Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-loss-exceeds-800-million-in-third-quarter-on-1-7-billion-in-net-revenue <comment><USER2> Uber will be a dead Unicorn in the medium future. They've got too many legal pressures, competitors with native advantages (i.e. the automakers), and their expansion plans have them overextended. Here in Edmonton, AB, Canada, regulatory changes have pushed the Uber prices to almost 2x during non-surge times over regular taxis. Taxi's have stepped up. Local competitors have sprouted. Carshares are abounding. It's all too much for them to compete effectively and the drivers are realizing they are making nothing. The driver pool has significantly dwindled here. The Uber model has no barrier to entry and they've lost their first-to-market advantage. Doesn't paint a pretty picture.

<comment><USER3> They still have the momentum.

This isn't a start up trying to figure out how to make money (Twitter) or a company that can't/won't change (Blackberry).

This is a company making money that is pursuing a blitzkrieg on the industry. They can sit back any day and rake in billions. I agree there isn't a high entry barrier, but I don't think they've lost the first-to-market advantage.

<comment><USER4> The question is whether they _will_ just be able to sit back and take in the billions one day.

I have always looked forward to self-driving car networks because of what I perceived to be their ultra-competitive and ultra-low margin nature.

Then two years ago everyone started talking about an Uber monopoly and I got super upset. Are we seriously seeing another industry ultra centralize due to technology?

But I'm beginning to suspect that this may be a massive miscalculation on the part of Uber and its investors. Maybe it _is_ a low margin, highly competitive industry and Uber will be remembered as that one company that subsidized everybody's rides for a few years until it just faded into the background.

<comment><USER3> > I have always looked forward to self-driving car networks

As great as that would be, those are still a decade away from common use, probably much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As others point out this isn't necessarily bad, but it does mean that Uber is extremely vulnerable. If we learned anything in the last bubble it was that attempting to bootstrap through the power curve is exceptionally susceptible to capital constraints. Back in the dot com days a number of 'baby telephone companies' that were building out their networks and spending huge amounts of money on laying out the infrastructure that was going to carry the traffic they would get _after_ their build out, meant that any cash crunch had this amazing multiplicative effect, which resulted in a massive implosion in practically no time (one customer I talked to in 1999 was putting the finishing touches on a $1.2M PO on Monday, and when we showed up for the meeting on Wednesday the doors were locked and the name of an attorney's office was there for questions. Later I found out they were negotiating additional funding and even though their business plan was "solid" once some other companies had gone under, everyone got too skittish to commit. They were already burning through cash to people who were putting in new fiber cables etc. They went upside down (more obligations than cash or revenue) on Tuesday and the bank sent the attorneys (and Sheriff) over to secure the assets before anyone could walk them out of the building that afternoon. Pilots have a term for crashes like this, its called "controlled flight into terrain" where basically right up until the last moment the pilot was flying the plane. So it can be with startups that right up until the day it isn't flying they are in control.

Its nice that if Uber does implode (not that they will) that only VC's will lose their money, of course Uber drivers will be out of their jobs as well but they hopefully won't be greatly finanically hurt. And of course a lot of employees that thought they were millionaires will realize that they aren't (been there, done that, got the t-shirt :-()

I hope at some point in the not too distant future we can get some more transparency on their financials. I really do consider them the poster child for the 'dynamic' economy (one where service suppliers and service demanders are paired in real time for a fee). If they can't make it work it will really call into question if it is even _possible_ to make it work.

<comment><USER6> The question is whether Uber is buying _anything_ of durable value with their billions. Dot-com companies were buying warehouse space, laying fiber, creating lock-in. Uber _might_ be running competitors out of business, but it's a business with low barriers to entry, and they're not really locking in customers or drivers.

They may claim to be building a moat, but to me it looks more like they're buying overpriced water.

<comment><USER5> Its a fair question. If I were to speculate I would say they were buying habits. Specifically transportation habits. The closest analogy in my own experience is telephone directories. For all of my early life experience there where printed and bound telephone directories which you consulted when you needed to find the telephone number of someone you wished to talk to. There was a very profitable business in selling ads in the commercially oriented pages.

Google search changed that, over time it became easier to find a phone number online than it was in the books. Then with the smart phone it combined both the phone and the number database (search engine) into a single device and now very few people use phone books.

But that habit changed slowly, over a decade at least to go from early adopters to the majority of people out there using their phone (or the web) to look up numbers. So the habit for calling a cab is changing slowly. From regulated livery service to less regulated ride share service. During that transition Uber is apparently "spending" billions[1] to connect in peoples brains 'Uber' and 'rideshare' so that as ride sharing becomes the expected norm, people will think of it as Uber not "any number of ride share companies."

[1] It is an odd definition of spend, they are perhaps purposely under pricing their service (so subsidizing) in order to encourage use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Presumably this is intentional -- Uber could raise prices and make more money, but right now they're choosing to keep prices very low in order to undercut Lyft and the cab companies with the assumption that having a monopoly will return more profits in the future.

At least anecdotally, here in SF Lyft is almost always more expensive than Uber.

<comment><USER8> I tried Lyft the other day, but after they charged me $25 as an "authorization hold" without notification, I cancelled my ride and decided to stick with Uber. Note that Uber's auth charge is usually around $1. $25 may not be a significant amount for some, but it's non-trivial for a college student like myself.

I would have been happy had they just notified me first instead of my bank. Terrible UX to be frank. I actually got in contact with Lyft support on Twitter, but they did not care and just claimed that it was "standard policy".

<comment><USER9> A $25 hold for a fare that might be $15 doesn't sound unreasonable? Is ride- sharing that big of a cost for your day to day?

<comment><USER10> When you're so broke that an extra couple of dollars will put you in overdraft territory, it's not reasonable.

At least they inform you in most hotels. I have not used Lyft - I would hope they do the same.

<comment><USER11> Not to sound rude but someone who's that short on cash might be better off going by public transit, walking, or using a bicycle.

<comment><USER8> I use public transport for my daily commute. I use Uber for shopping 2 or 3 times per month, and only on the way back. I think it's tough to save more than that.

Any tips would be appreciated of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sincere question: what protects Uber from competition enough to imply huge profits in the future?

Network effects don't seem that strong. People will download an app to save money, and drivers will download an app to make money. It doesn't cause any major inconvenience.

In fact, it seems like a market that may approach perfect competition in a matter of years. There are only two companies now because there are only two companies willing to lose money. After they start making money, that could change quickly.

<comment><USER13> Self driving cars change everything.

<comment><USER12> Can you be more specific? Their self-driving tech is worth $70B?

If it's the combination, then I still don't quite get it. Wouldn't any good self-driving tech pretty easily adapt to ride hailing?

Let's say it's a best case for Uber: there are only few self-driving techs out there, and Uber is one; and they dominate ride hailing, and start turning a profit. Couldn't another self-driving tech company snap up Lyft and bundle in the ride hailing, too?

<comment> alex- I think a lot of people see todays taxi company being tomorrows ground transport ruler, once self driving cars are ubiquitous.

The theory being less people will own cars. The savings made on storage/parking, fuel and maintenance will be greater than paying for individual rides (with no labour costs).

The car manufactures would no longer be the company the consumer interact with. i.e. How much does the average consumer care if they are picked up in a Lexus or a Toyota for the average ride?

This would put the car manufacturers in competition for the taxi companies business commoditizing the car industry.

Who knows what will happen? Maybe regulation will prevent self driving cars becoming ubiquitous? or maybe some advance in manufacturing makes it much cheaper to own self driving cars.

But speculation that Uber pulls this off is the only way that I can see how Uber is worth over $60Bn (more than ford $50Bn ish, GM $50Bn ish, Nissian $45Bn ish) while making a $0.8Bn loss on $1.7Bn revenue - as a gamble for what might end up owning a $400Bn+ market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Off-topic - but currently in India and the uber experience is absolutely amazing.

The handful of times we have used taxi drivers, none of them can find the place where we are staying even with written directions in english and in hindi or even with a hindi speaking person instructing them via the phone. There is always some niggle over pricing and whatever you pay them they claim you are shortchanging them.

With uber they go to the right place EVERY TIME, there is no haggling at all, they dont try to angle for tips but are very grateful if they get tipped. It is a complete gamechanger for travel in these areas.

<comment><USER15> In Boston it's practically the opposite experience. Cabbies almost always know exactly where I'm going and the fastest way to get there, because they've logged the hours necessary to learn Boston's confusing street system. Uber drivers are usually flipping between at least 2 GPS systems, and frequently get lost, confused, and turned around. The rider experience has really dropped off now that any Joe can make a few bucks as a part-time Uber driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The runway is finite. They have about ~5B in cash on hand and are losing ~3B per year. They are putting on the spending brakes somewhat but revenue will have to take off for their valuation to make sense.

They've already said no more dilution, so that limits new sources of financing. Tick-tock.

</comment><comment><USER17> Has there been a startup in recent history that was losing this amount of money per year (planned or not) that ended up going green and successful?

<comment><USER18> Side note, profitability is generally described as "into the black" not the green. Amazon is probably the best example, their GAAP losses totalled several billion dollars for a decade or so before they flipped the switch.

<comment><USER19> That completely got me. I thought he was talking about green technology which did not make much sense to me. Didn't realize he was talking about profitability.

<comment><USER18> Yeah it's usually clear what they mean with "into the green" but a thread about electric vehicles definitely makes that confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Uber is making the rest of us in SV look terrible.

1\. Collect a huge pile of money at sky-high valuations from those who really should know better.

2\. Ignore any sensible unit economics and undercut local taxi/transport services until those small businesses go bankrupt since they don't have Uber's money pile.

3\. Evade local regulations that everyone else follows in the name of 'innovation' even though the reality is they are just taking a free pass on conducting background checks, and skipping safety guidelines.

What's the endgame here? When they replace all taxis, do they really think they can just permanently ignore all driving laws?

<comment><USER21> Huh? What's the end game?

The end game is a company with self driving cars, having SIGNIFICANTLY less overhead than they currently do with human drivers. And, probably a ton of technology patents to boot?

Yea, they're definitely a brazen company, but do you really expect anything less from a unicorn company? Very few make it this big without cutting some corners, having some connection, etc.

<comment><USER22> Self driving or driverless? I don't see any significant savings for self- driving cars, you still need to pay the person and you have the significant added expense of fleet maintenance. Not to mention liability concerns, unless they plan in passing that off onto the 'drivers'.

Driverless cars on the other had and still decades away, whether the tech is ready or not. Society is not yet at a place that will allow the use of full driverless vehicles on public roads. It doesnt matter how much statistically better a driverless car is than a human, every single accident will be magnified. Driverless cars could be our first foray into truly autonomous robotics within the general public, it is not something that will occur lightly.

<comment><USER23> For established tech and car companies, both Uber and Florida have basically no rules about testing and implementation of autonomous vehicles. Essentially the only rule is 'don't make us look bad, guys'.

Google is a league ahead of the competition with their Autonomous OS, and they're getting close to implementing robotaxis commercially in limited capacities. However, Chris Urmson, ex CTO of the self driving project doesn't think they'll be able to go everywhere a human can for ~30 years.

Uber's autonomous program is looking pretty sketchy at the moment, but now that they have Anthony Levandowski to play Darth Vader to Kalanick's Emperor Palpatine, the project is in capable hands.

Uber's robotaxis need only augment their human network of drivers through the mid-term, and as the capabilities of their Autonomous OS improves they take over more responsibility. Still, this is capital intensive and it'll be still be many years before autonomous vehicles have any measurable effect on Uber's bottom line, and even then, Uber will still be facing competition from other companies with robotaxi networks in development, including but not limited to GM/Lyft/Cruise, The Tesla Network, Waymo, Zoox, and any Automaker willing to license from the Mobileye/Delphi/Intel partnership.

Uber is currently playing hardball with the California DMV, in some sort of attempt at asserting their dominance over the law. I'm not sure if they've got some kind of legit strategy here or not, because I'm skeptical they'll have as much luck leveraging popular public support against regulators in the Autonomous Vehicle space with as they've had in the taxi industry.

It's also an inevitability that Uber's labour will organize for better bargaining power. Legislators seem to side with drivers as 'employees' rather than 'contractors' in the few regional cases that have made it through the courts.

Nonetheless, these incomplete financial reports that have been leaking out make it easy to spin a negative narrative about Uber's future prospects. That narrative may be on the mark, but we can't know for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My understanding is that in mature markets, Uber is profitable. The issue is that it takes a few years to become profitable in a market and so it's extreme growth pushes out profitability on the whole for a few years

<comment><USER25> Not before destroying any competition with cripplingly low rates. That's the problem: I can't hail a goddamn taxi anymore, despite it being cheaper by any back of the envelope calculation for society as a whole.

<comment><USER26> > despite it being cheaper by any back of the envelope calculation for society > as a whole.

Can you explain this? Not challenging, just curious.

<comment><USER27> The gig economy is going to be terrible for society, everyone is a couple of bad reviews away from the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> With finances like this, Uber will either collapse in a gigantic, money-fueled fireball, or decimate transport. How long can everyone hold out?

<comment><USER29> Next, Uber will raise enough money to boil the ocean. Now their self-driving trucks can go from continent to continent, completely obliterating the container shipping business!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> OH! This explains why they're in so big a rush for self-driving cars that they can't even be bothered to stop at red lights...

<comment><USER31> Wasn't it clarified that the incident was caused by the driver and not the software?

<comment><USER30> That's Uber's claim, but given their behavior over the years, I see no reason to believe them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Uber: the worlds fastest growing charity.

<comment><USER33> So others in this thread are calling it venture capital subsidized transportation.

Why does the idea of venture capital charity seem so hilariously backwards?

<comment><USER32> Because VCs are using investor money and their investors are looking for a return. Someone along the line will be pissed off of their investments don't pay off.

Burning up $800m to subsidise an app with the justification of "market share" decades before self driving vehicles become the norm is totally fine by me, as long as it's not my money being incinerated.

<comment><USER33> I use Uber. I like cheap rides. Probably not going to invest, but maybe we shouldn't speak too loudly about this.

<comment><USER32> I'm with you on that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> After the tens of articles outlining Uber's bad business practices I've been trying to use other apps as much as I can. What's amazed me is how many drivers on Lyft and the like are former Uber drivers who left the service. I'm sure that they've been able to replace those drivers but I wonder if they'll he able to keep this up for the time it takes to introduce self driving cars. I suspect not.

</comment><comment><USER35> People keep forgetting that Uber didn't have first mover advantage: Lyft did. UberX came after Lyft, but Uber beat Lyft in execution and strategy.

</comment><comment><USER36> Here's what I'm not understanding about Uber. There' nothing they provide that couldn't be cloned. It's clear there's no way to grow into profitability so once the VC subsidies go away Uber will have to significantly raise prices to survive, putting them in the same price range as traditional car services. At that point, what's to stop Yellow Cab from creating their own Uber clone and eating Uber's lunch?

<comment><USER37> Well, Yellow Cab could hardly even get credit payments to work in their cabs, so they are not exactly a technology company. It's not going to be easy for a cab company to clone what Uber (or lyft) have built during the last 7 years. Plus Uber has a network of drivers/users that has significant value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Speculating Uber's future is just a silly as speculating the NFL draft. The better question is - how do you provide as much value as Uber?

</comment><comment><USER39> The biggest beef I have with Uber is that they went from a transparent price calculation to an opaque (and basically always more expensive rate).

So I always write back to their support team and they usually refund the extra charged money, but it's tiring to have to do this for every long trip I make with them.

(I'm talking about Uber in Mexico City).

</comment><comment><USER40> Hopefully this means they won't be around for much longer. I will not miss them when they're gone.

</comment><comment><USER41> There is so much irrationality in this thread and in public opinion in general... it makes we wish I could personally bet on Uber's future success.

However, Uber is staying private, so they don't have to cater their long term plans to the whims of random people who have no idea what they are talking about. (I include myself in this category)

</comment><comment><USER42> So what's "net revenue" in this context?

I always thought revenue was income before costs, and profit was revenue minus cost. Gross revenue would make sense as "total income", but net revenue doesn't make any sense to me. Clearly I'm missing something.

Can someone explain?

<comment><USER43> In this context it is revenue after drivers' fees but before anything else, ie HQ, R&D, payroll, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Also on track to have the first self driving car AND a ride hailing application to boot. That can't be cheap.

<comment><USER44> I don't know how people get this impression, unless it is by only reading the comments on this site and never reading any primary sources. Uber's "self- driving" tech is currently unable to do things that other companies were doing years ago. Google's car took a blind man to Taco Bell in 2012. Uber's car has two engineers in the front seat and still blows stop lights and can't make a right turn.

<comment><USER21> Yea, Google drove a blind man to Taco Bell in 2012 and still hasn't released a self driving car 4 years later.

Meanwhile, Uber's been in the self driving car business half that time? They already looks more likely to actually have these things on the road, and, they have the incentive, and cash pool to do it.

Another reason people "get this impression" is that Google has a history of interesting projects that never made it to market. Waymo gives me more confidence, but I'm still skeptical.

<comment><USER44> I don't understand how Uber "looks more likely to actually have these things on the road" when Google's cars have been driving people around Mountain View for years. Please explain.

<comment><USER45> He probably means as a wide release.

I also believe Uber will probably go wide first because the risk (people get injured, they possibly go down in flames from legal issues) is worth the reward (they have a chance of surviving as a business by automating human drivers out of the equation).

Google has money falling out of their ears and will do a wide release when it's boringly safe.

I much prefer companies waiting until it is boringly safe but I don't think that's compatible with the money fire Uber has built.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Economies of scale guys. Lose a bit in every transaction but make up for it in scale.

They're dead.

</comment><comment><USER47> RIP Uber. Imo it will be gone in less than 24months.

</comment><comment><USER48> How can they make so much money while also losing so much money?

Isn't it just an app with some staff and lawyers? Where did all the money go?</comment>


Ask HN:  Anyone know how to get a hold of Yodlee? - <AUTHOR>

I called and left a message with their main phone line, submitted an information request through their online product request form (both about 2 weeks ago), and emailed the contact on the news release for their new Developer API (emailed on Monday).  If anyone has experience getting a hold of them I would appreciate any tips or references.  Maybe it's just a matter of waiting?  Thanks in advance! <comment><AUTHOR> Finally got a hold of someone. Disregard!</comment>


WillWorkFor - <AUTHOR> http://willworkfor.org

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting idea with a _horrible_ landing page.

But right now it's just profiles of three (interesting) people. Their messages and vision are great, definitely something I could get behind, but there's nothing there to engage in discussion, encourage others, or really give the site a purpose beyond "showing off the efforts of three people."

It's a portfolio. With a really bad landing page.

<comment><USER3> >> Meet Ani, Claire and Reed, three characters who could almost be real

Are they actually profiles of three people? That copy suggests otherwise. I'm as confused as everybody else as to what the point of this is.

<comment><USER2> Oh, good point. Hmm..... Well, if they are not real, then it seems even more pointless. Yeah, color me confused.

I get/like the idea of trying to engage people in conversation about important social issues and technology, which is what I thought the site is trying to do (just doing it quite horribly)..... but I'm really not so sure now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

"Most unreadable web page seen in a month"

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say that it's unreadable, but I have no idea what it's trying to _say_.

<comment><USER4> No it's actually unreadable. Half the text is super low contrast.

<comment><USER6> Hover over some low contrast text and you'll see what they're trying to do, although it is not obvious and probably not mobile-friendly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks cool, and the message is something I can get behind. Only, what is the purpose of the site?

I'm asking honestly. Is there a product somewhere? A mailing list? A forum? What am I supposed to do?

<comment><USER8> One of the firms behind the site calls it "a design provocation intended to spark a reaction and fuel a conversation" on their Tumblr.

So I guess you're supposed to react and start talking.

<comment><USER9> i.e. troll, basically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this supposed to be a joke. It seems like there are numerous grammatical errors. I feel like it's a joke that I'm not getting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Will work for: less confusing landing pages

</comment><comment><USER12> There are some vaguely cool ideas, themes and concepts here, but what is it really for? Why should I use this, what can I do with it? And why doesn't the prominent search bar do anything?

</comment><comment><USER13> I think I get it, sort of.

Use the search bar at the top, type in something (or choose one they rotate), then facebook post or tweet it out, and it'll spread their message, and indicate to them (and everyone) that you're willing to work for (better health, food, money, whatever).

Pretty undiscoverable functionality, imo.

<comment><USER9> So, click a button and tweet one of their messages as if it's not basically free advertising?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> wat</comment>


SpaceX Advances Goal of Becoming Trusted, Long-Term Military Launch Provider - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-advances-goal-of-becoming-trusted-long-term-military-launch-provider-11597010973 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/D6QnD](https://archive.vn/D6QnD)</comment>


40G encrypted container networking with Calico/VPP on commodity hardware - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/fd-io-vpp/getting-to-40g-encrypted-container-networking-with-calico-vpp-on-commodity-hardware-d7144e52659a <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I am part of the team working on this, although not directly involved. AMA.</comment>


When Dickens met Dostoevsky - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is a tour de force of detective work. If you're going to read it, make sure you get past the point where the author says, "Having read my share of crime fiction..." That's where things really get going.

It is also cleverly written. The author tracks down his target with devastating precision, but by itself that story would be dry. But he turns up so many curiosities along the way—such as the journal that asks its subscribers to glue one article on top of another—that the piece is a scrollwheel-turner after all.

Edit: but the "erotic" bits are gross.</comment>


Oracle v. Google - A Last Minute Present to Google from the USPTO - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20111223193332457 <comment><USER2> Would anyone care to give some context for this?

<comment><USER3> A monopoly status quo company patents something completely ridiculous in the hope that no other company can ever get ahead of them in the same product spectrum, and then later attacks another company, which earlier refused to become their customer and instead boldly built their own database products, which is why they conquered the world, at which point the monopoly company realizes it's way too late to save their monopoly already on the path of irreversible self-destruction.

Less dramatic version: <http://www.google.com/patents/US6192476></comment></comment>


Philosophical quest for our biggest problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_on_our_biggest_problems?language=en

<comment><USER2> What software that we write today, or even over the course of our entire lives, will still be in use ten thousand years from now?

</comment><comment><USER3> The public died.</comment>


Exploration of the Google PageRank Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://googledrive.com/host/0B2GQktu-wcTiaWw5OFVqT1k3bDA/ <comment><USER3> This is way too complicated!

How about an easy explanation, one that a middle- or high-schooler who just learned to solve 3-equations and 3-variables and has seen probability can understand?

Let's say you have three websites: Reddit, Yahoo, and Google. Let's say Reddit links to Yahoo and Google, and Yahoo links to Google, and Google links to Reddit.

If you start on a random page and click randomly, what happens? You'll land on Reddit with probability x, Yahoo with probability y, and Google with probability z. Notice that if you continue clicking randomly, x, y, and z will stop changing after a while.

Okay, now stop clicking. How likely are you to have landed on page Google? (i.e., What's z?)

\- You're on Reddit with probability x, and 1/2 of the links there will take you to Google.

\- You're on Yahoo with probability y, and 1/1 of the links there will take you to Google.

\- You're on Google with probability z, and 0/1 of the links there will take you to Google.

Therefore, z = x(1/2) + y(1/1) + z(0/1)

Similarly, x = x(0/2) + y(0/1) + z (1/1)

Similarly, y = x(1/2) + y(0/1) + z (0/1)

Since x + y + z = 1, we get: x = 2/5, y = 1/5, z = 2/5

What does that mean? It means Reddit and Google are twice as "important" as Yahoo, since you're twice as likely to land on them.

There, we just learned how PageRank works with zero linear algebra business.

<comment><USER4> Nonetheless, linear algebra is the way it's done for real applications. It's how the literature treats the subject as well, so it's important to understand. This tool helps for that goal, so I'm glad it's there.

<comment><USER3> In a real application, you don't even know the transition probabilities to begin with, so actually performing the computation is the least of your worries -- the first problem is coming up with numbers, which wasn't mentioned. :)

So I feel that if the goal is to give a conceptual understanding, linear algebra is overkill. If the goal is to show how it's done in practice then this isn't terribly useful since it doesn't even show the tip of the iceberg!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey wfunction

I believe we know exactly what the matrix is, based on the hyperlink structure itself. It's updated and displayed on the vis here based on that, too.

btw, David Austin's article on PageRank is highly recommended : <http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-pagerank>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I made a similar example a few years ago. It even works in IE6!

<http://williamcotton.com/pagerank-explained-with-javascript>

<comment><USER6> Thanks & even great music you make!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome if you actually want to understand the linear algebra behind it.

A useful paper is also Bryan and Leise's The $25B Eigenvector, The Linear Algebra Behind Google.

<comment><USER8> Love me some power method :) I was amazed when studying it in numerical analysis, and the professor showed us how this works in the real world (Google).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else just getting a 404 "We're sorry, but you do not have access to this page." error?

<comment><USER10> Yup. If you google the URL you'll get the cached version though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What does G signify? I'm a bit confused as to why taking its eigenvector gives you the pagerank vector.

<comment><USER12> In essence, pagerank sorts pages by the probability that you'd arrive at them by randomly following links form other pages.

G is a matrix of transition probabilities - each entry is the probability of moving directly from a particular page to another particular page. It is composed of 3 terms:

\- the hyperlink matrix: the probabilities obtained by assuming a user randomly selects a link to follow from their current page, with an equal probability for each

\- the dangling nodes matrix: to ensure that it is possible to leave every page, this adds an equal probability for moving from a page with no outgoing links to every other page

\- the matrix U of all ones: this provides G with 2 desirable properties, by ensuring it is both irreducible/strongly-connected and aperiodic. It does this by making it possible to move from any page to any other page, with some small probability (exactly how small is determined by the damping factor d).

The pagerank vector represents the equilibrium probability distribution - <USER2> other words, the probability of being on a particular page after starting on a random page then spending a long time randomly moving between pages according to the probabilities in G.

Now, if at a given time your probability of being on each page is given by some vector X, the probability of being on each page after one random move is the transition matrix multiplied by X.

The equilibrium probability vector thus has the property that it is unchanged by multiplication by the transition matrix - it is therefore an eigenvector of the transition matrix, with an eigenvalue of 1.

Edit: After typing this, I see that explanatory hypertext appears when you mouse over the blue words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interested in more of the mathematics behind the algorithm? I implement and prove things about it on my website: [http://jeremykun.com/2011/06/18/googles- pagerank-a-first-att...](http://jeremykun.com/2011/06/18/googles-pagerank-a- first-attempt/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who may come across this, I have added some extra stuff to let you watch how the power method converges (or doesn't converge) to the PageRank vector. Just click the "Explore Convergence" button over there where the PageRank vector is written out.

</comment><comment><USER14> As old as this algorithm may be, it's still relevant/useful in many practical applications. It's crazy to think that these small examples on here scale to gigantic data sets, especially as each PageRank gets updated.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty cool. I'm playing around w/ different backlink structures. It seems if you link back to a tier 1 link, it will boost your PR. Is this true in practice?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Mike - can you give me some details on the examples you're playing with? If I get around to it, I was going to see about including some canned examples to maybe show/disprove how things like that work (at least with this version particular of the algorithm). The inclusion of the dangling nodes matrix and that extra all-ones one can make it trickier to predict what will happen.

<comment><USER15> I built a basic pyramid and then tinkered w/ variations from that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Mike. I've been playing with small networks as well (partly to confirm things working correctly) - wrote up a few notes on one little one with slightly counter-intuitive behavior - [http://www.nowherenearithaca.com/2013/05/google-pagerank- eva...](http://www.nowherenearithaca.com/2013/05/google-pagerank-evaluating- simple.html)

<comment><USER15> That's interesting!

Sadly, it does remind me of how much math/engineering I've forgotten since I graduated.

Are you still a student?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Mike

thanks for taking a look at that. Linear algebra/eigenvector/eigenvalue stuff is useful and usually fairly (re-)approachable.

I am a student of interesting things :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Try deleting all the Nodes with DEL

When deleting the last one it crashes (tested in FF and Chrome)

<comment><AUTHOR> thx - think I fixed that the other day.</comment></comment>


Travel like the Jestons with the hoverbike - <AUTHOR> http://www.trendslate.com/2011/06/11/jetson-like-transportation-with-hoverbike/

<comment><USER2> More details in yesterdays submission, with much discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2640972></comment>


Linux-insides: Introduction to deferred interrupts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides/blob/master/interrupts/interrupts-9.md

<comment> vezzy-fnord The "Linux Insides" book is a great effort, however I consider it to be of relatively limited use for conceptual understanding. It's more an annotated tour of the source code, read out in a literal fashion. Probably quite useful for aspiring kernel hackers to get acquainted with key data structures and subsystems, but not much in the way of _a priori_ knowledge.

The LWN kernel index ([https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/](https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/)) has always been much better at bridging the source code and the theory into good technical articles.

<comment><USER2> I think the author wrote this series of articles to better understand the kernel source code himself, an effort that I praise. It is probably the same reason why most of us write blogs: our articles are much more interesting to write than to read. The fact that somebody can find the "Linux insides" articles useful is mostly a welcome side effect, not the original drive that put them into existence. Again, this is only my personal understanding of the author's intention, which I admire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because turning them into messages (like Minix does) is too hard... /s</comment>


Making Google+ like Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/07/26/making-google-like-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Awesome work! A lot of people have written about the need for something like this (including me <http://bit.ly/nngbKc>). Hopefully GOOG is listening. Kudos, and thanks for releasing it.

<comment><USER3> There are a number of browser extensions out there that do this. G+Me and gpMin to name a couple.

Note: I wrote gpMin.

Edit: I hope that didn't come across as condescending or short. I just wanted to let you know there are a number of good extensions already out there that will do what you're looking for and provide extra benefits.</comment></comment>


Scientists find eternal Nile to be more ancient than previously thought - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-11-scientists-eternal-nile-ancient-previously.html <comment><USER2> The ancient Egyptians had it so easy. It's probably as close to the garden of eden as you can get.

Every year, the Nile would flood, bringing in rich alluvial deposits.

All the farmers would have to do is to sow seeds on there plots and then let the pigs trample it under the soil. No ploughing necessary.

While the crops grew, basically untended, many of the farmers were paid (no it wasn't slaves) to build the many public monuments, pyramids, temples facades obelisks etc.

There are even records of workers going on strikes if they didn't like their work conditions.

The narrow Nile valley was also really easy to defend, which preserved Egypt from invaders for most of its dynastic history.

<comment><USER3> Maybe.

Or maybe the existence of huge monuments is a sign that someone was somehow extracting an awful lot of work from other people. Who presumably didn't do it just for their own amusement.

Maybe the builders got paid. But if they did, the tax money they got paid with sure didn't reproduce itself spontaneously in the king's basement. More likely the tax collector had some nice men with pointy implements to encourage everyone to file on time.

<comment><USER4> You don't always need physical pointy implements to achieve this, as a lot of religious buildings in different points in time show. Sometimes the threat of eternal damnation is enough. Remember that the pharaos in ancient Egypt did have a religious significance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rivers can sometimes feel like surface-level details, but it's surprising how ancient they can be. One of my favourite geographical factoids is that the Amazon and the Congo are thought to have once been part of the same river system in the supercontinent of Pangaea more than 100 million years ago, with the Amazon part then flowing east to west and emptying into the Pacific.</comment>


VCs mistake diversity for a new asset class - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-investments-breakingvi/breakingviews-vcs-mistake-diversity-for-a-new-asset-class-idUSKBN23J31O <comment><USER2> So VC solutions is a "separate but equal" funding path with a separate but unequal pool of money? Great job guys, awesome innovation to respond to this issue.</comment>


My Favourite Things - <AUTHOR>

When you've got music from The Sound of Music stuck in your head, and you dont know why - you expand upon it. This is what I came up with, what can you come up with?<p>(To the tune of "My Favourite Things")<p>Webapps and music and playing with gizmos, Caffeine and tech news and scifi on Tivo, Coding at midnight and hot spicey wings, These are a few of my favourite things. <comment><USER2> One TB hard drives and ripping a CD, killing noobs in Quake and saying OH EM GEE, thinking I'm leet and txting on cellphones, these are a few of my favourite things.

<one more of those, I can't think of anything else>

When the host fails, when the server dies, when I can't code, I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don't feel so bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ruby and Smalltalk and dynamic runtimes, Emacs and shell scripts and UNIX command lines, Macros and lambdas and networking pings, These are a few of my favorite things.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you like messing around with songs, take a look at these: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/bouts-complete-song- parodies...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/bouts-complete-song- parodies.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> How do you get "The Sound of Music" music stuck in your head?

<comment><USER6> Listening to <http://www.sky.fm/soundtracks/>, perhaps. Their library isn't huge, but it's still fun.</comment></comment>


New Safe Memory Reclamation Feature in UMA - <AUTHOR> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2020-January/019866.html <comment><USER2> For uninitialized out there:

 _Exploiting UMA, FreeBSD 's kernel memory allocator (2009)_ has a nice background description

[http://phrack.org/issues/66/8.html](http://phrack.org/issues/66/8.html)

Here's the API:

[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uma&sektion=9](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uma&sektion=9)

</comment><comment><USER3> UMA is the slab allocator in FreeBSD.</comment>


Evidence of brine 'flows' on Mars: water study - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-09-evidence-brine-mars.html <comment><USER2> Current discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290793)</comment>


Ask HN: Itunes API help - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
we're working with iTunes API using this gem
https://github.com/dewski/itunes
And here's the code we're using:
search = "#{self.album.artist_name} #{self.track_name}"
        puts "Searching for '#{search}'"
       itunes = ITunes::Client.new

        response = itunes.music(search,:entity => 'song', :limit => 1)
sometimes it happens that we can't find a player even if the song it's present in iTunes, for example
Nosaj Thing - Eclipse / Blue (feat. Kazu Makino)
doing a search in iTunes from my iPhone for " Nosaj Thing Eclipse/Blue " (no space between the / ) it gives me the right player, using the API it doesn't work. <comment><USER2> I think that a better place to post this question is stackoverflow. They have an "itunes" and "itunes-sdk" tag. I don't know which is better for this.

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/itunes>

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/itunes-sdk>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, sorry you're right, thanks</comment></comment>


Google Allo vs. Apple iMessage vs. Facebook Messenger: How They Compare - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/4503176/google-allo-vs-imessage-vs-facebook-messenger/ <comment><USER2> Simple: Facebook Messenger won. End of story.

<comment><USER3> That seems unlikely to be the "end of story". I don't use any of those, but I use wechat heavily. It's about where the people you're talking to are.</comment></comment>


SolidOak, an IDE written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oakes/SolidOak <comment><USER2> I know people complain about the negativity on HN, so this is a minor nitpick. I have been an on-and-off Linux and UNIX user for a while, but ...

> It's just a standalone executable that will run anywhere without being > installed. See the Releases page for pre-built Linux x64 binaries (you need > Rust and GTK+ 3.10 or above installed).

Is this not contradictory? Granted, statically linking GTK, 2 or 3, must be ridiculous, but would this still be considered a standalone binary? Granted, I think this might be a variant of libc needs to link to and I am just confused, but I am curious what more knowledgeable people think.

Anyway, I am not dismissing this project though. It sounds very cool. I might give it a shot.

FYI to everyone, racer is also a core component of making Rust hacking on Emacs wonderful, from what I hear. I have yet to be Rustacean.

[https://github.com/phildawes/racer#emacs- integration](https://github.com/phildawes/racer#emacs-integration)

<comment><USER3> Well, that, and anywhere realistically means anywhere except the most widely- used operating system in the world. Of course, the dev has absolutely no responsibility to provide that, I just thought it was funny.

<comment><USER4> Why would you want to run an IDE on Android? Most of those don't even come with real keyboards!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Windows is not supported.... Sublime being on all platforms is what made it so huge. There are developers on WIndodws machines, and because they like it!

<comment><USER6> > There are developers on WIndodws machines, and because they like it!

Looks like there's no obstacles in getting this to run on Windows, GTK and all the other components behind this should run just fine on Windows. It just takes some effort from a Windows dev to set up builds and port whatever minor incompatibilities there are.

The problem with Windows is that non-Windows devs don't find supporting that platform pleasant (to put it mildly) and in my experience, there's a very limited number of Windows devs who actually contribute back to open source projects (this may be a cultural thing coming from a proprietary OS).

Additionally, supporting Windows is a bit painful because there isn't as much free tooling available, e.g. doing automated Windows testing in travis-ci is not an option AFAIK.

<comment><USER7> > ... there's a very limited number of Windows devs who actually contribute > back to open source projects (this may be a cultural thing coming from a > proprietary OS). > > Additionally, supporting Windows is a bit painful > because there isn't as much free tooling available, e.g. doing automated > Windows testing in travis-ci is not an option

I believe the second influences the first, plus the project maintainer needs to share the opinion that releasing on Windows is worth the inevitable project changes required to do so. I have seen more than my fair share of pull requests sit idle because "meh, can't be bothered".

Regarding the travis-ci item separately, I am hoping that the work that Vagrant is doing toward being able to provision fresh virtual machine instances on Windows will provide some hope. I do fully appreciate that just provisioning them isn't the whole story, but it's a major hurdle IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one thing which nags me about Rust is the amount of what seem like weird syntax choices, deliberately different from most popular programming languages.

See e.g. line 14 in [https://github.com/oakes/SolidOak/blob/master/src/ffi.rs](https://github.com/oakes/SolidOak/blob/master/src/ffi.rs) :

        let mut fds : [c_int; 2] = [0; 2];

Why not declare the array type as c_int[2]? And why use semicolons instead of commas?

There are enough such "wtf?" moments that it causes pause and a sense of weirdness while reading Rust code, if the reader is familiar with other C-like languages (which is not to say that Rust itself is C-like).

<comment><USER9> [0; 2] and [0, 2] are both valid in Rust, but mean different things.

[http://doc.rust-lang.org/reference.html#array-expressions](http://doc.rust- lang.org/reference.html#array-expressions)

I suggest learning the language before making an attempt to criticize it.

<comment><USER8> > I suggest learning the language before making an attempt to criticize it.

I will learn it.

I like the semantics of Rust, it's a thing which needed to be attempted. What I am suggesting is, that for a language to be popular and accepted in already existing communities, it should have as little syntactic differences from the standards already present in those communities (or more elaborate: that things with similar semantics should have similar syntax). This does not preclude adding both new semantics and new syntax to the language.

In this case, I think the "target audience" for Rust is the crowd already familiar with C and C++, and languages (which are in many cases superior to C and C++) with significant differences such as LISP, Haskell, Erlang are vastly less popular compared to C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript.

As a counter-example to my claim I recognize Python, which succeeded even if it was radically different and even today has some serious issues (for me, it is its performance and the GIL in CPython). IMO, it succeeded precisely because it was radically different than mainstream languages before it, so it didn't cause "mind crosstalk" issues you get when you encounter something which _seems_ familiar but actually isn't.

Of course, this is inconsequential, it really boils down to arguing about personal taste and preferences. And even if I am right, if the semantics of Rust become popular, I'm sure that a more C-like language will evolve from it (maybe called Crust? :D ). If I am wrong, Rust will live long and prosper as it is.

<comment><USER10> The syntax itself is such a low hurdle to learning the language it hardly merits complaining about, especially given how drastically the Rust core team has simplified the syntax of the language since its early days. It's not particularly arcane at all if you've ever used C/C++, Ruby, and perhaps any ML-family language (SML, OCaml, Haskell, F#) because Rust cherry-picks the best ideas from each of those languages.

Go is intended to be syntactically very C-like, you may find it more comfortable than Rust in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks pretty cool. It's nice to see there are working GTK3 bindings for Rust.

It'll be interesting to see how many IDE features will be implemented. Currently it seems like a distribution of NeoVim + directory tree + Racer (Rust Autocompletion).

</comment><comment><USER12> Tried to build it, seems the build is broken:

        error: could not find native static library `nvim`, perhaps an -L flag is missing?

.. guess I'll have a go at fixing this.

<comment><USER13> I think this means you don't have a dependency that Neovim needed to build. Make sure you ran the apt-get commands in the README.

<comment><USER12> I did indeed follow the README to a tee .. and on OSX .. so I'm still at a loss as to what may be wrong.

<comment><USER13> The specific build errors won't show because Cargo hides the output. Try cloning [https://github.com/oakes/neovim](https://github.com/oakes/neovim) and running `make libnvim` inside it. The errors you get should make it more clear what dependency is missing.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the tip .. looks like I've got something not quite right with my busted install, posting the details here in case any other HN users run up against it:

        Scanning dependencies of target stable-busted-deps
        [ 93%] Generating usr/lib/luarocks/rocks/stable-busted-deps
        PANIC: unprotected error in call to Lua API   (.../rust/neovim/.deps/usr/share/lua/5.1/luarocks/fs/lua.lua:3    68: cannot open /Users/fit2rule/.cache/luarocks/https___rocks.moonscript.org/manifest-5.1: No such file or directory)
        make[3]: *** [usr/lib/luarocks/rocks/stable-busted-deps] Error

.. seems like a conflict resulting from having lua5.2 installed alongside lua5.1 .. if I figure it out, I'll update.

Update: for reasons I don't understand, the manifest-5.1 file is .zip'ed up .. so:

        $ cd /Users/fit2rule/.cache/luarocks/https___rocks.moonscript.org/
        $ unzip manifest-5.1.zip

.. fixed the issue, and now libnvim can be built properly. Seems like there are issues with having lua5.2 and lua5.1 side by side as maintained by homebrew on OSX .. so if others run into this issue, there's the facts.

Update2: SolidOak still refuses to build, this time getting further but still reporting build failure:

        Compiling glib-sys v0.1.0 (https://github.com/oakes/rgtk#01b611cf)
        Build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...

EDIT: Never mind, I neglected to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH again in a new shell session, as per the README .. I'm now running SolidOak just fine and proceeding to use it to learn me some rust ... So .. leaving all the above for historical purposes ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really cool! I'll have to check it out later today.

Although, ahem, I expect that I'll just integrate Racer into emacs. :-)</comment>


Number of legal Go positions computed - <AUTHOR> http://tromp.github.io/go/legal19.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone try to count equivalence classes (after rotation or reflection) instead of raw board positions? To my mind, that would also be of interest if you want to know how many actually distinct game situations there are. I guess as a rough under-estimate you'd just divide the count by (4 rotations * 2 reflections)?

<comment><AUTHOR> That estimate would be equally precise and rough, in that the first 85 of 170 digits would all be correct.

Correcting the last 85 digits amounts to counting all positions with various symmetries, which would be as big an undertaking as computing L19, but a whole lot messier..

<comment><USER3> Sorry, but how did you compute this? Do you know that there are less than 10^85 board positions which have a symmetry?

<comment><AUTHOR> The bulk of symmetric positions are those with 180 degree rotation or reflection symmetry, and there are at most 3^{10x19} of those (I had mistakenly bounded it as 3^180). So it's actually less than 10^90, meaning that L19/8 is correct in the first 80 digits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I played very little Go a very long time ago, so I don't know this: could there be any legal positions that aren't reachable by any legal moves?

<comment><AUTHOR> No; you can reach any legal position by just playing all its stones and passing for the side that's done placing its stones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A note for the author and new readers:

L19 means "the number of legal positions for a 19x19 board".

cf. L18 which means "the number of legal positions for an 18x18 board".

L19 does NOT mean position L:19 on the Go board. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> The fact that the number of valid positions is 19 x 19 in base 3 is wild. You'd have to be almost dan-level to immediately recognize that the pic above isn't actually a real game.

<comment><USER7> There are only 3^289 possible configurations of pieces on the board, so the fact that the number of _legal_ configurations fits in a 289-digit ternary number is kind of trivial.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I'm surprised more comments aren't pointing this out. To spell it out further:

> the number of valid positions [of a game on a 19 x 19 board] is 19 x 19 in > base 3

This statement is true when replacing 19 with _any number_ , since the number of _legal and illegal_ configurations is exactly 3^(n*n).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I remarked elsewhere, what was more interesting to me was that the 2x2 board has hundreds of billions of games (assuming a superko, I suppose).

It's easy to recognize that there must be a lot of them, but hundreds of billions is absurdly fast growing. As another data point, the 2x1 board has 8 games.

<comment><AUTHOR> Table 7 on page 30 of our paper shows 9 games for 2x1. Did you forget the shortest game "pass pass"? The number of non-empty games is even, according to the color of the first stone played.

<comment><USER9> Yup, forgot pass-pass!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are billions of valid games on a _2x2_ board? Can anyone explain or link to something that explains how this is possible?

<comment><USER11> . . . . | B . . . | B . W . | B B W . | . . W W | B . W W | B B . . | B B W . | B B . B | . . W . | . B W . | B B W .

Loops are possible in a 2x2

<comment><USER12> Isn't it generally a rule that the game board can never be returned to a state it was previously in?

<comment><USER9> Generally the rule is that you can't return the board to the position it was last in, but some rule sets extend it to any position it was ever in to avoid a few pathological scenarios. Without this infinite loops can exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion at

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9167781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9167781)

<comment><USER13> That discussion is worth reading, but looking at the title of the HN article, it was about the earlier result for a 18x18 board.

This is a new result for the 19x19 board that appears to use the same URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To make sense of big numbers like this where any state is valid, I find it good to compare with cryptographic key sizes, so in case anyone else is wondering:

log_2(L19) = 565 bits

<comment><USER15> Chess is also a great game to compare against, since these numbers have been computed for chess many years ago.

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

10^43 is the approximate number of chess positions. In contrast, 19x19 Go has approximately 10^170 positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tromp's website is a treasure-trove of really cool things

</comment><comment><USER17> Although the determinate of that matrix = 0, and if it's conjugate transpose determinant is non zero then I wonder if all valid possible configurations on this board can be represented by a complex lie group?

Edit: did the work, it does, but too lazy to describe the group [https://gist.github.com/cinquemb/18e494348045725e2b60](https://gist.github.com/cinquemb/18e494348045725e2b60)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does this take into account the super ko rule? If so, seems a bit small.

EDIT: Never mind, no it doesn't.

<comment><USER19> Kos aren't relevant in any way when evaluating the validity of a board position. (They're only relevant when evaluating validity of move sequences.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Neat, is this sequence in OEIS?

<comment><USER21> Yes: [https://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C57%2C12675&sort=&language=engl...](https://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C57%2C12675&sort=&language=english&go=Search)

<comment><USER20> Cool! It looks like OEIS only lists terms up to n=14, but they seem to be getting them directly from the researcher who did the computation, so hopefully it will be updated in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> They couldn't fit more terms on the A094777 page, but it links to a more complete table at [https://oeis.org/A094777/b094777.txt](https://oeis.org/A094777/b094777.txt) which will soon be updated with the 19x19 result.

<comment><USER20> Congratulations on your results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this mean that a computer will soon be beating people at Go?

<comment><USER23> This result is not related to AI. However a new pro-vs-computer match has been announced today for February 6.

Japanese original [http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/event/area/other/post_704.html](http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/event/area/other/post_704.html)

Google translation [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/event/area/other/post_704.html)

The translation is pretty bad on technical terms. Obviously it's not about chess or shogi, but about go, and the "ten stage" should be the Tengen title, currently held by Ida Atshushi, the human player. I think this is the first time a Japanese title holder plays in one of these matches. It will be a 4 stone match. If the computer wins it should be at least 5 dan, maybe 6 dan (amateur scale). One should be at least 7 dan to be as strong as the weakest pros.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for clarifying amateur vs pro - it's easy to overlook the fact that dan levels are completely different when comparing amateur and pro. Is it that 7 dan amateur is roughly comparable to 1 dan pro?

<comment><USER25> 30kyu -> 1kyu (amateur)

1dan -> 9dan (amateur)

1dan -> 9dan (pro abbrev. to 1p -> 9p)

I think 8d ama can start to have competitive games with 1p or 2p... I mean they're getting into the same ball-park in terms of strength but averaged out over time a rank above _will_ beat a rank below, that's why they are in the ranks they are in after all :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone explain why factoring L19 is relevant?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. It's become a tradition, at least for counting legal positions in Go

2\. there are surprising similarities between the runtime complexities of dumb and smart algorithms for counting and factoring

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what's the smallest Go board such that the number of legal positions is a legal position?

(Not expecting an answer anytime soon.)

<comment><AUTHOR> My previous writeup of the L18 result at

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150310085851/http://tromp.gith...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150310085851/http://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html)

answers your question: "only L2, L3, L7 and L10 can be represented as legal positions themselves", graced with a picture of L10. L2=57 is 2010 in ternary, which looks like

        O .
        X .

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_title_holders_in_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_title_holders_in_Go)

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it's a legal position if the numbers spiral out from the center.

Or, more precisely, I'd be okay with any sort of "nice" arrangement of digits which made it work.

</comment><comment><USER29> as a benchmark it seems would be interesting to port this to java/scala and running it on a spark cluster, since it's map-reduce from the post (didn't look at the code) it should be possible I would think

</comment><comment><USER30> Why would anyone waste time calculating this? You may be curious, but you're not living to satisfy useless curiosity.

<comment><USER31> Hacker News' charter (from the guidelines): "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."</comment></comment>


Phaser/Angular/Electron Template - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tbosak/game-template <comment><AUTHOR> Easily create game UIs with HTML and CSS, organize Phaser canvases into responsive and flexible Angular components. Do this all in a stripped down basic Chromium-based browser to give the feel of a standalone executable.</comment>


Valuation Shell Game: the 409A valuation - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/business/dealbook/valuation-shell-game-silicon-valleys-dirty-secret.html <comment><USER2> The fact is that nobody can really know with certainty the true valuation of an early-stage company. Even venture investors just come to a negotiated deal and subsequent events often prove them wrong. That said, the definition of true value is probably whatever price is implied by a market deal between a willing seller and buyer both of which have access to all relevant facts and neither of which is under any compulsion to do a deal (so basically a venture capital transaction would qualify). The article correctly points out that valuation firms aren't market participants (i.e., actual buyers) so they are just doing their best to guess at a value--not establishing a value. The article also points to false precision--which most honest valuation folks agree to. They still have to do their best to come up with a defensible valuation but they recognize that it is just an educated guess. Finally the article points to the difference between common and preferred stock prices as if that is a scam. While you can definitely debate how close the two should be relative to each other, it's totally crazy (IMHO) to say that common should have the same value as preferred.

<comment><USER3> On Tuesday I spend a hundred bucks and start a Delaware LLC that has no assets and no business plan - what's the company worth? Most would say $0 or close to $0.

After breakfast on Wednesday I spend a couple hours on an abstract powerpoint deck, make a bunch of phone calls, and by dinner time (based on past successes and personal network) I have $1m in seed funds committed at a $5m pre-money valuation. What's the company worth then?

It's one of the best tax incentives out there, in that successful founders and very early employees usually pay long-term capital gains on near zero-basis stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couple of things that are not correct in the article:

(1) a $50,000 fee for a valuation is crazy- early stage companies pay less than 1/10th that.

(2) companies typically do not get a valuation done more than once per year. the article makes it sound like you get a new one every time you issue options, they actually have a shelf life of one-year, unless there is a new financing or other event that requires a new report to be obtained.

Not saying its a good system (it's not), just odd that the NYT would get some basic facts wrong.

<comment><USER5> The funny thing is that the author of this article is a former (longtime) investment banker. I found the line where he describes the lack of liquidity in private shares "falls especially hard on early investors who are not company employees, those so-called 'series A' or 'series B' venture-capital investors" especially amusing. As if we are supposed to feel more sorry for VCs who are diversified in many investments than employees who aren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We need an overhaul of private stock options in general. These shares sit at the bottom of the capital stack which means as that stack gets higher risks increase. The fact that someone needs to pay tax before these options are excerised is ridiculous. If the US wants to stimulate innovation they should stop gouging risk taking employees and focus their efforts on Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER7> We scam you with the 409a and you scam us with the AMT.

<comment><USER8> This is... Actually beautifully succinct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Getting a 409A did seem to be pretty dumb. It's just a super-expensive process to figure out how much taxes you have to pay on option grants. If the rules were just, a grant of startup stock doesn't get taxed until an IPO or acquisition, so you don't have to do options in the first place, that would be much saner!

</comment><comment><USER2> Btw, full disclosure I founded and sold Scalar Analytics, a valuation firm and am currently the CEO of Capshare.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article says that 409a valuations are imprecise, costly, and unnecessary tools that enable founders to prevent the secondary sale of company stock, and disenfranchise employees and early investors.

This is almost 100% hyperventilation.

I took to Medium to try and explain that 409a valuations are: a government- required, largely commoditized service; a consistent, objective approach to dealing with the uncertainty of startups; nothing more than the translation of the startup's underlying business fundamentals.

Link: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/startup-valuations-are-no- shel...](https://email@example.com/startup-valuations-are-no-shell- game-47e7c9c9595c#.8w370fkzs)

</comment><comment><USER11> This article is frustrating because it never mentions why low 409A valuations would be helpful to anyone. It seems to say the companies are benefiting from different 409A and investor valuations, but not why. Does it mean someone pays less tax or something?

<comment><USER9> If you give an option where the strike price is "the current fair value", the employee doesn't have to pay taxes. But "the fair value" is defined by the 409A. The company usually doesn't care about the strike price and would rather just give the employee as much value as possible. A low 409A is much better for the employee, a teeny bit worse for the company, and so companies just go for a low one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's pretty common knowledge that 409a valuations are underestimations of real value. What isn't well known is by how much. It would be great to see VCs with 20 years of data compare how much their preferred shares were worth vs of they had held common instead. Then again, publicly available data like that might invite an SEC crackdown. Be careful what you wish for.

</comment><comment><USER13> My understanding is the 409A is supposed to be a true valuation of the company, not of the shares. The price of shares sold to investors (probably with liquidation preferences, extra voting rights, maybe a board seat, etc) of course costs more than the company's value divided by number of shares.

<comment><USER7> 409a includes the valuation of the stock held, which is often discounted by "accepted discount factors" such as illiquidity discount and marketability discount. The latter being the fact that a common shareholder often has resale restrictions on their stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you are going to tax values of the shares then you have to decide _some_ price. What is the alternative? Using the last financing round is just as crazy and even easier to game.

<comment><USER9> A simple alternative would be to tax startup shares when they turn into real money, not when they are granted and all sorts of shenanigans are possible around their value.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. The current system is taxing eggs before they hatch into chickens. You're paying taxes on potential income rather than actual income. If the eggs break before they hatch -- too bad.

The weird thing is that if a stock loses value, you can't claim a deduction for the loss until that loss is actually realized, yet you can get taxed on shares before any gain is realized.

It's all Monopoly money until it becomes actual cash.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: OPML generator for following your starred GitHub project releases - <AUTHOR> https://opml.bb8.fun/ <comment><AUTHOR> Made this as a solution to [https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/410](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/410) (Warning: _very long thread_)

I was already using tiny-tiny RSS for other feeds, and since GitHub provides RSS feeds for releases, I thought I'd combine the two.

<comment><USER2> That's pretty neat. For my use case, a weekly digest would be enough though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the initial idea that I wanted to implement. There are some solutions in the linked GitHub issue, which might suit you.

Check gitpunch for eg.</comment></comment></comment>


GPG/PGP Basics - <AUTHOR> http://aplawrence.com/Basics/gpg.html

<comment><USER2> The reason why I never had a GPG/PGP key is that I don't know where to put my private key. It's an identity that's supposed to reliably identify you. In other words, it is you.

Computers can be hacked; cloud services are not trusted because they can easily access to it if forced by government or whatever. Could've use a passphrase but brute-force it is just a matter of time.

Burning into CD or store in USB stick and keep it safe in your house? What if it gets stolen? I feel like I need to use something like this: [http://worldsbestflashdrive.com/](http://worldsbestflashdrive.com/) but not sure how hard it is to brute-force it. Yes it "reset on multiple incorrect entries" but if you are targeted, people who try to hack it certainly will research the product first and won't be stupid enough to try multiple times to cause it "reset". It probably can only be a hassle for you when you forget your password.

The problem is that, once you published it, you can't regenerate a new one and claim the previous one invalid/compromised. That'll break the trust system. I guess the safest way is to memorize the private key in your brain just like some people memorize PI. Oh wait, what if you are hypnotized?

<comment><USER3> Use a smart card. After creating your secret key(s), you move them to the card (or you can create the key inside the card, so it is never seen by your PC). The card has no capability of exporting them so they will never be leaked. You can only wipe the card clean and start over. To further protect your PIN-code for the card, you can use a card reader with integrated keypad, which should work against most key-loggers.

For GPG you most certainly can invalidate a key, in fact, this is a crucial part of the key-generation and management process. Along with the public/private key pair, you also generate a key revocation certificate. The revocation cert can then be uploaded to the key-server in the case that your key gets compromised. A well behaving GPG-client will check the validity of the public keys in your key chain, and if it encounters a revocation key against the public key you are trying to use, it will then disable it and warn you.

For more, see: [http://g10code.com/p-card.html](http://g10code.com/p-card.html) and [https://www.crypto-stick.com/](https://www.crypto-stick.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> man, every time I want to give this another try the tremendous effort involved to even begin is off-putting.

Here Marge prepares her public key:

[marge@apl marge]$ gpg --armor --export firstname.lastname@example.com > mypk

To add Marges public key, Tom does this (he's saved the file as "margepk"):

[tom@apl tom]$ gpg --import margepk

[tom@apl tom]$ gpg --list-keys

[tom@apl tom]$ gpg --edit-key firstname.lastname@example.com

Command> fpr

Command> sign

[tom@apl tom]$ gpg --out secrets_to_marge --encrypt secrets

[tom@apl tom]$ ls -l sec*

[marge@apl marge]$ gpg --output secrets_from_tom --decrypt secrets_to_marge

And voila! "That's it. GPG is actually pretty simple, and nothing to get a headache over."

<comment><USER3> If you don't like the command line approach, you can use GUIs [1] like GNU Privacy Assistant or Cryptophane.

[1] [http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html#gui](http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html#gui)</comment></comment>


The Sleepy Geek - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesleepygeek.com A look at technology in my daily life. <comment><USER2> Thanks for the blog spam.</comment>


Congress Must Act After US Government Admits To Warrantless Wiretapping  - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/congress-must-act-after-us-government-admits-unconstitutional-warrantless <comment><USER2> There are two disconcerting trends I see in the NSA wiretapping fiasco independent of whether wiretapping is a good idea, a necessary evil, or a bad idea.

The first is the amount of effort it takes to get very basic level of information regarding NSA activities, even when those activities are known to exist. A "secret national security court"[0] determines whether the laws voted on by Congress are constitutional? Good information is paramount in developing good opinions. It would certainly be unwise to inform parties that have been wiretapped, but ballpark estimates of how many people are wiretapped and with what level of intrusiveness are necessary to really form an opinion.

Second, there is a surprising level of apathy on both sides. Of course most people would object to a secret court to resolve questions of government power, if asked, but no one seems to consider this a question worth debating. I see some editorials explaining that warrantless wire taps are an unfortunately necessary tool in modern law enforcement, but these seem to focus on explaining why the taps really aren't a huge deal, or why the airport scanners are not really invasive, but never why they are positive steps in the right direction, actions to be applauded.

These two properties combine in an unfortunate feedback loop: it takes an inordinate amount of effort to obtain reliable information on programs such as this, and without enough initial paranoia, few delve deeper. But without easy access to what's actually happening, it's hard for the non-paranoid to get upset: there's little to do other than to say "hey! the NSA might be wiretapping, we think, but we don't know who, and we don't know when and we don't know how many."

[0] WSJ: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044409790457753...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444097904577539413137490028.html)

<comment><USER3> Do you have an alternative source? The WSJ article is behind a paywall. :\

<comment><USER4> Try this:

[http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB...](http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444097904577539413137490028.html)

<comment><USER3> Just redirects to the paywall for me.

<comment><USER4> Weird, I've always had going through Google work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the past they sidestepped the law about spying on their own citizens by partnering with other nations, then swapping lists of people to monitor.

This was ECHELON. There were 5 nations involved: The US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

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

That was before 9/11. Why are people surprised that warrantless wire-tapping happens now?

<comment><USER6> This is because traditional media doesn't police this stuff for us anymore and the average person is too busy to keep up with these issues on their own. Most people have trouble just keeping up with their hobbies let alone politics.

<comment><USER7> This has been a weird week for personal privacy.

NSA insider reveals NSA has a file on ALL us citizens.

NSA admits to warrantless wiretapping.

NYTimes admits that all news orgs allow government censorship of media.

I mean, what kind of world do people think we really live in?

<comment><USER8> Once those things come true, stories like [http://www.stewwebb.com/GOP_using_Echelon_software_to_spy_on...](http://www.stewwebb.com/GOP_using_Echelon_software_to_spy_on_Americans_Nsa_bribing_media.htm) no longer seem so loony after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the probability of Congress actually doing something regarding this? Close to zero! Remember, these are the same fools that brought the US Government within days of not being able to pay its bills. These are the same fools who thought is was okay to have laws that banned trading off of insider information while effectively carving out a loophole for themselves. These are the same fools who will stand amongst union workers in a GM plant and villianize the banking system for taking bailout money so that the financial system doesn't fall apart but never mention that GM is one of those who also took money but has yet to pay it back. These people are nothing but self- serving swine. Don't expect them to do what is in the best interest of the American public.

EDIT: I am aware that certain provisions regarding Congressional insider trading have been closed; however, this did not occur until 60 Minutes raised the issue nationally.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the past I've felt cynical about these sorts of issues. Recently I went to Hackers on Planet Earth, a hacktivist conference, and left it with a sense of optimism: there are very, very smart people working on protecting our privacy, and recently their efforts are starting to come to fruition.

<comment><USER7> too little to late. We could take all the smart people and fund their work and give them minions for years and we would never get back what we have already lost.

<comment><USER11> But we might just manage to keep some of what we still have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The cynical side of me says that, while warrantless wiretapping is bad and the NSA will get a strongly-worded condemnation, not much else will come from this once the furor dies down.

</comment><comment><USER13> Every American citizen should know the 4th by heart. It protects us from "unreasonable search and seizure". When a government agent stops you (a police officer), you have the right to not consent to search. You should always exercise this right. It may seem like a harmless question when the agent asks, "If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look, right?", but it is not a harmless question, he is asking you to consent to a search and to give-up your constitutional right against such searches. Always say, "I do not consent to searches" and be polite to the agent. The agent may not place his hands in your pockets. He may not open your purse, and if he does these things, he's breaking the law as you have not consented.

<comment><USER14> > _"The agent may not place his hands in your pockets"_

Unless you live in NYC, in which case it's an explicitly condoned policy of the NYPD and the city government.

Most definitely unconstitutional, but since it's targeted exclusively at poor minorities, the odds of it ever it getting enough legal playtime is slim.

<comment><USER15> > The odds of it ever it getting enough legal playtime is slim.

I have some hope, since people have been fighting for years to repeal the heavily racially-biased 'open to public view' loophole in New York's marijuana laws, and Cuomo and Bloomberg recently voiced support for it (though it was right before the end of the session, so take that for what it's worth).

(For those not familiar with the loophole: in New York, possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana is a civil citation (think speeding ticket) and not a criminal offense. Despite this, NYC arrests more people per capita _and_ by volume for marijuana possession than any other city _in the entire world._

Why? Because having marijuana _either_ burning _or_ 'open to public view' is a Class B misdemeanor. So when the policeman says 'Empty your pockets for me; I know what's in there', he's essentially giving the victim an opportunity to incriminate himself for a misdemeanor that gets 90 days in jail, as opposed to a $100 fine with no arrest record[1].)

[1] Disclaimer: I'm actually not 100% sure how public the records for possession citations are; New York does this differently from Massachusetts, which passed a much more sensible law in 2008.

<comment><USER16> Holy entrapment, Batman!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is only one guaranteed solution to the problem of government wiretapping, and that is the concept of "privacy by design".

<comment><USER18> Which more or less translates into client-side encryption. Which some people here don't like, weirdly.

<comment><USER19> It's not weird, in fact it's perfectly logical. They have a vested interest in the proliferation of private information into the public space (the Internet), and -- more particularly -- that interest is financial.

If such private information were encrypted by default it would put a sizeable dent into their pocket book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if most of your communication is over GMail/Google talk/Skype/Facetime/etc, there isn't a way the feds could wiretap that without the cooperation of Google/Microsoft/Apple, and AFAIK, they will require a warrant.

<comment><USER21> You're more or less wrong.

1) You do not need cooperation of those services if you sit on the network in between the end-user and the service. We know that the NSA does.

2) Securing cooperation does not require a warrant. Information can be requested by the FBI using a National Security Letter, without a warrant, simultaneously collecting information while gagging the service provider from informing the customer their information was collected.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter>

3) Any person's communications can be wiretapped by court order from the FISA court, separate from our normal court system. The FISA court judges see only evidence from the Department of Justice, and no information about their hearings is ever released or even recorded. Between 1979 and 2009, the FISA court has only declined to issue a court order for surveillance 11 times out of thousands.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act)

<comment><USER20> 1) Facetime seems to be vulnerable to MITM wiretaps, but none of Google's services are transmitted in the clear anymore. Skype, afaik, is encrypted, as well.

2) Wikipedia says that "from 2003 to 2006 the bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests". That's a long shot from the mass surveillance affecting "millions of Americans" (from this article), or the NSA having "a dossier on every citizen" (recently here, as well).

3) Good point.

<comment><USER22> Each national security letter can request the records of thousands or even millions of customers. 200,000 requests can certainly encompass all Americans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You now live at the mercy of the government. It is an oligarchy. The rule of law is gone, as it does not apply to all.

It is time to leave. The writing is on the wall.

Beware normalcy bias. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias>

You must gather your possessions and your family, and move your business and self to another soverign state which respects its constitution and courts.

<comment><USER24> Suggestions?

<comment><USER25> Vote Ron Paul

<comment><USER26> Really? Wow that guy's a blithering idiot. This is the guy that let Bruno fool him. Your savior is the guy who wants to follow the Constitution by instituting libertarian ideology which has nothing to do with the Constitution (I mean come on, you can't just come out and see you want to take Constitution and burn it?).

Is your big concern really whether women are getting abortions? That's the guy that is going to save from the boogey man? I don't think you're safe either. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Excuse my ignorance, but what is the end-all be-all for internet privacy? Is there any configuration that would guarantee complete anonymity? All the possible solutions I've heard of (Tor, Freenet, etc.) have security holes which allow unmasking of the end-user.

<comment><USER28> I doubt it. In order for a message to reach you, the sender needs to know where to send it. And (in the USA) your ISP logs your IP address, so the feds always know who got the message.

<comment><USER11> The issues with things like Freenet are far more subtle than that. What you describe is easily addressed.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the best book about each country? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/best-book-country.html <comment><USER2> For Finland it's probably either Under the North Star (Täällä Pohjantähden alla) or The Unknown Soldier (Tuntematon Sotilas).

I don't think Sotaromaani, which is an uncensored version of The Unknown Soldier, has been translated to English.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_North_Star_trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_North_Star_trilogy) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Soldier_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Soldier_\(novel\))</comment>


New bill would prohibit FCC from reclassifying broadband as utility - ldd- http://www.pcworld.com/article/2303080/bill-would-prohibit-fcc-from-reclassifying-broadband-as-utility.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Translation: "Someone just paid me a lot of money."

Wouldn't enforcing neutrality be the most minimal form of regulation, where without that baseline it's impossible for some companies to compete?

It's not like declaring it a utility would mean, like in the days of AT&T, that Comcast would be required to put up pay internet terminals in the middle of the woods, no matter the cost, or lock in to a particular pricing structure.

</comment><comment><USER2> > Reclassification would heap 80 years of regulatory baggage on broadband > providers

Can anyone shed some light on what this baggage might consist of? I've heard rumblings that common carrier status might have unintended consequences, but I haven't actually seen them enumerated.

> imposing monopoly-era telephone rules and obligations on the 21st Century > broadband marketplace

Last-mile ISPs are usually local monopolies. I see a lot of handwaving here about regulating "the Internet" rather than specific classes of company.

Would Title II reclassification only involve consumer ISPs, or would it also affect backbone providers like Level 3?

> We support the efforts ... to codify current policy

A great tactic on both sides is to claim that you're fighting for the status quo, which works pretty well. The Net Neutrality argument is "let's fight to keep ISPs from selectively deprioritizing traffic because that would break the Internet." The other side's argument is "let's fight to keep government from interfering because that would break the Internet".

</comment><comment><USER3> Jeepers, our legislators really suck. You think utility regulation is too onerous, reform _that_. But trying to pre-empt the regulatory process (which involves exhaustive solicitation and categorization of public comment, unlike the legislative branch) is just pouring sand in the works. The government would function a lot better if Congress would let it operate instead of constantly trying to fine-tune it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm at a friend's house who has Comcast and I can't load any pages from pcworld.com, and [http://www.isup.me/pcworld.com](http://www.isup.me/pcworld.com) says it's just me. Hopefully that's just a coincidence...

<comment><USER5> Same here... I wonder what's up with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm tempted to refute his points, but it's not like anybody here doesn't get why "the internet economy" would be helped by neutrality. So I'll just sigh and vaguely wonder what it costs to buy a congressional representative these days.

<comment><USER7> If you'd like, there's also the option of kicking some money in for this: [https://mayone.us/](https://mayone.us/)

<comment><USER6> I'm already in! And excited by the emails I'm getting about the next stages of their plan. I am totally willing to try to buy our democracy back. I miss it.</comment></comment></comment>


Open Source Prediction Markets - $1,295 prize - <AUTHOR> http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2009/03/open-source-prediction-markets-1295.html

<comment><USER2> Uh, what?

Open Source is not powered by hype, it's powered by code. If you are just consuming it, you are doing it wrong -- you have the chance to mold the project to your needs, simply by contributing. There is no point in predicting the future; read the code, talk to the developers on IRC, and start contributing... then you _control_ the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this something like hubdub ? <http://www.hubdub.com/>

Don't think hubdub do actually have prizes in the form of classes/lectures/workshops, but it seems more "lively" in hubdub.

Edit: not affiliated with them

</comment><comment><USER4> The prize is just a free class - valued at $1295. Lame!</comment>