Rental home shortage is America's next housing crisis - <AUTHOR> http://soberlook.com/2014/06/rental-housing-shortage-is-americas.html <comment><USER2> No, it's not. The shadow inventory (and home vacancy rate) in the US is still massive due to overbuilding during the housing bubble. House prices and sales are dropping for 80% of the market, and banks are releasing inventory in dribs and drabs in order to keep prices from collapsing completely.

I have no idea which of these graphs is supposed to represent something other than a period of extreme overbuilding and speculation, followed by a reduction in building and a gradual rise in the rate of shelter cost increase which hasn't even reached trend yet. What difference would you expect to see 7 years after the collapse of a massive housing bubble if there _weren 't_ some pending shortage of rental housing?

edit: The distressed housing, as it is released and foreclosures are actually completed instead of artificially being held in limbo, will of course largely be converted to rentals. Virtually _all_ current residential construction is in multifamily units intended for rental. It's the only profitable segment of the housing market other than luxury.

edit2: an image _from that same blog_ that shows the enormous amount of vacant housing that isn't on the market: [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GWjstiIc_No/UfQTK38X-TI/AAAAAAAAaQ...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GWjstiIc_No/UfQTK38X-TI/AAAAAAAAaQA/EjHfwxmEAn8/s1600/Vacanices.PNG) from [http://soberlook.com/2013/07/for-many-americans-rising- home-...](http://soberlook.com/2013/07/for-many-americans-rising-home- prices.html)

This is yet another press release from the 'I want to build upwards in newly hot urban neighborhoods and get some of that upper-middle class 20-something moving from the suburbs into the city' money.

edit3: Annual Rental Vacancy Rates for the United States and Regions: 1968–2013

[http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig03.pdf](http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig03.pdf)

Show me the problem _here_ before we start building 80 unit buildings on the corner lots of quiet residential neighborhoods.

<comment><USER3> > This is yet another press release from the 'I want to build upwards in newly > hot urban neighborhoods and get some of that upper-middle class 20-something > moving from the suburbs into the city' money.

I'll take it. The "I want to build condos so I can cash out ASAP, and then turn around and stick that money into mortgage-backed securities so I can also cash in over the long haul, perhaps at the expense of those same people I just sold a condo to" money has been dominating the conversation for far too long.

Back in the 2000s I got kicked out of a perfectly fine apartment along with everyone else living in the building so that the property owner could flip all the units over to condos. Last I checked the building's still at ~50% occupancy, down from 100% when I was living there. And about half the units that are occupied are also for sale. It's far from the only former apartment building in that neighborhood with a similar story to tell, either.

Yes, that does mean that there's an incredible amount of vacancy in the area. But - and this is critical - the amount of vacancy that's a reasonable option for people who aren't in a good position to take out a 30-year is very, very small. If you're in your 20s and single with no kids, a 1-bedroom apartment is a great idea. But unless you're confident that you'll remain single with no kids for the rest of your life, a 1-bedroom condo (that you probably won't be allowed to sublet) is a kind of stupid idea. And all those empty condos units are difficult to flip back to rental because condminium developments have legal encumbrances that make things more difficult. So for now they're going to stay vacant and continue being a senseless waste.

<comment><USER2> It's purely a survival decision from the banks. Enough single-family housing was built during the bubble to safely house us all well into the next decade. Every homebuilder in the country is smart enough not to invest in adding to that overhang. The prices/sales are dropping _now_ \- what will they look like a year from now?

These articles are like those skills-shortage rationalizations for the current level of prime-age employment that ignore the fact that neither hours or wages are rising, so there clearly isn't a shortage that is having an economic impact.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, a lot of housing was built during the bubble. At least around here, it takes the form of a bunch of McMansions way out in the 'burbs. It's housing that was designed by baby boomers for baby boomers - the demographic whose current vector points out of the mainstream housing market and into retirement communities. For young folks entering the market, many have decided there's just way too much time, money, and gasoline in between those houses and the desirable jobs. You might as well say, "Well there are plenty of houses up for grabs in Detroit." That's well and true, but also pretty much irrelevant to someone trying to make a career in the job sectors that are currently growing.

I'm sure the market will eventually sort it out; the current situation is creating plenty of opportunities to make a buck for someone smarter than the banks have proven to be. But that doesn't mean it isn't an irritating situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brudgers hit on many of the most important points, but I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned lending requirements from Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac as major contributors to this problem. The impact of their loan policies has increased dramatically as the US moved from small buildings and individual homes on city streets to a model of large housing developments and big apartment complexes.

These two largest and most important lenders will either not lend or lend under worse terms when an apartment building or development has more than some small percentage of units available as rental units (IIRC, something like only 10-30% of units in a development can be available for rent.)

This then leads many HOAs to actively monitor and police the number of rental units in any development or apartment building, since the HOA is often used to institute rules that protect or increase the value of the underlying asset. Renting your housing assets often requires HOA approval, and if the limit has already been reached, your petition to rent will likely be denied.

Because of these lending policies rental units are under-represented in the overwhelming majority of new developments in more densely populated areas.

<comment><USER5> Having just closed on a house today, I can confirm that the lending requirements have made a complete 180 degree turn from being too lax to monumentally ridiculous. What was annoying is the attitude the lenders seem to have when you give them shit for each hoop they make you jump through... it's their own fault the market is in the condition its in - not the home buyer's.

That being said, this article is accurate for cities in Texas where the market is experiencing insane growth. I had to offer 5% over list and 40% down to get a winning offer out of more than 20 on a property that was active on the market for less than 48 hours.

<comment><USER6> " it's their own fault the market is in the condition its in - not the home buyer's."

There's a fair bit of blame to around here. Lenders should not have been lending to unqualified individuals or pushing unreasonable loans.

How come nobody ever mentions the Realtors in this process of looking for fault? They were generally most intimately familiar with their clients' finanacial states - working with them for weeks and months at a time, as opposed to a few hours that a finance company spends making a decision. Realtors abrogated their responsibility to their clients' best interests in the name of getting bigger & bettter commissions - because whether their clients could actually afford to _keep_ the overpriced properties they were selling wasn't their problem.

Finally, would-be home owners could have applied a healthy dose of common sense. It just took a little bit of research to see that houses were overpriced, and that there was zero logic in a 5 year ARM with a balloon payment under which you spend the first five years paying only a portion of the interest.

That a $3000/mo mortgage when living from paycheck to paycheck is not a good idea.

Yet millions did these things anyway, hand-waving at the future in order to get that extra square footage or in order to gamble something they didn't have on the hope that the unreasonable prices would continue for another five years.

It may be that it's only luck and timing that stopped me from being one of those people - I don't know what I would have done had I been looking for a house in the mid-2000s (I bought mine in 2000 when prices were relatively sane).

But I like to think I'd be taking responsibility for my own bad decision if I made it. No matter who was pushing me towards it.

<comment><USER4> My mother is a real estate agent and having observed that industry first hand for most of my life and seeing how backwards it is, I like to criticize it as much as the next person. That being said, I don't see how the holding the real estate agent accountable is the right solution. Their job is to find and show houses buyers may want to purchase, not handle the details of counter-party risk. Responsibility here lies with all the counter-parties to the transaction with contractual obligations, i.e. the buyer and the lender.

At best, you could maybe set up a simple framework that requires real estate agents a way to calculate the range of homes that they should be showing their buyers. This would be used just to make sure the real estate agent doesn't push people into homes someone should not being considering. However, with that said, if a buyer insists in looking outside the price range that is affordable for them, that isn't the real estate agents fault.

<comment><USER6> I agree re: it not being the agent's fault if the buyer insists. But I've seen all too many cases where it's the agent doing the 'gentle push' to higher prices. "Well don't forget this will give you a tax break over renting, and that will add up to a couple hundred a month..." Etc, etc.

I'm shopping for a house again now, and even now I've had to tell my agent that the top end of what I provided as a limit is actually a limit, and I want to see properties under it as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In Boston, an artificial scarcity of housing is the unfortunate result of laws that effectively limit new development. You either can't build new, can't build too high, or have to meet a neighborhood's aesthetic to get approval. The result is higher prices, more sprawl, and a generally depressing force on the kinds of great things that come from sufficient population density.

<comment><USER8> What's the current status of rent control in Boston and the surrounding suburbs?

Even if relaxed or gone, as I recall may have happened in some cities, it left a legacy, plus developers have to factor in the danger of it being reimposed.

<comment><USER9> Cambridge (outside Boston where I live) had rent control but got rid of it around 10 years ago. I don't think its coming back.

I work outside the city core, they seem to building a ton of rental complexes in Watertown. Probably because the permitting is easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm currently living in Australia, and the rent prices are fascinating. You see, to a certain extent, the housing bubble never "popped" (sudden massive drop) here. Instead of being bundled into investments or handled by real estate firms, a large portion of the market is privately owned (this was driven by "negative gearing" that gave tax breaks etc. for ownership). Sure, the market is depressed compared to pre-GFC, but property is still astronomically overpriced. The fascinating part: the rent is _much_ more reasonable. It's like some odd market form of cognitive dissonance. The boomers refuse to believe that a crappy apartment isn't worth 5 million dollars in the sense that they won't sell any lower and list at that price, but at the same time they'll signal that the "real" value is the much more reasonable half million by charging in rent what would be the equivalent payment for a half million on a twenty year mortgage.

This leads to all kinds of odd pathological situations. As far as I can tell, purely paying agents in commission is much less common here. Combined with the unmovable listing prices this has led to what is basically welfare for real estate agents and the most lackadaisical salesmen I have ever witnessed, even adjusting for the generally easy-going culture. I'm used to having to ignore calls from agents once it's known that I'm looking. Here, it's the opposite you have to keep calling them. I only have my current place because my wife explicitly asked about it, to which the agent responded something along the lines of, "Oh yeah. That's been open for months." Since many of the property owners aren't professional (pooling the risk/cost of owning over many units) and cash-strapped, getting maintenance done is a nightmare. It's either all done by themselves (with the ensuing comedy that entails) or farmed out to agencies that still bill the owner mostly piecemeal (so that every issue is a situation akin to getting your insurance to pay your doctor).

I would like to think that when the boomers prove, despite their thinking to the contrary, quite mortal and start dying collectively in large numbers that this will correct the market. My worry is that instead what boomers die last will use the last of their block voting power to convince the government to ease restrictions on foreign investment and Australia will become much like Hawaii.

<comment><USER11> I'm in a similar situation having moved to Australia (Melbourne) from Southern California. In Irvine I was paying $2165/month in rent for a 3 bedroom unit in a big rental complex, here in Melbourne I'm paying $1700/month in rent for a 3 bedroom house with a backyard. Coincidentally my next-door neighbour has just put her same-size house on the market for $650k ([http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic- west+footscr...](http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic- west+footscray-117205423)). Paying that mortgage would cost at least twice as much as I'm paying in rent which shows how out of whack Aussie house prices are.

But the markets for buying and renting houses are different. Rental prices are limited by local incomes. Property prices are only limited by the amount of credit available (currently effectively unlimited in a ZIRP environment) and controls, or the lack thereof, on foreign investors. Coupled with the incredibly idiotic policies in Australia of negative gearing and interest only investor mortgages (!), Aussies have created a monstrous property bubble, and the economic & political fallout from the pop will last for decades.

<comment><USER12> I dream about renting in Melbourne - i can get the equivalent of what i'm renting in Sydney for easily 2/3 of the price I'm paying now

You hit the nail on the head there - the price of a house is what a bank is willing to lend you. I can't see how someone can justify paying 620k for a rundown 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment.

The second interest rates go up, or the price of properties come down, all of these people who are mortgaged to their eyeballs will suddenly find they can't afford to keep them, and the collapse is going to be terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Meh, this is cyclical as always.

Not enough rental properties means developers will start building more rental properties, which means they will ignore regular for sale housing, which means prices in the for sale market will go up, which means developers will build more units to sell, which will cause a lack of units in the rental market, ad infinitum.

Exceptions for markets with government controls. :)

(One thing I like about the Pacific Northwest, our government controls are minimal, and have loosened up in many places recently, with less height restrictions allowing for higher density housing!)

<comment><USER14> The whole US is a market with government distortions in favor of ownership, in the form of subsidized mortgages.

<comment><USER3> Not just subsidized mortgages. Also tax and other incentives, zoning laws that make it more difficult to build rental properties, and infrastructure that can't support (or is specifically designed to prevent) the kind of population density it takes for building rental properties make financial sense for developers in many areas.

Combined with a lot of political tailwind behind these kinds of broad-spectrum public subsidies of landowners, because in the USA it's common for working class folks to think of themselves as really just being rich people who happen to not have a whole lot of money.

<comment><USER15> I like the quote, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." often attributed to Steinbeck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. My rent increase was 6% this year. It was 4.5% the previous year and in prior years was around 3%. This would be in a suburb a few miles from Boston.

The advertised price for apartments in my building is actually higher than my cost. I am waiting on renewal to see if they are forced to drop the price so I can use that to request a smaller increase.

I suppose the smart money was to have leveraged up on some housing while I had the chance, but I just can't stand the entire home purchase and ownership ecosystem.

<comment><USER17> Is this in cambridge/somerville? Big companies moving into Kendall Sq are pushing up rents like mad.

<comment><USER16> Not that close to Boston at all. Stoneham, just in the 95 loop. Rent went up to 1250 for a 1 bedroom.

I forgot that my price is higher because they allow dogs. Very few places do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "As an indicator, the chart below shows Google search frequency for rent related phrases."

That chart has no y-scale, so it's impossible to tell if it means anything.

<comment><USER19> I tend to view the absence of a y-scale to be very telling ;-)

<comment><USER20> That and the lack of listing the "rent related phrases" used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is not a new problem, the Federal government has had programs subsidizing the construction of rental housing via HUD financing and block grants of Low Income Housing Tax Credits to the states for more than 20 years.

The current scarcity of affordable rental housing -- and when we talk about a shortage of any kind of real-estate, we're always qualified by 'affordable' \-- is greater because of two trends.

The first was Hope 6 from the 1990's in which large public housing projects were torn down and replaced with much smaller and prettier public housing projects and by which the stock of public housing in the US was greatly reduced. Displaced tenants were expected to find housing in the private market using various vouchers, such as Section 8. This increased demand raised rents and removed surplus from the affordable housing market.

The second trend however, effected the rental housing market more broadly. In the housing boom of the early 2000's, a large percentage of the existing rental housing units in the US were converted to condominium ownership and the units were taken out of the primary rental market. Because of the way condominium insurance is written, many condominium deeds restrict rentals of units in order effort to limit association fees. This makes it less likely for former rental units to return to secondary rental markets after a property has gone condominium.

The issue is quite simply that rents don't cover development costs in much of the US for large demographic segments of the population. In part this is because the minimal cost of development is lower bounded, and not primarily by government controls but by land and construction costs established by the free market.

In the extreme for illustration, even if you get the land for free in Detroit, you cannot charge enough rent to cover construction if you build for the economic segment where most of the demand exists, and in the segments where the numbers work out, there is limited demand and every other developer is targeting that segment.

One last piece of rental housing development is also worth bearing in mind, the upfront costs tend to be higher and the payback longer than with owner occupied housing development. There's no deposits or presales to fund partial development or create an initial income stream. There's no revenue until the rent checks arrive so projects get built in a single phase. That means a bigger loan and an emphasis on faster construction times versus a slower more variable pace tailored to sales velocity.

Addendum: Another factor which may be coming into play is that rental housing has traditionally attracted institutional investors. To the degree that startups offer an attractive alternative the pool of potential investors for rental housing development might be reduced.

<comment><USER22> _In part this is because the minimal cost of development is lower bounded, and not primarily by government controls but by land and construction costs established by the free market._

Interesting comment overall, but this does not appear to be true: see _The Rent is Too Damn High_ ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/)) and _The Triumph of the City_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest- Invention-Health...](http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention- Healthier/dp/159420277X)) for more detail on how height limits and parking minimums in particular prevent the housing market from functioning, especially in desirable urban areas with many jobs.

<comment><USER21> All real estate is local, so there are places where rental housing availability is dominated by height restrictions. But most places. land costs and fire codes make building more than four stories economically infeasible, there are simply better returns to be had.

Parking drives projects upscale because it forms a lower bound and the costs are better amortized with higher priced units. Then again, we don't regulate automobile ownership in ways that prevent offloading private use onto public parking infrastructure. It's not as if people can be prohibited from owning cars based on where they live.

The dominance of parking is worse in the suburban environment where multiple spaces exists for every car.

<comment><USER23> > It's not as if people can be prohibited from owning cars based on where they > live.

In Japan to buy and register a car, you have to submit proof that you have access to a parking space for it, some cities have rules such as the parking space needs to be within, say, 3 km of your home.

<comment><USER3> In the USA many people grumble if the city wants you to pay only a couple dollars a month in return for the privilege of being allowed to park along the side of the public streets, on top of a patch of asphalt that probably costs the city many times as much to maintain.

I've heard people complain that it's communist for the city to charge for parking. Because here in the USA socialism means, "Either giving free things to people who aren't me, or _not_ giving free things to people who are me."

<comment><USER24> Where does the gasoline tax then go to? Are we just so numb to government pork that any new tax burden is immediately accepted as long as it 'sounds right'?

<comment><USER3> The gasoline tax goes to maintaining the roads that are owned by the entity that levies the gasoline tax. In many areas that's just the state and federal governments, and not one red cent of it will go to pay for the street you live on.

Municipalities frequently use property taxes to cover roads, but that's potentially a poor way to pay for the extra infrastructure costs associated with curbside parking. In major cities it would be downright regressive, since a lot of less-wealthy people don't own cars. It also fails to account for the fact that in denser areas there simply isn't room for everyone to own a car - and in such a situation it's not necessarily so great (and certainly more authoritarian) to expect everyone to pay for parking regardless of whether they'll be using it. And it fails to account for the fact that many people own cars, but acquire the location they use to store their car when they're not using it on the private market (perhaps by building a garage on their property, perhaps by renting a space in someone else's lot or garage).

It's unfortunate that Americans' way of thinking about taxes has become so distorted that they'll knee-jerk dismiss a tax they're not familiar with using weasel words like "pork", even when that tax is actually more equitable and economically efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> All that fiat currency has to get invested somewhere right? The real estate bubble is re-inflating, check the S&P Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index: [http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/SPCS20RSA](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/SPCS20RSA)

Dilbert touched on this back in '89: [http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1989-04-18/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1989-04-18/)

</comment><comment><USER26> TL;DR Metro Atlanta, incomplete/failed subdivisions are being finished by investment companies. However they are not aiming low, they are aiming for those who want out of apartments, have the income, and good background histories, to make renting profitable and safe.

North Metro Atlanta, anecdotal here but I have read similar. There are a lot of failed/incomplete subdivisions out where I live. Recently an investment group bought the last 11 lots in my 54 lot subdivision, they had been empty for three years.

Within short order 11 new homes were built and are being rented. There are two different companies contracted out to rent these homes for around 1300 a month. Single family only, background checks, and a host of rules. Two other nearby subdivisions are trying to sell their incomplete lots but the builder for this group told us the appeal of ours was no pool or tennis courts. Toss in large homes, existing were 3800 to 5200, large lots, and it was ideal for their investment. The new homes are 2400 square feet but fit in architecturally.

With the possibility of an airport expansion in Paulding I suspect NW Metro Atlanta will see a large expansion in rental housing. Contracting out to build homes in numbers of near a dozen does save good money

<comment><USER27> Why are pools and tennis courts negatives? Maintenance costs?

<comment><USER28> I would guess the management company doesn't want to get involved in mediating spats over the shared use areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Increase in number of searches (?) on the Google Insight graph could simply mean that more people are using google to search for rental properties than in the previous years..

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't really have an opinion on the conclusion, but it seems like some of the supporting charts are weak. For example, new housing per capita doesn't indicate shortage, and in fact I would expect this metric to fall to zero in case of a housing glut. What you really want is new construction per new households, ideally, or at least per new population. You don't need to build new houses for your existing population.

<comment><USER31> _especially_ if you're coming out of an overbuilding boom where too many housing units were built out of sheer speculative investment that destroyed a lot of equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there a way to get this data per county or even state? I'd like to see how my area compares (San Francisco Area).

</comment><comment><USER33> The market catches up with time, then overshoots. In both directions too. Just wait a bit.

</comment><comment><USER34> Its true.</comment>


Your words may predict your future mental health - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_your_words_may_predict_your_future_mental_health <comment><USER2> The conclusion is intriguing, but it's worth reading, or watching if you prefer video, the whole thing:

      > What I tell you today is that we're getting
      > close to understanding how we can convert
      > this intuition that we all have, that we all
      > share, into an algorithm. And in doing so, we
      > may be seeing in the future a very different
      > form of mental health, based on objective,
      > quantitative and automated analysis of the
      > words we write, of the words we say.

Don't take that paragraph in isolation - read about the supporting evidence, including their initial failures.

Transcription here:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_your_words_may_pred...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_your_words_may_predict_your_future_mental_health/transcript?language=en)</comment>


One Day With Arianna Huffington - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304765304577482563192366538.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

<comment><USER2> I see people like Huffington and Nick Denton as the media titans of our age -- in general the tech bloggers ignore them, but I'd kill to read a definitive article or even book on how these folks really got started. I know both Huffington and Denton had some cash to get started, but I sense that there is a larger story there (and they were at the right place at the right time).</comment>


Why San Francisco keeps losing tech conferences - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Why-San-Francisco-keeps-losing-tech-conferences-10939025.php <comment><USER2> They don't mention the fact that you might walk out of a conference hotel and find there is a soup kitchen across the corner with a line of patrons that wraps around the block.

Also that SFO has the worst car rental system of any airport I have ever seen. (It is not so bad, however, if you take the BART. Oddly, most Americans won't do that, so I always end up riding back with conference goers who came from Europe or Asia)

As for the hotel rates I am used to New York City so the rates don't seem entirely out of line for a "big city". To me Los Angeles looks cheap in that you can find a place to crash under $100, a stylish place to crash around $150-$170, and a really posh and special experience in the $200-$250 a night range. Contrast that to $300 a night at the Doubletree in Boston.

<comment><USER3>
      Oddly, most Americans won't (take BART)

Actually, BART is fine if your only venture outside of your destination inside SF proper is the airport (which is actually in the next county). But most visitors here with any optional time will want to venture out and will often get a rental vehicle because of that (beach, redwoods, wine country are all within an hour's drive, good camping within 2 hours, and skiing within 4 hours).

Also, BART doesn't go to/from the SF airport all hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > San Francisco was perceived as very trendy at one time. It just isn't > anymore

Companies are certainly not moving their conferences to San Jose because it's a more trendy city. San Jose is nice but it's not San Francisco. I fly in to San Jose regularly from Australia but San Francisco is hands down where I'd want to be given the choice.

With Moscone out of action and the San Francisco Design Concourse a block of Luxury apartments there just simply isn't the venues to hold conferences of different sizes in San Francisco.

Even when Moscone was an option, event organisers from moderate sized companies consider the space too large and potentially awkward if they don't hit attendance numbers. Going south for medium-to-large events is now the only option.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because sf is full? Conferences fuck the already overloaded streets and there aren't enough hotel rooms and the public transit is bullshit (it's literally quicker for me to walk for 55 minutes than take the bus to work) and being here is unpleasant because homeless people strew garbage and human waste everywhere. Not blaming the homeless here. If I didn't have a place to shit I'd damn well do it on the street too. We just suck at basically everything a city needs to do to be a pleasant place.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's one that's interesting. At the last conference I went to in SF several folks at one of the evening events had to leave early. They worked for a large Fortune 100 company but were unable to find a hotel in SF that was company approved and cheap enough to allow them to stay in. They had to BART back to Oakland. I don't know how many people are affected by that but I'm sure it's annoying.</comment>


Show HN: I made this to get me working out - <AUTHOR> https://fitloop.co <comment><AUTHOR> You can see the full routine here: [https://fitloop.co/routines/rr2018](https://fitloop.co/routines/rr2018)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use as customer service? - <AUTHOR> Intercom or zendesk or something else?<p>I want these tools to pull in customer info on demand and log the activity...so that the customer service reps do not request unessirely the info on customers. <comment><USER2> Intercom.

Zendesk is an absolute disaster as far as chat is concerned (from an user point of view).

Every time I have to request support from an app and I see it's Zendesk I either give up or find another way or mentally prepare myself for the painful waste of time that is ahead.

I'm sure it's great for the bean-counters' numbers (since less people actually request support because of how bad it is) but it sucks if you _actually_ care about your users.</comment>


PICO-8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php <comment><USER2> See also [http://puzzlescript.net](http://puzzlescript.net) which is even more minimalist but has some very interesting games, such as Heroes of Sokoban: [http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=6860122](http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=6860122)

</comment><comment><USER3> They also have a pretty interesting Voxel fantasy console: [http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php](http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php).

This was funded through a Kickstarter, and a lot of backers are pretty bitter over the progress and direction of the project - just check out the forums.

I love the idea, but I'm very sad that this isn't open source.

<comment><USER4> The lexaloffle forums? I don't see much bitterness there?

<comment><USER5> Read this - [http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2074](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2074)

<comment><USER6> So literally one guy is pissed on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I put together a tutorial on writing a simple game in PICO-8 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuaLuMhwcc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuaLuMhwcc8) its really a fun platform to play with

<comment><USER8> Excellent! Really nice demo .. me and the kids are sitting down to watch it together later today and see what we come up with after watching your tutorial. Thanks for that!

<comment><USER7> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> PICO-8 is totally awesome. I've built a few simple games, and have been encouraging my daughter to make games. She can't program (yet!) but she can play with the sprite editor and sound editor :)

The limitations really make it easy to not worry and just make a dang game! For those of you worrying about cart size limits: if your game is too big for one cart, make it a two-parter :P Also, apparently you can load data from another cart while your game is running so you could just chain a whole bunch of them together.

Two things I am really excited for are support on Pi-style hardware, and mobile support for the web player.

<comment><USER10> My understanding is that with PICO-8 you can export to HTML5. If this is the case, (I haven't used this myself.. Yet.) why would you need direct support for mobile and Pi's? Couldn't you just change the dimensions of the app to fit mobile devices, and take advantage of the HTML5 support while on a Pi?

<comment><USER9> You can run PICO-8 games on a phone browser, but there are no virtual buttons for touchscreens, yet.

Pi is just a bit too slow to run the JS engine, it needs to be ported to native ARM for full speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I want to point out that the console uses a (quite appealing [1]) fixed palette of 16 colors for all of its graphics. I think having a fixed palette is a great idea. I can see it helping would-be game developers overcome their initial art style analysis paralysis and helping ensure that the games have a recognizable "PICO-8" look.

[1] See [http://i.imgur.com/1VOlxCt.png](http://i.imgur.com/1VOlxCt.png).

<comment><USER12> You're right, it looks like much thought went into it. I se 4 distinct human skin tones, or 3 if you include a darker tone for shading, pleasant colors with darker tones for shading and good availability of high contrast (not everything is pastel).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love the aesthetics, and the idea to save "cartridges" as png images!

</comment><comment><USER14> You can play user submitted cartridges here no install required. Pico-8 can export to HTML5

[http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&sub=2&orderby=rating](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&sub=2&orderby=rating)

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cute and cool little environment .. was pleasantly surprised to see that it came with my Vexatron purchase (amazing in its own right) .. a truly delightful little environment, which I'm going to enjoy, very much, teaching my 8-year old to play with .. just like the good ol' days of computing, before IDE's came along .. ;)

EDIT: reminds me a little bit of antirez' LOAD81 environment which is also, a bit of a retro programming experience:

[http://github.com/antirez/load81](http://github.com/antirez/load81)

</comment><comment><USER15> This system is quite amazing. Peek and poke! Extremely limited pallet! An integrated development environment. The restrictions make for some very interesting design choices and force you to limit the scope of your designs -- super important if you ever actually want to finish a game.

I highly recommend this system to anyone. It's great and I've been having a tonne of fun with it. It's no Amiga 500, but boy it has that _feel_.

<comment><USER16> You might also enjoy Octo[1] which is based on a real 8-bit system called CHIP-8. There's even a month-long game jam going on right now![2]

[1] [https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo](https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo) [2] [http://octojam.com](http://octojam.com)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the link. Most interesting was that it was implemented on the mighty RCA 1802 processor and very directly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802)

Built on Silicon-on-Sapphire process, it was radiation and EMSEC tolerant plus low-power. Used in Galileo space-craft. Highly reliable. It's still sold with a spec that you can fully understand and that documents every state:

[http://www.intersil.com/en/products/space-and-harsh- environm...](http://www.intersil.com/en/products/space-and-harsh- environment/harsh-environment/microprocessors-and-peripherals/CDP1802A.html#)

So, not just a toy, Octo or CHIP-8 could be used to prototype applications that just run and run and run in the field. Heck, even a retro-gamer might appreciate a system that never freezes past game logic errors.

<comment><USER16> Sure!

Eventually I would like to equip Octo with an optional 1802 emulation mode and the necessary mixed-mode assembler for producing 1802 machine code. Probably won't be available any time soon without strong demand, though.

<comment><USER17> That's understandable. I doubt the demand will show up but it was cool to see them connected in the write-up. Few even know 1802 exist much less why it's worth copying.

Not sure how far you like to push yourself on low-level coding, reading on or doing it. I'll end with these links for your entertainment:

4-bit MCU's: the next challenge for 8-bit masters to strut their stuff. Interesting article esp how they're sold. [http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/2010/12/10/consider...](http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/2010/12/10/considerations- for-4-bit-processing/)

Example 4-bit CPU's for public [http://www.ttlcpu.com/content/links](http://www.ttlcpu.com/content/links)

Note: Really wonder what best retro games would look like on 4-bits, esp after hardware acceleration tradeoffs. I always challenge the demoscene to show us. ;)

Motorola _1-bit_ processor: "Real men don't need hulking 4-8 bitters!" Haha [http://www.electro-tech- online.com/threads/mc14500b-a-1-bit-...](http://www.electro-tech- online.com/threads/mc14500b-a-1-bit-industrial-processor.88417/)

Note: Manual and source code are attached to comments on that page. Would be amazed at seeing people do anything useful in modern applications with these. They'd win by default on memory/power/area efficiency haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> anyone in Tokyo interested in this should check out the Lexaloffle HQ in Kichijoji - [http://picopicocafe.com](http://picopicocafe.com)

They have a very developer friendly environment (I spent many days programming there, they often hold Ludum Dare marathons) and Joseph is a first class indy developer.

</comment><comment><USER19> This totally reminds me of Family BASIC. It had a music editor and level editor, and I had a fond memory of playing (i.e. programming) it at a friends house. The biggest problem: its memory storage was only 2Kbytes. A program had to fit in basically one screen. Also when you use the music editor, you had to give up the memory for programs. I kept saying "Phah! Mai-con (abbrev. of "Microcomputer") is so much better!" just like I do today.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks like fun! We're building something quite similar to this, but compatible with / inspired by existing 8-bit computers / consoles (Apple II, C64, etc...) Good to see some validation for the space though =)

</comment><comment><USER21> I love this little fantasy console. I've written a few small games in it already it's a lot of fun.

</comment><comment><USER22> Only thing about PICO-8 that makes no sense: the 32k limit. Otherwise, an awesome set of limitations.

<comment><USER23> The NES had 2 kb onboard and 8 to 16kb on the cartridge, 32kb ROM and 2kb display memory

<comment><USER22> It doesn't _need_ to do that, though. It's an interesting set of visual limitations, but the size limit is an arbitrary pain in the ass if your program gets too big. Nobody's hosting is going to break at 256kb.

<comment><USER23> Your missing the point, it has nothing to do with download speed.

32k is not a pita, its the point, this is a fantasy retro consol, giving it 32 MB would do what ? make it pointless probably

Its also a excellent opportunity to show off, for example, nobody would have thought you could make this on a C64 1984

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kJz_XfbxX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kJz_XfbxX0)

<comment><USER14> I agree. Those limits including the 32k code limit really focus what to aim for. Google online game editors and there's plenty with few limits and ... No one is using them. To me it's kind of one of the reasons minecraft has done so well. The limit style frees people from feeling like they need mad skillz

Also note pico-8 limits the number of instructions executed per frame. So a faster CPU will not increase what you can do. The goal is to make sure all games run even on the least powered hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> PICO pal' que lee.</comment>


Disconnect from your laptop 2 hours a day - <AUTHOR> http://toniowhola.posterous.com/disconnect-from-your-laptop-for-2-hours-a-day my first post while I'm drunk. Don't take it seriously. <comment><USER2> Good idea, bad title. Try "Disconnect from the Internet 2 hours a day".

The point being (TL;DR, I guess) that we should all spend some time each day programming without access to reference materials. Use only what you have in your head, as a sort of mental exercise.</comment>


Past nuclear explosions can help detect art forgeries - <AUTHOR> http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7971

<comment> daniel-cussen Testing for isotopes can have limitations. What if the forger gets hold of pre-war paint, or purifies paint personally, or forged the painting before atomic testing? I don't know how viable or common these methods are, but they could make this testing process less useful in the future. Of course, identifying fakes between 1945 and 2008 is still an awesome contribution.</comment>


Everyone I spoke with loved the idea... - <AUTHOR> http://redeye.firstround.com/2010/04/everyone-i-spoke-with-loved-the-idea.html <comment><USER2> Excellent advice, you can never hear stuff like this enough times. I don't buy everything I want/need. There is some stuff I simply care more about, and that's where my attention goes.

In addition to asking 'does the customer need this?', you should ask 'does the customer KNOW they need this?'. If the answer is no, your startup has two insanely difficult problems instead of one.

<comment><USER3> Your second point illustrates the difference between a latent need and an active need. It's difficult enough to gain attention for active needs, yet alone latent needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1995 was not the era of 1200 baud modems. I'm going to go as far as to say the only place you could buy a 1200 baud modem in 1995 was at a junk sale.

USR introduced its 14400 baud modem in 1989

<comment><USER5> Correct. I remember 28k being the norm around then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I lost interest when he said a good product isn't good enough, you need some sort of spam engine.

That's not been my experience, neither from a maker or buyer perspective. Good software sells itself.

<comment><USER7> _I lost interest when he said a good product isn't good enough, you need some sort of spam engine._

That is a severe distortion; of course he never said that. He didn't imply it, either, unless you add the assumption that all marketing is spam.

As for "good software sells itself", the bulk of the post is devoted to an example where that didn't happen.

<comment><USER8> To be precise, it's devoted to an example where software didn't sell itself. Maybe it was just bad and nobody wanted to tell their friends about it.</comment></comment></comment>


Meebo launches instant message platform so other web sites can offer branded chat - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/16/meebo-launches-instant-message-platform-so-other-web-sites-can-offer-their-own-branded-chat-services/

<comment><USER2> Competitor to 37signals Campfire?</comment>


Gene drive used to turn all female mosquitos sterile - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/controlling-mosquitos-with-a-gene-drive-that-makes-females-infertile/ <comment><USER2> Everyone questioning the wisdom of eliminating "all mosquitos": only a very small number of mosquito sub-species are capable of transmitting malaria to humans. The plan is to target those sub-species only. Other forms of mosquitos would fill in the gaps in the food-chain.

<comment><USER3> > The plan is to target those sub-species only.

How does the saying go?

The best laid plans of mice and men always work out exactly as predicted and never suffer from unintended consequences.

Just like cane toads and prickly pear.

<comment><USER4> > Just like cane toads and prickly pear.

Happily we're (I'm speaking on behalf of people way smarter than myself) getting much, _much_ better at this.

An article on Vox, discussed here 4 months ago, is just one poignant example of the level of introspection and caution being exercised by everyone involved in these trials:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214676)

"Kevin Esvelt wants me to know that if I fuck up this article, 25,000 children could end up dead."

The whole article is a tremendously compelling read.

I'm usually pretty wary of the whole 'we've come a long way since ...', but in this realm we really do appear to have done exactly that. The 1920/1930's attitudes could best be described as incautious (more accurately as brazen, cowboy, insouciant, etc).

Cane toads and prickly pear (and tiger pear and heliotrope and rabbits and hudsons pear and ...) are pests whose impact are nearly impossible to describe to people outside the ecosystems impacted by them, but the people dealing with these things are so much better informed than the lab techs of a hundred years ago _and_ know that if they fuck it up, there'll be a wiki page about them that'll last another hundred years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A recent study has shown that removal of malaria carrying mosquitoes is unlikely to affect our ecosystem [0].

> Lead author Dr Tilly Collins, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at > Imperial, said: "As adults, An. gambiae mosquitoes are small, hard to catch, > most mobile at night and not very juicy, so they are not a rewarding prey > for both insect and vertebrate predators. Many do eat them -- sometimes > accidentally -- but there is no evidence that they are a big or vital part > of the diet of any other animal.

> "There is one curious jumping spider known as 'the vampire spider' that > lives in homes around the shores of Lake Victoria and does have a fondness > for female blood-fed mosquitoes. Resting blood-fed females are easy and more > nutritious prey as they digest their blood meal, but this spider will > readily eat other available mosquito species as opportunity arises."

[0] [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/187427/removing- malariacarry...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/187427/removing- malariacarrying-mosquitoes-unlikely-affect-ecosystems/)

<comment><USER6> That's not the sort of thing science can prove.

<comment><USER7> Sure it is, wipe them from one area, and leave the other one alone.

Compare the changed area to the control area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone seen the movie "Children of Men"? I realize mosquitoes hardly, if at all, share dna with people but my imagination immediately jumped to wondering what if modified mosquitoes managed to spread their sterility to humans? Mosquitos are nature's ideal assassin of mankind. Arming them with the seeds of our despair would be a great misfortune.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, if we make all females of their species sterile, who is to say that the males won't cuck us and start mating with the females of our species? Any female born from a mosquito/human coupling would likely be sterile as well.

<comment><USER10> I know joking is frowned upon in HN but you my friend deserve a pass.

<comment><USER8> my nonsensical comment deserves sarcasm

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope we're right about mosquitoes. I recall that humans culled thousands of elephants in the past because we were convinced it would solve desertification in parts of Africa. Of course we were wrong.

<comment><USER12> It's only malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, lots of other types of mosquito will fill the void very quickly.

<comment><USER13> Honest question, won't the microorganisms that actually cause the disease adapt as well, perhaps jumping to another species of mosquito that is even more in contact with humans?

Do they depend on a specific characteristic of certain species of mosquitoes to thrive?

Is there zero chance that we won't end up spreading _more_ Malaria? Or end up with something worse than Malaria?

<comment><USER14> Yes, could happen. The extermination of the host could put pressure on the parasite and favor mutations that give them the ability to live in other species of mosquitoes (which didn't happen in the past for whatever reason, for example because the mosquitoes transmitting Malaria were competitors to those other mosquitoes and displaced them).

We were not even able to predict the impact of some rabbits on the local fauna. Now we want to play with genes.

<comment><USER15> I'd say though, that if the mosquitoes die off in approximately 10 generations then the parasites are likely to die with them rather than suddenly adapt where they never did before

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe an irrational fear, but how can we be absolutely sure (as in total certainty) that this kind of manipulation cannot "jump" to another living thing? Through mosquito bites, or by the mosquitoes being eaten by other animals, or perhaps by another, more subtle way?

<comment><USER17> Have already commented elsewhere, but keep in mind that any gene mutation that we try to enforce is already likely to have happened billions of times (DNA changes at every instance of sexual reproduction, that's why we're not clones of our parents, that's step 1 of evolution as well). If DNA changes in parasites affect hosts, then this is already going to be happening for all kinds of weird changes.

<comment><USER18> This is not a mutation. It's an engineered change equivalent to many many mutations - probably thousands at once. The probability that this would randomly occur in nature is essentially zero.

<comment><USER19> While I agree I feel compelled to mention survivor bias. If this had happened before to a species it is unlikely you'd know since they'd all be dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is an absolute no-brainer. Mosquitoes are flying disease vectors that deserve to be eliminated. In the Americas, they're an annoyance, but in many other parts of the world, they cause millions of deaths per year.

Many studies have shown that the extinction of mosquitoes would have little if any ecological impact. I think if we had to worry about malaria in the Americas, we'd have eliminated mosquitoes years ago, and this wouldn't even be a question of whether or not we should do this.

<comment><USER21> I think there still is an ecological impact, albeit a gruesome one, that still needs to be considered.

Avoiding these millions of deaths per year will just increase populations in parts of the world where resources are already scarce. It could lead to ecological collapse, which very well could result in more human death all-at- once than the Mosquitos were causing over time.

Now, I hate to advocate for letting people die - that's obviously something we as a species aren't going to do - but I feel like we care about population control for every single species but ourselves.

I worry that all of our modern medicine and championing of mother nature could eventually be our demise in the long-term, even if all of these things provide incredible benefits in the short-term.

We are, after all, just really smart animals. In any environment where a single species eliminates all threats to itself, it becomes the biggest threat to itself in terms of competing for resources. We are better at managing resources than any other species, but to a fault. Eventually we'll bite off more than we can chew.

I'm sure plenty of you will think that what I have said here is evil (even I feel that way a little bit), but I think that this really could be a credible threat to humanity ~200 year down the line.

<comment><USER22> What you're saying is horrific. If you think population control is important, birth control, sex education, economic opportunities, and women's rights are the answers. Letting other people die in misery (that you'll conveniently never have to witness) due to some half thought out idea about what might happen in hundreds of years is literally evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As ecologist this scare me to death. Yesterday I was wondering where are the predators who didn't fill this "empty niche" on cities? Dragonflies are natural predators on environment but cannot stand urban micro climate. Thinking something will fill a empty niche is a theory. Even "niche" occupation is a theory which is show to not fit many places (amazon basin).

Some consequences are starting to be measured and we're turning our eyes because we don't like bites? I got Dengue in two occasions and I really hate these mosquitos but we must not be innocent to think there is no consequences and nature will solve this for us.

> They found that the birds produced on average two chicks per nest after > spraying, compared with three for birds at control sites. > > [https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

Old compilation of papers about the consequences.

<comment><USER24> >Some consequences are starting to be measured and we're turning our eyes because we don't like bites?

Mosquitoes are the main transmission vector for malaria, which kills more than half a million people every year. This is literally one of the biggest problems in the world.

<comment><USER23> I understand this very well but this happen only on low-income countries.

Here in Brazil zika, dengue and malaria are our everyday neighbors but most of problem are from lack of basic sanitation.

One of my first studies was estimating the effect of proximity/density of nearest forest at the neglected tropical diseases. Many people come with the same conclusion: no effect for dengue and yellow fever. Later Brazilian government started doing in-house visits trying to find small pounds of water on backyards. The result was astonishing, most backyards are like paradise for Aedes and similar mosquitos. Even water box are open and full of water for children to play on hot days. Now the campaign is to not create spaces where they can proliferate like: [http://infodengue.ikiw.com.br/2015/03/como-evitar- dengue.htm...](http://infodengue.ikiw.com.br/2015/03/como-evitar-dengue.html)

Malaria is a special case because seems to not stand urban micro climate and people at these regions cannot afford to move. I understand the case of half million people losing their lives but realistic we will not stop using gene modification only on Anopheles. Here in Brazil will target minimum three genres of mosquito, any of them can cause diseases. Mosquitos also do not respect political borders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution)

</comment><comment><USER26> What could possibly go wrong?

Seriously there needs to be public oversight on this research. It has a non zero chance of significantly damaging the biosphere.

<comment><USER27> Do mosquitoes really serve any benign purpose in the biosphere with their existence?

<comment><USER28> You are missing the point. Gene drive can do this to any species.

<comment><USER27> Now the clouds part. Mosquitoes are just the first guinea pigs to see if this Gene Drive works as desired or not, am I right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I always get nervous when science start tampering with these things. Before you know it, zombie apocalypse!

<comment><USER30> Things like this always make me think of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox)

<comment> pure-awesome I assume you are specifically referring to the Great Filter, yes? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

<comment><USER31> Here is John Sotos paper "Biotechnology and the lifetime of technical civilizations" where he looks at the ramifications of a society where any resourceful person will have access to biotechnology capable of killing millions and setting back civilization.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01149](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01149)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We're already using massive spraying of insecticides. This has got to be less damaging? People are going to do something, hard to stop them, this might be the better alternative

</comment><comment><USER33> Gene drive is terrifying. Has anyone done any research on a gene drive "antidote" so we can fix it if we screw something up? A gene that would remove the gene drive?

<comment><USER34> You could isolate some mosquitoes in captivity and wait for the afflicted ones to die off completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If all the females are infertile there will be no offspring, how could a gene drive work if it cant spread the genes?

<comment><USER36> You make it a recessive trait. So only if both parents have it - it gets activated and the child is infertile.

<comment><USER37> I'm still wondering why we cannot do this to bugs like ticks or bed bugs? Especially bed bugs, they are really hard to kill and spread like crazy.

<comment><USER18> I'd guess that bedbugs exist in separate populations that don't inter-breed much. Once house or hotel may harbor a population that exists in isolation and can sometimes spread to new locations. Mosquitoes live outdoors, but still don't constitute one large population.

If we were to try to eradicate them I think using multiple techniques at once on a global scale would probably be necessary. You want to get them ALL. There will always be that one place with a bedbug population in isolation waiting to reintroduce them to the world.

<comment><USER37> It would be nice If you could mail order a colony of genetically modified bed bugs just like you can order pesticide. If this option were to exist even if there was a resurgence you could easily fight them off with this new option.

Now that I think about it. This would make a great startup idea.

<comment><USER38> The economic incentive of the startup would be to keep bedbugs alive. If they eradicated bedbugs, the company would go bankrupt.

<comment><USER37> Because of the points raised by phkahler I highly doubt that you could wipe them out from the entire planet. Even if you did, you would still make lots of money doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is this a plan to eliminate mosquitoes? Are there concerns about eliminating an entire tier of the food chain?

Surely this would be bad for the things that eat mosquitoes. And the things that eat those things etc.

<comment><USER40> Supposedly ecologists who have researched this believe that there are other substitute insects (gnats, flies, etc) that will provide enough food that removing mosquitoes would not be catastrophic.

I'm a little dubious myself, but I do hate mosquito bites, and I don't even live in a malaria zone.

<comment><USER41> There are an estimated 100 _billion_ brine flies in the Great Salt Lake ecosystem. I'm confident there will be insects to fill the void.

(I don't mean to sound blasé, especially given the environmental pressures facing so many insects, but I won't shed a tear for mosquitos.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Driving entire animal spicies into extinction is a wrong.

</comment><comment><USER43> One step closer to a Handmaid's Tale.

Blessed be the fruit ..

<comment> 3d-avid May the Lord open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How likely is it this could turn into a children of men situation if the delivery method becomes trivial?</comment>


Van Gogh was 32 years old when he painted his first major work. - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

<comment><USER2> He also died just 5 years later.</comment>


Removing the Dread from Internal Enterprise Systems - <AUTHOR> https://thetechladder.com/story/removing-dread-internal-enterprise-systems/ <comment><USER3> The main issues with enterprise systems is that their switching costs are really, really high, the return on investment for switching is much lower (unless the product itself is enough of a savings to justify the switching costs) and some regulators impose very specific requirements on them that make using alternatives willy-nilly difficult.

Also, these systems were modern when the company bought them and are often not maintained by the company itself (i.e. outsource SAP support to SAP consultants or Wipro). It is also common for a non-technical executive to authorize these kinds of purchases, though this is changing (which is great). For them, the brand matters a lot. ("Nobody's been fired for picking IBM.")

Also also, the consumers of these products don't really care about the dread involved in using them _until_ the pain begins to affect their career directly. And when that happens, it will become ITs job to work around the dread while keeping the product instead of replacing it outright.

By the way, terrible internal tools are rife in every industry, including tech. Google has some really, really shitty looking internal tools for core production services. For example, their bug tracker (Buganizer, as of two years ago) was a HUGE pain in the ass to use compared to Github. I am surprised that nobody went ahead and Material Designed it as a promo project.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think one of the main causal mechanisms is that corporate cultures do not associate internal tooling with revenue, directly. It is seen as a small cog in a large engine that just has to work. It isn't seen as something that would directly impact customers or drive ROI. So.. they end up being neglected and extremely terrible.

<comment><USER5> Ya revenue and ROI are typically the drivers that determine how budget and resources are allocated. If something is not seen as necessarily critical or customer-facing, then it can just be kept behind the scenes.

Then.. of course.. you face the issue of turnover and attrition. People leave and rarely do things transition smoothly from employee generation to generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work on enterprise systems for a living and the article is "skinny"; most of my clients are keen to progress to something more, for want of a better word, digital.

The fault is with the trusted large consultancies, who are still focussed on large deals for COTS products that have essential core models (ERP/MRPII, EDMS, CRM/Automated Selling, etc.) - they're changing but all too slowly - <USER2> often comically, into areas such as bitcoin, AI and VR - when some simple design thinking and user centred design would be enough.

On the flipside, most of the smaller digitally focussed agencies are unable to deliver the boring but essential bits of a project like programme, risk and change management where large consultancies excel.

Hell, most of the smaller agencies I interact with have not idea about practical architectural design, how to actually deploy and manage devops, how to manage risk, how to deliver in a boring but predictable way.

It's kind of a mess and unlikely to get better in the short term. This is the main reason Salesforce took off.

If there are any Django consultancies out there - you could really clean up ...</comment>


Run Kubernetes on a Mac with Kube Solo - <AUTHOR> https://deis.com/blog/2016/run-kubernetes-on-a-mac-with-kube-solo/ <comment><USER2> A few questions to Kubernetes people:

We are currently using Docker images locally and compose them together with docker-compose. Compose is using a custom devDockerfile identical to the normal Dockerfile, plus a self-reloading / self-compiling webserver.

For deployment we are using AWS EB and push the same Dockerfile (minus the self-reloading webserver). For heavy load applications, we use autoscaling behind a AWS loadbalancer.

Is Kubernetes giving us something over our current Docker setup? Can it improve on our workflow?

Is the time investment for learning this worth it for private projects vs plain Docker that can get pushed to Heroku / Google / AWS?

I have Kubernetes on my list of things I want to check out but every time I go into the getting started guides for local environments, it seems like a lot of work for just setting the environment up. One of the things I love Docker is that I can write the Dockerfile and everyone from our team can very easily use it and immediately has the app running. No Docker? Just install Docker and compose through brew or download it from the website. That's it.

<comment><USER3> I think it won't give you much in Dev but can give your more in production. We have the following work flow

1\. Use Docker images for our applications where we can run them locally by mounting in a config file pointing to local db or dev cluster db etc

2\. We then use CI to build new docker images and push them to our registry

3\. Using Kubernetes deployment yaml files we then deploy the new versions to the cluster with rolling upgrades. This can be combined with auto scaling For config we have a Kubernetes ConfigMap in the cluster which then gets mounted into the docker containers when they start.

My suggestions would be for you to check out Googles Hosted Kubernetes which removes a lot of the headache of getting up and running. [https://cloud.google.com/container- engine/](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just curious - how does this compare to just running minikube?

<comment><USER5> From a casual read - 1) has a status bar icon for easier control, just like Docker for Mac. 2) Uses CoreOS as the base OS in xhyve

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is going on in that second para:

> Fortunately, now that Docker for Mac is generally available, you can easily > run both Docker and Kubernetes on OS X

and then

> But what if you want to get up and running with Kubernetes on OS X?

</comment><comment><USER6> Would love not to have to maintain separate docker-compose config files for development and Kubernetes/Marathon/whatever for staging/production.

<comment><USER7> We use Minikube during development and have dropped compose files entirely :)

<comment><USER8> Have you run into any issues where the minikube env is sufficiently different from production that you it requires some tweaks/hacks?

Also curious if you run multiple services in local minikube for integration testing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Curious: Does the usage of CoreOS replace Docker OSX's virtualbox linux VM it uses? And if not, is there any reason why KubeSolo couldn't be designed to run on that VM, just to save resources?

<comment><USER5> Docker for Mac ditches VirtualBox and uses a more native xhyve. Also, I believe, Alpine Linux is used as the OS for the xhyve VM.

This uses the same Xhyve driver with CoreOS as base OS.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but why does this depend on Docker for OS X if it's not reusing Docker's Alpine VM?

<comment><USER11> Docker's new Alpine VM isn't really designed to be reused. AFAICT the interfaces are private and undocumented.

Reusing xhyve/hyperkit seems more stable, given that they're designed to be embedded.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


True Grit and 21 Black Hawks: A Tale of Entrepreneurial Leadership Training - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/true-grit-21-black-hawks-a-tale-of-entrepreneurial-leadership-training/

<comment><USER2> Is grit truly innate, or can it be changed through circumstance? In other words, can combat in a hellhole develop grit in some people?</comment>


Marvell's tri-core ARM chip has near-PS3-level graphics - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/09/marvells-tri-core-chip-has-near-ps3-level-graphics.ars <comment><USER2> Not really an accurate statement. They are basing this entirely off of the theoretical triangle throughput and not comparing pixel shading power, memory bandwidth, cpu perf (those SPUs on the PS3 actually do get used), etc...

<comment><USER3> So basically: a completely inaccurate statement.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't even be that generous, it's an outright lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Given the amount of hardware on this new chip, it's complete overkill for a smartphone. "

No it's not! I can't wait to have a killer smartphone with HD graphics on a high-resolution 5" screen. That would really rock. Smartphones this powerful could replace laptops as long as they had monitor-out and usb plugs.

<comment><USER6> The information is pretty vague, but seems to hint that the power draw is too high for a smartphone.

That said, apparently someone has already hacked Symbian to interact with the Wiimote, so the current smartphone hardware is already capable of supporting Bluetooth controllers. If you had S-video out to plug into a TV (or if you supported one of the newfangled wireless video protocols) you could have a gaming console that folds away into your pocket. Oh, the possibilities. :-D

<comment><USER6> I hate to reply to myself, but here's a product idea:

A Sheeva-plug form-factor device with video output, and Bluetooth support, sold with a set of Bluetooth controllers and a sleek carrying bag with pockets for the cables and controllers. You can carry it to your friend's house in one hand, plug it in to his/her TV set, and be gaming in under two minutes.

Package it with a bunch of casual multiplayer games, and whoever owns one will be invited to every party ever. ^_^ You could even sell it to those little businesses that operate children's birthday parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ahh, the old "triangles as an absolute measurement of power" fallacy. Shame on you Ars, shame shame.

Still, an amusing headline given that among developers the RSX (the PS3 GPU) is widely acknowledged to be a bit lacking. One of the big challenges of PS3 development these days is figuring out how to move basically everything onto SPUs and leave the RSX as a basic rasterizer.

<comment><USER8> Three (two-and-a-half) symmetric ARM cores seem to be easier to program than a PPC and an entourage of SPUs.

One of the things that always made me wonder about Cell's future is that it looks devilishly hard to program.

Wouldn't things like OpenCL sort of ease that pain? IIRC, IBM is one of the companies behind it.

<comment><USER9> "OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group. On June 16, 2008 the Khronos Compute Working Group was formed with representatives from CPU, GPU, embedded-processor, and software companies. This group worked for five months to finish the technical details of the specification for OpenCL 1.0 by November 18, 2008. This technical specification was reviewed by the Khronos members and approved for public release on December 8, 2008"

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

<comment><USER8> IBM has <http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/opencl> for Linux on PowerPC. It covers Cell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This micro is not for smartphone, Marvell is not in that business.

Currently Marvell has the best micro's for Server class machine based on ARM (XScale) architecture, look at the Plug Computer (<http://www.marvell.com/platforms/plug_computer/>). This last micro, with three core is in the same family of the ones used in the Plug Computer (armada) and in the OpenRD reference platform (<http://www.open-rd.org/>); And none of this chip are in any smartphone.

Not for lack of computing power, but because they have a different target market (and different on-chip peripherals). Marvell's Armada SoC have Gigabit Ethernet and SATA interface on board... not exactly something you need on a smartphone (at least not on mine).

<comment><USER8> > This micro is not for smartphone

TFA says that on the second paragraph

<comment><USER10> They say that the micro is overkill for a smartphone, I'm saying that Marvell is not in that business. This are two complete different story.

Look at current Symbian hw (nokia) and you'll see that for them even Cortex-A8 (the core of current and previous iPhone generations) is overkill.

ARM itself is targeting the Cortex-A15 in his single and dual cores implementation to smarphones.

And the core is only half (or less) of the story today. On smartphones the GPU is as important as the core... but this is all another story.

<comment><USER8> I stand corrected. Sorry.

Still... Marvell is not in that business, but neither was MOS in the personal computer business when they launched the 6502 ;-)

Accidents happen and the wildest things become real. Besides that, this level of performance will be quite mundane two years from now. In a decade, low-end smartphones will have this kind of capability. Not because they need it, but because nobody makes a simpler part anymore.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but when the Motorola engineers left to built the 6502 there was no Personal Computer market. The 6502 (its low price) created it. At 25$ it was a bargain against the the Intel 8080 which costs about US$150: [http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/mos/mos_technology.h...](http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/mos/mos_technology.htm)).

What about smartphones? they're already here and they're evolving.

Is this new chip something new and revolutionary? NO Is it an innovation? YES

      "In a decade, low-end smartphones will have this kind of capability. Not because they need it, but because nobody makes a simpler part anymore."

I'll not put my money on this. In electronics price is king, and for large volumes every dime is important. For example I'll not be surprised to find in my kid's toys some sort of 6502.

Phones are now an ARM territory, and the low cost ones will probably stay on ARM7TDMI for a long long time (may be in some speedy versions, around 300-500MHz).

BTW thanks for the nice "saturday" conversation. I love HN

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would like to see actual games on the device to actually judge how good this chip is in relation to the PS3.

<comment><USER12> Have a look at the "Epic Citadel" tech demo on an iPhone 3GS or 4. We're almost there already , of course subjectively (lower resolution on the mobile displays). The future is now, it really is pretty amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that is very impressive, here's a link to the Epic Citadel demo for anyone else interested: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymlCWbxTgds> Here's the link in iTunes as well: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic- citadel/id388888815?mt=8>

Also Project Sword looks incredible, coming this holiday season they said: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImdjgUip0Nc>

Also, that Rage demo by John Carmack was amazing also: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeXe_G0xmY0>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the "2.5 core" design. The OS can switch off the fast cores if the load goes below a certain level and resurrect them when needed.

IIRC Linux kernels had a memory and processor plug-and-play thing in place that could be used to dynamically "plug" and "unplug" cores as required by changing load conditions. Was it limited to SPARC?

</comment><comment><USER8> Good. Now I want a Windows-proof computer I can hook up to a reasonable LCD, keyboard and mouse, with a rich Linux desktop I can use to work.

And, while it's no pushing triangles, the GPU could help with OpenCL stuff.

Is that too much to ask for? Nobody makes Windows-proof personal computers anymore.

<comment><USER6> I'm closely watching these guys: <http://alwaysinnovating.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even if it does, you would need 5 years to understand how to use it to the full, if that is ever allowed, and not limited by what the underlying OpenGL ES 2.00 would give you.

</comment><comment><USER14> Useless without pics.

<comment><USER3> Considering this is completely about graphics, the parent comment is totally valid.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for appreciating Friday night downvote bait.

Point is technical specifications do not alone support the headline!</comment></comment></comment>


I'm moving to Sydney. Start-up community? - <AUTHOR>

Hello mates, I'm moving to Sydney soon and am curious whether a start-up community exists there, and if anyone here is part of it?<p>Any recommendations on places to live? Thoughts on the entrepreneurship culture? <comment><USER2> They call it Silicon Beach here: <http://siliconbeachaustralia.org/>

There are Open Coffee events, Drinks every fridays, some events every now and then (not enough in my opinion)

Lots of world-class startups were born in Australia (Remember the milk and 99designs come to my mind), you might be the next one :)

Places to live: Coogee, Manly or Bondi! (beach lifestyle, 25 to 45 minutes from the center of Sydney)

If someone else from Sydney is on HN, please say hello :)

<comment><USER3> Another notable startup coming from Sydney is Atlassian [1]. I live near the University of Sydney (currently an undergraduate student there) and they're quite a good force in the IT industry down here as the founders do a number of speaking gigs and also support NCSS [2] (an IT camp for high school students).

The other groups to keep an eye on are programming groups (SyPy, FP-Syd and the Google events). I really should attend some of the Silicon Beach functions - I've yet to go but am really tempted =]

[1] Atlassian - <http://www.atlassian.com/> [2] NCSS - <http://www.ncss.edu.au/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a bit of a roundup of tech meetups around Sydney that I found a while ago. [http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/sydney-meetups-and-events- inform...](http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/sydney-meetups-and-events-information- technology-web-industry-new-media/)

I just moved back to Sydney at the beginning of the year from Bristol in the UK and I have to say the Sydney community doesn't seem to have hit the same level of activity that the UK had which is a bit of a bugger.

If you live in Sydney you pretty much are obligated to have _something_ to do with the harbour: sailing, surfing, living near it, watching the sunset over it from the Opera Bar. I live in Mosman so I get to travel to work in the city by ferry every day - I can certainly recommend it as a lovely way of starting and ending your day!

<comment><AUTHOR> Too bad to hear that doesn't have that much activity.

You live in Mosman? I just started renting a place in Cremorne (border of Neutral Bay), and work in North Sydney. Seems like a cool place. Will check out the meetup, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also check out StartupDigest for regular local events <http://thestartupdigest.com/>

I'm on the lower north shore. In steerpike's words i'm "living near it", the views are great.</comment>


New PrestoDB GitHub home - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/prestosql/presto/wiki/Migration <comment><AUTHOR> Seems to have generated some confusion in their Slack channels as the original FaceBook repos still are in place: [https://github.com/prestodb](https://github.com/prestodb)</comment>


Show HN: Easy to understand, visual explanations of the latest Covid-19 research - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
My name's Neil, and I'm helping a group of scientists and physicians publish visual summaries of the latest COVID-19 research at https://www.researchexplained.org
Our goal is to stop the spread of misinformation by making it easy for people to understand the latest scientific research without being a subject matter expert.
It's difficult to determine whether a news headline is really supported by the source paper. The study could have faulty methodology or the news source could misrepresent the conclusions drawn by the researchers. While the scientific community relies on peer reviews to promote high quality papers, the general public is not qualified to review every paper, both due to lack of context and time. Instead, they rely on summaries from mainstream media sources, who tend to report on papers before they have passed the necessary peer review process. This creates a gap between when a paper is posted and when it is vetted and accepted by the community.
While this has always been an issue, the problem is more dangerous right now. With the ongoing pandemic, preprint studies are getting a lot of media attention without proper explanation of the caveats that come with that (no peer review, preliminary data, etc).
To combat this, we are creating objective summaries of the quantitative facts presented in a paper, along with a rating of the media's coverage to highlight any issues. There's been a fair bit of discussion around COVID-19 studies on HN lately, so I'm curious to hear what you all think of this approach! We just started, so only have 3 explanations published so far, but will be publishing 1-2 per week. This is a purely volunteer-driven effort that we're doing on the side to try to help how we can.
The idea was partially inspired by Distill (https://distill.pub), which is an excellent ML publication. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [https://www.researchexplained.org](https://www.researchexplained.org)

Direct link to most recent explanation: [https://www.researchexplained.org/10.1101/2020.04.16.2006592...](https://www.researchexplained.org/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920/)</comment>


Towards the Perfect Coin Flip: The NIST Randomness Beacon - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/nist-randomness-beacon/ <comment><USER3> > _it's also almost impossible that I could influence the value ahead of time > even if I had an insider at the NIST. Even if I've hacked into the NIST's > servers and tried to change that one value, the way that the values are > chained will eventually make this tampering obvious._

In the example, the decision is made based on whether the first digit is odd. Even if you can't directly manipulate the final random number, couldn't "an insider at the NIST" simply generate random numbers until the resulting hash matches the desired pattern, and then publish that number?

DJB wrote an interesting blog post [1] discussing how a rogue entropy source can manipulate the output of a PRNG by emitting only the values that produce a certain pattern in the hash:

> _Here 's an interesting example of an attack that can be carried out by this > malicious source:_

> _1\. Generate a random r._

> _2\. Try computing H(x,y,r)._

> _3\. If H(x,y,r) doesn 't start with bits 0000, go back to step 1._

> _4\. Output r as z._

> _This attack forces H(x,y,z) to start 0000, even if x and y were perfectly > random. It 's fast, taking just 16 computations of H on average._

[1] [http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html](http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html)

<comment><USER4> See also the BADA55 elliptic curves, which were generated by a variety of commonly-used "verifiably random" procedures, but which all contain the hexadecimal string "BADA55" (or, more impressively, "BADA55EC") in their parameters somewhere:

[http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/bada55.html](http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/bada55.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You want your own random bits? Tune your AM radio between stations and record the resulting static to your PC. Grab the low bit from every 10'th sample or so and concatenate into a buffer until desired length is reached. You may want to XOR alternate samples to eliminate any voltage bias your sound card has to provide equal numbers of 0's and 1's.

<comment><USER6> The NIST beacon means that two people can decide on a random value without trusting each other.

The NIST beacon just requires you trust NIST, and since you're not making an agreement with NIST, even -if- NIST knows the random values ahead of time, it's no use to either party unless they've hacked NIST's secret precalculated list of random values.

<comment><USER7> All you need is a commitment scheme. This is more secure than having to trust NIST and does not rely on being able to receive their beacon.

Alice and bob want to decide between Italian or Thai food using a coin flip, but do not trust each other to perform a fair flip. They devise a solution to their dilemma:

1\. Alice generates a 512b random number A.

2\. Alice performs SHA512(A) and shows the result to Bob who stores this as A_1.

3\. Bob generates his own 512b random number B and sends it to Alice.

4\. Alice sends A to Bob who stores it as A_2.

5\. Bob verifies that A_1 = SHA512(A_2)

6\. Both Alice and Bob perform XOR(A, B) and use the least significant bit to determine if they eat Thai or Italian.

Alice is satisfied that XOR(A, B) cannot be predicted by Bob because he sent her B before she revealed A to him.

Bob is satisfied that XOR(A, B) cannot be predicted by Alice because she `committed` to her value of A before he sent his B by sending him the cryptographic hash of it. If Alice tried to change her value of A in response to Bob's B, then Bob would detect it in step 5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A fair amount of discussion on the trustworthiness of NIST's beacon in particular, or how someone in control of a single beacon could influence the results in some way, but what about the author's suggestion for using multiple beacons run and controlled by competing interests?

Would there be any value in having companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo each running their own such beacon?

Edit: A bit of a tangent: if one were to create their own beacon service as a toy project, what would be the expected guarantees? Would a typical webserver's built-in randomness suffice for creating the seed values? What about interruptions in service/availability? Are timestamp gaps acceptable, or should they be backfilled after a server downtime?

<comment><USER9> Um, those are all basically American companies.

You need a Russian one, a Chinese one, North Korea, Somewhere Middle-East, and one datastream you bought off the dark markets via Tor, produced by a rogue group of renegade hacker cypherpunks.

If they turn out to be _all_ colluding, you're living the wrong novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _It's the instant that separates the past, a period of time when the outcome has a probability distribution around its possible values, from the present in which the outcome is a simple constant number._

I sure don't claim to be a QM expert, but isn't this almost the exact definition of the wave function collapse when "observed", and so then are the two related in some mathematical way?

</comment><comment><USER11> And from the 2009 class of critical design, the (mechanical) Coin Flipper: [http://www.dotmancando.info/index.php?/projects/coin- flipper...](http://www.dotmancando.info/index.php?/projects/coin-flipper/)

</comment><comment><USER12> There is no guarantee in this scheme that the data was actually generated at the time they state.

An insider can easily cycle through "random" numbers until the hash of the block has a desired characteristic.

<comment><USER8> That assumes the insider has a target in mind, though. How would NIST know that I am about to use the first bit of the number in a particular heads/tails scenario? How would they know I intend to use the upcoming 3:31pm number as opposed to the upcoming 4:59pm?

<comment><USER13> If the "contract" is between private parties not affiliated with NIST then they don't, however some interesting use-cases require the parameters be publicly known ahead of time, e.x. lotteries, elections, etc.

<comment><USER8> That's where multiple beacons would come into play. As long as at least one beacon provider is one you believe you can trust, that should be enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _We have no reason to believe this is happening, and it's hard to imagine > that the institution in charge of running the nation's most accurate clocks > would also be putting fake timestamps on the Beacon data._

This is hopelessly naive. We don't need to imagine that the NIST has been compromised: this has already happened. The NIST collaborated with the NSA to put a backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG standard[1]. Given this, I think we have to view the NIST as a compromised, untrusted entity.

As such, we must assume that an attacker has _both_ the seed values and the NIST's private key. Given an attacker with this power, none of the approaches mentioned in the article provide security:

> _SHA-512 is not known to be broken at present, and so even working backwards > through one of the SHA-512 stages is essentially impossible; two rounds is > impossible squared._

The proposed attacker knows all the inputs to the SHA-512 hash and therefore does not need to reverse the hash.

> _So if you'd like to make your adversary's work super-duper difficult, > combine the Output Values from today at 7:00 pm and yesterday at 7:00 pm. > Your adversary will have to work backwards through 2 x 24 x 60 = 2,880 > SHA-512 stages to make the chain verify, still assuming that he knows the > NIST's secret key._

The proposed attacker knows all the inputs to the two SHA-512 hashes and therefore does not need to reverse the hash.

> _But suppose SHA-512 were broken and working it backwards were easy instead > of being ridiculously difficult. Nothing prevents you from writing your > contract to take the Output Value, add one to it, and run this value through > a better hash of your choosing. Now the bad actor inside the NIST has to > reverse your chosen hash function as well._

The proposed attacker knows all the inputs to whatever hash function you choose, and therefore does not need to reverse the hash. Adding one does effectively nothing, and I'm not sure how to prove what it doesn't do, because I'm not sure what the author thinks adding one does.

A better try might be to use an adequately-sized random secret key with a unique, incrementing nonce to generate the random numbers via a pseudo-random function. However, you shouldn't trust that this works without seeing a mathematical proof--something sorely lacking in the original article. And even if it does work, it's counter-productive to use the NIST random numbers as input for your function. There are plenty of other sources of inadequate randomness, and at least if you're using your own inadequately-random numbers you can determine _how_ inadequate the input randomness is and act accordingly.

In short, the first step toward the perfect coin flip is to stop trusting the NIST.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG)

<comment><USER15> "The proposed attacker knows all the inputs to the SHA-512 hash and therefore does not need to reverse the hash."

Knowing the inputs to the SHA-512 hash does not give you the ability to influence the outputs. So, you won't be able to influence the results (greatly - exceptions can be made for small things like changing the odd/even of the next digit - but that ability disappears further down the chain), but, presumably, you will know what they are. I think the presumption should be that there is some agency that knows all the values in the NIST chain for the forseeable future, and no important system should be designed in the belief that those values aren't known.

What does make sense though, is taking a third-party trusted system (as suggested by the NIST), and adding that to the hash string. Something as simple as the latest block for a particular day from blockchain would be sufficient. In fact, all it really needs to be is something numeric - like the closing price of the S&P 500 would do the trick. That would prevent the NIST from calculating any further than one day in advance, and even then - <USER2> could _only_ target you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> NIST shouldn't be trusted anymore. Period.</comment>


Kleiner Perkins Shifts Strategy After a Rough Decade - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/a-humbled-kleiner-perkins-adjusts-its-strategy/

<comment><USER2> The silicon valley support for green/clean energy goes beyond rationality. They were investing based on faith (or hoping for bigger government intervention) and got burned.

<comment><USER3> I think clean energy enthusiasm is rational. The scientific consensus is that emissions are warming the planet, which will have large, undesirable effects. A rational response to that is to limit emissions. We haven't done so, which seems like the irrational link in the causality chain here.

<comment><USER2> There a lot of reasons Kleiner was foolish without even touching the global warming debate. $100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global warming. There is cheap abundant politically connected dirty energy. There is abundant clean cheap natural gas. Even people who believe that global warming will have large undesirable effects aren't necessarily willing to spend more money to do something about it. It isn't necessarily rational to bet on people behaving rationally.

\-- edit: I am not arguing against electric cars, especially cheap ones. But fancy Fisker $100k electric cars were rich people's vanity toys, not global warming solutions.

<comment><USER4> _$100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global warming._

Of course they are! With electric cars, it doesn't transmits carbon, plus it can get cheaper energy from the grid. Of course, coal plants are still dirty, but they are more efficient than using gasoline in ICE, and ICE only converts like 30% to forward motion.

All that is left is to improve and drive the cost of solar panels into the ground until they are competitive with oil and coal.

<comment><USER5> I haven't seen a good analysis of gas (from the ground) to ICE in mpg, vs. electricity from coal (in the ground) with grid losses and batteries, with the capital costs of the vehicles amortized. I'm not sure what the best comparison is -- dollars, kilos of CO2, other emissions, etc.?

Obviously the US grid isn't even 100% coal, and we're presumably moving toward more and more NG and renewables at all times, but it would be interesting to quantify this over time.

<comment><USER6> A few years old, but a pretty decent start to your "good analysis": <http://www.withouthotair.com/>

<comment><USER7> For the more specific answer to that question, the page is here: <http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_131.shtml/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fisker was a bad investment choice by Kleiner, because they wanter to jump onto the bandwagon of electric car. This is nothing new.</comment>