Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/?tid=sm_tw <comment><USER2> Previous discussion last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065)

<comment><USER3> This is actually the fifth time this is up for discussion (not counting the two submissions with zero comments):

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20open%20office%20trend%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20open%20office%20trend%20is%20destroying%20the%20workplace&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER4> And that's not including the discussions of open offices not linked to this specific article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been in two open office scenarios at two different companies.

At the first company, it started as sharing a corner with five other people. This was tolerable, but then we shuffled around I had an office shared with one other person. This was fantastic. Then, it went to High Density which was over 10. There were no sales people, but getting interrupted was frequent. Furthermore, there were many pauses in the day because I had to ping people or I was blocked by various things and what-not.

At the second company, it very much so open office, and it has been wonderful. I rarely, if ever, get interrupted. Also, I rarely, if ever, get unblocked. My biggest problem now is not watching the clock and missing the right moment to leave before I make the wife unhappy.

My conclusion is that the open office versus closed office depends a ton on culture more than the actual office. If you have respectful colleagues, then an open office isn't bad. If you reach flow, then an open office isn't bad.

Unfortunately, I don't think many companies can achieve both a respectful environment and have engaging work.

<comment><USER6> An open office isn't ever an issue for me because of being interrupted or blocked. It's simply that an office full of people, with the requisite fashionable foosball/ping pong table, is _loud_ and _distracting_. There's no getting around the fact that if you need to concentrate, you need to be able to do so while listening to music, because you're not going to get a moment of quiet during the work day. Alternatively, you can work late and do your thinking after most people go home. Both of these options are less than optimal, and I find it frustrating at times. Of course, offices with doors are not remotely realistic for a startup in San Francisco, so this is a sacrifice we make.

<comment><USER7> _It 's simply that an office full of people, with the requisite fashionable foosball/ping pong table, is loud and distracting._

Every place I've worked with an open office, the ping pong tables and social spaces have been nowhere near where people work. I'm in an open office right now and unless you are actually coming to talk to one of us there is no reason for anybody else to walk through this part of the office. The sounds I'm currently hearing is the keyboard of the person across from me and the soft murmur of a quite phone conversation a few desks over. If I slip on my headphones all the noise disappears, even without playing any music. If people are loud and distracting in and around the place people are trying to work, then that is a problem orthogonal to any problems of an open office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found I was the most productive when I was in a small office with 2-3 other developers, with a door we could close. Everyone was setup this way, and people ended up decorating each of their rooms and every room had a "theme" (ours was called the lounge). This degree of personalization brought me closer to my co-workers whom I shared the office with, and as a result we worked better together.

In the afternoons, we'd have our "coding sessions" where we could close the door and just sink into whatever project/problem we were working on. The result (without constant distractions of people walking by/around us) was extremely productive.

This was back in Ohio years ago. Since then, I've moved to the bay area where I've unfortunately been forced to work in open offices. I find them depersonalizing and my ADD kicks in with people constantly walking by/around me. I isolate myself with good noise canceling headphones, but I find myself longing for the days when I shared an office with some really cool dudes. Or, maybe I still haven't found a team I like.

Anyway, I find it odd that companies in the bay area, with how innovative everything is out here, think open offices are good and/or work. You pay people 6 figures to use their mind and then make them sit in a room all day with constant distractions. It makes no sense.

<comment><USER9> +1 for copy/pasting your old comment[1] when the same discussion pops up yet again within 30 days. I suppose there's really nothing new to say here.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514904)

<comment><USER8> haha :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been in multiple open office plans in my short career and there is a definite divide between open office. My current office is spacious, lot's of cupboards in between work places and has a ton of meeting rooms (which can't be reserved but are used "ad-hoc").

My previous open office plan was a fully booked, over crowded space with too little meeting rooms. This means that 1. There are more people in the same amount of space and 2. meetings happen at desks because there is no place to go to talk privately.

If you use an open office to create more communication in the office whilst at the same time putting the workers comfort first it is an amazing tool. But it's misused to put more people in smaller spaces.

<comment><USER11> A theme here seems to be that open offices work if and only if there's still concretely defined places for noise and for silence.

If everyone's desk is in the "bullpen",

1\. the bullpen needs to be a quiet place

2\. you need to have social/discussion spaces quarantined from the bullpen so as to not distract everyone all day.

The issues all seem to come from places where the entire workspace is a bullpen, with social, group work, and individual work happening in the same environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think I have ever worked in an office that wasn't either cubicles or open plan .. with one or two small exceptions. I have never really minded the lack of privacy but noise has always been an issue. There's always an office loud-mouth who thinks his or her thoughts should override everybody else's. At this stage a heavy set of headphones are a standard part of my office equipment.

I get that giving an individual office to everybody perhaps isn't feasible, and I also get that a more open plan office can in fact facilitate communication. But there are degrees .. I've had hard and soft-wall cubicles, open plan with dividers, open plan without dividers, facing a wall, facing a colleague but thankfully I have never had to deal with the author's scenario of a shared single long desk though I have seen some of my colleagues endure this, nor hot-desking either.

So in summary, I think an open plan office is fine in principle, and I believe there are some issues with private or shared offices it does address. But it does introduce some distractions and other problems that should be mitigated, and ultimately should never be at the expensive of having a bit of personal space.

<comment><USER13> We have an open plan office with two or three exceptionally loud/annoying developers and yet the boss refuses to allow anyone to wear headphones as it is 'unprofessional'.

He also refuses to allow plants in the office because he doesn't like plants, and loses his shit whenever he hears any talk of unions because unions are 'communism'.

I'm currently looking for other opportunities lol.

<comment><USER12> sounds like a buzz :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Problem is our work as software developper isn't uni-dimensional. We sometimes need brainstorming, fostering ideas, imagination moments, and we sometimes need ultra-focus "flow" moments. I'm working at home, and i sometimes turn on the music, and watch outside for inspiration. I sometime call or meet friends for social interaction, and i sometimes am so focused that i forget everything around me and code for hours straight.

You can't reasonnably assume that 10 people in a room will be in sync all the time.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is, and has been for many years, the norm in the UK. I've been working for over quarter of a century and have had my own pod/room for about 6 months in that time.

It's something you largely get used to, and in some ways is beneficial. Assuming you're working on the same things, it's far easier to pop your head up and discuss a quick question than to wander into someone's cubicle.

If you're randomly hotdesking with strangers though, it's far less good except as a general social thing.

<comment><USER16> > it's far easier to pop your head up and discuss a quick question

Oh man I hated it when people did that. I've been working from home for 5 years now and it's pretty great, except for my hatred of people not being able to use instant messaging properly.

Back when I worked in an office, if I was intent on my work, some idiot would inevitably need me and because I was thinking I wouldn't hear them. So they'd go, "Phil. Phil. Phil! PHIL! PHIIIIILLLLL!!!!" which is when they get my attention. Not realising of course that to me it feels like some wanker has just screamed "PHHIIIIIILLL!!!" in my ear whilst everyone laughs.

My new hatred is how people think instant messaging means ALWAYS getting instant feedback. So you're sat there working on something and realise someone's sent you a message 10 mins ago. It says, "Hi Phil". So I respond, "Hi". Now they've gone to the toilet or something and come back and say, "Hi, so my question is...". Why don't people ever just put, "Hi Phil, my question is..." right at the beginning? That way when I read your message I can answer you and we don't have to guarantee we're both at the keyboard.

And whilst on a rant, I also hate, "shouting across the room". This is where someone sets up a group chat for something, and then ends up using that group chat for the next six months even when they actually just want to speak to one person. Because it happens to be in their "Recent" list on Skype.

<comment><USER15> People asking me a quick question doesn't bother me in the slightest - if I don't want to be disturbed, I put my headphones on. If a 30 second conversation can stop them having to set up a meeting, or allows them to get on with what they were stuck on, then great.

Of course, if someone comes to talk to me when I've got my headphones on, that's a different matter...

As for why don't people start with "Hi Phil, my question is..." \- if you're not available now, I'll go and get the answer from someone else. I don't want to type out a big long question if you're not ready to respond. If I don't need an answer now(ish), I'll probably email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m."

Been there, done that. It was very counter productive, and led to me shifting my office hours gradually so I came in late and stayed late, as well as worked from coffee shops whenever possible (writing a presentation, writing documentation, catching up on emails, pushing odd bits of code to GitHub, etc).

</comment><comment><USER18> The article is a year old. Someone add (2014) to the title

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, didn't notice. Title edited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> You see this Open Office virus thriving all over European startups. All the startups I've visited have this open office layout. The funny thing is that they're proud of it and list it as a feature in their job posts.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been to the open office at Pivotal in SF and it's ridiculously loud. It amazes me paired programmers can consistently focus on work with that much noise.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Destroying the workplace" is a bit of a hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was in an open office at my last company, and loved it. I'm just one data point, but I vastly prefer it to cubicles.

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel with the author. One should think that employers are more interested in work performance.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've never had the luxury of my own office and google wasn't around when I started. I must praise the author for her highly developed sense of entitlement.

<comment><USER25> Looking for an effective environment so you can be more productive and deliver far more value for the work your company pays you to do is evidence of entitlement?

<comment><USER24> I don't know what it's like where you live, but where I live, having your own office is an exceptional privilege. Not something most companies could afford for a free lance copy writer. My boss doesn't have his own office, neither does the customer I work for.

In my experience, at both large and small companies, the only people who have had their own offices were either the CEO or people whose work has them talking on the phone much of the day, so they would be too disruptive to the rest of the team if they were in the same room.

<comment><USER25> Sure, a private office is quite uncommon. But I don't see how you can criticize the author for a "highly developed sense of entitlement" in pointing out the shortcomings of open office plans and then making suggestions for both reducing the drawbacks and to encourage employers to allow more people to work from home.

Honestly, it sounds like sour grapes on your part:

      Driven by distraction, a freelance copywriter asked for
      a private office but was denied one, although he made a
      compelling case for the increased productivity. As he
      went away, the copywriter remarked 'Oh, private offices
      are for people suffering from highly developed senses of
      entitlement! I don't know anybody who has one.'
      People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot
      attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.

[Adapted from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes#The_fab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes#The_fable)]</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Touch Anything - <AUTHOR> https://unintendedconsequenc.es/dont-touch-anything/ <comment><USER2> The message of this article (and the rest of the site) seems to be: Things you do will have unintended consequences; you cannot predict these consequences; they will be bad; therefore you shouldn't do anything.

This is a terrible position to take. The unintended bad consequences described, in this post and in the other posts on the site, are all reasonably predictable to anyone knowledgeable who's making a serious effort. And sometimes projects _don 't_ have unintended bad consequences, or the unintended bad consequences are worth it, or they would be manageable if only someone bothered to predict them.

<comment><USER3> _The message of this article (and the rest of the site) seems to be: Things you do will have unintended consequences; you cannot predict these consequences; they will be bad; therefore you shouldn 't do anything._

I think you might be bringing that interpretation to the site. At least, reading the linked article, I don't find it there explicitly. Maybe you are taking the "Don't Touch Anything" title too literally? The author speaks positively of the attempts to reintroduce beavers to Scotland, and seems cautiously optimistic about the attempts to eradicate the accidentally introduced brown tree snake from Guam.

Looking at some of the other articles on the site, I see a message akin to your correction. For example, instead of saying "don't do anything", this article is about how "bounty" programs should be run differently to make them more effective: [https://unintendedconsequenc.es/the-cobra-effect- redesigned/](https://unintendedconsequenc.es/the-cobra-effect-redesigned/). His recommendations sound about the same as your criticisms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading through the other posts. I'm learning as I go on this project. Funnily enough I had earlier been criticized (especially in the Cobra Effect post) for daring to suggest that improvements could be made at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2018 BC: Don't mess with nature because the gods are capricious and will get offended at your hubris and will punish you.

AD 2018: Same except substitute some other term for "gods".

It is manipulating nature that we learn about nature and uncover new things. Ultimately, if it had not been for farming, we would never had landed a human on the moon. Humans are the first earth species who is not limited to earth. Within our lifetimes we could have humans successfully living on another planet. Let us respect the intricacies of nature, but not get intimidated into inaction and passivity. Our human ability to adapt earth to our needs on a scale far above any other species is a feature not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr: many animal species were introduced to radically different habitats (rabbits and dogs in Australia, pigs in Americas, etc) and changed the balance there drastically and not to the better.

<comment><USER6> > ... and not to the better.

That just depends on the time scale. Everyone is fine with dingoes ("Australia's native dogs") despite them just being dogs that have been wild here for a few thousand years. If pigs had been introduced in 500BC we'd be campaigning to save them instead of trying to eradicate them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid point. The unintended consequences do show differently across time after a new equilibrium is reached.</comment></comment></comment>


Help Adam Carolla fight Patent Trolls - <AUTHOR> http://fundanything.com/en/campaigns/patenttroll

<comment><USER2> It's amusing because Adam Carolla doesn't need funding to do it.

<comment><USER3> If his networth is in fact ~$15m as claimed by [1], I'm not sure that's true.

[1] [http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest- celebrities/richest...](http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest- celebrities/richest-comedians/adam-carolla-net-wort)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat self-promotion gimmick.</comment>


Columnar Store for Analytics with Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw <comment><USER2> Have a look at ClickHouse for OLAP workloads:

[https://clickhouse.yandex/](https://clickhouse.yandex/)

It's a recently open sourced database by Yandex. It powers their web analytics backend. CloudFlare is already using it for their DNS analytics.

<comment><USER3> Do you know if it is an in-memory solution or can it work with data that doesn't fit into RAM?

<comment><USER2> Yes, in fact, it's specifically designed for data that doesn't fit in RAM. Their storage engine optimizes data locality for fast retrieval from non-flash storage.

See: [https://clickhouse.yandex/presentations/data_at_scale/](https://clickhouse.yandex/presentations/data_at_scale/)

Their docs also talk about it a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone achieved a dramatic speedup using this extension? Last time I tried it, I got barely a 30% speedup in a generic aggregation across a few fairly normalised tables with ~10M rows. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if this is all I'm getting. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> I've tried it a couple times but didn't see as dramatic a speedup as I'd hoped either. What has worked for me is storing a full array in a single row of a regular Postgres table. Then if you have to load e.g. 1 million FLOATs, you can just slurp an 8MB chunk off disk instead of looking in 1 million different places. Postgres doesn't have a lot of functions for working on that kind of data though, so I wrote an extension to provide a few at [0]. I will probably add some more functions soon around masking out values so you can work "R/Pandas-style" on these arrays.

My approach breaks down if you are heavily updating your arrays though. On the mailing list Tom Lane suggested I store that kind of data outside the database.[1] But of course all software development is an attempt to have your cake and eat it too, so I wrote an extension that is a bit like cstore_fdw, but maybe more extreme: you can store/load/append a float array as an ordinary file.[2] It has similar operational disadvantages to cstore_fdw (no replication, no pg_dump, etc.) but performs faster. On the other hand it is definitely not battle-tested and still likely to change a little. (I need to improve the crash story and may add compression.) If you decide to use it, let me know!

Oh another limitation of keeping everything in an array (whether with floatfile or not) is that Postgres has a 1 GB limit on most RAM allocations. For example you could try running array_agg on a giant table and you might get a message about `Exception invalid memory alloc request size 1073741824`. I don't think cstore_fdw has that problem.

[0] [https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_arrays/](https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_arrays/)

[1] [http://www.postgresql-archive.org/Performance-appending- to-a...](http://www.postgresql-archive.org/Performance-appending-to-an-array- column-td5984739.html)

[2] [https://github.com/pjungwir/floatfile/](https://github.com/pjungwir/floatfile/)

<comment><USER6> replication support is recently added to cstore_fdw. You can replicate a cstore_fdw table to another server using streaming replication.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Preferred mobile web frontend framework? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to target as many devices as possible, but Android would be at the top of the list (since we'll be building a native iPhone app).
I played around with jQuery mobile last night.  I found the documentation to be a little light in some areas, and I couldn't get some things working like they worked in the demos.  Is it still too early to make anything serious with it because it's in alpha?
Sencha Touch looks solid, but I've read that the Android performance isn't that great (maybe it depends on OS version). Plus, since it's tied closely to WebKit, I'm concerned about its ability to support WP7.  Maybe I won't have worry about that for awhile.
I've also read jQTouch's Android support isn't good either.
Is there a framework that you would recommend? Is it better not to use a mobile frontend framework until something solid and diverse (like jQuery mobile is trying to become) comes along? What's been your experience? <comment><USER2> Have you seen <http://www.phonegap.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have, although I was looking for mobile web frontend frameworks rather than building native mobile apps using web technologies. I'll keep it in mind though.</comment></comment>


Moral obligations of Free Software authors? - <AUTHOR> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1463-moral-obligations-of-free-software-authors

<comment><USER2> I find "That is a wonderful idea. You can either clone the repository and make it yourself or, in the alternative, pay my consulting rate and I'll do it for you." solves 99% of my problems with the OSS entitlement mentality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Free == Freedom to walk away from maintaining the damn thing. If other people can't be bothered to contribute, that's tough. A few dollars in the tip jar hardly counts, given what most coders could charge for their time and expertise.

I've given up writing free software since too many people want a free ride. Even after telling them "I have no interest in helping you fix your Linux installation on the way to making the software work", or "It wasn't designed to run with sqlite, only MySQL, and I have no time to change that", people keep keep keep coming back and demanding more time. "Which part of 'no' did you not understand?"

If an ecosystem doesn't develop around your software, if you have no other maintainers, and if you have a life, you should probably just leave it.

</comment><comment><USER4> No.

E.g. The ludicrous bashing of Gruber for not maintaining Markdown for the purposes of StackOverflow by Atwood.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/responsible-open- so...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/responsible-open-source-code- parenting.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> eh, if the users don't want to maintain it, and they don't want to pay you to maintain it, it won't get maintained. The same is true (only moreso) for commercial software.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting question. Probably falls under the _"teach a man to fish..."_ adage nicely. If you provide a functional tool that has reached the goals you set for it where's the obligation? Exotic features that are outside of your goals simply do not benefit your interests in the project. Someone has to make it worth your time and effort to continue otherwise you've provided a good platform that seems to be well documented and capable of being taken over by another interested party. If that never happens then you're probably right that the project is finished. Maybe find similar active projects to steer your users towards.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd say the most important moral obligation of a free software author is to not waste people's time. The primary way to not waste people's time is to be accurate about claims you make regarding your software.

For instance, if your site says that your software does X, and points to a "Howto do X" document you wrote--and that document is actually for an earlier version of the software and fundamentally won't work with the current version, and it won't be apparent that its fundamentally broken until after I've spend several hours going through the tricky steps of the Howto document--then you have wasted my time.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is pretty simple. Either they pay, or you have no obligation.</comment>


Cognitive Biases - <AUTHOR> http://orangemind.io/post/what-are-cognitive-biases <comment><USER2> This reminds me list of cognitive biases : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

I wonder if somebody succeeded in fixing these. Anybody?</comment>


Two heads are better than one. How about more? (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/two-heads-are-better-than-one-how-about-more/

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of a philosophical question from Tom and Ray Magliozzi:

"Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're talking about?"</comment>


My interruption-resistant workflow - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/LWPpbuH.png

<comment><USER2> I do EXACTLY this. Another thing I do in addition, is when I break (leave a cafe, leave the office, or stop working for the night), I write down a summary of exactly what I was in the middle of doing when i stopped, and what I should do next to finish that work. That makes it easier to pick back up when I sit down the next morning to work on the project.

The task list in the notes.txt file is also something I add to as I go. Sometimes if i'm doing something that requires a keeping track of more than i can remember in my head, I'll have little lists within the .txt that keep track. It's basically a stack data structure so I can keep track, and when i pop stuff off the stack, back up to a higher node, i have to add more to the stack to keep track of my progress deeper into another branch of the tree.</comment>


Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/technology/china-homegrown-internet-companies-rest-of-the-world.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur <comment><USER2> This article also doesn't touch on the simple technical pains of having to work across the Great Firewall and the effects of it their ability to do business outside of China. Even when you have an excellent partner in China (or vice-versa), so much of the back and forth ends up coming down to issues going across the firewall. Your collaboration tools don't work, so you're split across Slack and WeChat. Github is a disaster in China, and of course, the Googs isn't something you can require anyone in China use. Usual day-to- day stuff is neither simple nor reliable when you have to cross that firewall.

And too boot, it's amazing that Chinese companies are still doing a really poor job of figuring out how to connect well to the outside world. They'll turn to you asking why your API/whatever isn't working for their developers, and then expect that you have some miracle solution to get rid of the 200-400ms of latency (each way!) across the firewall, as well as a cure for the hours of it just dropping all traffic. Perhaps the Party has scared them enough they're not willing to chance employees doing illegal things on the company's connection...

The firewall is a fickle, cantankerous beast that, to me, is really at heart of this matter. Because they want throats to choke for every packet on Chinese soil, they've created this huge barrier that touches everything you might want to do in China or with a Chinese company.

<comment><USER3> Is it illegal to use directional antennas in China? If not, do businesses just get a place with a view to Taipei and route all non-chinese IP requests that way?

<comment><USER4> Not sure if you were being serious, but along these lines, I stayed in a Shenzhen hotel late last year that strangely provided unfiltered internet. Of course it wasn't advertised as such, but Google worked (redirected to google.com.hk). Given the hotel was right on the border with Hong Kong, one could only speculate how this worked and which option was easier: always-on VPN or antenna :)

<comment><USER5> My AT&T roaming in China was unfiltered too.

<comment><USER6> I was in Beijing two weeks ago, with 3 phones (AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile). I could not get Gmail on any of them. No Facebook, Twitter, Google search, Google translate, etc. I had to fall back to Yahoo Mail (and WeChat and QQ).

In Shenzhen, there was a moment in the hotel where Google worked for about 10 minutes. I was elated but then disappointed when that brief window of openness ended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience," he said. "If you look at > China, the teenage culture doesn't exist — the teens are super busy in > school studying for tests, so they don't have the time and luxury to play > social media apps."

LIES. WTF. My mother's friend's kids says that every one of his classmates is on WeChat and mobile gaming is HUGE. And look at how websites like Bilibili and Anime related 'Two-Dimension' culture prosper in China.

According to this report: [https://www.gitbook.com/book/fhggogogo/bilibili/details](https://www.gitbook.com/book/fhggogogo/bilibili/details)

10-19 teenagers is the second largest demographic group of Bilibili's users, which is the NicoNico+Crunchyroll+Twitch in China.

<comment><USER8> But who controls the purse strings? I feel like in the United States teenagers have a large say in the purchasing power of their parents. Including not so cheap items like gaming consoles, feature phones, clothing, maybe even cars. You can even include college tuition (potentially the second or third most expensive purchase of a parent's life) in this. Is it the same in China? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER9> Having spent a considerable part of my life in China, I can definitely say this is the case, if not even more so. There is a tendency for parents to spoil their children.

<comment><USER10> yeah, it does seem to be how the poorly educated in china express love towards their children. spoil them like hell. it is weird seeing teenagers from poor rural families with iPhones! several months of a farmer's earnings. but hey, their kid has "face" in front of their classmates, which is all that seems to matter..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That article struck me as strange, it appears to take a really common phenomena (build for a market you understand) and turns it into a "China" thing. Apparently nobody at the times remembers when the "Internet" was practically a US only thing. All written in English, not a lot of support for non-English speakers (even Spanish!), massive assumptions about what time zone you might be in, Etc. And guess what, people in Germany making web sites had to choose to either make German sites for their audience or US centric sites to appeal to the big chunk of Internet users.

China is a market that is large enough by itself to be self supporting, just like the US market. So you can create an Internet business that is "China only" or "US Only" and be successful. And as the size of the markets are comparable your large China only Internet companies can be as large as US only Internet companies.

The interesting bit is that those markets are different enough that approaches in one don't work in the other. Like Google's version of search in China didn't work, nor did Uber's version of ride sharing. We can discuss regulatory hurdles, or society expectations, or technological differences, but at the core of all this they are two very different markets. So you need very different products and organizations to succeed in one or the other. I have yet to see a multi-national/international organization which has the flexibility to achieve that.

One of the most informative experiments so far has been Airbus. It is interesting to look at how it splits itself across countries and works to achieve a common purpose.

<comment><USER12> I think you're understating the amount of protectionism going on here. This isn't just a matter of language barrier and it's not even just a matter of the CCP wanting to maintain control. There's a deliberate effort to kneecap American tech companies in order to help their domestic tech companies develop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really irritating. Not just because of the actual problem, but then because it feeds into the China vs America "conflict" which only exists to serve as an us vs them narrative on both sides of the Pacific. Everybody loses. China is playing this game just like the United States is.

<comment><USER14> > China is playing this game just like the United States is.

Is it? I don't recall the US erecting a massive firewall which keeps foreign competitors from competing here.

Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are all free to try to woo American consumers. So far they haven't seen much success.

<comment><USER15> They erected a firewall because of centuries of Western imperialism and foreign bullying.

As foreigner you might be fine with "free-trade" that allows you to freely sell opium, or take over cities on sovererign land, or to have foreign social networking companies plaster agenda driven poitical propoganda to people in your country (I'm talking about the facebook India snafu) because you have no investment or ties to the Chinese country, but they do have to think about national interest, and not foreign interest.

It's also not exactly a fair playground if foreign multinationals with decades of established dominance, experience, R&D, and human capital from the developed world compete against Chinese companies which most would be upstarts or recent companies, and with human capital from less developed sources. When none of the country has drinkable tap water, their people have a lot of things on their plate. They don't need foreign competition. It'd be like sending a fully armed US marine squad to duke it out with squad of high schoolers and blaming China for being unfair for erecting a wall around the high schoolers while they grow and train.

Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development and it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas. Any time there is a tariff, it's essentially being practiced.

<comment><USER16> >Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development and it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas. Any time there is a tariff, it's essentially being practiced.

What you are putting forward is essentially a rhetorically-colored version of this argument: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument) . It was dubious at best when it was first proposed and it's more dubious still now.

<comment><USER17> How is it dubious exactly? I just wrapped up Hamilton's biography and lengthy parts of it are devoted to Alexander Hamilton practising the "Infant industry argument" on America itself.

> _On March 24, 1791, the U.S. government granted patents for Parkinson 's > flax mill, even though he had admitted that they were "improvements upon the > mill or machinery ... in Great Britain". Clearly, the U.S. government > condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial > espionage._

> _" The extreme embarrasments of the United States during the late war, from > an incapacity of supplying themselves, are still matter of keen > recollection"_

> _His opponents cited abundant land and deficient capital and labor as > reasons that America should remain a rural democracy._

<comment><USER18> So? That's just an appeal to (200 year old) authority.

<comment><USER19> Well, given that economics doesn't amend itself to double-blind experimental verification, what sort of evidence would you even expect to find?

Keep in mind that economists tend to focus on problems that their own societies face -- if protectionism was only really useful to small, underdeveloped economies, you wouldn't really expect mainstream US or European economists to get a lot of funding to look into it, would you?

Note that this is an idea that has been tried under many guises with different names and details:

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prebisch%E2%80%93Singer_hypoth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prebisch%E2%80%93Singer_hypothesis)

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

Maybe the real answer is that whether these efforts are beneficial for their countries depends on the _context_ , and that sweeping generalizations aren't helpful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> All the comments about how restrictive and troublesome the Great Firewall is, yet probably 50% or more of the malicious/unwanted traffic I see coming into my networks (and those of my customers) every day is coming from China.

If you have a web service you want to make available to .cn, perhaps you should try running your web servers on port 25/TCP instead. That seems to be pretty much wide open through the GFW.

</comment><comment><USER21> > In many ways, the split is like 19th century railroads in the United States, > when rails of different sizes hindered a train's ability to go from one > place to another.

Or the railroads in Australia in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else

The sequel to: "Non-Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: China or Everywhere Else."

</comment><comment><USER23> As someone that is on the hunt for a new job, these articles about the market share war between American and Chinese companies puts me in a (kind of) ignorant position because I don't know where to focus my searches. I don't know if looking for a job in a Chinese company (being a foreigner) is better or worse than looking for a job in an American or even European company.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am not sure why these articles are popping up on the internet lately, but as far as I can see WeChat and Alibaba are two very successful companies both in China and outside China.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's just classic sovereignty.

</comment><comment><USER26> Glad to have diversity in the world - we don't have to get teenagers hooked on the same exact social network or the same app, regardless of where they are

<comment><USER27> If they get hooked on one network, it's easier for them to connect, and easier for ideas and memes (in original sense of the word) to flow throughout the world.

If you separate the medium where people communicate, it makes it easier to separate the people from one another and otherfy other groups.

(You would say that language already serves that purpose, but anyone "educated" or "smart" knows or wants to learn English anyway, regardless of where he lives.)

<comment><USER28> To be fair...

there is something to be said for diversity of THOUGHT. And many times, not always, but many times, social networks become more like echo chambers than idea exchange tools. When you have many social networks, well, at least you can visit different echo chambers from time to time. When you have only one, you really have to remind yourself continuously not to fall down the rabbit hole so to speak.

I like looking at Weibo to see what's going on. I like looking at FB. If they were not 2 totally different populations, I think I would not be exposed to many of the things I'm exposed to every morning. This is no different than me checking Le Monde, the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN. It's kind of the same idea.

And having all of those different ideas around me is kind of enlightening in a way.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Drag and Drop Uploading - <AUTHOR> http://hello.corkboard.me/2012/07/10/introducing-drag-and-drop-uploading/

<comment><USER2> Dragging a file is not easier for me than clicking Save in whatever program I'm using to manipulate the file.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This is more like Rapidshare than dropbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like Corkbord but I'm hesitant of any offer of "unlimited storage." How many of us have been burned by those promises from startups that can't scale and end up going under?

Still, with this, I think we finally have a drop.io replacement!

<comment><USER5> Came here to say this. Unlimited is never good. People get really pissed off when it's not really unlimited. And you immediately will have some people trying it and blogging about it.

<comment><USER6> I think specific flavors of unlimited make sense. It sounds like Corkboard can offer unlimited storage but with a cap of 50MB on files. The number of people willing to jump through the hoops required to make that truly unlimited is likely very few.

We do a similar thing at LayerVault. We offer unlimited storage and versioning of design files, but only for design files we support.

<comment><USER5> I would just be worried about them going away because they cannot pay for what they promise. Or because of bad press. I have for instance around 8 TB of log analysis PDFs which are around 20-30 mb per PDF. I know that's a special case but this is then a lot 'cheaper' for me to share with everyone who needs to see that growing amount of files than the way we use now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't help but comment here... on the marketing.

Making the comparison to Dropbox steers people to evaluate the service in comparison to one of the best out there.

I'd instead just explain why corkboard is great on its own merits. Claiming to be "easier than Dropbox" is probably effective at grabbing eyeballs but I'd question if it's the best strategy to acquire actual users.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about add client side encryption for selected files? I'm doing that with dropbox manually now, but I would like to be able to drop files, for instance, on an iron corkboard (part of the screen) which first encrypts and then sends. Obviously you cannot share those (or you can but no-one can read without private key).

<comment><USER8> Client-side encryption? I don't think that solves a real problem. If it's that sensitive, I would not be putting it on Dropbox anyway.

edit: be nicer.

<comment><USER5> Well it does solve a problem for me; I want my sensitive files to be backed up as well. How often do I read stories of people who have EVERYTHING backed up in the cloud but their sensitive files and at first disaster they are screwed, because well, they have everything in the cloud besides the files they ACTUALLY needed for day to day work. And encryption is strong enough to do this.

Where do you put your sensitive files as backup? Harddrive? CD/DVD? USB stick. Problem is that that's not very safe :) I have been backing up on harddrives (applies to cd/dvd/usb as well) since begin 90s and thus I have quite a LOT of harddrives. Time passes and those harddrives get into cupboards, you kind of forget them. When you need them they are often corrupt (esp USB sticks!), but you forget about the older ones after a while (20 years is quite a bit; you'll have kids in that time maybe, move 2-4 times etc). I'm quite sure a bunch of those hds/cds are potentially in the hands of people who could abuse them if they were interested (they are not; my sensitive stuff is not very sensitive). I like the cloud idea more as I don't 'lose' things and stuff is always there on every computer/device. But I just would like simple encryption. For dropbox I have a directory where I put stuff like that ; I have a background software which GPG encrypts everything there before sending to dropbox. It's great. But it still is a bit of a hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mashable story here: <http://mashable.com/2012/07/10/startup-corkboard- dropbox/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a big fan of using CorkboardMe as a collaborative workspace. This makes it that much better.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can I use it to store files that aren't as social? Such as GPG encrypted tar files?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. Our Pro plan also allows you to password protect your boards or make them completely private - so share your information with who you want, how you want.

<comment><USER9> Sounds incredible. Would you really be happy if I, for example, uploaded a 1 GB home directory encrypted backup after I finish work each day? Keeping each backup around indefinitely?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't allow that file size yet. We hope to, but to prevent scaling issues we've limited files to 50Mb - we hope to grow this in the future as demand increases.

If you have a special case and would like to tell me about it, shoot me and email at firstname.lastname@example.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

<comment><USER9> Well if it's unlimited for just a few dollars I could move all of my data storage into it. I could break down my many GB backups into 50MB chunks and just shove them all up on a cork board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me 50mb is way to little for me. In that sense you are no way like dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there a file size limit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Bootz15. Currently yes - and that's the only limit. We've set it at 50mb for now. I'd love to hear how that works for you.

<comment><USER11> The problem is -- people can split zip their files. So file size limits are kind of moot, yes?</comment></comment></comment>


One stop point for all the developers (https://devtoolsfor.me/) - <AUTHOR> I am working on a website to have a curated list of useful tools for the developers. I would be more than happy if you guys have any thoughts and wanted to see any in the above list. Thanks <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)</comment>


Heyzap (YC W09) releases Ads SDK allowing its 4,200 developers to monetize - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/22/mobile-game-network-heyzap-releases-its-ads-sdk-allowing-its-4200-developers-to-monetize-their-apps

<comment><USER2> How does this compare to Chartboost?</comment>


What is Zcash? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitcoinbeginner.com/blog/what-is-zcash/ <comment><USER2> Radiolab did a fantastic episode about the zcash creation:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony/)</comment>


Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kng57/dogecoin-my-joke-cryptocurrency-hit-2-billion-jackson-palmer-opinion <comment><USER2> >"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt."

The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the toxic incentives that can drive them and the ecosystem in which they exist).

The USD is pretty decentralized already. Sure the money supply itself is centralized, but the USD is a functioning currency because all people who accept and deal in dollars accept the fact that the dollar is a currency. We're all decentralized nodes in the Fiat network.

<comment><USER3> (author here) I agree! I was calling out Bitcoin's initial goals in the article but don't 100% align with them myself. Financial institutions came to exist for a reason and I'm really not on board with everyone "being their own bank" as I feel it'd be a step backwards from what we have today.

What I _do_ agree with is the need for more audit-able, accountable systems so the institutions we trust are less susceptible to corruption.

<comment><USER4> What I never understood with the blockchain is the idea that it would change the politics of finance in favour of the little guy.

As far as I can tell, financial institutions are exceedingly well practiced at co-opting new monetary systems, as they have been doing exactly that for a very long time, so I never thought that a new model of ledger was ever going to really faze them.

<comment><USER5> It should be a bonanza for them. Unregulated market. Every trade/contract they want.

<comment><USER6> I don't think anyone wants unregulated markets for everyone, just like no one really wants anarchy. There are criminal, or rebellious elements in every group, but co-beneficial arbitrage is what we've evolved to.

<comment><USER4> Do you mean anomie? I know a few Kropotkin fans who are fairly certain that they want anarchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> DOGE is a pretty good currency to use for moving money between exchanges. That is why its used. If BTC had low/no transaction fees and was fast, people would have less incentive to use DOGE.

Overvalued? Its possible but I think the entire crypto market is actually insanely undervalued. I was talking to my financial advisor the other day and he said pretty much 100% of people now are asking him about crypto and are considering putting money in. This seems like it is just the start.

The figure for the .com crash was around a 7 trillion dollar market cap. Crypto is 0.7 trillion today and its more of an international market then the .com days. Easily cypto could 10x in size over the next year or two.

In the end its super high risk speculation. You can figure the entire market is overvalued but there is no doubt that there is money to be made in several sub-sectors of the crypto market.

<comment><USER8> If you're invested I wish you the best. But here is why I think all cryptocurrency is worthless: It is backed by nothing.

The USD is backed by the courts of the USA, which in turned are backed by people with guns (law enforcement and the military). The YEN is backed by guns. The GPB is backed by guns.

What is BTC backed by? If someone literally steals your BTC, what recourse do you have? There is no court to go to, no one to back it up.

Even the most hard core Libertarians acknowledge the need of a court system and force to back up contract law.

So I will never invest in cryptocurrency because of that. Maybe I'll be wrong and miss out, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Distributed ledger is a good thing, but it isn't a store of value in and of itself.

<comment><USER9> If someone literally steals your BTC, you have the same recourse as if someone stole your golf clubs. The mechanism of law enforcement and the justice system will try to get your BTC or golf clubs back, and this has happened numerous times already. If they take my golf clubs or BTC or USD through fraud then the rules are slightly different, but all of them will be treated the same way by the justice system.

Now it is backed in the sense that if I say that I will not accept USD in payment of a debt, then I am pretty much out of luck. If someone borrows my car and destroys it, and they offer to make restitution in fair value in USD, I cannot say no to that (except to complain about how fair the value is), or demand that they give me a new car in exchange if they are not willing.

There are more subtle differences; if someone takes my USD then they can return the same number of USD, any old bills will do; whereas for golf clubs or BTC the situation may or may not be different.

All of this is just the justice system, though. I fail to see how the military figures into it, except that if another country decides to start printing dollar bills, then our military will get involved, and the cost of maintaining that threat is part of the cost of maintaining the currency. Fortunately, that's a moot issue with cryptocurrency, which has much better anti-forgery systems that do not require the use of guns.

The whole notion of any currency being "backed" by anything dried up a long time ago -- the closest we have now is casino chips, which are backed by the relevant currency and the faith and credit of casinos.

<comment><USER8> > All of this is just the justice system, though.

Only if you're in the USA. USD is subject to the US legal system regardless of where the transaction takes place.

<comment><USER9> If someone steals my wallet and the USD inside in Germany, the FBI isn't going to be knocking on anyone's door. I'm not sure what your point is here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_brain_dump_incoming/) , from one of the current Dogecoin devs:

> I feel some are using our rise to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency > pricing ([http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has- > ma...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-ma..). for > example). To me, in an environment where a cryptoasset with $30 USD > equivalent transaction fees has a market cap of over a quarter of trillion > dollars, I don't think we're the absurd one. Yes we take ourselves less > seriously, but that doesn't mean we're not serious behind the scenes. We're > a 4 year old currency with transaction fees barely over a cent and > significantly higher throughput than most other cryptocurrencies.

(Disclaimer: I know him personally.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Key take-away:

> Once the cryptocurrency price bubble pops and takes all the hype with it, > will the community be able to recover the energy it needs to build real, > innovative technology once again?

<comment><USER12> Yeah because most people are putting fun money into the alt-coins.

As long as people bought bitcoin and ethereum, they probably will end up positive.

The people that are riding on 3 month old coins like IOTA or TRON will lose. Those risking everything on the future of Ripple or BCH or 1-2 specific coins will lose.

Those that diversify impartially will come out major winners.

<comment><USER13> > As long as people bought bitcoin and ethereum, they probably will end up > positive.

This isn't possible - the bitcoin market is literally a zero-sum game. One person's gain can only come from another's loss.

<comment><USER14> Pretend alice bought bitcoin for $10. Alice sells to bob when it reaches $1,000. The price is currently $13,500. Alice gained $990. Who lost $990?

<comment><USER13> Bob is out $1000 until he finds a "greater fool".

The zero-sum aspect occurs if at some point all participants cash out.

<comment><USER15> This argument is also true of any equity that doesn't pay out dividends.

Most people wouldn't consider the stock market to be a zero-sum game. Maybe in the ultimate long-term, but not within a time frame that's meaningful for anyone.

<comment><USER16> No, it isn't. Dividends are only one way for stocks to return value. There are also buybacks and mergers.

<comment><USER15> Er, buybacks and mergers both involve a "greater fool" (either the company itself or the acquiring company).

<comment><USER17> Isn't it obvious that buying shares in a public company gives you proxy, fractional ownership of a business that's generating cashflow? You don't get that with crypto. Crypto, on the other hand, literally requires someone else to take you out in order for you to profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dogecoin is kinda like a control/placebo for real cryptocoins. And the fact that it exploded without providing real distinct utility apart from existing coins is an indication that something is indeed wrong.

<comment><USER19> Originally it was pretty much just a fork of Litecoin, but since then Dogecoin has considered the economic viability of it as a real currency. It's one of the few inflationary cryptocurrencies, it has a block every minute which is good for confirmation times, the transaction fees are very low, AuxPoW has given it a huge network of miners keeping the network alive, and the core devs have kept the stability of the network above all else which includes not adding every new feature that all the other altcoins love.

<comment><USER20> > which includes not adding every new feature that all the other altcoins > love.

Or indeed making any changes at all! The github repo hasn't been touched in over 2 years

<comment><USER19> Here's a reply I posted elsewhere in the thread about this:

Although there hasn't been a release in two years they're currently working on releasing 1.14 this year. In case you're interested the core devs have been doing a pretty good job on keeping people informed on the status of the release on the subreddit. Latest post here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_brain_dump_incoming/)

Also, there has been lots of updates to the github repo, just look at the 1.14-dev branch instead of master.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At this point, if you put Dogecoin and Bitcoin next to each other, Bitcoin looks like the joke. It's slow, the fees are too high, and its developers won't address these problems.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like you're looking at the wrong metrics. Dogecoin had 0 commits to its main repository in 2017. Compare that to 3,277 commits to Bitcoin Core alone. Bitcoin has scaling issues that developers are addressing with second layer networks because tons of people are using Bitcoin. Dogecoin doesn't because it has so few users that the demand for block space is well below the available supply.

<comment><USER23> The story those numbers tell me is that Dogecoin is already working well enough that it didn't need updating. Whereas Bitcoin developers are scrabbling hard to fix the sinking ship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Crypto allows people to do 2 very important and useful things:

1) Move money around government currency controls (for a small fee)

2) Invest and speculate on potentially valuable assets. Sure you can't live in, eat, or drive a Bitcoin, but finance/trading is all about creating and betting on abstractions, and virtual currencies are the ultimate abstraction. Crypto is especially attractive given the current easy money low volatility environment)

I am similar to the author in that I was very excited about blockchain and its implications in 2013/2014 and had recently become very disillusioned with how adoption played out in the real world.

I think it's time to move past this disillusionment and face reality instead of continuously being angry at how nonsensical a lot of this is, no matter how "useful" we really think these 2 current uses of cryptocurrency are.

The reality is that we are living in a world (in the US at least) we trust traditional institutions/knowledge to be able to provide common goods and help us raise our standard of living less and less. What do we want to do about that? Getting mad/worried about cryptocurrency speculation is not the answer.

<comment><USER25> wonder where we are in the hype cycle:

[https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hy...](https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype- cycle.jsp)

<comment><USER26> I think we're on the 5th or 6th one with two more to go in the next ten to twenty years as crypto chews through networks of people at different distances from expertise in bitcoin.

Also follow along with the classic stock bubble: [https://blogs- images.forbes.com/jessecolombo/files/2014/02/s...](https://blogs- images.forbes.com/jessecolombo/files/2014/02/stages_bubble.png)

These curves remind me of the dopamine response curve to tasks like in a rat running a maze:

[https://neurofantastic.com/brain/2017/1/12/dopamine- crescend...](https://neurofantastic.com/brain/2017/1/12/dopamine-crescendo- marks-the-path-to-reward)

But maybe that's pareidolia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> « _Once the cryptocurrency price bubble pops and takes all the hype with it, will the community be able to recover the energy it needs to build real, innovative technology once again?_ »

Of course it will recover. Blockchain technologies are so transformational that you need a _lot more_ than a simple price crash to kill cryptocurrencies. Of all persons, the creator of a cryptocurrency (even a joke one) should understand this. In fact, people always seem to forget that Bitcoin (actually the crypto market at large) has already experienced 4-5 major crashes in the last 8 years where prices lost between 50% or 95%(!), sometimes remaining depressed for months, but the market has always recovered.

<comment><USER28> > Of course it will recover. Blockchain technologies are so transformational > that you need a lot more than a simple price crash to kill cryptocurrencies.

 _Are_ they transformation? I have yet to see a blockchain application that's not done more cheaply with a traditional database. Most of the practical uses of blockchain are as effectively centralized "distributed" databases (e.g. corporate blockchains), while the rest are cryptocurrencies and other distributed ledgers that are, at the moment, extremely volatile.

<comment><USER27> A blockchain-based cryptocurrency has 3 central qualities: decentralized, permissionless, irreversible transfers. That's what makes it transformational. No other currency or system can provide these 3 properties (except physically exchanging a commodity, eg. exchanging gold in the real world.)

You claim most cryptocurrencies are "effectively centralized", but that is false. For example if I make a Bitcoin transfer by broadcasting it to the P2P network (ie. assuming it reaches most miners), no single entity can block the transaction, thanks do decentralization (ie. many disparate miners around the world attempting to include the txn in their block.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Anyone remember when Dogecoin raised money for the Jamaican bobslead team.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/20/jamaican-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/20/jamaican- bobsled-team-raises-dogecoin-winter-olympics)

</comment><comment><USER30> Just wait for Wall Street to start building complex derivative products that will be used as a vehicle for these cryptocurrencies and all of a sudden the bubble will reach epic proportions.

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=000al7ru3ms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=000al7ru3ms)

</comment><comment><USER32> The founder who was given the title as "inventor" in this article is not the inventor. He did not mention the developer who help do the C++ source code and actually invent Dogecoin. I would call my cryptocurrency a joke too probably if I saw the price rise exponentially and didn't put the work to make it a viable blockchain. It is easy to criticize from an armchair.

<comment><USER33> It was a fork of Litecoin (I think?), so yea, someone had to fork it, rebrand everything and publish all the apps. (All the bitcoin derivatives from like 2012-2014 looked exactly the same .. same Android/QT apps .. minor differences and rebranding here and there. The big differences were usually the crypto algorithms and hashing variations...)

But really, your comment goes to something more fundamental in how we look at inventors and Captains of a ship.

Zuckerburge early code leaks of Facebook show it was some pretty terrible PHP, yet we attribute everything to him instead of the hundreds of engineers that made things like Hiphop, Hack, React, etc. etc. Bill Gates was not a good developer. A lot of his early success projects were license purchases and rebrands and not trying to get fucked by IBM. Don't even get me started on the cult of Steve Jobs.

People like to see a Captain of a ship. People like Karl Marx saw those workers rowing the ores. Even people with the nicer more high paying jobs like navigators, sill made a fraction compared to the captain, but it was enough they felt better than the stack below them.

Orwell agreed, but contested that even if the crew men revolt and take control to give everyone a better and more equal share, eventually over time, some people will convince everyone on the boat they should be at the top, and enough people would follow and you'd be back to where you were.

But yes, we always need to have an "Inventor" .. a Tesla or Musk or Ford; the leader of a ship, ignoring the thousands of people that made it happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The problem is the use of market cap as a valuation metric. It is absurd to think that your joke cryptocurrency is actually worth $2B just because _one person_ was willing to trade at a price that implies $2B.

To show the absurdity, consider the people who buy used cooking oil from restaurants to turn into biodiesel for their modified 1975 mercedes 300D. They might pay $2/gallon for that used cooking oil. Would it be reasonable to assume that the market size of used cooking oil is now $2 * (Gallons of used cooking oil produced yearly)? No, that's absurd. Someone paid a high price for it, that doesn't mean everybody did or will.

<comment><USER35> > _The problem is the use of market cap as a valuation metric_

The currency analog to market cap is money supply [1]. It's a specialized term with less general utility than market cap for equities.

Market cap is a useful statistic because when it comes to shares, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. If you buy every share of Apple stock outstanding, you own a business throwing off $60 billion a year [2]. If you buy every Bitcoin in existence, you have nothing of value.

That said, the quoting of crypto market caps is a symptom. Nobody knows what these things are useful for. Dimensionalising the price is better than simply quoting a number. But you can't measure what you haven't defined.

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

[2] [https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL&fstype=ii...](https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL&fstype=ii&ei=_upYWsmgF5bCe-33j8AO)

<comment><USER34> No, money supply is a pure count. Money supply is not quoted in terms of trade, it exists purely outside of market behavior.

Market cap requires a _trade market_ in order for it to be calculated. It is _money supply x last trade price_. That's why you quote a cryptocurrency's market cap in some other currency, whereas a market cap is quoted in terms of itself.

<comment><USER35> > _Money supply is not quoted in terms of trade, it exists purely outside of > market behavior_

FX traders absolutely look at money supply, amongst other things, re-priced into hard currency when considering _e.g._ foreign-currency debt burdens; local rates, inflation and borrowing conditions; and the monetary policy relative to the internal and export-oriented economy. It's a specialist metric, though.

<comment><USER34> The money supply isn't the currency's value. Of course it is a factor in what traders are willing to pay to acquire it...but weather can be as well. Do you conflate the trade balance with the value of a currency too?

Market cap is money supply * last trade price. It _mathematically_ can't be analog to money supply, any more than density can be analog to mass.

<comment><USER35> As in take the outstanding money supply and convert it, at prevailing rates, to U.S. dollars and look at that statistic over time. It's a crappy metric, but it is useful in limited situations, _e.g._ when pricing rate or FX swaps.

Both market cap and money supply are metrics that sum across the set. In America we can just count dollars, because our unit of account is our currency. For countries with FX sensitivities, however, that sum is less meaningful in domestic currency than as a hard currency value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "The guy who ruined DogeCoin" is also an interesting read[1]. Things didn't turn out so well for him[2]

1\. [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78xqxb/the-guy- wh...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78xqxb/the-guy-who-ruined- dogecoin)

2\. [https://news.bitcoin.com/ryan-kennedy- rapist/](https://news.bitcoin.com/ryan-kennedy-rapist/)

</comment><comment><USER37> > "In many ways, 2017 marked the year that cryptocurrency stopped being about > technologically innovative peer-to-peer cash and instead essentially became > a new, unregulated penny stock market."

I don't think it stopped being about tech innovation - there is a ton of stuff happening around proof-of-stake, layer 2 networks, state channels etc. It's just that the stories around the speculative aspects of the cryptocurrency assets have been dominating in 2017.

</comment><comment><USER38> A copy/paste from /u/palmerstoned on reddit on 2018 Jan 7. What do you guys think?

/u/palmerstoned: There is no fucking limit on how high this can go (compared to traditional stocks where there actually is a limit due to economic indicators like P/E ratio's). When someone says it's overvalued or undervalued, they are automatically wrong because we have not found any method yet to actually value crypto's, unless you compare the value between crypto's. _The nominal value of derivatives in the world is estimated at 1.2 quadrillion_ (probably a gross overstatement and a bad comparison but a man can dream). Let that sink in for a moment.

/u/palmerstoned: We are still far away from large investment bank ETF's where they actually buy Bitcoins or Ethereum. But it will come, they will never let all this money lying around. The problem right now is that exchanges aren't safe enough yet to be buying Bitcoins by the millions. UI interfaces for wallets are way tooo complex for the average Wall Street trading desk. But this will change, eventually. (definitely keep an eye out for investment opportunities in this niche market). Goldman Sachs has already announced they will put up a trading desk by the summer. Things are about to get a lot more crazy!

<comment><USER39> love it. wonder why it's so contrary

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Jackson just mad because he sold instead of hodl

</comment><comment><USER39> by my reading, Author thinks we're all better off when we're protected from our irrationality by regulatory entities keeping us from doing stupid shit with our money.

i think the run on DOGE is about how much easier it is to move DOGE between exchanges. i could care less about pump&dumps... that type of behavior will naturally stop if we leave ourselves to discover the risks.

if we use a regulatory mechanism to prevent folks from engaging in that type of behavior, we may very well prevent speculation, but we won't teach anybody anything.

i think it's smarter, on the whole, to let the crazy crypto churn continue, and see where it takes us, than it is to disenfranchise all kinds of folks from learning about markets/currency/etc... by regulating them away from it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Pretty happy with the DOGE bubble since I've traded out a couple thousand already for other coins... _thumbs up_ But, yeah, I'd wager that eventually the bubble will burst and there will be few remaining cryptocurrencies that hold their value, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think that this article has too many anecdotal references to scams and profiteers but there isn't any sense of the statistics or scale. Without knowing if people are behaving worse on average in the crypto world or the fiat world, I don't find them very helpful.

My anecdotal experience has been really wonderful in crypto. I've become part of a really nice online community where people are eager to share ideas and help each other out. I've also found the crypto market to be far more approachable than traditional investments for myself. But who knows, maybe I just have been lucky?

</comment><comment><USER43> Wasn't Dodgecoin created to be an indicator of how much of a bubble the market is?

</comment><comment><USER44> Where do you sell your dogies?

<comment><USER25> [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/#markets)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It may have been meant as a joke but it has a purpose. but it's become a base market in several exchanges.

<comment><USER12> Uh?

What exchanges?

I've never seen a DOGE to anything.

Right now, BTC is the most popular. ETH is second most popular. I know some exchanges support monero, but those are very limited in what can be converted.

<comment><USER25> [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/#markets)</comment></comment></comment>


New CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon EBS Volumes - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/06/new-cloudwatch-metrics-for-amazon-ebs-volumes.html

<comment><USER2> Tracking EBS performance problems can be a hassle, but the new AWS console tools should make it easier to notice performance problems. Nice!</comment>


Movim: A social network on XMPP - <AUTHOR> https://movim.eu/en/how <comment><USER2> The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and less often used.

Just make it work and then get influencers to use and talk about it. That's how you win with a social network. Or if you care about reasonable income without winning big scale then go the Hipchat way and integerate well with some special usecase (like they integrate with all the other Atlassian products and development tools).

<comment><USER3> Is XMPP "less and less often used"? I just started using it seriously relatively recently. It's quite nice and there are multiple excellent open server implementations, and I've been thinking on ways to integrate it into some of my own projects. I don't really follow trends in this area, so I don't know what people are doing with it...I do know that Facebook and Google have abandoned XMPP, but that's to be expected. They want to own their users, and they have enough power to do so, regardless of the ethics of the question.

<comment><USER2> It's a technology that you need to be rather firm in to use it. There are many tools, but often they are a little "hacky" to non programmers. That's why it gets more and more replaced by the FB chats, Whatsapps, Skypes, and Snapchats of this world. The same goes for email. Email will die a slow death. Maybe even your children can still build a career out of email know-how. But it's more and more replaced by other technologies. Just look at China were people all didn't know the internet in its youth. The first contact to internet most of the Mainland Chinese had was with mobile solutions like QQ (their ICQ copycat). For them email is like a harder way to do the same thing that you could do just as well with Wechat/QQ. So even the most serious of corps in China have Wechat/QQ support and phone, but they might not even have an email support. This will come to us, too. Just slower because people know email already.

<comment><USER4> The crazy thing is that FB and Google used XMPP (Google still may, but had disabled their servers from accepting outside traffic) earlier.

I used to have Pidgin running hooked up to Facebook so i could say a bit in touch with family.

But with the economic downturn everyone has gone back to building silos, in an attempt at maintaining profits/growth...

<comment><USER5> I don't think it was the downturn that did it. Companies look at successful companies for hints on how to succeed. What has been the most successful company on the planet for more than a decade? Apple.

Apple are not shy about "owning" their platform, and they aggressively leverage their walled gardens. The market did not punish them; in fact, users raved about their "refined" experience. Other companies took note and ran with it.

<comment><USER2> That Apple thing might have been a reason. Another one might have been that if you don't follow a standard it's easier to debug your code and add the features management craves so much. I've seen that at work projects before where the developers pretty much enforced removing standard interfaces to get more freedom to resolve their tasks. It's a pity when not even developers see the advantages of interoperability of their services, but it happens just as often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame.

It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.

I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings.

EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it right, ever?

EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to, really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).

The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know your audience!).

Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all likelihood).

EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread. And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.

And the end of this.

I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work, short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)

Too bad.

EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put enough effort into community engagement".

EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation about this, I'm email@example.com.

<comment><USER7> The AGPL is a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER6> I did not call it a bug, and I'm not disagreeing with its use. I made an observation about it.

Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?

<comment><USER7> Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft- over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and think the AGPL is great and fits a very important legal use-case.

<comment><USER6> What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators?

I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free version.

<comment><USER7> >Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions

That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.

<comment><USER8> I agree. While I'm _not_ very pro copy-left in general, I think for a social network it makes more sense. If there are concerns about privacy, and the solution is open source, then why leave the door open to a proprietary version that would completely defeat the purpose of this software? It's especially ridiculous to refer to enforcing the AGPL as "legally bludgeoning" someone, since the proprietary code derived from this would presumably like to "legally bludgeon" anyone who distributed or modified their source code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Instead of the AGPL (which forces users of the code to share their modifications, like the GPL), I'd rather see a license that requires you to offer federation (but doesn't put any other restrictions on you).

With federation I mean that any other service which uses parts of this code should have to offer interoperability with this service. Like email, you can have your account on one server and still write to your friends on a different one.

I wouldn't put other restrictions on the code. I don't care much about having the code copyleft, because the thing that is hard and we need to protect here is not the code, but the social network.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a bunch of social networks (can be closed source as far as I'm concerned) competing to be the best "host" (most features, best UX, free/premium, ...), but all able to talk to each other?

<comment><USER10> Hi, thanks for your feedback, I've created an issue on Github regarding the AGPL licence [https://github.com/edhelas/movim/issues/43](https://github.com/edhelas/movim/issues/43) :)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for reading and considering me feedback :-), much appreciated.

And don't get me wrong, generally, I'm pro (A)GPL and copyleft. But for a social network kind of project one might have to think about tradeoffs to get the neccessary adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So if I understand correctly this network is distributed but not anonymous like for example Twister is. So I can see my feed in atom/rss and chat with all my contacts. This means it should be compatible with something like thunderbird or newsbeuter/mcabber. Almost exactly what we need! I cannot save my locality it seems. my movim id: email@example.com my movim feed: [https://email@example.com](https://email@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> Somebody needs to figure out a way to get this, or Diaspora, or something, going. Setting up servers for the Ivy League schools, and pre-populating them with the student directories, would be a good start. Worked for Facebook.

The problem with scaling any social network is "asshole amplification", or how to design it so a few people can't ruin it for everybody. That's hard to do in a distributed system, especially if you're promoting anonymity. (Yes, IRC channel kick bots sort of worked.) I don't see how Movim addresses that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like a great app to port to Sanstorm.io!

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems like the selling point here is supposed tight and seamless integration with a bunch of things that "millions of people" use for the last "several years".

But once you register and login (tough, because it doesn't tell you on registration what your "email address" is - it's the user you entered + '@movim.eu') .. now what? Where is that? How do I use the network without being on movim.eu?

It seems totally unclear how to do anything promised. Maybe it's in the Wiki, but, really..?

</comment><comment><USER15> Trying it out, -is there any hn groups there?

I am email@example.com I think.

<comment><USER6> I added you, I'm firstname.lastname@example.com. Let's see what happens, I guess?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres), not PostGreSQL.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is fantastic. Signed up.</comment>


40% of 'Monument Valley' Installs Were Paid for on iOS, 5% on Android - <AUTHOR> http://toucharcade.com/2015/01/06/40-of-monument-valley-installs-were-paid-for-on-ios-5-on-android/

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Either way, this is just another fine example of why the App Store is > continually moving towards free to play. Mobile gamers have consistently > proven, in shockingly large numbers, that they just won 't pay for things- > Regardless of how low the price is or how universally critically acclaimed > something is. With statistics like these, the typical anger towards > developers when free to play stuff is announced seems incredibly misguided. > All they're doing is reacting to a market that is saying loud and clear, "We > will not pay."_

This is why I submitted this story. We've had several discussions about "free- to-play" and IAP on HN, and there's no doubt it _can_ be rather suspect.

But games - especially those with ongoing server costs like ours - can't suffer piracy very easily (and still deal with massive amounts of it).

I know there are gamers that would pay all day long for quality games, but it just seems like "Mobile gamers have consistently proven, in shockingly large numbers, that they just won't pay for things" is the most well-summed-up statement about the race-to-the-bottom app store mentality from users on mobile.

<comment><USER2> > I know there are gamers that would pay all day long for quality games, but > it just seems like "Mobile gamers have consistently proven, in shockingly > large numbers, that they just won't pay for things" is the most well-summed- > up statement about the race-to-the-bottom app store mentality from users on > mobile.

If mobile gamers won't pay for things, F2P games wouldn't put so much effort in developing opportunities for IAP. What it seems to me that the behavior of developers shows is that they believe that users of mobile games won't _pay for mobile games that are unproven to them_ , but that once they get into a game, there is a substantial audience that _will_ pay for more of the experience. Otherwise, we'd just see ad-ware without effort going into supporting IAP opportunities.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would agree, but the piracy numbers don't support it. That said I would have thought that by now Apple and Google would have had some sort of shareware/trial support - and they just don't.

<comment><USER3> Can't you just have a limited part of the game for free and the rest as IAP ? Some mobile games like Reaper ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.rea...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.reaper&hl=fr_FR)) implement payment that way and it seems like a very good compromise to me. The only missing part is that Google Play does have a badge for this kind of game, only the classic IAP one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Happens If China Makes First Contact? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-atlantic/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact-472699c055c6 <comment><USER2> Why the fuck do people use medium.</comment>


How a Kalman filter works, in pictures (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-a-kalman-filter-works-in-pictures/ <comment><USER2> Kalman filters are wonderful things and great for keeping track of where other things are in relation to yourself. But for localizing my robot I'd generally use a Particle Filter[1] instead to allow me to represent multiple hypothesis about where I am. For example if I see a doorway I know I'm going to be by one of the doorways on the corridor but I won't be able to tell which one without further observation. But if there's a source of absolute but imprecise location, like GPS, then a Kalman filter is a good choice again.

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

<comment><USER3> Couldn't you fuse this extra fact into a kalman filter?

<comment><USER2> If you mean your GPS readings then yes you can and should. If you mean having multiple predictions of where you are then no, you would have to either run multiple Kalman filters explicitly or change things so much that it's no longer a Kalman filter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is my favourite explanation of how a Kalman filter works

[http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/Ka...](http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/KalmanFilter/blob/master/KalmanFilter.html)

<comment><USER5> Agree. I like how it starts "if you had 2 sensors, here is how you could combine the measurements". Then goes on to say what if you only had 1 sensor, but you know the system evolves in a linear way, you can use that to make a prediction and treat it as the input from a second sensor.

That finally made me understand it better, and it's much shorter than most explanations without losing necessary details.

Also even though I took both ML and probability and statistics courses saying "it's just Bayesian inference to update the posterior" makes it more confusing for me.

<comment><USER6> > "it's just Bayesian inference to update the posterior" makes it more > confusing for me.

I do not know the jargon, but perhaps that is because this sentence does not give you any context for what "the posterior" is referring to?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also check out Sebastian Thrun's videos from the "AI for robotics" Udacity course (2012). He explains with similar examples:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXJ5jrvDuEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXJ5jrvDuEk)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTL5-0DDqE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTL5-0DDqE4)

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUnTg5v4tDU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUnTg5v4tDU)

</comment><comment><USER8> Needs a (2015), plus, recent discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13449229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13449229) (213 points, Jan 21 2017, 32 comments)

</comment><comment><USER9> It looks very similar to Bayesian estimation. I wonder what is really the difference. Does any of you know, or have a link that explains it?

<comment><USER10> Yes it is a special case of Bayesian inference under the assumptions that the system is linear and that the priors and likelihoods are Gaussian.

<comment><USER10> I should have added that there's a very good reason for making these assumptions: they let you represent the system with extremely little data! In general for a system with a continuous state space (like position) then to represent a general Bayesian prior you need to store one data point for each of the infinitely many possible states. Obviously this is impossible so you might instead discretize the space into a grid and store the probability that it is at each that point in the grid. (Think of an image where each pixel's brightness tells you how likely you are to be there - you can store any shape of probability distributions this way but it's of limited resolution). Same for the likelihood and posterior distribution - this uses a ton of memory and is slow and limits your resolution.

Instead, if you assume that the priors are Gaussian, then you can store that information as just two numbers: the mean and the variance (or a matrix of numbers for higher dimensional state spaces). And Guassian's have the remarkable property that if you start with Gaussians and perform a Bayesian update, then you end up with a Gaussian that can also be represented with this same amount of data. Assuming that the system is linear means that you can also represent it's update from one time to the next as a matrix. Moreover, both of these approximations are pretty good for a large class of real-world problems.

There are other sophisticated ways to get around the downsides of the general approach. Namely, there's particle filters which discretize your distributions by a sample of points, but unlike the grid discretization above, the points aren't at specific fixed locations. They're allowed to move around and are constantly being resampled from the distribution you have. This allows lots of the points to get very close together and accurately represent the most interesting (most likely) parts of the state space without wasting tons of memory on extremely unlikely points in the state space. It's very clever and fun to watch in practice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://github.com/dougszumski/KalmanFilter](https://github.com/dougszumski/KalmanFilter)

^ A very simple Python implementation of a Kalman Filter with Matplotlib for visualisation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a C++/Eigen example implementation of something very similar: [https://github.com/google/detectorgraph/blob/master/examples...](https://github.com/google/detectorgraph/blob/master/examples/robotlocalization.cpp)

With autogenerated block diagram and description here: [https://google.github.io/detectorgraph/docs/html/robotlocali...](https://google.github.io/detectorgraph/docs/html/robotlocalization_8cpp.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hm, this is useful to know...there are a lot of conference posters and publications about using Kalman filters to interpret neural signals, particularly from Utah microarrays for the Gee-whiz brain-machine interfaces out of the BrainGate consortium. Not having an a background in EE, I was always fuzzy as to how it worked.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice pics for exam studies.

But in industry Worse Is Better and Kalman Filters is ofent just the optimal way to remove noise you yourself added in your simulation.

I've never seen any implementation use of Kalman filters where the covariance matrix is actually sound ... and I usually go with just lowpassfilters or moving averages.

<comment><USER15> It's industry standard in aerospace, granted one usually uses the EKF with nonlinear dynamics so the covariance matrix is not estimated perfectly. That setup is also flexible enough to let you introduce of band measurements from the past but with the correct timestamp and correct.

<comment><USER16> It's kind of interesting that how particular fields chose to embrace certain particular methods; till I have worked with aerospace domain,I never had heard of the Kalman filter, whereas some of the newer and even more fundamental methods like wavelets and compressed sensing appear to have such low traction in Aerospace till now.

<comment><USER17> You probably know it by some other name. It is so classical its unlikely that one hasn't run into it in some form or the other. If you assume a hidden Markov model with Gaussian state transition and Gaussian output and work out the recursive update equation KF is what you will get. It might not have been call a Kalman filter. May be Weiner filter will ring a bell, under certain assumptions they become the same thing. If not Weiner filter, recursive least squares would surely ring a bell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Previously: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bzarg.com%20kalman&sort=byPopu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bzarg.com%20kalman&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER19> Still waiting for the EKF blog post</comment>


Tesla: No algorithm prevents sudden acceleration into fixed objects - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/tesla-says-there-is-no-legal-duty-to-design-a-failsafe-car/ <comment><USER2> This is why we can't have nice things.

Should Tesla add such an algorithm: yes (if it doesn't comprise safety in other ways)

Should they be held liable for not having done so, yet: no</comment>


World Cup vs. Jihad  - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/06/25/the-war-nerd-world-cup-vs-jihad/ <comment><USER2> aren't they two topics very different in nature?</comment>


Google to Sell Wireless Service in Deals with Sprint, T-Mobile - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCEQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fgoogle-to-sell-wireless-service-in-deals-with-sprint-t-mobile-1421887967&ei=1HnAVNz3Coy3yATOiIG4Ag&usg=AFQjCNGGyDWxTJZbQGmLVCosR9ca1hDYqA&bvm=bv.83829542,d.aWw

<comment><USER2> It would be very disruptive if Google offered a plan that could dynamically roam between Wifi, Sprint and T-Mobile.</comment>