Ask HN: Who's the most inspirational figure in your professional life? - <AUTHOR>

Shigeru Miyamoto is mine. I really appreciate his thoughts on innovation and some of his quotes are truly inspiring. <comment><USER2> Holy fT%!#, that's a hard question to answer, because there are so many great candidates. If I had to pick one though, I guess I'd start with my dad. No, he's not rich, not famous, you've never heard of him, he doesn't do anything really technology related, and he couldn't spell "venture capital" if you spotted him the "venture capit" bit. In fact, he dropped out of school in 8th grade to go work and never really learned to read well. I expect the Internet is about as useful to him as a skateboard is to a blue whale.

That said, he's one of the smartest people I know, and he has a couple of things that allowed him to become fairly successful over time: an entrepreneurial spirit, great work-ethic, and absolute pigheaded determination. To the extent that I have any of those things, I credit my dad's influence, whether it's a genetic thing, or just social influence during my formative years, or both, or whatever.

All through my childhood, my dad made attempt after attempt at starting and running various businesses. From memory I can recall: running a pulpwood truck, cutting down trees and hauling logs to the paper mills; making handmade crab traps; building docks and bulkheads; a shrimping business, selling fresh shrimp to seafood wholesalers; a business running a bush-hog, clearing lots and what-not; a fill-dirt and land grading/levelling business; and probably one or two more that I'm forgetting. In between those, he made a living working back-breaking manual labor jobs, mostly on dredge boats. But after many years, he started a business pouring and finishing concrete... doing foundations, slabs, driveways, etc. And that one finally "caught" and he makes a nice living doing that now. He's at the stage where he has crews working for him, and he just does what we would call "business development" and "prospecting".

Outside of my dad, if I had to cite some influential figures, I think Nicola Tesla would be on the list, as would Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvalds, rms, Kevin Mitnick, Lou Gerstner, Tom Siebel, esr, rtm, and our very own pg. I'd also have to give a nod to my current $DAYJOB boss, acoliver. Oh, and Bob Young, of Red Hat and Lulu fame. I guess Mark Zuckerberg would count as well, even though I'm not a huge Facebook fan. Oh, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google, also.

<comment><AUTHOR> Elon Musk will definitely be someone our great-grandchildren will doing reports on in school. He just doesn't quit! Amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Joel Spolsky</comment>


Ubuntu Linux enters the smartphone wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-linux-enters-the-smartphone-wars-7000009302/

<comment><USER2> It is annoying that the tech press has to frame everything as a "war". They've been writing that same article for decades, only the players change.</comment>


Launch HN: Berbix (YC S18) – Instant ID checks to fight fraud and stay compliant - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone!
We're Steve and Eric, the founders of Berbix (https://www.berbix.com). We make it easy to instantly verify photo IDs. Our goal is to empower platforms to accurately identify their users while being responsible stewards of sensitive information.
Today, we're launching our self-service ID checks (https://www.berbix.com/pricing) to organizations of any size that need to answer the question: Are you who you say you are?
We're taking a privacy-first approach to identity verification. Your government-issued photo ID is one of the most sensitive pieces of information you own, and sharing it with a company online can be scary. We've invested significant effort to try to do this the right way from a security perspective, ensuring all images that ever leave our system are aggressively watermarked, and enforcing short retention policies to automatically purge data. We aren't—nor do we ever intend to be—in the business of selling personal data.
Unless you're a credit card processor, everyone knows that you'd be crazy to collect credit card numbers directly without using a system like Stripe because of PCI compliance. But there's no equivalent standard for identity documents. It's still the wild west when it comes to best practices around this extremely sensitive data. Companies inevitably will need to collect this data, whether to comply with regulations to verify age, confirm the identity of a GDPR or CCPA request, or deter fraud on a marketplace.  It may come across as self serving, but we'd rather have a privacy-oriented company collect that data on their behalf.
We were the product and engineering leaders of the Trust & Safety team at Airbnb for several years where we were tasked with stopping all bad things from happening on Airbnb—both online and offline. This was a challenging problem as it included your typical online fraud like chargebacks, account takeovers, and wire scams in addition to much more novel offline risks like property damage and personal safety issues.
We learned to distinguish between "premeditated" bad actors who come to a platform with the intent to cause harm and "opportunistic" bad actors who would swipe a $20 bill on a nightstand, as an example. Some techniques work well against one group, but not the other. One effective means to fight both is to check a government-issued photo ID. Premeditated bad actors will often leave to find another platform with fewer protections, and opportunistic bad actors will think twice before doing something malicious in the moment when they know their ID has been checked.
Historically, checking IDs online has been hard. It required a 5-figure contract with a legacy ID verification provider, would take minutes or more, and the quality of the data returned left a lot to be desired. We knew there had to be a better way, and so we started Berbix. Our product returns a result in 2 seconds or less and leverages the machine- and human-readable components of a photo ID to maximize accuracy.
We've designed Berbix in a way that we, as developers, would want to use it (https://docs.berbix.com), with backend API libraries that make an integration simple and intuitive. We offer client-side SDKs for a number of platforms including React, iOS, Android and more (https://github.com/berbix). We make integration simple enough to be completed in a matter of minutes, while also providing flexibility to offer custom configurations if desired. Using our API, you can request the information you need to verify your users, while isolating your servers from ever handling the sensitive user-submitted ID images directly.
We'd love feedback from the HN community. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! <comment><USER4> _privacy-first approach_

So, let's take a look at your terms.[1]

 _However, we cannot guarantee that unauthorized third parties will never be able to defeat our security measures or use your personal information for improper purposes. You should always use caution before sharing your sensitive personal information online._

 _we each agree to resolve any claim, dispute, or controversy (excluding any claims for injunctive or other equitable relief as provided below) arising out of or in connection with or relating to these Website Terms of Use, or the breach or alleged breach thereof, by binding arbitration by JAMS, Inc._

Not only mandatory arbitration, but arbitration with JAMS, which has problems.[2] Not the American Arbitration Association consumer rules. The AAA will often send small claims to Small Claims Court, which is cheaper, and has real judges.

 _These Website Terms of Use, and any rights and licenses granted hereunder, may not be transferred or assigned by you, but may be assigned by Berbix without restriction._

So if you exit by being acquired by Google or Facebook or Tencent, they get all the data.

There's nothing in the terms which places any legal responsibilities on Berbix beyond minimal compliance with the law. The terms are no better than the average web site, and worse than many.

So, "privacy last".

[1] [https://terms.berbix.com/terms/website](https://terms.berbix.com/terms/website) [2] [https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PRIVATE-JUSTICE-Can- publ...](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PRIVATE-JUSTICE-Can-public-count- on-fair-2870731.php)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for taking the time to carefully read our terms of service! We share your point of view that these aren't merely a series of boxes to check.

Our "privacy-first" claims are namely three-fold:

1\. We limit the data returned to our customers and enforce a maximum data retention period after which data is permanently deleted. We encourage customers to reduce the amount of data they need and the number of days it must be stored.

2\. We built our own image watermarking service to protect the sensitive images we process and store. This helps ensure that the images cannot be used to verify an identity on any other service.

3\. We completed our SOC 2 Type 1 examination in March 2019. This is an intensive security audit performed by an accredited third party. We perform these annually.

And thanks for the feedback regarding JAMS specifically. We are in the process of revising our terms that were first drafted early this year before our public launch.

We really do appreciate this feedback, which we will take into account as we continue to iterate on both our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to best- reflect our business practices. As part of this effort, we are making a commitment to always publish a record of all changes to our terms.

<comment><USER6> Commenting as an uninvolved bystander: your entire reply sounds like corporate-speak to me, and it's offputting. I get that you're trying to state your intent, and perhaps English isn't your native language, but it's deterring me from looking further into Berbix. Also, your second claim really just seems to be a lock-in, not a user-friendly positioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh! You're the company who -- when I was requesting the non-consensual tome of personal data that Sift keeps on me (and basically everyone else in the US and other coutries) -- refused to accept my straight-faced selfie and instead specifically insisted over and over again that I need to look "joyful or happy" and try again.

I get (in retrospect, after research) that you're asking for a real-time face pose change for better identity verification, but do you realize how dystopian it feels when someone is fighting with an opaque bureaucracy and the process demands that they smile about it?

You should try expressing a rationale up-front so it's not so Orwellian.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely understand and sympathize with that. We absolutely can (and will) do a better job of conveying the intent of the different checks here. The pose change requested is randomized, but I get that this can be frustrating.

I know you already get this, but for posterity, the idea here is to make sure the person submitting their ID is actually in front of the computer (and can react to a prompt). Attempting to use a still photo is a common way a bad actor may try to circumvent these protections. Obviously correctly identifying someone in the case you described is extremely important given the sensitivity of some of these data access requests.

Orwellian isn't exactly the vibe we're looking for, though, so we can do better here.

<comment><USER8> So you require someone's PICTURE to deliver the data you gathered on that person? To further augment your digital stash? Or train your models to recognize said person? (after which you delete the picture, logical - <USER2> space costs money)

I hope I'm wrong somewhere.

If I'm not, I don't think I want to do business with you, or to ever have my ID checked by you if it means you'll get to keep my data- then ask me for an up-to-date picture to improve your collection when I object to that.

<comment><USER7> As OP in this thread, this is a complete mis-read of the situation; you should re-read the other comments and consider removing this one.

<comment><USER8> They say the photo is to make sure someone is not using a copied ID - <USER3> believe them. Makes sense.

They say the photo will be removed - I believe them. GPDR, California laws, good will, storage is expansive, etc.

What I won't trust anyone with, is what they will do with the data created from this photo that is not the photo itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _disclaimer: I know some of the folks involved with Berbix_

I love this, for the same reason I love Stripe (and before them authorize.net et al): I don't want every vendor I use that has KYC requirements to implement their own controls on the screenshots/scans/videos/whatever of government IDs, because then there will be a huge amount of variation and some of them will inevitably get it very very wrong.

Putting it all under one roof (or a few roofs) allows those few companies to get storing and handling this toxic data really right, extract a reasonable amount of revenue, and everybody wins (Berbix wins because money, their customers win because they don't have to pay the opportunity cost or real cost of developing this in house, and end users win because of better/safer handling of ID information).

<comment><USER10> Not really following your logic. Why do you care as a customer if there's variation in KYC requirements from vendor to vendor?

Also not sure why this makes handling ID information "safer." The vendor using this service still has access to all the images (ID and selfie) and data returned to them from this API that they can store a copy of on their own servers forever. This is not like your Stripe analogy where you only get the token and not the actual card number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few questions:

1\. "images that leave our system..."

Why do they at all??

\--

2\. You're a startup. Meaning: 90%+ chance you die. What procedures have you put in place to make sure that _ALL_ the data is destroyed in case your company changes hands, so that it cannot be used by somebody whose ideas and privacy are different than yours, simply by buying you (or your carcass after you are bankrupt)?

\--

3\. What use is watermarking in case of a giant data breach? The fact that we know that _YOU_ lost our data doesn't help us any. What are your plans for data storage such that a breach in your systems does not allow easy exfiltration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the thoughtful questions.

On the point of why images leave our system at all, we provide a way to show our work to our customers — they won't trust our results if they can't see that they're accurate. When they access information on our dashboard, if we render the images, they've left our systems. To be clear, we're not syndicating this information to any third parties, just showing this information directly to our customer (who is the owner and controller of this data).

As for what procedures we put in place, we enforce short retention periods for the data we store in our systems for precisely the reason you are worried about. At the expiration of that period, the data is permanently deleted. Furthermore, in the event of a change of control, the contracts we've put in place with our existing customers govern how the information can be used. This is super important to us as we personally take privacy extremely seriously.

The aggressive watermarking is important for several reasons. First, in the worst case scenario, we can trace how a breach happened and when. Second, it is watermarked in such a way that the images become much less functional than they would be otherwise — the intent is to ensure that the images cannot be used to verify an identity on any other service. We take security very seriously — we've already secured SOC 2 certification and continue to invest heavily in security using industry best practices.

<comment><USER12> Cannot be used out of embarrassment, or you are actually 'de-facing' the identity?

For example, shutterstock logo sure doesn't stop people from using those. Plus there are open source tools to reverse such watermarking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I submitted a data request to a third party processor recently (to Sift, after they were mentioned in an NYT article) and they sent me a link to your service to submit ID and two selfie photos.

The consumer facing experience on this is not the best. Here I am filing a request to a third party processor for data that I never personally sent them. And in order to handle that, I have to send even more sensitive information to yet another third party processor. See the irony here?

Sift's email said the ID data would be retained for no more than 14 days, while Berbix' privacy policy says the retention period is the shorter of "until no longer needed" or for 3 years from my last interaction with your customer.

Who's right here, and if your customer quotes end users a retention period that's shorter than 3 years, how do you hold them to that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely understand where you're coming from. It can be jarring to be asked to go through those steps by a set of companies with whom you have no direct relationship. That said, data access requests can contain some extremely sensitive information and it's important companies responding to such requests don't share information with the wrong person.

Regarding your question on data deletion; we abide by the retention policies chosen by our customers, which are typically much shorter than 3 years. For Sift specifically, the retention policy is indeed 14 days, after which point we automatically delete all the personally identifiable information we've collected on Sift's behalf. We'll be taking in your feedback, however, as this could be made clearer in both our privacy policy and our product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations! Know your customer/online id verification sure looks like the business to be in lately. Given that there's [https://veriff.com](https://veriff.com) which seems to be the most advanced one and they are also YC graduate, what's the advantage/edge you guys have? Selling on the price looks like a race to the bottom.

Or are you focusing on USA customers only? GDPR and all that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! And yes, this space is definitely becoming increasingly important. Our focus has been to provide a lightweight, low-friction means by which to confidently check IDs. While we have been primarily serving North America- based customers, our product can work well for any US or Canadian IDs or ICAO compliant travel documents (which includes many European IDs).

<comment><USER15> Like Veriff, there are a lot of companies in this space. What is the differentiator other than low-friction? Most of the competitors offer ~$1 per use and are highly automated and frictionless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats on the launch!

Do you verify consistency of components on a license through access to a DMV database (e.g. name matches address matches license number) or is this closer to a surface-level check of subtle visual indicators present on a license? Watermarks, holograms, etc.

Curious if the core asset here is a well-trained CV model, or if there's a data/partnership moat as well.

<comment><USER5> Thanks and great question! Our patent-pending fake ID detection provides an additional layer of fraud prevention on top of the surface-level checks of visual indicators that are typical in online ID checks. This gets closer to a DMV database check without the high cost (several dollars) of checking against motor vehicle records.

<comment><USER16> Gotcha, thanks! When you say "provides an additional layer of fraud prevention", you mean you're verifying against some external service like Checkr or something?

If not, very curious how you solve for false negatives in your KYC. That itself is a meaty problem domain. I remember when Coinbase was scaling, tons of folks were complaining about being unable to access funds because they were told that they weren't providing proper identifying information, even when they were, in fact, were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice! ID checks are so prevalent that I really wouldn't mind a stripe-esque provider mediating it.

I stumbled on Indian government's effort to address this problem via [https://digilocker.gov.in/](https://digilocker.gov.in/) I think they basically store photos of you, your govt IDs (driving license, social security etc), your records (educational, financial) and digitally verify it with the issuer of those records (in most cases, other govt agencies), plus, also link it with your mobile phone number and/or personal email (for MFA). Is it fair to say berbix is doing the same but addressing a global market? Or, is berbix a complementary product, that is, you'd simply build on top of a service like digilocker as requester and/or issuer of verifiable documents [0]?

With that in mind, do you also plan to expand verifiability to other forms of documents, too, other than IDs?

Congratulations on the launch.

[0] [https://partners.digitallocker.gov.in/](https://partners.digitallocker.gov.in/)

<comment><USER18> there are a bunch of them out there already...

idology

jumio

identity mind

onfido...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is your service different from the KYC service providers out there targeting fintech startups?

<comment><AUTHOR> Many of the existing KYC providers for fintech startups rely on credit reports to perform identity checks. Our perspective is that relying on credit reports alone is becoming increasingly problematic given the widespread data breaches which expose the underlying data. Bad actors have access to full name, date of birth, address history, and social security numbers for countless individuals.

We believe that going forward, fintech startups are going to have to have to have increasingly robust KYC programs, which will include an ID checks. Berbix is an effective tool to collect and check IDs instantly as part of a robust KYC program. To that end, we're currently serving multiple customers in the fintech space with such programs.

<comment><USER20> Every European challenger bank or fintech I've signed up for an account with (Monzo, N26, bunq, TransferWise) has required an ID document check of some kind, sometimes including taking a video, and there have been multiple providers there.

Is your market research limited to the US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Congrats on the launch.

Couple questions

\- Is the verification completely automated?

\- Sound's really expensive at $1 per check, why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Super excited to show what we're working on. Yes, our product is fully automated - our customers can choose to review items that we've flagged as problematic, but they can also choose to reject them outright. As for the pricing, we've found that our price is competitive in this space, and we can provide significant volume discounts.

Drop me a line at (my first name) @berbix.com and I'll shoot over a demo link so you can try it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Berbix looks good.

We need to compare the face on the user's ID card against other user-provided photos to see if they are the same person. Will the 'images.front.face_image' watermark interfere with face analysis?

Twilio's Lookup API can return extra data from various databases. Have you considered doing something similar with Berbix Verify? We would be interested in sex-offender registration status, violent crime conviction status, and home geographic area. Various demographic info could also be useful: education level, employment status, income/asset level, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> This looks really interesting. Took a quick glance at the site but didn't see anything about use case examples. Do you have a hunch about what use cases will be most frequent? E.g. for landlords, selling cars, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> If this is going to further the trend of websites requiring me to upload my I'd, well then that is bad and you can definitely count me out.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Pay-as-you-go pricing for growing startups."

$100 / month is NOT "Pay-as-you-go" pricing.

<comment><USER12> Pay-as-you-go can mean not committed term: stop going, stop paying. If it's "month to month", that counts.

Pay-as-you-go doesn't necessarily mean usage-based pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Love this! We put it on the roadmap as an integration for our company Moonlight in Q1.

Do users typically redirect to Berbix, or is there a hidden API integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our customers typically integrate with us using one of our client-side SDKs ([https://docs.berbix.com/docs/client- sdks](https://docs.berbix.com/docs/client-sdks)). Our web SDKs embed an iframe into your website (or spawn a modal) that will take the end user through the image collection flow. Our mobile SDKs get baked into mobile apps so that there's no additional app to download to complete the end user flow. In either case, as soon as the end user finishes the flow, you can fetch the data about the transaction via our API (or using our backend SDKs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Who's liable in the case of an "oops", and a fulfilled GDPR data request winds up being a GDPR _violation_?

<comment><USER5> Our customers can specify their own risk profile, and in general, customers using us for more sensitive use cases (e.g. returning all the data they possess about individuals), tend to pick our most thorough checks. In addition, we return a number of signals to our customers to help them determine how confident they should be about a given verification. That said, it is ultimately the responsibility of the business who's the recipient of the data request to determine whether they're confident enough about the identity of a "data requester" before acting on their request.

The unfortunate reality is that very often, businesses do not do enough due diligence before responding to data requests. [1] Berbix makes such diligence easier and more secure, such that more companies should be able to adopt better processes around data access requests.

[1] "GDPArrrrr: Using Privacy Laws to Steal Identities" [https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Pavur- GDPArrrrr...](https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Pavur-GDPArrrrr- Using-Privacy-Laws-To-Steal-Identities-wp.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> ID checking for age verification seems like a moat for the big few adult sites.

Can this be used for age verification for adult sites?

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks really cool and I have some ideas and side projects that could use this.

Why is there no demo on your site?

<comment><USER5> Thanks! You can check out short videos of our mobile [1] and web [2] flows.

If you want to give it a try yourself, you can sign up and try our "test mode" for free!

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX4lQlCWXq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX4lQlCWXq0)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3nV0AXbsL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3nV0AXbsL8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very cool. Someday we might need to verify personal training certs</comment>


The thinking error at the root of science denial - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/the-thinking-error-at-the-root-of-science-denial-96099 <comment><USER2> The vaccine controversies are more subtle than can warrant an outright denial. The Japan legislation of 1994 widely cited, some cases were proven to be unrelated to the vaccine, however it was ultimately a moral question of whether the government could mandate a medicine, even with a proven public good, if there was any non-zero risk of complications. Which is a standard admittedly difficult to achieve.</comment>


How to build your own AlphaZero AI using Python and Keras - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/applied-data-science/how-to-build-your-own-alphazero-ai-using-python-and-keras-7f664945c188 <comment><USER2> I'd really like a good tutorial for combining MCTS with NNs, but this tutorial didn't help me at all really. MCTS is easy enough to learn on its own, but the details of connecting it to NN learning is still mysterious to me after having read this.

Of course I could go and study the LeelaZero or minigo code, but I was hoping for a nice readable introduction.

<comment><USER3> It's still in early access, but this could be of interest to you : [https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-and-the-game- of-...](https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-and-the-game-of-go).

<comment><USER2> This looks really good, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The same article was up 2 months ago, 55 comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16240234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16240234)</comment>


Ask HN: What are appropriate ways to find out how much I should be making? - <AUTHOR>

I do not feel right to discuss this with friends, colleagues. And recruiters always tell me "it depends". But every time I asked something and got accepted, I sensed that I asked too low.
The problem is that experience of each person is different (I graduated for some years). I tried to look at some online statistics and they do not look accurate to me.
Just wondering how you solve this for yourself? Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> It really is better to either have them make a first offer (or at least, give you a range) or to be slightly over-the-top when making your own first offer.

Aside from that, there are at least 3 important dimensions:

\- location \- experience \- field

The important thing is that you are being paid what you think you are worth. If you are self-aware and experienced, that should come more from your own views than based on what other people are making (don't count your neighbour's money).

If you aren't sure, you need to talk to people..including friends and colleagues. I mean, honestly, you say you have a hard time finding some information out, but don't feel comfortable talking to the most important people about it. Get over it and talk to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no shame in testing the waters. Tell recruiters you want $X and you aren't flexible. There's a chance they will deal both sides of the table to get a deal done and when that happens you are leaving money on the table.

This assumes you're interested in actually polling the market. If you're desperate then your bargaining position is weak.</comment>


Show HN: Control Chromecasts from Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexdelorenzo/chromecast_mpris <comment><USER3> Author of pychromecast here, the underlying library that this project uses to control the Chromecast.

I wrote this lib initially for use in Home Assistant, [https://www.home- assistant.io](https://www.home-assistant.io)

For Home Assistant I made a rule that all device drivers are stand-alone Home Assistant agnostic Python packages. That way more projects can use it.

Glad to see that strategy is working out and it powering projects like this

<comment><USER4> It would be incredible if there was a way to use mpsyt to watch Youtube videos with your library.

<comment><USER5> It's possible if you hook something running Kodi up to your TV.

Here's some example code I wrote, in the form of a few ZSH shell scripts:

[https://github.com/chbarts/kodi-command- line](https://github.com/chbarts/kodi-command-line)

The logic should port nicely to other languages. In particular, it shows how to do things like playing a YouTube video using either the URL or just the hash, plus, of course, a way to play videos on the computer you're running the commands from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you don't want a Google device on your LAN and are willing to put in a little bit more work for that, I've found that remotely controlling an instance of mpv over the JSON IPC interface works well for me. I can send it URLs from the web or paths to local files. My client for this isn't currently public, but it's a rather easy interface that some of you may find it easy enough to integrate into your other systems.

(Note that it only listens on a Unix socket. With socat you can redirect that to a TCP socket though, preferably listening on a wireguard interface to keep the rest of your LAN from accessing it, since there's otherwise no security.)

Definitely not for everybody, but perhaps suitable for some.

[https://mpv.io/manual/master/#json-ipc](https://mpv.io/manual/master/#json- ipc)

<comment><USER7> This is my preference as well! I even wrote an Android client app / Python server to control it from my phone.

[https://github.com/mcastorina/mpv-remote- app](https://github.com/mcastorina/mpv-remote-app)

<comment><USER8> This looks useful and to the point. Would you consider submitting it to f-droid?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OT, but i had an idea yesterday... will explain in UX language: would it be possible to send video to chromecast-like device and 'leave sound on mobile device' to be able to listen on bluetooth connected headphones while watching on big screen?

<comment><USER10> I've thought about the same thing, but I don't think it's feasible because you essentially need to play the video in both places and ensure it stays in sync. The easy solution is to hook up a Bluetooth transmitted to your TV.

<comment><USER9> I know, but it _could_ use one stream and send audio to mobile via LAN. Syncing would be an issue, though. Overengineering at its best. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't tell from this project's readme how to actually play things. It has an instruction for connecting to your chromecast...ok, and then what?

In the past I've used [https://github.com/keredson/gnomecast](https://github.com/keredson/gnomecast) which is a standalone simple media player that transcodes if needed and streams to my Chromecast. Thoughts on what this provides that's better?

<comment><AUTHOR> While you have chromecast_mpris running, you can use an MPRIS client to issue the OpenUri method[1]. Here's an example:

        $ export URL="http://ccmixter.org/content/gmz/gmz_-_Parametaphoriquement.mp3"
        $ playerctl -p My_Chromecast open "$URL"

This will cast a song to the Chromecast named "My_Chromecast". I forgot that OpenUri was implemented in the project because I typically cast from other devices and programs, but I'll include it in the README.

> _Thoughts on what this provides that 's better?_

People tend to use catt or castnow to cast from the command-line. I wrote about using VLC to cast to the Chromecast[2], but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're watching something that you need VLC for.

[1] [https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris- spec/2.2/Player...](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris- spec/2.2/Player_Interface.html#Method:OpenUri)

[2] [https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes](https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for this, I can't wait to test it out.

Are there other ways to control chromecasts from Linux? I used to be able to cast straight from Chromium, but that hasn't worked for me in at least a couple years.

<comment><USER13> VLC has a native client afaik.

Edit: included since v3.0

[https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc- branch/NEWS](https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc-branch/NEWS)

<comment><USER14> The VLC client is "barebones" \- even simple functionality like adjusting the volume is missing. If the network connection drops, the chromecast stops playing (regular chromecast would continue). There is no support for subtitles, alternate audio/video tracks, audio effects, video playback speed, or pretty much anything else.

Seeking is supported tho, as are audio-only files.

<comment><USER15> > _If the network connection drops, the chromecast stops playing (regular > chromecast would continue)_

How would you expect the video bits to get from the machine running VLC to the chromecast if the network drops? Not sure what you mean by "regular chromecast", but if the network connection between the chromecast and the video source is lost, you lose playback. That's true if you're watching YouTube videos or Netflix, or if you're using any other app to cast something from your local network.

<comment><USER16> Only if it's lost for longer than was buffered. Most decent streaming clients -- even YouTube -- will buffer ahead and keep playing while attempting to restore connectivity.

Speaking of which, the casting with VLC also has major buffering problems. Even casting a low-def video directly from an SSD to a Chromecast Ultra (over ethernet!) it will buffer for about 1-2 minutes for every 5 seconds of playback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is nice, I've been using catt mapped to the media keys via the native window manager shortcuts, but this seems easier to set up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do something similar with chromecast_mpris. I have my media keys mapped to Plasma's Media Controller, which uses MPRIS in the background. Works well for me, and you don't have to wait for catt to launch and find your Chromecast each time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Shameless threadjack: does anyone know a way to cast _to_ a linux or windows desktop? We use chromecast on all our entertainment video monitors, but sometimes I would like to hang on the couch in my office and cast a video to my desktop monitor.

<comment><USER19> Maybe scrcpy is enough for you.

[https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy](https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy)

If opening a browser tab is all you need any tab syncing app / service will do. I use kdeconnect / gsconnect so I don't have to rely on a 3rd party service, Google and Mozilla included.

<comment><USER18> Ah this is a good idea, I hadn't thought of approaching it that way. Having basic pause/back/forward media controls would also be nice, but they should work if the browser location gets updated right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> sorry to somewhat hijack this thread, but does anyone know a way to stream from linux to a miracast target?

I have a fire stick that I believe supports miracast, and periodically check if there is linux software that will allow me to stream as a source.

Last time I checked miraclecast[0] seemed to be somewhat broken. Has anyone had any luck?

[0] [https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast](https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast)

</comment><comment> baby-yoda does chromecast still require WAN access to operate?

<comment> m-p-3 I believe so, and it's less than useful on network with a captive portals like hotel rooms.

At least the upcoming Chromecast with Google TV comes with a remote, so you should be able to interact with the captive portal and use it that way.

<comment><USER21> While the chromecast's inability to work with captive portals is it's own problem, they make tiny wifi routers, half as tall and twice as thick as a smartphone, and they're cheap. If you find yourself facing captive portals more than once, I'd recommend buying one so you can use your Chromecast in hotel rooms, among other use cases.

<comment> m-p-3 I already have one from TP-Link, but having the new Chromecast would allow me to shrink down on hardware even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this also allow you to cast arbitrary media to the Chromecast? I couldn't tell from the readme.

<comment><USER23> I've been using catt ([https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt](https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt)) for years for that purpose. Basically:

        pip3 install catt

And then:

        catt cast <any image/song/video/URL supported by youtube-dl>

<comment><USER24> [https://airflow.app/](https://airflow.app/) is worth mentioning - <USER2> software (sadly Windows/macOS only) but works with everything you throw at it, transcodes unsupported codecs seamlessly and has great UI with remote control via an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> An unpopular choice for general purpose streaming: Steam Link.

You can install the Steam Link on a smart TV and your computer (including Linux), switch the Steam window and stream whatever you want to stream.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any way to cast zoom calls from my android zoom app to TV via Chromecast ?

<comment> m-p-3 You can cast your device's screen, but you'll still have to rely on the device's camera and mic.

You'll probably want to avoid outputting the sound on the TV or you'll get a feedback loop.

And there's going to be a slight delay, which might be annoying with a realtime conversation.

So it might not be a great idea from the start.

<comment><USER14> You'll also end up with 15 fps, high CPU usage, and random hangs... It works, but isn't really usable...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title says 'from Linux', but the README says 'Linux / *BSD / macOS' under 'Requirements'.

How would this work on macOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _How would this work on macOS?_

Theoretically it should work if you're able to get D-Bus working on macOS. D-Bus is usually a Linux thing, but it's been ported to other platforms. macOS isn't included in the title because most macOS users don't have D-Bus installed.

I included instructions here[1] with URLs to the macOS versions of D-Bus and PyGObject. I'd be interested in whether you're able get it working.

[1] [https://github.com/alexdelorenzo/chromecast_mpris#requiremen...](https://github.com/alexdelorenzo/chromecast_mpris#requirements)</comment></comment>


Duplicacy: Lock-free deduplication cloud backup tool, with "fair source" license - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy <comment><USER2> Reported to Github, as Commercial software masquerading as various open free license projects (MIT, GPL, BSD, etc.).

Also, intentional namespace pollution with existing backup tool, which IS gpl'ed.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

____________________________________

(response, since I'm submitting 'too fast'... ):

Github has commercial repos, and private repos.

It's pretty simple, really. If you want the free options on GH, you choose from a list of standard Open Source licenses. [https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on- gi...](https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com)

It's also asked you create a LICENSE file, to go along with this.

Their license, however, is very much NON-FREE. As in, if I click clone, since I work for an employer of 50k people, I'm in violation. Full stop. And we're not even talking about developing on it, or submitting PR's, or what have you. This is simple copy which puts me in violation.

It's very much against the spirit of GitHub, and probably against the license on GH as well.

And it also is attempting to dilute another project that does similarly. Just so happens they're 2 letters different. Duplicacy vs Duplicity. That's an asshole thing to do.

Here's a few names I just devised: ClouDuplicate , Clouder, DupliCloud, CfC (cloud file cloud)..

Instead, it's very uncool to try to pollute an existing namespace of the same thing. Talking about pro-level bad will here.

<comment> vertex-four Wait, how's it masquerading as what?

<comment><USER3> The name is very similar to the GPL software Duplicity, and the license is not a free software license.

<comment> vertex-four While I'd agree it's similar, it's not the same.

Public projects on GitHub do not need to be under an open source license - there is absolutely no requirement for that anywhere.

<comment><USER3> Right, I was just explaining the "masquerading".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that the "fair source" license is a proprietary software license that happens to sound like a free software license.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some claims:

"It is the only cloud backup tool that allows multiple computers to back up to the same storage simultaneously without using any locks (thus readily amenable to various cloud storage services)"

"What is novel about lock-free deduplication is the absence of a centralized indexing database for tracking all existing chunks and for determining which chunks are not needed any more. Instead, to check if a chunk has already been uploaded before, one can just perform a file lookup via the file storage API using the file name derived from the hash of the chunk."

Tahoe-LAFS's immutable file model (based on convergent encryption) was capable of doing this same thing a decade ago, and also features a pretty nifty capability-based security model:

[https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs](https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe- lafs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Naming chunks by their hashes is not a new idea, but this technique along does not give you a practical backup tool. The deletion of unreferenced chunks becomes a hard problem, and the center piece of lock-free deduplication is the two-step fossil collection algorithm that solves this hard problem.

<comment><USER5> Tahoe-LAFS supports a mark/sweep-style garbage collection algorithm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Developer here. Duplicacy is built on the concept of Lock-Free Deduplication ([https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/DESIGN....](https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy/blob/master/DESIGN.md)), which allows it to backup multiple computers to the same storage without using any locks. Currently it supports local or networked drives, SFTP servers, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Hubic.

I recently released the source code under the Fair Source 5 License ([https://fair.io/](https://fair.io/)) which means it is free for individuals or businesses with less than 5 users. Otherwise the license costs only $20 per user/year.

Questions and suggestions are welcome.

<comment><USER6> From the link to the license:

> Fair Source has the power to _promote diversity within the developer > community_. To date, contributing to open source has been an expensive > proposition for developers. You have to have a stable income and a lot of > extra time to work on side projects for free, which means talented > developers from underprivileged backgrounds often aren't able to contribute. > Fair Source allows developers to monetize their side projects, which means > more people can afford to join the ranks of developers who pursue these > initiatives.

I find it funny that some people feel a need to justify charging money for something by coming up with bogus social justice rationalizations.

<comment><USER7> I agree that people don't _need_ a justification to charge money, but the rationale isn't bogus—it is hard to contribute without a stable income, underrepresented groups in tech tend to make less money in general, and getting paid could help that.

I'm not sure this license is the way to go, though. Unusual licenses tend to turn people off, and it's not clear how profits from this license would go to contributors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The name is too similar to Duplicity; do you mind renaming?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't want to sound like duplicity intentionally, but duplicacy.com was still available at that time and I thought it was a perfect name for a backup tool...

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth, I thought this was Duplicity until I read the comment even after I did a quick glance at the github repo. Since you're both in backup, this is going to be very confusing to people.

<comment><USER10> Same here.

Edit: Come to think of it, it seems quite funny how many backup solutions are named akin to this, while, under the hood, they actually go through great lengths to actually get rid of duplicates. Maybe a name deriving from "condensing" or "shelving" would be more accurate? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think I understand the goals of the "fair source" license but why not make it copyleft all around, and just sell hosted version to small biz, and license exceptions to corporate clients?

<comment><USER12> Nobody needs the exception so they won't buy it. That business model only works for copyleft libraries.

<comment><USER13> Depends, if it's something likely to be customized, AGPL might work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The verdict of the "open source competition" in Duplicacy's README is not entirely accurate. Exclusive locking in the sync'd approach is just the easiest implementation, not the sole possibility. I can't speak for other tools, since I do not know their internals well enough, but I can say about Borg ([http://www.borgbackup.org/](http://www.borgbackup.org/)) that there is no _inherent_ issue in running the important parts of making backups (i.e. uploading and deduplicating data) in parallel. It's just not implemented.

Cloud storage back-ends are a somewhat similar story. It wouldn't be that complex, although locking is a problem due to the EC model of most of these services. Plans have existed for quite some time now to enable this — just no time to implement them, and other features are requested more frequently.

<comment><AUTHOR> I might be wrong but I want to hear more from you if you're a Borg developer. My understanding is that you may be able to have multiple clients uploading chunks at the same time, but you won't be able to exploit cross-client deduplication if different clients have a similar set of files (OS files or a large code base for instance). Moreover, if your implementation require locks then it would be very hard to extend to cloud services.

<comment><USER14> Yes, that's right, _concurrent_ addition of the same chunks would generally mean that some work is wasted; so concurrent long running jobs would not synchronize well in this model, and lock-free performs clearly better there.

The only operation which inherently has to be guarded by a lock in Borg is inserting the archive pointer into the manifest (root object, see [https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/internals/data-s...](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/internals/data- structures.html#the-object-graph)). I suppose it would be possible to work around that without locking or to use the usual hacks around EC, put/get/check/get/check?put/get/check?put etc. until it's "probably there".

Deleting / pruning archives would still require a full lock due to the same conceptual issues that your two-phase GC avoids. The same goes for "check".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For about the last year or so I've been looking for an online backup system with the following requirements:

\- Off-site storage, preferably not costing too much.

\- Option for on-site storage (e.g., to store a backup "in the cloud" and on my NAS)

\- Keeps version history, with the associated goodies (purging old backups, etc)

\- Able to run on FreeBSD and Linux, with Windows and MacOS being nice to have but not required.

\- Able to back up multiple machines to one account.

I strongly suspect that my solution will involve two separate things - one to actually do the backups and another for the storage.

So far, not having looked at Duplicacy, I'm leaning strongly towards attic/borg with rsync.net for off-site storage. At first glance, Duplicacy looks like it will meet my requirements so I will have to give it a closer look before I pick a solution.

<comment><USER16> You just need Borg. Here's a post I wrote about it (as you say, Borg and rsync.net):

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail- backups/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

I have posted it to maybe help a few people who want to do backups: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14507656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14507656)

<comment><USER15> I currently use Attic for backups going to onto my NAS, so one plus for attic/borg is familiarity. I figure that if I'm going to go with rsync.net, I'll switch to borg since it's (as you point out) better maintained.

Are you using rsync.net's "hidden" attic/borg option? This makes the price very attractive.

You mention using "attic check" to guard against bitrot on the provider's storage. How is this in terms of bandwidth used? Does it have to transfer every byte or does it compute a checksum on the encrypted data (since rsync.net doesn't have the raw data) and just send that?

<comment><USER16> > Are you using rsync.net's "hidden" attic/borg option? This makes the price > very attractive.

I am, yes, and it is quite attractive.

> You mention using "attic check" to guard against bitrot on the provider's > storage. How is this in terms of bandwidth used? Does it have to transfer > every byte or does it compute a checksum on the encrypted data (since > rsync.net doesn't have the raw data) and just send that?

It's very bandwidth-efficient, but I have stopped doing that every day, as rsync.net told me they use ZFS and scrub their arrays regularly, so they would discover bit rot early. I only run the check once a month now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is this related to the other Duplicity backup software?

[http://duplicity.nongnu.org](http://duplicity.nongnu.org)

<comment><USER14> Not related at all. (Duplicacy != Duplicity)

Duplicity is a pretty straight good old-fashioned incremental backup program.

Duplicacy on the other hand is hash-based deduplication (BorgBackup / Attic, Restic etc. are some others).

The design of Duplicacy is slightly different from that of e.g. BorgBackup. Duplicacy, as the title says, uses a _lock-free_ approach. BorgBackup and the handful of open source tools in the same spirit use a synchronized approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had been using rclone ([https://rclone.org/](https://rclone.org/)) for Amazon S3, which has some of the same features but recently the application key was blocked by Amazon. Is duplicacy safe from the same fate?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Amazon only blocked rclone's application key for Amazon Drive. There is no way for Amazon to prevent a third-party application from accessing S3, since users provide their own S3 credentials and Amazon doesn't know who is on the other side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain how it's able to make small updates, e.g. to s3? How does it know what's already there -- cache? How does it prune old chunks -- will there be tons of individual API requests to S3?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use a pack-and-split approach -- files are packed first (as if it is building a big tar file first, although this is only conceptual) and then split into chunks using a variable-sized chunking algorithm. You can customize the chunk size but by default the average chunk size is 4MB so you won't be uploading too much small files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Played with it for 20 minutes, really struggled with the GUI/UX. Have raised some issues (really wanted to like it), but just feels really clunky for something asking for cash.

</comment><comment><USER21> Its encryption scheme and threat model seems to be similar to cryfs's [1].

[1] [https://www.cryfs.org/](https://www.cryfs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> What is the encryption standard being used for file encryption?

</comment><comment><USER23> The website makes it sound just like Tarsnap. Am I wrong? Is there some compelling feature I am missing that would make me want to switch from Tarsnap?

<comment><USER12> AFAIK Tarsnap backups go through Tarsnap's server but every other backup tool seems to not have that requirement.

<comment><USER24> Does this mean Tarsnap de-dupes before encrypting? That doesn't seem to make sense but I don't see any other reason going through their server would be required.

<comment><USER25> Tarsnap uses content based hashing too. The pipeline is basically: tar | chunk | encrypt | upload-new-chunks

The tarsnap server provides a transactional KV store-- "In order to create a new archive, the tarsnap client sends a "write transaction start" request, many "write data" requests, and a "commit transaction" request to the tarsnap server; deleting an archive is similar (except with a "delete transaction start" and "delete data" requests)." [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-12-14-how-tarsnap- uses-...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-12-14-how-tarsnap-uses- aws.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Armoured Commander: The WWII Tank Commander Roguelike - <AUTHOR> https://www.armouredcommander.com/blog/armoured-commander-i/ <comment><USER2> I've got a sequel in the works too: [https://www.armouredcommander.com/blog/](https://www.armouredcommander.com/blog/)

<comment><USER3> Did you enjoy using libtcod?

<comment><USER2> It made sense for me at the time, since I'm not a programmer and it offered an easy to use library. But if I were to start again I would use something like BearLibterminal since it supports ttf fonts, multi-tile characters, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was unfamiliar with the term roguelike. For those in the same boat, a definition from Wikipedia:

"Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons".

<comment><USER5> And if you're new to the genre, definitely check out FTL. [https://subsetgames.com/ftl.html](https://subsetgames.com/ftl.html)

<comment><USER6> God that game was so hard. Maybe I'm a wimp about rogue likes in general though. I enjoy stuff like XCOM where it's a puzzle you can reason your way through and use save states to re-try when you realize your plan or your execution of the plan is insufficient for the task. There are random elements, but it's mostly a puzzle.

FTL was just confusing, hopeless death for me.

<comment><USER7> The thing most players do is try to race for the end, which makes sense -- you are being constantly pursued! Counterintuitively, you want to go as slowly as possible to maximize the amount of rewards you receive. The more planets you visit in a system, the more rewards you get, and the stronger you are when you hit the mothership.

That was a key misunderstanding I had that let me make significant progress once I figured it out. That... and liberal use of the spacebar to pause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Happy to answer questions about the game and its sequel here. I haven't worked on the original for some time and it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hopefully fun.

<comment><USER8> What inspired you to make Armored Commander?

I remember playing this way back when, after finding it when looking around for fun open source games. I still think I have a portable copy in my Google Drive somewhere.

<comment><USER2> I happened to read about Patton's Best and thought it was a really interesting solo game. I really liked the idea of following a small team through a number of days of a campaign, although this was something that was handled very simply in the original board game. But then I thought, couldn't this be done really well in a computer game? I had programmed a couple unfinished games in the past, and was looking for a project that I could bring to completion.

Also, I simply thought that this was something that ought to exist, so I went ahead and created it.

The first version was basically an attempt to translate the board game experience into a complter game, and since I'm neither an artist nor a programmer, the roguelike style suited me very well - no graphics, and an emphasis on the mechanics of the game. The sequel has had a number of false starts, but recently I thjink that I've been making good progress, and it will hopefully end up fixing many of the problems with the original game, and extend it into new territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like this will eventually be subsumed by Dwarf Fortress.

<comment><USER10> _Everything_ will be subsumed by Dwarf Fortress

<comment><USER11> Everything is Dwarf Fortress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Such a great game, pushes the boundaries of "roguelike" in a unique way.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Would you propose with a diamond grown in a lab? - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/630512/would-you-propose-with-a-diamond-grown-in-a-lab/ <comment><USER2> This is one of those curious cultural things that are well-accepted in a handful of countries and seem completely loony to the rest of the world. America has its engagement ring culture I guess. The phrasing of the article title says a lot.

I spent €100 on a lovely antique necklace for my fiancée, knowing full-well that she would call me crazy and feel unpleasantly embarrassed if I spent more on it. Meanwhile you come across stories of American men spending several monthly salaries on diamond engagement rings simply because they are expected to. Fascinating how such a custom has such strong inertia, despite all the critical voices denouncing it — not in the least because of the harmful way diamonds are mined.

Refreshingly, the geekier types seem to lean towards all sorts of creative alternatives, such as lab-grown diamonds, alternative unencumbered gem stones, and the coolest space-age metals.

<comment><USER3> It's less of a "culture" and more of a "deliberately engineered desire resulting from decades of covert marketing in mass media". Worth reading up on if you're curious how things we think "just are" got that way...

<comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kWu1ifBGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kWu1ifBGU) For a TLDR; version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> American. Spent a handful on a CZ. Spouse would shoot me if I blew that kind of money on a rock we derive so little value from.

We would take the cheapest reasonably durable stone that looks shiny.

I would not marry someone who wants a diamond. Perfect litmus test for knowing what they want out of life and having it match what I want out of life.

I'm pretty sure we are not representative, but financial literacy is not exactly common. IMO people are pretty bad at understanding what they want vs what will make them happy.

</comment><comment><USER6> There was a nice article [1] on how De Beers succeeded beyond even its most optimistic expectations in Japan:

"Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan became the second largest market, after the United States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings."

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have- you...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever- tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/)</comment>


The Bootstrapper's Bargain - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/201305/jeff-haden/the-bootstrappers-bargain.html <comment><USER2> > We committed to working a year without salary.

Sounds interesting. Not many of us could do that w/o previous success(s).

> We started in one person's apartment with the understanding we'd get an > office in six months. Six months became a year, a year became 18 months, > five people became six people...and the guy living there finally said, > "Obviously, you guys are not leaving my apartment, so I am." That let us > turn the bedroom into our conference room.

Haha, thats hilarious. I wonder how much more productive it would have been to have a more comfortable situation?

EDIT: Care to share why the downvote?

<comment><USER3> You need to be careful with using residential property for commercial purposes in most places. Repurposing a property, even though it would require no external changes and no structural internal changes, often requires planning permission and/or a correct license to operate a business. There are exceptions for sole traders, but they'd not count in this case.

Caveat: I'm in the UK. Things may be different the other side of the pond (and may vary by state).

<comment><USER4> Somehow, I don't like the idea of the government telling me how I may use a property I pay good money for, especially if there are no changes and it's just me with a laptop.

Too many laws in too many places. [I know I won't consider the UK now :->]

EDIT: I have heard about this zoning concept, it's just a bad idea IMHO, especially when applied to the modern tech workers. In France, unless you run specific equipment (say heavy machinery) which can create nuisance or risk for the neighbours, or if receive the public (wear and tear being a nuisance in itself), you're quite free. Zoning as in simcity (residential/industry/commercial) is a dated concept. I want to leave near the place I work and where I can find commerces.

In France, there are even special corporate statuses for single entrepreneurs, which especially allow you to do that in case your landlord may tick, and even deduct part of your home expanses as business expanses (say if you are using a room of your 4 bedroom flat, 15% would be reasonable because you'll still use the bathroom and the kitchen more for yourself that for your company, the % amount is left to the appreciation of the tax agents)

That's one of the rare business friendly laws, even if I must say I've been quite surprised by the recent Hollande plan, which for the first time seems to talk sense about business and employment.

<comment><USER5> The way you use a property affects all properties around it - that's why zoning exists.

<comment><USER6> Hardly true for any form of knowledge worker. A guy sitting at a desk for twelve hours is unlikely to create nuisance for neighbours

<comment><USER7> This example was 6 people in one person's residence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is a key takeaway:

"Most entrepreneurs think of the VC as their customer, but when your survival is based on the VC, you build a company on what the VC will like and not what your real customers like."

A VC-backed business often has the wrong priorities from the get go, which is why bootstrapping is really attractive because you live and die by building a product people want to use.

</comment><comment><USER9> "We started drive farming--buying external drives from retail stores, cracking open the cases, and placing the drives in our servers."

As a bootstrap lover, this is awesome even though critics can question this especially since they are a backup company.

<comment><USER10> They mention in a blog post that they don't buy enough drives to order directly from the manufacturers, much less at a discount. They had to do some pretty interesting things during the Thailand floods.

<comment><USER11> You missed the point of the OP's post - the company sells a backup service, which means losing a customer's data is a very bad thing. Breaking open retail external drives and moving those hard-drives into a server is not something that inspires confidence in their ability to actually keep the data safe.

The OP's point was a confidence issue, and not necessarily that there was a better option that could have been taken.

<comment><USER10> The pods have internal redundancy, and your data is stored on more than one pod, so I'm okay with them using consumer hardware to back my data up. They also wouldn't be doing it if they weren't sure that the drives were reliable enough for that use.

<comment><USER12> That's one of my favorite uses of probability: if you know what you are doing, you can build extremely reliable systems out of unreliable components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> $10 million/year in revenue in the 6th year doesn't sound like a VC-compatible growth rate.

<comment><USER14> > $10 million/year in revenue in the 6th year doesn't sound like a VC- > compatible growth rate.

Interesting point. Come to think of it, online backup services have existed for a long time, I remember using a similar service at a previous job 6+ years ago. I recall that it was quite expensive and certainly not unlimited. I seems clear that Backblaze was able to get to $10 million revenue by competing on price - dirt cheap pricing. And the dirt cheap pricing was made possible by not paying salaries, running a "data center" in an employee's apartment, building servers from ultra low cost hardware components, violating residential zoning laws, oversubscribing storage capacity, etc. One can only wonder what kind of sacrifices were made in terms of physical and network security. I wonder how many of their first customers realized that their backups were sitting in someone's apartment ... somehow I doubt it was disclosed at the time?

The problem with this kind of business model is that it is effectively a small business owner mindset. $10 million revenue after 6 years of toiling away ... at $5 per month, this means that they have something like 2 million users ... considering all the other backup solutions available (including far more secure solutions), it seems quite possible that their growth will stall or slow down as their target market is going to be relatively small and already saturated and you can't go much lower than $5 a month to continue competing on price alone. Incidentally, I noticed that their website actually says "as low as $3.96 per month" ... so they are continuing to push the limit on price. I'm not sure that a price war / race to zero is the optimal strategy for this business ... this is like trying market the world's cheapest helmet or life vest - how many people would seriously want that?

<comment><USER15> FWIW, the $10 million number is _annual_ revenue. So they'd only need about 170k users at $5/mo ($60/year) to be making that much.

<comment><USER14> Doh. That's true. My mistake. I suppose 170k leaves a lot of room for more users.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open sourcing my workflowy clone - <AUTHOR> https://eff.iciently.com/blog/opensource.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't actually think of this as a workflowy clone, i think of it as an org mode clone, but I think more people know what I mean if I say workflowy</comment>


Tracking Human Mobility using WiFi signals - <AUTHOR> http://sunelehmann.com/2015/05/26/tracking-human-mobility-using-wifi-signals/

<comment><USER2> Google likely has the most accurate "IP Address <-> Location" map of any company. They have all the data necessary for a true "god mode" view of the internet map. Consider the data they have:

\- Google maps cars collecting wifi ssid's

\- Android phones collecting wifi ssid's

\- Chromecast scanning internal networks

They know the names of the networks behind public IP's, they know where the networks are, and they know who connects to them.

Sometimes I wonder if IPv6 will ever be truly adopted, or if big companies have mined so much IPv4 data that they have little incentive to switch all systems to IPv6. Not everyone has the level of access and insight to IPv4 networks that big companies do. When every device has a unique IP, big companies will lose a competitive advantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are also willing to share their knowledge: you can do 100 requests per day for free to [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/ge...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/geolocation/), or pay up to have basically unlimited access (that's for wifi routers and gsm towers, they work much better than IP addresses for the reasons you mentioned).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> WiFi as a location technology is well-known -- [http://www.skyhookwireless.com](http://www.skyhookwireless.com) for example has been selling this data for a decade.

What seems to be new here is that Android is very permissive and leaky with WiFi access point data, which allows an app to reverse-engineer location without specifically asking permission to know your location.

Your claim that Android scans for AP's even when WiFi is off is a very interesting one, which raises a lot of concern for privacy but also for RF interference -- if I say I want a radio to be off, then I expect it to be OFF, dammit!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true: Skyhook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have been doing it for a while. Even more, there are free databases that you can use to map WiFi routers to locations (for example wiggle.net), but for some reason this is still not enough for Google to treat WiFi as equivalent to location. This also has consequences in age rating: if you explicitly require location access, you fall into a different age category than if you require "only" the WiFi permission.

You can control the scanning settings in settings -> WiFi -> advanced -> scanning always available. It's ON by default, but you can disable it there.

Apart from what you mention, what is new is the measurement of how many access point you actually need to know to track my location: it's costly to look up all the routers I see during a day, but we show that people spend a vast majority of the time close to a very small number of unique access points (~20 routers per person over 6 months).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am not sure this is a new threat, a user's list of known SSIDs has been a recognized threat to privacy for a long time. You do not even need to have an app installed on Alice's phone to track her location. All Eve has to do is listen for beacon probes from alice's laptop and Eve can get a good picture of where Alice has been and more: "Show me your SSIDS I'll tell you who you are"[1]

[1]: [http://blog.rootshell.be/2012/01/12/show-me-your-ssids- ill-t...](http://blog.rootshell.be/2012/01/12/show-me-your-ssids-ill-tell-who- you-are/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but: 1) you can circumvent this problem by randomizing your mac between probes, as apple already does, and that doesn't help with the threat we present

2) ssids are not unique - when it says "airport" it can be any airport. When you have access to the mac of the device, you can pin point it uniquely - that's the threat we present.

3) with the threat you link, you theoretically might be able to recover some of the past locations of the user where they did connect to WiFi. With the threat we present you get the location history with time resolution of up to 20 seconds, whether the user connects to WiFi or not, and even if they disable WiFi, and you don't have to control any routers. I would say this constitutes a novelty.

=== EDIT ====

4) the link only mentions a theoretical possibility, we show that the threat is real based on real data collected over 6 months about multiple people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote a post a while ago about how to use wifi ssid and signal strength to determinate the indoor location of an Android phone - [http://www.guidefreitas.com/indoor-location-using-wifi- signa...](http://www.guidefreitas.com/indoor-location-using-wifi-signal/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, checkout the app that shows the findings on your own data: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.dtu.compute...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.dtu.compute.mywifiscanner)

</comment><comment><USER6> Luckily, you can turn this feature off. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi > Advanced and uncheck "Scanning always available".

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a startup that leverages this for in store analytics: [http://euclidanalytics.com/](http://euclidanalytics.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something different: they just know when you visit a location with a router that they control. We show that you don't need to control any routers to track people's location, as long as you have an app with the "WiFi information" permission (and most of the apps do have it).

<comment><USER2> (Assuming you are the author of the post)

Did you watch the network traffic that apps send home? I would be curious to know, of the top games in the app store that see wifi data, how many of them actually send it back to their servers.

I've been running mitmproxy for a project, giving me rare insight into the data that leaves my phone. It's amazing how often android/ios apps "phone home." Every few seconds, apple and google servers receive a request from my phone with fingerprint information sufficient to pinpoint my location on a map. Usually the current WiFi SSID is included in that.

It has me wondering if there is viability in a consumer-grade "man in the middle" router for auditing/filtering the traffic leaving the user's home network.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, thanks! We didn't watch the traffic of these apps yet, we just point out that they have the ability to report it back, beyond the user's control.

I did however read through the privacy policies of the apps, and one of the top 20 with WiFi but not location permission mentioned collecting your location data.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Dave McClure, founder, 500 Startups - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/4064358646

<comment><AUTHOR> Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.

\- Dave McClure (@davemcclure)

<http://startupquote.com/post/4064358646></comment>


The Biggest DDoS Attacks in History - <AUTHOR> https://utopia.fans/networks/the-biggest-ddos-attacks-in-history/ <comment><AUTHOR> .</comment>


I made a new website for trail camera users - <AUTHOR> https://huntercameraworld.com <comment><AUTHOR> The main idea was to build a simple tool that sits on top of email server and parses jpg's and video files out of email sources. Hopefully hunters, wildlife lovers, tourists etc trail camera users will appreciate.

Please check it out and let me know your feedback.</comment>


Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store - <AUTHOR> http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html <comment><USER2> I liked the tenant-rent analogy xlarge:large:small::house:room:couch.

tl;dr version: The author is insinuating that Reddit doesn't have enough money to rent a house, so its renting a couch, and so it can't complain if the other occupants have an all-night rave party.

</comment><comment><USER3> Long, but well reasoned article on EBS. Basically comes down to-know your load, and be darned sure you have adequate metrics in place for tracking latency.

</comment><comment><USER4> My take-away message from this: if you want predictable predictable performance using AWS you need to use largest instances and EBS block sizes. This suggests Amazon scales up but not down. As in, if you're using the smaller instances (because you're a startup, say, and don't have a great deal of traffic) you're hosed. On the other hand, a lot of the calculations I've seen suggest maintaining your own server infrastructure is cheaper than AWS and you get more predictable performance, so I wonder why anyone who has a lot of traffic would use AWS (except for handing traffic spikes or batch jobs). So to me it seems that AWS doesn't have a great use case. I'm interested in other viewpoints.

<comment><USER5> It depends on the application(s) you wish to run on AWS. If your EC2 instance runs an HTTP server that is backed by an external database like RDS, your I/O bottlenecks is not the EC2 instance's disk.

The article points out rather successfully that once you know at least something about the internals of each AWS service, you can fit them into your particular needs.</comment></comment>


Rivian's full self-driving suite is designed to ignore inattentive driver input - <AUTHOR> https://www.teslarati.com/rivian-full-self-driving-ignores-driver-input-tesla-autopilot <comment><USER2> Sure - Just ignore as "inattentive" the input of the extremely aware and experienced 100-billion neuron processor with ultra-wideband sensors and untold years of experience dealing with actual human drivers in all kinds of conditions. What could possibly go wrong? I hope to never own a car with any of this kind of crap on it. That limits me to cars no newer than 2005-2010 at the latest, but given the grouper-like styling and built-in spyware of all new cars, that's no great loss...</comment>


What STEM Shortage? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378334/what-stem-shortage-steven-camarota

<comment><USER2> " We found that real hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) grew on average just 0.7 percent a year from 2000 to 2012 for STEM workers, and annual wages grew even less — 0.4 percent a year. Wage growth is very modest for almost every category of STEM worker as well."

The demand for STEM work is dwarfed by the supply, so wages are stagnant and thus losing ground relative to the rapidly rising cost of living. STEM work has this in common with most other sectors of the economy.

The real kick in the head is that getting a STEM degree and STEM experience is significantly more demanding than other degrees.

The other kick in the head is all the Wall Street types claiming there's a STEM shortage. There's no shortage, they just want to be able to pay each worker even less, and need to maintain the illusion of a shortage in order to procure cheap foreign labor legally. If there were a real shortage, domestic STEM wages would be rising meteorically in order to incentivize people to re- train. There's been no such rise.

This entire phenomenon kind of destroys the argument of the "you're unemployed, why didn't you STEM" folks. I'd also like to point to another one of my favorite facts against this line of thinking: according to the WSJ ([http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/#term=](http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/#term=)) the unemployment rate for philosophy majors is the same as neuroscience majors at a whopping %7.2. So much for STEM.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article's author: "Steven Camarota is director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies."

Center for Immigration Studies: [http://www.cis.org/](http://www.cis.org/)

This research group wrote "Hello, I Love You, Won't You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage Phenomenon": [http://cis.org/marriagefraud](http://cis.org/marriagefraud)

"Inside The Center For Immigration Studies, The Immigration False-Fact Think Tank": [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/15/inside- the-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/15/inside-the-center- for-immigration-studies-the-immigration-false-fact-think-tank.html)

<comment><USER4> What specifically was wrong in the article this thread is about?</comment></comment>


Amicus Briefs in Support of Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2016/03/03Amicus-Briefs-in-Support-of-Apple.html <comment><USER2> Salihin Kondoker's brief, husband of one of the San Bernardino victims, is in there. Worth a quick read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not seeing Microsoft, Facebook, Google yet.

<comment><USER4> Quite. This will demonstrate how much these companies really care, beyond mere lip service of a tweet or light interview.

Boil it down, there's only one question on the table here. _Are consumer electronics companies allowed to sell products that can encrypt data without a government-approved back door?_ It really is that simple.

<comment><USER4> Okay, we're getting some movement.

      Airbnb
      Amazon
      Atlassian
      Automattic
      Cisco
      CloudFlare
      Dropbox
      eBay
      Evernote
      Facebook
      GitHub
      Google
      Intel
      Kickstarter
      LinkedIn
      Mapbox
      Medium
      Meetup
      Microsoft
      Mozilla
      Nest
      Pinterest
      Reddit
      Slack
      Snapchat
      Square
      Squarespace
      Twilio
      Twitter
      WhatsApp
      Wickr
      Yahoo</comment></comment></comment>


Fruit machine (homosexuality test) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_test) <comment><USER2> "The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military."

This is very interesting considering in ancient Greece it was the opposite. Having soldiers being gay was said to improve morale and make the soldiers fight better, as their partners was fighting together with them. More information on the subject here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_militarie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_militaries_of_ancient_Greece)

Seems we're constantly in a pendulum in terms of sexuality, what's ok or not.

<comment><USER3> I have always wondered if the pendulum is really about sexuality at all. It could be that we just become more or less authoritarian. And certain groups are just a victim of that swing.

<comment><USER4> Unlikely. When people talk about homosexuality being acceptable in ancient societies they leave out the fact that it was acceptable for barely pubescent boys to be the receiving partner for adults. So are we going to head down that route in another decade or two when we become even less authoritarian?

<comment><USER5> >So are we going to head down that route in another decade or two when we become even less authoritarian?

Stupid as it is, anti-gay extremists do make that argument, that the cultural acceptance of homosexuality is a slippery slope towards the eventual normalization of pedophilia and even bestiality. That can be seen as an argument pro Christian authoritarianism of a specific political bent.

<comment><USER6> In many ways, it is the very opposite: the "egalitarian" model of homosexual relationships was _itself_ a new development and a desirable _outcome_ of the gradual "cultural acceptance" of homosexuality. You can see this even with very recent developments such as same-sex marriage. The polar opposite to that is the ancient, Graeco-Roman model of homosexuality (but also found today in many parts of the non-Western world, and even reflected e.g. in stereotypes about sex in prisons) as simply an exertion of male-on-male dominance and power. (Though, to be fair about it, ancient "fornication" wasn't different either! This is the underlying rationale for why a number of ethical traditions in the Classical world, including Christianity, condemned both sexual practices in very similar terms - both were incredibly far from anything that could be considered "egalitarian" or, in even more modern terms, respectful of "consent"!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was this PKD's inspiration for Voight-Kampff machine?

<comment><USER8> Funny I thought of Clockwork Orange because of the dentist chair.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military."

O Canada

I imagine this level of national homophobia was standard in most countries at the time. The irony of branding homosexuals as security risks because they could be blackmailed seems to be the sickest form of circular logic.

<comment><USER9> I don't think whoever was responsible for this policy genuinely believed that they were making the RCMP more effective by eliminating risk of blackmail. I think they started with "I don't want gay men working here" and searched around for justification that they thought was a little less unpalatable.

<comment><USER10> In the 1960's "I don't want gay men to work here" was acceptable and would not have been seen as unpalatable. Same sex sexual activity was made legal in Canada in 1969.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also "Fruit machine" is a British term, referring to a slot machine.

<comment><USER12> The same in Dutch.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Compare this to the US Navy trying to root out the subversive cell of 'The Friends of Dorothy'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy#Misunderstan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy#Misunderstanding)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOn9grCVO7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOn9grCVO7c)

!! Facepalm concussion warning !!

If only they could get to this Dorothy then they could maybe get her to give up a list of all the gay seamen, simples.

</comment><comment><USER13> On the subject of pupil dilation, in the book Thinking fast and slow, Daniel kahneman explains that for any mentally taxing task pupils dilate in proportion to the difficult of the task. If the task is too difficult, they don't dilate at all.

<comment><USER2> That's interesting. I could imagine a video game to employ this somehow, as basically the difficulty in designing video games is trying to make the game not too hard or too easy, so the player gets a challenge but doesn't experience it to be too hard.

Bit intrusive to get the pupil dilation currently, but maybe with future VR gear we can get better information and adjust video game difficulty depending on how the player is experiencing the game at the moment.

<comment><USER14> There is a theoretical risk of player mind spotting the causal link and abusing it. I cannot say definitely is it possible or not, but if pupils dilated not only due to complexity of the task but for other reasons too, then it would seem completely plausible for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Inspiration for [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner#Voight- Kampff_m...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner#Voight- Kampff_machine)

</comment><comment><USER16> 2019: But this time when we use half-cooked classification to identify undesirables and treat them badly it'll be different. We'll only target people that are OK to shit on by contemporary social norms.

</comment><comment><USER17> Article contains some a priori speculative criticism of the test. I wonder if its empirical efficacy has been assessed in the current epoch, and how that would compare to using AI to assess facial features towards the same end. Peculiar that the designers tried to measure interest rather than arousal (which can be done somewhat reliably by taking readings from the genital area).

</comment><comment><USER18> IIRC the Scientology E-Meter is quite similar to this, I can't quite remember if one spawned the other.

<comment><USER2> The concept of having a machine that can measure X attribute from humans have probably been a thing for long before both of those. Probably the earliest example of that (I can remember from the top of my head) is finding out if someone is a witch by throwing them into water with a stone attached to them. It's just with more technology, the "tests" become more advanced/elaborate.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. See also: phrenology

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why has this article been flagged?

I take it this flag is down to users flagging it as an issue. But isn't that exactly the point the article was raising?</comment>


San Francisco renters paying $1,100 a month to live in converted living rooms - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/homeshare-rents-luxury-apartments-at-affordable-prices-2018-1 <comment><USER2> SF startups appear to be a fascinating way for landlords to extract money from VCs. I wonder if the landlords give away plausible ideas to young hackers to pitch to the VCs? Perhaps landlords run all the incubators?

The employees of startups are working very hard to channel money from one very rich person, to another very rich person, in the vain hope of having an imperceptible chance of becoming a very rich person themselves.

<comment><USER3> Georgism, a tremendously popular school of economic thought in the US at one point that has been memory holed by the powers that be, advocated taxing rents at very high rates:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a huge market (i.e., base of buyers) for affordable housing for people who just want safe, private, convenient shelter. Maybe there's a surplus of luxury housing in SF, but I think a luxury building is an amenity that needlessly adds to the cost.

Incidentally, I was thinking about opening a hacker founder community somewhere affordable, like Detroit. But Detroit is cold.

<comment><USER5> Then again, there are some amenities I'd like if I'm paying SF rent. For instance, I was recently in SF and looked in into a one-bedroom non-luxury apartment that I could easily have afforded back home. It was 3k a month and didn't even have an in unit washer and dryer.

<comment><USER4> I can't do laundry ever again. I have fully bought into wash and fold. It's a total no brainer. For $25 I just got an entire hamper worth of mixed laundry washed and folded for me. The time and economics make it totally worth it.

I would definitely want to offer wash and fold service.

Privacy is important. I don't know that an "upholstered partition" ([http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5a501548c32ae61e008...](http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5a501548c32ae61e008b4d65-1874/screen%20shot%202018-01-05%20at%2041233%20pm.png)), which honestly reminds me of the doors of American bathroom stalls, offers enough of a sense of privacy, especially because of sound.

<comment><USER6> If you have a salaried job how do you justify spending that money when you can't earn more money outside of your salary?

<comment><USER4> I don't have a salaried job currently. I have a software consulting business, link in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The rest of the article title is significant: "...is so dire that renters are paying $1,100 a month to live in converted living rooms."

"Converted living rooms" is critical. My initial reaction to the HN headline was "what a great deal!" as I pay $1200 for a three bedroom, two bath house in central Florida. SF suddenly looked a lot more appealing!

</comment><comment><USER8> Sound like something out of Hong Kong...

</comment><comment><USER9> When/if the revolution comes, I really hope it comes with a 100% land value tax.

<comment><USER10> When/if the revolution comes, think constant IED's and slaughter like in Iraq. Guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the target either.

Revolutions rarely result in something "better," at least for the majority of the citizenry. I can't think of one other than the US 1776 and the French in 1799 that turned out better for the citizens, and these were both a special case during a special time that probably will never be repeated. The result of revolutions also last generations.

No, revolutions are when the citizens are convinced that "burning it down" will result in a better outcome. Most of the time, it just creates a power vacuum tyrants have an uncanny ability to fill that vacuum because they are ruthless and unscrupulous.

Think Iran circa 1979, Cuba circa 1959, Egypt fairly recently, Russia circa 1917 etc.

<comment><USER4> We are better positioned than ever to create an organized revolution. Look at YCombinator is doing, they are prototyping Basic Income. Keeps the masses loyal, it's totally disruptive and 100x better than our current welfare systems. Add housing, healthcare, and it's only a matter of time before they aggressively invest in weapons programs (I would be surprised if there are no current cyber warfare/espionage investments).

The revolution is happening, we're here on the ground floor, and we have a voice in this forum.

<comment><USER11> Who's paying for that UBI again? Still have no clear answer in years...

<comment><USER4> Why can't it be financed from the returns on the YC portfolio?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>