The Big Zero - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html?pagewanted=print

<comment><USER2> The elephant in the room here is campaign financing. As long as a person* with great wealth can outweigh the desires of the majority of people we will get the government that we deserve.

*By person I mean a legal person <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person>

<comment><USER3> > The elephant in the room here is campaign financing. As long as a person* > with great wealth can outweigh the desires of the majority of people we will > get the government that we deserve.

The fix, making it impossible for ordinary people to contribute useful amounts of money to political causes in which they believe, makes things worse.

Note that we didn't actually have rich people buying elections before the various campaign finance restrictions. Out of fear of a then-imaginary problem, we set up a system where the problem actually occurs.

Malice or incompetence - either way, it's not much of a recommendation.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that ordinary people are the problem. If by ordinary people you mean natural persons* . In the US government, the elected officials should represent the will of the people who elected them. The problem is that special interests find that money is better spent through lobbying. This allows them to buy votes and even write laws. A massive amount of money is spent lobbying:

<http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php>

This money obviously has an effect. Ordinary people aren't creating lobbying groups.

*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person>

<comment><USER3> > I don't think that ordinary people are the problem.

I didn't say that they were. I said that they were the ones adversely affected by campaign finance restrictions.

The rubes think that that's an accident and that it could be fixed. The cynics think that that was the goal and know that it won't. The realists know that it was inevitable.

> The problem is that special interests find that money is better spent > through lobbying.

That's because "we" keep voting for folks who set up programs "to do good". That always fails because regulatory capture always happens.

Either we're insane or we want to be fleeced.

The only way to stop being fleeced is to insist that govt stop doing things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My life is improved so much due to technology. Remember only your computer and the internet in 1999.....

The same counts for almost every other product you're using.

Maybe financially there wasn't much progress, but the silent and steady motor of improving daily life is still running.

<comment><USER5> Yeah this is what I thought when reading this. He does, however, preface his statement that "nothing good happened" with "economically speaking", and he makes a good case from that perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hard to argue with this:

 _So here's what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero._

<comment><USER7> If SarBox applied to the government's own accounting, most Federal officials would be doing hard time. Meanwhile, the vast majority of corporations don't end up restating their earnings. It's one thing to say that people are flawed, and are dishonest when they can get away with it; but it's another idea entirely to imagine that government regulation does a better job. Madoff's competitors called him a scam artist before the SEC got involved; Paulson made a fortune by correctly betting that housing was overpriced; the Enron story was pushed by short sellers and journalists, to the point that the government didn't get involved until after the bankruptcy.

So why would we trust the government--which has failed miserably so far--to suddenly do a better job than the private sector?

<comment><USER8> Luckily it's not an either/or.

There's a nice balance in there where the free market weeds out most problems, the government mops up mistakes that get by and regulation prevents those mistakes from growing into systemic risks.

The only _real_ problem we just suffered, was that certain institutions were allowed to become integral parts of our financial system _and_ were allowed to play fast and loose with their own solvency.

If those banks weren't absurdly leveraged, the housing bubble would have just been another recession.

Lesser problems were the risk ratings that were tantamount to fraud and the short-sighted financial focus of your average corporate entity which lead to the over-leveraging.

But I'm comfortable conceding that ground to caveat emptor and letting the SEC sweep up the most egregious trouble-makers a day late, as usual. Because I honestly have no idea how you could actually _fix_ those problems without breaking something far more important.

<comment><USER9> > There's a nice balance in there where the free market weeds out most > problems, the government mops up mistakes that get by and regulation > prevents those mistakes from growing into systemic risks.

You missed the largest problem - the Federal Reserve set the price of borrowing money artificially low, almost to the point of being free. Whenever you set the price of borrowing money (interest and fees) lower than the rate of inflation, you're going to get some sort of massive financial problem. It's in everyone's rational interest under that scenario to borrow as much as they can. Of course, that leads to catastrophe.

<comment><USER10> That plus the large tax cuts aimed pretty much exclusively at the rich -- give all of the asset holders a bunch of extra liquidity and remove ordinary T-notes as an option by setting rates lower than inflation even while borrowing a ton of money..

You're gonna get a bubble somewhere -- that money has to go somewhere.

<comment><USER8> But bubbles in and of themselves don't lead to the systemic crisis we just went through.

There were plenty of policies I disagreed with and plenty more that fueled the bubble. But I was talking specifically about the problems that lead to the credit crisis, paralyzed markets and generally gummed things up above and beyond a popped bubble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The good news is that there is only one way to go once you hit rock bottom. The bad news may be that I don't think that we've hit bottom. And, we don't necessarily know what the bottom is. The Big Zero is a nice round number, but I think we've been borrowing towards an unpayable debt for longer than ten years, and we are only falling further. Planes, both figuratively and literally, continue to keep dropping out of the sky. If it was left up to me, I would get right to the bottom of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> But it gave us the iPhone! Perhaps we could call it the "iCade" or something like that?

<comment><USER13> Basically the decade involved a ridiculous penetration of cheap phones, cameras, and texting, along with vastly improved TV and monitor technology. Along with this came an extreme social change towards being plugged into a social and media network at all times, toward where this is now near its logical conclusion of the devaluation and death of individual thought.

<comment><USER14> [citation needed]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This decade has been really really good for IT, especially salary-wise. There were tons of successful startups.

<comment><USER13> > This decade has been really really good for IT, especially salary-wise.

Yet somehow I'm making a lot less than I did in 1999, before inflation. Part of that is my fault, but still!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The best HTML editors for windows? - <AUTHOR>

What's the best HTML editor for windows? Is dreamweaver the best? How about an open source one? Which one do you use? NB. Any comment would be helpful. <comment><USER2> Just a simple text editor is best. My favorite for Windows is Notepad++

</comment><comment><USER3> There is no "best" editor. It depends on your preferences and workflow.

All editors will let you type HTML (obviously), but some have more bells and whistles - Dreamweaver has autocompletion turned on by default, and a WYSIWYG mode, which helps when drawing image maps, for example (the downside is that editors with more features usually have longer startp-up times).

The toolsets can also be quite different (e.g. switching from Linux to Windows line breaks is a breeze in Notepad++, DW has facilities to integrate with other Adobe products, VS comes with a js debugger).

Just pick an editor from one of the comments and try it (even the commercial ones have free trials).

</comment><comment><USER4> When I have to write HTML, I use Vim and Firebug.

I believe the primary advantages of GUI tools like Dreamweaver are supposed to be ease-of-use and visual feedback, along with workflow tools like automatic site uploading. Since I already know HTML, I don't need the WYSIWYG part (if I did, I'd use Nvu or Kompozer or Mozilla Seamonkey); for feedback, nothing beats hitting F5 in a bunch of actual real-world browsers; for site-uploading on small sites, I'd much rather script the deployment myself with rsync or sftp, while on large sites there's usually some deploy-from-source-control script that renders Dreamweaver's tools moot.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion, the best editor for everything on Windows is 'e' a TextMate clone ( <http://www.e-texteditor.com/> ). The cost is trivial and you get a chance to try it out to make sure it suits you.

This editor is extensible using Ruby or Python and supports the full range of TextMate bundles so you can get up and running editing your language of choice right from the start.

The support for HTML is good without being intrusive - plus the colour coding of the text keeps things readable and helps you find typos.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a .NET guy and I've tried both Dreamweaver and the Visual Studio shell and I prefer Visual Studio. It can get in my way sometimes but, since I'm likely in it anyway writing C#, it keeps me from having to use two IDEs.

<comment><USER5> You are not wrong about the capability of the Visual Studio IDE (well VS2008 anyway) when it comes to HTML editing but if you are looking to just edit HTML then VS would be just a little over the top I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Notepad2</comment>


Review our first product release Fab.com/Inspiration - <AUTHOR> http://fab.com/inspiration/

<comment><USER2> I didn't get it. The home page has little to do with flash sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. See here regarding our strategy: [http://betashop.com/post/4591690466/getting-social-and- getti...](http://betashop.com/post/4591690466/getting-social-and-getting-big- fast)

<comment><USER2> I understand now.

It is a very good looking site. I am a bit lost because there is not a great deal of visual cues to what I'm supposed to do. (My screen resolution is 1600x900) and the comment bubble didn't cue me in.

I've added a comment (see <http://fab.com/inspiration/submarine-room>). We'll see whether this get any reactions.</comment></comment></comment>


One div – The single element HTML/CSS icon database - <AUTHOR> http://one-div.com/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't this seem like a maintainability nightmare? I can see a small change in rendering that causes number portions of a website to break in difficult to diagnose ways.

Clicking any of the HTML/CSS links under any of the icons just doesn't absolutely nothing for me btw. Running: Chrome 25.0.1364.29 beta

<comment><USER3> I agree about the maintainability issue. I really hate this kind of use of CSS as it strikes me as abuse of coding standards. It's as if a bunch of intellegent developers decide to throw all sanity out the window and compare cock sizes using CSS as their ruler.

Maybe I'm just old school, or maybe years writing native applications and fixing other peoples kludges has taught me disciplines that many of the younger web developers missed; but I'm a firm believer of the need to keep the different paradigms separate:

* HTML: mark up for the content

* CSS: design (though I tend to run 2 CSS files: 1 for layout and one for the motif/colour schemes)

* img (et al): embedded objects such as images (if people really want to use vector graphics, then there's SVG).

It's like how you wouldn't write a game and have the OpenGL wrappers in the same classes as computer AI; you'd modularise your project sanely. So why does such logic get thrown out the window when it comes to web development?

</comment></comment><comment> l-p It needs a "works for me" button for each glyph so you can crowd-source the compatibility list.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whilst using CSS pseudo elements to generate shapes is useful, I believe it's ill suited to iconography when the better solution is to use a custom web font. We've had a lot of success here recently, being able to create cross- platform, vector icons with minimal problems with maintainability.

<comment><USER5> "Pure CSS" icons have smaller footprint, don't require additional request to the server, don't interfere with screen readers. Unless you need some more sophisticated shapes they are the way to go. IMHO.

In these other cases, I'd argue that SVG is better than fonts - but that's a totally different debate.

<comment><USER6> You could always use a data-url SVG in the CSS file for the "best of both worlds"... and a compiler could make this a pretty painless process... but a single sprite sheet for your entire site is probably worth the extra request in most cases, since you could lazily load your icons and speed up your initial page render, rather than waiting for the CSS to fully load to display content.

But if you do want to do this, see <http://jsfiddle.net/estelle/SJjJb/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of these icons look pretty bad if your browser isn't zoomed to 100% (In Chrome anyway).

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would anybody want to use this extremely hacky solution instead of webfonts?

<comment><USER9> Because they can, probably. Little other reason.

Although webfonts tend to render horribly on Chrome, so they're not without problems either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like it's down already. Couldn't get a Google Cache link.

<comment><USER11> Try hitting reload - I managed to get in after a few attempts

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice Idea!

Not to be picky but on on <http://one-div.com/about/> there is a space missing. Search for "logos.All"

</comment><comment><USER13> One small amount of HTML - but a giant amount of CSS.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. I think it might be a good alternative to fonts if it is a CDN hosted, widespread thing, CSS already cached and all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why not do these with SVG? This is pretty fucking stupid actually.

<comment><USER9> Because it's not as cool because it's been around for a decade ;-)

Also it would be with fewer rendering problems. Bleeding-edge stuff is supposed to keep at least 70 % of the population out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bug: Some icons break when browser-zooming.</comment>


Development is gamified and more.. - <AUTHOR> http://achivy.com

<comment><AUTHOR> collect and share all your achievements... Find new challenges...

Achivy adds some fun and gamification to your social life. Add Twitter,Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla , Flickr, Stackoverflow, Klout and many other applications to your profile to see how many achievements, badges,scores you have and follow your progress. You can keep up with your friends, and see the other people's achievements and activities - achivies.

</comment><comment><USER2> Stackexchange/Stackoverflow support is also nice :)

</comment><comment><USER3> finally a place to gather all your online achievements!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you keep your codebase knowledge in your team? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, OP here.

I'd like to explain the question a little bit. In our team, we are trying to create something we call "codebase knowledge". It's anything related to our code and technological solution that is important to know through the team. For example specific algorithms we're using and why, platform-specific decisions and caveats, or just simple explanation of how some internal API works.

I wonder, do you keep the same knowledge in your team? If so, where do you keep it and what software do you use?

Our problem is that currently, this knowledge is spread across Google Docs, Slack, readmes, code comments, or sometimes it's just vocal...

How do you solve this issue?

<comment><USER2> Good old Word documents work well for this along with comments in the code, which reference these documents.

<comment><AUTHOR> How often do you write/update such documents in your team?

If you do it the way you described, isn't it hard to search for some specific knowledge?

<comment><USER2> We write and update these documents when needed (this usually means when something has changed in the code) and when knowledge is fresh in people's mind.

If documents are referenced in the code it is straightforward to find them when needed. We also have documents to capture general architecture, which obviously help devs finding their way around the codebase.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reinforcement Learning and DQN – learning to play from pixels - <AUTHOR> https://rubenfiszel.github.io/posts/rl4j/2016-08-24-Reinforcement-Learning-and-DQN.html#asynchronous-methods-for-deep-reinforcement-learning# <comment><USER2> Couple key points: This project[0] is going to keep developing. It has Deep Q Learning now, A3C[1] is working and more features are being added.

Just as important: RL4J and DL4J run on a scientific computing framework called ND4J[2] that integrates with Spark and trains on multiple GPUs.[3][4]

It's basically porting RL to the production stack of large organizations that work with the JVM and need to scale.

The key thing to remember is that RL combines with other algorithms, like deep convolutional nets or Monte Carlo Search Trees. DL4J has the ConvNets already.[5]

[0] [https://github.com/deeplearning4j/rl4j](https://github.com/deeplearning4j/rl4j)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783)

[2] [http://nd4j.org/](http://nd4j.org/)

[3] [http://deeplearning4j.org/spark](http://deeplearning4j.org/spark)

[4] [http://deeplearning4j.org/gpu](http://deeplearning4j.org/gpu)

[5] [http://deeplearning4j.org/convolutionalnets.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/convolutionalnets.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome read!

Given the Doom examples, another work to add to the list at the end is [https://github.com/Ardavans/DSR](https://github.com/Ardavans/DSR). Extends the idea of successor representations introduced by Peter Dayan[1] in the 1990s to successor features using a deep neural net. The learning algorithm is demonstrated with Doom.

[1] [http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~dayan/papers/d93b.pdf](http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~dayan/papers/d93b.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. It seems very interesting. I will add it as a reference once I am done reading it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a terrific piece with a lot of depth, but it would be nice if you defined what a DQN is (especially since it's an ad-hoc DeepMind term) before going further. I recognized everything _but_ the specific meaning of the DQN acronym and ended up looking up DQN itself... standard practice when writing things up is to expand abbrevations on first use, show the reader what they'll be abbreviated to, and use that after.

I searched the document and did not see an expansion of DQN to Deep Q-Network anywhere in the body, nor could I find a link to a definition of the term, which is kind of silly considering how much effort you put into the rest of the document. (Why limit your readership and/or opportunities?)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks a lot. You are right. I edited and expanded it inside the introduction.

<comment><USER4> To reiterate -- it is a fantastic piece. I went back and re-read it just now, and there's more meat in that one webpage than in many entire engineering textbooks. Terrific piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't have time to read it yet (bookmarked it for later) but I must say I LOVE the style of this blog and the integration of images and code with a beautiful font.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. It is my first post so I actually spent a decent chunk of time learning some webdesign to make it look nice. I am using Hakyll as static site generator and it is really awesome! Highly recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!</comment>


The Story of Magic Leap - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/?p=1999666 <comment><USER3> I don't think they'll ship.

They either patent the product in which case cheap clones are produced before they get to market, or they keep it a secret and never release. Since the CEO is the inventor, I think they'll try to keep it secret.

Slow companies that want to do everything perfect just don't work once they lose that edge. They fail to compete.

<comment><USER4> Oculus Rift took 4 years to launch (2012->2016) and was acquired for $2 billion. Magic Leap only started working on this in 2014 and raised $1.4 billion. This stuff takes time.

<comment><USER5> They started in 2010 (it's even the first sentence of their history on the Wikipedia).

They are probably about 5 years from shipping

<comment><USER4> If you actually read their Wikipedia page it said they started working on what Magic Leap currently is about in 2014. That's when they started hiring VR/optical people.

They did other projects before 2014 under the same name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR."

I thought it was called AR, as in augmented reality?

<comment><USER7> There's a graphic midway through the article that makes a distinction. I don't necessarily agree, but the author (and apparently ML) see AR with additional overlays, like HUDs, and MR as virtual models and things, such as a whale flying through your living room.

<comment><USER8> Luckily they don't get to make up what terms we use. They previously tried to coin "cinematic reality" as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one that has less confidence that Magic Leap will actually ship anything after reading about their CEO? The way they talk about him makes it sound like he has a million ideas all the time and isn't laser-focused on getting X, Y, or Z out the door and in the hands of customers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Honest question—how is this hype without any technology details/demo any different than Theranos?

<comment><USER11> Was there not a tech demo video right on the linked article?

<comment><USER10> True, though to someone completely outside this area, it doesn't seem to show any claimed benefits over hololens. To be clear, I absolutely don't think ML is anything like Theranos, but wonder what signals we, as third parties, should use during the stealth hype cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will be excited if they ship. The technology (AR, MR whatever you want to call it) will redefine how people collaborate. Companies that keep things under wraps showing bits and pieces are hard to trust. Demos are easy. In a perfectly orchestrated environment, you can show whatever you want. It means very little in terms of what your final product/experience will be.

</comment><comment><USER13> Been trying to follow this development specifically for a while now and glad to have a long-form write-up about it. Behind the scenes is great. I just wish it didn't read like they'd spent five months guzzling the kool-aid. I mean, okay I get it, sounds exciting, you got it see it up close, we haven't yet, etc. Reads a bit much like quotes from a movie poster though..."Unleashes the potential of the Internet! Immersive! Astounding!"

> _Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality > will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds._

So, just like XBox Live, teenagers can yell obscenities at you! Half-joking here. Also relevant:

"Lenny! I don't deal black-jack clips! It's policy. I got ethics here." (Strange Days)

</comment><comment><USER14> What's the field of vision for Magic Leap?

The Hololens demo videos seem amazing until you find out users are not actually seeing all that's portrayed in them.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, people who have actually used Hololens tend to be pretty impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Speaking of highly secretive, well-funded startups... Whatever happened to that super-hyped, super-secretive startup that was going to use sound waves as a control device? I forgot the details, but it was something like that, something special done using sound

<comment><USER17> I remember another one, something about wireless charging at a distance by focusing energy waves. Sounded physically impossible, but they got funding and it had a lot of hype. Haven't heard about that one lately.

</comment></comment><comment> iam-TJ My take-away was that for all the work on the hardware and experience, it will be the people that solve the interactive tooling challenge that will open the flood-gates to mass-market MR/VR/AR.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK, I'm convinced. Magic Leap technology is the next big thing.

<comment><USER18> I agree that augmented reality tech has promise, but from the article alone, I don't think we can say much about the quality of the Magic Leap experience, no way of determining how it compared to HoloLens.

[https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en- us](https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us)

<comment><USER19> i think by the sheer amount of funding that the prototype gear has been able to raise is a testament to the quality of the experience. the article also elaborated on why the quality is much better - "an optical system that creates the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things, and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances.

In trying out Magic Leap's prototype, I found that it worked amazingly well close up, within arm's reach, which was not true of many of the other mixed- and virtual-reality systems I used. I also found that the transition back to the real world while removing the Magic Leap's optics was effortless, as comfortable as slipping off sunglasses, which I also did not experience in other systems. It felt natural."

I am not sold on hololens since people who have tested it complained about the effective 'field of vision' which the experience applies to. see [http://imgur.com/uCmWnis](http://imgur.com/uCmWnis)

<comment><USER18> Look at it with a critical eye. If they've already solved those issues, why would they have any reason to restrict who they demo to? I'd suggest they still have technical issues to overcome, and the Wired piece is at least partly hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR :

Magic Leap is a secretive startup based in Florida.

The author describes his experience interacting with, among other things, an 8-inch robot drone, which seems, but is not real - it's rather a simulation made visible by a VR kit. VR overlaid on the real world is called mixed reality (MR).

He saw other things with these magical goggles, and they looked very real.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating MR technology, but it's the most advanced, as proven by several notable investors, including Google, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, which poured 1.4 billion dollars into it so far, while the company has not released a beta version of its product yet.

All major tech players have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, as well as 230 other companies, working on hardware and content. The author has seen most of them.

The expectations of Virtual Reality are very high - the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Oasis. The author experienced VR first in 1989 with Jaron Lanier in California, exploring a virtual world with him through a special glove. He named it Virtual Reality, and all the elements were there: head-mounted display, glove tracking, multiperson social immersion.

Mass market VR was not imminent, though, mostly because of high costs. Thank to smartphones, the cost of many components - gyroscopes, screens, CPUs - <USER2> shrunk now. In fact, in 2012, Oculus Rift launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a VR headset prototype, and was then acquired by Facebook for 2 billion dollars in 2014.

Lanier estimates that you would have needed a million dollar in 1990 to achieve what you can achieve today with a smartphone.

Virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet, an internet of experiences - experiences that feel genuine, even if they are simulated, because of two things: "presence" (objects seem to be real), and (a personal feeling of living an) "experience".

This will lead to a Wikipedia of experiences, such as traveling, or terror at the edge of an erupting volcano, or shared experiences. Kent Bye, founder of the podcast "Voices of VR", says that VR talks to our subconscious mind.

The author mentions a great subconscious experience with "the Void" at the 2016 TED conference. The three co-founders have experiences with stage magic, a theme park, and a haunted house, and mixed them to create "the Void".

You wear a 12-pound vest, you roam free in a large room, and navigate an Indiana Jones-like adventure. You have the illusion of a larger space in which to move around thank to a trick called "redirected walking" and redirected touching. Stairs, as an example, can be made to feel endless if they drop down as you walk upward.

Most VR headsets today also include "dynamic binaural" \- 3D audio, which is more than stereo, which is fixed in space. This also helps prevent motion sickness.

Good VR also includes touch, as Jason Jerald, author of what people call the VR book, says. Most VR kit use controllers, as gloves are not sufficiently advanced yet.

Magic Leap is the most impressive on the visual front.

Founder Rony Abovitz was a misfit enthralled by science fiction and robots, with a career in biomedical engineering. He is warm, casual, full of ideas.

In 2008 his company, Mako, went public, and sold in 2013 for 1.65 billion dollars.

He then invented a whole fictional world on another planet, called Hour Blue, and hired Weta Workshop, a special effects house, to build it, and in 2012 he did setup a company to develop this immersive world: Magic Leap.

Abovitz saw Artificial Reality as part machine, part flesh, tricking the brain to created a "chain of persuasion". He then proceeded to build a display to realize it. Displays put at 1 inch from your eyes don't offer a good illusion of focus; Magic Leap's solution creates the illusion of depth in a convincing way.

Still, competition for Magic Leap is formidable, such as Hololens by Microsoft, or Meta. All three project images onto a semitransparent material; for Magic Leap, pixels disappear - for example when watching a movie in it. You can have browsers flouting around as well: Hololens, in fact, wants to replace the various screens in a typical office. At Magic Leap, instead, they will soon abandon desktop screens altogether in favor of virtual displays, even at the company itself, within a year. Famoous movie director Peter Jackson agrees: VR can be a virgin territory to tell stories, and he finds Mixed Reality more exciting than VR.

It could be a form of education, entertainment, and tourism, and in ten years MR devices can be used more than smartphones.

Blockbuster MR and VR worlds will require the highest level of world-building. Weta is working with Magic Leap to develop a small virtual world called Dr. Grordbort's, based on sculpted ray guns, an effort led by Richard Taylor.

Artificial Reality will need world builders like Taylor and Jackson to invent the grammar of VR and MR. In tests with volunteers, Microsoft's Minecraft developers discovered that performing the same role in VR - the so-called "you-person view" \- feels far more intimate than it does in first-person on a flatscreen, and emotionally taxing. A break is often needed within an hour.

The best experiences for the author had a strong social element.

The "bat-flinch" test tells you the quality of VR: If you stood next to someone who was holding a virtual baseball bat and they swung the bat at you, would you duck?

But a better test for VR is the poker game test: do you feel sufficient subtle eye contact, body language, and social presence that you can tell if they're bluffing?

The author visited an Oculus demo at Facebook's campus, and Palmer Luckey, Oculus' creator, joined in, and his avatar had the same body language in a demo called Toybox.

Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. Magic Leap (among others) is working on protocols that save a mapped "real" place in the cloud so it doesn't have to be remapped for each encounter.

The computing needs for this should not be underestimated.

Every virtual world is potentially a total surveillance state.

This comprehensive tracking of your behavior inside these worlds could be used to sell you things, to redirect your attention, to track your interests.

The familiar puzzles of this data collection will occupy us as a society in the near future.

The creation of a global artificial reality is an enormous project, and its adoption will start slowly.

Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led his company's early investment in Magic Leap, thinks VR will follow the flywheel effect: sluggish to start, then nearly unstoppable.

There's no getting around the fact that everyone looks like a dork wearing a head-mounted display - same problem that Google Glass and the Segway had.

Physical safety for VR headsets is also a concern, while MR can mitigate the problem.

The VR industry is waiting for its Doug Engelbart to invent the equivalent of the mouse.

Nearly all of the non-movie VR experiences uploaded to date were created using a computer-game engine from either Unity or Unreal - both of which have demoed a VR version that permits users to make VR in VR.

The author had a lot of fun in VR using an app called Tilt Brush, purchased by Google, with which you can paint in 3D and view it with your headset.

His aha was that at its root, VR is as much a creation tool as a consumption tool.

Fame awaits the genius who figures out the elegant VR interface for VR creation.

Right now the field of view in mixed-reality devices is too narrow.

All mixed-reality systems labor under a second challenge that VR systems don't: lighting should keep the illusion that a given object is real - a weak link in the chain of persuasion.

It's hard to overstate the benefit of wearing a lightweight device that is not tethered to a fixed location.

Most engineers working on VR mention one of two books: Snow Crash or Ready Player One.

At Magic Leap, Abovitz hired Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, as chief futurist because "he has an engineer's mind fused with that of a great writer."

Stephenson compared the challenge of VR to crossing a treacherous valley to reach new heights. He admires Abovitz because he is willing to "slog through that valley."

It's too early to know what virtual reality is or what it will be. The real way to the future might be biology.

Not immediately, but within 15 years, the bulk of our work and play time will touch the virtual to some degree.

Only a few companies will dominate the VR networks because, as is so common in networks, success is self-reinforcing.

After a long gestation, VR is good enough to improve quickly. It's real.

end of TL;DR.

Question: would it be useful to have a service that gives you the TL;DR of a long article like this? If so, would you pay for it?</comment>


HTTP headers we don't want - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastly.com/blog/headers-we-dont-want <comment><USER2> Via is not safe to remove and Fastly know this as well as Akamai, Cloudflare and others.

A very cheap attack is to chain CDNs into a nice circle. This is what Via protects against: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/preventing-malicious-request- loo...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/preventing-malicious-request-loops/)

Just because a browser doesn't use a header does not make the header superfluous.

<comment><USER3> What a terrible stance for a company like Fastly to take:

 _More debatable perhaps is Via, which is required (by RFC7230) to be added to the response by any proxy through which it passes to identify the proxy. This can be something useful like the proxy's hostname, but is more likely to be a generic identifier like "vegur", "varnish", or "squid". Removing (or not setting) this header is technically a spec violation, but no browsers do anything with it, so it's reasonably safe to get rid of it if you want to._

Actually, it isn't "debatable," since the debate occurred, and a decision was made, and published. That's what RFCs are for.

To ignore them with such wanton disregard speaks volumes.

Edit: to clarify, I didn't mean that RFCs should not be debated at all, only that disregarding this because "no browsers do anything with it" didn't seem like a good justification or stance.

<comment><USER4> Not really. Standards are nice, but as time goes on, things change, and we should NEVER only change things 'once a standard says so'. The web is an ever evolving platform, and standards are loosely respected these days anyway. Heck, browsers aren't a standard themselves!

<comment><USER5> By that logic there isn't any point to standards at all. If we all are supposed to ignore them when we feel like it then what's the point of having them at all?

If there is a standard published for something, follow it or publish your own RFC. Don't just nitpick the bits you want and break clients in the process.

<comment><USER6> They're provided as guidance. They aren't some kind of internet law. Sometimes contravening standards is harmful; sometimes it's helpful. It's not productive to point at them as if they were dispositive in debates.

<comment><USER7> Not really. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791) ^ Was burned in hardware all over the planet.

<comment><USER6> People play games with IP all the time.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but there isn't a big company with clout saying "Hey, you should deviate from RFC791".

I agree that standards can and should be replaced/amended to over time, but I kinda see what GP's point is getting at.

<comment><USER9> Dropping Via from a response is roughly in the same category as ignoring the TCP Urgent flag. Most widely used standards have vestigial bits.

<comment><USER10> A lot of hardware silently edits TOS flags, causing trouble with ECN and diff- serv...

Ignoring is usually fine. Dropping is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Saying that a header is useless because it has been deprecated and displaced by a newer header is... misleading at best.

If all you ever code for is the latest version of Firefox and Chrome, you might not understand this, but there's a _whole world_ out there with an astonishing diversity of browsers. (Also, your site is bad and you should feel bad.) Removing X-Frame-Options without first checking if 99.99% of your users' browsers support Content-Security-Policy is just asking for increased risk.

</comment><comment><USER12> Most of the suggestions in this post are great, but as always, especially when security is involved, you need to assess your business needs yourself.

The suggestion to use Content-Security-Policy over X-Frame-Options is great -- if you don't expect many of your users to be using IE-based browsers. If you're primarily serving large enterprises or government customers though, it's likely that most of your users will still be coming from a browser that doesn't support Content-Security-Policy.

<comment><USER13> But interestingly, they deem `x-ua-compatible` "useful" even though AFAIK that's also only needed for backwards compatibility with IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> P3P is unnecessary until you have clients complaining that Internet Explorer users cannot use the site and it's hurting their business. I speak of experience.

Curiously enough, P3P enforcement depends on the operating system and not on the browser. Internet Explorer 11 may or may not care about P3P depending if you're on Windows 7 or Windows 10.

<comment><USER15> Came here to say the exact same thing. P3P may be "officially" obsolete, but if your business wants older browsers to be able to handle your code, you're going to have to deal with it.

If you have the misfortune of encountering it, you can get really hard to detect bugs with ajax calls or script files not getting loaded in IE when you don't have P3P set up correctly. (for instance: [https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software- engineer/craft-a-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software- engineer/craft-a-p3p-policy-to-make-ie-behave/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> cache-control doesn't completely replace Expires for some use cases.

If you have a scheduled task that generates data every hour, you can set Expires accordingly so all clients will refresh the data as soon as the hour rolls over.

You can do this using max-age but then you have to dynamically calculate this header per request which means you can't do things like upload your data to s3 and set the cache-control header on it.

With expires, I can upload a file to s3 and set

      Expires: ... 17:00

and then not have to touch it again for an hour.

you can work around this client side with per hour filenames or the other usual cache busting tricks, but that's annoying.

<comment><USER17> It seems like kind of an unlikely scenario that you'd want to expire content at a specific time. I mean, if someone chooses to do that, they better know what the impact could be.

With the Expires header, all clients that retrieved that content would expire at the exact same time, which could cause some disproportionately high load in the few seconds after that (the "thundering herd" problem). The Cache-Control solution will stagger the expirations (relative to when the client last retrieved it) so the server doesn't get trampled.

<comment><USER10> Congratulations, your infrastructure stability now depends on particular web browsers and caches implementing their caches and headers correctly...

It takes just one big bad actor to break. Reminds me of certain routers damaging NTP traffic.

<comment><USER17> That's a cynical view, and I don't think I said you should _depend_ on Cache- Control working. Yes, there will be bad actors, but the majority of clients are good actors. It's just one of _several_ measures you should take to even out the load.

Of course you'd want a caching layer in front of the server doing the actual work, but it's still possible to "thundering herd" the cache server if you use an Expires header. Even if the herd doesn't hurt your backend server, it can still make the load on your caching frontend servers spike at specific time periods with every good actor refreshing the content at the same time. So it's still ideal to _try_ and even out that load with Cache-Control.

<comment><USER18> The use case of having hourly updated data (e.g. weather data) on an S3 bucket behind a CloudFront distribution is not that niche.

Thundering herd may or may not be an issue depending on the amount of traffic you normally get, the architecture of your backend (e.g. AWS Lambda or S3 which can most likely deal with this easily) and the primary purpose of your CDN usage (e.g. caching data closer to the users for faster delivery world wide rather than reducing back end load).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really wish the browser vendors would come together to establish a plan to clean up User-Agent. It's one of the worst offenders in header legacy[1] and fingerprinting. Exposing what browser I am using and it's major version is fine but I don't think every website I visit deserves to know what OS I am using, nor the details of my CPU.

[1] [https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2010/01/12/history-of-the- use...](https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2010/01/12/history-of-the-user-agent- string/) (2010, though little has changed since then).

<comment><USER20> Browser vendors can't clean up User-Agent because the websites sniff it and break if it's "wrong" (for any random value of wrong).

I'm sure there's a Bugzilla bug about the "X11; Linux x86_64" in the headers, and I'd be terrified to open it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Client HTTP header I don't want:

      * referer
      * user-agent

Happy to be wrong, but these shouldn't be mandatory to browse the web, which they _kind of_ are.

<comment><USER22> I too would like a world where all browsers implemented fully the same standard but that's not how it worked out (or it ever works).

This is an amusing (scary?) article about the history of the user-agent:

[https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string- history/](https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/)

<comment><USER23> Yes but you should be testing browser capabilities not user agents.

<comment><USER24> The requires more steps and a slower process. User-agent is a one step process. Browser capabilities means returning something back to the browser and potentially coming back to the server.

While it has obviously been abused, neither way is ideal. There's no way for a server to say "tell me the browser capabilities before I serve you the request".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >>> Vanity (server, x-powered-by, via)

gosh, no.

server is no vanity, server is needed to know WHO THE HELL responded you (we are in a very messy cdn selector _s_ \+ cdn _s_ \+ application layer _s_ depending on non obvious rules on (sub)domain and cookies).

<comment><USER10> That is supposed to be handled by Host header. Server etc. provides at most redundant debugging info.

<comment><USER26> The Host header is in de request, it should not occur in the reply (as the article states)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Speaking of HTTP headers. One I wish more people would use is Accept-Language instead of region/geoip based localization. Practically every site I've come across ignores this header in favour of geoip with the weird and notable exception of Microsoft exchange webmail and Grafana.

<comment><USER28> Yes, please! Is there some catch I don't know why people aren't relying on the header to determine the language served? Because if not I don't get how geoIP/region is used so widely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I get that this is data that Fastly has to send but doesn't get to bill directly to customers, but don't expect ME to care about this until the average news article stops sending me 10 MB.

<comment><USER30> Fastly is a CDN that charges by requests + bandwidth, so it absolutely makes money from extra headers on responses no matter how small.

<comment><USER29> I don't know how they bill. If it is just the Content-Length then they eat the cost of the header.

<comment><USER29> Also, I can't see any other reason they'd care. Who does the header harm?

<comment><USER30> You seem to be taking this way too critically. It's a simple article that's looking at the typical headers in responses and showing which ones probably are outdated or unnecessary. If you have 10 hits per day, it doesn't matter. For others that send billions of requests, it might just make a material difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wouldn't trust this entry at all. The author did not do proper research to understand the why's behind the headers that he didn't understand or didn't know well enough.

</comment><comment><USER32> They list "date" as being required by protocol. This is not true. The term used in the RFC is "should". It is a nice to have, for additional validation by proxies.

In haproxy, you can discard it with:

        http-response del-header Date

<comment><USER33> Just curious, what would a proxy do with such a header?

<comment><USER32> Proxies used to (and some still do) compare last-modified and date, if the date header is present. [0] They are not required to trust this header as accurate.

For reference around and clarification around the Date header, the "should" comes from the loophole that nobody is required to have a time source. The previous RFC's made that harder to understand, as the loophole was in another section.

[0] [http://devel.squid-cache.org/rproxy/dateheader.html](http://devel.squid- cache.org/rproxy/dateheader.html)

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-18.104.22.168](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-220.127.116.11)

<comment><USER34> I believe you have mis-interpreted Section 184.108.40.206 of RFC 7231, specifically it is identical to RFC 2616 Section 14.18 in that a Date header MUST be included except for 3 exceptions. They have listed the 3 exceptions first and also the wording that includes "SHOULD" which defines when the origin server should compute the date, but notwithstanding those notes it still notes that the Date header is mandatory for an origin server: "An origin server MUST send a Date header field in all other cases." (where other refers to the 3 exceptions -- HTTP 500-class errors; HTTP 100-class message-less responses; and no-clock systems)

<comment><USER32> I understand what you are saying, but I am not required to have a time source, which makes the entire requirement optional.

<comment><USER34> A time source isn't required, a clock is. Further, if the origin server does not have a clock, any proxy (such as HAProxy) is still required to add the Date header if it has a clock, as if it were the origin server. In practice, there are very few functional systems without clocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Oh God. No. Expires and Pragma are absolutely essential if you're writing a web app to be used by folks stuck behind a walled garden proxy implemented in the dumbest way possible.

</comment><comment><USER36> Step 1: Complain, "Nobody follows the standard."

Step 2: Advise, "This is part of the standard but ignore it because it's pointless."

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting that their blog itself has the headers they deem unnecessary...

        Server: Artisanal bits
        Via: 1.1 varnish,1.1 varnish
        X-Served-By: cache-sjc3150-SJC, cache-cdg8748-CDG

</comment><comment><USER38> First, we should fix user agent. Time to dump that historical baggage.

</comment><comment><USER39> >P3P is a curious animal.

This was a requirement to have IE6 accept third party cookies from your site.

<comment><USER40> This part of the article really threw me off. Someone writing an article on HTTP headers for a major CDN has never had to deal with IE6?

<comment><USER41> Are people really still dealing with IE6? I gave up web dev almost a decade ago and it's disturbing to hear that IE6 is still an issue!

<comment><USER42> Healthcare and government (US). So, so very many systems are on IE6. So, so very many websites only work correctly/fully when end users are on that platform. Until you've had to support code distributed by the US federal gov't and watch the percentages of users hitting your site from XP ( _or earlier_ ) UAs rise to the double digits, you have not known sadness.

<comment><USER43> Also all of China or so I was told about a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It would be helpful to have a guide to this for people running a 'low audience website' where there is no CDN or Varnish, just some Apache or Nginx server on a slow-ish but cheap VPS.

For a local business or community, e.g. an arts group with a Wordpress style site, there are many common problems, they might not need a full CDN, just serving media files from a cookieless subdomain gets their site up to acceptable speed cutting the header overhead considerably.

Purging the useless headers might also include getting rid of pointless 'meta keywords' and what not.

The tips given here could be really suited to this type of simple work to get a site vaguely performant. How to do it with common little guy server setups could really help.

<comment><USER45> Realistically, how much traffic is saved by cutting headers? A simple article like [this]([https://tp69.wordpress.com/2018/04/17/completely-silent- comp...](https://tp69.wordpress.com/2018/04/17/completely-silent-computer/)) (currently on the HN frontpage) weighs 178 KB, and that's without external resources. Unused headers account at best for 0,1% of the total traffic.

<comment><USER46> One could argue that the headers comprise a very important 0.1%, but any wasted time the client spends waiting for and parsing headers will almost always be utterly dominated by the unavoidable wait for HTML parsing, JavaScript parsing, painting and so on.

I could see the argument for pruning useless headers if, say, the method for generating them relied on some high-latency database call or filesystem access, but that would rarely be the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The details are interesting but "adds overhead at a critical time in the loading of your page" ... this seems pretty unlikely to have any noticeable processing overhead. Doing things better is generally good, but this all seems very low impact.

<comment><USER48> Depends on where you measure it. A client on a decent connection will never notice. If you're serving billions of hits, 20 bytes in a header is something you will definitely notice on your bandwidth bill.

<comment><USER49> More importantly, an extra header may push you into needing another packet, which creates extra potential for packet loss.

<comment><USER27> That's a very weak argument to make though when regarding the modern web; sites are routinely sending me multiple megabytes of content; optimising 20 bytes isn't going to make even the smallest dent if you're trying to pack your site down.

<comment><USER48> I'm sorry, but that's simply not reflective of reality. There's a reason Yahoo wrote yslow.

20 bytes times billions of requests is absolutely an optimization target; in fact, this is a really easy and low-hanging one at that.

Sure, there's also a ton of garbage sites shoving piles of garbage around, but the existence of fast food doesn't mean nice restaurants don't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I got stuck with a website once that was using one of the compression headers - maybe content-encoding to indicate that it's .gz files were gzipped even if the client didn't indicate it supported it. Some browsers would ignore it and just download the file, but others would unzip it. So you got a different file depending on what browser you used! I think wget and chrome behaved differently from each other. I wrote to the site operator who corrected it.

</comment><comment><USER51> "no-cache" doesn't prevent caching. "no-store" does.

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate

Mozilla recommends the following to prevent cachine:

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control)

</comment><comment><USER52> Please use a monospaced font when displaying numbers in a table. Otherwise, it is hard to tell which number is 10x bigger than the neighbor.

<comment><USER53> No need for a monospace font; tabular numerals should suffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Bit of a tangent, but Fastly's CTO gave a terrific talk I attended about a year ago, titled something like "Why load balancing is impossible". My career in consulting has led to a gradual diffusion from my earlier focus on front- end performance optimization, but Fastly retains credibility in my book on a number of fronts.

</comment><comment><USER55> In short [https://caniuse.com/#feat=contentsecuritypolicy](https://caniuse.com/#feat=contentsecuritypolicy)

</comment><comment><USER56> Good article to read, Learned something new today regarding HTTP headers

</comment><comment><USER57> fairly poor compared to cloudflare blogs

</comment><comment><USER58> This is a great article!

</comment><comment><USER59> This grey-on-white is hard to read. I gave up on the article.

<comment><USER30> It's more of the skinny font weight, which is somewhat of an unfortunate hipster design trend that only looks good on high-res retina macbooks.</comment></comment>


Fundraising Will Take You 3 Months - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/09/fundraising-will-take-you-3-months.html

<comment><USER2> There's an important difference between a fundraise actually taking 6 months, and a fundraise that you started several months before you were ready (ie, before your company has a "market-clearing" offer).

If, in parallel to fundraising, you are spending months demonstrating traction, preparing decks, modelling out potential outcomes, launching a product, or whatever, the problem isn't "fundraising takes longer than it looks on tv", but rather, "fundraising requires clearing higher standards that it seems to on tv".

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I see a lot of entrepreneurs start with a bad pitch. A few weeks in they will stop to regroup. They will refine the pitch, and start again.

In parallel, they may get more aggressive about coordinating all the meetings into a short window of time / pushing people to meet sooner.

<comment><USER3> Elad, I agree with you on this point. Question being, should entrepreneurs get more agressive about co-ordinating meetings into a short window of time? How do investors react to that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is probably because I'm not in the valley, but I would have loved to have been finished in 3 months. We closed our seed round 6 months after pitching our first angel group. Granted, we had a few bridge notes to get us through and we were pretty picky about the money we took, but still. Fund raising takes forever.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have to admit I found myself wanting to tell the author that his article about the unrealistic expectations about the time it takes to raise funding had some very unrealistic expectations around the time it takes to raise money!

All good points. I would just add that I'd double the time here. Secondly, time is to some extent on the investors side. A lot of folks burn out quickly so seeing you still dedicated and (mostly) telling the same story 3 to 6 months later is important.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha ha. Yes, it can take even longer. But I think even 3 months is much longer then most people expect. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't agree more! I constantly see startups underestimate the amount of time it will take to raise and then make suboptimal decisions because they are in a rush

<comment><USER7> It's also a bummer when startups don't factor the time it takes to fundraise into their calculations when figuring out how much cash they need.

Live and learn, I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> David Lee had a good recent post on this: <http://daslee.me/6-months>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 3 Months would be great. Raising angel money in Canada is a little slow. (I'm being kind)</comment>


Video: Shutting down the last Oracle database at Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jdarrow/status/1111629087947132928 <comment><USER2> Can someone explain this reply tweet?

[https://twitter.com/vijayravindran/status/111167101012907212...](https://twitter.com/vijayravindran/status/1111671010129072129):

> Oh yeah, but what about rickb's home directory?

</comment><comment><USER3> I watched a presentation by Larry in which he stated Amazon runs on the Oracle Database. Is that just AWS or was Larry telling tall tales.</comment>


Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/ <comment><USER2> With the exception of one or two, everybody was running terminals across multiple windows and not tabs. I spend considerable time on terminals on my Macs, but am a big fan of having a single terminal window with many tabs. I am curious whether people generally really prefer multi-window terminals and find it to have an advantage over the tabular alternative.

<comment><USER3> The advantage (for me, at least, on a Mac) is that it's easier to pick which terminal you want when they're laid out across the screen instead of all being in the same position: "The window I'm testing my code in is in the bottom right", "The window I'm compiling that large thing in the background is off to the left", "The window I'm running my backup script is up at the top".

<comment><USER2> I agree. For programming related use-cases, having multiple terminal windows can be very helpful. From a systems and networks administration perspective, I am not so sure, particularly when you can have simultaneous (SSH) sessions open to many systems.</comment></comment></comment>


How PHP is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed - <AUTHOR> http://epixa.com/2011/08/how-php-is-broken-and-how-it-can-be-fixed

<comment><USER2> I dislike these articles. And it's not because I like PHP or its development processes, but because the author is avoiding responsibility.

"As a PHP user, it is not my responsibility to contribute to PHP. That's not how open source works, and it never will be how open source works. But as a user of the software, I can be upset when it doesn't work."

If the author has a vested interested in the stability of the language he develops in, then he should be devoting a portion of his time to the project. And instead of writing code and trying to get the build to pass more of those acceptance tests, he writes a boring, scathing article and contributes nothing but vitriol.

Changing the behavior of the PHP core devs by writing a blog post is as effective as changing fashion by merely talking about it.</comment>


The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/the_ideal_praise-to-criticism.html

<comment><USER2> But correlation does not imply causation: Maybe teams that have a lot of praise going around were getting praised because they were already performing well.</comment>


An Atomic Anniversary in the City the Bomb Spared - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/08/atomic-bomb-anniversary-hiroshima-nagasaki-kokura-japan/595825/ <comment><USER2> Kyoto was in fact the first target for the atomic bomb:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182](https://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-33755182)

 _After holding a discussion with the President, Mr Stimson wrote in his diary on 24 July 1945 that "he was particularly emphatic in agreeing with my suggestion that if elimination was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians"._

<comment><USER3> I often wonder how big a role the need to keep occupied Japan out of the hands of Russia had on the scheduling of the atomic bombings. Allowing an East Germany situation to befall Japan would've had dire consequences for the latter half of the 20th century, but it does beg the question of whether allowing more time for the first bombing to sink in could have prevented the need for a second. Given the staggering casualty levels the Japanese government at the time was preparing to take to defend the home islands, perhaps not, but one does wonder.

<comment><USER4> > Allowing an East Germany situation to befall Japan would've had dire > consequences for the latter half of the 20th century

This is a comment that works in retrospect, but at the time the carving up of east europe to soviet and western forces, and the division of berlin was seen as the _solution_ to de-nazifying germany and eastern europe, not something horrific. The horror of east germany was still years, a decade and more, from being learnt.

The US may have desired the lion's share of pacific territory under their control, but the cold war had not begun yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Best bodybuilding iOS app? - <AUTHOR> I'm hoping someone would be able to direct me towards a really good bodybuilding app? I've looked at Fitbod but the issue is it doesn't tell you starting weights or rests between sets. I'm looking for something that could help even newcomers get back into working out ( haven't done weight lifting in a long time) would love some suggestions!! thank you! <comment><USER2> This does it: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stronglifts-5x5-workout- log/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stronglifts-5x5-workout- log/id488580022?mt=8)

If you want to adjust the program and add additional exercises you need the upgrade. Otherwise, it works great, built in videos and progress graphs</comment>


WhatsApp Backdoor/Vulnerability demonstration [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we-pJE5JjAs <comment><USER2> It now is a lot more clear what's going on here. The discoverer of this issue is basing his argument on the fact that when you verify a fingerprint, you are now confident that your end-to-end encryption won't transparently send your encrypted data to someone with a different keypair. The other side of the argument is that if WhatsApp actually did what you expect, data would be lost when a person switched phones in the middle of someone sending them a message. As a person who doesn't switch phones very often, I would prefer an end-to-end encryption to never send data to a different public key than the one I've used before. I would rather lose data than divulge it to a third party who has the ability to spoof the recipient's phone. This would only come up whenever someone switched their phone when I was sending them a message, so it's pretty rare.

To me the trade off is a no brainer, and apparently to Facebook and Whisper Systems the trade off is a no brainer in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER3> >if WhatsApp actually did what you expect, data would be lost when a person switched phones in the middle of someone sending them a message

Only temporarily lost. WhatsApp could ask you: "do you want to resend the message(s) to the contact's new phone?". An easy solution and it could be optional, even off by default.

<comment><USER4> I like that idea.

OpenWhisperSystem's response was that due to the delay involved the (potentially compromised) server would know who has enabled notifications/blocking and who hasn't.

<comment><USER3> >the (potentially compromised) server would know who has enabled notifications/blocking and who hasn't.

How would that be worse than the current situation, where everyone is vulnerable and we all know it?

<comment><USER4> From Moxie's response in another thread:

[...] a fact of life is that the majority of users will probably not verify keys. That is our reality. Given that reality, the most important thing is to design your product so that the server has no knowledge of who has verified keys or who has enabled a setting to see key change notifications. That way the server has no knowledge of who it can MITM without getting caught. I've been impressed with the level of care that WhatsApp has given to that requirement. I think we should all remain open to ideas about how we can improve this UX within the limits a mass market product has to operate within, but that's very different from labeling this a "backdoor."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13394900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13394900)

<comment><USER4> As a counterpoint, though, see the discoverer of the vulnerability:

"As Eike Kühl pretty well describes, this functionality only increases usability in a rare corner case: When you dump your phone in the ocean and you need a month to get a new one. Then everyone who has sent you a message during this period will not need to press an additional "OK" button."

[https://tobi.rocks/2017/01/what-is-facebook-going-to-do-a- su...](https://tobi.rocks/2017/01/what-is-facebook-going-to-do-a-suggestion/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those not wanting to watch 14 minutes of video, here is the author's blog post explaining the vulnerability: [https://tobi.rocks/2016/04/whats-app- retransmission-vulnerab...](https://tobi.rocks/2016/04/whats-app- retransmission-vulnerability/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I could be wrong, but he just puts the sender phone in Airplane mode and then sends a few messages. Then he swaps the sim card from the receivers "Laura's" phone to the government's phone. Then the government's phone is able to view the messages sent while the sender's phone was in Airplane mode. Is that really the vulnerability?

<comment><USER7> Yes it's a real vulnerability. Edward's phone is reencrypting the message with a new (malicious) public key without Edward's permission. It's not clear this would be a very practical attack, but it's definitely something that Whatsapp should stop if the extra security mode is enabled.

<comment><USER6> I get it, but let's stop calling it a backdoor conspiracy theorists. It is really a UX decision. WhatsApp decided they'd rather not have the possibility of losing messages when you switch phones.

I see the fix as being as easy as a new security preference that by default behaves the same way, but you have the option to prevent sending messages that are not reported as delivered to a new device/key. Essentially those messages get lost.

<comment><USER8> You can't prove whether or not it was intentional. Marketing speak can spin this as a convenience for the user. It's still a backdoor until they fix this.

I don't believe Moxie has the actual insight into Facebook's true intentions with the Whatsapp platform. He may believe their intentions are honest, but he's just a cog in their wheel.

If he honestly believed Whatsapp was sufficiently secure why would he bother with Signal?

<comment><USER6> Well perhaps it was just a bug or edge-case, and WhatsApp is just "spinning" it as convenience. We could go back and forth all day.

Immediately jumping to backdoor and malicious intent for use by the Government is disingenuous and we don't know that to be factual. Yet the media and this YouTuber seems to be distributing that very message.

<comment><USER8> You seem to attribute backdoor with malicious intent. Step back for a minute and consider the power of PR spin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm doesn't WhatsApp puts a red system message when the phone or key is changed?

When I talked to my gf the other day noticed it when she switched her work phone.

<comment><USER3> It does [if you enable it], but in special circumstances (as described in the video/article) the warning is only displayed AFTER your messages have already been delivered to a new phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was another article claiming there's no backdoor. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13394900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13394900).

Anybody with any ideas what is happening exactly?

<comment><USER11> It's what the other article says, for in flight message (single tick), if the key changes it might be reencrypted with a new key if the recipient key changes.

If there's a double-tick it's too late, and it won't reencrypt. In practice, unless you have a very long monologue, only one message would "leak", not the full discussion.

(after the key changes you'll get a warning if you have the settings to show cryptographic details enabled).

<comment><USER12> People have "monologues" on IM all the time. I'm sure FB has the data from Messenger and WhatsApp, what the aggregate exposure in message volume is at any time. I do not have that data but I suspect it's "a lot".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The premise here, being that powerful (or technically adept) people may have the capacity to impersonate a phone number, or clone a SIM card.

...since that part isn't directly stated, and might not be obvious to everyone.

<comment><USER4> That would indeed be enough. The other conceivable scenario is that the server gets compromised (and suppresses the "delivery receipts", then sends a spurious "rekeying" message).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like Facebook should start testing, turn on security notifications for 1% of users, see what happens

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the past few days of back-and-forth about this issue have made a few things clear:

1) The double-check was not widely understood as an indicator of any particular security state prior to the attention this has gotten.

2) Is it fairly easy to imagine a scenario in which the behavior of WhatsApp can be readily exploited - think of a journalist on the ground in Tahrir Square using WhatsApp to report on conditions, neither expecting nor receiving replies or confirmations, perhaps for hours at a time.

3) The matter of whether this is a "backdoor" or not is contentious, but also not terribly important to the stakeholders.

4) Moxie wholesale approves of the WhatsApp implementation.

5) WhatsApp does in fact provide substantial security for a common and important use case.

So, where do we go from here?

I think that those of us that care about freedom in the information age well- advised to remember that Moxie has done incredible, substantial, and landscape-shifting work in this space.

Nevertheless, I also think that Moxie can provide a few more details and thoughts that will be hugely helpful to the community in thinking through the coming years of IM security.

Specifically, I will quote the comment I made in the other article, addressing Moxie directly:

Moxie,

I think it's fair to say that you are the world thought leader on these matters right now.

One thing that the rest of us are wondering right now is:

> (Quoting Moxie, in response to my comment) I've been impressed with the > level of care that WhatsApp has given to that requirement.

To what degree do you really know that? Is there a place where we can read about your interactions with Facebook, the level of access they've given you, and the degree to which they have allowed your recommendations to shape the contours of their implementation?

Nothing less than the strength of dissent lies in the balance of questions like these.

> I think we should all remain open to ideas about how we can improve this UX > within the limits a mass market product has to operate within, but that's > very different from labeling this a "backdoor."

I agree that the jump to scary terminology is dangerous.

However, at the end of the day, I think that many of us have been trying to make a simple point that shows that there is a sort of crossing of that line:

WhatsApp claimed that they were simply unable to intercept communications, and now we find out that, without any user interaction or approval, messages which haven't received the "double check" are re-transmitted when a new key is generated.

So look: nobody here is trying to diminish your tireless work and your accomplishments in bringing freedom into the information age.

But there are nuances here that are important, and fleshing them out is a big part of what this community is about.</comment>


Slack Raises $80M Fund to Support Platform Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/12/15/slack-raises-80-million-fund-to-support-platform-strategy <comment><AUTHOR> _" The Slack Fund has invested in three companies so far, according to Mr. Butterfield: Small Winds, a stealth startup focused on work productivity co- founded by Ryan Block, a former editor of the tech blog Engadget; Xoxco Inc., which does business under the name Howdy and developed a project-management bot that asks people what they're working on and distributes the answers; and Awesome, also in stealth, which automates work tasks such as running meetings. All these products are being integrated with Slack."_

Startups still seem to be the R&D for more mature software companies,[0] ones even as young as slack. [1]

[0] _" The test of any investment is the ratio of return to risk. Startups pass that test because although they're appallingly risky, the returns when they do succeed are so high."_ ~ "Startup equals growth: Deals" ~ [http://paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://paulgraham.com/growth.html)

[1] started in 2009.</comment>


Alphabet's CapitalG Leads $1B Round in Lyft - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lyft.com/posts/alphabet-capitalg-leads-1-billion-round-in-lyft <comment><USER2> I wonder what is Alphabet's intent behind this massive investment? Are they planning to use Lyft as a ridesharing platform for their autononous vehicles, since Lyft already has a sizeable market share in the US? For Alphabet, Lyft would be a great partner to sell/rent autonomous vehicles to, given their current legal battle with Uber.

For riders, it's great, as prices should remain low. Interested in seeing Softbank's next move.

However you may look at it, I just don't believe this is a winner takes all market.

<comment><USER3> Self driving taxis will likely end up a monopolized market, and it may become one of the biggest industries in existence.

The thing is there is no reason that companies could not be, at least theoretically, profitable charging rates that are actually less than it would cost for an individual to own a car. Without a driver their only overhead is the maintenance/insurance on the car itself. And that's something owners have to pay as well -- with the major difference that thanks to economies of scale the taxi monopoly could pay substantially less for. The company that has the most cars will be able to offer faster rides and offer them cheaper.

The potential profit here is really quite incredible. Last year there were 3.2 trillion miles driven in the US alone. Imagine a taxi company is able to snag about 1/3rd of those or about 1 trillion miles. Their profit margin translates to $10 billion _net_ per penny/mile of profit.

So if they can, through economy of scale, operate their vehicles at $0.05/mile less than an individual owner could. And they then sell their service at a $0.01/mile less than what it would cost if you owned the car, then they're turning $40billion/year net. And that's again with 1/3rd the driving market. When you can offer taxis at below ownership prices, who would still own a car?

Tesla seems to be flirting with the possibility of taking this one step further will full vertical integration of production itself. It's already in their license that you're not allowed to use their vehicles (in what will be full autonomous mode) for any ride sharing service except for their yet-to-be- launched one. Interesting future coming up fast!

<comment><USER4> > Self driving taxis will likely end up a monopolized market, and it may > become one of the biggest industries in existence.

Like, where do people get this kind of argument from? I see it a lot around here.

Those are two _highly_ contestable premises, neither of which are at all supported.

Especially the first one. Why on earth would autonomous taxis be a monopoly? There will always be a more profitable segment of the market and a less profitable one, and thus always an incentive for a new entrant to cherry pick the most profitable segment. And the most important capital investment, the roads, by definition will be open to new users.

There's so much magical thinking around self-driving cars. You guys are aware that the only difference between a self driving car and not is the person driving right?

It's just replacing people. And people aren't particularly expensive or hard to come by. It's not like we've never invented a machine to replace people before.

<comment><USER5> The software and training data set an extremely high barrier to competition.

Once you've solved self-driving taxis, you've also solved a large chunk of self-driving commercial transportation. AI trucks could kill off rail, in addition to manned semis.

From there, it's a small leap to becoming the backbone of an ultra-efficient on-demand national distribution network.

All without the _massive_ operating overhead of human labor... No sleep, no breaks, no weekends, no healthcare, no HR, no wages, just the price of electricity and the low/infrequent maintenance costs of electric vehicles.

Eventually. I think the taxis are 5 years away from 24/7 availability in NYC, maybe 3 for San Francisco, and the grand vision is probably 10 years out.

But... Yeah... This is going to be huge.

<comment><USER4> > I think the taxis are 5 years away from 24/7 availability in NYC, maybe 3 > for San Francisco

lol

That's another amusing point of view I see here a lot. The use case of taxis in a major city is _by far_ the most challenging use case for autonomous driving. Mark your calendars for 5-10 years _after_ you first see an actual autonomous vehicle having any type of real world application at all. Which you haven't.

The whole idea that taxis are the vanguard of autonomous driving is obvious patent nonsense, why it persists remains a mystery to me.

<comment><USER5> > Mark your calendars for 5-10 years after you first see an actual autonomous > vehicle having any type of real world application at all. Which you haven't.

What's your criteria here?

Because I have the same opinion as you... Except I've literally seen experimental autonomous cars driving on the street... Hence +3 years for SV, and +5 for NYC.

Taxis are not the vanguard, they're just the most visible. Autonomous trucking is underway and will likely see mass adoption before taxis.

The revolution is close - we're seeing disruption everywhere. I could empathize if this was an isolated Google vaporware experiment... but every class of vehicle has promising automation, researched by dozens of companies around the world, and implementing multiple approaches.

Most will fail, of course, but we are on the cusp of success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google is copying GE's playbook. It's fascinating to watch this tech company turn into an investment vehicle.

<comment><USER7> What else do you do with 100B in the bank? If they just paid it out to the engineers (yes please, thank you!) half of them would retire after two years.

<comment><USER8> Well historically when a corporation couldn't reinvest its capital for an above market rate of return, it would either buy back shares or issues dividends so owners/shareholders can reinvest for higher return.

Hoarding this much cash is historically unprecedented, largely because it's mostly offshore for tech companies and repatriating it would cost many billions in taxes.

<comment><USER9> maybe they should repatriate it and pay their damn taxes.

<comment><USER10> Why? Why should they pay US tax on money earned abroad? They've paid tax to the local government where sales were made, why does the US get a cut too?

<comment><USER11> Why shouldn't they? Google pays sales tax here too and yet have a corporate income tax given they are based in the US.

<comment><USER10> My point is why are they subject to a corporate income tax on income earned and already taxed abroad? The US government hasn't supported that income.

<comment><USER7> Without arguing for or against repatriation taxes, I don't think it is true that "The US government hasn't supported that income."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like larger and larger rounds are being announced. Magic just also did a $1B round.

Is this cause for concern or innocuous? I don't remember rounds being this big before.

<comment><USER13> Cheap capital searches for a return. Venture funds pump up valuations of privately held companies to show mark to market valuations (paper returns) increasing. Allows funds to show good IRR without actually returning capital to LP's. Allows funds to raise more capital for new funds based on prior performance.

It's basically an unsustainable financial mess that will collapse.

Not that big of a bubble though compared with the student loan fiasco no one is really talking about these days.

<comment><USER14> LPs are much more sophisticated than you give them credit for. LPs are not stupid and know how VC works. They woul easily recognize the tricks you are proposing, which is why it's not actually how the industry operates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Waiting on Lyft to go international and disrupt Uber's hegemony.

<comment><USER16> I can't wait to have two 200mb apps on my phone fulfilling the same need instead of one!

<comment><USER17> The Lyft app is 17.38 MB, and the Uber app is 35.04 MB.

<comment><USER18> Lyft app size 43.33 MB, user data 1.09 MB. Android 8.0.0. I wonder why such a spread in size?

<comment><USER17> Probably AOT compilation and extraction of some resources from the APK. I don't have either installed, but my point was that 200 MB seems like a gross exaggeration. At worst, you could use ride.lyft.com in your web browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how Lyft's finances compare with Uber's. Is there any info available publicly ?

<comment><USER20> They claim that they could be profitable in 2018 in this article: [https://www.recode.net/2017/10/19/16503628/alphabet-lyft- rid...](https://www.recode.net/2017/10/19/16503628/alphabet-lyft-ride-hail- investment-billion)

<comment><USER21> Profitable in their current markets. Once they expand internationally they will need to subsidize heavily.

<comment><USER22> > Profitable in their current markets. Once they expand internationally they > will need to subsidize heavily.

Why would they need to subsidize outside of the US?

<comment><USER21> Majority of the cities that they expand to will likely have a competing player (Uber, Didi etc). Therefore to attract customers away from the incumbent they will have to offer free rides or discounted rides. That money needs to come from somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those wondering about CapitalG: [https://www.capitalg.com](https://www.capitalg.com)

> CapitalG (formerly Google Capital) is a growth equity fund backed by > Alphabet, Google's parent company. We invest in companies around the world > that drive market disruption by harnessing long-term technology trends.

<comment><USER24> that's the finest name

<comment><USER25> Although Trent Reznor may find it a little on the nose.

<comment><USER26> The person who named this group is either really clueless or really clever, I don't know which.

"I used to stand for something, I forgot what that could be. There's a lot of me inside you, maybe you're afraid to see"

<comment><USER27> I had to Google it... not everyone knows all the music out there :) but they definitely Googled it before settling on that name !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That's a billion with a 'B'! Is this a way Google is trying to get back at Uber?

<comment><USER29> I seriously doubt it. Google does business with its competitors all the time. It pays Apple billions per year to promote its search engine while engaging in proxy lawsuits against Apple.

CapitalG also has completely different objectives than Waymo. Larry & Sergey have 51% of Alphabet, but I seriously doubt the board of directors would approve a $1B spend out of spite.

The Lyft deal looks to be genuinely good. The Waze Carpool app still has low usage even in the Bay Area. Lyft can supply their network, so Waymo doesn't have to support every metro area, which is what they would have to do if they just sold self-driving kits to automakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a customer of ride sharing services that's become accustomed to VC subsidizing my rides, this is great news.

<comment><USER31> VC (at that scale) are just a pipe for the Fed's cheap money, ie. we all subsidize your rides. Strangely, it does seem to result in overall improvement to the society and economy.

<comment><USER32> Can you explain how VCs are a pipe for Fed money?

<comment><USER33> The federal reserve is keeping the federal funds rate low to try and run the economy "hot", and grow inflation. This is in the hopes that a "hot" economy will also grow wages and decrease unemployment further. Inflation is seen as less of a problem in recent years, as its been too low* for a long time.

The low federal funds rate (federal reserve interest rate) results in new Treasury bills being issued at very low interest rates. Large banking institutions must maintain certain capital reserves, which they hold in these TBills, and the low interest rates mean the banks earn tiny returns on the capital.

Banks, being commercial ventures, are expected to return a certain profit. The low interest rates from the TBills are too low of a rate, and won't cover inflation or operating expenses. So banks must chase riskier investments (in general, risky investments return higher interest rates) with their remaining capital to return high enough profits.

The riskiest investments are startups. Very high returns, if a startup succeeds and exits in an IPO, but failure is more common. Banks don't invest in startups though, they are too risky, but banks end up investing in all the less risky assets available. This demand for "medium" risky assets (sovereign debt, corporate or municipal bonds) drives other investors out of the market, they can't compete with the volume banks can purchase at, and are forced to chase the even riskier assets banks won't touch.

So low rates -> low interest tbills -> banks chasing risky assets -> investors chasing startups

<comment><USER34> Except that the Fed is not keeping the federal funds rate low. The Fed has raised the rate twice already this year as well as once at the end of 2016. They have also signaled that another increase is coming in December. See:

[http://thehill.com/policy/finance/337790-fed-raises-rates- fo...](http://thehill.com/policy/finance/337790-fed-raises-rates-for-second- time-in-2017)

and

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/fed- bond...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/fed-bond- buying.html)

<comment><USER35> It's still low by historical standards: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS)

<comment><USER34> Yes but I was responding to the assertion that "The federal reserve is keeping the federal funds rate low ...", when that hasn't been the policy for almost a year now.

So the _current_ Fed policy is not in fact indirectly subsidizing ride sharing.

<comment><USER36> The Fed is still keeping rates low because inflation isn't moving up, even with a tightening labor market (and they don't know why).

(Video) [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-09-27/what- yellen...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-09-27/what-yellen- admits-she-doesn-t-know-about-inflation-video)

<comment><USER34> The Fed has in fact raised the rates twice this years and once last year, how is that keeping rates low?

These rates are moved slowly and incrementally. You can't just raise the rate 3%.

That video in your link says nothing about keeping rates low, its about the nature of inflation.

<comment><USER37> It has raised the rates from extremely low to very low, which is still keeping rates low.

Now, you can argue that that is in part because a rapid increase to non-low rates would be disruptive given the status quo ante, but that's a justification for keeping rates low, not a rebuttal to the claim that that is what the Fed is doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Isn't Google also an investor in Uber?

<comment><USER39> These companies generate billions of dollars a year in profit. They, quite literally, have nothing better to do with their money than invest.

Interestingly, this is what will make these companies so entrenched for decades to come - anything that would ever come close to being a competitor..they will be part owners of.

<comment><USER40> I'm pretty sure they both operate at a loss or at least come very close to breaking even. There is a 0% chance Uber or Lyft make "billions" in _profit_ every year.

<comment><USER41> he means Google

<comment><USER40> Hah wow my reading comprehension is apparently not working at all today, my bad OP. Gunna just leave my comment up so I can be properly shamed :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> CapitalG is such a gangsta name.

</comment><comment><USER43> So much for that "winner take all" narrative.

</comment><comment><USER44> That's the same amount they want Uber to pay Waymo. What a coincidence!

</comment><comment><USER45> This is interesting. And about a 4 years back Google Ventures [https://www.gv.com](https://www.gv.com) had invested in Uber

Ref : [https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/22/google-ventures- puts-258m-...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/22/google-ventures- puts-258m-into-uber-its-largest-deal-ever/)</comment>