred. Personally I think Facebook has gone too far: they've manipulated people too much, and their platform has become mostly useless for its core feature (social interaction) because they've put too much work into monetization, ads, algorithms, and suggested content.

I think there's a lot to be said for what is effectively a collection of personal websites where people can share their life events along with a standardized communication protocol. There are a lot of advantages, like being able to keep up with (slightly) more people and being able to stay in contact with people who live farther away, and who you don't have the money or time to visit in person regularly. But it has to be on a platform that values those things, or it'll go the way of Facebook -- exploitative, and eventually useless.

<comment><USER21> The GP was talking about not understanding what all the fuss is about with kids these days and their phones and social media and I'm the one being dismissive? Your comment makes more sense under the GP, not me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy.

That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly?

It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly.

But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.

<comment><USER24> Here's why I don't think decentralization is a red herring: in a centralized service, if you disagree, you don't have another option. If you didn't like AOL and quit, there was no way for you to maintain contact with AOL users unless both parties used a different platform.

Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand that we've lost some of that control, but the basic idea stands.

If you don't have Facebook, you can't reach out to other Facebook users. If you don't have Verizon phone service, you can still call Verizon users with AT&T or <insert your another phone service>. If you don't have Gmail, you can still send e-mails to Gmail users from Yahoo or <insert e-mail service>. If you don't like USPS, you can send mail through UPS or <insert another service>.

<comment><USER23> That is a somewhat valid point but I think you and me are using decentralized in different senses here. When I said decentralized I meant a decentralized application, something without central servers. You are more talking about standardized protocols that can be implemented by different vendors and which together form a federated network. There is certainly also some overlap there.

But your examples of phone, mail, and email are essentially all centralized systems with a certain number of vendors for each but together forming a larger federated network due to standardized protocols. Email is probably the closest of your examples to what I call distributed because at least in theory everyone could run his own mail server although in practice it is probably not so easy because spam made everyone pretty paranoid when it comes to forwarding emails from random mail servers.

<comment><USER24> You're right. I think I'm referring more to "federated" than "decentralized".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the "regular" world spilled into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the moniker of the "mom" platform. Technology like blockchain might free the business model from having to generate revenue and better align the experaince.

But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://steemit.com](https://steemit.com) [http://minds.com](http://minds.com)

Bizarre that jonevans/techcrunch doesn't site these modern social networking sites, only the mysterious demise of Diaspora etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.

<comment><USER28> From what I see, last commit was a year ago and that was just to bump the version number. Is more work being done on this? It looks interesting.

 __edit __never mind, I was looking at[https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt](https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt)

<comment><USER29> Still very active: [https://github.com/ssbc/](https://github.com/ssbc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook situation.

Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1\. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally). 2\. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected. 3\. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper. 4\. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control 5\. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you.

How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in _any_ of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won't be impacted.

So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously.

Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database _can_ help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.

</comment><comment><USER31> In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be, isn't really required for social sharing.

I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user.

We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn't know what to do with them.

</comment><comment><USER32> Scuttlebutt seems like an interesting implementation of a decentralised social network:

[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz)

</comment><comment><USER33> How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new websites.

Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't post it on a mobile phone!

This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

</comment><comment><USER24> Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of "service"? Do you really want to say, "but I need Facebook!".

In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature become necessary for you to live your life.

Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.

</comment><comment><USER34> How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.

<comment><USER35> So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information?

That might _sound_ reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.

<comment><USER36> I run a Mastodon instance and I've had a few users ask me when I'm setting up a Patreon to help cover my costs because they want to start paying for it. YMMV.

<comment><USER35> Those users are mastodon users? Then they aren't in the category I mean. I mean the 90% of Facebook users who will not have heard about #deletefacebook when it's over for this time. And all those people are the reason I use Facebook.

That's the key to this problem:

\- making the product isn't the problem. Technically it's been done (e.g diaspora)

\- attracting integrity-conscious users isn't the problem. But they won't drag the rest along easily.

How to attract a billion Facebook users that won't even hear about the alternative?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently.

Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.

<comment><USER38> What extension is that?

<comment><USER37> Social Book Post Manager [1]

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book- post-m...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post- manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized.

ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post.

I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols. We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license you prefer.

[0]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC- activitypub-20180123/](https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/)

[1]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams- core/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/)

[2]: [https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...](https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implementation- reports)

<comment> dane-pgp If we can get some good examples of social networking sites interoperating with each other using W3C standards like the ones you mention, then things will get very interesting with the introduction of the GDPR in Europe. Specifically, it includes a right to data portability, with the wording:

"In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible."

[https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/)

Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks. I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American) company to support this use case when small open source (European?) competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble.

Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on Facebook.

This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non- blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious, century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You're exploding the problem way out of scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to demotivize people who just want to build _decentralized alternatives to Facebook_ , which is already an astoundingly huge problem.

Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, _then_ you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.

</comment><comment><USER41> Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it's toxic and that's the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.

<comment><USER42> Facebook has lists or do you mean it should be more intrinsic to the social network like Google Plus was?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is so annoying. "A world without Facebook" like it's some kind of almost apocalyptic reality. I'm only 27 and I remember when Facebook came out when I was in highschool. Miraculously, I also remember life before highschool and it was just fine too.

I deleted my account in 2014. Wow big woop. I didn't die, and I still stayed I. Touch with my family and friends I cared about. I spent less time passively stalking people I don't care about. Wow. Amazing. Mind boggling.

I also deleted my account before it became a fad to write some emotional diary about what it's like to get rid of your account like losing a child or approaching the topic like you just jumped to the other side of a heated world wide political debate and too a stand, about the same time as women started to post with no makeup (like wow, you are some kind of fantastical hero making a YouTube video or posting an fb or Instagram pic without spending an hour caking on foundation, more girls should "be brave" and step out like you) and I honestly can't tell them apart.

Stop making getting rid of Facebook a big deal and it won't be a big deal to not have one, the same way I'm a girl and never gave two cents about makeup, quite literally, and I don't make it a big deal to not wear it. I don't waltz around like some superior than thou feministic hero that girls should tremble to their knees.for guidance on how to give up their addiction to drug store eyeliner.

News flash. Your social life will not dissapear, in either case.

What is the deal. We have better things and more interesting things and more important things, all of us to focus our time and energy on than how other people perceive our obnoxiously curated profiles.

Stop giving Facebook so much power. They have power because you give it to them. Theyve been openly untrustworthy for years. So don't give it to them .

</comment><comment><USER44> We can never replace Facebook with another Facebook, decentralised or not. It needs to be disrupted orthogonally.

Think of the individual components of Facebook that are keeping people from leaving, and create better stand-alone versions of those. Can they be integrated with other things that Facebook doesn't have? Sort of like the concept of disrupting an incumbent by integrating a different part of the value chain from – except there isn't really a (known) value chain.

We have to find new points of integration, new ways of bundling valuable features that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. It would likely have social components, and probably be defined as a social network, but don't start in that end. Start with the components.

I don't see any other way Facebook is going away in the short term.

Personally I'm really only there because of work and for discovering events. Oh, and stalking.

</comment><comment><USER45> I guess an art collective could really be a group of people who can actually use some kind of decentralized social network. Especially in countries where there is censorship. So a decentralized network and some kind of control over what you post (like high quality pictures of artworks, and the copyright is really unbreakable). On top of the needs of an artist from a capitalist standpoint (need to protect your product, the artwork) there is the ideological-political one. Most artists I know are very political and leaning towards solutions that are liberal and are implemented despite of governmental agencies as well as big corporations.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is a world without Facebook one with a real alternative (everyone in the same place), or one where there are many alternatives?

Reddit is a single platform with many mostly-independent communities. Could a similar thing in the shape of a social network exist?

</comment><comment><USER47> The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano's block lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain.

You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just increasing transaction data size.

<comment><USER27> Yes! After reading the Nano whitepaper a few months ago I realized it could be a protocol for a general, free, scaleable social network. I've been prototyping and designing it for the past few months. You don't need to increase the transaction data size, just make the transactions pointers to the data which lives somewhere else like IPFS or S3, keep the chains small.

However a week ago I discovered scuttlebutt.nz who also had the same idea, about a year before me, and already had a working useable app. So I've been using it and will probably be hacking on this for a while and see how I could incorporate some of the ideas I came up with prototyping my own network.

<comment><USER47> Ha very cool. Though who pays for storing the data then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Every time I check HN I see increasingly dramatic headlines about Facebook, but I have a feeling that when I check Facebook's stock a few weeks from now it'll be back up like nothing ever happened.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm unconvinced that the US population cares enough about its data to get rid of Facebook anytime soon. The media goes berserk with every new breach, but even the Equifax debacle barely registered in the minds of most Americans. I don't see Cambridge Analytica as a tipping point, because most people are oblivious to the fact that people are deleting their accounts in the first place. Their infinite newsfeeds will be just as full of crap as ever.

</comment><comment><USER50> The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet.

Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, organizations & social groups.

<comment><USER14> IPFS claims to use a blockchain, and that nodes in the directed graph cannot be changed. This means IPFS is of no more than cursory interest to me. I want to be able to curtail and even delete my stuff. When I delete a thing, it must be gone. I don't want a record of it, or that it existed. If I retain a thing privately, I don't want it known publicly that I have it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why should decentralization equal blockchain? I didn't quite get the idea. Decentralization for social networks was proposed a long time ago. The problem is not in application of it, but in the fact that good social networks aren't supposed to be commercial. And that means someone should invest volunteer time to advance them.

Diaspora grew over the years, and it's still growing. But the growth is slow.

</comment><comment><USER52> For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a good idea within, go read Neuromancer.

Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it - or anything remotely close.

<comment><USER53> Gibson's cyberspace is a terrifying place where corporations, who execute total control over financial reality, operate centralized computer systems powerful enough to fry a human mind. It's not about a decentralized execution model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I tried to follow the article, but I don't get what the blockchain technology has to do with a social network.

Also, given how innefficient Bitcoin became with just a few transactions, how could the thing handle the billion of pictures that get shared every day?

</comment><comment><USER55> What happened to the Freedom Box? I think that is the only promising solution to online data tracking. Most problems could be solved if everyone had a small personal server so that developers could deploy online applications that store the data locally.

</comment><comment><USER56> But blockchain means all the information is public. So, author thinks it's better to just publish all your stuff by yourself on blockchain than it could be leaked from the evil Facebook's private database?

</comment><comment><USER57> Malicious ad took over my browser when I tried to visit the link...

</comment><comment><USER58> I find it curios that the article is calling the 'blockchain people' to save the world from Facebook when the blockchain is a _public_ ledger.

</comment><comment><USER59> What did I just read

<comment><USER60> "Towards a world without Facebook"

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Boy this is getting old. I hope FB dies for no other reason than for HN to get real content again instead of the same old tired anti FB crap that's dominated the front page for the last 2 weeks.

<comment><USER62> Yeah! Any technology that affects the lives of millions of people in potential harmful ways should die because it gets to the front page of my favourite news aggregator TWO days in a row!

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> "wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve"

I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

<comment><USER64> > I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

It seems pretty simple to me. People oppose DRM because it is content they paid for and disallows their modifying, repurposing it, etc.

None of those things apply to content I have created. I have the original, non-DRM'ed content that is always editable, I am the owner fo the content....

<comment><USER63> So if your proud mom wants to share everything her kid is up to with everyone, including Zuckerberg (because he gave her a way to automate reposting your feed for her directly to Facebook), you don't want a way to prevent that?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Wanna talk? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN reader,
The holidays are coming up! For some people, that means a month of nothing more than being "Home for the Holidays". For me in particular, I don't have much to do besides program, rock climb and hang out with family. My parents moved last year so when I come home from college I don't really have a group of friends to hang out with yet. Just me, my laptop, and my family's 24 pound cat to keep me company while I write code and read.
So, would you like to talk about something via Skype? Taking the bayesian approach, if you are reading hacker news, there is a better than average chance that you are really awesome. If you want to talk about hacker news or basket weaving or who would win in a fight versus PG or Stallman, then I can do that too (dibs on Stallman[0].) If you have a neat idea, then we can talk about the neat idea and what it would take to actually breathe some life into. And if you are doing neat things, then I have more questions than you probably have time for. Any way you dice it, I want to talk to you. I can usually pick up a subject enough to ask some interesting questions. I have a pretty open mind most days [1].
So, if you have some time on your hands and want to talk, send me an email[1]. Please inclue 2 times/dates that could work for you. If you don't include a subject for us to discuss, then my plan is to just ask increasingly deeper questions about your life in general until we hit upon a subject to talk about or you hang up. If you include things to read, then I will do my best to read them and understand them before we talk.
But really, I would love to talk to people and hear new stories. In my head, this all sounds like it could be a whole bushel of fun and could be really interesting.
Have a good holiday! -Zack
[0] He sleeps well armed. http://xkcd.com/225/ [1] Example: I made up a serious religion around the guy I was yesterday- http://zacharymaril.com/2011/12/04/a-prayer-for-myself.html [2] "moc.liramyrahcaz@kcaz".reverse() <comment><USER2> > _Taking the bayesian approach, if you are reading hacker news, there is a > better than average chance that you are really awesome._

Or the Brownian alternative; Ann and Bob are awesome, while I am sub-par?

I do hope that you have brilliant conversations with people! I'm not good at phones in general, and things are not great at the moment, so I'm not taking you up on your offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

And it's not even about having brilliant conversations. I've noticed that over half my communications with people are through electronic text most days. It's pretty depressing actually and I've been trying to brainstorm ways to fix it.

This is an experiment to see if voice and visual are enough to feel like you are actually having a conversation with a person. And, also something to do over winter break besides study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you checked out #startups on freenode?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. I am just a student so I don't really have anything to talk about there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _my family's 24 pound cat_

Post pics!! :-P

<comment><USER3> Just when HN was lacking, cat pictures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> idea: Chat roulette for hackers - maybe a good way to meet founders.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that would need too much hype for it to actually work. The easier solution is just to go out and meet people in real life.

Could be a fun weekend project though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> email sent...</comment>


A 1% Tells the Truth About Job Creation - <AUTHOR> http://digbysblog.blogspot.tw/2013/06/a-1-percenter-tells-truth-about-job.html?m=1

<comment><USER2> "A random guy with some money and no particular qualifications to address economic theory, addresses economic theory"

<comment><USER3> Particular qualifications to address economic theory? What is this, quantum mechanics?

There is a fight and a struggle over how the pie is divided up. To call the arguments around this "theories" which one must be "qualified" to discuss, is a laugh. It's more akin to theologians arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Most economic "theories" boil down to who the money should go to. In your world, only people with "particular qualifications" are allowed to have a say on this topic. Also, what a surprise, the "qualified" people always say that what should be done is what is good for the heirs who bankroll their think tanks, endow their chair at their schools and whatnot.

There hasn't been any mainstream study of economics for well over a century. There has never been actually. In the time of Adam Smith, there was an area of study called political economy in which, right or wrong, there was an honest attempt to study the topic. Although honest mainstream inquiry stopped before it happened, when "political economy" was tossed and "econom-ics" (like phys- ics? mathemat-ics? genet-ics?) came into being, the field had already been completely overrun by BS.

Read Adam Smith, Ricardo, Say, Mill etc. if you're interested. There is no living mainstream "economist" who is not a complete BS artist.

<comment><USER2> > In your world, only people with "particular qualifications" are allowed to > have a say on this topic.

In the real world ("my world"), economics involves multiple actors in complex, dynamic relationships, which require precise, controlled examination, in order to derive theories that enable accurate predictions and insight into causes and effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In the same way that it's a fact that the sun, not earth is the center of the solar system, it's also a fact that the middle class, not rich business people like me are the center of America's economy_

I think the author is slightly overestimating the extent to which he understands economics. No doubt the author has some very sound data to support this thesis, although he has chosen to support it with anecdotes and incorrect economics instead.

For instance, he complains about the 39% top marginal rate on middle-class, ordinary Americans. Now, it is an _actual_ fact that people who make this top marginal rate are not "middle class" by many common definitions. In his imaginary pro-worker universe which he incorrectly labels "Keynesian", that rate would also be a lot higher.

<comment><USER5> Most people point to the reduction in the top marginal rate as the primary mechanism by which the progressive income tax has been weakened and has contributed to income inequality. Others will say this is all bunk and capital gains becoming a primary compensation mechanism is what has caused the destabilizing imbalance.

There is another thing we've been doing, though - Reagan in 1986 dramatically reduced the _boundary of the top tax bracket_ versus its trajectory in the rest of the 20th century, to _5%_ of what it had been. Until then, you could reasonably argue about trashing the millionaire's extra yacht so that the $200k-ionaire could succeed. Later politicians raised it somewhat, but never to levels approaching the 50's - 70's. We appear to have tied it all together in order to mobilize the high-skill working people & entrepreneurs to defend the truly rich from having to contribute a larger share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with I think this entire post, strongly, but would still like someone to explain how it's appropriate for HN; it reads like a top-tier /r/politics post.

</comment><comment><USER7> The point that drove it home is that businesses aren't in t business of "creating jobs." We're in it to make money. I hire when it hurts. I don't hire when I have an excess of cash.

If tax rates were higher I'd hire people, buy office space or equipment. Anything to keep me from having to just gift it to the idjits in Washington.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why the middle class in particular? If our economy is based on spending, then it like giving money to anyone who will spend it is the answer. Could be poor, middle class, or rich, so long as they don't just put it into their bank account.

(And yes, banks could theoretically loan out the money, but currently they won't.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the TED talk ("censored" from TED) A TED Talk on Income Inequality by Nick Hanauer [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIhOXCgSunc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIhOXCgSunc)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you choose a startup to work at? - <AUTHOR> My immediate thought is to find people working on problems I find interesting and try to work for them. Is this a good model? I've only ever worked at a medium sized (~50-150 people) company which was acquired by a large dinosuar. <comment><USER2> I think your gut was absolutely right. Look for interesting problems. I would then check the founders out during your interviews (they should be there if its early stage) and check especially if they are down to earth, pragmatic and make sure they wont micro-manage.

I would avoid trying to evaluate startups like a VC would. VC's themselves cant predict success and its their job, so it's unlikely you would be able to. At most you can guage current "rocket ships" by looking out for extremely (relative to round stage and vertical) large raises. I would filter out those startups set up by career finance or well-off folks, as they would be better at raising money anyway so valuation may not be related to traction. However note raising lots of money is not a garuntee of success nor does it mean it will be fun to work there.

</comment><comment><USER3> You have to embed deep within startup communities and develop your instinct. Otherwise you're going in blind. You basically have to think like a VC and evaluate opportunity, team, trajectory, product, etc. It's more of an art than a science.

</comment><comment><USER4> Money, size (I prefer small startups), culture, interview process... all of them matter but eventually the most important factor for me is the challenge. I prefer really challenging jobs and to be honest it's not always the smartest path...

It can work great, you can make a huge impact on growth of a promising startup, but it can also fail...

</comment><comment><USER5> I would also factor in the quality of the founders. On top of that are questions general to all tech jobs.</comment>


Show HN: EduCLan – Teach Course with Udemy Like LMS - <AUTHOR> https://educlan.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am Rocky Sharma.

EduClan is just another LMS provider like teachable and docebo. The major difference being format of LMS provided.

My plan was to focus on providing elearning solution for schools and Individual Home Tutor too with restricted to public open model option.

With Open-model, I mean something like udemy.com, Currently supported formats are:-

1\. Public Multi teacher LMS. 2\. Private Multi teacher LMS with registration close. 3\. Private Multi teacher LMS with registration open.

4\. Private Single teacher LMS with registration close. 5\. Private Single teacher LMS with registration open.

The IDEA was to let Home-Tutor too open their LMS for one-one coaching to students at a very small fee of 5$ a month.

The IDEA is yet evolving and I am looking for more suggestion and feedback here to add up more features and solve the problem.

Thanks</comment>


The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra: A Visual Approach (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs00283-015-9572-7.pdf <comment><USER2> > _Points near the origin have dark colors, with the color assigned to a > complex number z approaching black as z approaches 0. Points far from the > origin are light, with the color of z approaching white as |z| approaches > infinity. Every complex number has a different color in this picture, so a > complex number can be uniquely specified by giving its color._

So I was wondering if this approach could also be useful in the context of floats and integers. The implementation becomes simpler in many ways (we only have a finite number of possible values to consider).

For example, start with a unique mapping of 8-bit integers to a continuous colour ramp. I suppose the easiest option would be to start in the top left, then go from left to right, top to bottom, resulting in a 16x16 image.

If we then take a formula that also returns an 8-bit value, map every possible input to an output, and show the results as an image, it should make it easy to see where we have an integer overflow, for example (if we see sudden jumps from very bright to dark or the other way around).

Then I realised: I _have_ seen this in the wild! It's used all over the place in the demo-scene. For example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o)

[http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/?oneliner=((t*(%22...](http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/?oneliner=\(\(t*\(%2236364689%22%5Bt%3E%3E13%267%5D%2615\)\)%2F12%26128\)%2B\(\(\(\(\(t%3E%3E12\)%5E\(t%3E%3E12\)-2\)%2511*t\)%2F4%7Ct%3E%3E13\)%26127\)&oneliner2=\(\(t*\(%2246893636%22%5Bt%3E%3E13%267%5D%2615\)\)%2F12%26128\)%2B\(\(\(\(\(t%3E%3E12\)%5E\(t%3E%3E12\)-2\)%2511*t\)%2F4%7Ct%3E%3E13\)%26127\)&t0=0&tmod=0&duration=30&separation=100&rate=44100)

Aside, this also reminds me of Gustafson's closure plots for comparing his number encoding to standard floating points, although it's not really the same thing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y&t=33m47s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y&t=33m47s)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a big list of proofs on MathOverflow [1]. Not a lot of pictures in it but there are many to be drawn.

My favorite is probably top answer: a polynomial f(z) gives you a map from the Riemann sphere ℙ^1 to itself. Topology tells you it's closed and analysis tells you it's open because locally a holomorphic map always looks like z^n. It follows that the map is surjective.

[1] [http://mathoverflow.net/questions/10535/ways-to-prove-the- fu...](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/10535/ways-to-prove-the-fundamental- theorem-of-algebra)</comment>


Crowdsourced photos coming from Aleppo, Syria. - <AUTHOR> http://www.teleportd.com/capsule/c792c61e53b6e91e8b4c9e4f1309f8c1afd00174

<comment><USER2> Incidentally it seems Al-Qaida may be becoming a more effective force in Syria than the Free Syrian Army[1].

[1] - [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/30/al-qaida- rebels-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/30/al-qaida-rebels- battle-syria)

</comment><comment><USER3> The UI confusion come from the shadow projected on the selected thumbnail. If the thumbnail is located in a dark region of the picture, the shadow become invisible, it's thus impossible to quickly recognize where we stand in the thumbnails stack. The horizontal translate is too small to compensate.

You could draw a small white circle with black shadow under the selected thumbnail, or simply swap the thumbnail for a white circle when it's selected.

I think the thumbnail are also to small, we cannot easily distinguish details by looking at them, so they serve no purpose.

Great pictures.

</comment><comment><USER4> Those pictures are amazing but the UI on teleportd needs work:

1\. Hide the little circle images unless I'm taking a hover action.

2\. Allow keyboard forward/back shortcuts.

<comment><USER5> keyboard forward/back works with left and right arrow keys

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> YouTube channel: (Possibly NSFW, showing fighting) <https://www.youtube.com/user/SyrianDeveloper>

</comment><comment><USER7> I cannot access the link right now but many of the stories trumpeted by Western and Saudi-backed media highlighting Syrian regime's brutality have turned out to be fake (or worse, some massacres blamed on regime were actually carried out by CIA-sponsored armed Syrian "rebels").

So US-sponsored Israeli terrorists bombing Palestinian women and children will also make it to hacker news top page? Syria's tyrant is not a US-sponsored one so we must highlight his brutality?

How about US-sponsored Egyptian, Yemeni, Bahraini and other butchers? I don't remember seeing anything about their misery making it to the first page of Hacker News.

Jul 24, 2012 German intelligence: al-Qaeda all over Syria By John Rosenthal

<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NG24Ak02.html>

Caught: Staged CNN Syria Interviews Faked By Activist Danny

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lWB5ssifTg>

CNN BUSTED!!! AGAIN more Fake videos from the Libya, Syria conflict

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1v5eQLCj_s>

06/19/2012 Eyewitnesses Contradict Houla Massacre Claims

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/eyewitnesses- contr...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/eyewitnesses-contradict- claims-that-rebels-carried-out-houla-massacre-a-839593.html)

Prime German Paper: Syrian Rebels Committed Houla Massacre

[http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/06/prime-german-paper- syri...](http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/06/prime-german-paper-syrian- rebels-committed-houla-massacre.html)

The prime German daily, the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has a new report (in German) about the Houla massacre. The author is Rainer Hermann who studied and speaks Arabic, Turkish and Farsi. Hermann also has a PhD in economics and wrote his thesis about the modern Syrian social history. He currently lives in Abu Dhabi and has been reporting from the Middle East for over 22 years.</comment>


Swift should not be the future of iOS, and why TypeScript should. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stevenbradleyconsulting/swift-should-not-be-the-future-of-ios-be54925074a5 <comment><USER2> I write Typescript for a living, and stink at swift - I don't understand where the author is coming from at all. Does Android support Typescript out of the box? Why shouldn't it as well?

I bundle thing into cordova and bang, what was once Typescript is now running sort of like a native app. You can make/get plugins for cordova that create wrappers for native methods, although I'm less familiar with that, but pretty sure you can expose things to the JS namespace using those techniques. Even when I'm running my typescript stuff in the browser, it's still getting transpiled before it runs there.

Not sure why Apple or Google would want to expose those methods via Typescript, don't know why Apple/Google would encourage Swift/Java developers to use Typescript when using Swift will create apps optimized for the hardware with fewer abstractions in the way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Swift developers seem to like Swift, it ranks 6th in most loved language this year ([https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology)).

I really hate that JS seems to be the go-to "alternative" for everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Swift is #6 on that list, TypeScript is #4. Swift is a completely new language which has a big overhead to learn from start to finish, but JavaScript has a lot of momentum and existing developers since it is already the lingua franca of the front end of the web. Swift is evolving slowly, but JavaScript is making very quick progress through TC39 during the same time span that Swift was alive. Swift has ambiguous and biased leadership but JavaScript has a well defined and established committee with members from major competitors who have common interest in the language succeeding. TypeScript inherits a lot of these benefits, as it intends to always keep up with the latest JavaScript standards and specification.

<comment><USER3> Swift is #6 on that list, TypeScript is #4.

 _This was meant to highlight that Swift developers don 't seem unhappy with the language_

Swift is evolving slowly, but JavaScript is making very quick progress through TC39 during the same time span that Swift was alive.

 _I 'm not sure this is a bad thing_

Swift has ambiguous and biased leadership but JavaScript has a well defined and established committee with members from major competitors who have common interest in the language succeeding.

 _I think this is a bit biased. Have you read Swift 's Community Guidelines? _ [https://swift.org/community/#communication](https://swift.org/community/#communication)

I don't really have a dog in this fight and would love some input from a Swift developer.

I still claim that introducing JavaScript is not the solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did pick JavaScript as an opinionated suggestion. But really what I meant was that a garbage collected, simple OOP, high-level language is much better than a performance-based efficiency focused language when most of what you use it for has no need for efficiency or high performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get this article. Should Apple make an ahead of time compiler for Typescript and bridge it to Obj-C? What would be the benefit of using Typescript instead of Swift?

</comment><comment><USER5> Give control of their primary dev language to others? Especially Microsoft? I can't see Apple doing that.</comment>


Why aren't tabs a window manager feature? - <AUTHOR>

Why do you suppose tabs are constantly reimplemented by applications?  Shouldn't this be a window manager feature?
Consider the similarities.  A tab overlaps other tabs, as windows do.  It has a title.  It can be moved.  It can be created and closed.
Sure, tabs have a few "expected" differences from windows: the tabs in a stack all move together, and when resized they stay in sync.  But this is already behavior that window managers are capable of (e.g. Mac OS X drawers can resize a drawer in sync with its parent window).
The devil is in all the other "differences" tabs have from windows, that are really just silly.  For one, every application seems to have "redundant" commands to satisfy their tabs, such as "New Tab" and "Close Tab".  All the nice keyboard short-cuts, such as rotating between windows, are either broken or unpredictable for tabs in each application.  You can't necessarily minimize/hide tabs.  On Mac OS X, a window-modal sheet blocks all tabs for no reason, when it could block just one tab "window".
As far as programming, all kinds of extra work is required to make tabs do the trivial things that are automatic with regular windows: for instance, on Windows, tabs do not have miniaturized previews unless the app goes to great effort; and on the Mac, Exposé can't split out all of a window's tabs.
There's one final problem with this "design decision" for tabs: it's impossible to tab-stack arbitrary things.  What if I want a tab stack with 2 web browsers, an E-mail message and a text editor?  I can't, because tabs are inherently app-specific.
As programmers and OS designers, it's time to step back and fix this, isn't it?  A tab fundamentally is a window.  It's a wheel being constantly reinvented.  Technically, all you need is a gizmo in the window manager to turn any window into a tab, at which point any other window can be dragged onto the window to "stack" more tabs into it (or dragged out, to recreate normal windows).  This behavior seems so clearly in the window manager's domain, that it's hard to imagine why an application would even need to know when one of its windows is technically a tab. <comment><USER2> If you can look past the author's... quirks, I highly recommend the ion wm: <http://www.modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/>

It has great tab support and is highly customizable and scriptable using Lua. Also, once you go with a tiling wm, you'll never go back. It brings the efficiency of you favorite IDEs to the rest of your desktop.

</comment><comment><USER3> That actually works on Compiz (Fusion) that is installed on Ubuntu and several other Linux variants.

More info on their wiki: <http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Group>

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some tabbed window managers out there, and many swear by them. Check out fluxbox - <http://fluxbox.org></comment>


AI winter - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter <comment><USER2> Gonna happen again and labelling images is not going to stop it.

</comment><comment><USER3> aka the fall of lisp

<comment><USER4> According to the article, before that, one professor's report lead to a near extinction level AI winter in the U.K. for a decade, which also effected Continental research funding. So more than one major winter.

As someone who rode part of the Lisp Machine wave in the early 1980s, I must say the all the "machine learning" ... ferment seems to be too weak a word, that I read about on HN nowadays is heartening.</comment></comment>


Buried in Jeb Bush Website, a 'Die Hard' Surprise - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/15/buried-in-jeb-bush-web-site-a-die-hard-surprise/

<comment><USER2> The easter eggs themselves are pretty boring, but I find it fascinating that they're reported on in the NY Times. And I find it even more fascinating that they don't try to explain once what source code is in that entire piece.

Coding is actually becoming mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER3> is it good thinking to add Lorem Ipsum dummy copy to a politico's website? how about [http://www.lorem-ipsum.info](http://www.lorem-ipsum.info) \-- that site generates Chinese random copy (or Japanese, Hindi, Arab), might add some flair and class to the nonsense

</comment><comment><USER3> is it good thinking to add Lorem Ipsum dummy copy to a politico's website? how about [http://www.lorem-ipsum.info](http://www.lorem-ipsum.info)? Chinese random copy (or Arab, Hindi, Japanese), might add some flair and class to the nonsense

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it for SEO?</comment>


Will unbundling make cable consumers worse off? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/upshot/what-rising-airline-fees-tell-us-about-the-cable-industry.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The author has some valid points, and there may be some consumers who are worse-off with an unbundled cable system. However, analogies to air travel unbundling are not particularly apt. The air travel industry has very high barriers to entry—i.e., FAA regulations, limited number of gates, and very high capital requirements. There are some barriers to entry in the media/entertainment space, but they are nowhere close to the barriers to air travel entry.

When unbundling occurs and it is difficult for new entrants to create new offerings, consumers may suffer because the suppliers have more leverage than consumers. On the other hand, if you have unbundling in an industry where new entrants can come in, the suppliers have less power vis-a-vis the consumers. If they don't supply the desired unbundled goods/services, then new entrants will come in and satisfy the demand.</comment>


Popcorn Time for the web permanently shuts down - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/20/9576803/browser-popcorn-shuts-down <comment><USER2> The qualification 'permanently' might be a bit premature...

 _He might also open source the code behind Browser Popcorn, so it 's possible that another developer will revive it in the future._</comment>


Why all great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but we only have 23 - <AUTHOR> http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm

<comment><USER2> This is very cool. Once you find out about chromosome pairs (high school biology in USA's public schools) a lot of things about Mendelian inheritance fall into place. But if you've got any curiosity, you start to wonder about the 23-pair vs 24-pair thing.

One question this article doesn't answer is "How does this work in a breeding population?"

Most chromosomal abnormalities cause spontaneous abortions, and the ones that don't (Down's Syndrome, etc) would seem to cause some pretty non-adaptive problems.

So how would a merger of 2 pairs of chromosomes start to breed true in a population?</comment>


Phoenix.LiveView is now public on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1106291353670045696 <comment><AUTHOR> On GitHub: [https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view](https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view)

The previous HN discussion at the time it was initially announced: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662585)</comment>


Ask HN: What was the last ambiguous problem you worked on? - <AUTHOR> I see and hear a lot around that a good value you should have is working towards ambiguous problems and finding your way to the solution, often with no guidance from above.<p>I am trying to understand the line between ambiguous statements and obvious problems with no clear solution or specifications. <comment><USER2> im not sure but i believe mine falls into the latter category of obvious problems with unclear solutions however i can generally adapt to most problems, when people ask my skill set i struggle to answer, im not an expert in any one area off hand but if a problem requires it ill simply learn whatever is required to achieve the end result

i do work for a few places that deal with recycled and grey market tech. im often tasked with problems which dont have a solution, one example is the phones you see in stores playing demo loops etc, after the phone comes off the shop floors theyre usually simply auctioned off in batches as is, my task is to find a way to remove that demo software and make the device into a standard saleable unit

how this is done has a different answer for near every device and can range from simple software tricks to full jtag operations. i have no aid from OEMs on this or even any documentation, i just have to "wing it"

id never really considered it a skill as such, its just something ive always done. ill rarely use instructions or set methods for anything, i guess doing that over many years has made me pretty used to working with the unknown and may be the reason im successful with particular problems others arent, i just approach it in a different way.</comment>


Try to Listen Me, PGP Chat in Browser - <AUTHOR> http://trytolisten.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the creator of the website, I would like to deliver it a AGPL after the campaign.

Do not hesite to contact me.

I will answer to your question.</comment>


Atlantic.Net cloud 15% less than EC2 for on-demand instances - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlantic.net/cloud-hosting/cloud-server-pricing.html Here is the official release:
http://www.atlantic.net/Press-Releases-for-2012/atlanticnet-technology-upgrades-and-product-enhancements-result-in-cost-savings.html
About 15% less than EC2 @ hourly rates for Linux, closer to 17% for Windows. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the official release of the price drop:

[http://www.atlantic.net/Press-Releases- for-2012/atlanticnet-...](http://www.atlantic.net/Press-Releases- for-2012/atlanticnet-technology-upgrades-and-product-enhancements-result-in- cost-savings.html)

About 15% less for Linux, closer to 17% for Windows on hourly rates.</comment>


'Pokemon'-like 'MinoMonsters' heading to iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/10/BUIA1LS8A8.DTL

<comment><USER2> Wasn't aware of these guys. I didn't think many game companies had made it into YC. The only other game company I'm aware of is Koduco. Humble Bundle isn't a game company per say but is probably the most successful game related company that has been in YC. This thread was pretty useful (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948870>) and lists a few more. Are there any more?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ycombinator doing it big!</comment>


Vellvm: Verifying the LLVM (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~stevez/vellvm/# <comment><USER2> I think it's important to understand what's meant when someone says some piece of software is "verified".

In this case, when they say LLVM is verified, they mean that they designed a formal correspondence between the (1) semantics of the LLVM virtual machine language and (2) the actual execution of the underlying CPU (in this case, modeled using actual assembly language). Essentially, this amounts to writing two interpreters (one for LLVM assembly and one for low-level assembly), writing a compiler to generate low-level assembly from LLVM assembly, and proving that the interpreter for LLVM assembly does the same thing as the assembly language interpreter running on the generated code.

The tricky part here is "proving that they do the same thing"; this means that, for any program written in LLVM, there is a corresponding program in low-level assembly that has equivalent semantics. Reasoning about all possible programs requires reasoning over an infinite family of objects; there are a few tools in mathematics for doing this, but by far the most useful for reasoning about programming languages is induction. Coq, the tool used in the linked page, is a very popular tool for writing inductive proofs on heterogeneous tree structures (aka, an abstract syntax tree).

Ultimately, they use Coq to define the semantics of LLVM by writing (1) execution rules (for example, adding two integers results in a new int in a certain register) and, (2) in the case of LLVM (but not low-level assembly), typing rules which provide certain guarantees themselves. Coq is a proving environment which provides a functional dependently-typed programming language which can be used to construct and verify constructive proof arguments about programs. For example, you can prove existence (that there always exists an assembly language program for every LLVM program), or type soundness (that an LLVM program that is well-typed never performs an illegal operation according to its type semantics).

Ultimately, the value of proving this correspondence is that we know that LLVM has (1) equivalent expressive power to low-level assembly and (2) that, barring any bugs in the way that a CPU executes its assembly, the generated LLVM code will perform the same operations as the assembly language that it generates.

Edit: As some follow-up posts point out, this particular project is more concerned with verifying intra-LLVM transformations (i.e., LLVM to LLVM). This is quite different from what I described; my post describes a verified compiler, similar to CompCERT.

<comment><USER3> > In this case, when they say LLVM is verified, they mean that they designed a > formal correspondence between the (1) semantics of the LLVM virtual machine > language and (2) the actual execution of the underlying CPU (in this case, > modeled using actual assembly language).

I don't think that's accurate. Vellvm is verifying _transformations_ of IR rather than _executions_ on any given CPU.

<comment><USER2> You are right, perhaps my original post was unclear. The goal is to verify the transformation between LLVM and low-level assembly. I embellished slightly by equating the semantics of low-level assembly with CPU executions.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure they're talking about IR to IR transformations (e.g. high level IR optimizations) rather than IR to low level assembly transformations (code generator backends). The former is grad school stuff; the latter is hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Zdancewic's an amazing teacher and lecturer who I was lucky enough to have for an intro CIS course. Cool to see him on here</comment>


The Race to Replace Your Keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmEc3QaC08E <comment><USER2> Here's the related WSJ article:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-qwerty-days-are-almost- over...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-qwerty-days-are-almost- over-1538312400)

The author is basically making the case that with AR, VR, and mobile devices, we need another input device instead of a keyboard.</comment>


Show HN: CBlocks – A Mystery Box of Cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> So me and some work friends were looking at https://cryptoroulette.info/
We thought, this is ridiculous; someone could buy random crypto's & be net positive right now. Our next thought was, we should find a way to commemorate the craziness that is the current hype in the "crypto space". So we created https://www.cblocks.io
It's an experiment in art/psychology. Are people willing to essentially just buy a USB pre-loaded with random crypto coins? We make it a keepsake because it's going to come in an acrylic case with a nice printed card outlining the coins that were selected for you.
For anyone wondering exactly how it works:
1. We've got a script that will pick 5 random crypto's from the top 300 on coinmarketcap.com.
2. We then generate paper wallets using an offline PC & transfer them to a USB.
3. Next, we delete the wallets from the PC.
4. We buy the coins at market on whatever exchange we find them on.
5.Then send the coins to the public addresses for each of your wallets.
6. Finally, we send you the USB in a nice collectors case with a sheet of paper explaining your cryptos! <comment><USER2> Good stuff! Congrats.</comment>


Are We Reaching the Limits of Silicon Valley's Venture Model? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bryce/are-we-reaching-the-limits-of-silicon-valleys-venture-model-f7b7f3708a50#.tmp1sm3u2 <comment><USER2> It seems to me that the big issue with the SV venture model is the geographic limitation of its current implementation. The reason that there is too much money chasing too few deals is that the money is 'stuck' in certain places (SF, NY, Boston, Austin). The assumption is that if you want to play the VC game, you go where the money is. But not all good opportunities are in those locations or are capable of moving there. And that is why we have mad inflation in the money centers, while the rest of the country is living with deflation.

I'm waiting for the next wave of VCs to figure out how to overcome this geographic limitation and grab those opportunities which are currently being ignored.</comment>