Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them - <AUTHOR> https://justinribeiro.com/chronicle/2019/01/31/tiny-pwas-and-why-i-keep-building-them/ <comment><USER2> When I first heard someone talking about "Progressive Web Apps" I thought they were talking about "Progressive Enhancement" [1].

Turns out doing a PWA is just basically about using the "Service Workers" API [2] and the practices around that.

This nice article does a lengthy trace on the origins of the "PWA" term [3]. The same guy that started the "Service Workers" spec in Github [4] created the PWA marketing campaign, apparently. Makes me wonder why he thought it was more marketable to sell this PWA idea more than the simpler and more direct message: "use Service Workers".

The PWA campaign also reminds me of the less successful "Offline First" campaign from a couple of years ago [5].

1: [https://alistapart.com/article/understandingprogressiveenhan...](https://alistapart.com/article/understandingprogressiveenhancement)

2: [https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/](https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/)

3: [https://medium.com/@amberleyjohanna/seriously-though-what- is...](https://medium.com/@amberleyjohanna/seriously-though-what-is-a- progressive-web-app-56130600a093)

4: [https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/tree/c49c878cdcbaf7a81e...](https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/tree/c49c878cdcbaf7a81e9e8cf3cca9970787017a19)

5: [http://offlinefirst.org/](http://offlinefirst.org/)

<comment><USER3> I work on the same team (Web DevRel) as the "service worker guy" you mention (Jake Archibald). Alex Russell (who introduced the "PWA" and is now advocating for the "Never-Slow Mode" idea you may have heard about recently) works on Chrome but collaborates with us frequently.

> When I first heard someone talking about "Progressive Web Apps" I thought > they were talking about "Progressive Enhancement"

Progressive enhancement is indeed where the P in PWA comes from. The core idea is to ship great sites for all users, and progressively upgrade with the latest web capabilities (service workers for offline, manifest for adding to homescreen and full-screen displays, and so on) when a user's device supports it. If the user's device doesn't support it, they should still get a good, traditional web experience: fast, secure, usable.

> Turns out doing a PWA is just basically about using the "Service Workers" > API [2] and the practices around that.

Your first impression about progressive enhancement was closer to the mark. The PWA Checklist [1] is the canonical document about what constitutes a PWA. We created that doc in November 2016 [2] to try to clear up the massive confusion about the definition of a PWA, but apparently to no avail.

Under the "Baseline PWA" checklist you'll notice that there's mention of service workers and manifest files, but there's also mention of loading fast on 3G, having mobile-friendly design, being secure, supporting all browsers, and so on. Again, the core idea is to ship good experiences for all users, and progressively enhance the UX when possible.

It'd be an interesting postmortem to study why the "PWA" term has been so notoriously confusing. IMO part of the problem was that we as a team weren't 100% crystal-clear on the definition at the start. But to be fair, I think we did straighten out our messaging pretty early on. The PWA Checklist that I linked to which has been out since November 2016 is evidence of this. But by that time it was already too late. PWA became a buzzword, and the blogging community seemed to conflate "PWA" with "promising new web platform capabilities" (service workers and manifests). I don't mean to shift blame. We (Web DevRel) most likely caused that conflation. I think the takeaway is that this is a lesson on what can happen when you're not 100% clear on messaging right from the start.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web- apps/check...](https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web- apps/checklist)

[2] [https://github.com/google/WebFundamentals/commits/master/src...](https://github.com/google/WebFundamentals/commits/master/src/content/en/progressive- web-apps/checklist.md)

<comment><USER4> I think the confusion comes from the fact that one of the key principles of "Progressive Enhancement" was making the site accessible to _everyone_ by providing support for browsers that either don't support JavaScript or have it disabled. This version of the website often also supported much older browsers (e.g. IE6-8, but also lynx, etc) that weren't supported by the enhanced version of the website.

In contrast, the PWA checklist makes no mention of support for browsers without JavaScript or much older browsers (and in practice very few PWAs provide such a fallback, as they are almost all SPA JavaScript apps where implementing this kind of fallback is difficult). As such, it is many ways the antithesis of the original Progressive Enhancement concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are only two real things limiting PWAs in my opinion:

1\. Lack of support on iOS. I presume it'll stay this way for a while (years!). Mobile Safari finally has service workers, but really, that's about it. No support for "Add to Home Screen" (technically it's there, but doesn't work the way it does in other browsers), and a lot of other APIs.

2\. The Web is missing some APIs that would really let it compete with native apps. I know there was WebNFC at some point, but it was dropped. No standard/widely implemented API for reading contacts, sending texts, etc. Features like that would really push PWA over the edge and make it awesome.

<comment><USER6> > _I presume it'll stay this way for a while (years!)._

It turns out iOS 12.2 will be "one heck of a release for Progressive Web Apps…"[1]

[1] [https://medium.com/dev-channel/progressive-web-app- progress-...](https://medium.com/dev-channel/progressive-web-app-progress-in- ios-12-2-beta-1-build-16e5181f-a18cd05ca361)

<comment><USER7> It's a shame they haven't budged much on push notifications. I know they have a reputation because they are used so much for spammy purposes, but I see that as a UI problem rather than a problem with push notifications themselves. I think if iOS got push notifications we'd start to see non-spammy use cases, e.g. one-click waitlist notifications and no-install turn-based games. One fun use I've found (I have an Android so push is supported) is getting messages with the loss at each training epoch in Keras (see the side project in my profile.)

<comment><USER8> I think a reasonable solution on mobile is to only allow push notification requests to PWAs that you have added to your home screen (i.e. "installed"), and removing the app from your home screen should remove the notifications. This way it will function pretty much like native apps, and you won't have to worry as much about random requests for spammy notifications - if I've gone through the trouble to "install" the PWA, then it's more likely I have a higher degree of connection to that app than just some random news site asking if it wants to send me notifications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm amazed there's a jurisdiction in a developed nation where driving a car with dead dashboard is legal.

<comment><USER10> That was my first reaction. If I was pulled over in Ireland with no dash the car would be _impounded_.

And the speedometer is great but what about the other info? Fuel gauge? Mileage? Battery Charge? Engine faults?? Geolocation won't help with any of those.

That said I do love the PWA approach to things and I think more people should embrace it. Just... not for this.

<comment><USER11> I'm comfortable with driving without any of those things -- my motorcycle, for example, only has a speedometer and a non-resettable odometer. (It's like that from the factory. Many street-legal motorcycles are similarly equipped.) You know how much fuel you have by knowing the capacity of you vehicle's tank, how many hours or miles you have driven, and your pre-existing (or found on the internet) knowledge of you vehicle's fuel consumption.

My car's battery gauge has _never_ worked, not in the 20+ years that my father and I have owned it. (I don't know if it worked for the one person that owned it before him, or if it never ever worked.) The only time it would have been helpful is the one time the alternator died. OP has an electric hybrid, so it's a bit more useful to them, but still not critical.

The "check engine light" is helpful to people who know little about their vehicle, telling them "please take me to a mechanic!" Otherwise, they seem to be more annoying than helpful -- the family minivan that said "I need an oil change!" because changing the oil yourself didn't reset the counter, or the endless O2 sensor replacements the SUV wanted. You could learn much more, and with less annoyance, by sticking an inexpensive ODB2 reader into your car once in a while.

<comment><USER12> That made me smirk. My motorcycle has a fuel gauge, but it's about as useful as a chocolate teapot. It manages a reasonable guess if on motorways. Normal riding and leaning and it may as well not be there. :)

I just do what I've done with every bike, reset the trip when I fill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What happens to your PWA page weight when you add tracking and ads to it?

How do I find your ad-free hobby project in the sea of search results for "speedometer" PWAs on the open web?

What makes sure you will keep paying the, admittedly modest, hosting costs for the app?

I think it's great you can make "tiny PWAs" but I think the article is glossing over the incentives and discovery problem that leads to 30MB ad- infested utility apps on the play store.

<comment><USER14> The other, largely unspoken, downside to PWAs are that the user cannot block the tracking and ads in them when launched natively. Even though they might run on your android where you have firefox mobile with all the adblocking extensions enabled, and run that PWA in the browser. I'm sure this might be another reason why PWAs are being supported by the advertising industry platform suppliers.

<comment><USER15> Speaking of Firefox, there was Firefox OS which appeared to be a stillborn child. It's app distribution model likely was close to PWA's. There's also Chrome OS which has lived longer than its foxy twin, and is going to be incorporated into Android according to wiki.

I think PWA is about tooling, like Google's chrome dev tools or Workbox, and frameworks. The good side of it is sharing the codebase/API between app and website. The bad side is you may bet on the stillborn/transient tech and will have to rewrite or monkey-patch everything.

And ads were never the only business model, it's developer's choice. There are apps for Android w/ decent prices and w/o annoying banners. PWA is no different.

The _convergent evolution_ leaves nothing untouched. I think if proliferate rate of web frameworks continues to grow exponentially, we'll have to deploy docker images right into the browser. I mean, it was a joke. Was it?

<comment><USER16> I was completely distracted from your point when you mentioned the "foxy twin" of the "stillborn child". I know foxy had a double entendre here, but...uh...disturbing choice of words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "surely there is a app for that!" A quick look leads to speedometer apps > with ads and 30MB download weight, and simple screen light that also have > ads that weight in at 5MB.

I'm finally groking what rms has been banging on about for so long. It is completely unacceptable that we are running software that does this to the user. Users need to be empowered and able to run code that they can control.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. If more people's reaction, instead of searching an app store for a privacy respecting screen light, was to sit down and write:

        <!DOCTYPE html>
        <script>let on  true;</script>
        <body onclick="on = !on; this.style.background = on ? 'white' : 'black'">

and were able to easily upload it somewhere on a phone and run it locally from a shortcut on the screen. We'd have hacker culture encouraged right there.

<comment><USER19> Upload? Come on, just load it as dataURI, bookmark it and you have _offline_ "application" at your disposal. And as a bonus, here, have this "distributed app store" you can even print on paper [1].

[1] [http://zxing.org/w/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chld=L&choe=UTF-...](http://zxing.org/w/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chld=L&choe=UTF-8&chl=data%3Atext%2Fhtml%3Bcharset%3Dutf-8%2C%3C!DOCTYPE%20html%3E%3Ctitle%3EScreen%20light%3C%2Ftitle%3E%3Chtml%20onclick%3Don%3D!on%3Bthis.style.background%3Don%253F%27white%27%3A%27black%27%3E%3Cbody%20onload%3Don%3Dtrue%3E)

i.e. QR-coded dataURI document

        data:text/html;charset=utf-8,<!DOCTYPE html><title>Screen light</title><html onclick=on=!on;this.style.background=on%3F'white':'black'><body onload=on=true>

<comment><USER20> My iPhone 6s doesn't like this QR code, it just says "No usable data found".

<comment><USER21> The built-in QR detector is very finnicky/odd, apparently it just assumes every payload is an HTTP URL, nothing else works even remotely.

Other applications work much better for that, though they may or may not recognise non-http URIs e.g. here scanbot just displays the textual content and you're on the hook for copy/pasting it wherever you need.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I had no luck even with QR reader integrated in Nightly Android [0].

Sadly, copypasting resulting URI as plaintext is most probably the only option for modern browsers, because any other way of top level frame navigation to dataURI document is blocked. (Besides existing bookmark, that is.) I keep forgetting this, sorry for hurried "in theory it must work great" shout out.

[0] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/scan-qr-codes- firefox-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/scan-qr-codes-firefox- android)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > A quick look leads to speedometer apps with ads and 30MB download weight, > and simple screen light that also have ads that weight in at 5MB.

I don't see why this means PWAs are better than apps. There's nothing stopping you from writing an app instead of a PWA in this case.

<comment><USER23> I've argued both sides of this for a long time. The short argument for web apps are that you have real control over them, which means any platform, any time. An iOS app from five years ago is useless without recompilation with the current toolchain, and even then it only works on iOS. A web page from 1994 still renders unmodified today, on any platform, and will for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER24> > A web page from 1994 still renders unmodified today, on any platform, and > will for the foreseeable future.

Rose tinted glasses.

There was a time not too long ago where IE6 was virtually required because of activex, vbscript, ie specific markup, etc.

<comment><USER23> Yes, there are always ways to lock yourself in. If you only use features supported by multiple browsers and consider the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect), you stand a decent chance of long term survival. What you sacrifice is efficiency and polish, which are important, so choose wisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > You see my car, a 2005 Prius, has a terrible glitch in the dashboard where > the dash simply doesn't work. No speedometer, no gasoline gauge, nada.

> Both the above cases would lead one to say "surely there is a app for that!"

I note from his 'about' page that the author is a proud and admirably public- spirited citizen of Oakdale, which proclaims itself "Cowboy Capital of the World". Seems about right.

</comment><comment><USER26> Introduce acronyms before you use them.

I'll say it again for the people in the back.

Introduce acronyms before you use them.

<comment><USER27> You wouldn't introduce the acronym "omg" since what it stands for is so well known. I'd argue the same is true in this scenario.

<comment><USER28> What does PWA mean? After reading some comments I guess personal web apps but I not sure.

<comment><USER29> Progressive web app. They're kind of like JavaScript-driven websites that think they're native apps. They tend to be characterised by their use of modern web standards to do some useful things, like being available offline, and caching everything heavily to cut down load time. It's like a website you can install, basically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Holy crap it's scary that he's building his own speedometer like that. GPS based speedos aren't all that accurate. Ballpark, sure, but not accurate. There are also many circumstances under which GPS won't work.

In many countries a car without a functional speedometer is not allowed on the road, for safety reasons.

<comment><USER31> I'd expect it to be better than the car speedo. Car speedos typically overread by up to 10%, and if you fit a non-standard tyre, they can be way off.

<comment><USER30> GPS is susceptible to atmospheric conditions, obstructed views (4 satellites minimum required for positioning) and a number of other factors, most of which are undetectable at the device level. Car speedos are done with over-read deliberately as a safety measure. Better overestimating than under. As a driver you can make conscious decisions about what speed you're driving based on all evidence available, including an understanding of how over/under your speedometer returns results. With a GPS based speedometer you can't realistically do that, you can have no idea what the accuracy percentage is at any particular moment in time. It might be over, it might be under. No one can make good decisions based on junk data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not sure if there is anything progressive about this but it's small, has a manifest so it will supposedly get cached, and is installable I think. Wrote it for similar reasons, sick of ads.

[https://greggman.github.io/interval- timer/](https://greggman.github.io/interval-timer/)

</comment><comment><USER33> This made me think about building your own services vs integrating others and I can't help to think rolling your own makes more and more sense.

I always come back to a paper some Netflix guys mentioned in a presentation I saw at a conference to make us appreciate how extremely hard integrating separate systems is : "Hundred Impossibility Proofs for Distributed Computing" ([https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf)). The paper basically says there are at least a hundred walls that are mathematically proven to be insurmountable that you are going to potentially hit when trying to keep your data corruption free across systems.

This makes systems that keep data within the bounds of a non distributed, transactionally sound database like Postgresql comparably much more agile and powerful as you don't hit these hundred plus walls.

After some high profile failures of integration like Oracle/IBM's "Phoenix Pay" here in Canada, after people tried to counteract the problems with sophisticated and costly CQRS layers to manage the connections, they are now noticing what was mathematically proven in that paper, that you can't make a maintainable and reliable system when data is spread across too many different companies' servers. I think, at least for tech companies that know how to build stuff, that the trend is now to minimize holding data in a web of connected SAAS services, regrouping key data to their own transactional databases.

This trend has been helped by the fact that, it is now incredibly easy to build frontend and backend services tied to your own database. This "Tiny PWAs" article is a good example. This guy quickly built apps so that he didn't have to deal with ad laden ones in the app stores. As a testament to their simplicity, these apps ended up being only 1.7KB and 800B. This would have been impossible just a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER34> This was cool and inspiring to read. I too enjoy making little apps to meet my needs and it was educational to see how someone else structures their tiny projects. Not just the projects themselves but also the lil domain they're hosted at.

</comment><comment><USER35> What is a PWA?

<comment><USER36> Progressive web app - [https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web- apps/](https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you want to see more PWAs, then go to the PWA Directory maintained by Google: [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/gulliver](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/gulliver)

Interesting, there is one speedometer there, created 2-3 years ago. The source code is even available in GitHub. It seems that it isn't easy to find PWAs? [https://pwa-directory.appspot.com/pwas/5079866537934848](https://pwa- directory.appspot.com/pwas/5079866537934848)

<comment><USER38> The best thing that Google could do to support pwas would be to build a good search for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you do like the programming challenge then fine. Speaking for myself, I spend too much time working with computers already. I just want a practical solution and spend time doing things I enjoy.

Speedometer app for example, I bought Ulysses Speedometer a long time ago. The price is almost nothing but over the years they maintained it well and added useful features. To me that is the most time and money efficient solution.

</comment><comment><USER40> Your car dashboard is broken. Instead of fixing it, you write an app that provides a lousy workaround. Is this meant to be a bad example?

<comment><USER41> Sounds like a hack if I ever heard of one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Tiny PWAs and why they don't render until you force refresh on mobile Safari.

Edit: to be slightly less snarky, that was my experience of the linked site - just one long scrolling blank page. This could be a really simple HTML / CSS page. Why do it as a PWA and add more points of failure?

<comment><USER43> Is it a PWA? I didn't get the normal "add to your homescreen" popup and manually adding it to my homescreen adds a bookmark instead of opening in a separate instance. I think this is just a regular old website with strange javascript libraries.

The footer says it's based on Polymer and Hugo, perhaps they don't play along well with Safari?

Strange how Safari still has trouble with PWAs, web applications were one of the main selling points of the original iPhone...

<comment><USER44> > I didn't get the normal "add to your homescreen" popup

I thought that only happened after a PWA site had been visited a few times, not on first visit.

Hugo is a static site generator so that has no bearing on the page's behavior in the browser. I don't know if it's a PWA but they used Polymer in such a way that there's no content in the HTML, which is stupid. I don't think PWAs are antithetical to PWE, Progressive Web Enhancement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> System on my old laptop had somewhat broken battery indicator in systray, so I ended up using simple HTML page polling / listening to navigator.battery changes [0] and displayed it, even in a "graph" form (in fact, just didn't redraw old values, so it was a side efffect). That worked pretty well, but then whole API became obsolete because of fingerprinting abuse. Ah, days of yore.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/b...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/battery)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think it would be easier to build an Android/IOS app if you already have the dev tools installed. Chrome APIs needed for web apps that interact with hardware are often unstable and not supported on all hardware or android patch from vendors. I built a simple app to submit links to HN, took maybe an hour, without much Android knowledge.</comment>


Why Athletes Keep Making the Same Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/sports/baseball/19score.html <comment><USER2> I think it's just hard to avoid doing things by thinking about them. Good luck avoiding touching your face for an hour by saying "don't touch your face." Luckily you can normally focus on doing something else like keeping your hands in your pockets.

<comment><USER3> I have this problem with biting my fingernails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK. I read it. Why do athletes keep making the same mistakes?

<comment><USER5> Because the concentrated effort needed to "not do something" seems to increase the likeliness that you will do exactly that, especially under stress. For some reason, it seems that it is not the will or intent of the thinker that is important, but what the thinker is actually thinking that controls reflexive actions.

<comment><USER4> Well, yeah. I knew that from watching Homer's antics on the Simpsons. This doesn't dp anything to explain why if you incessantly think "Don't do x; don't do x" then you wind up doing x. But maybe I'm expecting too much from an article in the Sports section.</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub reinstates Popcorn Time code - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/github-reinstates-popcorn-time-code-despite-mpa-threat-200520/ <comment><USER2> The funny thing is that the MPAA are so clueless, they don't even know popcorntime are their own worst enemies. They kept splitting out, rewriting from scratch, failing to establish a trusted way of distributing the app, then the latest releases have been so bad that people are abandoning it in droves - you can see the fallout on reddit. The ban was meant to DOS them for a few weeks, now that cinemas are shut and all eyes are on digital, but ended up being a big advertising campaign for PT. Good on the lawyers for getting paid to fail!

PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.

<comment><USER3> Tonight I wanted to watch _Spider-Man: Far From Home_ with my kids. I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS. Yet, my only option was to purchase it digitally via iTunes for $15. There was no rental option. It wasn't available in Disney+ because I assume Sony holds the rights despite the rest of Marvel belonging to Disney. It's only available for purchase and not rental because I assume: greed.

So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.

Edit: Starz apparently has distribution rights at the moment. 7 days free then $8.99/month. So I could've legally watched it for free by signing up via Apple and canceling. Sigh. This is exhausting Hollywood. Get your shit together.

<comment><USER4> >I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS

WOW. I had netflix once for a few days, I paid for netflix just to watch House MD, a week into netflix, they removed House MD from my region, I cancelled subscription and moved to PT. Never came back to netflix, I just no longer trust them, too much effort and too much legal complications. I can imagine paying for one portal, but more than two? That's more expensive and less user friendly then cable TV.

<comment><USER5> ok not trusting them seems a little much on that example, surely they didn't promise you that House MD would be on in your region in perpetuity? Although there are probably lots other reasons not to trust them.

<comment><USER6> Why wouldn't it be there?

Netflix have the data, he has the money, what's the problem?

The problem is "too much legal complications" and that problem does not exist on Popcorn Time.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, this really looks to me like someone still clinking to the long obsolete broadcast model, where you had no back channel to your customers from them to request what they want & to pay for it. And also broadcasts were regionally bound.

So you sold a license to a local broadcasting company to for a time window and number of runs for a show. Not more you can do with no back channel for customers to request individual shows and pay for them. By only granting one license per are you can enforce some scarcity and get your money & hopefully users liked it. Channels could the compete who gets the best time based licenses, who gets the new hot stuff first, etc.

Now here we are with a global network with basically any user being able to request any show and pay for it (or get a subscription for a channel carrying it) and yet the media companies still carry one like one had to win an auction to get one of the broadcast masters, drag in on top of a hill to broadcast it and then return it back to someone else to do the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get it. The No.1 copyright infringement tool is undoubtedly the most popular web browser, whichever that is.

<comment><USER9> The browser have other, legitimate uses. Popcorntime pretty much has no other legitimate use other than as a tool for copyright infringement.

<comment><USER10> I think it's still quite far from having no legitimate uses:

The app is for watching movies. there are lots of movies that are legal to distribute this way for anybody. And people could have rights to copy specific films from other routes. Copyright terms (if they exist) vary by jurisdiction, some countries have eg 25 years from date of production for movies.

<comment><USER11> Popcorn Time != BitTorrent, though. The way Popcorn Time and other BT streaming clients does torrenting is pretty bad for the the overall swarm health — everyone is seeding and leeching the beginning but availability deteriorates the deeper you go. My BT client of choice, Transmission, explicitly rejected the idea of getting chunks sequentially (you have to patch the source yourself if you really want to do that). So, if you can, contribute to swarm health by downloading with a traditional client upfront. And seed to a reasonable ratio, of course.

<comment><USER12> With far more people's download speed being much higher than the data rate of the content, this matters far less. Sure, you are downloading _some_ blocks from the start of the file, but you are also getting blocks from the middle and end of the file at the same time, which you can exchange with other users tit for tat.

Also, the benefits of tit for tat sharing to prevent Leachers are also less important - with more people having faster internet, there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.

<comment><USER11> With the exception of popular torrents (where swarm health is usually a non- issue), most of the time download speed is limited by the number of seeders and their upload speeds, not the leechers' download speeds. The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.

> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be > bothered to upload" issue.

There's the "people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their download" problem which faster internet doesn't solve.

<comment><USER13> Are there any VPNs that support the throughput speeds many consumers have access to these days? I have my client set to a 10:1 ratio, but rarely will a file actually reach that because I don't want to leave my slow VPN online for that long degrading my performance for other online tasks.

<comment><USER11> I've used commercial VPN with acceptable (think ~100Mbps) but not amazing throughput.

But for BT I just set up a secondary on-demand network interface on my Linux server specifically for OpenVPN (just need a shell script to add a couple ip(8) rules, and stick that shell script into the up command of ovpn config). Then I bind my transmission-daemon to that specific interface (bind-address- ipv4 option). This way all BT traffic goes through OpenVPN, but other traffic is not affected. Works for any OpenVPN provider.

<comment><USER14> This sounds fantastic, thanks for the idea and explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The funny thing about the streaming wars is that the music services somehow figured it out. I can pay for Google Play / Spotify / Apple Music and get literally all the music, for a single fee, from the same place. No content appearing/disappearing, no regional BS, no outrageous fees, it just works. Music piracy has basically died over the last few years cause of this -- I can't remember the last time I wanted to listen to something that I had to pirate.

What's so different about TV/movies?

<comment><USER16> Movies are at least one to two orders of magnitude more expensive to make than entire music albums.

<comment><USER15> So what? The number of albums available to stream is a few orders of magnitude higher than the number of shows/movies available.

<comment><USER16> It matters as the total budget of a movie needs to be recouped. The vast majority of albums are likely made using a few thousand dollars [0], if there isn't a break-even the artists potentially have other avenues of making money such as gigs/concerts if not making the limelight in the future.

Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in financing such movies.

[0] [https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record- album-2017/](https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-album-2017/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_Fallout)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Hydra will just grow more heads. Hasn't the MPA figured this out yet?

<comment><USER18> The most puzzling thing is they already beat piracy with netflix but now they are trying to kill the convenience by splitting content over 20 platforms causing piracy to come back.

<comment><USER19> Beat piracy?

Lol. Netflix is a joke, every time i sign up again I find it lacking tonnes of content.

It optimizes for flicking through its catalog so nobody notices its missing nearly everything.

It does this to wear you down into submission watching or rewatching some old crap.

I went to watch the last season of the 100 before the new release, found its catalog is two seasons behind. Its a mess.

<comment><USER20> Netflix is "TV, evolved" \- including cable TV. It's not comparable to Spotify or iTunes ("CD, evolved"), which made music piracy almost irrelevant with their very comprehensive catalogs.

Netflix content beats many open TV channels in my area, at least in the fiction and documentary arenas. And like some TV/cable networks do, Netflix invests heavily in producing their own content. It's just a matter of time until they figure out how/if/when they will launch a TV-like continuous stream of content that includes news, weather, sports, gameshows, realities... And add more focus on "live" and sell differentiated content packages by user taste.

<comment><USER21> I'm lucky to live in a country with a wide public broadcasting network (Germany). So I'm pretty sure that if Netflix comes up with a linear stream, I won't come back anymore. That split of content killed it for me and at this point streaming or 1-click hosters work well enough for the selected content I need. For everything else I have our public broadcasting network.

<comment><USER20> If they implement some continuous streaming (a hunch of mine), it would be just another box in your Netflix home grid.

Click on it for autoplay to start and watch a bundled playlist of current (random) content or, if they decide to dig into it: news, weather, sports etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why we need a p2p git storage. I wonder if IPFS can handle this.

<comment><USER23> Git already _is_ p2p. The whole centralized-git-through-github-or-whatnot is a fairly recent invention. Originally you'd pull directly from other developers repositories. The role of PR was fulfilled by emailing patchsets around.

All github does is provide convenience. If you want to use github in a peer- to-peer fashion all the tools are already there.

<comment><USER24> Stop inventing stories. How do I pull from developer's repo? Don't say every author will need to host some server with ssh. Imagine the rate at which unmaintained repos will become unavailable.

<comment><USER25> I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Yes, maintainers had to host servers. Yes, unmaintained repos disappeared.

<comment><USER26> That also depended on the project. With the right ports forwarded on your home router, servers can pop up and down as required.

Mercurial had a single command for this, "hg serve", that would just pop up a webserver for sharing. It was extremely useful for me during university, and I've often considered it a key failing that git does not provide a similar command out of the box. As a result, the distributed nature of git is hidden from a lot of people.

For the record, the command to make git do what mercurial does with hg serve is "git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose --enable=receive-pack".

Obviously this is insecure and anyone who can establish a connection can push and pull from your repo, but if you're just jamming with some friends you don't need github.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to help out a video rental store, which closed this month. I made them a mail-order rental catalogue ([https://rent.leosvideos.ca/](https://rent.leosvideos.ca/)) and looked into this whole fiasco.

When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership.

When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership.

People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad.

In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:

You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want.

Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time.

We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.

<comment><USER28> > You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism.

I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)

<comment><USER27> I'd say the unit cost of running a proper streaming-rental service is about the same as burning a copy of a DVD (20 cents per movie). There's way more to it than just bandwidth.

Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.

There _was_ a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It makes sense. If GitHub ever became like YouTube instead of a "dumb pipe" there would be a mass exodus. Right now they hold canonical copies of the law in some places [0] and are owned by Microsoft so most people (me included) are ready to flip out if they do something awful.

[0][https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-html](https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc- law-html)

</comment><comment><USER30> I had popcorn time installed for a while, but it kept running services in the background and spamming notifications, even when I killed them. After a few days of that I uninstalled it.

<comment><USER31> I don't know which platform you used it on but I've found the Windows version to be quite unstable. IMO the Linux version runs much better.

<comment><USER30> It was Android.

<comment><USER32> Long press any notification and ban the app.

<comment><USER30> Thanks, although I was really trying to stop the service from doing things behind my back in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> cloned em all

[https://github.com/popcorn-official](https://github.com/popcorn-official)

<comment><USER34> Even [https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn- app](https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app) ? That one seems to be missing with nothing but a bullshit DMCA notice in its place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Funnily enough I was watching a YouTube video, or live stream, by popular artist Lost Frequencies in which he showed and explained how he remixed a song. Popcorn Time was prominently displayed in his Dock.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just like I said on Reddit.

>According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies and TV-shows.

Laughing in Awesome Piracy[0]

0: [https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome- piracy](https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy)

</comment><comment><USER37> So, given how very p2p git is and all, where are all the hackers here willing to stick out their neck and actually share urls where a user would find popcorn-app now?

^-- that's a very sarcastic way to say: yes, git the protocol may be decentralized, but git the (distribution) ecosystem is not and was not ever really censorship resistant beyond "I can keep what I have and share it in a small circle"

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't get why people would use something like popcorntime which by using you are almost guaranteed a lovely letter from your ISP (especially Comcast) when there are numerous movies sites you can go to _cough_ cineb _cough_ and watch whatever you want through a browser and not BitTorrent. It's the BitTorrent aspect of popcorntime that gets you flagged. Why take the risk using it?

<comment><USER39> Ah yes, those "nasty" emails saying they can cut my service that I've been receiving weekly for about over 10 years now. They have your browsing history too, you know. It's not like you're not leaving a trail watching movies on pirate websites. I don't use popcorntime, but use bittorrent quite a bit. My guess on why they haven't cut my service is possibly that I live in an area with quite a few ISP's, so they know I'll just go to a competitor and they'd rather just send me automated form emails to claim they "did something" and keep the cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Note: This is the company that now owns NPM. You can/should expect the same take-down standards to apply to code hosted there.

If you weren't already, I'd strongly encourage having some kind of caching proxy between you and the NPM repositories, just to ensure that some kind of takedown action won't screw up your builds.

<comment><USER41> The risk is low for most dependencies. They have experienced the left-pad drama. I would rather have to fix my dependencies and have broken builds for a short while than having to maintain a npm cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Time to fix that ESP stuck inside the Casio calculator as well

</comment><comment><USER43> This is one of those times where it's a _good_ thing that GitHub got bought by the biggest company in the world.

</comment><comment><USER44> This feels a little sensationalized. This is just how dmca work. Party 1 files a notice, party 2 files a counter notice, party 1 either puts up or shuts up. The article makes it sound like github is picking sides, where really they are just not getting in the middle of the fight.

<comment><USER45> This is far from how it should work. The MPAA needed to certify a good faith belief the code was infringing. There is no reasonable way they could believe that the code itself was infringing on their copyrights.

The fact they had no concern at all filing a frivolous take-down request shows how broken the DMCA checks and balances are. This is a long standing problem [1]

[1] [https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment- law/...](https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment- law/30865/good-faith-belief-in-dmca-notice-and-takedown-provisions-requires- subjective-standard)

<comment><USER46> I don't agree with what the MPAA did, but they didn't claim the code was infringing on their rights. They claimed the code facilitated infringement, which is also not allowed under the DMCA.

<comment><USER47> It's _arguably_ not allowed by the DMCA, but outside the scope of the notice- and-takedown provisions which only provide for takedown of specific infringing works. Statutory infringements outside of that very narrow scope would require a traditional lawsuit with actual court oversight.

MPAA is not stupid and they knowingly abused the process in this case because they wanted to put Microsoft in a tight situation and gauge their response. Of course it went exactly as planned with Microsoft rolling over like every other tech company that won't stand up for its users' rights.

This is _exactly_ why we need decentralized P2P tech btw.

<comment><USER46> From the takedown request:

> Moreover, the Project in question hosts software that is distributed and > used to infringe on the MPA Member Studios' copyrights. See Metro-Goldwyn- > Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) ('the > distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence > shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to > infringe')

I agree though, they went around the courts with a DMCA takedown, and should've sued.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd).

<comment><USER47> The fact that the software could be used for infringement is irrelevant because the software itself is not infringing (someone else brought up web browsers as another example of this).

The MPAA are legally savvy enough to know this was an abuse of process. If any DMCA reforms are needed, top of my list would be removing takedown privileges from copyright holders that abuse it.

<comment><USER24> I wonder if you had say said same with a website that does not ban child porn or somehow encouraged paedophilia or let users discuss black lynching in public forum. I know they are extreme examples but sometimes the blanket statement like 'software itself is not infringing' should be used with more caution.

In popcorn time's I support it to be back but this does not mean I support fully uncensored net.

<comment><USER45> If laws are regularly abused for extraneous purposes then we no longer live in a society with rule of law. Armed gangs are replaced by teams of lawyers but the effect is the same.

There may be value in taking down tools used to aid copyright but if that is a desired outcome congress should pass a law permitting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I always find it interesting that inconvenience is seen as a justification for stealing. Although I did this myself for many years, so I guess I do get it after all. However, I think now in the age of Netflix and Hulu, I can get the majority of what I want at a reasonable price.

<comment><USER49> I think calling copyright infringement stealing is a hyperbole. They are very different things. Sometimes it's more than an inconvenience, though. At the present moment in time, I have no way to legally watch all but 3 Rick and Morty's episodes from the latest season (episodes 6, 7 and 8). And that's a brand new show. Don't get me started on older movies/tv shows.

We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident.

I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it, for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty much whatever they wanted in their collection.

<comment><USER50> How do you figure you're entitled to watch everything that's ever been released? There's no precedent for that. Even taping with a VCR was in the gray area. You had to buy every movie individually, and that was really just a personal viewing license.

<comment><USER51> How do you figure that media companies are entitled to wield the power of the state in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that makes the world better for everyone?

<comment><USER50> It's not the power of the state, it's the power of a private entertainment business. You could choose to only watch open/free media like many of us do with software. It's out there.

> in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that > makes the world better for everyone?

That question is loaded with your opinion (in particular the opinion I was suggesting is baseless) and so isn't really an answer at all... you want the world your way, I'm asking, beyond your opinion that it's "better for everyone" (ignoring artists, I guess), why you seem to think there's an issue of right/wrong here.

<comment><USER51> Intellectual property exists as it does because it was created that way by the state.

<comment><USER50> But you can't just ignore the reason... and "the state" created ways to protect intellectual property (at least in some significant part if not entirely) because creators wanted it. You can't ignore the fact that most creators are in favor of the general idea of copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Wow. I'm done with GitHub. This is a vulnerability afaic. Just going to dissapear my code base huh.

<comment><USER46> It's not GitHub's fault the DMCA exists

<comment><USER52> Yea but it is their fault for how they handled it.

They could have froze and privated the repo and investigated the issue.

This isn't the same as a pirated move or song on YouTube. This is code. And version control or code repos are very important.

<comment><USER53> No, really, they have to wait for the counter notice or they are liable too. I'm sure MPAA would love to sue a billion dollar company and not just random people on the net.

<comment><USER52> As another commenter pointed out since it wasnt infringing directly (code wasn't infringing copyrighted code) it actually does not fall under that constraint.

Even if I'm wrong, this is a valid way to dos my repo. Like when it happens on YouTube people loose money right and that's some people's main income. This can be even worse.

<comment><USER54> How almost every service provider reacts to DMCA notices is by taking down the content ASAP, and if they receive a counter-notice, putting it back up after 2 weeks. They do not make any decisions on whether the content is actually infringing or not. By doing that, they make themselves liable if it actually is copyright-infringing material.

If you aren't okay with that, use a service provider in a jurisdiction not governed by DMCA laws, or run your own service provider and take on that liability yourself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Calendar for Android: Find a time for my meeting - <AUTHOR> https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/04/google-calendar-for-android-find-time.html <comment><USER3> Interesting. Had a google interview not too long ago, and this was exactly the question asked to me - how would you design an algorithm to find overlapping free time from person X, Y and Z. I guess they got more practical with their questions over the years.

Looks great, liking that is suggests times too.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that just a bit wise AND?

<comment><USER5> Try having actual time ranges, not just slots, and you need to find, say, a 30m contiguous block of time.

<comment><USER6> It is still just bitwise if you model the time slots e.g. like one bit stands for 5 or 1 minutes and then look for some contiguous 'free'-block in the result

<comment><USER5> Okay, how do you find a string of N 1's in a very long bit pattern? What's the space and time complexity of your solution? (hint: you can do a lot better)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just got the update and used this on my Nexus 6P. Holy cow, this interface is gorgeous. Makes me want a Web Redesign even more now.

<comment><USER8> Web redesign is long overdue

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know why Calendar is getting a ton of new features on mobile but the web app gets no love?

<comment><USER10> Yes.

Google has been trying to dumb down their services and products for years, to the point where the UI is something even a baby or old person with dementia can use it. For the most recent example of this see the latest update to the YouTube app for iPhone - they managed to make an already austere interface completely bare-bones, to the point where the main "home page" is entirely useless.

They do this to product after product, all the while claiming things like "power users are not our target user group" or "only 5% of users used this feature, so we removed it", and for random millenials using their phone to figure out what bar they want to go to tonight, that approach works (ish).

But Calendar is actually used by lots of working people/professionals/power users every day, and those people aren't interested in a super stripped-down "beautiful, magical" (also inscrutable) interface that rips out every feature that's not used by at least 90% of the userbase for the sake of whitespace. We need a tool that is predictable, works, and doesn't require retraining for everyone to use it.

So Calendar stays frozen in amber, caught between one pole (being actually useful) that Google desperately does not want to migrate towards, and another pole (beautiful, magic, useless) that Google desperately wants to move to but knows would alienate their userbase if they did. And while normally they give 0 fucks about that, because of GAFYD they can't just wave away the consequences of such a change - that business unit would be in serious danger if they managed the apps & services within it as capriciously as they do everything else.

<comment><USER9> As a power user I find the mobile version more useful. Creating a new event on mobile is actually easier than on desktop. I want that same power on desktop too

<comment><USER10> How?

For the simple case, on web: Click the time I want to put in an event for, type in a name, click "Create Event". Even if somehow you managed to simplify further "I want to do something at this time - I want it to be named this - <USER2> am done" I'm not sure the world benefits from that being easier.

For the more complicated case... Really? I admit I haven't played with it on Android in some time, but is it really easier to, say, create a new event, invite 4 people, add a conference room, select a time that works for everyone, make it repeat Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with a reminder 10m before and 20m before? Because if so I'm honestly surprised - that they even offer all that functionality at all, let alone that it's easier on mobile.

<comment><USER11> You should be pleasantly surprised, then! All of the functionality you included in your complicated case exists directly on the event creation page. "Select a time that works for everyone" was the last one missing, and this update is of course just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Took long enough. This has been a part of outlook and exchange for a decade.

<comment><USER13> could you do it on outlook for mobile? Think that's the true benefit here, is being able to schedule across calendars from your phone.

<comment><USER14> A decade ago "outlook for mobile" was essentially BB or non-existent.

Reminds me of when I bought an old receipt printer with a serial port to print out the days weather, my calendar items from a text file, and any "must do" items. Haven't had it around since ~2011 and I really miss it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm going to guess that this only works if you're meeting with people who all have Google calendars. Within this limitation, the web interface has been capable of this for quite some time ("Find a Time" tab or "Suggested Times" when creating an event).

Of course, not everybody uses Google as their calendar provider, but that would be a harder (if more interesting) problem to solve.

<comment><USER16> The current Outlook app allows you to insert availability into an email, and let someone on another domain pick one of those times that works for them (and it auto-creates the meeting at that chosen time, too). I think this came from Sunrise, which also did this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this the first release of this app? I thought that previously the standard google calendar app was just AOSP Calendar, but I prefer the AOSP apps anyway so maybe I didn't notice the shift earlier?

Anyway, in case I'm right, it's probably useful to point out that this is another non-free app that's being marketed as a replacement for an existing free app that works perfectly fine. Not condemning Google for it (although I do wish they'd stop), just pointing out that if you don't find the new headline feature or visual redesign interesting, and you care about free software, you can go ahead and use the old app. Maybe fork it too, since it won't be getting any feature upgrades any time soon...

</comment><comment><USER18> I would love Apple to add some of this stuff to Calendar. I believe Calender is now on iCloud so interoperability is hard but that would also be great. Come on Apple I believe in you!

<comment><USER19> iOS already does this, at least for exchange calendars. It is quite beautifully implemented, too. It breaks down suggested time slots by attendance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > But scheduling meetings on the go is still difficult

Really? Is this really the biggest challenge in anyone's day?

<comment><USER21> It is about quantity. If you have a fair number of meetings with people that also have their fair share it can become difficult.

Also, when one person's schedule changes it can have a cascading effect.

In the end, all of this scheduling work get in the way of doing real work. I for one welcome anything that makes scheduling trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> a new api endpoint for this would be great. any word on that yet?

</comment><comment><USER23> Can't wait until Google decides that viewing the calendar agenda should be done by seeing one event at the time on the screen (newest YouTube update) [1].

Seriously Google, can this waste of space shit just stop ?

[1] [http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/04/27/youtube-redesigns- ho...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/04/27/youtube-redesigns-home-with- obigger-videos-and-more-relevant-personalizations/)

<comment><USER24> There is indeed a lot of focus on the screenshot now, but the two column layout wasn't that great either. For example, videos with long prefixes would make the right half of the layout useless: [http://i.imgur.com/7L8nB7s.png](http://i.imgur.com/7L8nB7s.png)

<comment><USER23> Smaller font and thumbnail ?

This "Material" design nonsense feels like someone installed two magnifying glasses on my eyes and told me to navigate previous UI. It's right on par the huge icons and full screen apps starting with Windows 8.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Uh... It doesn't account for travel time.

This app should only suggest times that have at least 15 mins between all meetings.

<comment><USER26> Depends entirely on the person. If you work remotely, 'travel time' is the length of time it takes to make a phone call. If you collect cash, it could be an awful lot more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one concerned about privacy implications here?

Google is revealing private calendar data without any ability to control what is shared and what is not. This is another example of sacrificing personal privacy for a "cool feature". No thanks!

<comment><USER5> It only works when you already have access to see the other people's calendars (and hints at this with "Designed specifically for organizations where sharing your calendar with colleagues is the norm").</comment></comment>


Americans can legally download 3-D printed guns starting next month - <AUTHOR> https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/07/19/us/3d-printed-gun-settlement-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> I don't see why a CAD file would be any different than normal instructions for building firearms. For example, building a 12 gauge shotgun from 1" and 3/4" steel pipe is cheaper, easier, and probably safer/more effective than the plastic gun from the article. It seems to me the 3D printing part of this made the article popular for clickbait and thus it garnered more attention than the traditional approaches to homemade weapons. I guess my point is that making a CAD file illegal when a PDF instruction file is legal isn't very consistent or logical.

<comment><USER3> One concern is that it's now cheaper, easier, and faster to mass produce weapons which will evade metal detectors. I don't think any of this should be illegal, but the concerns should be considered.

<comment><USER4> The saving grace, such as it is, is that these firearms are single-shot, and the rounds themselves are still metal and explosive-residue-detectable. While 3D printing has changed manufacturing methods, it's not like the method of deposition changes the strength of the material that much, so it's improbable that these plastic firearms will ever be able to withstand more than one or two shots.

It strikes me as likely that a 3D-printed gun will not be the most effective way to accomplish almost any kind of harm for almost any kind of perpetrator, no matter how situated. And that gives me a little comfort, even if I wish my countrymen were less fascinated with weapons.

<comment><USER5> The 3-D printed guns are single shot, but the new ghost gunner machine is a CNC mill and I believe uses an aluminum alloy which can handle multiple shots.

<comment><USER6> The ghost gunner is used to finish metal parts that are fully functional, they will last for thousands of shots.

But they also won't pass metal detectors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an entire industry in the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan and Pakistan dedicated to making firearms with nothing more than simple hand tools and scrap steel [1]. Firearms are trivial to produce. It's producing ammunition that's the hard part. Specifically, producing propellant for your bullets.

The panic about 3d printed guns is baseless. Any panic about terrorists being able to use something to commit heinous acts is generally baseless panic. As we've seen, all they need is a car or a knife and they can go on a rampage. The only reason we don't have more terrorist attacks isn't because of increased gun control or aviation security or restricted access to fertiliser. The only reason we don't have more terrorist attacks is because there simply aren't many people in the western world who hate it enough to commit terrorist attacks.

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

<comment><USER8> Interesting! There are videos:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRte65F_KRk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRte65F_KRk)

Of course firearms were made in pre-industrial times, and it's fascinating to see how: (just how do you chamber a gun accurately by hand?)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTy3uQFsirk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTy3uQFsirk)

But how would a technologically savvy first world person do it? These days you can buy a "gunsmithing" lathe for your garage workshop. Check out this video by Shiraz Balolia, CEO of Grizzly Industrial (they sell Chinese made industrial equipment to home shop machinists):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb- RvRe_9-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb-RvRe_9-g)

I was going to link to Joe Pieczynski's excellent machining videos on how to make an AR-15, but it looks like there are new YouTube guidelines:

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

In any case, the information is widely available (and check out his other videos if you want improve your machining skills).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Guess what, if you go in your garage and make a can with even one baffle inside and a hole in each end big enough for a bullet you've built a silencer (however shitty). If you don't have a class III license you just broke the law. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure 3D printing an impractical but illegal silencer is within the reach of most makers.

Technology is going to continue to make breaking all manner of laws easier for stupid people. I'm not sure what, if anything should be done about this (generally speaking).

<comment><USER10> > make a can with even one baffle inside

Actually, you don't even have to do that. The ATF has ruled in the past that it the device is _intended_ to reduce the report, it's a suppressor.

> Furthermore, I'm pretty sure 3D printing an impractical but illegal silencer > is within the reach of most makers.

It's within reach of everyone with access to a soda bottle and a roll of duct tape.

\---

Gun laws in the US are Byzantine. There are all kinds of things that fall under the same law as suppressors (National Firearms Act of 1934) that make no sense at all. For instance - installing a vertical grip on a pistol, or installing a barrel of less than 16" on a rifle.

Using any of the items on this page on an AR-15 lower receiver that is configured as a rifle _or was sold by a dealer in the past while configured as a rifle_ is a felony and carries the same penalty as possessing an unregistered machinegun: [https://palmettostatearmory.com/ar-15/barreled- upper-assembl...](https://palmettostatearmory.com/ar-15/barreled-upper- assemblies.html?upper_barrel_length=1352)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Right now, people are commenting this will enable 3D-printed _plastics_ , but there are mildly expensive (about $1000-$3000) 3D metal printers, and with a bit of metal-working and gun-smithing skill it should be possible to mass manufacture good-enough, metal guns from those files.

So, this lowers a bit the money and skill needed for it, but it's not braindead easy or dirt cheap yet. A decently organized gang will print its own guns in the near future, or paramilitary groups, or insurrectionaries.

<comment><USER9> In the US it's so ridiculously easy to obtain a firearm I don't know why anyone would bother. A home made (3D printed) firearm is just as likely to kill its operator as anyone else.

<comment><USER11> It's on the Internet, so this goes beyond the US. I'm thinking gun-controlled areas or conflict areas.

I'm also thinking how this potentially shuts down for the FBI entrapping wannabe-insurrectionaries by posing as weapons dealers.

Or how non-American gangs will have vast quantities of guns at their disposal, and how that will necessarily change police policy.

And how determined and savvy, but dangerous, individuals will more easily (this is the key thing here: more easily, lower barrier of acquisition) get their hands on guns in gun-controlled areas and go on rampages.

This will make gun control much more difficult.

<comment><USER9> In conflict areas, of which I'm familiar, AK47's are often easier to obtain than fresh produce.

<comment><USER11> And in gun-controlled areas? They would have to control the printers and the digital blueprints as well.

<comment><USER9> You mean like Chicago?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Realistically, how effective would a 3D printed firearm be? I was under the impression that PLA/ABS plastics are simply not that strong of a material.

<comment><USER13> It could be a good intimidation tool for stick ups. All it takes is one shot so most people will be scared enough to comply as they would when faced with any other gun or weapon.

On the flip side, the barrel doesn't last fore more than one or two shots if you're lucky. You can't reload fast and have a single shot. I can see it being a useful tool for an assassination. But that single shot better count otherwise you're either captured, dead or you lose the target.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't you be way better off buying one of those realistic airsoft guns and painting the tip? Plus in many jurisdictions should you ever be caught, crimes committed with a gun require serving more years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's on the internet. It won't be just "Americans".

Nice that TFA mentioned Cody Wilson's interesting politics, too. He certainly lives them...

<comment><USER11> How are they going to get bullets in gun-controlled places?

<comment><USER10> The same way they do now, presumably.

<comment><USER11> What way is that?

<comment><USER16> Probably the same way they get guns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow great victory for freedom of information.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not at all fear mongering by this Gardiner person:

        Gardiner fears it will make it easier for terrorists and people who are too dangerous to pass criminal background checks to get their hands on guns.

        "I think everybody in America ought to be terrified about  that."

        The fact that high end 3-D printers are still too expensive for most people doesn't ease her concerns.

        "The people who make them will be state actors or well financed criminal cartels who have the ability to execute well organized criminal attacks in the United States and elsewhere," she said.

<comment><USER19> FYI: It's really annoying to read quotes when you have to move the scrollbar left and right all the time. Please avoid using codeblocks for quotes. Just put a "> " at the start of each quoted paragraph.

<comment><USER18> Noted.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What books would you recommend for machine learning? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It's pre "deep learning", but I like

[http://cs.du.edu/~mitchell/mario_books/Neural_Networks_for_P...](http://cs.du.edu/~mitchell/mario_books/Neural_Networks_for_Pattern_Recognition_- _Christopher_Bishop.pdf)</comment>


Using a credit card? Watch out for the 'checkout fee' - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/27/pf/checkout-fee/index.html?iid=SF_BN_MPM

<comment><USER2> Thank God. I almost feel bad using my Visa for small purchases when I know I have cash (I'll sometimes ask the person checking me out which they prefer).

> Many big players in the retail industry have been up in arms about the > settlement. Stores from the nation's largest retailer down to small > businesses have lamented the agreement, claiming that it transferred the > wrongdoings of credit card issuers to the consumer...Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune > 500), Macy's (M, Fortune 500), JCPenney (JCP, Fortune 500), Limited Brands > (LTD, Fortune 500), Gap Inc (GPS, Fortune 500). and The Neiman Marcus Group > were among those who joined the NRF in claiming that "raising consumer > prices by adding an 'interchange tax' is no remedy for Visa's and > MasterCard's continuing monopoly abuse."

Yes, this does add the option to put the credit card company's extortionist fee on the back of the consumer, but from what I can tell it's completely optional for the merchant to do this, so I don't understand these big company's motivations (they can just continue not to charge the customers the fee). Perhaps it's linked to these companies having their own co-branded cards that let them split the fee's difference? Not sure what's going on here.

The bottom line is that this is incredibly good news for post-credit card tech companies. As a consumer, I'm going to be presented with three options at checkout:

1\. Pay with cash, which means you have to carry the cash and then carry the annoying small pieces of metal you're going to get back with another piece of paper that's the only proof you have that this transaction ever took place. This option sucks, and is the reason why people for so long have opted to...

2\. Pay with your credit card, but now you have to pay an extra 2.3% fee that before was getting footed by the business. You also have to carry your card around with you, make sure there's money on it, and be super careful you don't loose it. Which leaves...

3\. Pay with your smartphone. This will soon be _by far_ the easiest option (in the case of Square Checkout, all you have to do is tell them your name), and one of the most competitive, which will drive fees down. The customer doesn't have to carry anything extra with them, their money is as secure as their smart phone is, and fees will be minimal and only driven lower with competition. Just brace yourselves for the standards war.

I'm just waiting for the day when I can reduce my "keys, wallet, phone" door check to "phone."

<comment><USER3> I think it's unlikely that many retailers are going to pass along the fee via a surcharge. The law in Australia now allows retailers to impose surcharges or minimums for credit cards (by making these provisions illegal in the contract between retailer and credit card company). In practice very few businesses do so, with the exception of some small businesses that have maybe $5 or $10 minimums.

There does seem to be a lot of complicated maneuvering by retailers with regards to the fees - the change actually gives the retailers more negotiating power than before as they now have a stronger bargaining chip to use when negotiating swipe fees "Oh, Visa, you want to charge me 1% of the transaction amount when Mastercard only charges 0.5%? Well how about I impose a surcharge on Visa customers only and see how they like it?"

It seems like retailers are making a stink about it since this isn't their first preferred outcome where there is a ruling, settlement or law where interchange fees are actually capped.</comment></comment>


Mythbusting: Why Firefox 4 won't score 100 on Acid3 - <AUTHOR> http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3 <comment><USER2> IE9 version: [http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/acid3/default.h...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/acid3/default.html)

<comment><USER3> It'll be interesting to compare the discussion here to previous times IE9's stance on ACID3 has been discussed / referenced.

A couple minutes of Googling brings up:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859375>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196054>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399998>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1738681>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surely the correct thing to do would be to lobby to have these tests removed from Acid3 in favour of the separate font tests.

Webkit had to request changes to the tests in in Acid2.

[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html#0...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html#008011)

<comment><USER5> That's been done. WOFF was suggested as a replacement. It didn't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good information to know. Are there more current tests that are pushing the current generation browsers to implement new functionality?

Also, that site is beautiful.

<comment><USER7> > Are there more current tests

There's <http://html5test.com/> (which is only so-so as a test, since last I checked it only tests whether a feature is feature-detectable, not whether it actually _works_ or anything, for the most part; see the "input element types" section in Safari 5, say).

Once IE is passing Acid3 or close to it, Hixie was going to consider working on Acid4, maybe.

Note, by the way, that most of the point of the Acid2/3 tests is not to push new functionality as much as to push correct implementation of _old_ functionality: stuff that's been specced for a while but is buggily implemented. This was less true of Acid3 than Acid2; last I heard the plan was for Acid4 to be more like Acid2 in this regard.

So are you really looking for new stuff, or correctly implemented stuff? ;)

<comment><USER8> Old, but here's Ian's initial Acid4 plans: <http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/004/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds very similar to how browsers are optimizing js engines towards specific test implementations.

<comment><USER10> The article does not sound like that at all. There is not even a hint of the assertion that the browsers that do implement part of the SVG spec only did so in order to game the acid test.

It may _remind_ you of such affairs, but people are likely to come away from your comment with a wrong impression of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I wrote this post since there isn't a highly ranked piece on this if you > search for "Firefox Acid3," and there should be. Hopefully my site's search > engine ranking can be useful for something.

Am I missing something? Is his site supposed to have great google mojo? I ran the search he specified, as well as several variants, and couldn't find him in the first 12 pages. OTOH, Wikipedia's article on Acid3 [1], which is Google's first result, makes much the same point as he does. In fact, it cites him, which is probably a bad thing, given it's a blog.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Development_and_impact>

<comment><USER12> I just created this article a few hours ago. Google doesn't re-rank results that often, so give it some time. ;)

<comment><USER11> Well fine then. I presume it was you who added the Wikipedia link?

<comment><USER8> It was a user called Asqueela, although I suppose that could still be Limi.

<comment><USER5> Asqueela is not Limi. Both are well known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If it's such a technical difficulty, how does Opera manage to pass it still?

<comment><USER14> "Opera and Webkit implemented (very brokenly, in at least Opera's case) a small subset of SVG 1.1 Fonts; basically just enough to pass Acid3."

<comment><USER15> Translation: We were unable to implement the same subset and now tell everyone it isn't useful in the 'real world'.

Sounds better than "It was too hard for us. Sorry."

<comment><USER16> Has _anybody_ used SVG fonts on the Web? I'm curious.

I realize that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with browsers not supporting it, but it seems to me that the really good features start picking up traction even when only a few browsers support it (e.g. CSS transitions and animations, the latter of which Firefox still doesn't support).

<comment><USER17> If you wanted webfonts on iOS versions before 4, you had to use SVG fonts on that platform. They weren't great though, and having the choice to use TTF/OTF now is much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> great article!</comment>


Write your way to happiness - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lift-research/ee92bf7663ab

<comment><USER2> This deserves more than 3 upvotes...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you got something from reading it.

We just started writing posts that dive into benefits of a specific habit, so it's great to hear positive feedback.</comment></comment>


Larry and Sergey's CS349 at Stanford (last updated Oct 1998) - <AUTHOR> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/ <comment><USER2> I think my favorite part of this was:

 _It has culminated in the WebBase project whose aims are to maintain a local copy of the World Wide Web_

Weird to think that a local copy of the internet was actually feasible only twelve years ago.

<comment><USER3> And it took up roughly 150 GB. Six average BluRay movies take up as much space on disk as the 1998 internet. Hosting that much on Amazon S3 would cost about $20 per month, not including bandwidth bills.

Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

<comment><USER4> It goes to show that even if space and bandwidth are cheap (and they will only get cheaper), creating content will always be enormously expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a bit surreal. 12 years ago, two of the most powerful men in the world were lowly graduate students...

<comment><USER6> Is that really uncommon? Where was your average "young powerful elite" a whole twelve years ago? I think that _on average_ they were lowly grad students or undergrads a decade ago. The bounds for movement over 12 years is huge. It's a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case anyone is curious, here is a working link to the paper for the Introduction class, _The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine_ : <http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> So... they were teaching a whole course while they were PhD students?

<comment><USER6> Yeah; not that uncommon for a major research university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Imagine having been a TA for this class...

<comment><USER6> It looks like the TA, Diane Tang, ended up at Google.

<comment><USER10> Twist ending!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stanford has some bad-ass classes...</comment>


TSA budget increases to nearly $8 BILLION for 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/today-s-news-analysis/single-article/tsa-funding-up-in-2012-consolidated-appropriations-act/d2de1c5444b43c89e10cfc663d96c869.html

<comment><AUTHOR> 250 additional new scanners

12 additional new VIPR teams (in case a train gets hijacked and driven into a building?)

Number of terrorists caught by TSA for their hundred billion spent since 2001: ZERO</comment>


Companies in the U.S. are valued 10% above the cost of replacing their assets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-18/nobel-winner-s-math-shows-s-p-500-unhinged-from-reality-or-not <comment><USER3> "If you sold every share of every company in the U.S. and used the money to buy up all the factories, machines and inventory, you'd have some cash left over."

So by this theory the value of a tech startup is the developer's laptops and the value of a yoga studio is the loaner mats.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. I think the Bloomberg article oversimplified Tobin's work to the point where a) your interpretation of the article's claim is correct but b) definitely not in line with what Tobin claimed.

If Tobin were still alive, I think he would insist that intellectual property (read: code, patents, trademarks and software licenses) also be included. He didn't care about 'factories, machines and inventory'; he cared about 'replacement costs'. The author seems to have glossed over that bit for the sake of brevity and clarity, and in the process accidentally introduced a logic error, at least IMHO.

<comment><USER5> Obviously, however, replacement cost for intangibles is impossible to estimate accurately. Especially if you consider the risk that the "replacement" is a failure or doesn't accurately replace the institutional knowledge, intellectual property and goodwill the company has accrued.

It is fair to say that stock prices are not representative of current value, but rather the long term value and growth the company has yet to realize. So in that sense, Tobin is right, but the growth the company has yet to realize is really just goodwill accrued as an asset. Meh. I'm rambling now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem with Q ratio is it relies on hard assets. The reality is, much of the US industry isn't dependent on hard assets and is instead based on the value of the software that runs on those assets.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin%27s_q](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin%27s_q)

This is an economic theory that was first published 1968/1969\. It was a good model when Tech/IT wasn't a huge sector of the economy in its own right.

<comment><USER7> Customers are probably one of the highest rated "assets" of any company nowadays. So much of the expenses of the company go into acquiring them.

<comment><USER6> Yes. But my understanding of the Q ratio is it takes into account on-paper assets, not the cost of "acquiring" customers or knowledge to produce R&D type "assets".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rationally priced assets are valued by their prospective value.

In principle, the valuation seems overly simplistic. Corporate stocks — the combination of people and entitlements that can be wielded to generate revenue – should be more than the sum of the value of the piecemeal assets, IMHO.

Even if not overly simplistic, I feel like the methodology would leave a lot of room for broad speculation. How did they value: future redeemable assets, trade assets, intellectual property, intangible leverage, market and demographic prospects, cultural distinctions of the corporation, and goodwill? These things all tend to be waffly in the accounting, but they have a real impact on future income and therefore the prospective value of the company.

Everything I have read about Tobin suggests that the man was spectacularly clueless, and every time I read something about him I cringe and emit some guttorial sigh. In all likelihood I deeply misunderstand his thinking, but I have yet to see anything remotely resembling clear, persuasive arguments in defence of his ideas, which seem tragically disconnected from economic reality.

<comment><USER9> Ah but the interesting part isn't the long term correction factor but the rather shocking change over just a couple years. What has really changed in the last five years economically to result in such an impressive increase? Oh, nothing? Well, these things do vary randomly over time while tending to revert to the norm.

It is true, that when I toss a ball into the air, the error of my measurement from the instantaneous position of the ball to the gravitational center of the earth is very fuzzy. In fact the error bars are probably wider than the measurement of height given enough hand wavy argument and bad measurement tools. I agree with your interpretation of that observation. I really don't have any idea how far away that baseball is from the center of the earth. None the less, toss the ball up in the air higher than you've ever seen it tossed before, its coming back down faster than ever before, eventually.

Or rephrased it doesn't seem to be a random walk error where the odds of being higher or lower are always 50:50 no matter if its right on 1.000 or higher than its ever been. It does seem to revert to the norm. So if its higher than its ever been, then the odds of reversion to the norm in the near future are higher than they've ever been...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> can we conclude that it's basically become a game at this point? place your bets, manipulate where you can, and hope you sell before the other guy does?

<comment><USER11> Exactly this.

Things are never going to change because you'll never get enough people to willingly give up making so much money. Take bubbles, i.e.: When the numbers are so far askew that everyone knows there's a bubble, you are still not going to see anyone not play the game. There's just too much money to be made.

<comment><USER12> And Tobin's point is that we're all feeling bubble-icious.

Handwaving about intangible values or customer goodwill doesn't change the fact that market expectations are primarily built on faith in the future, which is an _entirely irrational_ basis for economic decision-making.

It's certainly difficult to quantify the value of IP, as opposed to the value plant and machinery.

But are most valuations driven by guesses about the future value of IP that have at least some connection with economic reality? Or are they driven by hope, hype, and momentum?

The reliable and empirically predictable manic-depressive boom-bust cycle of corporate capitalism strongly suggests the latter.

Or to put it another way - at some point the QE taps are going to be turned off, and the economy is going to have to go back to buying and selling stuff that people want instead of relying on stock price inflations created by cheap money hand-outs to banks so generously donated by the Fed and the other national banks.

Anyone who thinks there won't be a "significant adjustment" when that happens is - IMO - fooling themselves.

<comment><USER13> > _" market expectations are primarily built on faith in the future, which is > an entirely irrational basis for economic decision-making"_

Faith in some version of future events is the _only_ rational basis for economic decision making. You pay present money in the hope of future value, because otherwise you'd simply retain the present discounted value of the purchase price.

As long as that faith isn't blind, but instead well researched and based on a defensible thesis, there's nothing wrong with it.

On a company-by-company basis, it's practical to evaluate how much of the company's market value derives from intangible components like goodwill and market position, but it's much harder to do it on the scale of _an entire economy_ , which is what the analysis in the article claims to do.

It's more reasonable to look at capital intensive industries like manufacturing and agriculture and see if their Q values are historically high. Lumping compannies like Adobe and Apache into that same group and using the same metrics for the whole group is disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> " According to Tobin's Q, equities in the U.S. are valued about 10 percent above the cost of replacing their underlying assets -- higher than any time other than the Internet bubble and the 1929 peak."

Cue the "new normal" excuses. The "prices have reached a plateau". The same pre-buble-burst talk that has happened every other time.

This _will not_ end well.

<comment><USER15> We'll know we're doomed when WIRED has a cover story on "The Long Boom" and how this time it's for real.

<comment><USER16> Management "consulting" firms are probably already preparing strategy maps for the next "new normal"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." \--John Maynard Keynes

</comment><comment><USER18> This article seems odd to me. According to this article [1] a value of 1.1 is rather normal for the last couple of years and the value they are comparing it to is an outlier (of the 2009 crisis). It's likely that the intangibles are driving the recent values above 1.0. Anyways: Stock prices _are_ high - <USER2> not sure if Tobin will help us finding the right way out :)

[1] [http://www.indexologyblog.com/2013/09/03/too-high-or-too- low...](http://www.indexologyblog.com/2013/09/03/too-high-or-too-low-look-at- tobins-q/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Remember Long Term Capital Management... Just in case, Nobel Prizes & "Maths" can be very wrong.

<comment><USER20> For anyone interested in this topic, be sure to read "When Genius Failed". I finally read it last year and it's excellent.

[http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term- Managemen...](http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term- Management/dp/0375758259)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Capital value is not how the stock market has valued companies, not since the middle of the 20th century, at least. See [http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archives/2015/05/dont- fret...](http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archives/2015/05/dont-fret-about- tobins-q.html) for a nice explanation.

</comment><comment><USER22> I find it interesting that it seems like critics of the Q ratio justify the high price by saying that because of low interest rates, other investment options are worse. As much as I agree that still makes it a bubble. It's just not that investors get drawn to the attractiveness of the bubble on the stock market, but rather that the bubble is there because everyone gets pushed into it. Even if you don't buy the Q ratio, this reasoning if correct would mean that the stock market is most likely higher than it should be and probably won't stay there.

</comment><comment><USER23> Q value doesn't include brand value. The McDonald arches are just as valuable, if not more, than the the fryers, heat lamps, and buildings.

</comment><comment><USER24> I guess this is talking about price-to-book? In some other countries, price- to-book is usually close to 1, or even below it, which always struck me as strange. Either something is wrong with their stock markets, or companies are not as profitable as they might be for some reason. (Maybe a good reason; profits aren't everything in life). I'm not familiar with the Q ratio so maybe it's a slightly different concept...

It makes sense for a single company, if it is so unprofitable, even including future potential profitability, that it really should be shut down and stripped for assets. But ordinarily I would expect a company to be worth significantly more than its book value. Otherwise, you could easily recreate the company by just "replacing" the assets. But this is only true if the company is based entirely on easily replaceable, low skill labor. Are there any large companies like this anymore?

In reality, there are intangible assets - and I'm not talking about software etc. - that are very difficult to measure, and guarantee that any worthwhile business should be valued at more than its tangible assets. Some things are hard to price, but might be possible to sell off: brand identity, customer base, marketing data, etc. Still, replacing these things is hard.

Some things are very hard to sell off. Businesses have employees, and employees are in an organizational structure where they know how to work with other employees to get their jobs done. As well, there are relationships with contractors and vendors. Replacing these is extremely hard.

</comment><comment><USER25> I thought markets were designed for unhinging numbers from reality. Surely that's what leverage is all about.

</comment><comment><USER26> This doesn't account for the liquidity premium, talent, internal process. 10% seems like a bargain. If I bought a equipment today, it would be worth less tomorrow and I'd have to sell it at a deep discount. Investors pay up to have a liquidity premium.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not only is this model flawed but this sort of thinking makes it hard for small software companies to borrow money : banks value you company only based on hard assets. This limits software companies to raising cash only by selling equity.

</comment><comment><USER28> So fuck my IP right? It's not worth anything more then the air I breath...

<comment><USER16> It isn't, unless you can actually sell it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: 808 16-beat sequencer - <AUTHOR> https://808-sdmijujoce.now.sh/ <comment><AUTHOR> More importantly than the React code, I was playing around with `next.js` and `now.sh`. It was the simplest setup I've ever done. Barely any boilerplate, support for es6, and instant deploy. :)

Code: [https://github.com/csciutto/challenges/tree/master/808](https://github.com/csciutto/challenges/tree/master/808)</comment>