Development on Remix OS and related consumer products is being discontinued - <AUTHOR> http://www.jide.com/ <comment><USER2> Once ChromeOS started adding support for Android apps, the use case for this (Android on a laptop) became even more questionable than it was already.

</comment><comment><USER3> So with Remix OS being effectively canned, what other alternatives do remain for Android on x86? I do know they were leveraging the efforts of the aptly- named Android-x86 project, but I don't know to which extent they did and the state of completeness of said project.

<comment><USER4> Bluestacks. Wikipedia entry here [1]. It works but it might have too much overhead for your needs though.

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

<comment><USER3> I've used it before, along with similar "emulators" but what I was indeed looking for were for other native Android distros, one advantage being as they used to advertise it, that it was light enough for you to stick into an USB or a SSD then boot up your underpowered computer from it. I used Remix OS for my parents' computer as a no-frills alternative to a fully fledged Linux distro, and it actually worked pretty well for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have backed and received a few Jide products and love them. The ones I have received will continue to work and benefit my family. It is a shame they are moving away from the consumer space but I wish them luck.

I recently ordered a pinebook and intended on installing remix OS on it. I think I will choose differently now though.

</comment><comment><USER6> They should at a minimum open source all the closed pieces.

<comment><USER7> Open source isn't particularly appealing to a lot of enterprises, and now that they're focusing on that market, they have little to no reason to look for 'community contributions'. Giving away their special sauce isn't in their best interest.

If they were shutting down, open sourcing would be more likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's still [https://maruos.com](https://maruos.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> "we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward."

Edit: only the English page has been updated. If you're in China and get auto- redirected, click the 'English' button at the bottom-left to see the full message.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's like a loan with no interest! How has no one done this before?

<comment><USER11> _> How has no one done this before?_

Lots of crowd funding projects have done this. Just look at the Jolla Tablet [0] if you want a concrete example of a company using backer's money as an interest free loan without delivering anything. Fortunately for Jide backers, they're actually receiving a refund. Jolla has been giving their backers excuses for why they cannot return the funds for the past 2.5 years.

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

<comment><USER12> I mean, this is how crowdfunding works. If you're not willing to risk getting nothing in return for your money, then don't crowdfund. You need to evaluate the people proposing the project before deciding to trust them with your money. There should be no expectation of a refund if the project fails.

<comment><USER13> This is reasonable in general, but the expected narrative for "project fails" is something like "we can't make this" or "we needed more money than expected" or even just "we got bored, screw you". It does feel a bit different when the answer is "we took this as seed funding to go enter a totally different market, suckers!" Or in Jolla's case, "thanks for the money, asshole!"

There are plenty of markets with risks to the investors that still have boundaries. If a mutual fund picks badly and loses money, that's an issue for the investors. If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue.

<comment><USER11> _> If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue._

Exactly, there's a difference between failure and fraud.

If you're soliciting donations to advance your OS development, then pitch the project as such. If you're promising backers a physical good, and then you decide to pivot, keep the money, and not deliver the backers _anything_ or return their money, then people will obviously feel like you've defrauded them.

Unfortunately from a legal perspective, crowd funding backers have little to no legal recourse when businesses decide to use their contributions as an interest free loan for their other business operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Samsung beat them at their own game, if you have an s8 with the desktop dock your phone can act like a remix os box.

<comment><USER15> Android in general really.

Once 7.0 was demoed with optionally floating windows, it was really game over for Remix and similar.

The really sad part is that if one watch the thinking from Rubin and crew around Android 3-4, it was clear that this was their goal.

But then came ChromeOS, a refocusing on that for "desktop", while Android languished in a doldrums.

Only after corporations etc firmly dismissed Chromebooks did we see a renewed interest in Android as anything more than a fancy media player.

<comment> amiga-workbench I thought that Remix was a doomed product the first time I'd laid eyes on it. We have seen similar attempts from other manufacturers in the past, be that Motorola's webtop, the mini apps lumped into several OEM ROMs that emulate floating windows or the third party app packages that do the same thing.

At the end of the day, Google is the only one who can viably create new modes of interaction and the new API's to support it.

OEM's can throw their own garbage together but they will typically only ever push it on a single flagship device or some quirky variant with this feature differentiating it from the horde of other models they vomit out in the space of a year. You will get the paltry in-built apps to use and perhaps the apps of one or two sponsored partners, the development community at large will not bother using the feature because they would be targeting such a tiny fraction of their users.

Android OEM's should be purely hardware companies, focusing on hardware gimmicks alone, leave the software to those who can do it properly. It's not dissimilar from ISP's gagging to be anything but a dumb pipe, inserting themselves between you and your media. It's very unwelcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My phone broke (only the screen) back last year and I used Remix OS as a substitute. I have to say I loved it! I could load the apps I wanted to use all from my desktop, including things that are limited by design to mobile/tablet.

I am so sad to see it gone, it seemed like the main project with a future in the space.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a remix mini attached to our TV. It's been a fine device for what we use it for- watching movies and TV shows from Google Play and the occasional ABC iView show. Sorry to see them exiting this space.

</comment><comment><USER18> Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.

<comment><USER19> From my experience seeing games on kickstarter, this is pretty much what is reasonable to expect.

I mean the whole model is 1\. Get money from community to fund game development 2\. Sell the game again after, for extra profit, because why not

And somewhere along the way there's usually a total mis-estimation of funds and resources

At least here something was given back to the "community"...

The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity; I'm not really sure what people are thinking when they use it. Nothing given back to community, significant risk of failure, no real quality control or even a basic measure to meet, and extremely hype-cycled. Its mostly just a platform to give away your money for empty promises...

<comment><USER20> > The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity

The totality of this statement is what's absurd. There's some good stuff on Kickstarter etc., but Sturgeon's Law applies: 90% of everything is crap.

<comment><USER21> No, it's crowdfunding itself that is absurd: You are literally pre-paying full price for a small _chance_ that a product will actually be shipped to you.

Imagine Amazon, but instead of next-day delivery you get next-year delivery and there's a 90% chance your product won't be delivered at all: That's what crowdfunding _is_.

Traditionally, when funding a product, investors got a portion of the earnings to offset their risk. Crowdfunding has managed to eschew that in favor of just getting you to give people money just in case they can come up with a product. If the bet works out, great, you get a product, but so do I, and I didn't give the creators any money in advance. If it fails, you're out your money.

<comment><USER22> > You are literally pre-paying full price for a small chance that a product > will actually be shipped to you.

Anecdotal, of course, but "small chance" for me is that I have received 28 out of 29 projects I've helped fund in roughly the time-frame outlined. Only one project did I simply waste money on (the Lunecase for iPhone). For me, that's a 96.6% success rate of crowdfunded items I've backed.

The reason I crowdfund is for the product, sure, but also for the extras that the main product won't have upon release. It's not so much bragging rights, I couldn't care less about that. It's because I feel like I'm getting more for my money, well, because I am.

Maybe I'm just lucky.

<comment><USER21> Maybe you're just better at due diligence than the average person (who can't really be expected to know how products get launched and what the red flags are).

<comment><USER22> I would love to think so! But sadly I've been burned on some things in the past as well (usually trusting that Amazon ships me the right item, eBay, that one item on Kickstarter, etc). I do my best to check seller reviews/ratings on typical eCommerce sites, but with Kickstarter it's more about experience of previous campaigns (like Cool Mini or Not, I trust them implicitly now).

I do agree with you, though, that crowdfunding, as a concept, is a _caveat emptor_ situation. Sadly, as is the case in the United States anyway, _caveat emptor_ seems to be the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just tested android-x86 7.1 rc on Dell XPS 13, it's impressive. Everything was working properly.

</comment><comment><USER24> What is Jide's enterprise offering?

</comment><comment><USER25> So... Android is built on the Linux kernel... and these people were making an "Android" PC OS? How is that not essentially just another Linux distro?

What exactly, was the point?

<comment><USER26> Access to all Android apps maybe?

<comment><USER25> So it's a Linux distro that offers native Android app support, sans-emulator? Was that the whole thing?

Considering how... entrenched the OS market is, it's not easy to have a solid value proposition for creating a _new_ OS.

<comment><USER27> I mean ChromeOs is a thing right? They wanted to beat Google to the Apps on Desktop game

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm sad, I almost liked Remix OS.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why was this thread renamed? Now people have to guess that it might be about...

Edit: It's better now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Given the background of founders, some might have thought that they only seek an interest-free loan.

From the time of original kickstarter campaign, the interest from the sum would've been more than enought to sustain the company given crazy interest rates in Chinese black banks</comment>


CIA Gift Shop - <AUTHOR> https://www.eaamoc.com/home.php <comment><USER2> There are some real gems here. "Smooth Operator" lip balm, a security officer bear, "In God We Trust / All Others We Monitor", a .50-cal bottle opener, "Admit Nothing Deny Everything", "Beware Of Female Spy", "Screen When Confronted", etc.

The NSA gift shop is much more tame in comparison. Have some nice shot glasses from them (won my first at a Defcon panel when everyone was too drunk to answer any questions correctly)

[1] [https://www.eaamoc.com/Lip-Moisturizer-Smooth- Operator.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/Lip-Moisturizer-Smooth-Operator.html) [2] [https://www.eaamoc.com/Bear-SPO-With- Handcuffs.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/Bear-SPO-With-Handcuffs.html) [3] [https://www.eaamoc.com/T-Scrn-A12-Plane-IGWT-Gy- Wh-S.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/T-Scrn-A12-Plane-IGWT-Gy-Wh-S.html) [4] [https://www.eaamoc.com/Bottle-Opener-50-Cal- Gold.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/Bottle-Opener-50-Cal-Gold.html) [5] [https://www.eaamoc.com/Btl-Scrn-ANDE-Gunmetal- Swell-17oz.htm...](https://www.eaamoc.com/Btl-Scrn-ANDE-Gunmetal- Swell-17oz.html) [6] [https://www.eaamoc.com/Btl-Beware-of-Female-Spy- Pink-17-oz.h...](https://www.eaamoc.com/Btl-Beware-of-Female-Spy- Pink-17-oz.html) [7] [https://www.eaamoc.com/Btl-Scrn-When- Confronted.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/Btl-Scrn-When-Confronted.html)

<comment><USER3> > "In God We Trust / All Others We Monitor"

Good lord. Seeing it so openly is just bizarre. Where do these places find their employees? I want to be reasonable and try to see both sides, but I really can't. I just don't understand how someone could love this country and also work at a place with this sort of environment and culture. I don't understand the character behind this --- you work for less pay in the public sector, why? Because you love your country? You love your country and you show it by being proud of spying on the average American? Makes no sense. What do you love about America?

<comment><USER4> The CIA doesn't operate domestically, or at least doesn't make it their day to day. Domestic crime is the FBI.

And the quote you cited is a joke. A decent one at that, imho.

<comment><USER5> Because they haven't figured out how to monitor God yet.

<comment><USER4> Not for lack of effort

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> >The No. 1 question people ask him upon hearing where he works is, "How can I shop there?" Put simply: Anyone is welcome to peruse the merchandise online, but actual shopping is restricted to agency employees, a shortlist of vetted visitors and, once a year, employee family members.

Back story here: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet- the-m...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-man- behind-the-cia-gift-shop-the-nations-most-secretive-swag- shop/2019/11/27/5eb27776-e39a-4fa8-a127-7fa987acbc3a_story.html)

<comment><USER6> Ahh, shame. Would be fun to 3d print a commerative waterboarding or rendition figurine, put a price tag on it, and put it on the shelf. Or some hidden compartment rubick's cubes.

<comment><USER7> I'd just print out some t-shirts with "WATERBOARDING WAS ILLEGAL IN 1999" on them. Probably with a stylized graphic on them of a stick man on a down slope and a bucket with water pouring out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whatever feelings I may have about the CIA, good, bad, or indifferent, I have to say that someone there has a wickedly delightful sense of humor:

[https://www.eaamoc.com/BIB-UNDERCOVER-OP-WH- BL.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/BIB-UNDERCOVER-OP-WH-BL.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> You'd need a certain _sang froid_ to buy the Alger Hiss book [https://www.eaamoc.com/Book-Alger-Hiss-Why-he- Chose.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/Book-Alger-Hiss-Why-he-Chose.html) from the company store, maybe.

<comment><USER10> I have read that book. It's no hagiography. In fact, it is written by ex CIA

<comment><USER9> Given the subtitle, and the fact that the CIA is promoting it in their souvenir shop, that's very much as I'd expect. You'd still feel a little self- conscious, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The EAA store had a shoplifting problem in the 80s

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia- rdp85-0...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia- rdp85-00375r000300120018-8)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Home Accessories -> Russian

> There are no available products under this category.

Not sure if joke or real.

<comment><USER13> They have this one: [https://www.eaamoc.com/Coin-KGB-Nvy-Rd- Gold.html](https://www.eaamoc.com/Coin-KGB-Nvy-Rd-Gold.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> ATF shop (loosely-affiliated?): [https://www.apifederal.com/atf/default.aspx](https://www.apifederal.com/atf/default.aspx)

<comment><USER15> I rather have the shirt:

Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms....whose bringing the chips?

<comment><USER16> And no matter how this was presented it would have more taste than the current offerings.

<comment><USER17> At least they're self aware enough to sell ATF pint glasses and moonshine jars. Sadly, no "t" or "f" products in their shop

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For what it's worth, the Google Merch Store sells a privacy kit, which includes a webcam cover and a dummy microphone jack :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Curious if you can use Google audience targeting on that website, and how accurate that will be.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would love to have some of this, if for nothing else than to pretend I'm Jack Ryan.

</comment><comment><USER20> The International Spy Museum tickets SKU should've been 9999007.

</comment><comment><USER21> Finally, some Buttigieg campaign flair!</comment>


One week of OpenSSL cleanup - <AUTHOR> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140418063443

<comment><USER2> They still haven't done the most critical thing: add tests. This is for two reasons: the code has no tests now, and when you refactor, tests are important to make sure you're not subtly introducing errors.

<comment><USER3> If openssl has no tests, what is it doing when you run "make test"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to see information about the actual security value of these changes. A ton are just adjusting to KNF.

[http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi-bin/cgit/openbsd- src/log/lib/li...](http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi-bin/cgit/openbsd- src/log/lib/libssl)

<comment><USER5> I don't think the changes they are doing at the moment have much security value. They aren't working on fixing OpenSSL security flaws. They are obliterating all the layers of cross-platform compatibility that make the code more complex, and removing everything OpenBSD isn't likely to use.

They are transforming a local copy of openssl that tracks upstream changes to their own fork, that probably won't reunite with the upstream version anytime soon.

In the process, they are obviously likely to find some bugs (and they already have fixed one or two harmless ones), but I think they are more interested in building a clean fork for themselves than in fixing the upstream openssl.

<comment><USER4> But they are doing stuff like this:

1\. Let's remove OPENSSL_cleanse: [http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi- bin/cgit/openbsd-src/commit/lib...](http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi- bin/cgit/openbsd- src/commit/lib/libssl?id=6fec7be36425adfd2b48f3695d24a03f6287d4fe)

2\. Crap. Let's put it back again: [http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi- bin/cgit/openbsd-src/commit/lib...](http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi- bin/cgit/openbsd- src/commit/lib/libssl?id=e51513a6c7d3dd499dd4a8a5767951ccfadab599)

That plus the 'tone' of the commits makes me wary of these changes.

<comment><USER6> Did you actually read the second diff you linked? They did not put anything back again. They removed even more junk. It is all deletions.

I'm getting tired of all the people who complain about the humour, tone or style in the commit messages. If you have serious concerns, why not read the diffs and comment on the actual changes? This is how real problems get noticed and corrected.

But some things were in fact removed and put back again, because it turns out some ports depended on it. Sometimes you just don't notice what a few thousand other applications depend on before you remove some code.

<comment><USER4> You're right. I'm wrong about number 2. Mea culpa.

<comment><USER7> Also look at the manpage for explicit_bzero: [http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/man.cgi?query=bzero&sektion=3](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/man.cgi?query=bzero&sektion=3)

It already does what OpenSSL_cleanse is meant to do, so using it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would have loved knowing their reasoning behind this decision, which I'm sure it's very calculated, because the implications are huge. They're choosing to switch from a simple packager role to a maintainer role, they will have to always keep their fork in sync with upstream which if they try to apply every changes will require a lot of work, or maybe they have decided on another strategy e.g. freezing functionalities and applying only security patches, I don't know I didn't look at the current types of clean-ups maybe that could hint what their intentions are.

Regardless, I have mixed feeling about this, one month ago a lot of people lauded openssl for not being vulnerable to the _goto fail_ saga while criticizing Apple for not using openssl and now everyone is ready to ditch openssl in a heartbeat for a flaw not related to crypto, not committed by core developers. I'm not defending openssl, I would love a concerted effort by big industry players for implementing a new SSL/TLS stack from scratch, maybe in a safer language, but I also don't think it is a reason for taking quick, disruptive decisions like this. It is also likely they had this move in mind before this episode and this flaw was the last straw but they should have exposed their plan, it would have been a bit better for us to understand their reasoning.

<comment><USER9> Maybe they should just fork it completely, keep only the most used stuff, and call it OpenTLS - the "clean" alternative to OpenSSL. Then push for it to get accepted in server software. It would be kind of like the OpenOffice/LibreOffice situation.

Although if they're going to embark on such an endeavour, maybe it would be best to also rewrite it completely in a memory safe language like Rust (but in a year or two, after Rust becomes more mature).

<comment><USER7> It wouldn't help if they create another project based on OpenSSL code, because that will inherit OpenSSL's license that everybody hates, and wouldn't necessarily help other projects adopt it. It might also discourage other people from looking at / contributing code, when they could just improve another TLS library with a saner license that people actually want to use not just due to legacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In case your cvs-fu is rusty FreshBSD[1] or OpenSSL Rampage[2] provide an easy way of keeping an eye on the changes. One of my favorites so far is: "Remove hacky workaround for Cray T3E," as in the debuted in 1995, Cray Research T3E.[3]

      -/* Added for T3E, address-of fails on bit field (email@example.com) */
      -#ifndef BIT_FIELD_LIMITS
              memcpy(&server.sin_addr.s_addr, ip, 4);
      -#else
      -       memcpy(&server.sin_addr, ip, 4);
      -#endif

[^1]: [http://freshbsd.org/search?project=openbsd&q=project%3Aopenb...](http://freshbsd.org/search?project=openbsd&q=project%3Aopenbsd+lib%2Flibssl%2F)

[^2]: [http://opensslrampage.org/](http://opensslrampage.org/)

[^3]: [http://freshbsd.org/commit/openbsd/01f41ed5b37037b963c0de2c2...](http://freshbsd.org/commit/openbsd/01f41ed5b37037b963c0de2c25a84f35390455a2)

[^3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_T3E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_T3E)

<comment><USER6> There's also [http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi-bin/cgit/openbsd- src/log/](http://anoncvs.estpak.ee/cgi-bin/cgit/openbsd-src/log/)

<comment><USER10> I hate cgit's log view, they should at least be honest and call it shortlog. Most importantly the link you provide displays everything from src, I could just browse the source-changes list if I wanted to see everything. The freshbsd and rampage links allow you to see just the libssl changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are tons of simple cleanups I'd love to do. But with all the activity and people already working on it, I'm afraid I'd just be stepping on people's toes if I started sending diffs now.

<comment><USER11> Stepping on each other's toes is just what happens with large projects. There are tools to help deal with merge conflicts so I don't think you should hold yourself back. OpenSSL needs all the eyes it can get right now.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I filter the most upvoted stories from a given domain? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to get top stories from The Atlantic, is there a way to do this? <comment><USER2> Search HN from Algolia can probably help, either currently or using a custom script :)</comment>


Why San Francisco is tech's utopia - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/17/technology/startups/silicon_valley_promised_land/ They make a point about the Bay Area by giving numbers for California. <comment><AUTHOR> Funny they make the case for the Bay Area with numbers for all of California.</comment>


Brave Browser and the Wayback Machine: Working Together - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archive.org/2020/02/25/brave-browser-and-the-wayback-machine-working-together-to-help-make-the-web-more-useful-and-reliable/ <comment><USER3> Opinions are obviously split here among HNers about the merits of Brave and what it's actually trying to achieve.

I can only speak for myself but I find that Brave as a daily driver is a wonderful browser. Since it's built on Chromium, it has all the common extensions I use with Chrome (Dark Reader, uBlock Origin, etc.). It has built- in Tor and a rich set of default privacy features. The ads it provides are opt-in and the way that it allows the user to choose which website/content creators to reward allows a level of freedom to users that other browsers typically don't.

I don't know about the ethics behind everything Brave is doing - but this built in functionality of 404 redirects with the help of the IA/Wayback Machine is, to me, an interesting and welcome feature. I did not know, before reading this thread, that other browsers had plugins/extensions available for this. The fact that Brave is simply building it in natively seems to be a bold move. If other browsers adopt similar functionality natively, we'll know that it was a winning move. When all is said and done, despite any missteps Brave may be making, it is trying a different approach, and I think that in the end, whether or not Brave succeeds, that's healthy for a competitive browser ecosystem.

Edit: One thing I'd really like to see for Brave's mobile browser in the future is the ability to use Chrome extensions - it seems completely strange to me that this hasn't been implemented yet (if I'm slow on the uptake and this capability has been added, please correct me)

<comment><USER4> I want to use Chrome desktop extensions on mobile, I recommend trying out Kiwi Browser. It's open-source.

<comment><USER4> *If you want

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if it changed, but last time I checked kiwi was not open source. There is a GitHub repo but it contained only part of the code

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used Brave for a couple of months, but in the end I had to switch, because it is just not ready to be used in everyday situations.

I actually tried their crypto ads, out of curiosity. I had some BATs collected, then I reinstalled my machine, used their backup code to import the wallet again, but it showed zero value. I contacted them about this, never got an answer.

The sync was causing a crash for some people, so they turned it off for everybody. It was off for at least a week, and maybe even now. But even when it was turned on, it didn't sync properly between my iPhone and my laptop.

The browser frame is rendered weirdly both under xfce and kde. I had to resize the window and maximize again, to get the min/max/close buttons properly rendered, and make some random border disappear.

There were sites where I couldn't log in even after turning off the shield.

On my iPhone for some reason when I searched something in DDG, clicked on it, then went back, DDG was rendered, then tried to scroll, and the previous site started bleeding through from the bottom of the screen. The URL bar showed DDG, but nothing was clickable. Refreshing the page didn't work, so I had to force close the browser and open again to see my search query. Interestingly Google seemed to be working, although I only use it for like 1-2% of my search queries, so I cannot be sure.

In the dev tools the audits tab didn't work at all. Couldn't connect an Android device for remote debugging.

In the end all the little annoyances just made me uninstall it, because for me it is just too much to put up with all these. It definitely has some interesting ideas, but I cannot recommend it just yet.

<comment><USER7> As a counterpoint to this I use Brave on my iPhone, Windows home PC and Mac work laptop. It blocks all ads, I don't use the crypto at all and never have, and it works for 99% of the sites I visit including ones for various services around work. I never opted in or out of anything, it just works and because it blocks so much nonsense it's fast. Frustrated by all that negativity when it works great for me as a "download and forget" drop in replacement for Chrome without all the Google tracking.

<comment><USER8> After reading an article here on HN, I gave Brave a crack for a week but returned to my regular browser. The thrill of dopamine hits from earning a BAT oken for viewing a brave-blessed ad for the underprivileged wasn't worth changing a browser for.

A "drop in replacement for Chrome" just isn't my thing as a Firefox user - <USER2> just didn't love the browsing experience otherwise.

If the company were to expand their market for postive-ads and crypto coins by releasing a Firefox plugin as a "drop in replacement for uBlock Origin" it might tickle my fancy.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I never understood why Brave rewards only works in their own browser. Seems like they're kinda limiting their userbase with this all-or-nothing approach.

<comment><USER10> Their goal is to change the incentives around web browsing and privacy. It becomes much harder to do that if they help other browsers retain their marketshare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we not work with the Brave browser? Technologists like us and archive.org should be boycotting it. Cryptocurrency nonsense, swapping ads with their own, soliciting donations for creators without their permission... Brave is a known bad actor in the browser market.

<comment><USER12> As a privacy-minded, ethically-motivated technologist I support Brave for their strong position on privacy - a position in which they are peerless amongst other browser vendors.

I am always open to changing my mind, yet when I see the same untruths mustered to poison-the-well ('swapping ads with their own' \- not true) I wonder why the same dishonest and distorted talking points come up instead of any valid criticisms.

What you call 'cryptocurrency nonsense' is a model that potentially threatens to overturn Google's ad model, and with it the current ad-tech ecosystem.

That obviously means there's a huge number of high-stakes players who are very keen for this particular model not to 'take' in the online world, and so we see the same untruths constantly amplified.

Brave must be doing something right, and even if there's a purist's position which says their model is not the holy grail, I'd prefer innovation and disrupted business models over a continuation of the current ad-tech status quo.

<comment><USER13> > 'swapping ads with their own' \- not true

Only by the strictest definition of swap. They block ads and show ads from their own ad network, which they collect revenue on. That the Brave ads don't appear in the same place as the blocked ads doesn't impact the ethics of it.

<comment><USER12> Very happy to engage in an ethical debate on this one.

This line about 'swapping ads with their own' has been an attempt to imply in the reader's mind that Brave was / is nefariously replacing actual ads with their own, which is not true.

The truth is Brave blocks all ads by default, and nothing more.

Do you believe it's ethical for a user agent to block ads, or that it's unethical and a form of theft?

I'm with gorhill of uBlock on this [1]:

      That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.
      Don't fall for this creepy idea.
      The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.

Separate to this, Brave has a rewards system users can choose to enable which can show OS-level notifications of advertiser content in a privacy-respecting way.

The ethics around this are clear:

* if a user wishes to opt-out of an insecure, fraudulent and privacy-harming ad-tech ecosystem for content on the open web that is their right

* if that same user wants to opt-in to a privacy-respecting alternative ad model which operates in a very different way, that's also their right

Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.

A more accurate phrase considering the individual user choices involved might be 'model swapping'.

As a user I deliberately choose to swap the current ad-tech model with a new, innovative model. That model may have to evolve, but from a technical and human perspective appears to be much better than the current status quo.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#philosophy](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#philosophy)

<comment><USER14> Thank you for taking the time to explain this in a careful and thorough manner. You are absolutely correct to say:

> Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad > swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.

...

(For the benefit of anyone else on mobile who finds HN's quotation style unpleasant, here is the gorhill quote:

"That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.

Don't fall for this creepy idea.

The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. ")

<comment><USER15> > _For the benefit of anyone else on mobile who finds HN 's quotation style > unpleasant..._

Code blocks are definitely not HN's quotation style and not recommended for quotes. They are often used for that purpose by mistake. It is an understandable mistake considering the lack of formatting options here.

A common quotation style that works on all devices is what I used above, a leading '>' followed by the quoted text enclosed in asterisks, like this (with code formatting here to show the special characters):

      > *For the benefit...*

      > *Blank line between paragraphs*

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This add-on for Firefox works well. Accessible from toolbar and (most-used options) from my context-menu.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback- machi...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback- machine_new/?src=search)

</comment><comment><USER14> Which browser is best for respecting user privacy?

"""

We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser.

For Brave with its default settings we did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details of web pages visited with backend servers. For all three this happens via the search autocomplete feature, which sends web addresses to backend servers in realtime as they are typed. In addition, Firefox includes identifiers in its telemetry transmissions that can potentially be used to link these over time. Telemetry can be disabled, but again is silently enabled by default. Firefox also maintains an open websocket for push notifications that is linked to a unique identifier and so potentially can also be used for tracking and which cannot be easily disabled.

Safari defaults to a poor choice of start page that leaks information to multiple third parties and allows them to set cookies without any user consent. Safari otherwise made no extraneous network connections and transmitted no persistent identifiers, but allied iCloud processes did make connections containing identifiers.

From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests (and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.

"""

From:

[https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf)

(Paragraph breaks added for readability)

</comment><comment><USER14> There is some valid criticism made of Brave in this thread, which seems to ignore that those additional features are opt-in. In my experience, Brave is the best browser for empowering the less technically literate to protect their privacy. Until Mozilla ships Firefox with more aggressive, integrated, on-by- default privacy protection, Brave is the best browser to advocate for non- techies.

<comment><USER17> Yea the OS/free-software zealotry is annoying. I use Brave and it's been great so far. Even the UI is nicer than Firefox imo.

<comment><USER14> There may be zealotry involved in the attacks on Brave, but I don't think it is essentially OS/free software zealotry. Brave is open source, after all.

Edit: I am a passionate advocate for freedom, privacy, and free software and I like Brave.

<comment><USER17> It feels to me like even a nice comment about Brave is an outright threat to openness and virtue. IMO it's the same bizarre Manichaean zeitgeist that pops up in so many other aspects of life and discussion.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I think we agree about the fact of an ideological bias, just not the underlying motive for, or nature of, the ideological bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mozilla did this a couple years ago. [https://medium.com/firefox-test- pilot/test-pilot-no-more-404...](https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/test- pilot-no-more-404s-graduation-report-22e65f62b2b1)

<comment><USER19> Perhaps something a Brave Browser dev was involved in at Mozilla? Seems useful but probably is rightfully in plug-in territory IMO.

<comment><USER20> Not sure if you are being sarcastic but the Brave browser was made by Brendan Eich one of the cofounders of Mozilla .

<comment><USER21> Brendan Eich was also the guy who created javascript.

(In 10 days, which probably explains a lot of the warts.)

<comment><USER22> He also donated money to prop 8 to oppose gay marriage.

<comment><USER23> Hopefully this is one of the things that we stop bringing up in the future. This donation was made by him, in his personal capacity. We only know about it because of political donation disclosure laws and it was dug out 4 years later.

There have been zero accusations or complaints that Brendan Eich harmed inclusivity as part of his job. It's a shame he was forced to step down, but we don't need to be bringing this up like it's a mark of shame on his part.

<comment><USER24> I didn't know much about him and Googled him out of curiosity to read about his affiliation with Mozilla. It is rather eye-catching to see "Known for: JavaScript, opposition to same-sex marriage[1][2][3][4]" under his photo.[0] Seems very easy to "bring up" unwillingly.

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

<comment><USER25> Check the wiki history, there's an edit war ongoing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This sounds like exactly the sort of feature that usually triggers an online Lynch mob when it's Mozilla doing it: It's not part of the core feature set people expect from a browser, and it seems eminently possible to do it in a plugin?

I also find the self-acclaimed "Brave" browser company an odd partner to work with for an organisation dedicated to the open web like IA. This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.

The proposition "Brave" is making is: "Don't you also feel what this world needs is an intermediary between you and the people creating what you like, skimming from both sides whenever money is involved?"

<comment><USER27> _This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it 's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge._

Chrome is the only one of these browsers that is produced by a company where at least 80% of its billions of dollars of revenue is generated by monetizing the personal identifying information of web users using ad tech.

It's also the only major browser without built-in support for mitigating tracking cookies and scripts.

What Brave is trying to do is bootstrap an ecosystem where users can use a utility cryptocurrency to reward content creators they like while optionally getting paid to view ads that related to sites on the web they visit without leaking personal information due to zero knowledge proofs.

Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.

That's not a bad idea.

<comment><USER28> >Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.

It's not a bad idea, but IMO it's a bad execution.

They're effectively running a business based on extorting everyone building anything for the web (everyone from big businesses to small hobbyists trying to make something new) by flat-out replacing the most common form of monetization (ads) with their own monetization and saying, "Hey developers, I know you worked hard on that website, so if you want that money (or, at least, a cut of it we feel is fair), sign up for our platform instead".

<comment><USER29> 1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

The dividing line is privacy invading third-party ads.

At a whole 12M users, they're hardly extorting anyone at this point. Let's back the hyperbole train up a bit.

<comment><USER28> >1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

They're only free to do so in Brave's eyes if they roll their own ad solution, which is an option but not _always_ the best option. The "easy" (and, arguably, more featureful/secure/"better") route to monetize across the Internet (especially on hobby projects and small businesses) is third-party ads. There's lots of reasons someone might weigh the options and make the decision to go with a third party ad provider; Brave takes that decision away. Whether that's better or worse for the Internet as a whole is debatable.

<comment><USER29> Your response did not address privacy which was the main thrust of my point.

wrt third-party ads being more secure... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising)

You also point the arrow of causality in the wrong direction. It's not as though Brave magically shows up on devices. The current ecosystem and its host of problems (including privacy and security) are precisely why users are choosing adblockers of all stripes.

In Brave's case, at least they're conscientious enough to provide an alternative path to monetization for creators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Web is fragile. The average life expectancy of a single Web page is anywhere from 44 – 100 days. We've all hit the dreaded error code 404 "Page Not Found". As of today, Brave Browser users can heal many of those broken links with one click.

Now this is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER31> is Brave paying the Internet Archive as part of this deal? surely this will increase load on the wayback machine.

<comment><USER32> No. No $ is changing hands.

To be clear... we are super happy that Brave values helping to make the Web more useful and reliable.

We welcome other browser companies joining them and working with us as well.

The extra load on our servers is not that significant. At this point we support thousands of request per second, we can take on a few more.

Having said that... we always appreciate the support and love from the community to people (and companies) who use and appreciate our services.

We are adding more a billion URLs/day to the Wayback Machine these days... that is a LOT of hard drives :-)

<comment><USER33> I tipped 10 BAT to the Wayback Machine today. I'm going to make it recurring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Surely the pages that go down quickly are less likely to be in the archive? That limits it's usefulness.

</comment><comment><USER35> What saddens me about the threads here is that it seems that some paint a very deliberate picture of Brave as a bad actor worse than other browser vendors.

I was using Firefox and then I switched to Brave. None of their featyres/business model is shoved down my throat. I just use it to browse the Web, I do not see ads, I do not participate in their crypto currency program. Heck I don't even see their icon for crypto currency on my browser UI.

I found Brave to be faster and more user friendly than Firefox which is why I switched. What I meant by user friendly is not just the UI components but also requires a minimal setup effort. I would like to hear more about technical and privacy related merits/demerits of Brave as I feel that's more pertinent at the moment when it comes to browser. However, the hate I hear about their business model/crypto currency somehow is baffling and ironically it seems to come from Firefox users. Can anyone point out some interesting technical and privacy related drawbacks of Brave? That'd be useful for a lot of us.

<comment><USER36> >> a very deliberate picture of Brave as a bad actor worse than other browser vendors.

They have been at times.

Particularly in the period during which they solicited funds to "help support" blogs and pages by people who had not signed up (and did not want to sign up when they found out about Brave and BAT).

I'm not saying they're all bad, but they've overstepped the bounds of good behaviour at times.

<comment><USER37> > Particularly in the period during which they solicited funds to "help > support" blogs and pages by people who had not signed up

IANAL but this sounds like straight up fraud, not just "overstepping the line a little bit".

<comment><USER36> I agree, they seemed to be scraping author images from blogs, and putting messages up saying "You can support the site by sending a tip!"

There's a screenshot here - [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web- br...](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no- longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/brave-tom-scott- donation-page-december-2018/)

Tom Scott was alerted to this when someone sent him a tweet asking if he'd got thte tip, and was annoyed because he had no intention of monetising anything.

It does indeed look fraudulent to me. They have changed the behaviour now IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is Brave the only iOS browser with fingerprint protection? Does that really works?

</comment><comment><USER39> Not sure how I feel about this. A lot of people don't know about the wayback machine. This may incentivise people to send deletion requests to internet archive.

<comment><USER40> I think that is called "concern trolling" right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Brave is a wonderful browser on android, the best in my opinion. Ad blocking, plus one click javascript global blocking, and easy enabling for selected sites, make it a joy to use.

Also, since it uses chromium, performance on android is way better than firefox. Android firefox is too slow.</comment>


Electric life forms that live on energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy/

<comment><USER2> previous discussion of this article on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8055520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8055520)

</comment><comment><USER3> The statement in the article that they take no other nutrients is patently false and poor writing. They must have a source of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, trace metals, etc. The interesting thing about these organisms is that they can take in energy poor forms of these elements that require energy to process into usable forms (e.g. co2 instead of sugar) and to do this they can draw power from electrons directly instead of indirectly using chemistry.

As for engineering them, one of the largest problems is that these organisms are mismatched to our electrical technology. Biology is low voltage high current (~500mV is already too high because that electrolyzes); our power systems are high voltage because P = I^2R second order in current but P = IV first order in voltage so by pumping to a higher voltage you can limit power losses over transmission distances.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice clickbait. What exactly is "pure" energy, anyways? As I understand it, energy comes in many different forms, but I don't know what makes electric potential energy any more "pure" than gravitational potential energy.

<comment><USER5> Not really clickbait. Well kind of, but the article is fairly thorough at a high level.

"Pure energy" in this case is the bacteria are able to obtain electrons directly from their environment in order to power their internal chemistries that are needed for all cells to continue functioning. Those chemistries involve repair and reproduction mainly.

The key difference to all other known biology is that while all cells (singular or part of animals) use electrons for repair and reproduction they get from ATP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really was hoping to see a purely electric life form--maybe some kind of electric noise waveform that resonates around a circuit and reproduces by cannibalizing other noise.

Hmm, I wonder if lasers could be considered a form of life?

<comment><USER7> If it has a circuit to flow through, then how is it different from what's going on in a computer or in a brain?

A _pure_ electric life form would be a bunch of electrons moving somehow in a vacuum. If it _needs_ anything atom-based to exist it's not "pure".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seen that Star Trek episode as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> "that live on pure energy" \-- Don't we all?

<comment><USER10> I think it's fair to distinguish between organisms that process electrons and organisms that process all manner of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats to produce carbon molecules that are used to generate molecules that induce inhaled molecular oxygen to function as an electron acceptor and drive ATP production.

<comment><USER9> Fair. But that's only one form of respiration we already knew about, you anthropocentrist, you XD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (2014)

New to me, though.</comment>


Show HN: Exploro – Organisation service directory managed by VCS - <AUTHOR> https://exploro.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

A common problem I've experienced in previous companies is finding out about the systems/services other teams are building/running. What is their support process? Do they have any scheduled maintenance coming up? Who do I contact if I have some questions? Where can I find their documentation?

This spawned the idea for Exploro. A service directory where the information lives in the services VCS repository and is updated as part of the CI pipeline.

Services can then be explored via the website which would display the information in a consistent and familiar way.

I'm still at the validation stage (website is a quick MVP mockup) and so it would be great to get some feedback.

[https://exploro.dev](https://exploro.dev)

Do you think this would be useful?</comment>


Benchmarks for Startup Spend and Cash Burn - <AUTHOR> https://brex.com/blog/state-of-spend <comment><USER2> _" 82% of startup failure is due to cash flow problems."_

That seems unlikely. That may just mean that 82% of the time, the founders don't pull the plug until they totally run out of money.

"Cash flow problem", as a real term rather than an euphemism, has a very specific meaning. It's when the _business is profitable_ but there's a lag between paying out cash to buy needed labor and materials and receiving payment for goods and services. Manufacturers and farmers have that kind of problem.

<comment><USER3> Ahh, the dreaded Cash Conversion Cycle (or "Succeeding yourself to death") I'm a wearable device founder, and it's AMAZING watching how often this happens to my hardware friends. Especially once they begin raising serious amounts of capital.

I had a friend who got into Walmart -- he was ECSTATIC. His product was a smart electronics product, and quickly shot up to being a heavy seller.

It sold so well---that he was bankrupt within six months.

Why? Because he paid his supplier upfront. Walmart didn't pay him until 60 or 90 days after sell-through. After the first run, Walmart wanted more, his P&L (accrual) showed profit, so he took a loan. Then another. Then suddenly he couldn't get any more loans. And he couldn't get a hold of product. And because of his fixed costs, there was no way to future payables could save him.

So common, and no one seems to know about it.

<comment><USER4> What should he have done? Negotiated a 60-90 day payment cycle with his supplier?

<comment><USER5> Turn down the Walmart offer...

<comment><USER6> Accepting the offer is selling your car for gas money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN -

Henrique here co-founder of Brex (YC W'17). I wanted to introduce the HN community to some new data we gathered at Brex as part of our new blog.

We specifically looked to highlight data that is not available to other startups.

\+ We focused on startup cash burn rates by funding stage (pre-seed, seed, Series A, etc.) because for many startups there is always this question about how much you should be burning.

\+ Separately, we looked at some of the most popular vendors for startups on Brex in categories like cloud services, CRM, rideshare etc.

\+ We analyzed the size of the "stealth" startup market. For Brex, it was hard being in stealth for over a year and it's helpful to know just how many of you are out there

\+ We looked at regional trends in startup cash burn to help startups adjust their benchmarking for their locations

Note, we were careful to aggregate the data and only share things we thought could actually help startup founders and early employees

Let me know your feedback!

Henrique

<comment><USER7> Doing a COL adjustment/average employee salary to burn rate could be interesting to normalize the data. In other words is the salary of engineers driving the disparity or are there other factors behind the burn rates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Our plan going forward is to start breaking down burn by major factors like salary, rent, vendor spend.

Another interesting one we're looking at is the breakdown of burn by industry and stage. We can also then compare the major factors across these breakdowns to give really good comparisons for startups.

<comment><USER7> Other interesting normalization metrics to consider is # of FT employees, contractors & revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, all worthwhile normalizations!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Top startups who "graduate" (a success metric) from raising another round > of funding from pre-seed to series a burn more than the benchmarked > average._

Startups that spend more money need to raise more money, I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from this fact.

<comment><AUTHOR> But startups don't just raise money because they need it, they also have to be given it. That said, there is a question of what parts of this are causal that we plan to tease apart in future analyses.

<comment><USER8> > they also have to be given it

How many startups needed to but were unable to raise capital in successive rounds? If the failure rate of successive raise attempts is low then I'd suspect that the driving factor would be the desire to raise capital.

Given that we've been in a record bull market for nearly a decade and there are signs of slowing, it may be hard to extrapolate these findings to the future. It would be interesting to try to model what things would have looked like on this data set at lower levels of investment. This type of information would be hugely valuable if there is an investment regime change occurring.

<comment><USER9> Matriculation/graduation rate from round to round seems pretty low (that is, new funding failure rate is high), based on this chart cited by pg:

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/781743196963540992](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/781743196963540992)

Tracked down the original post here:

[https://mattermark.com/startup-graduation-rate- surprisingly-...](https://mattermark.com/startup-graduation-rate-surprisingly- low/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great data here, thanks! Yes, part of the difficulty of this analysis is the low number of graduates makes it hard to see what's causal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just gonna leave this here

[https://youtu.be/JjjUj1ypVmI](https://youtu.be/JjjUj1ypVmI)

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously belongs on every real HN thread

<comment><USER10> For any given discussion on HN there is usually a song of his that applies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's definitely an interesting report of some of Brex's aggregate data, but certain statements are inaccurate and misleading. Not sure if this was intentional or not.

For example:

> CRM: 61% of startups use Copper (formerly) ProsperWorks for their CRM

Then below:

> CRM: Salesforce 13.0%, Pipedrive 26.1%, Copper 60.9%

That adds up to 100%. So startups don't use any CRMs other than those three? Bullshit. Therefore that "61% of startups use Copper" statement is also false.

Also weird that they think Intercom is customer support software, cause it's more of a CRM for us and everyone we know.

<comment><USER12> Maybe they are not including the numbers of unknown and/or didn't enable crm integration, etc? I know my second company uses Brex, doesn't use one of those 3, but only has our accounting software linked to Brex, not our crm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "all light grays" color scheme in the "Design Project Management" pie chart is very difficult to understand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we'll make that clearer in our next iteration.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How important is design? - <AUTHOR>

How important is design when you launch a website or an app? I'm not only speaking about UI-design, but also about the "aesthetic factor". It seems to me that design is important, but not a necessity. Of course, design will boost your startup, but is it really important to have a well-designed, beautiful interface or is it good enough to have a clean, usable interface - like HN?<p>What do you think about this issue? <comment><USER2> Like jospehpmay mentioned, it really depends on what you're building. Usually I find good design to be an absolute must when breaking into a crowded space (like social networks, email clients, etc). If you're innovating, I think most people will usually care more about the functionality and what problem you're trying to solve rather than how it looks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with the others but; design should be important in enterprise applications as well. I have seen many enterprise applications which were designed so badly people can't really use them very well. Of course I am not talking about fancy design things, but their usability sometimes... argh. Though they need to cut down money on something, so they focus on the functions instead.

But - if you want to get attraction (like said below) you need to focus on design. You won't look at a Mercedes if it was ugly.

</comment><comment><USER4> It really depends on what your building. Are you building a B2B application targeting IT departments? Design doesn't matter as long as it's logical and functional. Building a consumer app? In that case, design is much more important.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about Craigslist? Is Craigslist a special case?

<comment><USER5> Craigslist is the only exception I know of.

<comment><USER6> how about reddit?

<comment><USER7> Don't confuse simplicity with poor design. Or, to rephrase that as a question: what aspect(s) of Reddit do you feel are poorly designed?

<comment><USER8> How is Reddit simple? By my count they have 40+ navigational buttons on the main pages and each story has 6 buttons (in one form or another) [1]. Reddit absolutely overwhelms me with places to click and gives me no sense of it being nicely organized (as opposed to Craigslist which I think feels very orderly). Amazon feels a lot like reddit to me, but I mostly only need to use Amazon's search bar, so it's ok.

1\. <http://imgur.com/wVO2JUI>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Design = attraction

Development = personality

You need to be attracted to someone before you're willing to get to know their personality</comment>


How come no girls choose to apply to y combinator? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER3> I think 4 out of 39 startups have had a female cofounder. This reflects fairly accurately the proportion of women among the applicants.

I think the reasons there are so few women are that (a) fewer women are fanatical about technical stuff, and you have to be kind of a fanatic to start a startup, and (b) fewer women are willing to have their lives consumed by work, which is what happens to most founders of successful startups.

Y Combinator itself has a female co-founder:

http://foundersatwork.com/jessicalivingston.html

We've talked about the question a fair amount, and I think she would agree with the explanation above.

[edit: changed 3 to 4]

<comment><USER4> Would it not help to have a cofounder who is fanatical about the service itself rather than its implementation? Such a cofounder could take on something like a program manager role.

<comment><USER5> YouTube's spokewoman upon the acquisition received approx. 5 million dollars. The 3 founders together received more than 750 million dollars.

Your co-founder should be able to provide more in tech side of the start-up because thats what is important in the beggining.

<comment><USER4> Whether or not a startup succeeds has probably more to do with understanding what users want rather than anything to do with the tech side. Tech is important later when you need to scale the service to support millions of users.

<comment><USER5> with "the beggining" i was reffering at the "later" you are talking about. the scale and the success of the web start-up is its beggining. And you need the people that will do that. Expect if you are the investor and paying them to do so...

To my mind and my experience unfortunately, if you have a co-founder who is doing only business without any other contribution (e.g. money) and he has same equity of your company as you then he is ripping you off. Better go to YC and give them 5-10% and access their network if you need a what u call program manager...

the reason you decide to start-up, is that although you don't know everything, it means you already know or u are willing to use other skills too and/or learn the rest (including those you are reffering to) , in order to encompass more characteristics --enough to take the risk to become a founder. Otherwise using one skill (e.g. programmer) should get you a job somewhere.

an non-YC example with female co-founder I am aware of is Emily Boyd of www.rememberthemilk.com

<comment><AUTHOR> volida, can you qualify what yu mean by "only doing business". A good product is nothing without distribution, good product management and a keen sense of copy, branding, and the ability to sell. Building the product is only part of the battle.

If you mean, the business guy can't read code, doesn't know how interfaces should look and can't visualise the direction of the product i guess you are right. But, strangely business guys are needed to get users and thats pretty hard - even if you are myspace or bebo. Bottom line - doesn't matter how great your tech is - someone who gets business makes or breaks your product.

<comment><USER5> yeah, basically i mean someone who is not willing to be part during the development cycle and is interested only in pushing the product or finding the users.

The problem is that in the beggining there is not a product to push! And if there is and is launched even with some minor features showcasing the idea, then you'll receive feedback from the users, so you get this help from your users. This means, that having more features to produce you do need someone who is technically capable while the product/service is maturing.

Now if there is a product/service and that product needs someone to find clients that will pay for, and not relying in word of mouth, like most low budjet web start-ups do, then ok, you need someone who will help you with this, but does it really worth it giving up equity equal to yours?

For me, no because I believe that if its your idea (refering to 1 or more people), then you know it better. So, being the soul you can pursue becoming capable to talk about it and make others even invest in it.

<comment><USER4> Why do you think users will be interested in trying out your service and giving you feedback in the first place? You need someone to help you understand what users want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting question, and as a girl geek who is applying to y combinator and has worked for many startups, I can mention a few things.

1) Startup culture appears to be a boys' club.

a) Have you ever noticed that when you hire the first woman in any company, the dynamic changes? There's resistance to that change, whether it's for better or worse. (pun intended) There's a big sign on your clubhouse that says [GIRLZ KEEP OUT!] Sometimes it's very subtle. Sometimes overt. How many of you actually had women on the short list of people you were choosing to partner with? Some geeky guys still have a hard time talking with girls. It may be an issue with whom you're comfortable sharing your great idea. From what I've read in these posts, you have some assumptions that you're making about girls. Truth is, when you get to a certain level of skill or creativity, assumptions need to fly out the window - for both men and women.

b) With that being said, I love it when work consumes me with a passion and takes all of my time to the exclusion of all else. I have mad skills in a bunch of different areas and startups seem to want me. . . but they don't think of me as a co-founder. I code, design, do market research, marketing strategy, media buys, infrastructure, pitches. . . basically I've worked for many startups doing everything necessary to get started. Still thought of as an accessory - never fully included. My solution to this has been to position myself differently - and I can do that now. I need to market my skills differently from the way guys do. This has been successful.

2) We're not as sensitive to hierarchies and heirarchies' flip side, competition, as guys are.

a) We often just want to get it done. We don't care as much if it strokes our ego or your ego. It needs to be done. If, every time we have a conversation, it becomes a zero sum game of who wins the dominance, it's stupid.

If there's a list of things that need to get done on the table, and some tasks are seen as too onerous for guys' job descriptions (egos), we wind up doing it because it needs to get done. Because we did it, somehow our status falls. We wind up getting stuck with _all_ the crappy jobs, and it winds up sucking for us as our status continually sinks.

b) We assess ourselves and our skills differently. Here's an illustrative example. A female engineer once told me why she gave up working in industry. She was the only woman working with a team of guys. The team lead would throw out a task for discussion on the table. Everyone but she would say they could do it easily. She would say that no, this has these challenges and would take much longer. One of the guys who said that it was easy would get the project and then go to her for help doing the problematic tasks. Who got promoted? The guy. Who was doing all the hard work? She was. Female examiners at the patent office tell the same story. There are a lot of women engineers who leave industry because they can assess themselves and the problems accurately and this isn't valued. Managers want their problems solved. They value gung-ho over truth.

c) This is often linguistic. Men and women use different syntax to express the same thoughts. I need to remap what makes sense to me onto another linguistic pattern and that seems to be a waste of energy. In fact, this has a lot of benefit because it makes us better communicators all around. It's a learning curve - and it's often hard to recognize that it's there or needed. (I was a linguistics geek in college, where I found out that 85% of all conversational interruptions occur men on women, so it's a challenge for us to get a complete paragraph size thought into a conversation - much less complete a sentence without being completely stepped on.)

But even in the more egalitarian parts of the States, there are different linguistic patterns for men and women. If you go to the South, it's much more amplified. If a woman makes a statement with the same intonation and wording as a guy, the conversation just stops for a hot minute while everyone in the room processes it. In places like Alabama, I need to preprocess so that the communication is seamless and the conversational stoppages don't occur - <USER2> this often means using what would be considered subservient speech, like ending a statement with a questionmark. Up north, if I'm in a roomful of guys, or even just talking with one, the preprocessing still needs to happen.

d) It may be that because we're not as sensitive to hierarchies and have different sensibilities about status, money means something fundamentally different to us.

e) When I was in college, I really wanted to go into physics, and I was good at it. I spent a summer working for NASA and saw how cutthroat the competition was among the physics geeks and didn't like it. Several years later, I was the webmaster for a hearing research center at a big university. It was a collection of twenty or so labs. I noticed that there were a lot of female scientists, that there was a lot of collaboration between scientists in this particular center and also around the world. I decided to find out what was so different and spent about a year asking people how it came about.

The story is interesting. It wasn't by accident. It turns out that at MIT thirty years ago, there was a hearing research professor who got all of his grad students together and told them that their careers didn't have to be all sniping and competitive - that they could do something different and agree to cooperate. These grad students are now the heads of their own departments. They teach their undergrad and grad students what behavior is acceptable and are growing a culture of deep respect and cooperation. It has a lot of benefits for hearing research as a whole. Work isn't hidden from each other and duplicated - meaning money and time isn't wasted - so it's much better for the hearing research discipline. There isn't the attitude of hoarding ideas for credit. Everyone's resumé has long lists of collaborations. Mostly, everyone's really happy and nice. Apparently, vision research is the exact polar opposite.

I know that in a free market society, competition is seen as creating efficiency, but in a lot of ways, it's very wasteful because of hoarding of ideas and duplication of effort. For people who don't have access to resources, cooperation results in significantly greater value. There isn't nearly as much money available for hearing research, but these researchers are incredibly efficient because they eliminated the competition from the discipline. They're still evaluated. They still have to do their work and be very good at it. It's just that the element of fear is gone.

Alpha males and alpha females see competition differently. How many alpha males can be in a company at any one time? Those who aren't the tiny percent of you who are alpha males feel fear when there's excessive competition. Do you want to work in a fearful environment?

3) If we're single and cute, the dominant chimp will hit on us unless he has a well developed sense of morals. I've been around and around with this one with other women about what to do in response to this and have seen a lot of different strategies to handle it. Some women just shut down their levels of expression and passion for their work. (sucky solution) I know one woman who pretended she was a lesbian. (sucky solution, but one of the most successful - she still retained respect) This comes up a lot at female executive dinners. It's tiresome because when the dominant chimp's ego's bruised there's _always_ retaliation of some form.

4) It may be that y combinator and the VC game doesn't get us where we want to be.

a) If the majority of all small businesses in the States are being started by women, and if we're especially good at communication and customer service, which you'd think would be great for Web 2.0, then what is it about the whole VC game that doesn't get us there? How are we starting our businesses without you? When we're starting businesses, what's the structure like? What kinds of businesses are they?

b) I know that usually VCs or angels don't even look at people until they've spent $50k of their own money. Women have a harder time coming up with funds like that. We still don't have wage parity. We're taking care of our parents or our sister's kids. It's harder for us to get out of family obligations. In the family, daughters are still thought of differently. While I was still an undergrad, I was a founder in a startup. I had to leave to take care of my sick mother. When I asked her if I were a guy, would she have asked me to give up my business, she replied, "no." without any hesitation. We're still expected to do the bulk of non-market labor in this culture. If we say no, there are repercussions. Being a good girl is always for someone else's convenience.

c) It may be a timing thing. Women may have different goals immediately after college. It would be interesting to check to see how old the women are who are starting businesses in this country. I'd want to check the distribution graph - don't just look at the mean or median ages of when they're starting businesses - I bet there are several humps on it - each would tell a different story about that group's lives. By excluding women who are above a certain age, you're cutting out a lot of experience and wisdom. One of the coolest businesses was started by Mary Kay. However cheezy her pink Caddies are, she had a lot of insight into how women ran their lives and built her cosmetics distribution model on those insights.

d) I'm willing to bet that women are starting businesses with less, are entering businesses with lower barriers to entry in general, and that the geeky women aren't starting businesses or aren't going your route to do it. If you look at the percentage of female college grads in engineering and the sciences, it's a much higher percentage than who are applying to y combinator. How are their opportunities and thoughts different? Perhaps you should ask them. You're missing a lot of talent by not addressing it. Are there qualities that you are rewarding that talented women find reprehensible or icky?

By definition, you're looking for special people. The next Teslas are going to be odd no matter where they're from or what their gender is. What would have happened to Tesla if there had been no viciousness of Edison's smear campaigns? Clearly the world lost out. (I have a thing for Tesla, and in an ideal world, Firefly would still be on the air.)

If the next Tesla is currently wearing a burka in Afghanistan, she, and the world, are out of luck. If she's in school just down the river, or has just sent her kids off to college, you may be able to do something about it if you want to.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious - how many YC companies have girls involved? How many founders have a mixed founding team?

<comment><USER7> According to Jessica Levingstone, it is 4. And according to Paul, it is 3. The rest of us can take the mean and agree upon 3.5 females.

<comment><USER3> Oops, it is 4. I forgot one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the same reason guys don't apply to "America's next top model". There just aren't enough female geeks. Which is a pity, since they are mathematically better tuned.

<comment><USER8> "America's next top model" has only asked for women participants. The criteria for judging male models and female models is different, and the places for them to model (ads, runway shows) is different, so it wouldn't be a fair comparison to have them competing on the same show. Given the opportunity, I think you would find plenty of men wanting to apply for a similar show.

As for the "mathematically better tuned" comment, I've always disliked the arguments that one sex is better suited for anything, especially when talking about the brain. I think socialization has a lot more to do with brain development then sex, and since we've got hundreds of years of gender roles to overcome before we find out for sure, I think we're better off judging individuals, rather then genders.

As for why there aren't more women in startups, or women geeks for that matter, I return to socialization. Bill Gates made it cool to be a nerd for guys, we still don't have a female in that category. A largely successful role model that makes it ok for women to not be entirerly obsessed with their appearence. Maybe when I get my own start up...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> maybe because you still call them girls?</comment>


Ex-NeXT Developer: Steve Jobs "Would Have Died Before Giving In To The NSA" - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/231714/andrew-stone-steve-jobs-wouldve-died-before-giving-into-the-nsa/ <comment><USER2> Coincidence... ? Hehe</comment>


Carbon dioxide extraction company Carbon Engineering receives $68M investment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47638586 <comment><USER2> This is actually a very bad idea and a complete waste of money which should have been used for other projects. It reminds me of another bad idea, which just will not die - extracting water from air by cooling it.

Right now, we have several technologies ready to go. Starting with the most cost-effective, and omitting the "use less" scenarios:

1\. Replacement of fossil fuel power plants with carbon free electricity such as wind and solar power (also geothermal, where possible and nuclear, where palatable). Cost per tonne of CO2 saved: less than zero for about 30% of current generation, and "very low" for a good portion of the remainder.

2\. Sequestration of concentrated CO2 streams, such as those produced in natural gas processing. Cost: $20-$40 per tonne.

3\. Biosequestration, ie tree planting. Cost varies greatly, maybe $15-$50 per tonne.

The approaches above are the only ones that are actually used in the industry today, but there is plenty of room to do more. The approaches below are considered to be economically prohibitive, and AFAIK are not in use:

4\. Post-combustion carbon capture: Scrubbing the CO2 from exhaust gases of power plants etc, where the CO2 concentration is 10-20%. Cost: $50-100/tonne, PLUS the cost of sequestration, as above.

5\. Pre-combustion carbon capture: here, the carbon is removed from the fuel and sequestered, and only the hydrogen is burned. Cost: $80-150/tonne, but sequestration cost is low.

and then we have:

6\. Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. The article says the cost may be "under $100/tonne", but the serious estimates I have seen are circa $500/tonne. Consider that the CO2 concentration in air is around 0.04%, cf post combustion concentrations of 10-20%. Regardless of the advances in technology, this will _never_ be as cheap as post-combustion carbon capture, which is essentially the same process but with 250 times less throughput.

I am with the people who worry that this is a cynical move by the companies to avoid urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions.EDIT: another comment calls this "moral licensing", and I completely agree.

<comment><USER3> How much of your valuable land would you like to convert to forest? Unless we start paying people more to keep forests than they otherwise could in real estate, agriculture, etc it is a nice argument that trees can sequester carbon but unrealistic that it can happen on a scale large enough to move the needle.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes I'm surprised how cheap land is. You can get an acre of grazing land for maybe 5 grand in the right area (if you buy in bulk), in a place conducive to rainfall and reforestation (Ireland).

I've looked at this and there are grants, but they're paltry (maybe a grand a year for 3 acres?) and you give up the right to do whatever you like with the land, like graze it.

<comment><USER5> I did some back-of-an-envelope calculations on converting beef grazing land (with its high methane emissions) to forest, specifically for Ireland

tl;dr - it's not cheap, but it's doable

A cow produces around 2.3 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year [1] You need 0.184 hectares of grazing land per cow [2] So each hectare of beef- grazing land emits around 12.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year

Irish forests sequester on average 3.36 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year [3] So converting beef-grazing land to forest offsets around 15.86 tonnes of CO2 per year per hectare. Cost of grazing land is around €25k/hectare [4]

Cost of planting a forest is around EUR3k per hectare [5]

So the cost of offsetting 1 tonne of carbon per year by converting beef- grazing land to forest is around €1750

Ireland's total emissions are around 61 million tonnes per year [6] So to offset it ALL would cost over a hundred billion euro, and a little more grazing land than actually exists in the country (and not all of that is beef anyway)

Or in other words, offsetting carbon by converting beef grazing land to forest would take around 1 billion euro per percent of our total current emissions. To put that in context - Irish govt spending is currently around EUR75 billion per year [7], and under the Paris Agreement we're committed to a 30% reduction of emissions by 2030 [8]

[1] [https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global- warming-m...](https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat- methane-CO2) [2] [https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/dairy/statistics-and- links/fr...](https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/dairy/statistics-and- links/frequently-asked-questions/grazing-infrastructure/) [3] [http://woodenergy.ie/media/coford/content/publications/proje...](http://woodenergy.ie/media/coford/content/publications/projectreports/cofordconnects/CarbonSequestration.pdf) [4] [https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/2018-agricultural- land-...](https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/2018-agricultural-land-values- rose-steadily/) [5] [https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/establishment/r...](https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/establishment/reforestation/) [6] [https://www.rte.ie/news/enviroment/2018/1205/1015300-greenho...](https://www.rte.ie/news/enviroment/2018/1205/1015300-greenhouse- gas-emissions/) [7] [https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/2018/](https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/2018/) [8] [https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/topics/eu- and-...](https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/topics/eu-and- international-climate-action/2020-eu-targets/Pages/default.aspx)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that! Really appreciate it.

It explains why most of the forestry is on land not suited to a lot else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am surprised all of the comments so far are so negative. They can take carbon out of the air and make jet fuel with it. We still need jet fuel. It makes flying carbon neutral.

The CEO argues that even if all carbon emissions stopped today we would still need to remove some of the carbon we've already emitted.

<comment><USER6> > I am surprised all of the comments so far are so negative. They can take > carbon out of the air and make jet fuel with it. We still need jet fuel. It > makes flying carbon neutral.

This is either an oversimplification or the technology is not useful, since a naïve method of doing this means that you will have to put in the energy we got from burning the fuel to convert the carbon dioxide.

<comment><USER7> Gather $renewable energy for $x time (x > 8 hours), convert to high-energy- density fuel required for flight and burn for 8 hours to cross $continent... Seems useful to me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main driver of C02 reduction is based around geopolitical forces and national interest, and the west is on the wrong side of history on this one.

We got lucky that China / East Asia / India do not have access to cheap hydrocarbon, aligning their national interest with that of longer term survival of humanity.

Some dude in BC is vacuuming up C02 in his backyard and this becomes news ?

Meanwhile ...

\- China continues to shave off millions barrels of global oil consumption due to their initiatives involving electric buses for the masses.

\- China dumps so much solar production capacity on the market that it undercuts coal and gas.

The solution to climate change is not going to come from cute startups but from national projects.

When history books are written, the pages will be filled with praises of national initiatives taken by govts of south korea, china, germany, ... ( india ? not sure yet have to wait and see ).

Pretty words are not going to be written about the richest and most carbon intensive nation on earth along with its cronies ( Canada / Australia / UK ) actively undermining efforts to fight climate change ( while continuing to export and use fossil fuels to support the bulk of their GDP ).

But you will always have some dude vacuuming up CO2 in his backyard in BC to provide moral licensing.

<comment><USER9> The UK has cut emissions more than ANY other country

<comment><USER10> I found different data. Perhaps the UK cut emissions by a larger % but US by nominal tons?

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the- u-s-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-leads- all-countries-in-reducing-carbon-emissions/#38387ad03535)

According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.

<comment><USER11> > annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric > tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over > that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline > for the entire European Union.

This is deceptive.

The emissions per capita in the US were much larger than in the UK or the EU to start with, which means still many low hanging fruits waiting to be picked. The lower your emissions are from the start, the harder it is to lower them even further...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm building consumer products using Carbon Engineering's carbon and carbonates. Check it out here: [http://bynegative.com](http://bynegative.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is huge news. The implications of cheap C02 extraction are immense.

See this paper on what it means.

[https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/r...](https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2716-2009.03.pdf)

The key thing is that in 2100 to keep C02 ppm at 450 ppm it would cost 0.6 % of global GDP.

This comment was originally submitted for the first submission of this article at : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566711)

The reaction to this development on twitter and other places is fascinating. Many people are clearly upset that C02 capture at scale is likely to become economically viable.

<comment><USER14> My god, I know we can't qualify absolutely everything we say, but I feel like you need some error bars on those predictions. Actually that is an understatement. It is wildly speculative to talk about GDP proportions and technological solutions in 80 years time.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough. Double it. 1.2% of GDP.

The cost benefit calculations for global warming are similarly wildly speculative.

But it puts limits on the cost in 2100 which is really interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> $68M doesn't seem like much compared to the billions of capital available. Lyft can burn 1 billion per year but a crucial technology like this for climate change can't get even half of that? Society's ability to allocate capital is really ineffective sometimes.

If this technology got more R&D and was refined, it could potentially be the solution for excess solar/wind. Why build expensive large batteries if all that excess solar/wind can suck CO2 from the air and produce fuel? Then cars running on such fuel could effectively be carbon neutral.

<comment><USER16> Thats not really how investing works though. I agree 100% on importance but in high risk unproven markets you dont just throw 100m over the fence and see what happens. This is a phenomenal outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This technology is fundamentally non-scalable because it relies on potassium hydroxide chemistry to sequester CO2. Let me explain:

Potassium hydroxide (KOH) is manufactured by electrolysis, which is electrical power intensive. The amount of KOH manufactured every year is a microscopic fraction of the total CO2 emitted every year. Scaling this up to the same scale as CO2 production isn't simply a matter of building more KOH factories: the implied vast electrical power generation capacity and infrastructure simply doesn't exist at this scale. You would need to build massive power plants along side your KOH manufacturing. This is the kind of thing that only works when you have access to cheap excess hydropower.

And this ignores the secondary issue of scaling potassium supply sufficient to support throughput at CO2 scales, even with recycling. Potassium is a _mined_ mineral with limited reserves that is critical for agriculture. Reliable access to mined potassium is already a major concern for food security and this would require increasing the rate of mining (and depletion) of potassium reserves many-fold. No one is going to care if we've reduced atmospheric CO2 if billions are starving to death.

tl;dr: This CO2 extraction process has severe practical limits to its industrial scalability. Its feasibility relies on leveraging the excess capacity of existing industrial processes, which is only possible at tiny scales for use as a point solution.

Atmospheric CO2 sequestration is a bitch. The thermodynamics and chemistry rate limiters are extremely unfavorable to an economical engineered solution. Fortunately, the planet has a prodigious background sequestration rate that can be leveraged for free if human CO2 production is reduced sufficiently.

<comment><USER18> Hence the question is: why can't they use NaOH which is much cheaper and easier to get?

<comment><USER17> NaOH manufacturing is electrolytic just like KOH, and is similarly limited by power generation.

As to why they can't use NaOH, NaOH being a cheaper material does not imply a cheaper process -- reaction rates matter to amortized unit costs. For example, the reaction rate of KOH is almost certainly much higher than the reaction rate of NaOH, which means it requires much less physical plant/material per unit of sequestration throughput. This plant cost savings could easily offset the lower material costs of NaOH. If it actually made sense to use NaOH, the designers of this process would have used it.

<comment><USER19> NaOH would at least be scalable though. So if they did manage to reduce the price it could play a part.

<comment><USER17> NaOH is not scalable either. It doesn't address the core industrial scaling issue at all, which is the same for sodium and potassium, nor where we will find terawatts of available power generation. There is several trillion dollars in hidden CapEx baked into the idea that we can sequester atmospheric CO2 using this method _before we even get to the direct costs_. It assumes infrastructure that doesn't exist being built at mindboggling scales.

To actively sequester atmospheric CO2 at net negative rate on a time frame of several decades would require $10T _per year_ by their own numbers at their current cost using potassium and assuming the industrial infrastructure already existed. Using sodium would greatly increase this price tag, making it even less probable. There is no getting around those cold hard numbers.

The fundamental thermodynamics makes it impossible, even ignoring the industrial scaling problem, to reduce the cost per ton to a level that is remotely economically plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand where the energy is coming from to complete the cycle?

<comment><USER21> Probably a natural gas plant.

<comment><USER22> Baby seal tallow more likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They must really hate plant life. So where is all the energy to run this process (and refine and process the magic chemicals) going to come from? Oh yea, it's going to be clean energy like wind power, taken from that giant surplus when wind scales up to power all homes and factories and municipal treatment plants. So much left over. Many happy energy.

Meanwhile, in the making not using energy department, Kirk Sorensen gets a paltry ~3 million from DOE that isn't even to be put towards development of Weinberg's MSRE concept.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8&t=44m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8&t=44m40s)

I fear for the human race.

<comment><USER24> They could put their plants next to wind farms that have over-capacity of what the local grid infrastructure can handle - ie on a windy day they make more electric than the grid can take. The air capture would only run on windy days. That might be a reasonable way to make jet fuel.

<comment><USER19> Yes, renewable energy is becoming very cheap per unit but intermittent, likely one of the ways we will tackle that is overbuilding supply, I think it's likely we will have a class of industries popping up that can use cheap electricity available intermittently.

<comment><USER25> Mining bitcoins on AWS spot instances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At this point you can figure out if a technology to reduce atmospheric carbon level will be effective or not by looking if oil companies are investing in it.

</comment><comment><USER20> The atmosphere then becomes a kind of carbon reservoir and we tune the CO2 content to match our needs. Either we want to control temperatures, or we want liquid carbon fuels which are, to date, the best aerial platform fuel form. For maximum Carbon availability and use/recycling, we would want to put all the carbon locked in oil/underground into the atmosphere where it is far more available to use. This allows the Earth system to maximize its metabolic rate. Maybe we should see the burning of fossil fuels as the unlocking of Earth's buried carbon repositories so they can be more easily used. Plants concur.</comment>