So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://drinks.seriouseats.com/2014/03/challenges-of-opening-a-brewery-job-advice-beer-industry-collin-mcdonnell-henhouse.html <comment><USER2> My personal taste complaint with a lot of people who open a brewery... Everyone seems to think that more hops = better beer. There are so many other possible flavors and types to a beer than some type of IPA that is absolutely overloaded with hops. But that seems to be a very common type of thing to brew. When I open something and am assaulted with the aroma of hops, it's not appealing anymore.

It was interesting 7-8 years ago. Now it's just "oh here we go again".

I have a personal theory that the overwhelming aroma and taste of hops in a beer can be used to mask many errors and missteps in the brewing process, which might be more easily tasted by the customer if it were, for example, a weissbier.

<comment><USER3> This is a west coast phenomenon, I've found the Midwest and east coast to have a lot more variety. It feels in Seattle like beer bars have a "token" stout in the same way that they have a single house wine. Hops must be what sells though.

<comment><USER4> >Hops must be what sells though.

I'm increasingly suspicious that (typically) high relative ABV of high-IBU beers is a significant factor in influencing consumer choice, perhaps moreso than hops enthusiasts would like to admit.

<comment><USER5> I definitely do fast math of $ vs % alcohol and volume. It's less that I want to be drunk and more of a "super size me" feeling, like I'm getting a better deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quoth the article:

> Being intimately aware of the financial health of your company might not be > glamorous, but it is as important as monitoring your fermentations or > selecting hops.

At the advice of a therapist, a friend of mine started looking for things which bring him joy, with the phrasing, "I love $X. It brings me joy." We started doing it together, and I've also started doing it on my own. I realized that one of the things that brings me the most joy is a clean house; but I hated to clean. Somehow, verbalizing that a clean house brings me joy has made the process of cleaning... enjoyable. Cleaning went from something I 'had to' do for abstract (guilt from upbringing) or external reasons (friends and clients coming to the house), to something I do, just for me. And again, somehow, it has also made a clean house _more_ enjoyable to me.

There will always be the parts you love and the parts you don't want to have to do. Selecting hops, especially for something that many people will potentially enjoy, is super fun (in my imagination anyway). But it is only by "being intimately aware of the financial health of your company" that you are even in a position to do such a thing. Based on my experience, connecting these two things in your psyche is the key to at least easing the burden, if not making the entire process enjoyable.

<comment><USER7> > I realized that one of the things that brings me the most joy is a clean > house; but I hated to clean.

On the flip side, obviously only if it's something you can manage to do, this is also a good litmus test for whether you should just hire someone to help you out.

* If you don't care about having a clean house and don't enjoy cleaning: Don't worry about it.

* If you do care about having a clean house and don't enjoy cleaning: Learn to enjoy cleaning (as you have), or hire someone to help clean.

* If you do care about having a clean house and don't mind cleaning: Clean it yourself.

To bring it back to the topic at hand, I'm quite surprised to see the article dismiss the idea of hiring an accountant to manage your books and give you a general sense of your financial health/etc. I think it could be well worth the money, especially if the most likely alternative is (as it is for most people I would imagine) to just ignore it.

That doesn't mean you have to be ignorant of the financial health of your company, in fact just the opposite: A good accountant will let you know about problems you would've been ignorant of before they even arise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a friend who dropped everything in his life to start homebrewing and trying to enter the brewing industry. He's broke and miserable and doesn't understand why the jobs are so bad. I'm trying to convince him that the fact that people are willing to give up everything to take one of these jobs is why you have to give up everything.

It's ironic as well, because the types of jobs he is running away from (spreadsheets, sales, boredom) are even more pronounced in this industry.

I appreciate having a job completely removed from my interests in life. And I've found the inverse of the above axiom to be true: jobs that seem super unappealing from the outside are often the most rewarding. Either the people who do it really enjoy it, or get treated well to stay in their position.

For most of our history, humans have not had many if any choices about the type of lives they live or the work they do. It would make sense that we are ill equipped to handle making good choices.

<comment><USER9> Maybe he can use those skills to get into the industry...spreadsheets may be less boring when they pertain to your passion.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but just like with game development - he will be doing similar (if less boring) work for half the pay, while being treated like crap to boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Running a brewery ends up being more about running a business than actually brewing...

Every corp ends up being much more intensive in the administrative side once the process or product has been standardized or reached a stable version. Isn't this the case for most businesses, including tech?

<comment><USER12> This is definitely true for tech.

A lot of startup founders, including myself, fall in love with the idea of building technology -- but quickly learn founders are usually required to be great salespeople more than great technologists.

<comment><USER13> Can't you hire a salesperson?

<comment><USER14> It's not just about literally selling the product. It's more about selling the company vision to employees, convincing investors, delivering talks and arranging interviews, which are really just high-level sales pitches. For example, Steve Jobs spent a huge amount of his time on preparing and rehearsing his keynotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Give me a brewery that isn't concrete floor, dark walls, and exposed ceiling, and I'll be a regular like Barney Grumble. Every one I've been to in LA is like this. All that hard surface makes it impossible to hear anyone without yelling, and breweries are not clubs, they are places to have beer and talk to your friends. Restaurants used to have carpeted floors and drapes for a reason——actually hearing your friends.

<comment><USER16> Restaurants (and breweries) are purposely loud, as it leads to better sales.

[Source] [https://www.bonappetit.com/test- kitchen/ingredients/article/...](https://www.bonappetit.com/test- kitchen/ingredients/article/3-reasons-why-restaurants-are-so-loud)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish there was a "Stripe Atlas" for brick and mortar businesses. 90% of the work to start a restaurant, cafe, shop, etc., must be the near identical to others colocated in the same city/state.

The rise of "ghost kitchens" tries to solve this in some way but I think there's opportunity to go further.

<comment><USER18> 1\. I wonder why we are not seeing "cloud brewing"? The process, as they describe it, seems very standard.

2\. For restaurants, it's either "ghost/cloud kitchens" or franchises. If you go outside those, it's possible that restaurants require too much uniqueness and too much risk to fit a standardized model.

<comment><USER19> As others point out, contract brewing is definitely a thing, but a better comparison than cloud computing would be shared hosting: you're stuck with whatever stack they happen to have installed, no admin rights, and you get the same dismal bandwidth as all other tenants. Or back to brewing: yup, the process is fairly standard – and how could it not be – but great breweries tend to be great not just because they have good recipes, but often because they have mastered their gear and have perfected their processes across the board. Only very few contract breweries are that good.

<comment><USER18> Why are only few breweries that good ?

And is that something that can, with the right investment be scaled, and offered affordably ?

Or is it inherently expensive ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The world if full of people that like to eat/cook that open a restaurant, like to travel and open a hostel, like to do X and open Y. They all later realize it is a completely different endeavor.

<comment><USER21> and they become adults..

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> OK, add brewery to the list of bed and breakfast, bar, restaurant, movie theater and book store. All things people fantasize about owning yet know nothing of how grindingly difficult and prone to failure they are. Dream on...

<comment><USER23> They're all "Richard Scarry" jobs where you can still make a living being the "best" in a small area. Few people aspire to become a butcher or carpenter or farmer any more because different aspects of modern living have removed the ownership of these roles (or rendered them completely obsolete).

Brewing (alongside baking) is one of a few jobs to actually resurrect itself as a luxury good where it is lucrative to stay small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> From what I've read and from talking to friends in the industry, there isn't a ton of money to be made making suds unless you get bought out for your brand. That said, I think it's a fun business for the right kind of person.

Running a brewery is generally far easier than running any other kind of alcoholic establishment. The permits are often easier and the hours are limited. One successful approach I've seen is to locate cheap light industrial space around well paying businesses in areas with horrible traffic. You'll capture a well behaved, affluent clientele and only need to open from 4-9pm. Even in towns with a saturated brewery market (San Diego...), there are areas which still need breweries because of the effects of traffic. Many folks would much rather wait for traffic to die down with a beer in their hands, and maybe grab a quick food truck dinner.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've done a bit of consulting work for breweries and beer bars over the last couple of decades, nothing in the brewing process directly (mostly bespoke hardware and software solutions), but have had a great view into craft brewing.

it seems like there hasn't been any real technological progress in craft brewing since the 90's. in the 90's, there were unix based control systems, with X11 interfaces, for larger craft breweries, while smaller breweries were using notebooks and pens.

now, there are spreadsheets.

it seems like there's a lot of room for the booming craft beer industry to have a shake up in software.

<comment><USER26> Hmm, this is not really true. There are a number of apps/software for brewing and I would wager nearly every brewery is using one and not using paper/pen/manual spreadsheets. BeerSmith, Ekos, Fermentable are a few.

<comment><USER27> BeerSmith is fine and I've seen it used at a number of different craft breweries, but ultimately it is indeed a glorified spreadsheet.

I think OP is right, brewing remains pretty low tech. The process is ultimately not that complicated, as befits an 8000-year old craft! The step that is most difficult/error-prone, malting, has been outsourced to a few large industrial producers. The rest is essentially just making tea and letting it sit around.

<comment><USER26> "craft" malting is becoming a thing now too with smaller producers showing up: [https://www.rootshootmalting.com/home](https://www.rootshootmalting.com/home) and [https://coloradomaltingcompany.com/](https://coloradomaltingcompany.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tony Macgee of Lagunitas has a full on book on this. Fun read. Henhouse and Lagunitas are basically across the street from each other and both have great beer. Bonus they are next to my office!

[https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Start-Brewery- Lagunitas/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Start-Brewery- Lagunitas/dp/1556525621)

</comment><comment><USER29> Discussion from 6 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375043)

</comment><comment><USER30> If anyone wants to experiment at home, the folks at Penny Arcade have a weekly stream where they create 'D&D-theme' beers:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v_dJC0AKD8&list=PLjZRIC6PME...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v_dJC0AKD8&list=PLjZRIC6PMEFlJgsGXgiBWC_7wvENmr2TC)

Names of previous concoctions:

* War Priest

* Long Rest

* Bardic Inspiration

* Little Dagger

They go into detail about what each ingredient will/should add to the final taste.

</comment><comment><USER31> Something I'm noticing is the emergence of contract breweries who will take a recipe and a label, and brew up a batch of beer. Mostly over-hopped. I think that this kind of custom brewing with economies of scale will strongly affect the "craft" beer market. It might make some people think twice about setting up their own brewing operation.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why is there a completely unrelated video playing constantly on the right margin and using up my data?

</comment><comment><USER33> I live in Seattle where the IPA thing is just out of hand.

My uncharitable pet theory is this: A certain class of men (sometimes women, but it's almost always men) get interested in something and then desire to make it part of their identity. That in turn means they want to convey that they are _more_ into it than other people. Their passion expresses itself as _competition._

Most people that aren't really into beer don't like hops and bitterness. It is very much an acquired taste. So liking hoppy beers is a good signal that "look how much _more_ into beer I am than _you! "_ Even better — and this is always a good signal that bros have shown up to suck the fun out of your hobby — there is a _number_ you can use to measure it. Menus show IBUs so a table full of dudes can pick their poison and show how hardcore they are.

I like some amount of hops, but I've had beers that literally just taste like hop tea. The flavor just dominates everything else and leaves little room to enjoy all of the fun nuances you can get from the actual brew.

Before IPAs it was porters with the darker the better. Or Belgian beers with competitions to see who can handle the highest ABV. It's always about getting the best score and not just, you know, enjoying some beer.

My favorite Tweet ever was someone who described this process that dudes do where they show up, take over a hobby, and drive all the fun out (and thus women) as "MENTRIFICATION". It is my new favorite word.

See also: Riding bicycles, listening to music (ugh audiophiles), metal guitarists playing 64th note scales, etc. I can't wait for the day that bros discover knitting and it becomes nothing but a race to see who can make the longest scarves.

<comment><USER34> It feels a little cynical. You can enjoy beer and music and stuff without getting into a dick measuring contest. If all they want to do is one-up you then they're not your friend. Find someone who listens to you.

If that's their way of enjoying things, then what's so bad about it? They presumably dislike a lot of the hobbies you enjoy, they're not out there to 'mentrify' them. (Why this gendered insulting is okay when it's aimed against men, I don't know.)

<comment><USER33> _> You can enjoy beer and music and stuff without getting into a dick measuring contest._

Sure, and most do, across genders.

 _> If that's their way of enjoying things, then what's so bad about it?_

Every act tends to have social/economic implications that affect how others participate, even if unintentional. Walk into a bar now, and often eight out of the ten taps are high IBU IPAs. Fewer choices for people that aren't into the hops competition.

Some people will be rude to others who don't want to play the competitive game.

 _> (Why this gendered insulting is okay when it's aimed against men, I don't know.) _

Men collectively have enough power to handle a funny critical term without risk of being marginalized.

<comment><USER35> >> (Why this gendered insulting is okay when it's aimed against men, I don't know.)

> Men collectively have enough power to handle a funny critical term without > risk of being marginalized.

What does men collectively have enough power even mean? It's not like all the men in the world work together to decide the fate of all the poor, powerless women. Where is black men's power? Where is the homeless white men's power? And why should risk of being marginalized factor into it? Insulting a very large fraction of humanity for the actions of a small subset shouldn't be OK no matter who it is. Would insulting all Muslims for the actions of a few fringe sects be OK? I mean, they should collectively have enough power to handle it, they even run whole countries!

Decry the actions of bros all you want, but why expand that to saying all men do this as "mentrification" implies? Doing so is both inaccurate and hurtful to many people for no reason other than feeling smug that some man (who most likely isn't very privileged) finally got their comeuppance.

<comment><USER36> I don't think it implies that all men do this at all. It also seems like a much more palatable expression/term than "dick-measuring contest".

<comment><USER37> But it seems to collectively place the blame on all men, rather than the minority who are interested in dick-measuring contests.

And not only is this unfair, it's silly. Brewing has always been an almost exclusively male hobby, the rise of the hop nerd is nothing to do with sex at all, contrary to what the word might imply.

<comment><USER38> I would also be willing to believe that the, for lack of a better term, dick- measuring, isn't something that men inherently do more; we're just primed to see it that way due to sexist stereotypes. And/or they get away with it more easily 'cuz hegemony.

Evidences:

At quilting shows, numeric boasting is also common - number of hours, number of pieces, number of spools of thread, I've even seen a count of the number of broken quilting needles.

Carbon fiber knitting needles are a thing. I own some. The packaging talks about how carbon fiber is also used in aerospace. (In case, I dunno, you need to get those puppies moving through the air really fast, maybe?)

My grandmother's approach to baking Christmas cookies.

(That said, MENTRIFICATION is a hilarious term, I chuckled out loud, and I will be using it in the future, with only moderate fear that doing so will emasculate me or invert the patriarchy, and minor hope that people who like to complain about political correctness will be offended on political grounds.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Response to EFF complaint about student data privacy - <AUTHOR> http://googleforeducation.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-facts-about-student-data-privacy-in.html <comment><USER2> Google:

> There are no ads in these Core Services, and student data in these services > is not used for advertising purposes.

This isn't in the original EFF complaint, EFF specifically says (at least in the press release [1]) that Google doesn't advertise:

EFF:

>This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non- advertising purposes

Google then says:

>In addition, our systems compile data aggregated from millions of users of Chrome Sync and, after completely removing information about individual users, we use this data to holistically improve the services we provide. For example if data shows that millions of people are visiting a webpage that is broken, that site would be moved lower in the search results. This is not connected to any specific person nor is it used to analyze student behaviors.

Which is exactly what the EFF's complaint is about!

EFF:

>Google's practices fly in the face of commitments made when it signed the Student Privacy Pledge, a legally enforceable document whereby companies promise to refrain from collecting, using, or sharing students' personal information except when needed for legitimate educational purposes or if parents provide permission.

so imho Google just confirms what the EFF said

[1] [https://www.eff.org/press/releases/google-deceptively- tracks...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/google-deceptively-tracks- students-internet-browsing-eff-says-complaint-federal-trade)

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. I get the impression that data aggregation&analysis is so deeply ingrained in Google company culture that it's entirely possible the responsible people truly believes nothing went wrong here.

<comment><USER4> From PBS Frontline's "United States Of Secrets" (part 2):

        LIZ FIGUEROA, (D) State Senator, CA, 1998-06: We walk into this room, and it's myself
        and two of my staff— my chief of staff and one of my attorneys. And across from us
        was Larry, Sergey, and their attorney.

        All of a sudden, Sergey started talking to me. He said, "Senator, how would you feel
        if a robot went into your home and read your diary and read your financial records,
        read your love letters, read everything, but before leaving the house, it imploded?"
        And he said, "That's not violating privacy."

        I immediately said, "Of course it is. Yes, it is." And he said, "No, it isn't.
        Nothing's kept. Nobody knows about it." I said, "That robot has read everything.
        Does that robot know if I'm sad or if I'm feeling fear, or what's happening?"
        And he looked at me and he said, "Oh, no. That robot knows a lot more than that."

Of course, what that ridiculous robot analogy leaves out is that to be useful, _something_ has to be reported back to Google; if the "implosion" prevented _all_ of the data from returning to Google, there would be no point in sending the robot.

> Nobody knows about it.

This idea that no _person_ knows about it is suspiciously similar to the word games the NSA plays with their claims of only needing a warrant once a human searches for something they already captured and stored.

<comment><USER5> Senator, if i was spending billions on robots to go to people homes and read their diaries and then explode before leaving, would you think there was some ulterior motive on me building those robots?

<comment><USER6> Or even more reasonably, if I were spending billions on such robots and they became a pervasive part of society, such that every family had such a robot regularly visiting their house and their daily routine was dependant on such robots...

Coupled with the fact that the function of said robots could be changed with a code push...

Doesn't that create an incredible opportunity for monetization and therefore risk for future abuse?

Just because we could provide a perfect search result to any query if we knew everything about a person (including their current thoughts) doesn't make enacting that a reasonable or good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When Google starts to state that the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) agrees with their policies, you know that something's amiss. Looking at fpf.org, they present themselves as a Thinktank, but it's probably more honest to describe them as industry lobbyists.

(i) Pages like [https://fpf.org/issues/ad- tracking/](https://fpf.org/issues/ad-tracking/) don't present a critical and balanced view on ad tracking but put forward the view of ad companies.

(ii) A random quote from the page on big data: "In Big Data: Catalyst for a Privacy Change, Joseph Jerome discusses the rise of big data and the role of privacy in both the Fourth Amendment and consumer contexts, and argues that the future of privacy will have the be built upon a foundation of trust." The future of privacy needs to be built on a foundation of trust? Well, you can state that, but it indicates that you're not an independent thinktank but try to advance policies that are beneficial to your supporters

(iii) Supporters ([https://fpf.org/about/supporters/](https://fpf.org/about/supporters/)) all big shots, but also including Facebook, ComScore, ad companies and so on.

So take it with a grain of salt that the Forum for the Future of Privacy states that Google has done nothing wrong.

<comment><USER4> [https://fpf.org/about/](https://fpf.org/about/)

[https://fpf.org/about/our-mission/](https://fpf.org/about/our-mission/)

Their "About Us and "Mission" pages are identical, and are full of glowing talk about _convening a discussion_ that "seeks to advance responsible data practices", and doesn't say anything about privacy. This smells strongly of a corporate/lobbyist PR front.

<comment><USER8> The Future of Privacy Forum's future of privacy is "no privacy".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Besides not addressing the points that EFF raised, one of my serious problems with Google Apps (as a user) is data leakage across services and accounts.

Some examples:

\- Google Hangouts is one of the covered apps. But to be actually useful (e.g. if you want to share images), you had to turn on Google+. Images end up in Google+ photo albums, which are not covered by the Google Apps agreement and the data can be mined for advertising purposes.

\- Google Drive is also covered, which means that data on Drive is not mined for ads. However, in a realistic work environment, you have to share files outside your organisation. If you share a file and someone ends up opening it on a non-Apps Google account, your document has been leaked to an ad-mined Drive account.

\- When Google Photos was introduced, suddenly all my Drive photos were there as well. Google Photos is not covered, which means that the photos can be mined for ads. Luckily, this problem seems to have been resolved.

\- Google Mail is covered by the terms of apps. But if I go to Google Plus, people I communicated with via e-mail are suggested as circle additions. Since Google Plus is not covered by the Apps terms, why does data from e-mail end up there?

My impression is that (perhaps driven by the consumer apps) data isolation is a real problem within Google and there is a certain amount of data shared between apps that are covered by the Google Apps terms and those that aren't. This seriously undermines my trust in Google Apps and its suitability for business/education.

Of course, I could switch off every Google service in Apps outside what is covered. But then you need two Google accounts, which is really inconvenient.

<comment><USER5> I am one of the suckers that try to live with two google accounts.

It is maddening.

For example, if you do not agree to g+ on your main account and by mistake you select that account on the dropdown from hangouts or the play store* then you get the EULA agreement and there is no way to go back to the app and select another account if you don't agree. Because as soon as you decline you exit the app, and opening the app again will how the aggrement for the last selected account, if you having another account already green lighted. The workaround? remove one account. clear data on that app, and redo everything.

* there is no way to NOT show the main (undesired) account on the drop down, and you have to use the dropdown a lot on hangouts as SMS is another account! so every time i move from sms to wifi calls, i have 1 in 2 chances of screwing everything, even more so as my profile pic on my main account is not shown because i never agreed to some policy that would allow it

<comment><USER10> I find that using Chrome with the multiple accounts feature helps a great deal. You can theme the different Chrome accounts differently to provide a visual hint when you're in the wrong window. And if you consistently log into only one web account from each Chrome account, you never get the multiple- login selector.

<comment><USER5> yeah, that is easy. i also do that with firefox. i have one themed using a proxy to work, the other not.

i was mostly talking about android apps, where there is hardly an alternative for google services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is EFF's full complaint: [https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/01/ftccomplaint- googlefore...](https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/01/ftccomplaint- googleforeducation.pdf)

Basically, it boils down to:

\- Google is violating the student privacy pledge by logging non-educational material a student user sees, by having sync turned on by default, and by allowing administrators to turn on sync if it is off

\- Student Privacy Pledge is enforcable by the FTC due to previous precedent

\- EFF wants FTC to open an investigation into Google's practices, and, if found in violation, to stop the offending practices and delete already- collected personal data.

It seems fairly straghtforward to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am an American high school senior and can say confidently that most American students are screwed over pretty extensively when it comes to the software they are forced to use.

I have several classes that require the use of proprietary software such as Google classroom, Microsoft silver light, and Adobe flash. On top of that I cannot even remember the last time I was given a document that wasn't a .docx.

It would be one thing if these tools were optional, but they are strictly required and students' grades do suffer if they choose to opt out of using them. In previous years I simply followed along in my windows VM, but after getting accepted to the university of my choice I've had enough. I have alerted all of my teachers I will not be using Google classroom, or complete any assignment that requires the use of flash, silver light, or any other proprietary software. Has my grade suffered? Sure, but now that I am securely in the school of my choice I could not care less.

<comment><USER13> Won't the university have similar requirements?

Society is living with compromises. If you want everyone to switch to open source software make it better than the alternatives, they won't switch because of any other reason.

<comment><USER14> My university was interesting; you could get a computer degree with the Engineering department or with the Math/CS department, and their IT policies were polar opposites. Engineering was 99% Windows/MATLAB/Visual Studio/you name it. CS was 99% Linux/GCC/CUPS/etc.

If you were on the wrong platform you had a hell of a time submitting assignments. (CS students on Windows found their C programs would run fine on their laptops but would crash in the CS environment because of compiler and C std lib differences. Engineering students on Linux found that they couldn't open the .docx files to submit lab reports without destroying the mandatory formatting in the tables.)

<comment><USER15> So, supposedly educated young persons couldn't even "Save as..." and choose a free format when saving the documents? That's not a software problem...

<comment><USER16> And having a copy in a free format helps with submitting a correctly formatted .docx how?

<comment><USER15> They[0] should be saving the documents in a free format, despite the closed source software. Office supports .odf files or some other free format, does it not?

[0] By "they" I mean the persons who created the documents, not the ones who try to edit them using Gnu/Linux...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here is a strawman, because I want to challenge the other parallel universe.

Let's say this whole pledge thing didn't exist and the only thing that GAFE promise is no ads. Now let's supposed Google is collecting and anonymizing usage data, like most sofwares do, is that a big deal? Since 99% of the people won't read the ToS and most people assume some level of usage data will be collected, what would be people's stand on that?

I think, Google's stand on the current issue is that they disagree their intent violate the pledge. They would argue data collection is anonymized, and like most software out there (Chrome, FireFox, etc) these are telemetry (and all sorts) collected. For Google the collection is for regular development purpose. Perhaps they will argue that they did not do a good job at making a "disable me" option, and that they didn't make that clear to their customers. I supposed EFF just doesn't trust Google handling the data in the first place, since Google can lie about not logging the individual user name in some server's log file.

<comment><USER18> They don't collect anonymized data. They collect data, then anonymize it for aggregation by their machine learning systems. They still have data with user information in it.

I'd be surprised if it was just "for regular development purposes."

I'd wager that collected usage information in drives marketing and sales efforts, to enterprise customers at least but perhaps consumers as well. And while it's not directly used to target ads at the students on that platform, I'd be similarly surprised if it wasn't used to train their commercial-side profiles to make targeting "anonymous" 12-18 year-olds more effective.

<comment><USER17> Maybe. Google doesn't specify how they are fitting their data in their training program. But to be clear, I didn't say they were just for development purpose. I was imagining that'd be their interpretation. They would see that as telemetry or diagnostic information.

But if they will provide an opt-out option, that will help resolve the issue. EFF isn't wrong, they are catching an implicit fineprint, and Google is interpreting that very differently (not being Google).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The university I go to makes a point of telling us almost every day that we have no rights because we signed them away when we accepted the application.

</comment><comment><USER20> Man, how far Google as fallen. Reading that corporate press release made me feel embarrassed and uncomfortable for all the people who had (unwisely) trusted Google over the years.

Maybe they are not (currently) using the data in the very legalese-specific way that they have claimed. But, there's no doubt that they will build unrelated products using that data to make their owners gazillions. That's fine, you say - we're all here to make money, right? But, imagine that you're tracked, monitored, and experimented on 24/7 throughout your childhood. When you're 20, will you be surprised when Google's AI will understand every intention, desire of you and be able to recognize every nuance of your actions and behavior? To me, that's scary.

<comment><USER10> That would be super-convenient, as long as the AI is still helping me find what I'm looking for, wouldn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I want to be fare to Google but their response was not satisfying to me. There should be no leakage of students' data that will persist and have an effect on students' digital (and physical) lives later in life. I side with the EFF on this issue.

In the comments, a parent advises their kids to only use their Chromebooks for class activities and never for personal email and web browsing. Great advice, and should work fine for children with privacy respecting smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER22> protip: install a full linux distro on your chromebook, and then use non- google end-to-end encrypted services such as firefox sync or owncloud for dealing with private data.

<comment><USER23> While this is great for personal purposes, the article is discussing Schools/Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Chromebooks are nifty for the low price they offer and the relatively low maintenance needed on them, but this solution for privacy on them simply doesn't scale once you get above a few machines due to the fact that you can't just stick a live disk in and install, you have to go through a few hoops on the Chromebooks/Chrome Machines I'm familiar with.

GAFE is really convenient in a lot of ways; the EFF is absolutely right to complain though that there are a lot of privacy issues baked into the whole thing by virtue of it being Google Services.

Outside of data collection, the issue is that GAFE admins are still at the mercy of Google changes. We may get advanced notices from Google about changes and certainly some are optional, but things like G+ integration, Photos, and so on are completely outside of our control.

My last workplace used GAFE for the University, and we had a lot of very basic privacy things that popped up as a result of GAFE and new gmail features pushed out. Our few privacy minded users (mostly older professors) would get really upset over how much data got sync'd between LDAP and G+ without our admin realizing it, students who had legitimate privacy concerns (harassment cases) were frustrated with the same issue, and so on.

I'd like to believe Google could just ease up the data collection from schools and businesses - it can't be that great compared to the public at large, and it would make GAFE absolutely perfect for schools. (Seriously, privacy aside, GAFE is otherwise perfect for a University set up. Unlimited space, great for student collaboration, and honestly many universities could do away with Office subscriptions at this point since the Google Office Suite is close enough for all intents and purposes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > For example if data shows that millions of people are visiting a webpage > that is broken, that site would be moved lower in the search results.

Cue endless SEO community debate & speculation in 3...2...1...

</comment><comment><USER25> Sometimes, I don't understand EFF actions</comment>


Web API performance: profiling Django REST framework. - <AUTHOR> http://dabapps.com/blog/api-performance-profiling-django-rest-framework/

<comment><USER2> Let me preface my comment with a statement that this is very interesting work and it's appreciated. Nevertheless, my worry with the advice given here is that it provides comfort to those unwilling to evaluate other options: platforms or frameworks that may provide the necessary performance characteristics without as many rounds of optimization. Avoidance of premature optimization and avoidance of selection of a well-fitting platform and architecture are not the same thing, though they are often confused for one another.

If you are familiar with Django, and better yet familiar with Django REST, and do not have the time to invest in considering other options (learning about, experimenting with, and taking the necessary time to properly digest), this article gives useful data and demonstrates how to reach performance levels that may be acceptable for your use-case, with some concessions (notably, caching).

However, if you are willing to evaluate other options, there are many platforms that achieve the synthetic target established by the "third bar"\--that is, 25ms of server-side processing while doing so _with_ client- side concurrency and _without_ resorting to caching or other potentially complicating/limiting concessions.

If you are a Django developer, by all means leverage advice such as this. If you are not, consider looking to alternatives that meet your performance target out of the box. Perhaps you will find something new that you'll eventually be glad you looked at.

<comment><USER3> honest question: what are the names of other platforms similar to Django REST that you would recommend to this newbie.

<comment><USER4> we use tastypie: django-tastypie.readthedocs.org

for the most part it works really well. for a while the development was sort of stagnant/dead while the developer was looking for people to take it over. recently (2-3 months ago) a team has formed around the project and is actively maintaining and pushing new features again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the takeaway is not 'use Django REST and caching' but 'profile your web api and tweak it'. Good use of profiling here.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some good advice there, but I believe that plugging a middleware like [https://errormator.com/](https://errormator.com/) would give even better insight into what is happening in your applications.

(disclaimer: I've created errormator)

<comment><USER7> Your carousel needs to stop after a using manually clicks an arrow. I tried clicking back a slide to read it and it just kept right on spinning. I can't even read about your features.

<comment><USER6> This should be fixed now :-)

<comment><USER7> Much better, thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proof emerges that a quantum computer can outperform a classical one - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/09/26/proof-emerges-that-a-quantum-computer-can-outperform-a-classical-one <comment><USER2> I'd like to take the opportunity to clear a misunderstanding that I've seen in several threads related to quantum computing.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The classes of complexity of interest here are P, NP, BPP, and BQP.

— __P __corresponds to the problems that can be solved by a classical computer (deterministic Turing machine) in polynomial time. For example finding a shortest path between nodes in a graph is in this complexity class.

— __NP __corresponds to the problems where "verifying a solution" is in P. In other words, it 's "easy" to check if a solution is actually valid. We know that P ⊆ NP which means that when it's easy to find a solution, it's also easy to check that a solution is valid (but we don't know if the opposite is true). This class contains interesting problems such as prime factorization on which all the current Web's security depends. It's easy to check if a factorization is valid, but it's hypothesized that it's hard to actually find it. Now the interesting part is that we're not _sure_ it's actually true, so the security house of cards might actually tumble at some point (if it hasn't already secretly).

— __BPP __contains all the problems that you can solve in polynomial time (so like P) but with a chance of less than 1 /3 of being incorrect! In practice, we run the algorithm several times to reduce the probability of being wrong to less than 2^(−ck) (c is a positive constant, k is the number of times it's run).

— __BQP __is probably the most interesting class here. It 's just like _BPP_ but on a quantum computer. Now the interesting part is that we don't know (yet) an efficient way of finding the prime factorization on a classical computer. But on a quantum computer, we have the infamous Shor's algorithm which can solve this problem in polynomial time with a bounded error!

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The current knowledge about complexity classes is that P ⊆ BPP ⊆ BQP. We don't know how NP and BQP relate to each other.

What does this mean? We don't know if quantum computers can solve harder problems _theoretically_. But they seem to do _sometimes_ in practice to the best of our knowledge. Coming back to the Shor's algorithm example, we don't know any classical algorithm that can solve the prime factorization problem as efficiently. But this doesn't mean that such an algorithm doesn't exist!

Now you might think that all of this is only theoretical considerations that only mathematicians care about. After all, we don't care if theoretically there might exist efficient classical algorithms for supposedly hard problems if we don't find them anyway right? This is a valid observation. If big enough quantum computers become a reality one day, we'll be able to solve some hard problems _right away_. However in the meantime, we might totally find efficient classical algorithms making quantum computers less useful. Actually, it has already happened last year[1]! A recommendation problem that we thought was intractable by classical means (but easy to solve with quantum computers) turned out to be solvable more easily than expected by a classical computer. This classical algorithm draws inspiration from quantum algorithms however. So if anything, quantum computing will force us to look at problems from another perspective and solve them in novel ways.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271)

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that they have a quantum computer that can solve a very specific type of problem. (But it solves them exponentially faster than a classical computer). They don't have a general purpose quantum computer, in particular, they can't run Shor's algorithm to factorize numbers and break a big part of encryption methods.

For a more detailed and better explanation than mine, you can read post of Scott Aaronson [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4317](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4317) (HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053405) (595 points, 5 days ago, 207 comments))

<comment><USER4> > (But it solves them exponentially faster than a classical computer)

do you mean literally exponentially? or do you mean "a lot" faster?

<comment><USER5> Literally exponentially.

But keep in mind that QC does not mean you can solve _any_ problem exponentially faster than a binary computer. If something is NP-Complete (or any of the less familiar "hard problem" classes) then it's still gonna be hard for the quantum computer.

So you'll get an exponential speed up for some specific problems like quantum circuit sampling, but it can't help you solve the Traveling Salesman Problem any faster unless we find a new algorithm—and even then that would imply P=NP.

There's still lots that QC could bring to the table even if it only works for some problems, but it's not expected to completely replace classical computers—more like augment them with some new super powers.

<comment><USER6> The Traveling Salesman Problem is indeed a potential application of quantum computing. Grover's Search could theoretically find a solution in quadratic time (sqrt(n!) versus n!). On a physical quantum computer, this would have profound impact to many different real-world applications.

<comment><USER7> Grover's algorithm provides a quadratic _speedup_ , but sqrt(n!) is not quadratic time; it's super-exponential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://archive.is/QJ0ae](http://archive.is/QJ0ae)

</comment><comment><USER9> No surprise coming from The Economist, this article has done the best job (that I've seen) of explaining these complex topics in a language accessible to most. I now understand the significance of this new discovery and its limitations. And I like how they've stayed humble with their tie-in to Watson's famous prediction in the last sentence.

</comment><comment><USER10> These little steps towards usable QC keep coming. Is there a paper or doc that outlines what breakthroughs are still needed before we can consider ECC or RSA broken? Is QC interesting for signal processing? How would having a million Qbits in my iPhone change us?

<comment><USER11> Predicting how home users will benefit from QC is like predicting the iPhone on the day when Edison made an electronic tube. I am a researcher in the field and have no idea how it would be useful in a smartphone.

However, here are the breakthroughs necessary for scalable QC: make the quantum operations about 10 times more precise and the qubits about 10 times more long lived (currently the information stored in the qubits decays a bit too fast). Then make it possible to manufacture not just 50, but a couple of thousand of the qubits. At that point you will be able to simulate important chemistry (for drug discovery and material design) and important field theories (for high energy physics and cosmology).

Breaking RSA will be possible later on when we get to millions of qubits, but it is not that big of a deal as we can switch to other crypto schemes (but recordings of important messages will be decrypted).

To your other question about signal processing: quantum computing is providing technologies that would be very useful in metrology and the creation of crazy sensitive sensors (sensing various fields or displacements or taking pictures at crazy resolutions and signal to noise ratios).

<comment><USER12> Good points. It's hard to predict where these QC developments will lead.

One little aside, John Ambrose Fleming[1] is credited for inventing the first electronic tube (a vacuum tube based diode) around 1904 that initiated the development of modern (tube based) electronics.

However, the work at Thomas Edison's laboratories in previous decades on the electric light bulb were almost certainly important prerequisites to Fleming's work. He even worked for Edison for a period of time.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How "big" is a qubit?

How many can fit in a server rack, now and in the near future?

<comment><USER11> These are between micrometer and millimeter sized, depending on technology and exactly what you count. But miniaturizing them is by far not the most pressing problem. And it will not be a server rack for now, rather a helium dilution refrigerator that works at less than 1 Kelvin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love the teleological formulation "Proof emerges".</comment>


Security report for Peatio Bitcoin exchange [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sakurity.com/peatio.pdf

<comment><USER2> If anyone trusts a rails app for real money, they're an idiot. Homakov made his report today and they'll patch these bugs but did he get them all? What about new code that is written? Will he watch every commit made in the future? Or the deployment environment? What about code that was out of scope for this assessment?

An audit report like this does not make a secure app. And Rails does not lend itself to one either. Without any mitigating controls, all it takes is one bug and you lose all your bitcoins...

</comment><comment><USER3> Known Exchanges using Peatio

      Yunbi Exchange - A crypto-currency exchange funded by BitFundPE
      One World Coin
      MarsX.io - Australian Cryptocurrency Exchange
      Bitspark - Bitcoin Exchange in Hong Kong
      Yes-BTC - Bitcoin Exchange in Taiwan
      Mulcoin.com
      ecoinz.info (Launch soon) - New Zealand Cryptocurrency Exchange</comment>


Yik Yak Hack - <AUTHOR> http://silverskylabs.github.io/yakhak/ <comment><USER2> Like if all new social network need to be hacked before explode : Tinder : [http://www.cammipham.com/tinder-hack/](http://www.cammipham.com/tinder-hack/) WhatApp : [http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/12/hole-in-whatsapp-for- androi...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/12/hole-in-whatsapp-for-android-lets- hackers-steal-your-conversations/) Snapchat : [http://www.reddit.com/r/Thefappening3/comments/2j4lql/90000_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Thefappening3/comments/2j4lql/90000_private_photos_and_9000_hacked_snapchat/)

<comment><USER3> I don't quite understand what the hack was for the Tinder one. She just optimized her profile for likes? And added a banner saying match of the day? Not the hack I was expecting.

<comment><USER2> sorry, the good link : [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-19/new- tinder-s...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-19/new-tinder- security-flaw-exposed-users-exact-locations-for-months)

<comment><USER3> This one is much more troubling, and fits in more with your other links. I guess the lesson here is to treat everything like it's a beta, because that seems to be the nature of app and game development these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprising they only used the User ID for auth. Surely you'd also generate a private key on the device and either use it as a password, or do public key cryptography to authenticate?

By the sounds of the Wikipedia article the developers were novices, however, which might be why they didn't think of doing this.

<comment><USER5> There's no visible usernames in the app. I'm not sure what good taking over someone's account would do you.

<comment><USER6> 1\. Hack someone in your office

2\. Hack someone in your home (one of your kids for example)

3\. Hack someone in a coffee shop

Generally, when someone thinks they're anonymous and they aren't, bad things are going to happen.

<comment><USER7> By "hack", you mean "discover the userIDs of users launching the app in your {office/home/coffee shop}." But this does not equate to a deanonymization of ANY past posts necessarily. userIDs are generated on app install, so anyone hoping to be anonymous needs only connect via a VPN to avoid a MITM on that particular connection, post the anonymous secret, and re-install the app. Then any further use of the app will not leak that they posted the secret, and in fact the information has been destroyed.

<comment><USER8> And I'm sure that's exactly what most users will do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So you can MITM and take over someone's anonymous account, so what? There's no associated personal information, no logins or anything, so you wouldn't even know who owns that account, let alone passwords or emails.

You can view all the posts they've made and make a reasonable guess as to which person it was, I suppose, but that seems like a pretty flimsy argument.

<comment><USER10> Being able to link an account to a local IP address and MAC address would probably let you deanonymize the account. At the least, you could find the wifi MAC and then walk around measuring signal strength until you found the right table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't seem like it will be too much of a practical problem. As said in the article, YikYak is mostly used on university campuses and odds are if a student is on campus they would be connected to the university wifi. From personal experience most university's use some form of WPA2-Enterprise authentication which which wireshark can't decrypt.

<comment><USER12> > As said in the article, YikYak is mostly used on university campuses

University campuses, where students are constantly using the free WiFi in cafes, are on private WiFi networks shared with friends, etc. Even if the University's own WiFi was magically invulnerable, there will be _many_ associated venues ready for use of this exploit.

<comment><USER13> 1\. Setup an open access point in the middle of campus.

2\. Give it a default name (e.g. 'linksys').

3\. Capture packets.

4\. Profit.

<comment><USER14> There is no profit though, no one uses YikYak for posting anything remotely important.

<comment><USER4> Ehh, people sometimes post embarassing/hateful things on YikYak, being able to out them would be a problem.

<comment><USER15> Or to blackmail them so you don't reveal their identity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was this responsibly disclosed? It doesn't seem to say whether it was. I'm fearing the worst.

<comment><USER16> Does the website disclose who is posting what?

Turnabout is fair play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They could just one way hash the userid then send that to the analytics service.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sacrificing users' security just to load ads and generate revenue says a lot about this company's ethics.

<comment><USER7> Do you know anything about Yik Yak? It doesn't have ads, at least not on Android.

<comment><USER18> The article says they temporarily disable HTTPS to make a call to Flurry, which is an advertising/analytics company. They must be accessing the analytics side.

<comment><USER19> To be fair to YikYak, they didn't switch off HTTPS, Flurry switches it off by default. Maybe they didn't know of that? In any case, they should enable it and Flurry should make it the default.

<comment><USER20> I imagine it's disabled by default because at one point in time (not sure if it's changed in the last few years) any application on the iOS App Store using SSL required registration with the US Government for export control.

<comment><USER19> Really? That sounds... stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> big take away: if you're using dependencies that talk across the internet, make sure they're ALSO using HTTPS

<comment><USER6> There's genuinely no excuse for Flurry (or any other vendor) to have an API that is not secured with HTTPS by default. I can't think of any reason other than stupidity or laziness, and those aren't excuses.

This is especially true of Flurry, which is tailored for connections directly from devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They're hosted on AWS and probably using server name indication (SNI) for their SSL. Android's version of HttpClient is outdated (and won't be upgraded [1]). This is why SNI is not supported in that library and this may be why they chose to use some dirty hacks [2] so that they can use SSL with HttpClient.

[1] [http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2011/09/androids- http-...](http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2011/09/androids-http- clients.html) [2] [https://developer.android.com/training/articles/security- ssl...](https://developer.android.com/training/articles/security-ssl.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> "To perform user-based analytics, Flurry needs some way of keep tracking of individual users. Yik Yak gave them the only user identification they have available: the userID."

And, while reading the article, we all probably were: "No, please, I hope they didn't do what I'm afraid is following now ..."

</comment><comment><USER23> What the hell? All that talk, plus a toolkit download, and not a word about responsible disclosure?

I'm not sure if I'd ever want SilverSky (the firm behind this) to have my money.

<comment><USER24> Silversky disclosed this to the Yik Yak team on December 2nd.

The original source appeared on their blog on Friday, December 3rd after Yik Yak had released an update to the App Store.

[https://www.silversky.com/blog/yik-hak-smashing-the- yak](https://www.silversky.com/blog/yik-hak-smashing-the-yak)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Would it be illegal to use this and post photos of the idiots using this app on my campus with their associated comments?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see how this matters much. YikYak is anonymous, so if you stole my "account", all you'd get it my yakkarma. Potentially having a history of past yaks would reveal something about the user (not in my case).

</comment><comment><USER27> This is the app that all those highschool kids almost killed themselves over right? Hack away, I would say responsibly disclose but this app only hurts people.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands So another session hijacking hack using easily available tools?

</comment><comment><USER28> Oooow snap!

</comment><comment><USER29> A truly futile 'vulnerability'.

<comment><USER30> Sorry, in what way? Because Yik Yak is pointless?

<comment><USER31> Probably because the hack is value-less.

I doubt the users find the app pointless, but there isn't much reason to steal someone's account. You can't even link it to their real name to blackmail them.

<comment><USER30> Sorry, I'm really ignorant about these things, but once you have the ip of the phone that sent some message, couldn't you trace that to the physical phone? So you want to know who posted "foobar", you wait until you have someone's user id that posted "foobar", and then use the IP address of the most recent outgoing message to identify the phone. Since there's typically one user per phone, won't that identify the user?

<comment><USER32> Knowing the IP is pretty useless. The closest you can get publicly if you know that is the general region, but this app is already a nearby radius app, so you already know that. If you have law enforcement powers you can try to get the subscriber info who was using that IP during that time period, but normal people don't have that ability.

Even the article has to fall back to saying you have to just keep monitoring packets with that IP and hope the user uses some non-HTTPS web site that reveals their name. Although, honestly, most ISPs don't give you a static IP any more so the same user could be a different IP address multiple times a day.

<comment><USER33> As demonstrated in the article, this gives you a local IP address which you could use to find the hostname of the device. For iOS devices, the hostname often contains the owner's name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I still don't quite get why people would want to disclose real private message anonymously on the internet. It should be common knowledge that nothing is ever 100% secure. It's all about the amount of efforts people are ready to put in order to hack it. For me it's a pointless app, with a hack that require way too much effort to get such a small value. But that is nonetheless a vulnerability and I agree that this reveals some neglecting from Yik Yak engineers. It's a big fail for them to be advertising privacy when they don't even check the security of the 3rd party tools they include in their flow. This should serve as a reminder for the rest of us engineers to never blindly trust 3rd party tools and always cover your ass! Thanks for sharing :)

<comment><USER35> >real private message

That's not the point of Yik Yak. You're just broadcasting to the community, and rarely is something super incriminating posted, at least in my college's community.</comment></comment>


Playing action video games may be bad for your brain – loss of grey matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/shooting-video-games-health-1.4237361 <comment><USER2> Non-sensationalist headline:

 _A subsequent randomised longitudinal training experiment demonstrated that first-person shooting games reduce grey matter within the hippocampus in participants using non-spatial memory strategies._

And the rest of it, which changes the whole character of the article...

 _Conversely, participants who use hippocampus-dependent spatial strategies showed increased grey matter in the hippocampus after training. A control group that trained on 3D-platform games displayed growth in either the hippocampus or the functionally connected entorhinal cortex. A third study replicated the effect of action video game training on grey matter in the hippocampus. These results show that video games can be beneficial or detrimental to the hippocampal system depending on the navigation strategy that a person employs and the genre of the game._

[http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201715...](http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2017155a.html?foxtrotcallback=true)

Interesting study, terrible article.

<comment><USER3> So does that mean that people who play games that have maps and that keep the maps in their heads _develop_ grey matter, but people who just blindly run around the map and don't learn where things are will _lose_ grey matter?

What games DON'T require spatial memory? I'm having a hard time thinking of one.

<comment><USER4> A lot of modern games that offer convenience features like GPS navigation in GTA or the quest markers in Skyrim. I prefer playing GTA with the GPS turned off because it forces me to actually learn the lay of the land.

<comment><USER5> Trying to do this on my Zelda: Breath of the Wild master mode replay. Turned on the "Pro" HUD, which deactivates the map and requires more geography and landmark based navigation... surprisingly fun.

<comment><USER6> My experience with this kind of thing (like turning off quest markers in oblivion/skyrim) is that the game has been designed with quest markers in mind, and by turning them off the navigation systems stop making much sense. ie the map lacks "natural" markers, and because quest markers exist large view distance isnt very nexessary (and thus non-optimized) so the only larger objects to use can't be seen from a far distance, and the map is just generally designed without interconnectivity or even proper consistency, because the connections are through the markers.

Games depending on such GPS systems tend to be significantly hampered by its removal (which makes sense), and thus such basic removal is rarely a sufficient fix.

The only reason I'd imagine BotW might work fine is that Nintendo has made open(ish) world games before, and as far as I can remember, have never made much use of such systems. More likely than not, the game was designed without markers, and markers added after the fact; which is clearly untrue of most other modern open-world games

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's more than video games:

\- Becoming pregnant reduces grey matter[0].

\- Watching porn reduces grey matter[1].

\- Heavy use of Facebook reduces grey matter[2].

\- Tweeting while watching TV reduces grey matter[3]. etc etc etc.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/pregnancy-brain- mean...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/pregnancy-brain-means- reductions-in-grey-matter-for-new-mothers/)

[1] [http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-find- association...](http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-find-association- between-porn-viewing-and-less-grey-matter-brain/)

[2] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432817...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432817305090)

[3] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3036198/people-who-jump-from- scr...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3036198/people-who-jump-from-screen-to- screen-have-less-grey-matter-in-one-brain-region-s)

<comment><USER8> Coming soon: living reduces grey matter?

<comment><USER7> Yep. Teens (ages 13-8) lose 1 percent of their grey matter every year[0].

[0] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/adolescent.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In contrast, I would like to point out another research paper [0] about the possible "Cognitive benefits of computer games for older adults". I think that it's fascinating that we're living in a world of evolving, new art and entertainment forms.

[0] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4130645/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4130645/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think what they're describing isn't related to video games. It's just that using your brain a certain way makes it better at that type of task. The idea that playing Mario 64 improves the spatial reasoning isn't surprising because most levels are large and open and require spatial reasoning whereas first person shooters often featured tight, indoor corridors where the player cannot observe landmarks easily from different locations and must therefore hardcore directions into their memory.

</comment><comment><USER11> The study is interesting but I find the term 'action game' too imprecise to actually be useful. Having just skimmed through the paper it seems like what they actually experimented with were highly linear games which require little to no perceptual mapping of the world into memory because you do not have to backtrack much or at all. But that is an artifact of that particular games linear level design, it has nothing to do with 'action'.

</comment><comment><USER12> From the study:

"Thirteen first-person shooting games from the Call of Duty, Battlefield, Killzone, Medal of Honor and Resistance: Fall of Man series were chosen based on their highly similar gameplay tasks and demands. Participants only played the single player campaigns and did not play any multiplayer components of the games."

Single player for most of these games is very boring and requires little thinking. They need to add another category to this study where they are playing competitive multiplayer fps. Maybe even specifically strategy game types like capture the flag.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. The thrill of playing real opponents who quickly learn from patterns in your behaviour forces you to constantly adjust while also observing their unique behaviours which can be used to your own advantage. Far more challenging and requires on-the-fly tactics and strategies. I'd be quite surprised if multiplayer games didn't lead to more brain matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> wow imagine if john carmack hadn't played all those videogames

<comment><USER15> I get the feeling software engineers are going to end up net positive in grey matter regardless of their gaming habits just because of the nature of the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "After 90 hours of playing first-person shooter games..."

90 hours in the gym @ 3 hours / week = 7.5 months of exercise

At this point one expect to see physical changes in the mirror.

Why would it be any different in the brain?

A much broader implication may be that dedicating around 90 hours to something is the point at which your brain will start to show physical signs of adaptation.

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be interesting to study what other activities trigger 'response learning' \- I would imagine most sports?

</comment><comment><USER18> So what about strategy games then, such as Civilization?

<comment><USER19> I'll be right back, I'll go spend 4 years with two full time jobs, and dozens of training groups in order to answer this question. And then I'll have a non- definitive, very specific answer you probably didn't expect and which will raise more questions than it answers. Science is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> News articles about scientific studies may be wrong, misconstrued, misleading, or not statistically significant.

<comment><USER21> I expected better from CBC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In my experience, FPS enthusiasts do tend to manifest some pretty bad traits that are less common among other types of gamers. Interesting.

Especially stuff related to "race realism" and various forms of sexism.

<comment><USER23> I will never forget being verbally abused for the first time on xmas day 1996 Doom Deathmatch. Funny stuff, about 2 minutes of insults and death threats.

The sad thing is nowadays this is bullying, sexist, racist, trolling and so on. It just made me laugh. I think the trash talk was always in this community.

<comment><USER24> It was bullying, sexist, racist, trolling back then too.

<comment><USER23> I disagree. I am pretty sure that the guys saying they wanted me to die didn't actually want me to die. It was just a way to taunt.

It is absolutely ridiculous that someone who has never seen me, met me, know where I live, any of my history, my sexuality, my family can possibly achieve any of emotion that could ever be taken seriously enough to be considered bullying. It is stretching the term almost far enough to be meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'll take my chances clickbait.</comment>


Say Goodbye to Banking as We Know It - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-29/china-has-edge-over-silicon-valley-to-end-banking-as-we-know-it <comment><USER2> This sounds terrifying. I've been in situations where there was no electricity, let alone internet or phone. Think, after a hurricane. Being able to exchange cash for services or goods was super important to preserve life and health. The last thing I'd want to hear is, "we'll get power in a week or two - until then just wait for FEMA".

<comment><USER3> It's been over a decade ago, but I've been without power for about a week after a natural disaster. Most places won't open if they don't have power (just because I didn't have power, didn't mean others were without). Not having gasoline and reliable food sources seemed to be the bigger issue. With gas there were long lines, rationing, people still were paying with credit cards. POTs was probably in better shape back then. Cell service was spotty.

From my time working in food service, managing cash has its own infrastructure issues. Secured money bags, blind drops, safes, even a system for counting, tracking, and inventory of cash and coin. Since day-to-day those things aren't used as much I'm sure in a natural disaster it would be a mess.

I'm sure cash with stick around, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> China is so far ahead in consumer financial services. Even panhandlers in China use Alipay/WeChat pay. Constrast that with the west, where you need to jump through way more hoops to start taking payment.

The onboarding of non-Chinese users onto these platforms is going to be a huge trend in the next decade.

<comment><USER5> I see plenty of buskers and homeless sellers of The Big Issue accepting contactless here in London, although still a minority.

<comment><USER6> I see them in the US as well, although there's no way I'd ever use a card to give to a panhandler or busker. I'm barely OK with using a card with established retailers.

<comment><USER4> That's the whole point. They use QR codes or a namespace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unsurprising that China would want people to use something so easily trackable!

<comment><USER8> Yep. Every bit as easy to track as cash.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand your comment. The article explains that the blockchain will be managed only by the Chinese central bank or its proxies. Thus, it will be far easier to track than cash.

Are you disputing that assertion about the proposed Chinese cryptocurrency?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/nsNuf3](https://outline.com/nsNuf3)</comment>


Show HN: Layered – Neural Networks in Python 3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/danijar/layered <comment><USER2> Such projects are nice for educational use but not so much further when you don't have any GPU implementation.

It's pointed out in the Readme that this was for education but it still wasn't clear whether it's supposed to have a practical use outside of that (some educational projects develop into something useful). If it has (or maybe even if not), it should have a small comparison to other frameworks (maybe Python frameworks only), e.g. Theano, Blocks, Keras, Brainstorm, Neon, .... I think Brainstorm ([https://github.com/IDSIA/brainstorm](https://github.com/IDSIA/brainstorm)) or Neon ([https://github.com/NervanaSystems/neon](https://github.com/NervanaSystems/neon)) are somewhat close to your framework, because they are not based on Theano and thus do not do automatic symbolic gradient calculation but have explicit backprop code. Also, you really should point out what GPU implementation you have (if any), if it supports multi-GPU, and/or maybe other distributed setups.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, but really slow to train.

Partially because of the class __call__ instead of function calls among other things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking a look. Do you really think __call__ affects performance that much? I'll look into OpenCL to improve performance.

<comment><USER3> The lib looks good otherwise. Might be a useful educational tool if anything.

In my tests it's 2x slower, but it might not be the main reason. I didn't profile it at all.

Another thing is that it seems like it doesn't use Atlas to scale to all the cores even though my Python is linked against it.</comment></comment></comment>


Scary simulations of all-out war between China and the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/scary-vision-of-allout-war-between-china-and-the-us/news-story/a683b3bfaba4e0f9ac5bb91a88dff4e0 <comment><USER2> Seems like there are too many unknowns to accurately predict outcomes.

1\. How much does the experience of US forces benefit them? Has it created bad habits from fighting in different conditions? Does the US military have a bureaucracy problem? Is the US weapon infrastructure up to date, or decaying?

2\. How does the Chinese military make critical decisions? Who's really in charge? Are the Chinese weapons systems fully capable in real world scenarios? How do the Chinese servicemen feel about fighting? Does their lack of experience matter?

3\. Would a conflict based on keeping China from expanding their reach in the South China Sea balloon to full scale war across multiple theatres with multiple allies? What percentage of each superpowers resources would be allocated to win this conflict?

</comment><comment><USER3> Well that's embarrassing. Spending all this money, more than the next seven countries combined, dwarfing the spending of #2 China. And yet it's ambiguous who would win a war? It's almost like China could force the U.S. to spend itself into oblivion, sorta like the U.S. did to the U.S.S.R.</comment>


Modern text rendering with Linux: Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://mrandri19.github.io/2019/07/18/modern-text-rendering-linux-ep1.html <comment><USER2> Nice, I've subscribed to the RSS feed. A little weird to see such old software versions being used in an article with 'modern' in its title, but I suppose you have to pick a point that's 'modern enough' to have something the majority of people can follow along with when they're all running old software too.

I wish it covered error handling a bit more than just 'exit(EXIT_FAILURE)'. FreeType must have some sort of error code or error message function.

But that's all just minor nitpicking. I like the simple and direct walkthrough of the FreeType API (and promising to include friends from the ecosystem in the future). I hope the blog series will continue!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) I've used what was available on the latest ubuntu lts. FreeType functions return 0 (FT_Err_Ok) on success or a specific value for each function, but yes I agree that error handling could be better, maybe at the expense of terseness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems that with high resolution displays, font rendering techniques are becoming less important. I remember spending days tweaking font rendering. Now with a 300 dpi display, everything looks great.

<comment><USER4> No, this is wrong. Microsoft tried it with Windows 8, getting rid of subpixel antialiasing for hardware accelerated rendering and the results were so bad that a recent update to Windows 10 began switching back. Unfortunately, Google did the same thing in Chrome and they still don't get it and continue to insist that "it's too hard to do it right" every time I file a bug about UI régressions that came about as a result.

macOS gets around this be aliasing the hell out of all fonts regardless of manual type hinting (or lack thereof).

<comment><USER5> OP specifically mentions his 300 dpi displays, where you indeed don't need subpixel rendering. Low-DPI displays do need to continue to use tricks to make text halfway pleasant though. Windows with its hinting philosophy and off-by- default vertical smoothing is a bit of a special case though... like every other system out there. Oh well.

> they still don't get it and continue to insist that "it's too hard to do it > right"

What is wrong with that reply? It _is_ hard to do it correct _and_ quick.

<comment><USER4> > What is wrong with that reply? It _is_ hard to do it correct _and_ quick.

If it were anyone other than Google/Microsoft/Apple, I might accept that. Closing the bug (rather than assigning it to a future unknown release) because it's "too hard" is ridiculous. It's a valid concern, the results are noticeable even on hi-dpi displays, and it _should_ be fixed (if not now, later).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What makes this approach "modern"? What is this approach the alternative to?

As someone broadly unfamiliar with text rendering it's not clear to me. An introduction to these points would be very helpful

<comment><USER7> It's part 1, so I would hope the author plans to move on from the basics here into more modern techniques (things like subpixel anti-aliasing, ligatures, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, Subpixel AA, Kerning, Ligatures, Gamma Blending, and Emojis will be treated

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't wait to hear about Linux's gamma corrected antialiasing in future posts (or lack thereof).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it's an interesting topic. On reddit one of the authors of dear imgui has some interesting thought on it: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cfxltf/modern_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cfxltf/modern_text_rendering_with_linux_part_1/eudnxab/)

</comment></comment><comment> Const-me I recently needed that, too: [https://github.com/Const- me/nanovg/](https://github.com/Const-me/nanovg/)

Also using FreeType, but unlike that article rendering on GPU, with ClearType.

No advanced typography features are supported, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are following along with gcc on Linux and continuing to get linker errors even after adding -lfreetype, try passing it as the very last argument, e.g.

      gcc `pkg-config --cflags freetype2` -Wall -Werror -o main main.c -lfreetype

</comment><comment><USER10> While we have almost photo realistic live 3d, some text based app's are very laggy. To their defence, even though it's probably not the reason for the lag, rendering fonts are very slow and complicated.

</comment><comment><USER11> Small nitpick: Freetype works on Windows too. So the same code can be used to render fonts there. Though it is perhaps easier to use the native DirectWrite api.

<comment><USER7> DirectWrite isn't necessarily much easier, but it has many perks you don't get from freetype - kerning, combining characters, etc - and supports hardware acceleration, which is pretty cool.

Because integrating pango/harfbuzz is so difficult I'm tempted to replace my freetype usages with DirectWrite...

<comment><USER5> What makes integration of HarfBuzz difficult?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome, please continue!</comment>


Google Wave: Flop Crunch - <AUTHOR> http://w3crunch.com/2012/02/02/google-wave-flop-crunch/#more-32

<comment><USER2> Not necessarily a useful comment but the choice of font/background colour on that site a horrendous. Had to copy out the text to read it for fear of getting a headache.

<comment><AUTHOR> Man, sorry about that !! Let's do something: find a Template you like to suggest and I will buy it immediately !! Really I mean it. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Saying goodbye to SimplyTweet - <AUTHOR> http://motionobj.com/blog/saying-goodbye-to-simplytweet

<comment><USER2> I developed SimplyTweet.

Wow. I've never knew — but judging from a few emails I've got — I had some users of SimplyTweet from HN. It's sad, but it was fun while it lasted.

<comment><USER3> How much of a factor were the client limit and the API changes? I'd like to better understand if this is just you moving on or if twitter has made it impossible to continue your app.

<comment><USER2> Not impossible, but it's highly improbable to continue. The API changes aren't the biggest factor, but it requires some changes across the entire app, and I would like to take the chance to revamp a good part of it (It's major version 3, I've revamped it twice across the years already). Till now, they haven't answered me on how many user tokens I have used up, so it's a big risk for me to put in major effort, not knowing how much sales I can get in return. There's also some technical issue users are facing that they have been very slow to respond to (read: not yet), so frankly, I think I'm a low priority to them anyway.

I remember when I was on honeymoon and my web host fired me an email about blocking internet access because I was overloading their DNS server. I explained my situation (hey it's a production site and I'm away on vacation) and requested for them to keep me up for 4 more days when I'll be back home. They refused and I had to worked on it at the hotel, while my newly-wedded wife waited. I remember when I woke up in the night 2-5am, doing support, replying to users. I was fanatic about supporting users well.

I loved what I did. But that love has waned. Why stay when you aren't welcome?

<comment><USER4> You should consider moving it to App.net <https://alpha.app.net/>

<comment><USER2> I'm one of the earlier backers (userid: 886) and paid for the developer tier. Haven't done any work on it yet. Once bitten, twice shy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twitter likely feel that it's easier to monitise users if they're using official clients. The API and the early developers have served their purpose in attracting enough users, now they're more of a hindrance so time to cut them off.

I'm not saying I agree with this policy (I absolutely don't!).

<comment><USER6> I both understand and don't understand.

WHy don't they "just" serve ads using the API as well? And ad a line in the EULA saying something like: "Not showing these ads will mean termination of your Developer Account" or something like that

<comment><USER2> Looking at the product as it is now, offering an API for third party app developers that clones the primary timeline browsing experience is a no-no because Twitter gives up control over how they can craft their product experience. For example, look at their official app's Discover tab. They can't offer something like that and iterate quickly easily across all apps.

Serving ads through the API alone also limits ads delivery. For eg., they might want to display full screen video ads like how iAds does it. Or they even want to do something even more fancy (remember the dick bar? Imagine if there was no third party Twitter apps when they launched it). Without complete control, it's hard.

In a way, they are at stage 2 of their evolution, stage 1 was iterating on their core product, now they need to iterate on their business model.

PS: I'm the developer for SimplyTweet. I'm biased, but I can imagine where they might be coming from, even though I'm not happy about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a shame. SimplyTweet was the only twitter client I've found that lets me digest my twitter feed the way I want to. Now I need to look for an alternative. And presumably repeat the process until all we're left with is the standard client.

<comment><USER8> Business model issues aside, It wouldn't be quite so bad if their standard clients didn't suck so much! So, what are we going to migrate to? Vine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Twitter is succeeding with 3rd-party clients killing. Good job!

<comment><USER10> They are killing the promise of Internet-as-a-platform... and open APIs trust. [http://apijoy.tumblr.com/post/40831434657/twitter-api-and- it...](http://apijoy.tumblr.com/post/40831434657/twitter-api-and-its-3rd- party-ecosystem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another day, another old twitter app shuts down.</comment>


Dyon: A rusty dynamically typed scripting language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/dyon/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> The last time I "wished" for that kind of language (Lifetimes with dynamic types) people said it couldn't be done.

Happy to see otherwise.</comment>


Ask HN: How to setup Node.js build server in the closed network - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm trying to setup Node.js build and deployment system in the company. But we use closed network, thus, we can't access the external resources like npmjs and github.
So we set up nexus server and proxy npmjs by nexus. But lots of node modules using the github for modules repository but nexux can't proxy github.
Our system security managers are a bit of a maverick and they don't want to open network for it. Is there any solution for solve this problem?
Or how are you using Node.js in private network without proxy? <comment><USER2> It sounds like there is a business case for hiring a consultant with domain expertise.

Good luck.</comment>


Asset prices are high across the board - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21730019-ultra-loose-monetary-policy-coming-end-it-best-tread-carefully-asset-prices-are <comment><USER3> Joe Kennedy supposedly said he avoided the stock crash of 1929 by getting out of the market when his shoeshiner started giving him stock tips.

Multiple times recently I've been at restaurants recently overhearing people talk about how much money they're going to make in Bitcoin. It's hard to convey here, but the make-money-who-cares-how-it's-magic came across every time in such a wow-this-is-definitely-a-bubble way.

But as they say, markets can remain irrational longer than you cane remain solvent.

<comment><USER4> As far as the stock market goes, sentiment has not yet reached a peak. There are still a lot of what I call the "wise naysayer" on CNBC and elsewhere, claiming that we are due for a big decline, or even a crash. Until there are no naysayers left, the chances of further climbs is supported by sentiment analysis.

<comment><USER5> I agree stocks are rich/richish by most metrics, but still cheaper than bonds/real estate. And the latter have very strong negative correlation to the level of interest rates.

Plus, private equity is sitting on close to $1T of dry powder. That's a pretty strong back stop to stock prices. In short, to avoid the crash you need to figure out what causes mass PE withdrawal, and get in front of that.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-01/why- priva...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-01/why-private- equity-has-963-billion-in-dry-powder-quicktake-q-a)

<comment><USER6> _" I agree stocks are rich/richish by most metrics, but still cheaper than bonds/real estate. And the latter have very strong negative correlation to the level of interest rates."_

Bond _prices_ go down. Yields go up.

<comment><USER5> Yield spreads are at extremely rich levels. happy now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to note that _dollar adjusted_ the market has actually been going down for months.

[http://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2017/10/04/Photos/NS/MW...](http://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2017/10/04/Photos/NS/MW- FV586_image0_20171004091402_NS.jpg?uuid=e3e92926-a905-11e7-98d3-9c8e992d421e)

<comment><USER8> Can you explain this a little more? I don't quite know what dollar adjusted means.

<comment><USER9> The real value is the nominal value adjusted for the rate of inflation (using an agreed definition of inflation and against some agreed monetary base - <USER2> M0, M1... and other types of monies)

Inflation means the purchasing power of the unit of currency is reduced. iirc it was Keynes who noted that government financing can utilise the margin between real and nominal values, with the benefit of also maintaining animal spirits (bullishness/confidence) as the public sees only price. For economist perspectives: Paul Krugman's blog elaborates on this in a readable way. Mises.org provides one critique. David Harvey another. Dan Amerman provides an CFA/investor perspective ([http://danielamerman.com/va/Dow36.html](http://danielamerman.com/va/Dow36.html))

The graph linked to above could be viewed as a decline in real value of equities - or the value preserving market response to inflationary pressures (with some degree of non-market support)

The combination of inflation and tax rates is important to understanding the interplay between government, markets and the wider economy. Which is the dog and which the tail is a moot point. Not endorsing, and not by any means the last word, but David Graeber provides an alternative starting point before exploring further: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/oct/28/...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/oct/28/david- graeber-what-government-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-debt-video)

<comment><USER10> I also read the Amerman article now. His analysis completely forgets one very important thing: stock dividends, which are also higher during periods of high inflation, and compound if you reinvest them. I didn't run the math, but that would for sure change the results a lot.

[http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend- yield/table](http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield/table)

<comment><USER9> Agree on the oversight. From his CFA perspective (which I'm not in any way), divs are somewhat diminished in the new normal (as your link shows), and minority of companies account for the majority of divs. Of course, fiscal policy also impacts div gains. Double whammy. Creates a great climate for the development of productive assets, rather than resting on protective assets.

<comment><USER10> But the "new normal" includes very low price inflation, while his analysis is based on a period of high inflation and high dividends. With that overlook, his predictions look very shaky to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My projection is that this is resulting from a lot of circular investing. Fund A gives money to company B, who has more money than they can spend so it goes to fund C, and then that goes to company D, etc.

We've learned that you are not supposed to have idle capital. And yet we keep so much of our wealth as money, the only way to deploy it is to send it in a circle. Valuations go up, prices and costs don't.

Unfortunately it's a house of cards. When someone finally cashes out, they'll pull money from the whole system to the tune of the amount it's been amplified by circular investing.

There will be an ugly correction.

<comment><USER12> That end is called raising the interest rate. When the rate hits some magic phase transition number where enough people believe you can invest in safe liquid accounts for more than the return on risky assets then the whole thing collapses.

But then it'll get propped up again afterwards and everybody believes that now.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why you are being downvoted. That's essentially how things work.

That's what FED and interest rates exist to do. Create and pop bubbles.

As the FED raises interest rates, money will start trickling out of "riskier" assets. The quicker the FED raises interest rates, the more quickly money will leave. Then we get a recession and when the FED feels they've sopped up enough money from the economy, then they will lower interest rates to get more money into the system, get more economic activity and re-inflate asset prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think that anyone in markets such as Bitcoin or Ethereum should be getting out now. It's obvious that we're at the peak and the bubble is soon to pop.

<comment><USER15> This has been "obvious" many times over the last 9 years. What's different this time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Recommended reading. _1929_. Galbraith.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/great- crash-1929/oclc/93339017...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/great- crash-1929/oclc/933390176&referer=brief_results)

<comment><USER17> I doubt it would help.

So far I've seen four posts that are spot on, downvoted.

The general sentiment is towards hype and bubble, and it's just another echo chamber reinforcing the spiral.

Not just here, and a lot more pronounced lately.

<comment><USER16> There's a tremendous amount of motivation to keep speculative bubbles running as long as possible. I'm not certain that expresses itself as self-delusion or attempts to manipulate others, though I suspect bits of both.

Oh, and Galbraith covers that in his short, _very_ readable, book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately I cannot access the article... could anyone summarize the content? Thanks

<comment><USER16> [http://archive.is/bNRMM](http://archive.is/bNRMM)

<comment><USER19> Looks like you're shadowbanned Goldenkey

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is almost not a week without an article in the Economist or/and the FT about us reaching the peak of the market. I can't help thinking that it starts to look like 2006 again.

<comment><USER4> But there is also not a week that goes by without an "expert" in the financial media claiming we are due for a crash. Until there are fewer of these "warnings", the market could very well just keep on truckin.

<comment><USER21> People who write these articles I think learned from the last crash that those who "predicted" it became famous ("Did you hear, so and so called it, smack on the nose, they must be a good economist. Let's have them write a book").

So now nobody wants to be left out, and so they predict crashes every week. Eventually when a crash will happen they'll say "see I predicted it, where is my book deal".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "In investing, it is better to sell a year too early, than a day too late".

<comment><USER23> No it isn't! It's better to buy and hold and ride it out. Otherwise you tend to miss the gains on the other side. Decades of research by now has shown that buy-and-hold beats timing the market every time.

<comment><USER24> ...beats _trying_ to time the market...

If you can time the market correctly, that is obviously the optimal strategy.

<comment><USER23> Only barely (see "What if we could perfectly time the market?" in [0] which cites [1]), and it is the height of self-delusion for anyone to think he or she will time it correctly, when professionals fail to do so. Don't try!

[0] [https://www.bogleheads.org/blog/bogleheads-principles- never-...](https://www.bogleheads.org/blog/bogleheads-principles-never-try-to- time-the-market/)

[1] [https://www.schwab.com/resource- center/insights/content/does...](https://www.schwab.com/resource- center/insights/content/does-market-timing-work)

<comment><USER25> From [1]:

> Rather than putting it immediately into the market, he waited and invested > after month-end January 1993—that year's monthly low point for the S&P 500. > At the beginning of 1994, Peter received another $2,000. He waited and > invested the money after March 1994, the monthly low point for the market > for that year. He continued to time his investments perfectly every year > through 2012.

That's hardly "perfectly timing the market" in the usual sense. I'd consider "perfectly timing" to be sell at every peak and buy at every trough, so you're always holding stocks when they're gaining versus the dollar and holding dollars when stocks are losing versus the dollar.

It's impractical, but it's a _much_ better result -- the theoretical limit to how much you could have made with perfect knowledge of all the pricing ahead of time.

That analysis, by contrast, only looks at what happens if you have a _little_ perfect information -- and the answer is "not much".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Translation: wages are comparatively very low.</comment>