Elizabeth Holmes is finally presenting Theranos data as company collapses - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/elizabeth-holmes-is-finally-presenting-theranos-data-as-company-collapses/ <comment><USER2> I wonder what the chances are that Theranos has invented _something_ valuable. Maybe not worth 9 billion dollars, but if they had any scientists doing research, they might've invented something useful.

<comment><USER3> Theranos' original big PR splash was when they got FDA 510k clearance on their finger stick test for a herpes (one of the herpes) test. This was a splash for several reasons. One of them was that it technically wasn't needed. At the time of the release, the finger stick test was classified as a 'lab developed test', and FDA rules at that time is that lab developed tests do not have to go through the same approval process of say of standalone diagnostic device or test that would be sold.

Essentially under old FDA rules, selling devices and tests were held to a higher level of scrutiny than selling testing as a service. This obvious loophole is in the process of being closed.

So assuming that they haven't completely fudged their original 510k submission, what Theranos does have is a finger prick test for herpes.

Detection of infectious agents from human samples is typically (not always) an essentially binary process. Many of the issues that we've been hearing about Theranos' tech is an inability to properly quantify (that is provide a number on a continuum) whatever they've been testing for.

It is possible that Theranos' tech as is is sufficient for certain types of infectious agents tests beyond herpes simplex. However, it's not at all certain. It'll be a very careful balance of what the sampling error (the fingerstick), the actual limit of detection (of the testing device), and what the clinically relevant threshold is (what concentration of virus/bacteria/antibody) matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So my company is sending me to this conference (too bad, I don't get there till tomorrow, so I'll miss this talk). My coworker and I were really surprised when we looked at the sessions last week and found that she was still presenting. Any other HNers going?

<comment><USER4> Probably don't need any HNers in the room when there are 1,000 scientists with twitter accounts. Should be covered pretty well. =)

<comment><USER3> =P of course. Would sure be nice to hear it er, second hand in person though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a careful P/R rework is underway. It's all about the "tabletop lab" now, and Holmes has shed the black turtleneck. We're scientists now!

[http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/01/health/theranos-table-top- labo...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/01/health/theranos-table-top- laboratory/index.html)

<comment> xkcd-sucks That photo evokes Zoolander to a scary degree

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> At this point, I think this is a show, mainly with an eye to avoiding or overcoming any future criminal liability.

</comment><comment><USER5> is it just me or does that woman always look like she just downed a bottle adderall?</comment>


Debunking "America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide" - <AUTHOR> https://www.subverter.co/2017/05/19/debunking-america-has-become-so-anti-innovation-it-s-economic-suicide/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that he mentions Elon Musk when his companies are literally kept alive by billions in government subsidies and contracts.

I don't like the binary view of "Give all power to corporations, with no government intervention" and "Let the state control all means of research and access"

The ideal is clearly in between, where the state should break up monopolies and punish companies that have detrimental externalities to their functioning(like polluting the environment).

That's not to dismiss government funded research either. We have Computers and The Internet in large part due to US Government research. Once an idea becomes marketable and profitable, private companies can swoop in, like Microsoft or Apple with Computers.

But decades of unprofitable research is not feasible in a corporation. You would need the government to fund that.

<comment><USER3> "Interesting that he mentions Elon Musk when his companies are literally kept alive by billions in government subsidies and contracts."

Your point would be stronger without this falsehood. Both SpaceX and Tesla could do business without subsidies and government contracts. There were times during the worst parts of the Great Recession when this WAS true (and both businesses benefited from the technology and general environment enabled by government investment), but it's not "literally" true any longer that they're "kept alive" by government subsidies or contracts. Most of SpaceX's are non- US-govt satellites now, and SpaceX doesn't receive launch support subsidies like ULA. Tesla would still sell a lot of cars without the EV tax credit (which goes to the consumer, not Tesla, by the way... and is a bigger proportion of their competitors' car value than their own). Both companies would need to pull back growth without govt contracts and incentives, but to say they are today literally kept alive is blatantly false.

And your false claim undermines your central point, actually. If innovative corporations need government subsidies indefinitely to literally stay alive, then government-funded innovation isn't competitive and all government is doing is propping up industries instead of making R&D investments that pay off in long-term growth.

<comment><USER2> Without the NASA contract in 08, SpaceX would have gone down, according to Musk himself. It's true that they are increasingly less dependant on the government, and they hopefully reach a point soon where they are completely independent. But in the early stages when they weren't making profits, government contracts were crucial in keeping SpaceX alive and is the reason they exist today.

>If innovative corporations need government subsidies indefinitely to literally stay alive

I didn't say they need subsidies indefinitely. It's clear that once they start making large profits, it's not a necessity- but they take it anyway. I think SpaceX and Tesla are good examples of companies that governments _should_ subsidise, because they are focussed on innovation in fields which are important for long term sustainability. I don't think they should subsidise Exxon or oil companies, for instance.

My point was you can't dismiss government subsidies as irrelevant when in comes to innovation. It is necessary to support companies that carry out important research, but aren't able to make profits yet.

<comment><USER3> "Without the NASA contract in 08, SpaceX would have gone down, according to Musk himself."

Yeah, that's what I said in my above post. In the depths of the Great Recession, both were on the razor's edge, and the government helped a lot for both (particularly SpaceX). But this situation was temporary, not current.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm tired of these articles. Seriously. Government has funded hi-tech through the military for the last 70 years. That's not a secret and we wouldn't have what we have now with out it. The government knows this and the large corporations who benefit from it know it.

Corporations are not willing to take on the risk to sink billions of dollars to develop a technology which may or may not pay out. Plus once it does pay out, who is to say China isn't going to steal the tech and then undercut the very thing they just developed.

He cites SpaceX as this idea of private investment, completely overlooking the fact that the government is subsidizing the whole endeavour. Please....

<comment><USER5> > He cites SpaceX as this idea of private investment, completely overlooking > the fact that the government is subsidizing the whole endeavour. Please....

Take your pick of any of the major US industries. Chances are the successful players they take a lot in subsidies. None of the Musk companies are really outliers in this, they just get a lot more attention (e.g. GM, Boeing, and GE all take a _lot_ of subsidies).

<comment><USER2> True that Musk is absolutely not an outlier. But you can't really use him as an example of a company doing all their innovation without any government help. I'd rather the government fund SpaceX and Tesla than Exxon anyway.

<comment><USER5> You know, I was fully in agreement with you, but I just went looking for numbers and apparently Space X has only received about $20 million in local incentives and rebates for a space launch facility in Texas (although I'm not sure about the "only". That info is generally prefaced by a note that Space X doesn't disclise financial info, and I'm not sure if that implies there could be more or not). Almost all of the $4.9 billion that it's been reported his companies have received in subsidies is for Tesla and Solar City.

So, apparently the example is actually better than it seemed to both of us.

<comment><USER2> Subsidies are one thing, contracts are another form of support. Government contracts are what kept SpaceX afloat in 08, when they couldn't find private clients, and these contracts can be excess of 100 million.

<comment><USER5> If we start counting government contracts as "support", there's a whole bunch of companies that need to be viewed in a different light. Every defense contractor for one. Every company that sells to the public school system for another.

It's not like these companies are getting something for nothing, they still have to provide a good or service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Classic Austrian economics. There's a clear misunderstanding throughout the whole article about how money works, which is typical of the entire school. This sentence is illuminating: "... monetary expansion, the latter of which causes prices to go up and the purchasing power of the dollars in my pocket to go down."

That is not necessarily true, and in fact is often false. That is called the 'quantity theory of money', and for all its faults even mainstream economics doesn't buy into that anymore... It does _appear_ intuitive - if there is more money in existence then existing money is worth less, right? There's even an identity that 'proves' this, PY = MV. Well, no. For price rises to be the case, the economy must be both at full capacity and full employment. It is also thinking about the problem statically, assuming that the amount of goods and services in the economy does not change to respond to an increase in demand.

In the real world, economies actually have a lot more capacity to absorb extra money than people think (many people are spooked by cases like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, whose problems in reality were caused by completely different factors). And the Austrian mistake of assuming that monetary expansion == price inflation is dangerous, because if implemented the kind of policy leads to effectively controlling inflation by causing unemployment.

<comment><USER7> >For price rises to be the case, the economy must be both at full capacity and full employment.

Who's using intuition now? Stagflation in the 70's is a pretty jarring counter-example.

We're living in an interesting economic time where Keynesian policies seem intuitively more effective than Austrian economics. Afterall, the Fed has been printing money like mad for the last 20 years, and there's no worrying inflation to be found.

But there's an argument to be made that prices should be much lower than they are - that the scale of automation and globalization that we've seen has put enormous downward pressure on prices, and the currency devaluing effects of Fed monetary policy have put upwards pressure on prices without resultant inflation.

So we can still afford a loaf of bread without having to push a wheelbarrow full of greenbacks up to the register, but the problem has manifested itself in different ways. Most obviously in the growing wealth gap, where those who are most capable of taking advantage of the Fed's cheap currency (the financial industry) have gotten all of the gains from automation and globalization, while the rest of us are stuck with a devalued currency.

<comment><USER8> Stagflation was associated with two things: high spending on the Vietnam War, and OPEC oil price hikes. To illustrate this, let's take for granted that inflation is "too much money chasing too few goods." That's really a statement about two things: inflation very much can be driven by having fewer goods with the same amount of money. This is why Germany and Zimbabwe are bad examples, because both of them involved a real goods collapse. Likewise, oil supply shock can easily drive large inflation.

In other words, the way to reconcile stagflation with the text you quoted is, "full capacity" was lower in the 70s, so we had inflation without full employment. And to be fair, the text you quoted should be "full capacity OR full employment."

Quantitative easing is also very different from what you might think, but in a sense, QE was also the ultimate refutation of, at least, the money multiplier view. The Fed injected far more base money than necessary to maintain the prime rate, and what happened? The money multiplier fell. So really the Fed had the story backwards there, or else they were trying to invoke some voodoo magic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > When the government floods the economy with cheap money printed out of thin > air, it distorts market indicators, making many unprofitable projects appear > profitable.

Oh, is that a new one? It's the first time I read someone stating that when VCs get high on drugs and spend their money on stupid ideas, it's because of something the government did.

<comment><USER7> It's not new at all. It's actually fairly easy to demonstrate. I recommend Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression[0] from 1963.

The quick hit is this: A. US Monetary policy provides large banks with extremely cheap capital B. Large banks competing with each other in the free market must make use of that capital C. Only so many investments are good investments, because in the end, there's only so much consumption, but the unnatural levels of capital driven by US monetary policy push banks to make bad investments (see every financial crisis since the Fed was founded). D. Those bad investments fail, and mass margin calls lead to an economy-wide de- leveraging that destroys economic growth for months or years.

Systemic financial crises can't happen without cheap, printed money.

It's also reasonable to question whether giant companies could exist at all without US monetary policy. Companies of that size are almost completely dependent on the financial industry, which is completely dependent on the Fed's cheap currency.

[0][PDF][https://mises.org/files/americas-great- depressionpdf-0/downl...](https://mises.org/files/americas-great- depressionpdf-0/download?token=rwW4UjXa)

Edit: added PDF label

<comment><USER9> > C. Only so many investments are good investments, because in the end, > there's only so much consumption, but the unnatural levels of capital driven > by US monetary policy push banks to make bad investments (see every > financial crisis since the Fed was founded).

If the US government in 2008 had let Goldman Sachs (and others) to get what they really deserved, possibly keeping afloat tiny investors/victims for social reasons, I think investment would be pretty balanced.

I would argue that the problem is a _revolving door_ between Goldman and the US Gov that benefits very specific ppl and not the FED's policy.

<comment><USER7> I agree with the revolving door.

The way I see it, the Fed is inflating bubbles by pumping cheap money into the financial sector, and then the US Gov is bailing out the financial sector when the bubbles burst.

It's hard to distinguish between the government and big finance, that's for certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem is the VC, stock market and the economy are becoming a giant monopoly(monopsony) engine. It's stupid to invest in competition.

VCs invest "small"(way larger than the average person can afford to start) bets on a few companies so they can dump a large amounts on the winners. Once the companies have passed the test they go to the stock market to raise even more money to further entrench their monopoly.

It used to be the market was justified because competition drove innovation and choice, but investors don't invest in competition.

<comment><USER10> Think of it like a systems problem. You'll only find local minima/maxima with greedy algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Other than Juicero and some sweeping statements about the technology, > energy, and pharmaceutical industries benefitting from government research, > Tarnoff offers little evidence to back up these claims._

The "debunked" article is not scientific in 100% of the meaning of the word, that's a fact -- but if we go by the message of this "debunker" this means we must doubt every single deduction we make in our lives, on the grounds of what? Oh, none of us can't access all the information on the planet in real time. Legit as hell, lol. Let's face it, none of us is Skynet-like and yes we will _always work with sparse data_. Trying to make a good use of those is not a bug. It's a damn good feature.

Far too often I am seeing a very perverse and backwards "arguing" on HN these days -- people grossly underestimate our innate human ability to draw rather good conclusions based on incomplete data, and constantly require "scientific proof" about pretty much anything. Science doesn't have data on most of what's happening on this planet however. And that won't change for a long time still.

We make do with what we have. The rest are yelling "give me evidence!" in non- deterministic areas like country/world economics. Heh, OK.

</comment><comment><USER12> Henry Hazlitt, one of the economists quoted in the article, wrote a book called Economics in One Lesson [1]. It is a brilliant, and very approachable, piece of writing that should be read by everyone interested in the basics of economic theory.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest- Underst...](https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest- Understand/dp/0517548232)

</comment><comment><USER13> >My point being, these examples show that, without market forces, the government has no indicator as to what's worth allocating resources to and what's not.

This supposes that the only things worth allocating resources to are things which would be successful in the market place. He mentions public goods in this essay so I know that he's aware of them, why does he ignore their existence here?

>Shifting focus from the public sector to the private, the idea that entrepreneurs and corporations are somehow worse at innovating, or don't invest enough in R&D, is also called into question by many examples to the contrary. Like SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk with the goal of one day colonizing Mars,which recently accepted a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity.

 _Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times._

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk- subsidies-2015...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk- subsidies-20150531-story.html)

Hmm. He also presupposes that public R&D spending will drive out private R&D but that is actually an open economic question. (lots of studies showing them to be complements and lots showing them to be substitutes)

 _This short survey demonstrates that existing empirical studies do not allow for a definitive conclusion regarding the sign of the relationships between publicly and privately funded R &D. Hence, it is still an open empirical question as to whether public R&D funding increases or decreases privately funded R&D. In order to answer this question, more research with more comprehensive datasets is needed._

[http://aei.pitt.edu/6736/1/1195_30.pdf](http://aei.pitt.edu/6736/1/1195_30.pdf)

>As Ludwig von Mises so eloquently put it...

Ah come on, I am so tired of libertarians whose entire economic education comes from reading other libertarian blogs online. Please quote some living economists, maybe even an economist who is still publishing papers. When will we realize this (specific) sort of libertarian for what they are, a utopian. The market can't solve every problem, that's why we have governments in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't really follow this:

> First, it confuses technological innovation (impressive to engineers) and > economic innovation (valuable to consumers). Second, it confuses gross and > net benefit — of course, when government does X, we get more X, but is that > more valuable than the Y we could otherwise have had?

[...]

> And don't forget Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology that has > the potential to decentralize everything from web apps to logistics.

The latter here seems like a rather good example of the former. EU is about to introduces the revised payment services directive (PSD2) which is set to force banks to interface with third parties. I would expect this action to have far greater value to people than the blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER15> Many already mentioned (at least partially) the fundamental flaws in the economic theory he bases his text on, and also his bad examples (completely ignoring you could provide as many counterexamples of staet-funded innovation and private sector waste) but I just want to emphasize his quotes: Being so obsessed with trying to point out logical fallacies, they don't provide any proof or actual arguments for their side.

For example, the third quote literally provides zero evidence for the fact that the market's failures are primarily attributable to government intervention. Collective action theory alone points out how at least parts of the failures will be the market's.

</comment><comment><USER16> Government does engage into efforts/projects that end up being wasteful.

But, market forces should not be heralded as panacea of there being no-waste.

Every private sector bankruptcy is wasteful for its investors.

Yahoo, HP, Former Dell, Anderson

Ton of examples of failed efforts, pure waste, nepotism, bribery and downright illegal (civil/criminal) behavior in private sector.

I look at it this way... The will of the people also acts as a market force. I think most would agree with that.

Whether there is waste or if it is most efficient, is immaterial. Will of the people, in terms of government's willingness to legislate, will always be a market force. Push and pull is given and is to be expected. Let the battle rage on.

<comment><AUTHOR> The market is certainly not perfect. There is waste, bad investment, etc. There's no avoiding that. Unlike government, however, the market is much more efficient in realizing and correcting for that.

<comment><USER17> If only we had the evidence to support this sort of sweeping generalization. It's a nice theory on paper, in practice it seems to be more complicated depending on time scales and type of goal. There is a lot of no-true-scotsman- ing in support of the dogma, which muddies the waters. For people who want to affect actual change and believe in evidence-based approaches, it's really hard to avoid the conclusion that (today at least) you are best off with a mix.

This empirical mismatch is either handled by engaging in no-true-scotsman support for the dogma, or engaging

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> America: Good for innovation! except for the predatory patent lawsuits which as a small business you won't be able to afford the legal bill to defend against.

<comment><AUTHOR> A good topic for a future article!

<comment><USER18> I think there is some interesting things going on with patents that need looking into. Especially the root cause.

Someone should look at wisdom of making the Patent office self funding, seemingly incentivizing them to give out more patents (if they're valid or not), and having them being seeming immune to penalties for issuing bad patents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The truth is government and the public sector is where innovation, and the > money that fuels it, comes from.

Bell labs? Xerox Parc?

<comment><AUTHOR> What you quote is part of the summary of the article I critique. To avoid any confusion, that's certainly not what I believe. :)

That said, both of those are good examples that I don't even mention in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> CompuServe called. This internet thing is a government boondoggle. They want their article back.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why does he list Bitcoin as an American innovation? Or did I miss read that.

<comment><USER22> It's sort of a stretch, but nobody knows who Satoshi is and many of the major players are American. The Bitcoin Foundation is American, the first user[1] is American, the predecessor to Bitcoin was developed by an American[2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_\(computer_scientist\))

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

<comment><USER17> For this sort of distributed project, it's mostly inept to attempt to nationalize any claim to innovation anyway. Not that it will stop countries from doing it, but it's all rather silly.</comment></comment></comment>


Embracing the Incrementality Mentality - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/08/embracing-the-incrementality-mentality/

<comment><USER2> Thank you - that is good, hard earned knowledge from the trenches. We don't often get that these days.

I would offer one piece of advice to anyone trying to stay on course: when you experience those early highs (launch, fundraising, etc), try to explicitly capture how you feel and why you feel that way. Write it out somewhere you won't lose it, then make a habit of re-reading it regularly. There's nothing foolish about that phase of optimism. It's no worse then some future dose fueled by a new tangent. Keep that optimistic mental image around and use it to fuel new attacks in what can become a boring fight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry to complain, it was a good post, but those loopy animated gifs seriously distract me from being able to read properly.

Maybe I have some strange attention disorder, but the last part of the post I felt like I just can't concentrate on the text because the moving images kept grabbing my attention.

<comment><USER4> pipe it through printfriendly.com, no chrome, no image (if so desired), simple typography.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip! I normally use instapaper to read stuff offline, but some things are easier to read on the spot.

I wonder if printerfriendly can also help in combination with instapaper - some pages, e.g. paul graham's blog (and others) are not converted properly to epub on instapaper for some strange reason. Will give it a try.

<comment><USER4> Yeah they all try to infer meaning from html structure but none can be perfect. I switch from printfriendly, readability or simply disabling css in firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It amazes me that pg (who has seen a lot more startups than I have) sees 5-10% WEEKLY growth as a reasonable target. That is amazing. I suppose its really the difference in "startup" and "lifestyle business" (more my style) right there - the pure scale of the growth.

<comment><USER6> That 5-10% per week is probably only for a very short period. From the article:

 _Important context for this advice, which I believe is often missed, is that the majority of companies in YC launch during the tail end of the program._

So we're talking about companies launching a few weeks before demo day, making a big splash, and getting some nice numbers for demo day. When you've only been launched for four weeks it comparatively easy to get great numbers like this.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, especially if your user base is in the low thousands, if you toss in a $1,000 into marketing per week, you should get a few hundred users from that :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: For you, what's a "must go" conference for Developers - <AUTHOR> I'll get some sort of budget by my company to go to conferences this year, expenses are not a problem right now. Which are some good conferences across the globe that I should look into? <comment><USER2> IMO if you actually want to know for personal use, the question's way too broad. (But fine for a discussion many can benefit from of course.)

The more specific they are (to something you care about) the better.

Unless they're so general that there are high-quality talks about a range of things I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, that's what I'm looking for, specific events. What's an event that is worth going to if you're investing hard in Kubernetes? Azure? Devops(broader scope, but could be usefull). Development in general is harder since you could say it's language dependent, but a broader event like "The Developer's Conference" is fine for this kind of thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think SIGGRAPH 2020 in DC this year will be lit ;)

[https://s2020.siggraph.org/](https://s2020.siggraph.org/)</comment>


Creating bundles with guix pack - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/news/creating-bundles-with-guix-pack.html <comment><USER2> Guix and Nix lack the hype of technologies/buzzwords like Docker and anything container related, but they look incredibly pragmatic and easy to use.

Whenever I look at containers I always think they were started with trying to solve the problem of app packaging but at some point they tugged too hard on the tablecloth and all the other virtualization problems came tumbling down, too. I guess you can avoid a lot of these if you stick to running 1 container per host.

Anyway, Guix looks super user friendly and I'm going to give this a try!

<comment><USER3> Yeah Docker and friends exist basically because the industry is blissfully unaware of nice things like Nix.

<comment><USER4> Not exclusively. If I want to pay someone for support for running NixOS-based servers, who do I pay? Does NixOS have a support term anywhere near Red Hat (or even Ubuntu)? What about the awkward CLI UX? What about a turn-key solution to deploy my app? These questions are reasonably well answered with Docker, less so with Nix/NixOS.

I say this as someone who really likes the ideas of Nix. In fact, I see the benefits of Docker as being solved reasonably well by Nix:

* Isolation of multiple applications on the same server are handled by NixOS containers, which use the same configuration as a NixOS system and use things like cgroups and namespaces,

* Immutable/declarative deployments (through things like docker-compose) are elegantly handled through nix-expressions,

* Multiple versions of a dependency are handled through the nix store.

I think a good measure would be to provide good tooling for generating Docker images from Nix, and this is what `guix pack` can do today. Once Nix has gotten over these pains, it can become a good developer tool, and from there, ops may choose to adopt it.

<comment><USER5> This company uses Nix & recently funded certain features. If you really want some help with Nix, they might have expertiese for you: [http://www.tweag.io](http://www.tweag.io)

<comment><USER4> I was making a point, not actually looking for purchasing a service like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really love GNU GUIX SD (the distro based on this package manager). I just wish the linux-libre crew would bite the bullet and simply publish an actual HCL. "Some transmitters with this chipset may not work because they require non-free firmware (that we deliberately changed the kernel to refuse to load)" doesn't really work for me.

<comment><USER4> The district looks very consistent and nice. I wish there was a version that did have firmwares so those of us with hardware that requires non-free firmware could use it. Yeah, idealism of FSF, but I'm not in a position to buy a Linux-libre-compatible machine right now.

<comment><USER7> FWIW: it's not hard to obtain hardware that works with Linux-libre. My main machine is a Thinkpad X200S where the restrictive Lenovo BIOS has been replaced with Libreboot, allowing me to install a WiFi card from Tehnoetic (using the Atheros driver).

I have a couple of other machines and only one of them has reduced functionality when using Linux libre (e.g. the on-board Radeon graphics chip needs nonfree firmware for higher resolutions).

Guix and GuixSD makes it easy to use a custom kernel package, so you can choose to use a blobby kernel, if you can accept that.

<comment><AUTHOR> To share my own story, I flashed a hacked version of the proprietary BIOS on a Thinkpad X220 and was able to replace the Intel wireless chip with an Atheros chip. At the time Libreboot wasn't available, but it could still be a viable method of using a newer Thinkpad with a fully free OS, downside being that the proprietary BIOS is still in use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't this all be a bit easier if the hashes in guix/nix were relative to some global destination store location, rather than /nix or /guix?

<comment><USER7> What would that look like?

<comment><USER8> I need to look at how pack is implemented, maybe I'm missing something. I already used this to install guile 2.2 on a debian machine, so I'm excited for this development.

But to clarify my point - instead of all the content hashes being based on "/guix/store", they'd be based on "guix/store", which would be relative to a configured "store root" to the daemon (or defaulting to /).

Then packages _generated_ would also have relative links, thus "installing a package from guix" would just be a matter of downloading the dependency graph, and tucking away wherever you please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Without using absolute file names you'd have lookup problems everywhere.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, ran into this when thinking more about this on the bus. Sorry for the distraction.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners - <AUTHOR> I think about starting learning programming for android (possibly iOS) since I have macbook. Looking for decent guides, books, youtube channels. I am open to any advice. <comment><USER3> I'm not sure how mainstream of an opinion this is, but I'd suggest skipping Google's own tutorials. It would be reasonable to suppose that a multi- billion-dollar corporation that massively benefits from a thriving developer community would put out first-rate documentation, but I was quite disappointed by how much of an inconsistent and incomplete mess those tutorials are.

While I've only briefly skimmed it myself, I've heard a lot of good things about The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development. Newer editions require a $20 "subscription", but older ones are available for free [1].

[1] [https://commonsware.com/Android/4-2-free](https://commonsware.com/Android/4-2-free)

<comment><USER4> Is there any example where a library/framework's creator has the best getting started documentation for learning how to use it?

I'm lazy and not very academic, and I feel like I always end up following a Medium or Hackernoon tutorial and using the official API docs for supplemental reference. I feel like this has been my experience for Flutter, React, ReactNative, Docker. I'm actually curious what folks' favorite 1st party docs are.

<comment><USER5> I needed to use only official docs for Laravel and before that CodeIgniter.

Also I really like React's documentation. Previously, I had used random tutorials to get started but recently I went through their official docs to fill in gaps in my knowledge. Now I wish I had started with official docs in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Android development is a mess. Much of the documentation and resources you will find will be outdated. Last time I looked at the code labs from Google many where already deprecated. The Udacity courses are more current than the offical documentation. I'd recommend Programming Kotlin [https://pragprog.com/book/vskotlin/programming- kotlin](https://pragprog.com/book/vskotlin/programming-kotlin) by Venkat Subramaniam if you don't know Kotlin. It's honestly a bad time to learn Android as the ecosystem is in flux with Jetpack and Kotlin and Android X changing everything up.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recommend working through the beginner and advanced programming for Android tutorials on Udacity, both are free:

[https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps- with-...](https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-kotlin-- ud9012)

[https://www.udacity.com/course/advanced-android-with- kotlin-...](https://www.udacity.com/course/advanced-android-with-kotlin-- ud940)

That gives you a solid start to look into more details and do some codelabs on

[https://codelabs.developers.google.com/?cat=Android](https://codelabs.developers.google.com/?cat=Android)

or watch a series about a certain topic on Youtube. I really like the Coding In Flow channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Fh8kvtkVPkeihBs42jGcA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Fh8kvtkVPkeihBs42jGcA)

<comment><USER8> That's a good idea. I did the University of Maryland Coursera course and I liked it a lot:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/android- programming](https://www.coursera.org/learn/android-programming)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This may be a little of topic, but I think that Google's Flutter is really game changing. It let's you write your app once and deploy down to iOS and Android and does so compiled to the target environment. Compared to other cross platform mobile development frameworks, I think they're at the top performance wise.

<comment><USER10> Unless things have changed drastically in the past 6 months, Flutter still isn't ready for the limelight.

It trails React Native significantly.

<comment><USER9> Why do you say that? It's currently being used in production by Google. Can you be more specific about how Flutter is trailing React Native from a tech POV?

<comment><USER10> "Being used in production by Google" is a poor quality measure for most companies/people.

Google, and similarly large companies, have an entire infrastructure and internal community built around supporting tech stacks. If/When developers hit bugs or limitations, Google has the resources to address it. They can literally assign an entire team to improve a single performance aspect of Flutter or build any missing functionality (much of which is going to stay internal to Google).

Outside developers don't have that ability or bandwidth. They can't afford to stop feature development for days or weeks to figure out quirks/improve Flutter. They're almost 100% reliant on public feature set and community support.

From a pure tech POV, Flutter seems like a better technology approach. However, there have been plenty of "technologically better" frameworks that have failed because the general community does not support them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Ray Wenderlich stuff is pretty good. (Full disclosure, I wrote a book for them so I am biased :))

</comment><comment><USER12> There used to be this awesome resource called codepath. They took a developer from tutorials to actual intermediate/senior tier. It was a bay area hands-on thing but I would frequently watch their recorded videos or their online documentation. They still have some material up but a lot is gone (e.g. videos) and I am doubtful if things are up to date. But yeah .. that was awesome and I still point my engineers to what remaining resources they have left online.

</comment><comment><USER13> As you also mention iOS I highly recommend Paul Hudson's books at [https://www.hackingwithswift.com](https://www.hackingwithswift.com)

His 100 Days of Swift (and Swift UI) are also quite good to work through. He is widely known and respected in the iOS development community and works hard to keep it all up to date (all updates are included if you purchase his books).

<comment><USER14> I just bought his Swift book collection based on a colleague's advice - <USER2> particularly wanted this book on Unit Testing.

I've loved them. Just chiming in to also suggest them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is without knowing your existing background in programming, or your ambitions.

I was interested in something similar, many years ago, and realized that the app I wanted to write didn't call upon any of the internal resources of the Android phone. So I was able to write it in Javascript / HTML, and it runs on any platform in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are some good code examples on [http://guides.codepath.com/android](http://guides.codepath.com/android)

They're all outdated now, still in Java. It's open source, so I might actually get around to contributing to them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Before learning to build native apps, I'd try out something that is write once, deploy anywhere like ionic, react-native, vue-native, etc.

Being able to ship to both platforms from the beginning creates a different kind of momentum.

</comment><comment><USER18> There are some good articles/tutorials on raywenderlich.com. [https://www.raywenderlich.com/android/articles](https://www.raywenderlich.com/android/articles)

</comment><comment><USER19> The Free Android Notes for Professionals book

Link: [https://books.goalkicker.com/AndroidBook/](https://books.goalkicker.com/AndroidBook/)

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://developer.android.com/](https://developer.android.com/) and start reading

<comment><USER16> The official documentation is _terrible_. It's practically an example of how bad documentation can get. The developer documents are verbose and say little.

This is perhaps one of the most commonly used widgets in Android: [https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/w...](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/widget/RecyclerView)

It doesn't say why it's deprecated and what it's replaced with. The link is even more confusing. And the document itself also doesn't say what a RecyclerView is or how to use it.</comment></comment>


Google deleted our G Suite - <AUTHOR> https://ilya-sher.org/2018/03/23/google-deleted-our-g-suite/ <comment><USER2> So, if you get an email notification about a service you rely on for critical infrastructure, make sure you follow up on it to be sure there are no critical impacts, rather than tossing it aside after a casual glance without understanding the impact.

</comment><comment><USER3> In short: We f%%%ed up not reading our mails and responding on time, so the account got canceled - and now we put all blame on Google.

<comment><USER2> Well, except they read the mail and, because it only mentioned the primary domain which their G Suite was anchored to that they had let lapse, and not the current domain which was subordinate to the old one, they decided to ignore it and deal with it "later" because they are a "busy startup" who apparently doesn't have time to deal with the fallout of switching business names and domains.

<comment><USER4> If the admin that received the email did not know how the domain was setup that is not google's fault. If they were paying for gsuite they could have and should have changed the default domain on the account. If they were using the grandfathered free version of gsuite they can't change it but they use the old domain for all logins so it should have rung a bell.

The only surprise to me is that the data doesn't go into a recoverable place for a short time instead of just wiping it.</comment></comment></comment>


2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html?src=twr&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&mtrref=t.co&gwh=C0E7076E37291C75ECCB1B1E30B85A2C&gwt=pay <comment><USER2> Several related articles and outright dupes have been on the front page at the same time. We don't need that, of course, so for now let's keep the discussion concentrated at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940674). If someone has a better idea and we can do it in an orderly way, let us know.

<comment><USER3> You're linking to a different article. This article was about 2 airmen having a specific encounter, the other article is about Congress and the funding of the overall UFO program.

<comment><USER2> The two articles form a single piece. One is a sidebar to the video at the top of the other.

In such cases, rather than dedicating two front-page slots to it, we leave the main piece up and link to the auxiliary one in the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the way, if you stop and think about it, you'll realize how much effort it is to "stay in one place" if you have some kind of anti-gravity drive. For instance, right now, I'm sitting at a Starbucks in New Jersey. From my point of view, I have not moved during the last 8 seconds. And yet, planet Earth just moved front-to-back over a point on its orbit around the Sun. And the Sun is rotating through the galaxy at about 40 kilometers per second. So long as you are constrained by gravity, you don't have to worry about this. But what if you had an anti-gravity drive, such that you never experienced gravity? Can you imagine the incredible effort it would take to remain in a "stationary position" if that position was, from your no-gravity perspective, moving very fast, in several dimensions? That's why this jumped out at me:

"The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction"

We should exactly expect a craft to be "jumping around erratically" if it has an anti-gravity drive, yet is also trying to stay over "fixed position" relative to another object that is rapidly spinning (the Earth).

And boiling or frothy water is, again, exactly what water should look like if it is being effect by anti-gravity:

"The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling."

If you could wave a magic wand and make all gravity on Earth stop, the ocean would rapidly disappear into space, and as it did so it would look as if it was boiling.

<comment><USER4> If you had an antigravity drive, the only reason you would bounce around is if it's poorly calibrated.

And if you had one, why would you travel all the way to earth and not say hello? Your power would be so immense you could wipe out life on this planet if you chose. You have zero reason to hide.

<comment><USER3> _the only reason you would bounce around is if it's poorly calibrated_

It's likely that there is no way to calibrate it correctly. If you don't have the benefit of gravity to hold you at a specific point of space/time, then where would you get the coordinates that would allow you to remain in a specific spot, especially when that spot is moving rapidly, relative to a previous spot in space/time?

<comment><USER5> What the heck are you discussing?! If there was such a thing as an antigravity device, there are so many unknowns, that to even pretend we can have the slightest cue about if or how it could be calibrated, is just ... weird.

<comment><USER6> Back off, Man.

These are Experts here.

Show some respect.

<comment><USER5> ? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941390)

Should HN just truncate query strings?

</comment><comment><USER8> What do you think? Will we ever know the truth of this incident? Are there more being covered up? Are aliens visiting Earth?

<comment><USER4> No.

Faster than light travel is impossible.

Aliens are easy to detect if they are anywhere nearby.

<comment><USER9> > Faster than light travel is impossible.

We just discovered our first extrasolar planets in 1992, so let's not pat ourselves on the back for having 100% complete knowledge of everything possible in the universe just yet.

> Aliens are easy to detect if they are anywhere nearby.

Oh, honestly. We can't even detect a stealth aircraft a couple hundred miles away. Submarines can go undetected for months at a time. Asteroids are spotted _after_ they pass between us and the moon.

I suspect alien stealth tech would be at _least_ as good as our own.

<comment><USER4> The amount of energy required to operate a submarine or stealth fighter is less than a trillionth trillionth the amount needed to propel a starship. Asteroids don't emit energy. That energy is easy to detect upon deceleration into our solar system.

And the limit of speed of light is a basic cosmological principle. Faster than light speed travel would violate all principles of our universe, it couldn't exist in it's present form.

<comment><USER9> > The amount of energy required to operate a submarine or stealth fighter is > less than a trillionth trillionth the amount needed to propel a starship.

In a trillion trillion times the volume. You could also have a seemingly inert asteroid that lobs out small probes as it passes through a system for fairly minimal energy signature.

> And the limit of speed of light is a basic cosmological principle. Faster > than light speed travel would violate all principles of our universe, it > couldn't exist in it's present form.

Both relativity and quantum physics came about because we found stuff that violated stuff we thought were principles of our universe.

Even our _current_ theory seems to permit workarounds like wormholes or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does it make sense that this is now a headline even in hn? The current commander-in-chief is a former "reality TV show star".

<comment><USER7> Every president from now on will also be a reality TV star. It is an unbeatable strategy.

Trump will of course be reelected in 2020. In 2024 he'll be succeeded by Martha Stewart.

<comment><USER11> > In 2024 he'll be succeeded by Martha Stewart.

Paris Hilton for 2032.

<comment><USER12> It will go down in evolutionary biology that electing a dysfunctional leader is a sign of surplus and superiority for any group. Assuming it survives the resulting Armageddon...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Swagsy Pre-launch Blog - <AUTHOR> http://blog.swagsy.com/what-is-swagsy-all-about/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just set up our blog for Swagsy in preparation for our beta release. We've run some tests with a few celebrities while working on our MVP. I plan to share some of the insights around celebrity social media that came out of that.

Would be great to hear your opinions about the blog, the content, or anything related to celebrity social commerce in general.

Cheers

Miron

<comment><USER2> I'm not getting a favicon on Firefox on a PC. Don't ask me why I notice these things, but it makes the Swagsy tab look dull.

<comment><USER3> Same on Chrome on Lion</comment></comment></comment>


ShoutEm launches new iPad builder  - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/10/19/shoutems-app-builder-launches-ipad-support-lets-you-quickly-make-apps-youll-actually-love-using/ ShoutEm's app builder launches iPad support, lets you quickly make apps you'll actually love using <comment><USER2> The Next Web loves us :). What can I say.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good work guys, tnx for replying!</comment></comment>


Create React apps using Kotlin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JetBrains/create-react-kotlin-app <comment><USER2> Does this mean that Kotlin -> React -> React Native is feasible too? It's a bit ridiculous on its face, but is there a better way to run Kotlin on iOS? Kotlin is a godsend for Android but if you have to support both platforms one codebase is better

<comment><USER3> Kotlin Native is what you are looking for.

Or maybe j2Objc

One codebase for both platforms is not necessarily what you want though.

Let me rephrase, it might be what you want for a pretty small app : if you have to create an app for a restaurant with orders and menu, a cross platform solution is probably the best use of your time.

For anything bigger, it becomes a harder sell. All these solutions tend to have the same downsides :

\- limited access to new platform features. Especially damaging when Apple tells you that you are going to get featured if you do a Watch app but your SDK does not support that yet.

\- one design does not scale well to two platforms with different UX and features.

\- one more layer of abstraction to manage; making maintainability harder

I think that there is clearly a space for a cross platform business logic framework though. It tends to be the same on both platform with minor differences. It is a pity that only j2objc seems to clearly target this. k2objc/swift would be awesome.

<comment><USER4> Don't mix platform and language. Having same language is just 5% of one platform for iOS android and windows. Weex gives also web mobile support btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is the debugging experience? Is there a debugging experience?

I'm currently a typescript user and I like what VS code has going on with attaching to chrome and providing debugging within the ide. Source maps are okay but a seamless experience in the source language is better. Does the kotlin IDE have facilities for debugging what is going on in the browser?

<comment><USER6> Being a grumpy old man: it's not programming if I can't set a breakpoint.

<comment><USER7> Talk to functional programming folks... :D

<comment><USER8> Or not, we do printf debugging ... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can I use this outside IntelliJ (Atom perhaps)? I despise JavaScript, GWT is underwhelming and Kotlin seems like a nice way to bypass these issues + React is becoming a de-facto standard. IntelliJ became too big/slow/feature creeped and I am not having good time with the latest code completion changes, so I am considering dropping it (PyCharm as well) for something more light-weight.

<comment><USER9> > React is becoming a de-facto standard

The Vue.JS community would beg to differ.

But yeah, if JetBrains could implement something like the Rust Language Server for Kotlin I would be so happy.

<comment><USER10> Agreed with this. I use both React and Vue intensively, day to day. React and Vue both have pros and cons, but I would argue it's actually easier to optimize Vue apps.

Vue's reactive nature actually is superior, because something like Redux requires destroying, regenerating, and messaging around entire objects. This can create serious problems when, for example, trying to use Chrome APIs or manage component renders.

Also, although JSX is nice for developers, it's not friendly to designers. Vue, however, supports single file components that are very designer-friendly.

FWIW, Alibaba began creating their own native framework with Vue called Weex, which is now part of the Apache project. [https://weex.apache.org/](https://weex.apache.org/)

<comment><USER8> Redux is not actually necessary for React, you can manage state without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was trying to get this setup going the other day and found it a little fiddly with some of the Jetbrain's documentation on Kotlin->JS being outdated it seemed and the sample application they have supplied having some issues with missing dependencies, specifically missing package versions on NPM. I'll be trying this out straightaway, so many thanks for this!

<comment><USER6> What's the fix to config mgmt jitter, entropy?

Every time I set aside a few hours to do a React tutorial, I'm defeated by the stack.

I'm very late to docker. I always liked the idea, but didn't have the immediate need. But Python, trying to fix bugs in someone else's project, has now made that need urgent.

After spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME getting the exact right constellation of stuff installed. Switching from macports to homebrew, preinstalling the native libs, wiping all the misc failed python runtimes and starting over, bootstrapping pip, oops I screwed up once with sudo and now a hidden cache under /var/private/root is borking dependency resolution.

FFS.

I really hated Java & maven until I got a nodejs gig.

I really hated nodejs & npm until I had to fix someone else's python.

When does it get better?

Nix everywhere?

<comment><USER7> I think Vagrant is for reproducible development environments.

<comment><USER12> That's the theory ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why use this over TypeScript?

<comment> lf-non Primarily because Kotlin is not a superset of javascript and thus does not inherit the quirks of javascript.

Other than that, if your backend is kotlin then you can potentially share (non JVM dependent) business logic code with the backed. Same goes for android clients. Same interfaces can be be used in client and server.

<comment><USER14> I've never really found a good use case for reusing business logic, but just reusing types is pretty helpful. Although you can also get that via something like Swagger as well.

<comment><USER15> I too am more of a fan of the Swagger/OpenAPI approach (in general terms), but I find it valuable to be able to share validation logic too. (Unless your validation requirements are extremely simple.)

Of course Swagger/OpenAPI doesn't _preclude_ using the same language on the client and server side, so one could always combine "isomorphic" approach with the "service definition" approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Intriguing approach. Anyone know if there's a write-up somewhere from somebody that's tried it? It's always helpful to learn from the gotchas others have run into.

<comment><USER17> JS as a compilation target is supported by kotlin out of the box. You can use any js framework and IIRC it even understands typescript type annotations. I'm super pumped about kotlin, can't wait to write a whole app, backend and front- end in it.

<comment><USER18> Wow. I had no idea. That's great to know. Thanks for relaying that info. Do you have any further resources you recommend with regards to this?

<comment><USER17> Here's a whole stack app built by JetBrains themselves in Kotlin with React for front end [https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-fullstack- sample](https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-fullstack-sample)

<comment><USER18> Nice! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the kotlin code gets compiled to Javascript or to Java bytecode?

<comment><USER20> both: JVM Target -> Java bytecode, Browser Target -> Javascript</comment></comment>


PayPal ends business dealings with Alex Jones's Infowars - <AUTHOR> https://reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKCN1M12NT <comment><USER2> As much as I detest that site, this is now dangerous precedence. Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.

Imagine scenario - there is a totalitarian government in some banana republic that forces these companies (who are already global) not to support dissidents of it's regime in order to operate in their countries, what moral high ground will they take? The totalitarian regime will say you are doing this in US then why not in our country too?

Internet was supposed to be great equalizer. But supposedly monopolies are abusing their power. This is too close to net neutrality argument. Payment processors is oligopoly business like ISPs. It's a high barrier to enter due to governmental regulations. Now why can't be case made for net neutrality for payment processors?

And "build your payment processing company" \-- give me a break. Any media organization can't just build payment processing services. I know there is BTC/ETH, saving grace for decentralization of Internet and working as true intended goal.

<comment><USER3> _Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim._

It's not on a whim.

Payment processors -- including Visa, Amex, Discover, Mastercard -- have clear rules about hate sites and promoting violence. This is a rule clearly spelled out that all merchants must follow.

Infowars violates rules they agreed to follow when they became a merchant. That's breach of contract.

Edit: and here's Paypals AUP: [https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse- full](https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full)

 _You may not use the PayPal service for activities that: ... relate to transactions involving ... the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory_

Seriously... that's breach of contract. Does infowars need to follow the contracts they agree to? Do those that promote hate get to disregard contracts?

Peddling hate speech does not earn you the ability to disregard contracts you have agreed to.

<comment><USER4> Hate speech is protected free speech. Not because anyone loves hate speech, but defining your opponents views and journalism as "hate" is very easy to do depending on your worldview.

<comment><USER5> That has no relevance in this discussion since the Government wasn't involved.

<comment><USER4> The government intervenes and is involved all of the time in private companies regarding constitutional rights (e.g., a bakery making cakes for non- traditional marriages).

I don't like Alex Jones or his view, but we have strong protections for speech in this country for good reasons and I don't want to see us sacrifice them because someone we hate comes along.

<comment><USER5> PayPal has free speech rights as well. Would you force a Black owned printer to do business with the KKK?

<comment><USER6> I mean, we make KKK-owned enterprises do business with black people...

One's a choice and one's not of course, but there is still a comparison to be made there.

Edit to add: it's possible that being a conspiracy theorist is as much a choice as being schizophrenic is. If that was the case - true, proved beyond any doubt, it's genetic or environmental, whatever - would you be willing to extend the same protections to conspiracy theorists as you would to other protected classes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Visa, Discover and Amex prohibit hate-group sites on their networks. Mastercard doesn't allow merchants that promote or incite violence. PayPal too, it's the 2nd paragraph in their AUP: [https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse- full](https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full)

What do you guys expect PayPal to do? Draw a line at InfoWars, and die on their sword, as the major credit card networks cut them off and kill the company?

Infowars isn't going to be able to continue processing credit card payments. It's up to paypal if they want to go with Infowars and die or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> People doesn't realize that all this will effect them. Ya, scapegoat the guy who everyone thinks deserves it. But, then it's on to the people who might deserve it. Then, they come knocking on your door and you question how. It's happening right now in front of your eyes. I would be very scared at what is to come from letting these massive corporations exercise this kind of mass banning power.

<comment><USER8> So you demand that these private corporations need to do business with someone they find contemptible? Nobody is putting him in jail. He's free to speak his noxious views. And other people are not obligated to publish or advertise on them.

<comment><USER9> As long as it's not a wedding cake, right?

<comment><USER10> I think there's a substantial _moral_ difference between (1) a business discriminating against members of a sexual minority, and (2) a business discriminating against a dogwhistling conspiracy theorist.

<comment><USER9> I agree. I also would say that allowing a company to make decisions based on moral relativism is an even more slippery slope than we're already on.

<comment><USER10> Where's the relativism?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Paypal's own words:

"We undertook an extensive review of the InfoWars sites, and found instances that promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions that run counter to our core value of inclusion."

The problems are:

1) There are many websites "promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions". As an atheist, I would say I have seem many atheist websites doing this.

2) This may not be fair. Nobody would believe Paypal has reviewed the speech of all the websites using their service. So why did they pick InfoWars? For what reason? Was that because there were lots of complains? Paypal not only need to explain why InfoWars should be banned, they also need to explain why they picked InfoWars.

3) There is no due process. Does InfoWars has a chance to appeal the decision? Were they informed before the decision was made? Were they given time for transition?

4) Yes. Paypal as a private company can make this decision. But nobody here is claiming that Paypal's decision is illegal. Many people feel this is dangerous, and there are good reasons to feel this way:

a) The nature of Paypal's business has nothing to do with speech. It is dangerous for a financial company to censor speech. It is different from facebook or twitter, which are speech platforms, so the content of speech are important to them. Why should Paypal even care about the speech on other websites? We do not need financial companies to shape the world of speech.

b) InfoWars promotes hate speech, but it is not illegal in the U.S. It is not a terrorist group. If it really incited violence, law enforcement will handle it. The difference between law enforcement and business: law enforcement has to follow the due process, but business makes arbitrary decision.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a question for the commenters who are disappointed by this event: how do you feel about PayPal's actions here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017635) (PayPal's crackdown on ASMR creators)? If you have a different reaction to that, then please explain the difference between the two kinds of events for me as plainly as you can for my understanding.

<comment><USER13> What's a reasonable explanation of the ASMR ban.

I'm asking because I just don't see any ewuivalence between these two issues. I'm personally deeply disappointed by (and oppose) both bans, but at least I can see _some_ reason for Infowars ban ("he's spreading harmful information") whereas I cannot really come up with any not-obviously-contrived (i.e. "sex- fear-mongering") explanation.

<comment><USER12> My question is aimed at developing my understanding of the people who support the ASMR ban, but are against the InfoWars one.

<comment><USER14> Are there any such people?

I tried to figure out what was going on from your story but it's like coming into the middle of a family fight that's been going on for years. The stuff they're currently arguing about is probably not how it started.

In particular PayPal says specifically in that article that they don't have any policies against ASMR (which apparently is mostly videos of women making weird sound effects?). So why are they suspending accounts, well presumably they think they're doing it for other reasons. The article goes on to talk about YouTube being "anti sex" or something so presumably there's more to these videos than is being let on.

At any rate, I think it's dumb that payment processors suspend accounts for sex-related stuff too, but that's at least something with a basis in US law so PayPal may feel they are legally forced to do it. FOSTA is mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Despite my feelings of "It couldn't have happened to a 'nicer' fellow", I still have to stand by "It shouldn't have happened to _any_ fellow".

</comment><comment><USER16> How far will this go? Banks refusing to finance his mortgage? Grocery stores banning him from buying food? He hasn't done anything illegal he's just an asshole.

<comment><USER17> Slander is a crime.

<comment><USER18> *tort

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sadly, these enforcement actions are very selective.

It's not like PayPal or other SV companies for that matter like Patreon really care about their Community Guidelines.

I reported a person to Patreon some time ago who takes it as a job to spread hateful/false info about white helmets, even advocating for killing them many times. High profile enough person to be documented by journalists, and have special chapters in large reports about russian propaganda. No response. And it's not like these people are not being killed regularly, by the same government that regularly tags her in images posted to twitter from their embassy accounts.

But hey, baby steps.

<comment><USER20> Bullshit. Paypal drops merchants for arbitrary reasons all of the time. They've been doing it for over a decade.

<comment><USER6> Paypal dropping merchants for arbitrary reasons is not evidence in favor of them caring about their community guidelines. Consistently dropping merchants for well-defined violations would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> PayPal would have prevented American Independence, citing violence.

</comment><comment><USER22> Its paypal business who they do business with but it shows a very low threshold on the integrity of their service. They may not like what he says or what's he generally about(I am not a fan of him) but he's not doing anything illegal. If I was in working in a business they were not a fan of(who knows?), I would definitely be looking for other options.

They have a history of doing this sort of thing and they have known to be less than righteous. It's really discerning that a money handler can do something like this at their whim.

I haven't had great experiences doing typical business with them.

</comment><comment><USER4> The barrier to being categorized as "hate speech" seems to becoming increasingly easier to apply.

</comment><comment><USER18> And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

</comment><comment><USER23> Damn they really are doing a number on him. A conspiracy to silence Alex Jones and deplatform him completely.. I never really saw him as a serious guy to over the top screaming etc.. but this is pretty insane.

<comment><USER24> A conspiracy implies all of these companies .. conspired, rather than independently reaching a conclusion that supporting this fellow with their services was bad for their own business.

<comment><USER13> How could they "independently" reach the same conclusion at roughly the same time?

I'm not saying they necessarily "conspired", could be as simple as one CEO seeing the news and saying "that's a good idea, we should do that too", but the chances of these decisions being completely independent is almost zero.

<comment><USER24> Either it's a conspiracy or it is not. If there are a bunch of people running down the street, and I see that they're running from a fire, then I'm going to run too. That is not a conspiracy. The decision is independent even if the reason is shared.

That's not to say it's just one big coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What the fuck are these comments? At some point, when _everyone_ has shut you out, don't you realize that _you_ are the problem?

<comment><USER26> Some people think abstract principles matter more than specific edge-cases.

<comment><USER27> I'll just throw out that it's not a coincidence which specific edge-cases these people choose to get up in arms about.

Like, I don't see a lot of outrage from free speech types when liberal professors get fired for saying stupid shit. It's only a certain kind of speech being suppressed that they seem to care about.

[http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/college/ut- condemns-t...](http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/college/ut-condemns- teacher-whose-tweet-blames-harvey-on-texas-gop-vote/2335504)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2017/06/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2017/06/26/professor-fired-after-defending-blacks-only-event-on-fox- news-i-was-publicly-lynched-she-says/)

<comment><USER28> > Like, I don't see a lot of outrage from free speech types when liberal > professors get fired for saying stupid shit

Is it the same thing?

A better example would be if power companies and phone companies started disconnecting liberal professors for saying stupid shit.

<comment><USER27> I wasn't trying to make an analogy to this specific situation. You're right that it's not the same. I was just pointing out things I've noticed about the broader free speech discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cue the: "if you don't like it; just create your own internet and payment- processor" responses.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't care about Alex Jones, but this is why we need Bitcoin.

<comment><USER9> We have Bitcoin, but it is still more challenging to use than Paypal for most users.

<comment><USER31> Use Square's Cash App. It has USD and BTC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> BTC buy signal?

</comment><comment><USER9> I fear Mr. Jones will go from being a fringe loon to being a major talking point in 2020, spoon feeding people what they want to hear about their fears (similar to what we saw in 2016).

</comment><comment><USER33> The First Amendment isn't defended at Michelangelo's "David", but at Larry Flynt's "Hustler".

<comment><USER34> The First Amendment doesn't obligate private companies to do business with people or other businesses they don't want to be involved with.

If the U.S. government were ordering his accounts closed, you might have an argument.

<comment><USER33> The ideal is bigger than that. If we only support rights for people and ideas we support, then they aren't rights. Freedom of speech is not just a constraint on our government; its an ideal that only survives if we stand up for it vigorously. Its absurd to expect our government to be a better "person" than we expect of ourselves.

<comment><USER35> Do we have a right to a business's services though? Should bars be unable to ban unruly customers? I don't see how this is very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> About damn time. There are limits to "free speech", namedly when said speech is inciting racial hatred.

And it's about time companies realize their role in actually _enabling_ the hatred - and act upon their responsibility.

<comment><USER37> > namedly when said speech is inciting racial hatred.

There is no such limit in the US.

<comment><USER36> > There is no such limit in the US.

...which makes the US fairly unique in the world. Nearly all other developed countries have developed laws to combat hate speech. With the result being that the US is probably the _only_ country in the world where people wearing swastika flags and doing the Hitler salute will be _defended_ by ordinary citizens.

400k US citizens died in WW2 fighting the Nazi regime and in 2018 open Nazis can carry the swastika flag in the US. What a disgrace.

<comment><USER38> We (or, I hope, some of us) still believe in the same values. Murder and genocide are not condoned, nor do we want a repeat of what happened in WW2. _Free speech_ is the protected value. That my countryman might choose to use that freedom poorly is his choice, but that's part of it: he's _free_ to choose. Unorthodox ideas might be the next freedom or civil rights movement, or they might just be absolute garbage; it isn't the government's place to pick or choose what ideas get expressed.

The old quote applies,

> _I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to > say it._

That said, I don't see why a private enterprise should be forced to do business with someone unwillingly. (Again, if this were the government, I'd have a very different opinion.)

As for some of the more egregious things he's done, such as claiming Sandy Hook was a hoax,

> _six families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as > well as an FBI agent who responded to the attack filed a defamation lawsuit > against Jones for his role in spreading conspiracy theories about the > shooting._

This is the proper forum for this to occur in, and hopefully justice will be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This kind of thing is the one unquestionable good reason for having crypto currencies available. They're not just for drugs and contracts!

Forget paypal. The oligopoly that is Visa and MasterCard could easily shut down anyone they want because of "hate" or whatever abstract noun we're using to attack those the NY Times doesn't like.

</comment><comment><USER40> I truly wish the predictable conversation to follow could be something other than the inevitable bike shedding over what constitutes free speech, slippery slopes, and conspiracy theories. In a dozen submissions of similar topics the comments could be largely interchanged with only a few proper nouns being changed. All too often it seems like people firing mortars from deep within ideological trenches, and worse, some people making weak fallacious arguments of doom instead of openly supporting the speech in question.

It's all very twisty, predictable, and pointless and I've never seen anyone budge. It's just "over the top boys" and at the end of the day no man's land gets a few more craters.

<comment><USER13> Do you have a more substantial viewpoint to share?

I think to a large extent the same arguments are repeated because stories like these are _literally_ arguments for both sides:

"See, I was right, censorship will not stop at at anything, it's a slippery slope!"

"See, bad people/ideas should be censored and it helps make society better."

<comment><USER40> My point is that it is pointless to have these conversations here, because no exchange of ideas takes place, no intellectual curiosity is satisfied, and bad faith arguments are the norm. You may not like that point, but that doesn't make it any less of a point. For whatever reason (I already presented my thoughts on those reasons as I see them) this site can't handle this discussion, and the results are distracting and disheartening.

I suspect that a major reason I haven't yet mentioned is that everyone who isn't identifying as being on a "side" stays the hell away from them. That leaves the raving ideologues for the most part, with a smattering of the same being shouted down for not hewing to what is Obviously Correct. My substantive point is that the moderation on this site should treat this like any other instance of politics that it buries, because it is, and because it creates the same kinds of endless and repetitive arguments and flame wars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> As much as Alex Jones says some indefensible things, this continuing saga is a great argument for why we need to start regulating certain things on the Internet like utilities.

Imagine Alex Jones's power company deciding to shut down power to his studio because they (rightly) think he's being an asshole, or the phone company disconnecting his landline.

Just because something's a private company doesn't mean we should put up with them selectively denying people access to their "platform". Being plugged into the power company is also being on their "platform", and would probably be regulated as loosely as Facebook, YouTube, PayPal et al if electric power was a thing that had only really taken off in the last 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think that Monday I will be talking to the money transmission licensing board in my state.

Maybe PayPal needs to explain to my state why they should retain the ability to continue to operate...not sure that their one-sided values are in alignment with the law.

EDIT: remember that if you tolerate this behavior towards people you disagree with (I myself don't pay any attention to Jones as I think he is someone who doesn't really try to understand reality), then when the tables are turned, as they do quite often in politics, what basis will you have to complain about the poor treatment you or someone whose views you champion, receives?

<comment><USER43> A commercial business is not allowed to pick and chose who it's customers are?

I'm not picking sides in this discussion, only curious to understand your viewpoint and to learn more about what legal boundary PayPal crossed.

<comment><USER9> There is an entire category of laws dedicated to discrimination by businesses, yes. The question is here is whether Mr. Jones is part of a protected class, and how broadly a company can use their terms of service (which is essentially discrimination by policy)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask: Everyone criticizes our education system, but what could be done to fix it? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Some things I'd look at:

Stop isolating people in class rooms, and get them out, at least part of the day, involved with their interests with companies pursuing them.

Shift some of the responsibility for paying for highly skilled workers back to where it used to be, companies that use them.

Invest more money in education, and reap the benefits in lower crime rates and less unemployment.

Stop punishing boys, especially minorities, with suspensions for class room disruption when they aren't able to sit quietly at their desks. Instead provide opportunities for them to engage actively with their learning.

Smaller classroom sizes, which have been linked with higher grades.

Restore funding for the arts and sciences, both of which have been cut in favor of increased support for reading, composition and math because of standardized tests.

Or maybe you want to talk about College?

Require colleges to give preferences for merit based scholarships to those with actual financial hardship, instead of the current practice of subsidizing middle class students because it's more lucrative to give 20k at 4 people who's parents can pay the rest, instead of 80k to one person.

Again, connect classroom content with actual work, and actual research.

Provide a no cost college education to any citizen that wants it, like many countries in europe. Have college applications be based on the best school a kid can get into, instead of the best they can afford.

<comment><USER3> Your ideas are great, but I believe the implementation will be impossible, especially for free college education to every citizen who wants it. Or maybe it is possible, but the quality will drop.

I wonder why we focus on education. It is a good thing, valuable for far more than monetary purposes, but my primary concern is the character of the students. As great as education is, I believe character is more important.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My weekend project, realtime log viewer in Flask - <AUTHOR> http://logger.conceptis.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> So if anyone's wondering how this works, it's actually quite simple thanks to juggernaut. I used Flask to build the web app but because it's basically just serving up a page that really wasn't necessary. You could actually write this all with something like gevent, however Flask lends itself to extensibility and you could certainly use this as a component of a larger app.

The primary functionality goes like this: Essentially I wrote a small script to read off a log file, that runs concurrently as a greenlet via gevent. Anything it reads is pushed to juggernaut which uses socketio to publish that along a channel. The frontend reads off that channel, pushing in realtime.

I actually spent more time styling it than I did coding it. The VT terminal style is very intentional and I'm pretty happy with the overall result of the look (hey, CSS3 is nice!). I also included a couple of alternate color schemes: blue and orange.

Hope you like it! :)

<comment><USER2> I understand Flask can not do socketio because it is WSGI app. Any idea if socketio will be supported by WSGI at all?

<comment><USER3> In addition to this, I recently discovered that Flask doesn't support Transfer-Encoding: chunked (which is part of the HTTP/1.1 spec), and doesn't fail gracefully either (when receiving a chunked request). Then I discussed it with Armin and realized that the WSGI spec prevents Flask from doing either. (See also <http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/aug/10/wsgi/>)

Time to fork WSGI?

ETA: Upon further investigation, there's a big discussion out there on what to replace WSGI with, here's one entry point: [http://dirtsimple.org/2011/08/is- wsgi-lite-library-or-protoc...](http://dirtsimple.org/2011/08/is-wsgi-lite- library-or-protocol-and.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool. And not to take away from it all, but ...

You can do the same or better with multitail locally tailing a remote tail over ssh, and you get multitail's color schemes for various log types like mail or httpd.

        multitail -s 2 -sn 2,2 -C \
        -l "ssh -t xxx.yyy.zzz.123 tail -n 100 -f /var/log/nginx/a*" \
        -l "ssh -t xxx.yyy.zzz.123 tail -n 100 -f /var/log/nginx/e*" \
        -l "ssh -t xxx.yyy.zzz.123 tail -n 100 -f /var/log/uwsgi/*" \
        -l "ssh -t xxx.yyy.zzz.123 tail -n 100 -f /var/log/ufw.log"

<comment><USER5> That's pretty cool, hopefully we will have better support for multiple logs soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is really bugging me as a programmer: We live in the 21st century and people still include user-supplied data in their pages as if Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is totally unknown.

I get a bad feeling when these simple attacks are possible; because this shows that there are fundamental flaws in some people's coding styles. I know this sounds harsh, and I recognize it is llamdba's weekend project, but these flaws show neglection of fundamentals in handling data.

Apart from this, this live log is very entertaining!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, I overlooked the fact that the log data wasn't being escaped (something that I had realized in a previous chat application I had made last week). A quick fix is to use flask's built-in escape function, something like: line = escape(line). The server is now escaping lines off the log.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for the entertainment, unknown people of HN.

X.X.X.X - - [27/Dec/2011:00:26:07 +0000] "GET /hey-i-can-send-secret-messages HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2"

Y.Y.Y.Y - - [27/Dec/2011:00:26:19 +0000] "GET /I%20can%20recieve%20secret%20messages%20too HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"

X.X.X.X - - [27/Dec/2011:00:26:25 +0000] "GET /hey-i-can-send-secret- messages/maybe-al-qaeda-could-use-this HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2"

X.X.X.X - - [27/Dec/2011:00:26:50 +0000] "GET /ooh-you-can-recieve-them? HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2"

Z.Z.Z.Z - - [27/Dec/2011:00:27:05 +0000] "GET /they+are+already+using+it HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"

X.X.X.X - - [27/Dec/2011:00:27:34 +0000] "GET /hello-decatur! HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2"

Y.Y.Y.Y - - [27/Dec/2011:00:27:56 +0000] "GET /this%20is%20alqaeda%20checking%20in...%20Hussain%20do%20you%20copy??? HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"

X.X.X.X - - [27/Dec/2011:00:28:15 +0000] "GET /200-hussain-found HTTP/1.1" 404 211 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2"

<comment><USER8> I coudn't respond to hussain :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can immediately envision some use cases for this RTM at the workplace, yet our log file throughput is extremely high, so I would have to incorporate some type of throttling mechanism, Great Project...

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice demo, thanks for enlightening me of juggernaut's existence! If I were to be picky, it's hard to read anything because the scroll position moves to the end even if you explicitly control it, which it shouldn't. Plus, there's this reliability problem that between your Flask code that serves the last 100 lines and the realtime communication, you can miss some entries. And it's a bit inefficient such as loading the whole log file just to grab the last 100 lines. Perhaps this comment should be on GitHub...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's definitely a little rough around the edges. If you're interested, I'd be more than happy to merge your suggested changes via a pull request on GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was planning on writing something like this in the next few weeks for my Flask app that runs on the Rascal (see profile for details), but now I won't have to.

Thanks, Max.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're most welcome. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about setting it up. Also if there's changes you'd like to make that would benefit the application in general, I'll be happy to accept pull requests on GitHub.

<comment><USER7> Roger that. I'll let you know if I come up with anything good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's poetic. It's like walking into a room filled with mirrors.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is it that Flask is highlighted when juggernaut, node.js and redis do the realtime communication? :-/

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it's not built in a JS framework such as Node (it just uses those things as a secondary service). Which up until recently was kind of a pain. Juggernaut makes life easier and as a result there has been an increase in realtime Flask applications which is pretty cool if you're a Python web dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's fun to watch. You can communicate with your browser agent.

</comment><comment><USER8> Response 500 :(. I was having fun chatting with GET requests..

</comment><comment><USER14> XSS By firstname.lastname@example.com :) nice work

<comment><USER15> <https://github.com/maxcountryman/logmon/issues/1>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems to have some XSS vulnerabilities

<comment><USER5> Yeah we had the data just return instead of escaping the value.</comment></comment>


YouTube Co-Founder Starts Venture Capital Firm - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/03/20/youniversity-ventures/

<comment><USER2> this is quite old, YV was started almost a year ago, if not more, i think.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it was about a year ago. I met with them last April about a now-defunct project, and they had been operating for a few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> its just the trend nowadays......

<comment><USER5> I don't disagree, but at the same time, it does take an eye to be able to spot a good idea. If you look at Karim's LinkedIn profile (<http://www.linkedin.com/in/jawedkarim>), he worked at IPO and then helped to found YouTube--two not so bad bets (though I don't know if he got anything above his salary at PayPal). That said, if you assume that he's worked at only these two companies, he's already batting .1000.

A typical VC will make 10 investments for his portfolio of which 7 or 8 will go under, two may return 3-5x ROI, and one _may_ be big (but very unlikely it'll be the next Google). Since Karim is starting a VC firm, you could argue he's going into it with a better track record than most VC's, and the fact that he's played an active operational role in two companies matters quite a bit when it comes to evaluating deals. I'm not saying he's going to kill all the other VC's out there, but if he's got the dosh ($), why /not/ start a VC firm--espescially if that's his passion?!</comment></comment>