The complexity of downloading favicons - <AUTHOR> https://www.simplecto.com/complexity-downloading-favicons-told-in-15-plus-edge-cases/ <comment><USER2> 17: sometimes there are multiple sizes, according to the spec ([https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel- icon](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon))

18: sometimes favicons are not square

19: sometimes favicons have transparent pixels (GIF) or an alpha channel (PNG)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ones! I forgot about the transparent pixels.

May I add those with credit to you?

<comment><USER3> ICO files can have an alpha channel or a bit mask.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article on how ridiculous it is trying to sort favicons out from the end user perspective reminded me of how difficult it was to get right as a creator.

I use this tool: [https://realfavicongenerator.net/](https://realfavicongenerator.net/)

Rather than make everything simple it makes everything easy.

Thanks to the Sam for immersing in that subject so others can reap the benefit.

<comment><USER5> I've used [https://www.ionos.ca/tools/favicon- generator](https://www.ionos.ca/tools/favicon-generator) in the past. It has the image upload ability as well as the ability to quickly draw something on a 16x16 pad for when you just want an absurdly simply icon. (in no way affiliated with the site)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember having similar issues a few years ago, I think I ended up using a google service to capture favicons (can't seem to find it anymore)

EDIT: Found it! [https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=](https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=)

(simply add a domain name after '=' and it will return the website favicon)

<comment><USER7> I came here to post this same tip.

"<img src="[https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=news.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=news.ycombinator.com") />"

<comment><USER8> Be advised... while this img tag is ok for embedding, clicking on the link in HN reveals an extra quote character.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Chromium favicon service for comparison: [https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/components/...](https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/components/favicon)

<comment><USER10> So much code for what ideally ought to be a simple task!

<comment><USER11> I glanced over it quickly. A lot of the code files are really small, a couple of lines each. The rest is a mixture of actual logic, boilerplate and integration overhead (mostly due to a lot of event based asynchronous task handling). The overhead comes with the territory when integrating something into a big codebase such as a browser. The business rules are still a few 100 lines, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another recent complication is serving different favicons for browsers running a dark mode. For example, somehow nytimes.com inverts theirs on my browser and it actually looks great. Sites need to be aware that a dark icon over a transparent background will be invisible in dark mode.

<comment><USER13> This is an annoying downside of dark mode, which I tend to have enabled on everything all the time: Favicons often don't look good (github, circleci...). Also many slack emoji don't show up.

I don't know if there's a good solution to this. It's unfeasible to require developers to provide two icons, particularly in places that are mothballed. Should browsers always render favicons against a light/white background?

<comment><USER14> It's not really a problem of dark vs. light, it's the fact that transparency in a generic logo is a pretty bad idea. I'm not sure what transparency is supposed to solve that an explicitly designed color wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Favicons are also not always defined in <head>, they are automatically requested by the browser whether you have the <link> tag or not. The <link> tag mainly allows you to specify locations and file types other than the default /favicon.ico.

</comment><comment><USER16> 16: Sometimes it is an animated gif.

That's so funny, I've never seen one moving. Do browsers just convert the first frame into a static icon on the fly when they're downloaded or have I just never noticed one moving?

<comment><USER17> You can even control them with JavaScript which... well, see the game for yourself:

[http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/](http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/)

(Press N to start, the arrow keys to move.)

<comment><USER5> This is today's best thing. Thanks. Made in 2008 - everything still working in a modern browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of these problem apply to crawling in general. I run adstxt.com which crawls ads.txt files.

Some issues we have seen:

\- Pages that say they are one encoding but are actually another

\- Redirects to other sites

\- invalid contents or malformed content. How hard should we try to interpret what they meant? For example, an html page that looks like a valid CSV.

\- Page too long or extremely slow

\- Invalid certs

</comment><comment><USER19> 20\. Sometimes the favicon is dynamically generated by the page JS and is actually a playable arcade game: [http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/](http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I always try to squash as much of the complexity as I can with some well tested tools or libraries. In this case I'd use imagemagick's convert to resize and convert any of the possible file formats to the type of image I need. Solves a lot of points on this list. For the download part, curl would also solve a few points (ssl, redirects). Of course it depends if you're writing this for a SaaS product, a desktop or mobile Application.

</comment><comment><USER2> This list fits into [https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome- falsehood](https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wrote [https://github.com/scottwernervt/favicon](https://github.com/scottwernervt/favicon) in Python to get a company's logo. Looks like I need to handle more edge cases.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Downloading that little icon you see in you browser tabs should be a simple exercise. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought. Be vigilant that you are not shaving a Yak. This is my story...

</comment><comment><USER22> Favicons can be TIFF? Browsers don't have support for TIFF—for one, libtiff has historically been a huge source of security vulnerabilities. What pages have TIFF favicons?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a list of 500 domains that I used for testing when originally developing. To be clear I don't recall seeing tiff files loaded in browsers, but I definitely remember seeing them downloaded and crashing my code.

I wrote favicon-getter just as a means to populate an icon next to a list of links in another project. Hence, all the references to Yak-shaving.

In the end I just assumed that I would "almost" never see a tiff used as favicon and move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> favicons? Try scraping the page title of a random link

The consistent problem for me is that cloudflare doesnt like (some/certain/it seems random) ip ranges or user agents and pops up a captcha immediately

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried proxy-rotation services like Crawlera? This is on my radar if I encounter too many issues.

[https://scrapinghub.com/crawlera](https://scrapinghub.com/crawlera)</comment></comment>


Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society - <AUTHOR> https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-society.html <comment><USER3> >Cryptocurrencies have existed for eleven years, they should have something to show for right now.

IMO this argument is pretty seriously flawed. We tend to think of revolutionary technologies as "overnight successes" but that's rarely the case.

If we had abandoned the smartphone 11 years after the first attempt at, we would never have the iPhone. If we had abandoned combustion engines 11 years after their first attempt, we never would have had the automobile. New technology is hard and requires a lot of tinkering.

I also think the author fails to capture what people look to as the potential of crypto. While there is a definite subculture of neo-Austrian economics, a lot of us are also interested about the ability to structure new forms of digital markets, make money programmatic, and increase the structural privacy of the internet.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Bitcoin is the first flip phone. Let's see what things look like in 20 years.

The one point I agree with the author on is that the electricity waste is unnecessary and unsustainable. Proof of Stake or other alternatives, if there are any, should be a requirement of all future cryptocurrencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> The flip phone was usable from day 1. This is not a flip phone. It's a tamagotchi.

<comment><USER5> Which made a bunch of Japanese elders not to suicide (yet). Yeah, no value at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Missing the point is an art, I must admit.

<comment><USER5> You've passed the flame-bait territory and are headed straight for troll-land. I'm so angry at myself that I got caught in your scheme, you wouldn't believe it.

<comment><USER6> Please don't. If someone is that wrong, or you feel they are, just let it go.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This post presents a very low effort argument. It's basically taking the argument "the only reason anyone would want privacy is if they have something to hide" and applying it to money "the only reason anyone would want financial privacy is because they are buying drugs".

<comment><USER8> Its also far too dependent on the ignorance of the primitive BTC proof of work protocol to move its simple minded argument forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean boiling the oceans for.... what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Detrimental to society" isn't very defensible, he should have gone with "dysfunctional, practically useless technology" instead:

* "Anonymous" transactions which are actually on a public, immutable ledger

* Power structure moved away from banks/Fed, and instead to various Chinese mining cartels, shady exchange owners, and early adopters

* Incredible power/resource usage, given the functionality

* Complete lack of fraud protection, insurance, and basic consumer/legal controls (which adopters will claim is a feature)

* Wild, constant price swings based on speculation/gambling/front-running/malfeasance

* Various forks and community squabbling, even 10 years after release

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's a valid criticism, you won't hear me complain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> tl;dr - "So in short, I think that cryptocurrencies provide nothing of value to society. They do however facilitate crime and contribute to climate change."

Is this satire?

I'm wondering if this author covertly intends to strengthen the perceived utility of through this article.

Yes, near-free & instant to exchange, borderless, alternative to gov't, privacy-preserving, competitively evolving etc. digital money provides 'nothing of value'. /s

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the actual value of that?

<comment><USER11> Being able to send money to a friend in the US from Greece has value to me. Currently, I can't do this without a lot of hassle, since there's no overlap between what banking methods we use in Greece and what they use in the US.

The problem is that ~0 stores accept cryptocurrencies, so my friend can't do anything with it.

<comment><USER12> Western Union, Moneygram, Paypal, and so on?

<comment><USER11> Nowhere near as convenient, fast or cheap. I guess there's Transferwise, which is still more expensive and slower, plus they banned me as a user, which cryptocurrencies don't do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The extreme energy waste is the most salient point to me. Imagine what you could have if you took all the energy spent mining crypto and instead had spent it on building solar panels or N95 masks or high speed rail.

<comment><USER11> I don't know, how much energy is spent producing reality TV shows? To me, those have less value than instant, trustless payments.

That's not to say that I don't hope non-PoW cryptocurrencies become more popular, we should conserve energy when we can. I haven't looked very much into it, but Stellar seems interesting, and it's not PoW.

<comment><USER14> While I'm not a fan of reality TV, I know plenty of people who are, and whose lives are enriched because of reality television. There is no accounting for taste.

I don't know how much people's lives are enriched by cryptocurrency. Other than the people directly involved in mining and speculating on it.

<comment><USER11> I, for one, enjoy watching all the speculator drama, much like watching a reality TV show. Plus, it lets me buy LSD online, which is something that I believe I should definitely be able to do but currently cannot.

Unjust laws change by disobeying them, and if you clamped down on that 100%, neither homosexuality nor cannabis would be legal now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Money laundering and buying drugs" "No intrinsic value" "Energy waste" These arguments have been in the wild for over 10 years and discussed by both sides in much detail. The article brings just personal opinion of author and probably the most dumb down version of these arguments I have seen. Not sure if satire or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you answer the question of the article?

> Can you please show me the benefit to society of cryptocurrencies?

<comment><USER16> I'll take a stab.

First, society is a semantic shortcut, not something that actually exists as something that can experience gain or harm. Only individuals can, and many have, and do.

I had an unbanked contractor, a refugee from Russia who could not get a bank account anywhere he went, and had to hop countries a lot as visas expired, and I paid him in Bitcoin even though he was completely unfamiliar with it when I proposed it, because we could find no other solution. He and I both benefitted substantially from that. I'm aware that other solutions exist, and we had exhausted all the ones we could find, as one by one my bank started rejecting transactions as fraudulent.

For most of what we want to do in the US or the rest of the first world, we have a reasonably functional banking system. For most of what we want to do internationally, at least commercially or with trading partners able to work with approved banks, things work pretty OK. There is a substantial part of the world that doesn't live under these conditions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your story. I'm sorry for the Russian refugee, but that kind of scenario - although noble - doesn't seem to really justify what 'we are doing' with crypto.

Indirectly, your scenario seems to admit that for the vast majority of the world, cryptocurrencies don't add much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every single downside listed in the article already existed way long before cryptocurrencies were even invented. Yet another article that confuses security of exchanges with security of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are digital asset designed to work as a non-centralized medium of exchange. You can ask any citizen from countries that went through hyperinflation, capital control or cyprus-style bank account seizure (bail-in), what is the value of cryptocurrency to them. Then ask yourself if and when it can happen to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mention this 'argument' in my article.

<comment><USER17> To any person living in Europe, I hope you guys know the bank account seizure that happened in Cyprus in 2013 has been used as a template to create an european law named "Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive"(BRRD). Some people are going to learn the hard way:

[https://eba.europa.eu/regulation-and-policy/single- rulebook/...](https://eba.europa.eu/regulation-and-policy/single- rulebook/interactive-single-rulebook/4402)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> sawmill-picture Fiat Currencies are Detrimental To Society

How would you explain the inner workings of fiat currency to someone in simple, understandable terms?

"Imagine if the person in your neighborhood with the biggest house ran a printer in his garage that printed off paper that said "1 Buck" on it, and instead of giving the pizza delivery guy silver coins in exchange for their service, gave them bucks. Also he demands you pay him "$1 Buck" a week or else he'll take a buck worth of your stuff every week and if you can't pay he'll break your legs. And if you started printing your own "1 Buck" notes, he will come and lock you in a cage."

This explanation seems perfect to me because it illustrates the absolute insanity of all fiat currencies in one simple sentence.

It captures the unimaginable unfairness of maintaining fiat currencies. And it also captures the dark side of fiat currencies: perpetuation of a system of sovereign violence.

At this point fiat currency enthusiasts are rolling their eyes and sigh. This point has been made many times over. I know, I'm definitely not the first to criticise fiat currencies this way.

I do have a simple challenge though:

Can you please show me the benefit to society of fiat currencies?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing you do is to move attention away from cryptocurrencies to (other) fiat currencies. They may have problems too.

But we are now talking about the merits of cryptocurrencies. I see zero argument for them.

<comment> sawmill-picture Cryptocurrency is: * Resistant to government censorship: Short of total firewalling and mass whitelisting of all IP packets and blacklisting all encrypted traffic, governments have difficulty controlling transfers. * Resistant to capital controls: Centralized banking can prevent you from using your money. The Federal Reserve reduced the reserve requirement to zero and cut interest rates to zero on March 15th. The FDIC released a PSA video advising people not to withdraw their money from banks. In June 2015 Greece closed its banks for almost 20 days and limited cash withdrawals to 60 euro. With cryptocurrency there is no bank to close, no authority to enforce withdrawal limits. * Deflationary, not inflationary: Cryptocurrencies are all different, but Bitcoin for example has a strict upper ceiling on the number of bitcoins that will ever be produced and 85% of that supply has already been produced. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve is pumping billions of dollars into banks by buying their bonds and securities and is speculating about expanding its purchasing. Venezuela has had issues with inflation and hyperinflation due to excessive production of currency and deficit spending. They even launched their own cryptocurrency in an attempt to have a commodity-backed and more stable currency, which flopped because it was still under central control of the Venezuelan government for which there was little trust and apparently it was a scheme to avoid sanctions, which is laughable because... * Resistant to Sanction: Venezuela could just start selling its oil for Bitcoin directly, obtaining a reserve of uncensorable value that it could use to regain its economic strength. In fact it is attempting this, which is underreported. Sanctions are economic warfare which harm the poorest members of a nation the most. Whether you think a nations' leaders are criminals or not, do the people deserve to suffer at the hands of the world's markets directed by the economic juggernaut and political interest of the U.S.A.? * Low Fee Remittances: Using cryptocurrencies, people can easily send money across borders to family and dependents. If someone working in the U.S.A. wants to send, by Western Union, $200, or about a months' wages MXN, they pay a fee of $5-7, which is approximately the minimum DAILY wage in Mexico. Transfer in bitcoin, the transaction fee is about $1. If you have to also purchase your bitcoins (instead of receiving them directly as wages) the fee goes up to about $4. * Automated Finance: On Ethereum you can earn 4% interest on your deposit with the Dai Savings Rate. Other protocols offer up to 10% or more for lending cryptocurrency to others who take small loans, all with no middleman other than an automated contract. No loan application, no credit check, no redlining. This is a huge silent movement for microfinancing and is growing at a steady rate, granting underserved populations access to financial services. And what's the best rate you can get from a centralized bank? 1.7% and likely to drop in the coming months.

So there are some arguments.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all theoretical problems that have not shown up in real life in the west. Also there is no evidence that cryptocurrency will truly address those topics at scale, meaning full for a significant part of the population.

This reads like a religious text to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cryptocurrencies answer the need to move money fast and free, the same way the emails free us from using post offices to send letters.

<comment><USER19> But cryptocurrencies are neither fast, nor free. They're slow compared to regulated banking transactions, and use up vastly greater amounts of energy and resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Stopped reading after first two sentences.

Bitcoin works because it provides a transaction platform that's virtually impossible to censor or control and a monetary system that is virtually impossible to debase.

Bitcoin provides those things through law of the universe - you can't make energy out of nothing.

If you figure out a different way to provide those things, feel free to make your alternative to Bitcoin, but don't make these dumb comparisons and arguments that just demonstrate your complete lack of understanding how and why something works.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Bitcoin works because it provides a transaction platform that's virtually > impossible to censor or control and a monetary system that is virtually > impossible to debase.

Why is this good? What tangible problem are we solving here?

<comment><USER20> It's good because it solves problem for me. The problem it solves is absence of financial system that is impossible to censor or control and monetary system that is impossible to debase.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do these words even mean in every day life?

<comment><USER20> They mean exactly what you can read in the dictionary.

<comment><AUTHOR> But no examples how it would actually work in real life.

<comment><USER20> Money you think you have in your bank are actually just a promise recorded in a database. Even if that promise is fulfilled and you get cash on your hands, it can be diluted into worthlessness by printing trillions more. All of that is controlled by few guys behind closed doors.

None of that applies to Bitcoin. Is that good enough example from real life?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, because it's such a narrow view on currency. Because governments have every incentive to keep currencies stable, so they will never become worthless.

Cryptocoins are not backed by anything, making them very volatile and thus unsuited as a foundational currency for any stable society.

This example only illustrates to me that cryptocoin proponents only have esotheric hypotheticals in mind.

Sure Venezuela happened, but those are exceptions. When the stock exchanges went down hard due to corona, the cryptocoins went down hard too. But regular money kept stable.

Yes fiat money is just a record in a database. And that's it for cryptocurrencies. But fiat money like a dollar or euro is so much more.

<comment><USER20> Fiat is controlled by governments, governments are controlled by humans, humans are often irrational and there are many more examples than just Venezuela which is the only thing you could think of.

Bitcoin is governed by math and that's why it's valuable to me.

Bitcoin is beneficial to society because it provides choice. I don't care if you don't get it or if you disagree.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you really didn't care you would not have responded.

The truth is that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are highly volatile and in fact a very dangerous alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You might see how useful they are quite soon.

"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve."

– Satoshi Nakamoto

We are currently at banks being required to keep a ridiculous zero percent in reserve.

<comment><USER22> Now you just need to trust the software developers not to increase mining rewards and the crypto exchanges not to scam you

<comment><USER19> If you cant trust anonymous cypherpunks and organized crime to be fair and honest stewards in an anarcho-capitalist black market then who _can_ you trust? Bankers? _Governments?_ Might as well just burn all of your cash in an oil drum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >unimaginable energy waste of mining cryptocurrencies Not all cryptocurrencies require a massive amount of energy.

>Cryptocurrencies have existed for eleven years, they should have something to show for right now

I'm using a cryptocurrency for feeless, instant microtransactions in a browser based game. It happens to be a near ideal solution. That, said I won't force it upon anyone. It is a purely voluntary proposition.

>Ponzi

This is somewhat true. When there is no actual use case, there is no actual value. But again, the author generalizes. Not everyone is in it to promote some coin. Some of us are just looking for a technical solution.

Let's take a second to remember what happened with e-gold and liberty reserve. There's a reason why cryptocurrencies are necessary. They aren't backed by anything because they are decentralized. They can't be backed by the obvious (precious metals) because that is highly regulated.

>Those regular currencies provide tremendous value to our societies.

This is as far as I have time to go right now. If you think there's no issue with traditionally issued paper and digital money, then there's very little to say here. The US is about to issue $2 trillion in monetized debt.

From Roman coin clipping to the Wiemar republic's hyperinflation, if you can't see what is happening and actually believe that this process is 'adding value' to society...

If hamburgers were once 5 cents each, how has value been added?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm using a cryptocurrency for feeless, instant microtransactions in a > browser based game. It happens to be a near ideal solution. That, said I > won't force it upon anyone. It is a purely voluntary proposition.

I think you just made the point of my article again for me, thanks ;)

The volatility of crypto just don't provide a real alternative to regular currencies though.

<comment><USER23> Not at all. It isn't criminal, nor does it use loads of electricity. It wouldn't be possible with Paypal or any other solution.

>The volatility of crypto just don't provide a real alternative to regular currencies though.

What's that have to do with the price of tea in China? I.e. if that's the best you can offer, you can't construe that cryptocurrency is a detriment to society...

Definitely a ways off from proving your point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This blog post fails to mention anything about alternative consensus mechanisms to Proof of Work (PoW).

Proof of Work requires the energy expenditure of a small country.

Proof of Stake requires far far less power, negligible amounts of power.

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum- plans-...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-to-cut- its-absurd-energy-consumption-by-99-percent)

<comment><USER25> And yet, proof of stake has led to no cryptocurrency that can claim anywhere near the activity of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER26> Ah, yes. Argumentation by number of users. Reminds me of Facebook conclusively proving that federated social networks are dead end by its own merits, definitely not by the fact that when you start using social network you are more likely use one that your friends already use.

<comment><USER25> I was simply pointing out a fact, not looking to argue. You won't hear any support for centralized media - be they social networks or cryptocurrencies - out of me.

However, I'll also point out that when it comes to things which claim to be effective means of exchange, buy-in from users is pretty dang important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If people didn't raise the "selling drugz" thing every time. Selling drugs should not be a crime anyway.

I don't like crypto currencies (and coffee is my drug of choice), but saying "drugs are bad mmkay" and "how are we going to pay the generous pensions to our public servants [while most of us are never going to be able to retire]" is almost an incentive to try Bitcoin once again.

<comment><USER28> If drugs are illegal, then that's the law. Fair or not, that's beside the point. If you don't like the law, feel free to lobby for changing it, but in case you're selling drugs illegally, then you should go to jail.

In general people breaking the law should incur the associated costs, especially when they are doing so knowingly.

<comment><USER29> A bad law tends not to change until there are enough people breaking the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> People in general are detrimental to society, regardless of what currency we are using. Your argument is pretty weak considering conventional currency has been used for illegal and immoral activities since it was a thing, and even before that there were illegal trade in goods and services. All your examples in your arguments have been around long before cryptocurrency, with the exception of ransomware, which still was around prior to bitcoin, but i will grant you is much easier now. Nothing new really except a new payment method. It all comes down to the fact that there is a percentage of people out there that are not "good" people, with the definition of "good" relative to your perception of the situation. this will always be the case, regardless of technology. Cryptocurrency problems, are just a symptom of a greater problem which is human nature...which you cannot change.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please state the benefits of cryptocurrencies. Nobody here seems to be able to answer this question without resorting to crazy jargon.

<comment><USER30> Well you haven't really state any benefit of traditional currency either....it can be given, taken, lost, stolen...and given the current world situation it is certainly not stable. Cryptocurrency has every benefit of normal currency for the user, less beneficial for law enforcement and governmental control, but control is not always a good thing either. Your talking about a currency....why does it have to perform something magical for it to be "good"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cryptocurrency can facilitate crime just like cash, but with scale come new and unknown implications. Same with information security, surveillance, and more: physical vulnerability in a door lock vs. remotely exploitable vulnerability in Wi-Fi router firmware; standalone CCTV vs. a connected network of cameras with centralized storage that allows tracking the movements of a given person throughout the day—the latter cases inevitably create potential for less obvious, more insidious exploitation not restricted by physical barriers.

<comment><AUTHOR> But what value does it provide?

<comment><USER31> Also same as cash, amplified by scale and lack of geographic/political barriers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any actual evidence that this is true, taking the exchange rates in cryptocurrency exchanges into account?

<comment><USER31> What is in doubt here, value provided by cash?

A friend of mine uses (used?) cryptocurrency for transferring/receiving money to/from a sibling across the ocean. Converting to/from local currency is apparently cheaper relative to PayPal rates. (Plus, in some countries PayPal et al. restrict accounts not associated with a bank, making it even less attractive to unbanked.)

What is unclear to me personally is whether benefits outweigh other implications, once everything gets amplified by scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a very uncommon esoteric situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Therefore, I would propose to shut them all down.

OK the author clearly has no idea how a blockchain and a set of validators work

I would gladly hear his plan to "shut them all down"

<comment><USER33> I wouldn't be so confident. Making things illegal works pretty well in discouraging usage, and shutting down the "exchanges" like coinbase would tank the value for crypto, as most normies would no longer transfer surplus cash into bitcoins.

Of course no one can take those long numbers from those cold wallets.

<comment><USER32> >and shutting down the "exchanges" like coinbase would tank the value for crypto

Sure it would, but you can't close decentralized on-chain exchanges like uniswap or Kyber

I'm pretty sure there will always be a fiat<->crypto bridge, you can't "shut them all down" IMO

<comment><USER33> As I said, your long random numbers on your special devices are yours forever and you can decrypt more SHA-1 if you like.

There would be a lot less of that going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Half way down the page and there are zero arguments in favour - <USER2> disingenuous article.

Much of what this "discussion" focuses on casts every innovation (of which there are many) into the Bitcoin Proof of Work pidgeon hole.

Bitcoin is a primitive protocol - nothing more than a technical proof that can now be used as a gold store.

There are some serious upcoming corporate monsters building their foundations right now. Cardano, Chainlink, ETH(Maybe), Augur.

All of those are real companies not anarchist dreams. Serious scientific minds like Philip Wadler, who has contributed majorly to Haskell and Java, this is not some libertarian dream.

This is IoT and the eventual interface with AGI.

But yeah, focus on the silk road for gods sake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you answer the question I pose: Can you please show me the benefit to society of cryptocurrencies?

You only point to other smart people that have started companies to purposes unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's telling that the theoretical justifications the crypto folks use is mostly warmed over goldbuggery, and therefore concerns about the effects on society at large are discounted. The appeal is to people who have no fucks to give about society at large.

<comment><USER35> Most people support crypto for its novel technology, societal antagonism, and it's ostensible 'freedom'. Possibly also it's Ponzi scheme appeal.

But they tend to not have any grasp of currency, economics, finance and how things really work in this world.

Yes, it would be nice to rid ourselves of Visa and possibly even get rid of the Fed, but at least in the later, there are existential issues at hand.

Currency is a social contract it will always involve 'trust' of some kind.

There is absolutely no way around that.

There is no such thing as a 'trustless' currency or store of value.

Digital currency has a bright future, and maybe someday we'll get rid of Vias fees, but outside of that, we're not getting away from central banks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Therefore, I would propose to shut them all down.

How?

<comment><USER37> I'm pro-crypto; but Proof-of-Work mining is an ecological atrocity. If it's infeasible to outright ban mining at scale, a sufficiently onerous carbon tax to disincentivize might be enough. In either case, miners would recoup their losses by selling ASICs, certainly to those in countries with no such restrictions, and the mining would continue. Maybe a government buyback program, similar to what countries have done with guns; but it seems difficult to summon that much political will.

We've created a monster.

<comment><USER8> Take a look at what Compute North is doing - reframe what an energy producer is. Electric power plants will have the market cornered on computation cost, they will be the miners using surplus load, fluctuating with the market and generating tokenised wealth at the point of generation.

Tokens created at the point of value generation - not abstracted to a few interest rates and financial levers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We should be able to have an interesting discussion based upon just how wrong this article is.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think the whole thing is a scam by the energy industry to drum up demand for energy.

</comment><comment><USER39> OP, how do you propose that Bitcoin be shut down? How would you go about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know we can't. But the people involved should stop and do something 'less detrimental' with their lives.

<comment><USER5> Why do you feel entitled to tell people what they should do? How do you know what value - or lack thereof - people get from using Bitcoin&co., have you checked with them, or is it just theory? Why do you assume your sense of value has to be universal?

The 'drugs' traded on the 'deeply depraved' marketplaces save lives and make other lives kind of comfortable even amid a chronic disease. Yes, I mean drugs which should, but for various reasons are not, available in the pharmacy. That's a real use case, do you think it's 'detrimental to society'? Because ill people get a chance to live again? Great thinking.

And to top it all off, your post is worded in a purposely confrontational and inflammatory way. It's a flame-bait, and it got flagged and removed from the site because of this. What do _you_ gain by presenting a biased, unoriginal post to the crowd here? If you think you just made a "net benefit for society" \- think again. In solitude, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes the title didn't help, a good lesson. Less judgement in titles.

You call my post bias and unoriginal, which you can do. But can you answer the core question I pose?

And please not with esoteric examples of availability of medicine for chronic diseases which to me raises the question: is that all you can come up with?

<comment><USER5> It's not esoteric! It happens. I can't go into details, which should be understandable, but I've seen this happen. People I know and love were able to live freely in the last year of their lives; people I know and love are able to function mostly normally because of the drugs they buy illegally. What, please tell me, is esoteric in this? What exactly?

> is that all you can come up with?

No, but it's enough to falsify your claims. There are people who get _tremendous_ value out of the 'depraved markets'. That's it.

EDIT: typo.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't falsify it. It only shows one or a few examples where just a few people self-report any benefit. And getting medicine through the dark markets is shady as fuck.

That kind of example doesn't seem to support the whole crytocurrency stuff with all it's downsides in any way.

If that's all you can come up with, all the more reason to shut it down (hypothetically).

<comment><USER5> > people self-report any benefit

And who other than the people is qualified to report whether people benefitted?

> And getting medicine through the dark markets is shady as fuck.

Are you a Christian? I'm amazed and ask seriously, because I can't imagine much of anything else that would make you spew this much of a nonsense with this much conviction.

dang, yes, I know, this is the last post from me, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> crypto is like cruise lines to me. I know it is there but I never used it to buy something.</comment>


Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap - <AUTHOR> https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ <comment><USER2> Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on- demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas turbines, the customer might not see costs go down (and emissions might not go down either!). Solar is clearly economic in many markets, but we'll never get grid emissions in a place like California down much more without storage.

<comment><USER3> All they need to do is build mechanical/hydraulic systems for storing solar power during the day and unleashing it at night.

For example, use solar power during the day to pump fluid from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir, and then harness the energy of the water flowing from the higher reservoir into the lower reservoir through turbines.

As long as your output energy is always coming from the turbines, and as long as your solar powered pumps running during the day can keep up with double the rate of drainage flow, then you should have a constant loop with a steady supply of power.

This type of system could be retrofitted onto virtually any dam, giving you a way to create a closed loop with constant power and without the water loss typical from a dam (other than evaporation).

For areas where water is scarce and a dam isn't feasible, there are also other ideas, such as gravitational potential energy systems that use solar powered energy to lift weights on pulleys, which then power a generator as the weights are lowered by gravity.

Other ideas: Thermal storage including molten salts which can efficiently store and release very large quantities of heat energy, compressed air energy storage, flywheels, cryogenic systems, etc...

<comment><USER4> >...For example, use solar power during the day to pump fluid from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir, and then harness the energy of the water flowing from the higher reservoir into the lower reservoir through turbines.

Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.

For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity:

>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany's current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.

[https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...](https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5950.pdf)

<comment><USER5> > If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades > ago.

Except storage is much less useful in the old paradigm, so the motivation wasn't there. Going forward, prices will swing wildly, so storage will be more valuable.

<comment><USER4> >Except storage is much less useful in the old paradigm,

Plentiful storage would obviously have been very useful over the last several decades. There is a large variation in daily electrical usage (particularly in summer months):

[https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915)

There is also the need for extra capacity in the system because of planned and unplanned maintenance.

>...Going forward, prices will swing wildly, so storage will be more valuable.

Well yes, our economy is based on having reliable power and it would be impossible to have anywhere near the reliable power relying on intermittent power sources without a huge amount of storage. The problem is that contrary to what advocates claim, people have been looking at grid energy storage for decades and it isn't as simple as they claim.

As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon's. And that's one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt- hour. But it doesn't come at night, it doesn't come after the sun hasn't shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or "Oh, it's easy to do" hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we- need...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an- energy-miracle/407881/)

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another aspect of this is the cost of the physical solar cells have dropped low enough that other costs have become significant. This is pushing companies to increase efficiency which opens the door for other applications.

A hypothetical cheap ~30% efficient solar panel could add something like 40 miles of range per day to a car in ideal conditions. That starts to look actually useful vs a simple gimmick.

<comment> TheGrim-888 Correct me if I'm wrong, and I quite possible could be, but from a quick Google search, I'm seeing numbers of anywhere 200Wh/mile to 350Wh/mile for a Tesla. If we're generous and assume only 200Wh/mile, then 40 miles of range translates to an energy consumption of 8,000Wh.

A 100 watt solar panel, producing the full 100 watts, would take 80 hours of perfect sunlight to produce enough power for an extra 40 miles of range.

Assuming best case (unrealistic) conditions, if you get 8 hours of perfect sunlight in day, and your solar panels produce 100% of their rating for all 8 hours, it would take 1000 Watts worth of solar panels to produce that extra 40 miles of distance over 8 hours. It seems kind of unrealistic to fit 1000 Watts of solar on top of a car. And that's an absolute minimum, under best case conditions.

If you had, say, maybe a more realistic 300 watts worth of panels on top, and they got 4 hours of full sunglight, you'd be producing an extra ((300W * 4h) / 200Wh/mile) = 6 miles. And that's still assuming best case condition for power consumption per mile.

[Edit] - And like the other commenter stated, those few extra miles get cut down when you consider the weight of hundreds of watts of solar panels added onto the vehicle.

<comment><USER7> Here's a recent analysis: [https://teslatap.com/articles/solar-vehicle-roof- analysis/](https://teslatap.com/articles/solar-vehicle-roof-analysis/)

To me it looks like it will never be a meaningful solution, due simply to physics.

<comment><USER6> That has several really bad assumptions by assuming all solar roofs need to fit on an existing Tesla'a roof.

> The usable clear area of a Model S glass roof is 42" x 45"

A Model S is actually 195.9" by 77.3 (ex. mirrors). Assuming a reasonable shaped solar car using 75% of that surface is covered in panels that's 12x the area. But you also gain from panels covering the sides of the vehicle.

Further "Because the vehicle roof is flat, it collects less light than if it was positioned at the optimum angle to the sun." as I said your not limited by the roof. "Lastly, we lose at least 10% more due to the safety glass," we don't need glass and that's already part of panel efficiency numbers. "and the inverter/charging is only 81% efficient." Solar panels and batteries are both DC so you don't need an inverter, the charge discharge efficiency of lithium ion can be over 90%.

San Francisco 5.34kWh/m * .3 efficiency * 7.33 square meters = 11.7kW/day /.3kW per mile = 35 to 39.14 miles in San Francisco depending on how much your charging the battery with plenty of areas getting more sunlight. Using the highest efficiency panels currently produced that goes up significantly, but cheap 30% efficient panels seems like a more reasonable mid term prediction.

PS: Example of a flexible 1m panel zero glass required at under 300$/m: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082FCZ4MD/ref=emc_b_5_t?th=1](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082FCZ4MD/ref=emc_b_5_t?th=1)

<comment><USER8> > Solar panels and batteries are both DC so you don't need an inverter, the > charge discharge efficiency of lithium ion can be over 90%.

You'll still need a DC-DC converter, which is just an inverter with a rectification step. The 81% number is low, but there is a loss here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> nice application of the learning curve, a model taught in strategy and operations courses in business school.

basically every model from around 2010 badly miscalculated the learning coefficient of the solar industry. apparently some forecasts are still badly calculating it.

<comment><USER10> The part that boggles the mind is that the forecasts are still terribly wrong, in the same direction, 10 years later.

<comment><USER11> The forecasts from the IEA are my favourites, predicting a decline in PV expansion every year. [https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus- solar-pv-r...](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus-solar-pv- reality/)

<comment><USER12> The IEA forecast has been so wrong it suggests malice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This tells me that until fossil plants are mostly shut down (and perhaps afterward), we will continue to have negative electricity prices at times. It might be a profitable idea to buy extra energy storage capacity to get paid for storing energy at certain times, then sell it when it is high demand.

<comment><USER14> I just wish the negative electricity prices reached the non-industrial consumer.

If it reached me, I'll have an Arduino controlled hot water heater, furnace and fridge/freezer dynamically turning on/off to take the most advantage of prices pronto.

<comment><USER15> In some areas you can _buy_ electricity this way, but the other end of the deal bites you, so beware of that.

When it seems like you might die from the heat but the price charged is $8.50 per kWh how much longer do you want to wait before switching on the AC? (If you live somewhere it never gets hot, figure on the same but for a midwinter freeze and deciding when to pay for your resistive circuit heat pump boost)

<comment><USER14> I figure it all averages out. But when I pay an average price, I have no incentive to lower demand when prices are high or raise demand when prices are low, contributing to even higher average prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Energy is cheap, power is expensive - you can already get energy for free sometimes on the intraday market, but you still pay if you need delivery at a certain time and the grid fees for peak power consumption stay expensive. I am looking forward to Tesla's million-mile battery!

</comment><comment><USER16> With launch costs set to drop aggressively I wonder if space based solar becomes viable sooner than expected. Iirc the NASA estimate was something like $200-500/kg launch costs. I wonder if concentrated solar in the form of thin mirrors can change that.

<comment> lachlan-sneff Musk's most recent estimate of the eventual cost per kg on starship was 10 usd/kg. He may be considered an unreliable source at this point, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's now reached the point that "energy producer" lobbyists are lobbying Trump to keep banks from refusing to finance fossil fuel projects.[1][2] They're now a bad long-term investment.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/05/08/us/08reuters- heal...](https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/05/08/us/08reuters-health- coronavirus-energy.html)

[2] [http://archive.is/QSPle](http://archive.is/QSPle)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm actually quite shocked at how much energy is produced by solar, especially when compared to residential wind turbines. Panels are efficient, and when it's sunny, you're juicing.

The real challenge is of course bringing down cost of storage, which is the key to make solar systems efficient (not just cheap).

<comment><USER14> > residential wind turbines

Wind has a scalability problem. Residentially, it's only a good sell as a backup supply for when solar isn't cutting it to hopefully prevent generator use. And even that's a tough economic argument.

Towers have huge economies of scale, both in total size and height. So the turbines just keep getting bigger and bigger because it's more and more cost effective.

<comment><USER19> If my understanding is correct there is curious difference in perceived scale with kinetic vs thermal energy. Based on a a rowing machine's advertised metrics, I calculated you could row across the English channel on half a packet of chocolate biscuits.

<comment><USER20> This sounds interesting but I don't really understand, could you elaborate?

<comment><USER19> 1 biscuit = 85 cal

1000m rowing = 60 cal [1]

English Channel = 35km (narrowest point)

35 * 60 / 85 = 24.7 biscuits!

[1] [https://darkhorserowing.com/how-to-translate-calories-to- met...](https://darkhorserowing.com/how-to-translate-calories-to-meters)

<comment><USER20> Ah, got it. That's cool, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought the old lie with statistics trick of starting the Y axis above zero was debunked in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s etc. The blog name above the X axis and gray shading make it look like the costs are approaching zero.

</comment><comment><USER22> I recently watched the documentary "Planet of the Humans". For context, the writer of the documentary is an environmentalist.

One of the stated points was that solar and wind cannot be relied upon 24/7 -- to account for the lack of reliability, you need to have a backup power generator (e.g. coal power plant) running. The thing about coal plants (does it apply to natural gas plants too?) is that if you "idle" them, then have to ramp them up to feed demand, then later ramp them down -- it's a very inefficient way of running them. Now based on my understanding, it might be more efficient to just run the coal plant (or natural gas planet?) 24x7, in which case you've just added waste with the use of solar/wind. How much truth is there to this?

<comment><USER23> 0? You can have utility scale storage and Nuclear as backup

<comment><USER24> Damn shame we haven't been investing in nuclear over the past few decades. Now when we need it most, it's too late.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nuclear is one of the few technologies that has a negative learning curve. As we improve designs, it seems to get more expensive rather than less.

There was a brief window in the 1970s where US nuclear construction projects were finishing on time. But the utility industry had planned for waaaaay too much new capacity. So when all the construction projects with poor execution, that struggled to complete and therefore came in way over budget, finally came online in the early 80s, they were financial disasters in a scale that nearly bankrupted several utilities.

Since then, utilities lost their appetite. And there's basically _no_ way for us to replace the 400 or so reactors in the world that eMate nearing end of life.

However, I'm not sure we will need nuclear. With how cheap wind and solar are getting, far faster than anybody anticipated, we have finally found the technologies that may some day provide energy "too cheap to meter." However, like nuclear they are not dispatchable (except for some designs in France), so if we want to power a grid we either need to overbuild capacity by quite a bit, or use energy storage. There's a cost trade off for the two that depends on how cheap storage gets, and how cheap extra capacity is, and how cheap transmission is from an area with different weather that day. (For example, one can imagine building 2x of panel capacity over the amount of inverter capacity on a solar install, so that even on cloudy days you can chug along at near full energy output... it all depends on the cost trade offs.)

And as fast an solar is getting cheap, far beyond expectations, so is lithium ion storage. And there are many chemistries with high specific energies (and thus unsuitable for vehicles), that we are just now dipping our toes into.

Nuclear would be a nice tool to have, if it was competitive with other technologies, but it's going to be decades before it can prove itself and establish a positive track record for deployment. Utilities have been burned too many times by financial dumpster fires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do we really need a "2020" by the title?

<comment><USER26> It's in the title of the original post, to distinguish from similar posts in 2011 and 2015

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Solar's future may be cheap but capitalism's future is always going to be pricey.

</comment><comment><USER28> Making solar panels require massive amount of energy. If built in China, these panels are made with electricity from coal. They don't have a great C02 budget.

<comment><USER29> Today's solar panels are efficient enough that even if they are produced using electricity from coal, by the end of their life, they've reduced CO2 emissions by more than what the coal produced to manufacture them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I know we're now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don't yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-waving of "it's getting cheaper". (forgive my tone, i have a hard time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to eventually see how it actually fits into a utopic idea of a "closed- loop economy")

I'm reminded here a bit of Ted Chiang's short story, Exhalation, where the people devise clever ways to try to put air back in the ground without using more than they're sequestering. I hope our situation is better than that.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure about the resource costs of solar in particular but the question is a very salient one. Vaclav Smil has a great piece on this. "What I see when I see a wind turbine"

 _" the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels. • Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.[...] For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels."_

[http://vaclavsmil.com/wp- content/uploads/15.WINDTURBINE.pdf](http://vaclavsmil.com/wp- content/uploads/15.WINDTURBINE.pdf)

<comment><USER32> Sounds like a bullshit purity test.

<comment><USER31> It's not a bullshit purity test at all. It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'. In some cases it's questionable if some green technologies actually are a net positive at all.

There is a strong 'abundance' bias implicit in articles by people like Ramez Naam, who push so strongly for green energy production because they don't want to consider the very obvious alternative, dematerialisation and reduction of energy consumption. People like Naam still categorically hang onto a growth narrative so they tend to neglect the downsides of the solutions they provide.

<comment><USER33> > It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non- > electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are > nominally 'green'.

Ignored by whom? You?

In fact, embedded energy is a huge consideration in the evaluation of green technologies.

<comment><USER34> It's a depressingly common reality that "nobody has considered" is effectively equivalent to "I haven't considered" on the internet.

The idea that solar panels might not be more efficient than _burning coal_ is not an opinion held by someone who has done any level of research on the subject at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Cheap for the economy, not so cheap for the environment.

These kind of articles rarely calculate the price to dispose old solar panels.

Our country recently found that current methods for disposing solar panels pose a grave danger to the environment and imposed strict regulations for it. As a result the price for disposal quadrupled. Because consumers of the solar panel, which are mostly individuals, can't afford those prices, the government is preparing for a law that charges manufactures up front for the price of disposal.

It is assumed that solar will be more expensive than natural gas after the changes.

<comment><USER36> I'm wondering why landfills are insufficient? Are the linings not good enough?

<comment><USER35> Not processing old solar panel was deemed dangerous by the government and we are building a government facility to recycle and properly decontaminate them. The price to run the facility will be collected from the manufacturers.

Same for Wind too. 81 tons of waste needs to be processed after 20 years of service of a 5MW wind turbine but operators and manufacturers does not take the price of disposal into account.

<comment><USER36> Sure but I'm asking about the technology. It seems odd that old solar panels couldn't somehow be safely buried without leaching.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Size of Brain Structures Predicts Success of Video Gamers - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100120093521.htm

<comment><USER2> Money quote:

> "This is the first time that we've been able to take a _real world task like > a video game_ and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive > of performance and learning rates on this video game"

To be fair, later in the study they mention that a particular sub-class of gaming skills has demonstrable overlap with real-world performance, namely being able to flexibly shift priorities. But taking that phrase out of context is just too tempting.</comment>


Reconstructing a lost NES game from 30-year-old source code disks - <AUTHOR> https://gamehistory.org/days-of-thunder-nes-unreleased/ <comment><USER2> Although at the moment there are other organisations you should be donating to, at some point you may like to donate to the following:

[https://gamehistory.org/donate/](https://gamehistory.org/donate/)

[https://www.gamepres.org/en/qamission/](https://www.gamepres.org/en/qamission/)

[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So cool to see computer archeology happening already.

Here is a quick glance of the game: [https://youtu.be/63G9PrLLo_U](https://youtu.be/63G9PrLLo_U)

I love the tron-esque music :)

</comment><comment><USER4> It is really cool to see people go to such great lengths to recover lost software projects.

I wonder about what other interesting failed products from this time will later be found important enough to attempt to piece together and display to people in the future.

Perhaps an app that was prescient in its intent or the career of one of their makers seen as remarkable in some way that their digital detritus is dug up and placed under glass.

<comment><USER5> With all the security paranoia these days, the future of "digital archaeology" seems pretty bleak. Even if you do manage to find the storage media, it's likely to have been encrypted with an algorithm that remains unbroken.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but it also may be cracking the password is a trivial endeavor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> an unreleased NES game – an unpublished version of Days of Thunder done for Mindscape (a separate attempt done by Beam Software was ultimately published in its place

I wonder how many other games reached playable or nearly-complete states, and were just cast aside because of schedules, contract snafus, etc? Imagine what we missed out on.

<comment><USER7> There's an unreleased Dreamcast game with a playable near-complete build leaked, called Propeller Arena. It's probably in my friend group's top-4 favorite multiplayer games for the platform, despite not actually having been released. Actually aside from MVC2 (still more fun for us amateurs than MVC3—and kinda looks better?) it might be the most likely game for us to play on the DC, just because the others have newer, better replacements, but I've not seen anything newer that's quite as arcadey and easy-playing as Propeller Arena in its niche (multiplayer propeller aircraft dogfighting, mostly)

<comment><USER8> I'd argue that Capcom has never made a better looking fighter than MVC2.

<comment><USER7> I really wish they're re-release it on a modern console. My DC's gonna die one of these days and it's a pain to keep old consoles in service. I'd really rather have it than 3. Which is probably why they don't—it'd directly compete with the new one.

<comment><USER9> I think it's technically on ios...

<comment><USER7> Not anymore. Was for a while (and also other platforms) but hasn't been purchasable in IIRC several years. Though I'd forgotten it was for a while. Still, aside from iOS even _those_ consoles are old enough that I'm trying to find new platforms for all the games I play in them, so I can get rid of 'em.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz I have worrying thoughts about how many prototypes get trashed and lost forever every year, yet have no idea how we could go about systematic recovery of lost games such as these. Can we buy up old game studio assets somehow?

<comment><USER10> An old friend of mine worked on an unreleased SEGA Genesis game for the movie Akira. The ROM was recently "discovered" on the internets.

Pics and vids: [https://hiddenpalace.org/Akira_(Prototype)](https://hiddenpalace.org/Akira_\(Prototype\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given IO errors and degradation of storage media, how long can one realistically preserve digital data?

Is it possible with multiple disks and an extant error correction algorithm to prevent data corruption indefinitely, assuming some maximum error rate?

<comment><USER12> > Is it possible with multiple disks and an extant error correction algorithm > to prevent data corruption indefinitely, assuming some maximum error rate?

This is the main thrust of the Dynamo paper, yes. You _can_ solve all the _technical_ problems. Put something in a "living system" like Amazon S3 (where data has 17+ clones; and where ops people are there to both replace individual hard disks as they fail, and to gradually port the system over to new storage layers as new technology displaces old), and then—presuming the _company providing the service_ is still there—it'll be vanishingly unlikely that your data will have degraded on a human time-scale.

What's left in the way of "indefinitely", though, are _political_ problems. "How do I preserve data indefinitely" gets into the same sort of hairy problems as "how do I enforce my will on my descendants after I die?" kind of questions, where you start to see people putting forward ideas like immutable autonomous trusts.

The key question being: how do I ensure that the stuff _I_ want to stick around, sticks around, after _I 'm_ dead, during a period when literally nobody else cares about it, until a later time when somebody else _does_ care about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The movie reference is buried in there, and it might not be obvious to some younger folks, so: [https://youtu.be/AhUhuDW_jOw](https://youtu.be/AhUhuDW_jOw)

<comment><USER14> god i'm old

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "To those who are about to play, I salute you!" \- Chris Oberth.</comment>


Billions of devices vulnerable to new 'BLESA' Bluetooth security flaw - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/billions-of-devices-vulnerable-to-new-blesa-bluetooth-security-flaw/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't affect the COVID tracing apps that much as I understand it aside from having bluetooth activated.

Glad that bluetooth cameras are rare. I don't expect it to ever be patched in older IOT devices.</comment>


Pirate Party Wins 7.1% of Swedish Vote, Enters European Parliament - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-wins-and-enters-the-european-parliament-090607/

<comment><USER2> The Pirate Party has limited information in English and I know it can be hard to understand what they really stand for. So I compiled a summery of their program. Keep in mind that this is only a summery and mostly only says what they stand for and not why they stand for it. This is also not an official document.

The Pirate Party's cornerstones are; the right to privacy, culture must be open/free and that patents and private monopolies hurt society.

Privacy: Secrecy of letters should apply to all forms of communication, including digital. No data retention and no surveillance without substantial prior crime suspicion. No anti-terrorism legislation, current legislation is sufficient. New legislation risk being used as a tool of oppression. The individuals right to control ones own personal information must be strengthened. Respect for human rights without exceptions.

Freedom of information: Swedish freedom of information laws, access to government documents and communications, should be applied to the EU. All government archives and documents should be available in open formats. Use of open formats and open source in the public sector, including schools, should be encouraged.

Open culture: Copyright should be reasonable, balanced and with societies best in mind. The copyright holder's commercial monopoly should be limited to five years. You should have the right to remix copyrighted works, with some clearly stated exceptions. All non-commercial distribution, consumption and remixing of copyrighted and non-copyrighted works should be legal and encouraged. Trademarks should be kept.

Private monopolies: The successive removal of all patents, including software and medical patents. Patents force scientists to keep research findings secret instead of sharing them. Competition should be based on innovation, consumer benefit, and quality.

<comment><USER3> That's a nice summary of their platform, but it is perhaps also worth noting that one of the defendents in the Pirate Bay case (Carl Lundström) is a neo- Nazi, who has a history of funding small single-issue parties and using them to push extremist right-wing views.

<comment><USER2> Carl Lundström and The Pirate Bay are not affiliated with The Pirate Party. As far as I know the rest of The Pirate Bay do not share Carl Lundströms views. The connection between The Pirate Bay and Carl Lundström is also very loose.

The Pirate Party has very clear views on civil liberties and human rights for everyone, regardless of religion, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual preference, handicap or political view. Most political analysts actually think that The Pirate Party, with its large number of youth votes, prevented the right-wing nationalist party in Sweden from reaching the European Parliament.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clearing that up. One of the problems with small parties is how easily they can be derailed, especially by someone who is a) dedicated to the task, and b) well-funded.

<comment><USER2> As a consequence of The Pirate Party very narrow focus, and decision not to take a stand in any other issues, it would be hard to introduce other issues.

Currently I only know of two people who work for the party full-time. The party founder Rick Falkvinge, an former entrepreneur who quit his job to devote himself to the party. When his money ran out he asked the members for contributions and gets a small amount from a large number of members each month. The other person who works full-time with the party is Christian Engström, also an entrepreneur who sold his company for a profit and spent five years as unpaid activist at the FFII lobbying against software patents. He is the party's first pick for the European Parliament. The party also gets founding from several other sources. Some of Sweden's "Internet Icons" publicly supports the party.

It would be really interesting to see what all the great American entrepreneurs could do if there was a chance for a smaller party to actually get seats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is the greatest thing to happen in european politics in a long time. Times have changed, and this is a strong message to the establishment that things will need to change a bit regarding some laws!

<comment><USER5> I share the feeling of optimism, but must point out that the European Parliament is where a lot of good ideas go to die, and it has little in the way of real power. Members include representatives of parties who wan to leave Europe and other relatively fringe thinkers. So it's significant, but not momentously so.

<comment><USER6> That's a common misconception, actually the European Union has a lot of power, and member states are obliged to align their national laws to those of the EU.

From the wikipedia article on EU: _"The EU has developed a single market through a standardised system of laws which apply in all member states, ensuring the freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital. It maintains common policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries, and regional development. A common currency, the euro, has been adopted by sixteen member states constituting the Eurozone. "_

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union>)

The problem is that for the common man in the various member states EU is seen as a monolithic bureaucracy placed in a country far away. Many don't realise it's power. This is the problem that the members of parlaiment face.

<comment><USER5> European Union =/= European Parliament. I suggest that the EU Commission and Council of Ministers, along with the European court, have more influence on the development of the EU than its Parliament; which is not to say that the European Parliament is entirely toothless. The election of a Pirate Party member to that body, while interesting, is likely to have only marginal effect.

<comment><USER6> The parlaiment, along with the council is the highest legislative body of the union and yields a lot of power. From Wikipedia: _"The European Parliament has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world."_

Of course, as you say, a single representative from the Pirate Party will only have marginal effect. Those are the rules of a democracy.

<comment><USER5> I suggest you ponder the rest of that wikipedia article, or since you live in Europe, look at its day-to-day workings for a while. As a fellow European, surely you are aware that in practice the EUP is a punching bag for national governments and widely perceived as a sideshow, which is why nations fight tooth and nail to preserve their commission representation.

Given its inability to propose legislation, it is hamstrung compared to a typical national legislature, not to mention being riven by petty disputes of language nationalism and so forth. With the best of intentions, how is the new Pirate Party member going to bring about a provocative debate on the meaning of copyright and intellectual property when everything has to go through a tabling committee and debates normally impose a 1 minute time limit for speakers. Hell, I'm an ardent europhile and even I think it's politically moribund.

One upside of this, though, is that I ever move back to Europe I'll consider running for a seat...I figure it ought to be relatively easy to get elected given the general public apathy that prevails around euro elections :)

<comment><USER7> I agree with you, mostly. However there is one significant effect of the election of the Pirate Part: _Swedish_ political parties have been given a rude awakening and if the Pirate Party continues to gain they will need to face up to the fact that a lot of people want more relaxed copyright legislation, _or_ the Pirate Party may be swept into the Swedish parliament next.

(keep in mind: they were polling around 5%, and many dismissed them, claiming that their key demographic of <30's "doesn't vote" - instead they performed _better_ than the polls indicated; that's going to scare a lot of politicians into rethinking their stance)

It's also bound to make a lot of people think seriously about trying to get equivalent platforms in place in other EU countries.

It's an amazing showing for a "single issue" (not really, but almost) party running in only a single, small country.

<comment><USER5> Oh absolutely. And it's a welcome counterweight to the fringe right-wing parties (I'm looking at you BNP) and the various communists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting reaction from Tom Watson MP, until last week the UK government minister for e-democracy and (more or less) the Internet:

"That Sir, is a seismic result, and a big warning to a very large number of vested interests."

<http://twitter.com/tom_watson/status/2068168426>

The Pirate Party and friends are, in many ways, the new face of the libertarian left in Europe.

<comment><USER9> "The Pirate Party and friends are, in many ways, the new face of the libertarian left in Europe."

I'm curious: What distinguishes "libertarian left" from plain old libertarian?

<comment><USER10> Focus, mainly. Libertarians have long been aligned with the right in America because they have emphasized the economic parts of their platform, at the expense of the social ones.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure it really translates - it's a post-socialist phenomenon, and socialism still seems like a swearword your side of the pond.

Take issues like gun control, social welfare, environmentalism... the modern European hard left is, in general, strongly in favour of all of the above. Their platform's libertarian in that it's mostly against government intervention in personal lives, and therefore pro-marriage equality, drug decriminalisation, liberalisation of copyright, etc etc etc. You'll find a lot of anti-globalisation fellow travellers too.

The influences are much more things like anarcho-syndicalism, Christiania (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania>), that kind of thing.

<comment><USER10> I think we're in total agreement. Libertarians share platforms with both the left and the right; we call them "left-libertarians" when they find themselves mostly voting in alignment with the left, and "right-libertarians" when they find themselves mostly voting in agreement with the right.

European libertarians, coming from the background you describe, much more often find themselves on the left than the right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just got back from the election party in Stockholm. One seat in the EU parliament is just what (pp) needs for the Riksdagen election 2010. Most likely, there are differences hidden under the purple surface of the party that will show now. The maturity process is started.

Will be interesting to see if this spawns copycats throughout Europe. At the very least the established parties should take notice. Infopolitics is here to stay.

<comment><USER12> I've read that most of the power is tied up in committees ([http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story...](http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13788340)). If it's like the US House of Representatives, that means seniority is necessary for any real power. Legislation by committee is also a great way to wield power behind closed doors, since the media rarely reports on what they do.

Is there an EU equivalent to Congressional Quarterly (<http://cq.com/>)?

<comment><USER13> no seniority plays no role that's a very us specific thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just to put it slightly in perspective: here in the UK the BNP (far right racist party) won a seat too. Getting the seat is just part 1 - next the PP have to cut through the red tape and get the message out to the rest of the EU.

(I must apologise for my countrymen btw, I never thought it would actually happen :()

<comment><USER15> The Swedish variant of BNP almost got a seat too.

It's to be expected, of course, with an economic meltdown. Nothing brings votes to right wing extremists like a crisis and someone else to blame it on - this time it's the muslims who get the blame for everything that's wrong in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is one of the most surreal pieces of news I've seen in a while. No offense to any pirates. Arrr.

</comment><comment><USER17> So people voted on a party which wants to deal with copyright issues of the distributed music/video content (as its main goal)... A party that will now be able to have its say about national and European issues. It's a bit interesting that such an issue can be so high on people's priority list. Not that I'm opposed to what they want to do, but I'm not sure what to think of Sweden right now:

Is it the best country to live in? One where people don't come across bigger problems in their daily life?

Or is it that all standard political parties in Sweden crossed the line which many parties in any country are very close to - not doing anything, having every possible populist claim in their programme, getting old...

<comment><USER18> Not sure if you're in the US, but reading your comment, I can't help but linking to an explanation of how legislative seats are dealt out in Sweden (and many other countries). It's not a thing like we have in the US:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Sweden#Seat_alloca...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Sweden#Seat_allocation)

In such a system, it's not uncommon to see a few seats go to minor parties. In the US, we'd surely see some Libertarian and Greens in congress if we had such a system. However, the US system is more conducive to 2-party politics because of the way the rules are defined, which is why we see it here and not so much elsewhere.

So, its a surprising result if you're used to 2 parties, but not so unexpected when multiparty politics is the norm.

<comment><USER17> Yeah - I'm from Europe and used to multiparty government. Yet every small party I've seen, that actually targeted young people and specifically issues that people <30 care about, never gets to be popular. And they certainly don't get 2 seats in EU.

I was just wondering why it happened in Sweden of all countries... was The Pirate Bay court case really the trigger, or is it connected to how Swedish people act, or was it something else?

<comment><USER7> They've taken a talking point that is _shared_ between liberals, libertarians, communists, anarchists and some socialists/social democrats and that directly affect peoples lives (a huge percentage of people share files etc. and don't see it as something wrong) at a time when big media are trying to tell people they're all criminals.

That's probably key to their success - they can take voters from across the spectrum who don't have a voice at all in large parties (the closest in Sweden perhaps being the socialist/communist Vensterpartiet - Left Party - which also wants to significantly limit copyright) but who have liberal tendencies.

This has been brewing for a while, and it'll likely spread outside of Sweden, limited by non-proportional voting in some countries. What is particular about Sweden is that Sweden had one of the most liberal policies on copyright in Europe to start with - non-commercial copying for "personal use" (including sharing with friends) was (is it still?) legal. This is a right that was ingrained. So when these rights are being taken away, it's natural you get a backlash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just wanted to highlight part of a BBC news report (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8088309.stm>):

 _Sweden's Pirate Party, which wants to legalise internet file sharing,_

They also got mentioned right after the far-right parties. I find it a bit worrying that mainstream media is still vewing them in this light. It smacks of not being taken seriously still - I wonder how that can be addressed?</comment>


Ask HN: Building channels for customer development?  - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
Let's say, that my target market is physical service contractors -say, plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc- wanting to generate more clients for their businesses; and I have a product, which can do just that. How to reach out for these people for custdev?
I realize, that this is fundamentally a different channel building, than that of customer acqusition, in that it doesn't have to be scalable, or even repeatable much, BUT it has to lead to an open, mutually beneficial conversation (preferably in an office), in which they don't feel they are being sold to, and can openly discuss business.
How would you attack this problem?
Many thanks. <comment><USER2> Offer to buy them coffee or lunch. Be honest, telling them you're working on a system to get THEM more work, but you'd like to leverage their expertise in order to make it the best system possible. If you have a recommendation from a friend or family (ie. a roofer who fixed your neighbor's roof) mention how they were recommended because they did such a great job. Reiterate that you're just looking for feedback and information, not a sale. Offer to meet them near their office or at a worksite to make it as easy as possible for them. Try to focus first on services that are hitting their low-point of seasonality (ie. painters are busier in the summer, so try to contact them in the winter when they have the time to talk).

Like any good salesperson, you'll need to know how to talk your way from a no to a yes when talking with them.

Then focus on finding out what each of your service providers needs to know about their potential customer for them to find your service useful. For example, some electricians will only want to do (or be qualified for) general wiring/socket replacement/etc, whereas others will be licensed to hook a solar panel into the electricity grid. Some pest controllers do termite work only, others do everything under the sun. Etc.

Also, keep in mind that you'll need to weigh the amount of data you get from customers against the amount of information the service providers will want (the service providers will always want more information).

I just finished up a contract with a company in Australia which sounds like it has nearly the exact same business model (quotify.com.au). Let me know if you want to chat further about this.</comment>


Show HN: A compass for the stock market jungle - <AUTHOR> http://www.cresus.io

<comment><AUTHOR> All is quiet... until it's not. That was usually the norm for the stocks in my portfolio. As a casual investor, staying on top of things proved to be very time-consuming. I tried to tackle this with Cresus.

After you've subscribed and entered your portfolio, you'll get daily emails about your performances and important news. The goal is that you can stay connected with the information that you care about, and learn a few things about finance along the way.

And it's free.</comment>


Kotlin 1.1.2 is Out - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/kotlin-1-1-2-is-out/ <comment><USER2> Finally we can have minor updates on the front page. Yay to those with 500+ karma & who let this go up up & away....

<comment><USER3> If you think you have something front page worthy feel free to post it. Maybe it will be upvoted and push those things you don't like out.

<comment><USER2> A single line on the submit page could filter this out way more efficiently.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would buy a desktop app that launches its UI as a browser tab? - <AUTHOR> I see a lot of dislike against Electron apps and I share it to some degree. I have however over the last months looked into "native" cross-platform libraries/frameworks and the choice is very limited.
I am currently wondering how open people would be to "alternative" solutions when buying a desktop app.
E.g. are there apps that just open a tab in your browser to show their UI? Do you find this acceptable or a no-go for a desktop app?
There would also be the option to launch a new browser window with certain features disabled (such as URL bar, menu, etc.).
I know that the resource consumption would probably be similar to electron. However at least the distribution packages would be smaller.
Then there is the webview[1] solution. It uses Cocoa/WebKit on macOS, gtk-webkit2 on Linux and Edge on Windows 10 as respective backends. My guess is that this would be the most accepted of the listed solutions.. what do you think?
[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview <comment><USER2> "are there apps that just open a tab in your browser to show their UI?"

pgAdmin ([https://www.pgadmin.org/](https://www.pgadmin.org/)) does that (at least on a Mac). Acceptable? Yes. Good? No, but part of that is that the web UI doesn't feel good.

Edit: the page it opens isn't on the Internet, it's served by a web server that the application runs. That means it runs without an internet connection, but also (for better or for worse) that you have to update the application to update the UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know. This is however free software. I wonder if there is commercial software that chose this route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You are describing either 1) an Electron app; 2) A website; 3) A shortcut

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what your comment intends to say. I also have no idea what you mean with 3) A shortcut.

Of course an Electron app or a website are similar to what I describe because it all uses web technologies for the ui frontend, which always means some kind of browser. You could even argue if an electron app is just some kind of website.

But again.. not sure what you are getting at and if you tried to answer my question.

<comment><USER4> On ChromeOS, and probably others, you can create a shortcut accessible from the OS launcher which just opens a URL in the browser. (You might like ChromeOS, basically everything runs in a browser tab without electron)

This is how I do slack and a ton of other apps. Just type the name, no need to recall the URL. You can do this with multiple subpages on the same URL as well</comment></comment></comment>


The "Tourist" Investors Flooding Silicon Valley With Money Will Go Home One Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/why-startups-should-be-wary-of-tourist-investors <comment><USER2> While the big "tourists," eg Fidelity, are investing, they aren't investing in the early stage froth. That's not to say Uber & co's valuations haven't been high, but I've found most investors to be here. Many of them have been here for quite some time too.

This article is a whole lot of speculation without much substance. What I'm most curious about is LP's effect on VC fund distribution. The big funds are still raising big funds, General Catalyst as an example this week. They still need to allocate that capital.

To answer my own question : I guess they'll be allocating it to the highest growth / most safe opportunities though. And at better valuations.

<comment><USER3> > The big funds are still raising big funds, General Catalyst as an example > this week. They still need to allocate that capital.

After the dotcom bust, there were many cases where VC funds just returned uninvested money to LPs, as it was evident that the IPO market had dried up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The search for yield... a predicted consequence of 7 years of zero percent interest rates. Last time around it was investors seeking yields in low- quality mortgages. This time, they're investing in low-quality Silicon Valley startups. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory)

<comment><USER5> That would be somewhat ironic - startups have no profits for the most part, let alone dividends.

<comment><USER6> But they have growth...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Considering that central banks are creating a new norm of negative rates around the world, I doubt that foreign investors who are there to seek yields will go away anytime soon.

<comment><USER8> Seems like that would simply cause deflation in equal measure once people catch on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wait... El-Erian said "re-up".

When did this urban/inner-city drug culture term become mainstream?

(for the etymology geeks here, El-Erian means "of the aryans", no not the nazi aryans, the original aryans)

<comment><USER10> The Wire

<comment><USER11> I actually wasn't aware of it being either street slang or associated with The Wire. It seemed a pretty familiar term to me. A few different online sources suggest it started out as military slang to mean "re-enlist."

<comment><USER12> And the military usage goes back to the early 1900s:

[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/re- up](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/re-up)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clickbait article about an article about impending doom.

<comment><USER14> I stopped after the first sentence starting with a conjunction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of course it will. Investment will ebb and flow in cycles, just like it always has. Back in 2001 was a massive pullback in VC investment, and we very well may see something similar if there's a catastrophic downturn in the tech economy.

But it will always come back. There is no place like Silicon Valley because of the critical mass of talent and greed. There are far too many greedy people who want to make money that will always bring in the money.

<comment><USER16> If you think SV is greedy, go work in New York at an investment bank for a couple years. SV is full of naive do-gooders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Loldidn'tread</comment>


Twitch Prime is now called Prime Gaming - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/amazon-twitch-prime-gaming-rebrand-170037480.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24111114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24111114)</comment>


PSA – snapshot your websites - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/appifycanada/psa-snapshot-your-websites-765ce0cad6cd <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. I'd love to see something on how the more advanced snapshot tool works from a technical standpoint.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed very cool

Based on the author's comment [1] this is how the default mode works:

> http/s traffic goes to through the browser and is rewritten to point to the > Webrecorder server

He also gives an brief description of the other modes here:

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648472)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another thing this may be useful for is to be able to snapshot and compare a product from version to version, without having to worry about setting up deployments and environments for older versions.</comment>


Show HN: Improving LinkedIn endorsements using graph connections and weights - <AUTHOR> https://ratein.io <comment><USER2> Improving something that has the underlying idea broken beyond repair? What? O_o

Endorsements are an idea completely useless for showing that the endorsed person really knows something. I've been endorsed for knowing tools by people who never ever had worked with me on a project, much less have seen me using the tools they say I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's we are trying to solve, the underlying idea. It's broken because it's based on what you just described.

But, getting a rating (or an endorsement) from a stranger, it won't affect you really (it won't always go +1) as it's based on the person's knowledge about that tool. On the other hand, if the person knows that tool really well (has a good rating), then that's good for you, I guess :-)

Does this make sense?

<comment><USER2> > But, getting a rating (or an endorsement) from a stranger [...]

I've never had an endorsement from a _stranger_. All the people who are in my contact network are people who I really know.

And even if your comment was about somebody who doesn't know the tool they say I know, my comment (that they usually couldn't tell I know the tool) still stands.

> [...] if the person knows that tool really well (has a good rating), then > that's good for you, I guess :-)

> Does this make sense?

If the person knows that tool, it still doesn't tell whether the person has seen me doing anything with the tool. There's just not enough context about the relationship between endorser and endorsee to derive anything meaningful, this is why the very underlying idea is broken beyond repair.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, maybe the initial position, mentioning endorsements, was very strict.

A tool, maybe in your case is a development or design tool, can become a generic skill. It is common to get a rating/review for something that it's not that personal and it can come from a stranger. Maybe we can think about ebay reviews or stackoverflow upvotes.

Although the problem from this point of view remains, it can be a large improvement in general ratings and reviews.

I hope this helps!</comment></comment></comment></comment>