Launch HN: Goodcover (YC S17) – Cooperative renters insurance for half the price - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, we're Chris and Dan, co-founders of Goodcover (https://www.goodcover.com). Goodcover provides renters insurance (only in California at the moment) and operates as a cooperative. We take a fixed fee on every policy, pool the premiums to pay claims, and then return what's left over back to Members through an annual dividend. Thanks to this model and good technology we're able to cut the price of renters insurance in half.
I (Chris) worked in traditional insurance for 8 years. That time taught me to love insurance and how it picks people up after disasters, but it also gave me first hand exposure to the things people hate about it – the ever-increasing prices, the adversarial claims negotiations, the mountains of paperwork, and the byzantine decision making. All these inefficiencies kept us from really understanding and working for our policyholders – the people we were meant to serve. I became convinced technology was coming for this industry.
I moved to SF in 2016, which is where I met Dan through a family friend. Dan had co-founded Cloudkick (YCW09) and was now looking to start another company. He also knew technology was coming for insurance, especially after his early career at IBM where he saw just how many "tech consultants" were placed in State Farm. Meeting him was a breath of fresh air – we started Goodcover in 2017 and got into YC right after.
And then… it took us two years to get a product to market. We had opportunities to get going faster – you can get an agent's license, buy off the shelf software, and sell other companies' products in a matter of weeks. But they would be the same crappy, overpriced, adversarial products that everybody sells, and everybody hates. What good is that? Instead, we didn't take the shortcuts and stuck it out to change the business model to cut the price in half, and Goodcover is the result.
The story of how we did this starts with how insurance prices are made. If you have lots of claims data, you can run regressions to learn how underwriting factors like location, customer data, previous losses, etc all affect the frequency and severity of claims for every dollar of coverage you are providing. You then load that claims model with your expenses and desired profit margin, and boom you have insurance rates. You then have to get the Department of Insurance in each state you enter to sign off on your rates (not too low so you lose money, not so high that the government calls out your gouging).
We knew technology would save us a lot on processing costs – with Dan's technical background we knew that we could build technology that would run the business for a fraction of the cost that the typical industry vendors charge. We weren't going to be saddled with huge agency forces or massive brand advertising. But, we didn't have any claims data.
Enter Quirk 1 of the insurance industry: all personal lines insurance pricing is public. Since all product and pricing is approved by the state government, to start something new you need to essentially reconstitute work other companies have done, proving that the elements you choose work for your target market. This is why most new insurance offerings are basically just another version of the pricing model sold by the "Insurance Services Office" (ISO – yes, that's a company, not a government agency). It's approved everywhere and used by everyone, so it's a quick start. Lemonade uses ISO with one important modification: they set their minimum premium at $60 instead of $120, allowing them to claim an introductory price of $5 a month. If you buy more than the minimum coverage though, you'll quickly get to "everybody else's price" territory.
However to cut the price without sacrificing coverage, we couldn't use the same model that everyone else does. We needed a more granular model where we could charge the safest 99% people very little in exchange for charging the riskier 1% more. In my insurance career I had learned a lot about models designed for high-value homes, jewelry, cars etc – these models price in catastrophe (like hurricane and wildfire) very precisely to manage exposures in high-risk places. This granularity results in much lower prices for safer risks, since prices there don't need to subsidize risky ones like they do in traditional "mass market" models. We decided to adapt these models to build our own that would be applicable to our target market, i.e. Renters. Our competitors that don't use these models are in a bit of a pickle, because they can't raise prices for high risks too fast thanks to regulatory constraints, meaning they have to keep prices high in safe places to balance the book.
It also meant we could start with a coverage baseline that was better than the usual Renters Policy, including coverage for mold remediation, water damage originating from other peoples' apartments, etc. We modernized the coverage, getting rid of extra coverage for things like oriental rugs and replacing it with more computer coverage. And critically we lowered the expense base, allowing us to offer huge savings thanks to the compound effect of lower costs and more granular pricing for our target market. The biggest apples-to-apples discount we've clocked so far is 71%.
Custom model in hand, we were a critical step closer. But we still couldn't offer insurance until we had the capital ready to pay claims. Insurance regulation sensibly makes sure that before you sell insurance to anyone you are adequately capitalized to pay your claims. Thus we set out to raise more capital.
Here's where we ran into Quirk 2, and something I should have known all along. Insurance Claims Capital is inherently not venturable. VCs look for 10-100x return on investment. But, as we grew the company, by law our claims capital reserves would always need to be at least 3x our expected losses (8x is normal). That geometric growth pattern is not scalable. Even if we raised over and over again, by the time we "made it big" we would be selling shares to normal investors, people who value insurance companies on a multiple of their cash on hand. Today's insurance monsters have grown their cash base slowly for about 100 years. We found it was inefficient for us to own this capital, and therefore impossible to pitch. Money we raise should go to scaling our operations, not sitting around in case we had more claims than premiums. This meant we need to get claims capital partners – aka, rent it from insurance companies.
We had hoped to avoid this because of quirk 3 of the insurance industry, "underwriting profits". It used to be you could run an insurance business with huge expenses at a loss and make money because interest rates are great. No longer. The way insurance companies make money today is by keeping the difference of premium minus claims and expenses, or "underwriting profit". This sets insurers up to be in conflict with their customers, and my experience in the industry showed me that if there was a root cause for all the reasons people hated insurance, this was it. So not only would we now need to ask insurers for help, we'd need them to give us their profit back to return to Members.
This process took over a year. Fortunately we secured in-principle approval from a great reinsurer (TransRe) early on. The next step was to find a "primary" insurance partner to get us set up in California. We still have the chart of our emotions on the whiteboard in our office from that time – with huge ups (like when we moved to board-level conversations with one of California's best cooperative insurers) to huge lows (like when those talks collapsed because that insurer's agency force wouldn't allow the channel conflict of a digital partner). Eventually we got it done, inking a three-party deal that worked for everyone, providing a more or less stable return for our capital partners but with the excess profit returning to Goodcover's Members. With model and insurance capital partners in hand we then moved to get approval from California, which went as well as a process like that could, thank goodness.
While we were working on these business objectives we built the necessary technology to service policies, quotes and maintain regulatory compliance. The easiest way to think of insurance is it works like an append only database. For instance, to remove coverage you would amend a person's policy contract to remove a coverage, and so similarly in our tech stack we append an event that describes the changes to the policy which outputs a final policy. As a side benefit, this allows us to see the current state of a policy at any point in time. This model works well for us considering most, if not all, of our code is written in a functional language (Scala).
Which brings us up to late last year when we wrote our first Goodcover policy. Honestly it's been quite an ordeal, but we think the changes we've been able to implement have been worth it. I am so thankful for the hard work and persistence of the team, and for all the feedback and help the HN and YC community have given us over the years (shout out to anyone who remembers our "Advice" Show HN from 2018! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465114).
Renter's insurance in CA is just the first step, (home and more states on the way) We have a ton more listening to Members to do, but we hope you enjoy the benefits – and are super grateful for any feedback you have! <comment><USER3> Great business concept. I loved the write up, made me think of my own trials and tribulations as an ex-entrepreneur.

As a marketing guy though, I saw a few points I'll mention in case you want to implement. I'm sure the editing will improve your conversion rate:

1- Authority logos - I'm pretty sure the average renter won't recognize them. Find more recognizable logos to use, or don't use them. The whole purpose of authority logos is to leach off the goodwill people might have to brands they know and love. If they can't recognize the authority logos, that defeats the point of having them.

2- I'd change from "TV Famous Insurers" to "Geiko" or whatever specific one you are talking about (lemonade uses specific names on their landing pages for a real good reason)

3- Clarify the meaning of "Free Insurance" \- I'd use the Get 1 Month Give 1 Month of FREE Insurance" or simply "One Month of Free Insurance". I'd then make the text under the headline much clearer. Why you do something isn't as important as what the end user gets, avoid getting bogged down in too many details.

4- Testimonials need to look more like testimonials. Use pictures or something that shouts 'this is a testimonial'. The colored boxes look cool, but I believe design should always follow function.

5- I'd avoid mentioning the packages on the lander/home. Just mention the highlights "From as Little as $5 for insurance of up to $500,000". Moving people through the funnel before you get into details.

6- Avoid the word 'ruthlessly'.

7- I'd include a hero shot or something a little more human. The page is a little dry.

Overall though, I love the concept and will likely sign up soon (my wife generally handles that, but I'll bring it up to her) - The website is also super well done, my comments aren't trying to detract from that in any way. Just trying to give feedback to make it even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice! As an insurance guy... I am always in need of advice from marketing folks! So thanks again.

<comment><USER4> I'll just add that I loved the packages on the front page. I never bothered with renter's insurance, because it seemed like a hassle and I have been willing to self-insure. But seeing my options immediately made me think, "Maybe I should!"

Please do put a jobs page up, though. Your thoughtful and frank description here definitely has me curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah it was always annoying to us that you needed to give away all your personal details before you even found out whether something would be worth it, so we wanted to be different. Glad to hear you like it!

On a jobs page, thanks for your interest! We have something up on AngelList right now: [https://angel.co/company/goodcover- co/jobs](https://angel.co/company/goodcover-co/jobs)

<comment><USER4> Alas, I suspect I'm not FP-ish enough for that role, but I appreciate you pointing it out. Good luck with your efforts!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh bummer, but no problem, thank you for considering us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think you made a good choice in picking renter's as your first policy offering. It's not complex, many people are required to have it (as a landlord, I certainly require it of my tenants), and you won't have a tough time getting some reinsurance for your policies.

How will you deal with aggregator sites? Will you allow scraping?

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I think (correct me if I'm wrong) you're asking about comparison sites - <USER2> those cases the law requires them to establish an agency relationship. We're open to it and think we'll compete well, but much like Southwest it would be hard to give better prices anywhere else than our own site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chris,

Congratulations. I wish there were more like Goodcover.

How would you handle premiums and claims from high risk earthquake and fire prone areas (in California)?

For example, if I invested in building a defensible area around my house, would you give me a discount on "fire insurance"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, if the whole industry ended up working the way we do, we'd be thrilled.

To your question: Premium: Our model has granular rating for high risk areas (fire is the biggest issue there). And part of that is the defensibility of the specific property for sure. But unfortunately the biggest factors there are all location specific - distance to water, slope, ease of access, distance to burnable area, etc, which not much can be done about. This is why although it is hard, communities investing in collective defense has the biggest impact on insurance prices.

On claims: We have reinsurance, so no need to fear us being blown out capital- wise. To actually get the claims paid and work done we (like most others) have contracts with emergency-overflow claims administration teams, so that a force is ready at peak times.

<comment><USER6> > fire is the biggest issue there

A few months ago during the socal fires my community was up in flames, as were a lot of other's.

The house a mile down from me burned. We were evacuated

There is no insurance company willing to insure our area

> This is why although it is hard, communities investing in collective defense > has the biggest impact on insurance prices.

100%. My neighbors and I self insure. We have built defensible areas and maintain it together.

It's cheaper (?) to self insure than pay premiums some, who managed to get a quote, said.

It is a lot of work maintaining that defensible area and keeping it up to spec!

We like to say our actions stopped the fire from spreading but when I saw embers in the air around me, I could not stay around to verify whether that was true.

Our firefighting department, incidentally less than a mile away from us, is one of our best buddies.

This is possible because of the rural location I have chosen to live in.

I see no way of pulling this off in a city.

I will keep checking with you and recommend to my community.

Please keep it up

<comment><AUTHOR> Firstly, I'm sorry to hear about your community, that is rough and hope people are ok. And thank you (and your fire buddies - my cousin is a wildfire- fighter) for all your work to keep your community safe!

To your question on self insurance - it's a matter of risk and statistics. No insurance is less money up front than coverage, but you retain the risk which may or may not cost a lot. We give a quote everywhere, and we think it accurately represents the risk Goodcover is covering for you, but I concede it is more expensive than it used to be.

Something else to know - CA has a non-renewal moratorium in force for wildfire areas, if anyone is being cancelled or non-renewed in your area please check this out: [http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press- releases/20...](http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press- releases/2019/release092-19.cfm)

<comment><USER6> > CA has a non-renewal moratorium in force for wildfire areas

Thank you sharing the link as this raises a question I think you are perfect to ask:

What are your thoughts on this regulation?

Would it now, in effect, significantly increase premiums for everyone now that an insurance company cannot drop the high risk customers?

Feel free to email me as the answer might be not something you want to make public.

If you can answer, and I think the answer is yes, how much in hike in premiums would account for this regulation?

<comment><AUTHOR> So, given the underlying risk, I think the premium for wildfire in CA will be going up in general with or without this. The moratorium on non-renewal only lasts one year, and really just reiterates existing law. Most insurers have been trying to adjust their rates long before this came out.

How much is hard to say. An old mentor of mine always said, "There's a price for every risk, but sometimes it's as much as the limit of insurance." That's a bit geeky but basically, as wildfire becomes more common, the models will adjust to accommodate. Community efforts to make their communities more resilient will go a long way though, like mentioned above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This pricing is way better than other insurers but I just signed up for Lemonade. How do I know you can pay out?

Also, the fact that you can give me a quote without an email address is amazing. I'll sign up but it'll be a year before you see anything because I just got Lemonade.

<comment><USER8> I hadn't heard of Lemonade and it is 30% of the price of State Farm for the same coverage levels, and is way more transparent for electronics and cameras. Thank you for mentioning.

<comment><USER9> I have State Farm and found Lemonade renter's insurance to be more expensive for the same coverage levels. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such a well-written community resource, educating members and not just promoting the service. Thanks!

Question: does someone like me _need_ renter's insurance? I rent a bedroom in the owner's flat, don't have anything super valuable in there and am not required by the owner to have insurance. If I'm comfortable self-insuring my personal belongings, is there any other outsized risk that would justify paying $60/year?

<comment><USER11> Thank you! Probably the most outsized risk is liability, basically if you're sued for something related to the property (had a party and someone broke their leg) your insurance company will defend you up to your liability limit.

Edit: Also keep in mind our renter's insurance (and most others) covers you wherever you are, so if your laptop is stolen out of a coffee shop, it's covered. Also if there's a fire in your building and your stuff is not damaged but you have to move out, renters insurance covers additional living expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> An actually honest(-ish) insurance launch! Congratulations!

Competing on better pricing/underwriting models, and modernized, streamlined endorsements of ISO forms is fine. (I can't speak to whether the actuarial and underwriting work you did is up to snuff, but will give the benefit of the doubt, and TransRe is a good company, as is Milliman). You probably didn't need to create your own PAS (hint...you've just just started! MTE are not the only hard parts...) but enjoy the challenge.

If you're doing by-peril, bit surprised you didn't try to collaborate with AAIS, instead of copying CAIC? AAIS loves working with startups, and they're a non-profit, member-driven organization. (Btw, delete the CAIC references from [https://www.goodcover.com/files/Goodcover_Policy_Sample_Full...](https://www.goodcover.com/files/Goodcover_Policy_Sample_Full.pdf) )

Surprised (did you? I don't see it mentioned in your Filing Memorandum, which it definitely, _definitely_ should be) you got approval for "Goodcover's Invitation Thank You Policy," pretty sure that won't fly in NY. Your advertising should really say "up to" everywhere, as you (and everyone knowledgeable) knows you are not selling steeply discounted insurance across the board. (As you quite rightly admit, Lemonade's "$5/month" (including instalment fees!) offer is a loss leader, even if they can't admit that.)

Looks like your TOS was updated, still not happy about the blanket ownership of customer data terms.

</comment><comment><USER13> While I understand you've clearly run the numbers, it still boggles my mind that you can cover $100,000 with $5/mo, and even more for higher tiers. It's fairly hard to see how it all works out, could you maybe ELI5?

<comment><AUTHOR> The math for any insurance pricing is basically Price = Expected Loss Severity x Expected Loss Frequency. The frequency of getting sued (Liability Coverage) is really low, hence low price, even though the expected loss is high. But yeah it really is mind boggling!

PS you've got me thinking about how I would explain insurance to a five year old! My son is 3 and Dan's is 4 so we'll get practicing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait, is Goodcover an actual cooperative, as a business structure?

Because that has a specific meaning, especially with regard to insurance. (And there are a lot of mutual insurance companies out there that are genuinely, 100 percent member-owned.)

But you mention venture capital and a rate of return for your capital partners.

So how is Goodcover what you say it is? Sounds like a for-profit company to me.

Saying you operate as a co-op when you're actually a for-profit is like saying you operate as a non-profit when you're actually a for-profit.

Ultimately, if you have outside investors, you've gotta make them money. If that's true, then suggesting you're operating as a cooperative is misleading at best.

EDIT: I looked at the legal notices section of your site, and this ain't a cooperative in any shape or form.

* "Goodcover takes a fixed fee - currently 20% of premiums."

* "Whether a Dividend can be paid is up to the discretion of Goodcover's board."

This is absolutely a venture-backed, for-profit company that is describing itself as a "member driven cooperative." I would not be surprised if legal issues arise because of this misrepresentation, because California treats cooperatives as a distinct legal structure. (For instance, it's illegal to have the word "Cooperative" in your business name if you're not incorporated as a co-op.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your question, it's an important one, and deserves more than a handwave answer. When we started Goodcover, our goal was to make it so we were not in conflict with our Members - and the core of this is a cooperative model.

The original business model we were looking for is known as a "Reciprocal Exchange" (RE) - a type of co-op or mutual (like you mention) where the members own the claims capital, but the business is managed by a company called an "Attorney in Fact", which is usually a for profit (Farmers is an example). That would be us - we'd make money providing an amazing service to as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, we found out from the CA regulators very early on that starting a Reciprocal Exchange today was basically a non-starter. The capital requirements I mention in "Quirk 2" mean we can't just raise money from somewhere and kick-start the RE. We would need to get future-subscribers to put up the cash, and the amount we were talking there was just not possible. Farmers started in 1928 with a loan for their backend capital, something that is illegal today. So we were stuck - how do we start a new co-op insurer given this requirement?

The above story is the process of us figuring that out. Goodcover is an MGA that manages insurance on behalf of its Members, like an Attorney in Fact does for an RE. However since we can't have an actual RE until we have sufficient number of Members, we rent the capital backstop from conventional carriers. They pay us a fee and return the "underwriting profit" to us (that part is even more complicated and can talk later if you want), which we then return to Members, like Farmers should, but doesn't anymore.

So, long answer - but yes, we are a for profit company. We operate the insurance like a cooperative, but like many other coops we do that for a for- profit fee. But, given the regulatory environment today we don't really look like your 1920s co-op!

<comment><USER15> Thanks for sharing this extra detail. Your industry is obviously much trickier to navigate than the service industry our worker co-op is in.

Do your members get any voting rights or other feedback mechanisms?

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, it's important I think. It is a heavily regulated industry so we always have to be mindful of what is legal, what is going to get regulatory approval, and what we actually want that will serve Members the best.

On voting rights - we haven't worked out how to legally do so, but we're experimenting with ideas over how to give the community more control. Would love to brainstorm ideas! Feel free to reach out, chris @ goodcover com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey, product looks awesome, something I would put time into:

Large landlords: They often mandate specific coverage, and will cross sell & promote you into their tennant email/welcome kits.

EQR requires something like 100K of liability in the bay area, gives you 30 days from lease effective or so to secure a policy or they auto enroll you in a $10/Mo from another vendor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And yes, great idea. So far we've been seeing a lot of landlord- provided policies, and we beat them by wide margins. By pitching ease of use and great coverage for the minimum possible tax on their tenants I hope will be a win!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hi!

I have 3 questions:

1) how much, in total, excluding your own hours, did the regulatory compliance stuff cost to launch just 1 product in 1 state?

2) how much would it cost to launch that same product in 50 states?

3) since you didn't want to have x3 or more sitting in the bank you chose to go with a re-insurer. And that took a year. Why was it that hard? Did you need a connection?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your questions! So, the actual cost of the regulatory filing part isn't that high in dollars, it isn't necessarily cost prohibitive. The real issue is building a unique insurance product, the underwriting for it, the pricing model, and all that good stuff - and then finding the reinsurance and primary insurance partners that will go to this new place with you. Knowing people helps, track records are important, the strength of your underlying models (industry vets at those companies will put them through the wringer). And then you need to do that 49 more times...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks really cool. I'm in MO so I can't check it out quite yet. I know you can't give specifics but could you give some generalities on the plan to roll out to the rest of the US? Is that something you are _actively_ working on now or are you really just trying to establish yourself in CA first and then will work on other states later? Basically, are we looking at months or years? In either case, I've already added my email to be notified.

Again, totally understand the legal aspects of making too many promises. Just curious. Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Short answer, Months - but perhaps not in 2020. Definitely recommend you get renters insurance if you don't have it.

More info: We have to roll out state by state, meaning we need to get approved in a state before we can do business there. That can be a pretty tedious process. So although we are working on it, we don't really have a good estimate for when we'll be available in each one. Since our model is a bit... different... some state regulators may take more convincing. California is very consumer friendly, so we got along because our model helps people. But other states don't share that point of view.

<comment><USER18> That makes sense! I have renters insurance now but will be needing to renew within the next few months so I'll probably still have to go somewhere else for now but I'll keep checking back with Goodcover. Thanks for the reply and congrats on the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just signed up for Goodcover. The cost-saving and how simple you make it to switch from Lemonade is truly mind-blowing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, and Welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm actually curious on this: how broad is the coverage on say computers? This is HN, so would say a home server be covered?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question - yes. "Home computers" would cover it. Just be sure to check the limit you're buying and that it's adequate for the amount of equipment you have.

<comment><USER12> Note the "Scheduled Items and Blanket Coverage" exclusion "5\. Loss to property used primarily for "business" purposes."

If the server is being used primarily for business purposes, it is not covered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Im extremely impressed with what you've built here. Id love to connect, any chance you can drop me a note toni @ figma?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!! Sure, will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In a previous life tried this with a UK car insurance startup. It's a tough world. Glad you have reinsurance already.

Good luck! Hope you come to New York

<comment><USER23> Ah Uk car insurance. Crazy variance in premiums between providers when I was there. Like I don't hunk I ever took the renewal offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really appreciate your business. I hope you make it to the rest of the US soon!

<comment><USER11> Thanks, we're working on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a really cool idea! Looking forward to seeing availability in New York.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!! You don't have to, but if you punch in you zip on the site and leave your email we'll let you know when we're there!

<comment><USER26> I second this. I'd loveto get away from big insurance. Also is there a plan for more different coverages? Home/Auto/Life?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, for sure - Home/Condo is next, with Auto, Life and others further down the roadmap. Lots to do! But the goal is to be full service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but, if renters insurance is only $100/year, what makes you think that a lower price matters at that point? Is the market that price sensitive, and doesn't psychology drive people away from deviantly low offerings for insurance?

</comment><comment><USER28> Glad to see this.

I worked in insurance for a few years and I am sometimes flabbergasted that it's legal. Good job analyzing where (some of) the sticking points are and working through them.

I hope this actually works and gives us a new model that makes me stop seeing insurance like some kind of evil empire.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> i was just looking at my renter's insurance with AAA recently and was thinking about canceling because the premiums have steadily creeped up over the last few years (by ~30-40% overall).

goodcover would cost a third of my current premiums for the lowest tier, and half for the highest. i'm going to dig a little deeper and will likely switch!

(i also did some tech consulting early in my career in life insurance underwriting, when mutual firms were all converting to corps)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great, let us know if you have any questions! You can send your current policy to compare @ goodcover and we'd be happy to send back and apples-to- apples comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just curious, as a product, is renter's insurance very different from homeowner's insurance? Superficially, i can think of similarities.

Is it a matter of time before you would move into this sector as well?

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats! Awesome that you use Scala!

<comment><USER32> Scala.js too! Been a great experience overall. (I work at Goodcover)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How are you different than lemonade? I use them And sounds like same approach

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your question. Apart from the structural difference (MGA vs. balance-sheet carrier) the main one is our business model. It allows us to offer better coverage for less money, and a Member Dividend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Your maximum ALE coverage ("Temp Housing") is unconscionably low for any major metro area, metro area with a tight housing market, or area with rent control.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. The default scales with our property coverage (and you can top it up too) ending up at $50k total. What number would you be looking for here?

<comment><USER34> Your maximum ALE limit in my zip code is $29K.

By way of background, I consult on litigation for a living. I may not be the Farmers guy but I've seen a thing or two when it comes to displacements (evictions, mold, fires/explosions, natural disasters, etc.). Here are some reasons and scenarios explaining why $29K is likely to be woefully inadequate in the areas I mentioned:

1\. You're going to eat up a chunk of your ALE coverage in the immediate aftermath of your displacement and will never find permanent relocation immediately.

2\. You have to assume that the claims reps on the subro or defense side (or both) are going to fight you on paying out limits.

3\. You have to assume that you'll need to retain an attorney. With a standard contingency fee of 30%, your maximum ALE recovery is going to be 70% of your ALE limit, which in Goodcover's case is $20,300.

4\. You have to assume that there will not be an entity against which you can pursue an uninsured loss above your limit (for various reasons).

5\. You are highly likely face a substantial monthly rent increase, including the loss of financially tangible amenities, when you relocate. Full stop. That increase is likely to be indefinite.

6\. Supposing you are lucky-- for example you're in a rent-controlled unit in an area governed by a law which requires the landlord to offer back a unit under your original lease terms upon rehab/rebuild-- you are highly likely to hit your ALE limit anyway for a variety of reasons. A) There might be no rebuild, in which case your rent increase will be indefinite. B) Your landlord might violate the requirement to re-lease under the original terms, in which case your rent increase will be indefinite. C) A rehab/rebuild could easily take 2-3 years (especially in a heavily regulated metro area) if the building damage is extensive, in which case you may well exhaust your coverage before you can move back in.

<comment><AUTHOR> All regions go to $50k if you up the property coverage, thanks for the feedback on the UI we'll adjust to make that more obvious.

In the renters insurance market our ALE numbers are pretty normal (or better!), so wanted to get a sense of what you think is needed here.

<comment><USER34> Whether or not your max ALE limit is "normal" is beside the point: my experience tells me that the amount is insufficient to cover one's probable downside risk in a major metro area, especially for unit larger than 1 bedroom.

I live in SF. My personal best case scenario in the event of a permanent relocation (insurer freely pays out limits without me having to hire an attorney, I use none of my ALE coverage in the immediate aftermath of my displacement, I relocate to a rent-controlled apartment with the same amenities), is that if I'm extremely lucky, $100K _might_ last me 4 years before I have to leave SF entirely.

<comment><USER26> > 100k might last 4 years

ALE is not meant to permanently replace your apartment. I don't understand why you would be expecting 4 years of living expenses to be covered in the case of your apartment burning down. I wouldn't even expect 4 months. It is meant to help you get back on your feet, and go to a hotel for the immediate aftermath while you look for a new place to stay.

You lost your apartment, not your entire livelihood. Chances are you still have an income to pay rent and a big chunk of contents coverage to help you out with down payments, and honestly, the insurance company should be going after the building owner.

<comment><USER34> You're misunderstanding both my point and how ALE works. Among other things:

1\. ALE time limits are set by the policy unless otherwise defined by statute. In CA, for example, if you are displaced due to a natural disaster, your ALE coverage remains in place by law _" for a period of no less than 24 months from the inception of the loss"_ (CA Insurance Code 2051.5(b)(2))

2\. There is no statutory ALE time limit on uninsured losses (at least not in CA). In theory (and in practice), you can make a claim for an indefinite period of time if you can prove you'd more likely than not stay in your apartment forever (I have recently seen one such actual claim in SF for 30 years of ALE, for example).

3\. If you live in SF, you should expect 4 years of ALE because it might well take that long to rebuild. The building owner may spend the better part of a year deciding whether or not to rebuild, 3-6 months getting estimates, and 2 years actually rebuilding. This happens all the time.

4\. I won't speak for what other people want from their insurance, but the loss I am personally trying to protect against is not the out of pocket cost while I look for a temporary apartment, it's the additional $2K or $3K+ per month that a temporary apartment is going to cost me until I can either find something cheaper, move back into my old unit after a rebuild, or decide to permanently leave the Bay Area. I want to buy myself as much time for that process/decision as possible, because the odds are good I'll need it.

<comment><USER12> ALE for a home vs. renting are conceptually extremely different, sorry. ALE for a home covers the fact that it may take many months to rebuild, particularly after a natural catastrophe. ALE for a rental means how long it takes the renter to find suitable long-term housing _somewhere else_.

If the underlying issue here is that you're in some sort of rent controlled situation, and market rents in your area are way way higher than what you pay, and you expect the insurance company to pay ALE until you find another rent controlled apartment--sorry. You're not going to find many insurers that will plan on covering that.

<comment><USER34> You are incorrect.

A) There's no point in quibbling over what "temporary" or "permanent" means because the definition varies from policy to policy. There is no other source of truth unless it's in a legal statute.

B) With respect to the scenario I'm talking about, you are both factually and legally wrong. Again, I know this because I work on property damage lawsuits for a living. If my rent-controlled apartment is damaged in a fire and I have to _temporarily_ relocate to another more expensive one for 3 years while I wait for mine to be rebuilt, the _additional living expense_ I pay in the form of increased rent during that period is absolutely something ALE is intended to, and does in fact, cover.

<comment><USER12> Well, tell me if you find a carrier offering renters insurance with ALE of I guess the $200k+ limit you're looking for. I'm sure it exists, but not in a mass market, D2C product line, where the underlying personal property coverage is much less than that.

Also, since unlike homeowners' the carrier has no way in expediting the rebuilding of the building, I'd be surprised if they are willing to pay for your rent indefinitely until the original building is rebuilt. Perhaps you could win if you took them to court, but it will not be a routine process.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Mental Universe (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.Universe.pdf

<comment><USER2> The article seems interesting but I am afraid I do not understand quantum physics well enough to understand it fully - could someone more knowledgeable please try to explain it like I am five? How would quantum mechanical perception of the world for common people look like?

<comment><USER3> I explain quantum physics (or at least the underlying principles) to myself this way:

1\. Quantum fluctuations are the random number generator function of the universe. Without which, the universe will be utterly uniform and lacking detail. All detail (or information) is born through quantum fluctuations.

2\. The universe has a finite resolution -- you zoom in enough and you reach a point where you 'see' the 'pixels' of the universe and see no further. This applies to matter, energy, space and time.

I may be oversimplifying or even understanding it wrong, but to me, denying either (1) or (2) eventually leads to a _reductio ad absurdum_ \-- 1) a universe that is a uniform, featureless soup, or 2) infinite information density.

* As a side-note, denying (1) also results in denying free will -- all future states of the universe becomes classically predictable, including the thoughts and behaviors of conscious beings in it.

EDIT: sorry, I know you asked about perception. I've never quite been able to explain waveform collapse to myself. Intuitively, it feels like the universe does lazy evaluation -- all variables are in flux until read?

<comment><USER4> "As a side-note, denying (1) also results in denying free will."

Denying (1) clearly denies free will since we are talking about a purely deterministic universe. But notice that (1) holding true doesn't really open up any space for free will anyway.

With (1) you now have randomness as well as causality in the universe, but how does that mix produce free will? If the conscious beings thoughts and behaviours are stuck in determinism/randomness, there is no free will.

I've seen that quantum argument for free will thrown around, but random events in the brain giving rise to our thoughts and actions is still the antithesis of free will. Whether you're doing something because of a chain of cause and effect, or because of random fluctuations in the very small, you're not doing it because you want to do it.

<comment><USER3> True.

Since we are on the subject of perception, what if I were to postulate (as a lot of people have done before) that what we call free will is just our perception of randomness in the brain _ex post facto_? Some studies have shown that decision neuron clusters fire a fraction of a second _before_ the subject appears to make the conscious decision.

Anyway, apologies for potentially derailing the thread by throwing free will into the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the universe is purely mental, then why does it follow a set of rules so precisely? Why doesn't it just dream up the best possible thoughts it can have?

Also, why are different parts of this mental process disconnected from each other? For example, if you and i are both part of the same mental process, then why do we intuitively believe that we are different, disconnected entities?

<comment><USER6> 1\. We don't know if the universe follows any rules precisely. We can never know because the only way to know that a rule is being followed unconditionally would be to exhaustively verify every event in the universe to see if it follows that rule, which is impossible.

2\. There's not just one mental process. There are an infinite number (most likely) of mental processes. But even though we're not both part of the same mental process, we're both part of the same causal process. The reason we perceive ourselves as discrete entities is: 1. mental processes (thoughts) can be both true and false, 2. true thoughts are more rare than false thoughts, 3. false thoughts are still capable of doing work, and therefore, our survival has relied on the false thought that each of us is a separate individual, even though the truth is that we're causally dependent on one another, our environment, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental." — The Kybalion.

find and read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kybalion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kybalion)

the idea that the univers is mental is old, very old. it's funny how these scientists discover all of the sudden new ideas. and it's funny how we attribute discoveries to someone... the biggest minds that lived didn't attributed to themselves the ideas they had. modesty? honesty? :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Except that quantum mechanics _does_ say there is "underlying stuff"; it's called the wave function. And it's in no way mental.

I'd like to recommend the QM explanation on lesswrong. Unlike most other explanations out there, it attempts to take away, rather than add, mystery.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/)

<comment><USER9> Everything you observe, your entire perception of reality is mental.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And who exactly makes the observations? Is a cat good enough? A chimp? If we get someone really smart to look at an electron can we collapse it better?

The brain centered quantum mechanics I've seen become fashionable to lay people in the last 20 years are a last gasp of homo-centrism that really should have died a very long time ago.

<comment><USER11> No one said animals are not good enough to do it. It is not homo-centrism, it is consciousness-centrism if you wish to name it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a shared hallucinated dream/reality our bodies and planet, if not real, may serve as a metaphoric language for some purpose. Perhaps as a classroom or habitat for gods.</comment>


Hardening Windows 10 with zero-day exploit mitigations - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/01/13/hardening-windows-10-with-zero-day-exploit-mitigations/ <comment><USER2> Never mind hardening windows, how about stopping Windows update behaving like some sort of particularly malicious malware by forcing me to rebuild my machines at random after an update? AU forced one machine to be fully reinstalled, last week's update rendered another machine inoperable with admin access denied on windows system programs (mmc etc.) followed by boot device error (disc was fine) with no restore or roll-back available, so had to rebuild that one too. Getting very tempted to set windows update addresses to point to Host.

<comment><USER3> I hate how Windows 10 silently installs updates and then rolls them back every time I boot it up (and then forces another reboot)... all because I have a Linux bootloader installed and C: isnt the active partition.

Fuck you Microsoft. This is 2017. You've had 25+ years to perfect dual booting.

<comment><USER4> You're making it sound as if Microsoft would _want_ dual-booting to work. Hasn't the Surface Pro been pretty bad for using Linux on it so far, compared to other notebooks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Instead of discussing the merit of these exploit mitigations this has turned into a complaint forum about Windows update. Mods?

</comment><comment><USER6> How does this Windows Defender ATP relate to EMET?

</comment><comment><USER7> Still prefer to run Win10 with Surfright/Sophos HitmanPro Alert.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's still one major, consistent source of unwanted access and software that hasn't been addressed.</comment>


Malware Detection in Executables Using Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/malware-detection-neural-networks/ <comment><USER2> As a desktop software vendor, I gathered a lot of perspective on this topic. AI anti-virus engines tend to mark everything as malware. Literally everything, even the simplest well-behaving "Hello World" apps. It looks like a pure manifestation of greed and laziness to me: smash a black box, pretend it does all the heavy lifting and relax taking all the orders you can take in this life.

More than that. Currently there are a lot of shady security suppliers who do nothing except imitating a good protection. They put fancy design into UI coupled with a mediocre 3rd party anti-virus engine, and presto, you have yet another source of false positives. They do not react to reports nor provide any meaningful support. Instead, they are pretty busy with marketing, buzz and sales. Yes, what could go wrong.

<comment><USER3> I'd be cautious about making broad statements regarding how AI based AVs tend to behave. It's a new space with a _lot_ of competitors, of varying degrees of quality, with varying degrees of actual AI in use. Not all of them are even tackling the exact same problem, so comparisons can get murky fast.

Its also a space where data collection and ground truth are expensive, so people try to boot strap solutions in odd ways. Its tough.

As the paper author, I'm not going to name any companies. Especially since one was sharing data with us for this work, and I don't want to inject any of my biases into a particular name. But we've done some fairly extensive testing of the models we've built. Both on data they gave us and data we got ourselves, and our model don't just label everything as malware. It is not quite AV quality at the moment, but we also have limited training data and are really still exploring the different ways one can tackle this problem with AI.

Jon did a great job in this blog post, but if you want more details on why there is so much work to still be done, I'd recommend reading our paper! We tried to make the intro section accessible to people with no AV/malware background.

<comment><USER4> > _one was sharing data with us for this work_

I sure hope it wasn't Tehtris, because their "AI detection" is nothing short of random.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having worked on a machine learning-based AV for several years, I'd like to point out that the dataset choice here is extremely important and they seem to have a pretty small one considering the number of possible variations and the choice of model.

What happens in the wild is that one malware author releases a lot of very similar polymorphic or differently-compiled malware so it ends up being trivial to identify it. For example, they could have picked up a small icon that is common to half of the malware or some internal library that is used in a large portion of them. Then a week later the nature of the malware changes and you would identify a lot less.

Another thing to consider is that in many cases, a tiny modification to a known good program can make it malicious. This includes such things as changing the update URI. I don't see how they could catch such malware using this method so the 98% detection seems like a very unrealistic number.

Just to present an example:

One can train a simple logistic regression on some metadata features where the malware comes from one source and easily identify almost all of them correctly, while failing to identify malware from most other sources.

Having said that, it's a pretty cool novel approach and I'd love to try it.

<comment><USER3> Hi, paper author here!

The dataset is small by AV standards, but we aren't an AV company. We can only use as much as real AV companies are willing to share with us. If you'd like to share more, we would be happy to take it :)

The model is fairly robust to new data, and we tested it with malware from a completely separate source than our training data - so there shouldn't be any share items like icons between the training set and the 2nd testing set. However, we aren't arguing that is of an AV quality today. The main purpose of this research was to get a neural network to train on this kind of data _at all_ , as it is non trivial and common tools (like batch-norm) didn't translate to this problem space.

We are looking at the modification issue! I can't share any results yet since we have to go through pre-publication review, but the issue isn't unknown to us!

<comment><USER6> Did you talk with VirusTotal? That's probably the largest dataset out there that isn't controlled by an AV company.

<comment><USER7> VirusTotal is owned by Google since 2012. [https://virusscan.jotti.org/](https://virusscan.jotti.org/) is another one, even older. It says 2004, but I met that guy in 2002 or 2003 and back then he had this up already. URL might've been different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could someone explain something to me? The difference between malware and useful-ware can be just 1 negation instruction. e.g. you list all files in a folder recursively and delete the ones that end with ".tmp", or you delete the ones that DON'T end with that. How can anyone expect an antivirus to distinguish these?

<comment><USER9> sandbox and analyze the end result (file actions, system-level actions) of running the software - the actual results of use don't lie. until they do, where you have context-sensitive viruses that detect VM's and are generally designed to not trigger when analyzed.

<comment><USER10> Right, and that kind of malware is going to have a lot more code than just a negation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article left me thinking about the possibility of adversarially constructed malware. It seems like an adversarial network could modify existing malware to look like benign machine code from the classifier's perspective. This might result in an "arms race," similar to text spinners vs spam classifiers.

Regardless this seems like a promising technique, even with that potential caveat. Since most malware out in the wild isn't that sophisticated, this is likely quite effective.

<comment><USER12> Another interesting possibility could be an adversary training the network to treat benign code as malicious.

<comment><USER13> That's not a "possibility", it's a reality.

From what we are seeing (as a desktop software vendor) all fancy-shmancy AI- based antiviruses absolutely "excel" at false positive detection. It's more of a miracle when they do NOT flag something that's not of "hello world" variety as a malware. And I wish I were kidding.

<comment><USER14> That is concerning. I knew over-fitting was a real issue with AI.

Still haven't found a good way to deal with high bias or high variance myself.

<comment><USER11> Cross validating the classifier/hyper parameters and a good scoring metric (Matthews correlation coefficient) go a long way. Since the classes are very imbalanced, an appropriate scoring metric is very important. Even more importantly, train with lots of high-quality data whenever possible. Anecdotally many seem to obsess over the particular classification algorithm, while neglecting data quality. A classifier is only ever as good as its training set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this what Cylance does? They had to train on a very large dataset of normal executables to cut down on false positives.

<comment><USER3> At a _very_ high level, yes. But the same could be said for anybody in the AI- AV space.

At a more technical level, the approach we take in this paper (and most of my research) is fairly orthogonal to what most AV vendors are doing. Even compared to the AI based solutions.

The idea here was to throw away _everything_ we know about the file being a valid Windows PE binary, and try and let the network learn what it needs on its own. Its making the problem harder, but allows us to re-purpose the same code for PDFs, Word Docs, RTF - basically any file format we can get data for. This gives us a lot of potential flexibility that others don't have.

<comment><USER16> > _allows us to re-purpose the same code for PDFs, Word Docs, RTF_

It doesn't seem like you've looked into this. The interesting data in PDFs and Office docs is all encoded, often multiple times. E.g. OOXML docs are ZIP files and store macros in an OLE container, where they're further encoded in streams.

You can kind of get away with not parsing PE files, although you're missing out in that case. For PDFs, Office docs, and most other non-binary, non-script types, though, you have no choice but to parse.

<comment><USER3> We have looked into it, it's just not in this paper. It actually works better on other file formats. PDFs are really easy to do with even simpler techniques, no parsing is needed. Modern office docs need to be unzipped first, but that's not complicated. Old office 97 docs are also a common vector that doesn't need to be processed.

This paper looked specifically at PE files because it's the hardest case of any of the file types (in our opinion & experience), and it's the one we have the most data for. We've built models for many other file types with success using much less data (though we are always looking for more).

<comment><USER16> I'm responding to your comment about parsing, which doesn't jibe with reality. It's not a question of data science, just of what's visible to the naïve byte- driven approach.

E.g. in PDFs malicious JavaScript might be buried in an XFA stream with /Type /EmbeddedFile and /Filter /FlateDecode -- a ZIP file, in other words. Nothing about this is suspicious; benign PDFs do it too.

Without looking inside the stream, you can't know whether it's bad. The rest of the PDF is incidental and can be swapped out with no change to the attack.

Can your approach produce a model to detect these PDFs? Sure, by overfitting a small/homogeneous data set. Which, to be fair, is almost impossible not to do, because sourcing and curating data is the hardest part of security-related data science. But in the wild, your miss rates will skyrocket.

This will all make more sense if you ever deploy. Then you'll see issues even in your PE model, for example with installers, signed files, parasitics, generic packers, p-code, DLLs, drivers, on and on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As an engineer working on security applications, how do I learn more about the machine learning/deep learning discussed in this article? Is it enough to have a general understanding and use off the shelf tools/libraries, or I should study the nitty gritty math? I have a CS degree but haven't touched math in years.

<comment><USER3> Brushing up on your math will definitely help! But it's not strictly necessary. It really depends on how deep you want to go.

For the Neural Network type stuff we used in this work, I would recommend Michael Nielsen's awesome website as a starting point [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/) and keras [https://keras.io/](https://keras.io/) is the easiest NN library to pick up and get something going with. Andrew Ng's mooc [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning) is also a good starting point for some slightly more general machine learning background.

If you want to avoid the math (not my personal recommendation), I would start there and just mess around. Build small things and start reading more as you get comfortable. Its definitely an area I would encourage learning in an iterative way: try to learn a small amount, try and apply it, repeat.</comment></comment>


BBC Micro / ASCII Music Video - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC25gRwbpsg <comment><AUTHOR> Basically this is what you get if you learn to code in the early eighties, then try picking up thirty years later.

I was asked by a friend who is in the band if I had done any graphics work or was interested in doing anything for a music video. Graphics are not something I have done before except [ _cough_ ] years ago on the BBC Micro, which is where the 8-bit geometric graphics and code came from.

The conversion from the video of the singer to ASCII was done via ffmpeg to de-frame/re-frame the video and a hacked together C# program that works well enough[0] to convert each frame to letter of the right font, size, words/letters (which are the lyrics - the letters in each line are used for the ASCII rendering of the singer while that line is being sung).

The combination of the two sets of graphics into a far better music video was done by a guy called Chris Bate from FilmBee.

I've submitted this as there was a discussion[1] a few weeks ago about ASCII art being dead or alive while I was putting this together.

[0]'Well enough' \- I couldn't get it to run and flat line all the CPUs when running parallel processing. I caused a catastrophic memory leak by modifying a couple of the methods thinking I'd improve something. I dread to think what it has done to the lifetime of the two SSD while it's been firing GBs of data at.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411059)</comment>


Paxos Explained from Scratch [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ux.uis.no/~meling/papers/2013-paxostutorial-opodis.pdf

<comment><USER2> Happy to see my thesis advisor's paper on the HN front page! This paper really helped me when I was implementing a simplified version of Paxos using OpenFlow.

I also remember Hein recommended me to study Paxos before delving into Raft, actually, even though Raft is supposedly easier to get started with.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good resource.

If you feel like watching a presentation I recommend Joseph Blomsted's talk on developing Riak Ensemble module.

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

That is a module that added consistency to an otherwise AP system.

They did it using Paxos and it was interesting because it was during the time when everyone was implementing consensus using Raft and there was, perhaps undeserved, FUD regarding Paxos during those times.

He explains how Paxos is not that bad in certain situations -- such as agreeing on a value (instead of say replicating a log). And then how it was like implementing it in practice.

</comment><comment><USER2> These guys also made a slide deck for the paper: [http://www.ux.uis.no/~meling/papers/PaxosTutorial-Meling- OPO...](http://www.ux.uis.no/~meling/papers/PaxosTutorial-Meling- OPODIS2013.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: Bibleqs - Dynamic shareable images with quotes - <AUTHOR> http://bibleqs.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Playing with multi-device, full-screen images, web fonts and social-media embedding options. Static image is generated only when shared. New image on every refresh.

Still need to add more options, fonts, images.</comment>


A product to help you improve EQ and health - <AUTHOR> https://amotionsinc.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everyone, I am working on an idea on an AI powered virtual coach that helps you understand & process emotions, improve your emotional intelligence, health, and social skills. Would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you! [https://amotionsinc.com/](https://amotionsinc.com/)</comment>


How to open a microchip and see what's inside - <AUTHOR> https://zeptobars.com/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside <comment><USER2> I always loved the easter eggs and art that some chips have included on the circuits, most of which has never been seen and will never be seen by anybody but the designers.

Here are some examples:

[http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm](http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm)

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

My favorite has always been Wally/Waldo from Where's Wally.

<comment><USER3> Great links! Reminds of this [0] instance in the wild of using chip art to send a message to those attempting to decap and reverse engineer a design.

[0] [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42255/was- there...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42255/was-there- cyrillic-text-visible-on-intel-386-chips-after-decapping)

<comment><USER4> Which reminds me of a story from a retired Bell Labs, Murray Hill engineer who related how they would add useless circuits to microprocessors to see if these sections were duplicated or deleted by the old Soviet military engineers. They were duplicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While sulfuric or nitric acid is the best way to do this, you can also decap using a box cutter and some patience. I recently did this to figure out if an opamp I bought was fake:

[http://41j.com/blog/2019/03/various-op177-die- images/](http://41j.com/blog/2019/03/various-op177-die-images/)

I've posted some better images here:

[https://twitter.com/new299/status/1111301269988106245?s=21](https://twitter.com/new299/status/1111301269988106245?s=21)

I'm going to try and get setup to decap properly. But the for those more concerned about using the required acids, a box cutter can give some insight into what's going on in many devices...

<comment><USER6> We occasionally used a regular old propane torch at a previous employer, mainly looking for counterfeit power FETs. It'll burn the bond wires and such off an IC, and certainly isn't going to result in great quality images but it's not too hard to get rid of the plastic without damaging the silicon beyond recognition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to do this as part of R&D efforts at my employer 15 years back. It was pretty dirt cheap to get someone to decap a package like this. You could also get them to put under an electron(x-ray?) microscope and fly around the chip like an airplane simulation. Then they would use something called FIB to cut and draw wires to test out bug fixes. Usually the designers would keep a couple unused gates at periodic intervals to borrow for fixes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Applied Science YouTube channel did a video on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1FStxAVz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1FStxAVz4)

</comment><comment><USER9> I always liked the physical side of electronics as contrary as computer programming where is all virtual nowadays.

What would be the career path for a job in chip design and manufacturing?

<comment><USER10> > What would be the career path for a job in chip design and manufacturing?

Very long and very lucky.

I looked into microelectronics when I was a teenager. In 2009, you needed to be at the top of your class just to get an internship with a fab or a fabless.

In general, there are more automation with each year in both design and fab side.

Companies have luxury of employing people with 20 year careers at prices of average software devs in California.

<comment><USER10> The only exception is, of course, China: their fabs offer 6 digit salaries for senior engineers, but work experience is famously bad.

All of them expect foreign specialists to come with some "magic trick solution" for their business refusing to work, and of course they get pissed off if told that there are no magic tricks in this business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm struck by how aesthetically pleasing some of the images are. They remind me of stained glass windows.

<comment><USER12> colors are enhanced

<comment><USER13> No, that's pretty much what they look like under a microscope.

<comment><USER14> or in regular light... I recently decapped some old chips that were ceramic packages with a soldered on metal cap. A 486 DX2[0] and an old Analog to digital converter IC [1]. the bare silicon was beautiful once exposed..(Pics posted without filters, though huawei's photos are generally more saturated than I normally like) [0][https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTdillc-K/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTdillc-K/) [1][https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTG3Ml2ki/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTG3Ml2ki/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's some more here:

[https://siliconpr0n.org/wiki/doku.php?id=decap:start](https://siliconpr0n.org/wiki/doku.php?id=decap:start)

If we can digitize the entire netlist (schematic of transistors) from the 6502 processor by analyzing this type of photograph, why hasn't someone started analyzing the crappy wifi chips that people who don't run Trisquel use--the kind that require proprietary drivers to work correctly, in order to write free drivers for them?

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux- firmware.git/tree/)

<comment><USER16> A modern wifi chip is made with a lot smaller processes and multiple orders of magnitude more complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As an aside, I find chips that have been covered in epoxy really annoying. Not only are they really difficult to remove, but even before that they don't have the typical markings on their casings that serve to identify them and tell you whether they're interesting to pursue…

</comment><comment><USER18> When I was young, a friend of mine sawed a chip in two for this.

It was rather old and had small golden wires everywhere that connected stuff, they made it look like some ancient tech.

<comment><USER14> You might like the pics I posted in the sibling comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19513860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19513860)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> These are very cool.. The layout and traces remind me of a well designed factory in Factorio.

</comment><comment> La-ang I'm gonna print this and hang it on the wall :D Circuit Art I'd call it..

</comment><comment><USER20> These would make really cool art pieces on their own.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very interesting technique. I remember when they would reverse engineer chips by grinding them down while taking nice pictures of each layer for the engineers to interpret later.

<comment><USER22> At a prior job last decade involving FCBGA packaging design for the company's ASIC, and I witnessed exactly this to debug ESD problems, etc. That is, prototype dice failing test would be ground down until a black spot was found. Very expensive design cycles, so lots of incentive to extensively model such issues before fab.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup idea - <AUTHOR>

My startup idea is a questions and answers website for user interface design.
I'm aware there is a stack exchange for programming and ux, but there isn't one specifically for user interface design.
How many of you can see yourself actually participating in a Q&A site about UI design? Would you ask and answer questions? <comment><USER2> Problem is with UI design q&a site is if there is a demand for it, it wont be long before StackExchange puts competition up. It would take minimal effort on their part, that's your main risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something like this? <http://guicheck.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> What about Forrst.com ?</comment>


Sweden reopens Assange rape inquiry - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48253343 <comment><USER2> I can't wait to see how the goalposts get moved here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19796933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19796933)</comment>


Using bash parallel for fun and profit - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alonisser/parallel-straight-from-your-command-line-feb6db8b6cee

<comment><USER2> This was -amazingly- helpful at $JOB-1 when hundreds of servers needed an SSL certificate check/update/restart.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Running common tasks straight from your CLI might be easier then you think</comment>


E.W.Dijkstra: On the foolishness of "natural language programming" - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html <comment><USER2> A moment isn't such a long time anymore, not for compute clusters anyway.

If we don't keep trying to make AI, we're never gonna get there. I'm not saying data mining is AI. I'm saying human brains do data mining too, but differently, and figuring out _how_ is what might come of all this.

Wolfram-Alpha-style natural language programming actually isn't that bad because it's a _dialogue_. The thing tells you its assumptions, so you're back to formal representations you can deal with. Natural language is mostly statistics, also known as guesswork. A machine can guess better than humans. Google proves that by suggesting "torrent" every time you search for a movie title.

Dijkstra fears a world where the lack of formalisms prevents progress. That's why he likes formalisms. I do too, maybe not for these exact reasons. Anyway, I take formalisms as a given because they've always been there my whole life.

Formalisms can be _impractically_ formal. The level of precision required by machines is beyond even what most mathematicians are used to casually (i.e., pen and paper, or at a blackboard). If you had to do math like you write code, mathematicians would go bonkers. Include this, type-cast that, ... nah, everyone knows what this and that is supposed to mean, right?

A little NLP could make it easier to command computers. A little more NLP could turn machines into really useful slaves. AI would be opening a can of worms few in this world are prepared to deal with.

<comment><USER3> This man knows about programming languages way more than most of us. Listen to him. I bet it isn't the first time he has this discussion. See: Algol, Ada and others.

<comment><USER4> It's often the foolhardy and the ignorant that tackle problems that are supposedly impossible. And sometimes end up succeeding.

Wisdom is certainly something to take from, but embodying the limits imposed by someone as a roadblock to onself isn't the way to innovation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's suppose it's a really easy problem to solve.

Why the hell would anyone want to program in a natural language?

Suppose you could write a kernel in such a language, and one of the instructions was:

"Load the first 5 bits at address 0x323abc into the last 5 bits after address 0x89bbca"

Now, wouldn't it be easier to say 'shuffle_bits(5, 0x232abc, 0x89bbca);' where you control precisely what 'shuffle_bits' does?

<comment><USER5>
        copy the time field from cpuinfo to temp_time'
        backup the low 5 bits of goodnameformemorylocation'
        locA's low 5 to locb's low 5'

Seems like there are a fair number of nice representations. Context is obviously important though: in a kernel, you probably want fairly implicit ways of referring to bits.

<comment><USER6> That is basically what COBOL looks like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes_

This is interesting, I think - this is really one of the core parts of the argument between static and dynamic typing. I prefer bondage and discipline to free love when it comes to types - I find programming in dynamic languages mushy, ill defined and error prone. And yet, lots of people love them and manage to do amazing things with them. Although in general I agree with Dijkstra's essay, maybe there is more wiggle room for a "more natural" language than I'd thought.

<comment><USER8> Actually, I don't think this has to do with dynamic vs static typing. It is more about strong vs weak typing, i.e. implicit type casting.

In many dynamically but strongly typed languages (like Ruby), you would still get a type mismatch when you try to add a string to a number at runtime. It's just that with static typing, you would have realized your error much earlier at compile time.

<comment><USER9> While I think you're right, my guess is that he had strong static typing in mind when he wrote the article.

Ultimately they lie on a scale. With a dynamic, strongly typed language, you still leave plenty of opportunity to make undetected mistakes. The obvious example is changing the expected type of a method argument, while only updating a subset of the call sites.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what he had in mind at that time, but Dijkstra was never all that enthusiastic about type theory. He thought it was a promising and worthwhile avenue, but was suspicious of it being treated as a panacea.

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1243a.html)

"Another thing we can learn from the past is the failure of characterizations like "Computing Science is really nothing but X", where for X you may substitute your favourite discipline, such as numerical analysis, electrical engineering, automata theory, queuing theory, lambda calculus, discrete mathematics or proof theory. I mention this because of the current trend to equate computing science with constructive type theory or with category theory."

<comment><USER11> > _[Dijkstra] was suspicious of [type theory] being treated as a panacea_

I'd be suspicious of anything being treated as a panacea.

<comment><USER10> =) Sorry, I was being sloppy there - couldn't come up with an accurate and un- platitudinous way to characterize Dijkstra's attitude. There are other places in his writings where he's suspicious of an overemphasis on types, I think his criticisms of Ada mention it for example.

Dijkstra was a big proponent of rigorous mathematical means of establishing program correctness in general, of course, but he didn't necessary equate that with types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think alot of people have the paradigm wrong. I think people conceive Natural Language Programming as a simply change in syntax, which in it self would complicate stuff.

But if you take the stance that we as humans are Natural Language Programmers, the concept becomes easier to understand.

You can think of your boss at your software development firm as your programmer. He wants some job done and you program some approximation of what he wants done, then you modify based on his inputs. It is a similar thing with Natural Language Programming, your boss didn't use complex symbols to get what he wants done and didn't have to sit with you all the way through to get something done.

For me, it is not a question of whether this makes programming simply but whether we can build a machine with the same capacity as a human.

<comment><USER13> The problem here is that there is 20+ years of acquired "state" that allows this to happen. Also, think of the hiring process, weeding out potential programmers with "bad" "state"; i.e. they are crap programmers.

If you want a machine with the same capacity as a human you had better have something that can learn at the same rate as a human, and then add 20 years of "life experiences" and education. Then.. _maybe_ you might have a good programmer.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but us meat sacks are better at doing that, evolution has stumbled upon some pretty cool hacks that make it cheap enough (think of a 20 year computer maintenance and energy bill!) to have a "sentient" being.

<comment><USER12> I don't want to get into the how. The how should be a very open question. Like there is a million and one ways to program something, so there are a million and one ways to create AI. Some implementations are more efficient than others. What you should be asking yourself is how do I make this more efficient than taking 20 years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What makes 'natural language' 'natural' is not really the appearance, it is what it is _used for_. A natural language is one used for communicating between humans. It only works the way it does because of what is on the other end of it -- another person.

And that is why software must be different. Software must always be an 'un- natural language' because its (ultimate, essential) purpose is different: it is not communication but _design_. It works the way it does because it is for constructing an artifact.

If you want to build complex things, that is equivalent to saying you will have complex requirements. The complexity cannot be squeezed out, substantially, by changing language -- as Brooks said in 'No Silver Bullet', there is a hard core of essential complexity.

That purpose of design seems to mean an essential dichotomy of simplicity vs. control. If you want more simplicity you have to give up some control, and if you want more control you have to give up some simplicity.

One opportunity is that it seems likely true that we over-specify much of our software: we are using more control -- hence complexity -- than really needed. But the solution is not in changing language -- that would be the _result_. It is in figuring out what to do behind that -- AI figuring out what you want without you saying so. Maybe one day, in particular limited areas . . .

<comment><USER15> I think we'll see human and machine languages get more alike in the future. We're already seeing a huge increase in the amount of nonfiction written and the level of literacy of the public. English spelling has become more standardized over the past couple centuries. We could say, humans must always communicate by grunting, because they are dumb animals. Or that speech recognition is impossible because machines lack a soul.

Dykstra is brilliant, but he's also a curmudgeon who never likes anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

— Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

<comment><USER7> To be fair, he doesn't so much say it's impossible as say it's a bad idea.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. The grandparent's comment is anything but relevant. While I do agree with it, it is clear it has nothing do with this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> NLP 1 : Natural Language Programming : ability to instruct a machine using your natural language

NLP 2 : Natural Language Processing : modeling and processing of the natural language phenomenon

NLP 1 requires advancement in NLP 2 to a significant level of accuracy which in turn requires the accuracy and care of the formal symbolism of lower level programming automaton. Having said that, the progress has been slow which often times leads to denouncement of pursuit of research in the NLP field.

The article is 6 years old and a lot has happened in terms of both processing power capabilities that an individual has access to now (cloud computing) and amount of data available (online information explosion, particularly social media streams) which used to be a bottleneck earlier. This opens up a huge opportunity for breakthrough in NLPs by mathematicians as mentioned by Yuri yesterday at Web 2.0 Summit. AT&T's voice activated remote ( <http://www.research.att.com/projects/WATSONASR/index.html> ) is an example of natural language programming that is achievable today.

<comment><USER19> Dijkstra died in 2002, so this is probably older than the 2004 date listed as the transcription date below the article. Looking at the date of other EWD notes in the same number range it was probably written in 1978.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was thinking about lojban (<http://lojban.org>) when I read this. I mean we do have programming languages, which are unambiguous. Why should we not alter our "natural", i.e. legacy based, communication when dealing with computers?

<comment><USER21> > Why should we not alter our "natural", i.e. legacy based, communication when > dealing with computers?

Or when dealing with each other, for that matter. In Lojban, it is grammatically incorrect for someone to give me vague directions like "we are at the pub to the left of the central plaza". They would instead have to say something like "we- _not-you_ are now at the _only_ pub to the left ( _when seen from the cinema_ ) of the _only_ plaza".

Imagine political debates where imprecise language and double meaning are much harder to express. Mmm...

.i mi batci le mlatu

<comment><AUTHOR> > of the only plaza

Which plaza? Just because you said "the only plaza" doesn't make it unambiguous. There certainly exist more than one plaza in any given city.

<comment><USER21> > Just because you said "the only plaza" doesn't make it unambiguous.

That was just me compressing it to fit somewhat into English. What it really would say is "the only plaza which fits the current context", as opposed to e.g. "the specific place called The Plaza" or "the only plaza in the universe".

The specific Plaza change wasn't the intended point, though. The "to the left of X while standing at Y" as opposed to "to the left of X" is the biggest clarity gain.

It is _obviously_ possible to express ambiguity in any language, even Lojban, but you have to work harder for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> How exactly is that any different from "the plaza"?

What's even "the current context"?

<comment><USER21> Again, the "plaza" part of the sentence is not relevant to the actual point I was making. I did not claim that specific change gave a huge boost in clarity.

> How exactly is that any different from "the plaza"?

It is different in that the ambiguity is explicit.

> What's even "the current context"?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context> : "Context is the surroundings, circumstances, environment, background, or settings which determine, specify, or clarify the meaning of an event." Example context: Me and the person who gives me directions commonly use that specific plaza as a reference point. Another possible context: Directions are related to my small town, which only has one proper plaza.

<comment><AUTHOR> We understand these things, but they _are_ technically ambiguous, saying "the- only-plaza" doesn't remove any ambiguitiy. "The current context" is also implied, stating it explicitly doesn't add anything, what so ever.

Actually, referring explicitly to the current context would probably just cause confusion, it implies that we both agree on the exact meaning/content of the "current context", which is often not exactly the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://inform7.com/> is a successful counterexample, to _some_ degree: it gets used, and it's much closer to the vision than older attempts like Applescript and COBOL. On the other hand, it's bad at the kind of programs Dijkstra liked to think and write about. I'd say Dijkstra expressed a basically sound but overly narrow viewpoint.

<comment><USER23> I like Inform, but it boils down to a kind of Prolog augmented with procedure- like sections, and I'm not sure that I'd prefer it to something more terse. I started to write a non-trivial game in it, and it was actually a lot of fun, but I had to look up the syntax a lot because it wasn't always obvious how to do something that was otherwise conceptually simple. For example, you could write something like

        The Lobby is a room. The oak table is in the lobby. The cake is on the table. The cake is edible. Instead of taking the cake say, "Best wait until the party starts before digging in."

But even though it's "natural language," it still _feels like_ I'm writing

        is_room(the_lobby).
        contains(the_lobby, the_table).
        is_on(the_cake, the_table).
        on_taking(the_cake, { print "You can't get ye cake!"; }).

That said, Inform _does_ manage to make programming non-scary to non- programmers, which is a very good thing. It's probably the fact that I expect programming languages to be unlike natural languages that I felt it was awkward. (I personally ended up rewriting the game in Scheme. Never finished it. Maybe I should go back and work on it at some point.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does a specification count as native-tongue programming (using this term as NLP seems overloaded)? If it doesn't, why doesn't it? Would it be better if everybody on a project expressed their ideas in a computer programming language?

This seems like an eloquent diatribe against AppleScript, but Applescript is not what I imagine native-tongue programming to be.

</comment><comment><USER5> Funny, I just read this — [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2010/11/programming- with-natu...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2010/11/programming-with-natural- language-is-actually-going-to-work/)

<comment><USER25> And an analysis of Wolfram Alpha from a viewpoint similar to Dijkstra's: [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If there is a significant enough demand, it will eventually be produced.</comment>


Apple to unlock iPhone NFC to read secure data from passports - <AUTHOR> https://www.nfcworld.com/2019/04/09/362259/apple-to-unlock-iphone-nfc-to-read-passports/ <comment><USER2> [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc)

Perhaps it's already possible? I don't know if this supports the chips in passports.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is according to UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Personally I wouldn't trust him to tell me the time. He's one of the more slippery politicians we're currently stuck with.</comment>


'Waffle House Index' is a real thing during disasters - <AUTHOR> https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/01/hurricane-dorian-waffle-house-index-disasters/2187708001/ <comment><USER2> I really admire Waffle House's dedication. They can't get everyone's power back on or grocery shelves restocked, but providing a normal meal for people after a disaster situation is really valuable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking of disasters, I wonder how many people actually follow the government's recommendation for things like basic disaster kits.

<comment><USER4> Round numbers? Something approximating zero...

In all seriousness, I actually sat down and read the FEMA recommendations on things to keep on hand. It's surprisingly thorough and surprisingly difficult to keep all of it in stock, rotated so that it doesn't spoil and checked on on a regular basis. Growing up, my mom was an avid coupon shopper, not necessarily because we needed it, just because she could. That meant that we had a pantry that sorta, kinda resembled an edible version of a prepper -- no MREs, but enough commercial and home canned food to last several months without any rationing even without power. Dad also kept a 200 gallon gas tank due to bad memories of the fuel rationing and prices in the '70's. We were as prepared as you could reasonably expect, but we were still not as prepared as FEMA recommended in many ways. These days, in relatively expensive town, in a relatively small house, I cannot possibly keep everything on hand that FEMA recommends, even on the light kit for a few weeks, but I at least make a passing attempt.

<comment><USER5> The problem with FEMA's recommendations is that they're too general.

If you will have a water supply no matter what (I'm near the Great Lakes), Canned foods are a waste of space and weight. Dry beans, rice, a 5gal collapsible container and purification tablets (or bleach) are better.

<comment><USER6> > If you will have a water supply no matter what (I'm near the Great Lakes)

Algae blooms make this no guarantee (and in fact more likely than other disasters people do keep in mind): [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo- say...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo-says-its- water-is-safe-to-drink-again.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Waffle House, better than The French Laundry:

[https://youtu.be/bct8stbZafI](https://youtu.be/bct8stbZafI)

(RIP Anthony Bourdain.)

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20886914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20886914)

</comment><comment><USER9> The example of strength of centralized organization

<comment><USER10> Seems to me the organization is decentralized, but the CCC is centralized. Sounds military-esque, until you realize that in book "Team of Teams" General McChrystal makes a case of decentralized bottom up faster acting organizations.

<comment><USER11> an organization is centralized by definition, it's just a matter of scope, the arbitrary place where you draw the line depends on your politics.

<comment><USER12> > an organization is centralized by definition

No, it's not. An organization can be distributed/decentralized as well as centralized. "Organization" does not specify the latter in opposition to the former.

<comment><USER11> *as well as centralized?...sure it can, which means that it's centralized. What it cannot be is completely independent.

<comment><USER12> > *as well as centralized?...sure it can, which means that it's centralized.

No, you aren't understanding. "organization" can label something that is centralized or something decentralized/distributed. Or it can be anywhere in between. "Organization" implies some structure, it doesn't imply that the structure is heirarchical/centralized, though.

> What it cannot be is completely independent.

Yes, whether centralized or distributed an organization can also be completely independent (or not, either way), which is a separate issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whenever I read about this I always wonder if this is one of those modern dystopia things where a business is endangering its employees in order to stay open in a disaster zone.

Like what kind of waivers are people in these Jump Teams signing?

<comment><USER14> That is an exceedingly cynical way of looking at it. People usually _volunteer_ to do this kind of thing and have no small amount of personal pride that they are able to help their neighbors in a disaster. It is a very positive experience for the people that do it, and they are often some of the first people on the ground. This is a manifestation of the self-reliance bias of American culture, they want to fix things themselves when disasters happen.

Disaster response in the US is completely driven by these kinds of community- oriented actions by private individuals and companies, and it has a long history of being highly effective.

<comment><USER13> How many volunteers are doing it because they need the hours?

Does WH pay employees who can't show so they can still cover their bills?

Is it ethical to pay someone $7/hour (the average wage of a WH employee) and then ask them if they would volunteer to travel to work in a hurricane?

<comment><USER4> Citation on the average wage? Federal minimum is $7.25/hr, and at least in my midwestern town, McDonald's is paying $11.25/hr, starting, so that seems _shockingly_ low as an average. Or is that the average of the tipped staff, before tips?

<comment><USER13> [https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Waffle_House%2...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Waffle_House%2C_Inc./Hourly_Rate)

[https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Waffle- House/salaries](https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Waffle-House/salaries)

But really, if the employee was making $11.25/hour, would that somehow make it more ethical? $22k/year is still borderline impoverished for a 3 person household: [https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level- definition-...](https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level-definition- guidelines-chart-3305843)

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be $44k/year?

<comment><USER16> The usual estimate is 2000 hours/year.

<comment><USER15> Yes, per person, and two people who can work in the household.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>