The US startup is disappearing - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1309824/the-us-startup-company-is-disappearing-and-thats-bad-for-the-economy/ <comment><USER3> Very interesting chart in this article that shows more educated people (masters, bachelor's, some college) are less entrepreneurial than they were 25 years ago. On the flip side, less educated folks (high school graduates and non-high school graduates) have seen an increase in entrepreneurship.

"In 1992, 4% of 25-54 year olds with a master's degree or PhD owned a small company with at least 10 employees. In 2017, this was true of only 2.2%."

Could it be that the cost barrier is lower today than in the past, but there is much more money to be made as an educated employee today than 25 years ago?

<comment><USER4> A big difference is that modern kids are conditioned to do what they're told, work hard and choose a safe path in life.

To get into a good school now you have to spend your time studying hard to pass the standardized tests.

Previously kids playing around, got bored, chasing girls/boys, leaving home as soon as possible, maybe joined the army, married young. So a 25 year old already had a lot of life experience. Able to take the responsibility to follow dreams and start up a new firm.

Today's kids at 25 are just leaving school and still dont really know much about the real world. Great candidates to get a safe job in a company, not so great at starting a firm.

<comment><USER5> I can attest to this. I'm currently working my way through the college application pipeline, and my peers are laser focused on what it takes to get into a good college. Rather than pursuing what interests them, many choose challenging courses just to have a favorable transcript, and standardized test stress is an epidemic. Anxiety about "getting in" to a good school supersedes any dreams of starting a venture or pursuing an option that isn't a 4-year prestigious university.

The disappearance of new ventures can be attributed in some way to this new way of thinking. I've been told that college anxiety didn't exist 20 years ago -- maybe it's time to go back to those days. High school, in my mind, is a time to experiment and find what actually interests you: not to manifest into a homework bot that's dominated by stress.

This isn't always the case, though. The 25-year-old with life experience and a past of experimentation still exists, it's just not the norm anymore.

<comment><USER6> I've done some serious reflecting on exactly what you've said. I'm on that "safe" route. I went through the college anxiety, the GPA worries -- all of that was my mantra. To this day, I still admit to being a "resume" builder. I want things on a paper for a sense of achievement.

This scares me, though. I'm starting to realize that is not what it's about. It's about making a difference. Sure, you can indeed make a difference doing what you and I have described. A company needs people like that. But I always wonder, could I have made an even bigger difference doing something else? I'm not even talking about my education. I've even thought about this for sports.

For instance, I grew up playing baseball religiously because I had already invested a lot of my time with it. I didn't want to adhere to anything else for the fear of wasting my time. Here I am, years later, realizing I would've been an even better tennis player had I actually been open to trying something that would've given me more success, but potentially been less safe (starting a new sport in the middle of being so devoted to one already). Here I am, hitting with racquet on every volley, wishing that I had bought into the sport earlier because I know I could've been better at it than I was baseball.

<comment><USER7> I hear you. I believe it's most rewarding, in general, to create your own path.

You will fail. Embarrass yourself. 'Let down' family and friends. But you'll know those that really care about you.

And you'll find out what you're made of. Oh, and have some good stories along the way.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a self-educated software engineer, entrepreneur, and business owner I cringe whenever data statistics of "educated" people are only represented by individuals who have a masters, Ph.D., or doctorate.

I have studied at universities, but unfortunately, the education system in the USA is not suitable for Autism. From an early age I had to teach myself because 99% of my teachers and professors didn't have the resources or time to help me. Does anyone here have a similar experience?

<comment><USER9> I was briefly Director of Community Life for the TAG Project. I was homeschooling my 2xE sons and moderating a gifted homeschooling list, basically.

Since he was a preschooler, I have told my oldest son he will need to be an entrepreneur. He won't make it as an employee. I tried to enroll him in college classes when he was 13. The college accepted him, but the classes fell through. I think one was full and the other was cancelled.

After that, he told me he really did not want to attend college. He wanted me to keep homeschooling him, even though what he knew in some areas was beyond me, so I wasn't really qualified to teach him per se in some areas. So I became a resource person that fostered his own self education.

Bill Gates is a college drop out. So is Madonna. I used to be able to quote statistics. A fairly high percentage of entrepreneurs can't be arsed to finish a degree program. They are too busy making things happen.

Degrees are about credentialing. Entrepreneurs often take classes for a specific purpose, to learn specific knowledge or skills. Credentials tend to matter less to them than knowledge and skill.

The minute I post this, you can bet someone will rebut it. It isn't true of, say, 90% of entrepreneurs and there are plenty who do have substantial formal education. But the aggregate figures show (or did at one time) that these things are generally true.

It's certainly not just you. Plenty of entrepreneurs describe themselves as _mavericks_ or _misfits_ or similar.

<comment><USER10> i once heard that most small business owners are either the children of small business owners or small family farmers.

if this is true, perhaps we're in a downward spiral, given historically smaller startup cohorts and the agglomeration of family farms into corporate farms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.theatlas.com/charts/Syh34PDZm](https://www.theatlas.com/charts/Syh34PDZm)

That graph is fascinating. The decreasing value of formal higher education to becoming a successful entrepreneur is being accelerated from so many angles. The cost of collegiate education itself has risen dramatically, while at the same time the cost of access to collegiate educational materials has plunged to zero due to the internet and open publishing. If this trend continues, I wonder if motivated, aspiring entrepreneurs will be better off skipping formal higher education altogether. Could that already be true today? If someone can decide that the college path is not for them at a young enough age with a high enough level of maturity, then they can unschool and skip the bull-shit college-admittance optimization altogether, and instead focus on actually becoming an educated, masterful individual in domains that will help them create new value that they, and society, care about.

Of course, there's so many confounding factors feeding into this one simple graph that I may have over-extrapolated to this particular thrust, but I think it's a perspective completely absent from the article that should be articulated.

<comment><USER12> That's one conclusion you could make.

An alternative conclusion is that educated would-be entrepreneurs are now receiving higher wages in industry, resulting in the group shifting to industry. Less educated would-be entrepreneurs see wages lowering/stagnant in corporations and thus shift to entrepreneurship.

Income source: [https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s- household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective)

<comment><USER11> Right, that's definitely a huge component, and one that is focused on in the original article. I bring up these other factors because they're not mentioned, including the fact that the rate of entrepreneurship has actually increased among the least formally educated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every nascent industry is dominated by startups and little guys becoming big guys. It happened with oil, the auto industry, electronics, and among many, many others.

Although I believe we're only in the midst of the information revolution it would make sense that over time as the industry matures it becomes more and more difficult to break into it. The big guys have leverage and lawyers and I think what we see today with many startups being built to get bought rather than as new enterprises that will stand on their own is evidence of this new phase shift.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would love to see if there is a correlation between the quantity of startups VS new major innovation waves.

Yes, there are less new startups today but if you come to think of it, we don't have a major innovation at the moment that's easy to jump into. Look at the late 90s, we had the INTERNET, anyone could make a website with frontpage or a little html tag understanding.

Then in the late 2000s we had the MOBILE PHONES... I have an idea for an app! (everyone did!)

At the moment, we have AI/ML but my opinion is that it's not ripe for an average person to start an ML company. Another major upcoming branch is blockchain but it's also not mature enough for this major innovation to trickle down a leaf tree of startups.

What do you think?

Oh, almost forgot to mention AR/VR! Not there yet!!

<comment><USER10> i also wonder about the funding mechanism and landscape.

could it be that the VC firms have come to dominate and guide the funding process in such a way that starting a firm is a lot less attractive now?

<comment><USER15> Well, for one, they have ensured that joining a startup is financially less attractive than working at a large company/FANG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure "the startup is disappearing" is the only explanation for this data. Isn't it possible that companies are just lasting longer than 2 years?

What if there was a larger percentage of age 0-2 companies '85 because back then, so few were making it past 2? Maybe easier access to capital has increased survival rate (or at least slowed down dissolution by a few years).

This explanation also fits better with the massive influx of cash into VC over the last ~10 years.

<comment><USER17> Startups lasting longer would have nothing to do with this? 0-2 Years represents "New" startups, so the number of new startups is declining.

<comment><USER16> That would be true if this was actually a number, not a percentage. To take a hyperbolic example, there could be 100x more startups at 0-2 years right now than in '85 and 100,000x aged 2-4 years; you'd still see a percentage decline in the former and we'd be pretty far from "the startup disappearing."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am curious about the methodology to count startups. One of things is sure that we are now in a consolidation phase. We are seeing a glut of M&A deals. In that vein many startups are disappearing because they are getting acquired by larger companies. No one wants to be the next Yahoo refusing to buy a company which might become their next chief competitor. And the cheap credit environment is making this easier.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't have enough broad economic insight to know if this should be worrying generally or possibly even be seen as good.

But what I do know is that work conditions, pay, and equity risk characteristics in start-up jobs are miserable, not to mention that work life balance is often poor and the start-up management is often deluded about the scope and importance of the business.

I would be happy if entrepreneurs believed they needed a far greater amount of initial capital before starting a business, and viewed it as essentially mandatory to provide market rate salaries, comprehensive insurance, and seriously professional work life balance and workplace behavior, all _before_ even hiring the first employee, and also even after accounting for early stage equity.

If it was something of a cultural norm that you are a shyster, suspicious "entrepreneur" if you attempt to convince people to work for you without already having the capital arranged to invest that significantly in giving them good jobs from day one, I think this would be a great thing for the labor market generally, and would greatly deter a bunch of hype-driven nonsense startups that essentially allow already wealthy people to treat it like lottery tickets at the expense of employees.

</comment><comment><USER20> In my experience, only the founders of startups make any money. If the startup is successful, then the founders walk away with millions. Everyone else would be financially better off if they worked for a large company instead.

Also, the executives of the startups take free trips and expense everything on the company's dollar. While the employees receive low pay.

I don't think the large companies are winning. The startups are killing themselves.

<comment><USER12> > Everyone else would be financially better off if they worked for a large > company instead.

To be fair a lot of the change is because large companies are paying people so much these days. Barring large amounts of funding, a Series A- startup (based on the company being 0-2 years old definition of the article) simply can't compete with salaries.

Perhaps startups should start offering far more equity to early employees (I'm surprised you don't see more seed stage firms offering ~5% to senior devs) to compensate for the cash loss.

<comment><USER21> Nobody will give a senior developer 5% equity when even VCs only take 7% for the first investment that also includes access to professional networking events.

<comment><USER22> Then maybe those companies don't deserve a senior developer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The author of the article uses "start up" to refer to a business less than 2 years old - fair enough. As someone who runs a business which falls into this category, it certainly is frustrating to know how heavily our government subsidizes well-funded, monied large corporations (whereas small business owners have very little government-supplied - or otherwise - <USER2> incentive to fuel their endeavor).

I don't suppose I would want them to stop subsidizing certain deals in the private sector with corporate America. A lot of that seems to be smart business to me. But I certainly would like to see the government to place a higher value on small business innovation. Starting something from nothing is already hard enough.

<comment><USER24> Have you looked at the SBA? There's actually a fair amount of support there, including preferential treatment for bidding on set aside gov't contracts, including SBIR - Small Business Innovation Research contracts. Is it dollar and lobbying wise the same, no, but it is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They always want to equate disappearing startups with lack of labor supply. That just seems completely ridiculous. Lack of labor in startups is a result/effect, not a cause. Labor, as a general rule of thumb, always follows the money. If Startups were more successful, they'd get more investment and more labor. If you doubt this, just remember what happened when facebook opened up it's app store. Just like that, overnight, thousands of developers and start ups appeared out of no-where. As soon as people smell the money, they'll leave their cushy jobs at google or anywhere else in a heartbeat. It all comes down to opportunity.

I mean, just look at the ycombinator and other investor's acceptance rates. They're that low because there's only so many opportunities. When there's too many people chasing too few opportunities, this is the result.

The real reasons why start ups are far fewer, is much more complicated: an it has to do with fewer opportunities. Some opportunities are limited legally, some due to market barriers and some are just due to what's currently possible.

The solution is to look at all those barriers and see what govt can do to reduce or get rid of the barriers. Look at the industries in most dire need of innovation: transportation, housing, and health insurance (where need is measured by $ opportunity) ~ and all the downstream industries that support these - like manufacturing, raw materials, etc. How many start ups are addressing these needs, and why is it so low?

<comment><USER26> You were on the right track and then veered off course at the end. The problem is startups don't pay enough for the risk you have to take, and there are few easy problems left to disrupt. There will always be small businesses and sole proprietors, but there are few winner take all startup opportunities that require little capital to start.

Also, after seeing what happens when startups flout regulation (Uber, Airbnb, Theranos), I prefer government regulation stay intact or more of it. The less startups abusing the commons, the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are mom and pop stores included in the data? What about law firms, doctors offices, mutual funds? I don't think we'd consider those new businesses to be start ups.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised nobody's mentioned it, but the bureaucracy of licensing, taxes, and now national sales tax collection is unhelpful to the startup. Not that it's a startup, but I just jumped through all the hoops required to legally hire a nanny in the US state of Washington:

\- obtain Federal EIN number \- obtain state business license & UBI number (still waiting on this, and I need childcare _now_ ) \- file with state employment security department \- pay state labor & industries insurance \- pay state employment security taxes \- pay my portion of income taxes for the nanny \- pay payroll company to deal with all the tax payouts and paychecks

Oh, and actually pay the nanny.

All of this to just have a nanny and be above board. And what I do for my startup is way more complicated than this.

<comment><USER29> I'm confused, to legally hire a nanny you need to start a legal entity and hire the nanny as a contractor/employee? It seems to me that this would be the nanny's responsibility to start a business and charge the customer (you) money for their service.

I'm sure you're much more familiar than me, can you help me correct my intuition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Another factor could be that before, big companies kinda sucked for the employee. Today's big companies like Google and Facebook are wonderful place to work for. In the grand scale of things, the new management styles are considerably more comfortable for the employee, the decision making and the promotion methods are significantly more efficient, interesting and smart. Not saying they are perfect, there is definitely room for improvement but 30 years ago, it was all wage slavery.

<comment><USER10> i like your idea, but Google and Facebook are very far from typical.

<comment><USER30> I guess you may be right. Is there still big companies which would fire you because you're late 2 minutes 3 times this year? Where everybody have to be there at 8am? And stuff.

<comment><USER31> I've always assumed the laid back approach of employers here was a West Coast thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Small local businesses / startups get squeezed out by larger brands with name recognition. No one looks for stuff in the yellow pages anymore - they go to the most successful brand off the internet.

Additionally, the risks of starting a business / startup are much higher when the cost of housing and healthcare is so much higher. And on top of that you have student debt.

</comment><comment><USER33> > _This means that, contrary to popular belief, jobs in the US are far more > secure than they were in previous decades._

This is a fallacy. Your job is not secure if you're not able to speak up about injustices because there's no competitors to hire you if you were to get fired about speaking up about something that's immoral but not illegal.

</comment><comment><USER10> the paper seems to be talking about "startups" as firms less than 2 years old. i guess this includes startups in plumbing as well as startups in software.

maybe the reason a young plumber doesn't go out and start their own new firm is different from the reason a young software engineer doesn't go out and start their own new firm.

</comment><comment><USER34> If startups fail (test bad ideas) 5x faster than in the 80's and 90's and if most founders quit entrepreneurship after their 1st failure, even if 2x more people are founding companies, then it's probably normal that, overall, less man-years would be spent in startups every year in the US.

</comment><comment><USER35> What I always thought the economic system would naturally come to is actually happening now. It's interesting why it's only happening now, likely because of the new growth dynamics of data companies.

</comment><comment><USER36> _> Startups are struggling in this era of rising market concentration._

To rephrase it, current anti-trust is often too toothless.

</comment><comment><USER37> Oh please... People are just realizing that startups aren't all that glamorous and at times attract a special breed of shitty egotistical workaholics.

By the merits of this article we should wait to see Paris or some other benign socialist hell-hole become "the next startup hub". I can assure you that won't be happening anytime soon.

Silicon Valley is an incredibly un-sustainable incestuous bubble. The future of startups will be distributed, not in one place.

</comment><comment><USER38> From the article:

 _Startups are struggling in this era of rising market concentration. In most industries, since the 1980s, the share of all sales going to the top firms is increasing. Startups may have a hard time competing with these mega firms, which can out pay them for the best talent and sometimes attempt to drive them out of the industry. Previous Brookings research found there are fewer startups in states where a smaller number of companies dominate the market_

From Lenin, "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" (1916):

 _This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important — if not the most important — phenomena of modern capitalist economy._

</comment><comment><USER39> I paid out $100,000 to pay off my wife & my own student loan debt early. Student loan debt can not be discharged by bankruptcy; it's always waiting for you.

This implies several things immediately:

\- You have to take a job which can make payments on the debt.

\- You have to choose stable jobs which will not suddenly fold under you.

There's also a somewhat hard to define aspect to the problem where you have to ensure that your local system is fiscally stable.

Anyway, non-1% Americans graduated from college not taking risks in their first 10 years out? _Totally_ predictable, just from the debt perspective.

Then, at 32, 34, a lot of people are married and/or have a kid on the way. Welp, there's your high levels of downside again.

Add in to all this the fact that housing prices are effectively tethered to the availability of cash provided to the "highly paid" market (inequality increases)....

... so if your startup fails, you'll lose your place to live, and remote jobs are very rare, so you're in trouble in the big city with now-unaffordable costs of living.

the solution, in part, has a simple policy component: declare jubilee on all federally-originated student debt; free college for all students who maintain adequate gpas, no more federal loans. impose cost controls on universities that take federal money.

that effectively derisks an entire generation and opens up new options.

housing costs are less directly tractable and more politically problematic: the effective solution is to federally strip single family zoning from all land, and mandating density minimums and other supply-increasing zoning. (I _assure_ you, the housing market is an interstate commerce system. :) ). But that only staunches the wound, it doesn't bring down housing prices into line with the median American's income.

Wait, this is about _startups_? Ha! No. That's a third order consequence caused by increasing early-career & mid-career risk, which in turn is increased by the planning & zoning codes and governmental defunding of education.

<comment><USER40> Just make student loans dischargeable. The market will sort it out at that point. Loans for degrees that are valuable will be granted, and loans that are for selfish degrees that produce no skills anyone else wants or cares about won't be granted. And colleges would have to start cutting costs to make their degrees more affordable. And given the mind boggling increase in tuition over the last 40 years, there's an epic amount of fat to be trimmed.

<comment><USER41> Wait? What? You can't be serious? The market will sort "what is a worthwhile education"?

Why not let the market sort out legislation? Or court cases? Or child custody?

This is a pretty sad statement of your personal values if you're serious.

<comment><USER42> The market might not be fit to decide what education is worthwhile, but it will certainly figure out what degrees are lucrative.

It would be nice if we could all go to college to chase our childhood dreams, but the reality is that most of us need to prepare to support ourselves and, someday, a family. That's why I'm a software engineer and not a novelist, and that's why I got a CS degree and not a BFA in English.

Are the humanities "worthwhile?" Certainly. But should the average person drop $100,000 on a humanities degree? Absolutely not. And the fact that we're willing to bury children under that kind of debt so that they can get a Master's in French Opera or whatever is a crime.

<comment><USER22> "The market might not be fit to decide what education is worthwhile, but it will certainly figure out what degrees are lucrative."

And those are completely separate things, and should not be conflated. Basically, you're saying that only the rich should be able to study non-STEM stuff.

<comment><USER42> > Basically, you're saying that only the rich should be able to study non-STEM > stuff.

I'm saying that only rich people _are_ able to study non-STEM stuff. I mean sure, a disadvantaged person can study literature or interpretive dance or whatever, but that choice will make them a debt slave with no significantly increased earning potential.

You don't need to go to college to improve yourself as a human being. You can be well-read and appreciative of the arts without paying $100,000. And for the vast majority of people, that is the only sensible course of action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Regulations are the problem, imagine wanting to build something and finding out you'll need to spend $20K on lawyers to go through thousands of pages of GDRP.

That's even before hiring a developer to actually build an MVP.

... And people laughed when Trump said he wanted to eliminate two regulations for every one being added.

<comment><USER44> Imagined you bought a meal and had to go to the hospital because they cut corners on food safety? Regulation is a balancing act between compet in forces not just a Boolean good/bad

<comment><USER45> There's a strange thing about that. I enjoy traveling and living in developing nations. Food safety organizations and inspections are basically nonexistent. And in a decade I've gotten food poisoning exactly once - no hospital visit even then. It's anecdotal, but it's also very typical among other expats. People that make their living selling food generally know how to cook and enjoy it! And they also know full well what happens when they serve bad food. Think about the places you eat at. There's going to be a handful of places you eat at, over and over again. And this is also typical. Serve bad food just once, and a business stands to lose immensely. They're going to not only permanently lose that customer but also deal with all the terrible word of mouth that they will spread.

And in the end the biggest risk of food poisoning is often not from the food itself, but from unclean handling of the food. And all the FDA rules and regulations in the world don't mean a thing when a disinterested minimum wage worker chooses to not wash her hands after a bathroom visit, or just keeps on prepping after sneezing on the produce. The one time I got food poisoning was not from one of the literally thousands of dishes I've ordered from street vendors, but from a western-targeted chain restaurant. Instead of having the business owner being the person prepping the food, it was our low wage disinterested worker -- same story as the times I've gotten food poisoning in the US.

This video [1] just makes our whole system of food safety regulation seem so backwards, at Berkeley no less. Not an appeal to pathos, but an appeal to logos. We're treating people like shit and deterring entrepreneurship for the sake of enforcing these rules and regulations which don't really have such a major benefit as we might believe. It's an undesirable cost:reward ratio.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_TvG_ZNvQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_TvG_ZNvQo)

<comment><USER44> Instead of theoretical ideas about what would happen to the food industry or your anecdote about being fine when eating food that was unregulated I am going to point you to "Jungle" by Upton Sinclair.

<comment><USER46> _The Jungle_ is fiction. Only 12 pages of the novel concerned anything close to food safety, and at the time there were _already food inspections_.

[https://www.zeroaggressionproject.org/uncategorized/upton- si...](https://www.zeroaggressionproject.org/uncategorized/upton-sinclairs- the-jungle/)

<comment><USER44> Huh. I knew Jungle was a novel but the part based on food safety was based on actual situations he observed</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TCP Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://bramcohen.com/2012/05/07/tcp-sucks <comment><USER2> Designing networking protocols that are robust in mathematical sense is unbelievably difficult. In fact, we humans have only found optimal solutions in a few cases if you dig through the mathematics literature. Many real-world networking protocol design scenarios do not have a known non-pathological implementation. Furthermore, there is a large number of decentralized protocol designs that we can prove to have many poor qualities. To bludgeon the equine, people that can significantly advance our understanding of such things tend to win Nobel prizes and similar. It is that difficult.

That said, TCP is not the best we can design given everything we know about designing network protocols. It was good enough for the people that designed it at the time, and possibly (my chronology is fuzzy) was approximately as good as the mathematics would have reasonably allowed when it was developed. We can make it work well enough in many cases -- the economics of inertia. Other narrow use cases are better solved differently but are not general solutions.

It is one of those problems that sounds like it should be easy to solve on the surface but turns into a bloody epic challenge once you start to dig into it. I am not offering a solution, just noting that very few people can.

<comment><USER3> To people who don't know what the parent is talking about.

Take a simple example.

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

My summary:

 _The two generals problem proves that, if there exists any nonzero probability of packet loss, two people cannot even coordinate to both have a state 1 at sunrise tomorrow (attack!!!) or both have the state 0 if it is not 100% mathematically guaranteed that they both believe this has been coordinated (since an uncoordinated attack will be a catastrophic loss for them).

(In other words, the guarantee must be such that by sunrise tomorrow state 0-1 or 1-0, in other words one general thinking the attack has been coordinated with certitude and attacks, but the other general thinking the attack has not been confirmed with certitude and does not attack, must be a mathematical impossibility.)

Take a simple approach. The following packets are all encrypted, but any or all may be lost.

1) first general sends: "Let's both be in state 1 tomorrow (coordinated attack). Since an uncoordinated attack is so catastrophic to us, I will only enter state 1 if I receive your reply. Please include the random number 25984357892 in your reply. As soon as I get this the attack is ON. If I don't get such a packet within the hour I will assume this post was intercepted (lost), and I will send another. I will remain in state 0 until I receive that packet."

2) second general sends: "Got your packet with 25984357892. This is my acknowledgment! I will attack as well. In case you don't get this, I know you won't attack thinking I didn't get your message, so I am sending this message continuously."

Great. But what if all messages from the second to the first are intercepted. Now the first thinks all of HIS were intercepted (has received no acks) and doesn't attack, but the second one does. Failure.

So, we have to emend 2) to:

2) second general sends: "Got your packet with 25984357892. This is my acknowledgment! I will attack as well. In case you don't get this, I know you won't attack thinking I didn't get your message, so I am sending this message continuously. In case you don't get any of THESE messages, however, I will not attack. Therefore acknowledge ANY of them with random number 458972984323..."

Ooops. What if all the first general's ack's of the acks are intercepted or lost? (Perhaps the first general is able to send messages until receiving (2), but just as the first general gets 2) conditions change and the general no longer has any of his messages delivered.)

Now the first general thinks he has acknowledged the ack, but the second general doesn't even know if his ack-(cum-request-for-an-ack-back) message was even delivered..._

and so it goes...

Of course, in practice you can simply say: "Let's do this for a certain number of acks of acks of acks, 3 let's say, and then just keep sending the same ack to each other, assuming that if the connection was reliable enough to get to three deep, then it will be reliable enough for one of the final acks to make it through." That's a false assumption (mathematically - what guarantee do you have that if 3 of your encrypted messages made it across, at least one of the next 217 that you send by sunrise all with the same message will), but a reasonable one.

So it is not a practical problem. This is a mathematical problem. Although you cannot even do something as simple as "let's agree to both be in state 1 (or neither if we fail to agree), OK?" over a less than guaranteed reliable connection, if the connection has any reliability at all you can get to within a practical level.

once you reliaze that, PROVABLY, you can't even do the most mundane things no matter what, the mathematics the parent is talking about do not seem all that interesting anymore. :)

<comment><USER4> While it's true that network protocols are neat challenging puzzles with nontrivial solutions, the hardest parts end up being the mundane: how does any given protocol change interoperate with all the existing implementations out there, especially changes to congestion control, and across the range of optional protocol features.

Uncertainties introduced by packet loss are actually pretty easy to work past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but reading the article I see some weird ideas:

RED is hard to deploy, so let's change the base protocol instead. - how does that make sense? Everyone would have to start using new libraries and for backward compatibility we'd have to preserve the tcp layer too. That means standards like http would have to get extensions to use SRV records or suffer delays while utp availability is probed.

There's also a complaint that RED will drop packets once the queue is full. I don't get that at all - it will always happen...

In addition I get an impression there is some tension/implied superiority between us (people doing uTP) and them (ones doing RED). Why does it look so ugly? There's a known problem, there's an interesting solution for new software (uTP) and some plan to migrate old protocols transparently (RED). When did that turn into some bizarre conflict and why?

<comment><USER6> BitTorrent is using uTP just fine, which is only, you know, most of the upload from consumer internet connections, and we're working on getting the same things crammed into TCP with LEDBAT, but that's a slow process.

I wasn't complaining about RED dropping packets, just describing how it works.

As for the tension, my point is that my solution works and the other one doesn't. If you want to know why the person I quoted was being such a dismissive jerk, you'll have to ask him.

<comment><USER5> Ok, I don't understand this part then: "With RED the router will instead have some probability of dropping the packet based on the size of the queue, going up to 100% if the queue is full." - that seems to be universally true for any queue with limited capacity. If it's full, it's going to start dropping packets - whether it's those on the queue, or the new ones doesn't matter. Any queue which is full will require dropping as many packets as the number coming in.

Is there some reason this was described as a specific behaviour here?

<comment><USER7> I believe the focus is more on the first part of that statement. A "standard" queue would only drop packets when it is in actuality full. RED drops packets when the queue is non-full based on some calculated probability. The likelihood of drop simply goes up until the queue is full (and 100% of new packets drop).

Apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      The solution is for the end user to intervene, and tell all
      their applications to not be such pigs, and use uTP instead
      of TCP. Then they'll have the same transfer rates they
      started out with, plus have low latency when browsing the
      web and teleconferencing, and not screw up their ISP when
      they're doing bulk data transfers.

That still doesn't address the problem when you have many users behind the same queue, some of whom care only about throughput and not latency. You need a scheme which will work when all of those users are acting selfishly.

<comment><USER9> My thought was more fundamental than that: any solution which involves asking users to request different transport protocols is not going to solve the problem. There are far more users who have no idea what a "transport protocol" is than those who do.

With that said, I enjoyed the post. It's an interesting problem, and I do find the base idea attractive: allowing applications to opt to be background traffic.

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't (at least in my understanding) be the user that would choose, it would be the application. WoW for example would optimize for latency, whereas BitTorrent would optimize for throughput.

<comment><USER9> Correct, but Bram's argument (as I understand it) was that the users would put pressure on the application developers to opt to be background traffic.

<comment><USER10> Two nearly-universal truths about users that suggest solutions: they're both rare, and usually wrong. :)

It's more likely that users will state the problem -- such as, "I want to be able to run WoW and BitTorrent at the same time." From there, the software developers would determine the solution (optimization for latency vs. throughput).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone is curious what uTP is, you can find the protocol defined here: <http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> The author seems to claim that is is implausible for a router vendor to sell a router that drops more packets.

      The marketing plan is that the because router
      vendors are unwilling to say 'has less memory!' as a
      marketing tactic, maybe they'd be willing to say
      'drops more packets!' instead. That seems implausible.

Yet he concludes by suggesting the router should drop all the packets.

      The best way to solve that is for a router to notice
      when the queue has too much data in it for too long,
      and respond by summarily dropping all data in the
      queue. /snip/ Of course, I've never seen that proposed
      anywhere…

Based on his earlier reasoning, that would also be implausible.

<comment><USER6> That's what you would do IF you were going to be serious about making the router drop packets in a way which actually helps. I don't expect it to happen any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems to me that on the IP level the net has been in a technological paralysis for some time.

We can't get RED or IPv6 deployed, and and the IETF doesn't seem to get anything useful happen these days.

edit: anyone else remember when layer 3 had a bright future ahead of it, IPv6 and end-to-end IPSec (with keys in the DNS) were just around the corner...

<comment><USER6> uTP carries the bulk of all BitTorrent transfers at this point. This would seem to imply a certain level of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having uTP running against UTP as an alternative network connection means is a rather unfortunate naming - I imagine a lot of people getting confused to the max, especially as it's pronounced the same. So pretty pretty please: Give the protocol a GOOD name first, then we're talking business! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the catchy title was meant to grab attention to an important present day issue.

But TCP actually does not suck, it's been there for longer than I have and served us pretty darned well up until now.

Never forget that when the TCP protocol was designed, the biggest concern we had was that a nuke would land on top of our heads at any minute and the network should keep working. Also, the "Internet" was thought to be a small niche network of networks among the military and academics.

I guess this is all well known, it's just my reaction to the editorialized title.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just to be clear, "TCP Sucks", despite successfully running the majority of the global Internet traffic. "TCP Sucks" so bad we're basically going to copy a lot of it: window based congestion control, SACK, timestamps, ability to add new options, etc. "TCP Sucks" because it is not perfect and has an issue, an issue that requires router / switch upgrades. We're going to fix that by breaking backward compatibility with _tons_ of applications and requiring an OS update on _every_ client and/or application. All this assuming our relatively new and unproven thing is as good as TCP in all other ways and fixes this issue of TCP perfectly.

Hmmm. Me thinks that TCP does not suck so much.

<comment><USER6> Did you read the article or just the headline?

<comment><USER16> I did read it, guess I just got too caught up in the title to brush it off (looks like some others here also wondered about that).

Anyway, uTP looks cool, LEDBAT sounds very interesting and BitTorrent is of course, completely awesome. I just don't think TCP sucks. I'm constantly surprised at how well it works for how simple most of it is and how complicated and intractable the rest is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shameless plug:

Extremetcp.com is the solution to the congestion problems of TCP. The best part of ExtremeTCP is that it is not a new protocol. It is TCP. It just uses clever algorithms at the sender side to send data while avoiding congestion. (Since TCP does not actually specify which algorithms one should use as long as one avoids congestion, ExtremeTCP is a perfectly legal version of TCP).

Yes, I am involved with this. If interested in testing, please send an email to the contact address in the website.

<comment><USER18> there is also <http://www.fastsoft.com/home/> which professes to do the same, personally I worry about any non-documented non-public congestion control protocols, many years have been spent in the academia researching this subject ... it is easy to be "fastest" - just disable congestion control altogether - trouble is tons will break. In order for me to use a different congestion control algorithm in production I would need some experts to review the protocol to ensure I am being a good web citizen and not breaking the internet.

<comment><USER17> That is the initial reaction of most people. But it is not the case actually. If you disable congestion control, you will be the fastest for a little bit (maybe a hundred miliseconds) and then you will get drowned in dropped packets. In other words, you will be sending data fast but packets will start dropping on the way, so the data will not be received fast.

When we say we are the fastest, I mean we are the fastest at sending packets all the way through. This is not easy at all, and it is not as simple as sending packets as fast as possible.

We are very good at modulating our speed in order to have full speed while avoiding dropped packets. Thus, in many situations, we send data slower than other TCP versions but the other versions get into trouble and start dropping packets.

There is one universal rule for TCP congestion avoidance algorithms and that is that as soon as you notice a dropped packet, you have to stop and wait for the congestion to clear up. If you do not do that, you will break the internet. But we do follow that rule; furthermore, we avoid large numbers of dropped packets in the first place.

We have tested our software with other standard connections and it does play well with others.

As someone else noted, Fastsoft are respected by the industry and it is well established that they do not break the internet. We are about 30% faster than fastsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the shout-out the mere mentioning of bittorrent? Or does nick weaver elude to bram some other way in the full article?

<comment><USER6> Who do you think made the development he's referring to happen?

<comment><USER19> I obviously know who is behind bittorrent that is why I mentioned it as a possible alternative. But you yourself state that Stanislav Shulanov is the man behind utp. More importantly shout-outs traditionally explicitly reference the person/thing in question. I was not sure if there was a longer/muddier/more-controversial back story that would not be appropriate to discuss in an acm article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised he doesn't mention CurveCP. He's taken ideas from that author before (e.g. netstrings, which you'll find in the .torrent file format).

TCP does suck. If you try to use it for lots of short lived connections. And that pretty much sums up how it's being used nowadays, most the time.

For single, long term connections, TCP is fine.

<comment><USER6> uTP isn't based on CurveCP, and CurveCP is nowhere near as mature as uTP is.

<comment><USER21> That said, CurveCP is a quite interesting protocol! It just needs more support and testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Of course, I've always used TCP using exactly the API it provides, and even > before I understood how TCP worked under the hood gone through great pains > to use the minimum number of TCP connections used to the number which will > reliably saturate the net connection and provide good piece diffusion.

BitTorrent must not not have any books on copyediting.</comment>


Anti-homeless spikes are part of a wider phenomenon of 'hostile architecture' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/13/anti-homeless-spikes-hostile-architecture <comment><USER2> Could use a (2014) in the headline, but it's obviously still relevant. The privatization of public space has been a pretty clear theme in William Gibson's work, I assume hostile architecture comes as no surprise to him...</comment>


Wire wrap - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap <comment><USER2> For sub-50MHz digital applications, wire wrap is still my preferred method of prototyping, predominately influenced by my undergrad experience with this guy[1]...I'm fairly confident that he was the sole reason why the local RadioShacks in town kept a handsome stock of affordable wire wrap tools and 30AWG wire on the shelves year round.

I know certain defense performance specifications (e.g. [2]) explicitly prohibit the use of wire wrap in production hardware, although in this particularly case, the driving factor is largely based on maintainability considerations.

[1] [https://www.ece.ufl.edu/users/gugel- karl](https://www.ece.ufl.edu/users/gugel-karl) [2] [http://www.acq.osd.mil/ats/MIL- PRF-32070A.pdf](http://www.acq.osd.mil/ats/MIL-PRF-32070A.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> For years, wire wrap was preferred over soldering for aerospace hardware because there were no cold solder joints. NASA still has plenty of documentation on the matter.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wire+wrap+nasa&t=canonical](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wire+wrap+nasa&t=canonical)

[http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html](http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I still have a wire wrap tool and a spool each of red and green wire.

<comment><USER5> That wire is still the nicest stuff for making small modifications to printed circuit boards, because it takes solder well, but the insulation doesn't melt.

My wire wrap tool is somewhere.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, on the PCBs manufactured in the '70s and '80s that I worked with in the '80s, I never saw anything but wire wrap wire used to make ECOs (Engineering Change Orders, I think that was a DEC phrase that had gone into general circulation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is stuff of nightmares at the start. I remember my first year doing my BEng. Discovered the wiring of the 32bit address bus was out by one. The wraps were on the bottom layer as well. This forced me to get my schematics right before starting the wiring wrapping. Plenty of other lesson learns as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> As part of my degree 10 years ago we did wire wrapping to make a simple 68332 computer with serial terminals for I/O. The team I was on was weeks ahead of the others, until we were stuck by what turned out to be one wrong wire.

I think it was dropped from the course a few years later.

<comment><USER9> Holler. Our EE curriculum did the same thing (with an 8088). All the groups spent an lot of time with the logic analyzer detecting one-wrong-wire issues.

That was an incredibly valuable learning experience. I don't know if it's still taught that way, but I hope so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately, wire-wrap wire, tools, and (most importantly) sockets are expensive and difficult to come by these days.

<comment><USER11> Ebay is a great place right now for this stuff. Pennies on the dollar vs what you can get from Digikey.</comment></comment>


Adblocking is a 'modern-day protection racket', says UK culture secretary - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/02/adblocking-protection-racket-john-whittingdale <comment><USER2> Maybe, but even if that's the case, it only applies to UK's own Three ISP, Adblock Plus, and the new Brave browser.

So don't go after "adblocking". Go after those making deals with certain companies to allow ads, while blocking everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER3> So adertisers have an absolute right to execute code on my machine? That seems wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> The guy has a point: companies paying ad-blocking companies so you have to look at their ads, even with the "ad-blocker", reeks of protection rackets.

The solution to all this is very, very simple: install uBlock Origin. It blocks ALL ads (that it's programmed for), and has no way for companies to bribe them to allow their ads through. So it can't be compared to a protection racket.

<comment><USER5> The same argument could be made about government taxes. People recognizing a need for a government (and those not being forced into it by others) enable the creation of governments that charge taxes to provide "protection" to the people.

People recognizing the need to block advertisements created an environment where there is an opportunity for companies to pay adblock's developer to go on an acceptable ads list though.

The only difference is that the advertising companies are not forced into it by law while those who do not recognize the need for government services are.</comment></comment>


MobileCoin Test Network Launch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@j_10523/mobilecoin-test-network-launch-37bcb0b86b08 <comment><USER2> I hope this approach to launching a blockchain project becomes the standard in 2020. No hype, lots of interesting integrations: \- Remote attestation primitives, \- Tools for building and signing enclaves \- Support for Intel Software Guard

Haven't tried the testnet yet (just signed up) but looking forward to taking this for a spin. [https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/mobilecoin](https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/mobilecoin)</comment>


Acid test: on drugs and science fiction (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/the-acid-test/ <comment><USER2> On anoxia -

> In just a minute or two, you'll discover a vast increase in your mental > abilities—a sureness of thought, a breadth of understanding, and a rapidity > and sureness of reasoning you never achieved before…Of course your brilliant > realizations and mighty discoveries somehow seem to misfire when you come > down off that jag

I believe this covers quite a lot of the amazing 'realisations' people have whilst on psychedelics like LSD, as well. And I'm not speaking from ignorance here, but as one who has tried around 10 different natural and synthetic psychedelics. They are beautiful, I'm not going to dispute that they can change the way we think of ourselves and the world around us. But...

The utopianist ideas of "If everyone just tried this, there would be no war, we could get rid of government and all look after each other, and the world would be as one!" are wishful thinking. As illustrated by the vast majority of the communal living projects started in the late 60s and early 70s.

<comment><USER3> The "if everyone just tried this there would be no war..." is absolutely wishful thinking yes, because it ignores that organization and process is required for large scale structures to function. And while we may not like each and every function of the large scale structures we have, we're much better withem than without.

But as for realizations that are had, typically the value isn't in anything thought of while on LSD, but from the lasting change of perspective in months afterward. Realizations can happen on it, but they seem minimal. The closest thing would be that one point while on it I realized I was fully capable of holding two contradictory beliefs and simply consciously ignoring where they contradict. The thing is, a realization like that leads to greater realizations about how your own brain works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heinlein:

> I know of no work of art, essay, story, discovery, or anything else of value > created as a result of LSD. When the acid-droppers start outdistancing the > squares in any field, I'll sit up and take notice.

Heinlein wrote some decent novels but I keep coming across pretty closed- minded, strong opinions in quotations of his. Many great musicians were known to have had LSD inspire their creations. The Beatles, Coltrane, the Beach Boys to name a few. Some of Huxley's work was influenced by it, and the biochemist Kary Mullis credits it with helping him develop the PCR method for DNA sequencing.

<comment><USER5> Heinlein wrote that in 1967, when there wasn't as much evidence of enhanced creativity as there is today. Sgt. Pepper's came out the same year and PCR wasn't until 1983. A somewhat square older person (he was 60 then) might not be expected to appreciate psychedelic music right away.

For a person of his time, that only puts him in the bottom 99% of open- mindedness.

<comment><USER6> What evidence is there for "enhanced creativity" from taking LSD? I don't think there is any, other than subjective feelings.

People used to think sniffing ether, taking absinthe or breathing nitrous was incredibly profound. Until enough people did it that the evidence was underwhelming.

<comment><USER5> You're right: there are only people's reported subjective feelings. The question is basically not studiable scientifically.

Michael Pollan's _How to Change Your Mind_ has a good overview of the attempted scientific research. Early research was tainted by overzealous experimenters, then research was banned for a long time, and recent studies have only been approved for serious conditions, like treatment-resistant depression.

The real problem is that creativity, the long-term generation of valuable ideas, is basically un-measurable. Scientific studies of "creativity" exist, but they all pull the ol' research switcheroo by measuring something easy to measure, rather than the kind of creativity that matters.

So, don't expect good scientific evidence of improved creativity, from any treatment, ever. That's as true for substances as for, say, whether to write on paper or at a computer. Most novelists swear by one or the other, but there's no feasible scientific study you can do to decide which produces objectively better novels. Same for whether meditation improves creativity.

(If you want to get into this line of research, start with meditation rather than psychedelics. It's much easier to get approved.)

For making your own plans about how to maximize your mental output, all you can really do is ask people whose works impresses you (and who are willing to talk about such things) what works for them, and then try those things to see if they work for you too. Being careful to compare the results side-by-side some time later, to reduce bias.

<comment><USER6> I've got the laboratory of "me." In my experience the closest thing to a creativity enhancer I've found is going without sleep while thinking intensely about an interesting problem.

LSD is ... frankly, in my experience, a lot of bullshit. I've done enough of it in my youth to early adulthood to be annoyed I wasted those brain cells instead of thinking about interesting problems. I've also never seen anyone who it improved; mostly it seemed to increase people's self-regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > drugs pay off in visible ways only for people who have already put in the > hard work of figuring out how to make and do interesting things.

I agree with this. I've known a lot of people who have done a lot of psychedelics and most of them learned absolutely nothing from it if I'm being honest, and the few who had what I'd consider to be profound or interesting insights from it were deep thinkers anyway.

<comment><USER8> LSD primarily teaches you to see things from multiple perspectives. It blows away the consensus and is most effective when trying to see through conditioning of any sort. I think anyone with a modicum of self-awareness and self-insight can gain a lot from these, baseline, effects. One doesn't need to be a creative genius.

There are multiple difficulties when talking about LSD experiences, especially to others, given the enormous degree of subjectivity and variability in these experiences. Sometimes, the transformative effects take time to manifest or time for one to realize that they did manifest. Most importantly, given that LSD plays tricks with one's notion of what constitutes one's self, one can be rewired in major ways and never himself realize it.

Psychedelics in my view are a supremely useful tool. They can lead to unveiling hidden potential, intelligence amplification, wilds bouts of creativity, confronting and healing traumatic events, breaking free of conditioning, resetting and transforming one's mind. These are baseline effects, there is also the spiritual/shamanic domain which - for some - is by far the more interesting one.

<comment><USER9> > LSD primarily teaches you to see things from multiple perspectives.

Hard agree. The least anyone can take out of it is a new perspective which does not come often to many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> LSD and Ketamine were incredibly healing experiences for me that seriously broke through a lot of deep-seated trauma and helped me deal with PTSD that was debilitating my life beforehand.

They've also been incredibly great experiences for benefiting my poetry and musical compositions.

I believe they are great tools that require education to use. It's a shame that education is more or less forbidden knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER11> A worthy read on the subject of psychedelics: _How To Change Your Mind_ by Michael Pollan:

[https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness- Transc...](https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness- Transcendence/dp/1594204225/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=change+mind&qid=1547744331&sr=8-2)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Campbell believed that the real problem with marijuana is that a teenager > who learns to doubt what adults say on the subject is likely to become > equally skeptical when it comes to cocaine, heroin, and LSD

There's some merit to this, but by the time they were teaching us about drugs, teachers had already lied to us about countless other topics. I wish they hadn't lied about the severity of marijuana, but that alone would have hardly changed my skepticism regarding everything else.

</comment><comment><USER13> Campbell:

> Marijuana ... is not an aphrodisiac ...

No, but it _does_ improve sex.

<comment><USER14> Depends for who. Personnaly, it makes me sleep, and sex with a sleeping guy is kinda limited.

<comment><USER15> Indica makes you sleep. Sativa improves enjoyable experiences. Sativa by day - Indica by night.

<comment><USER16> "Indicas" tend to be more tactile. (I use quotes because indica/sativa doesn't mean anything. The subjective effects are really a matter of the ratios/amounts of cannabinoids and terpenoids and the manner of ingestion)

<comment><USER17> I upvoted your comment. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. This is correct. Even different plants of the same strain will have different levels of these depending on growing conditions, drying, curing and other factors. Even two clones grown in different conditions can vary greatly in cannibinoid ratios.

There was also an excellent study i read a while back on the effects of different terpenes on the kind of high you have and how they interact with thc and various other cannibinoids.

This article summarizes the study pretty well:

[https://lift.co/magazine/terpenes-cannabis- strains](https://lift.co/magazine/terpenes-cannabis-strains)

<comment><USER16> A bit off-topic but I thought this video was neat [0]. Cannabinoids produced by GMO yeast! (Your reference to the variance in ratios reminded me of this. An interesting answer to mass production and standardization)

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gUXtBuI- tY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gUXtBuI-tY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks It's a little surprising Dune isn't mentioned in the article, seeing as the spice is basically a proxy for LSD

<comment><USER18> Frank Herbert explored drugs an a SF context in several novels, as well as Dune.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Laptop that can really stay on lap - <AUTHOR>

Related to the post of Linux laptops, I wonder if anyone knows if there is a machine that can really stay on the lap all day long without heading your legs and your palms (Older MBP here).<p>I'd happily trade some power for comfort: I'd take a 1 GHz computer that is light and cool for a 2 GHz that is just unpractical to use. <comment><USER2> I have found that you need to consider more than just the hardware. You have to consider workload, operating system support, and power saving configuration.

In particular, running linux on new hardware or poorly configured on older hardware will run generally run hotter as the drivers aren't tuned to use all the available power saving states.

If you keep the machines workload down, run the intended OS for the hardware (or use older/highly supported hardware), and maximize all the power saving features, quality hardware (Apple, IBM, etc.) will run much cooler.

Other ways to keep cool include running intense operations on a remote computer, plugging in ethernet and disabling wireless, plugging in power and removing the battery, and/or getting one of those tacky cooling pads. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> With all that you're better off using a desktop computer. Isn't there a laptop with better/more fans?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some people have said these are good: <http://www.xpad4laptop.com/>

Certainly cheap enough to try instead of a new computer.</comment>


Comets can't explain weird 'alien megastructure' star after all - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28786-comets-cant-explain-weird-alien-megastructure-star-after-all/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's no remaining explanation consistent with this new data, according to the author.

        "The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best
        of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all
        were a poor lot," he says. "But now we have a refutation of
        the idea, and indeed, of all published ideas."

</comment><comment><USER2> Any astronomers care to comment on what rules out these explanations:

1) Planetary nebula, with patchy bits

2) Inherent star variability

?</comment>


How to cure a hangover: what one man found after a 10-year quest - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/23/hangover-cure-book-shaughnessy-bishop-stall <comment><USER3> For those curious what the 'cure' is in the article:

"His cure is relatively simple, or at least relatively simple to acquire – all the ingredients are available in pharmacies, or online.

To prevent the hangover, Bishop-Stall will quaff – after drinking but before sleep – milk thistle, for the liver; the amino acid and immune system aid N-acetylcysteine; vitamins B1, B6 and B12, which boost metabolism; and that famous gift to Jesus, frankincense – an anti-inflammatory"

<comment><USER4> Or, alternatively, just don't drink so much. If you drank so much you're feeling bad from it the next day then you definitely over-indulged. Hiding the hangover isn't solving the root problem. Drinking too much causes real health problems that aren't prevented by treating the symptoms.

I'm glad I get hangovers. It makes it really obvious when I've overdone it, and it's a useful reminder not to do that again. If I could drink a lot all the time and never experience the short term negative effects then I would definitely experience the long-term ones of alcoholism.

<comment><USER5> There's more variables than just "don't drink so much". Just the other week I woke up with a hangover after having two (4.5% ABV) beers. And this is coming from somehow who often measures their intake in liters, not bottles.

Whether you get a hangover or not is dependent on pretty much all the variables of alcohol metabolism: how much you drink, how fast, at what time, whether you had a full stomach, what type of food you ate, the type of alcohol (dark vs clear), whether you smoked cigarettes, etc. While you definitely shouldn't drink so much, I think it's a bit disingenuous to simply the issue down to how much you drank the night before.

(My personal theory for the two beers night is due to me drinking them some time between 1 and 3 in the morning.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand why every single article about hangover cures seems to ignore the most obvious cure that works pretty much every time, especially when most people already have ready access to it: Ibuprofen

1\. Set your alarm for 1-2 hours before you actually need to wake up.

2\. When the alarm goes off, take 1-2 Ibuprofen, drink some water, reset your alarm, and go back to sleep.

3\. Wake up at the scheduled time, hangover free.

Note: Don't abuse this technique, as it will take a toll on your kidneys and can be hard on your stomach lining. But in a pinch, it straight up works.

\</comment><comment>---

Edit: I just went and looked up the side effects of ibuprofen on the stomach lining and all I have to say is, "Holy crap!". This would explain why I have been having to take anti-acid medicine for years! The ibuprofen bottle doesn't even mention the risks to your stomach, and my doctors and gastroenterologist never said anything about it either. They just blamed it on my weight.

<comment><USER5> Ibuprofin can be hard on the stomach lining and result in stomach bleeding and intestinal damage, especially when mixed with alcohol. Plus it can be hard on an empty stomach and plenty of people have trouble eating during a hangover due to nausea.

I take ibuprofen during a hangover now and then to help with the headaches, but it often just leaves me with an equally-bad painful stomach.

<comment><USER7> I once read an account of someone that took Ibuprofen on an empty stomach and burned a hole in their stomach lining. Since then I always eat something first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> cure it by never getting it. drink a full 8-14oz glass of water for every single drink unit i.e. 1 shot, 1 beer, 1 glass of wine

havent had a hangover in close to a decade doing this.

<comment><USER9> This is also great for avoiding binge drinking. I did this in college and it's incredibly hard to drink to the kind of excess most college folks do when you're needing to pee ever 15 minutes.

<comment><USER10> > it's incredibly hard to drink to the kind of excess most college folks do > when you're needing to pee ever 15 minutes.

Maybe with beer or mixed drinks. You can do a lot of shots in 15min.

<comment><USER11> How many can you drink if you drink a glass of water for every one of them? That was the proposal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Main problem for me is a headache the next morning. I once read this is caused by water shortage in the brain (caused by the alcohol).

Drinking water is a solution, but normally that goes into the stomach, going to the brain only indirectly. So in 'those cases' I go to bed with a little water that I keep moving round a little in my mouth for a long as am able to (because very soon I fall asleep). If I wake up in the night I do the same again. Next morning again.

I read this 'trick' a long time ago in a book about Indians drinking 'fire water'.

In general this helps al least for keeping away the headache (not the general slow feeling, not the waking up more often, etc).

</comment><comment><USER13> A long time ago, I was hanging with a bunch of pharma reps ("we'll push whatever they want us to push") and they all mentioned that taking a Lipitor before a drinking session would help prevent hangovers. An off-label use for sure.

<comment><USER14> Wonder where they were getting their non-prescription prescription drugs from. I guess any statin would do the trick here?

<comment><USER15> Samples probably.

<comment><USER13> Yes, samples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have found that Grapefruit Essential Oil rubbed onto the back of my neck combined with one Vitamin B Multi and one molybdenum supplement pill before bed get rid of the headache and body ache. Then in the morning 2 pints of spring water with added sea salt and lemon juice. If my Stomach is unwell upon waking a Ginger Kombucha really helps settle it. No matter how the body feels it seems that the emotional low that follows still seems unavoidable. Coffee in the morning seems to make really bad hangovers worse and really light ones better.

</comment><comment><USER17> My go-tos are: Coconut water and Pedialyte

<comment><USER18> dioralyte works well too

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 10 years lmao.

Here's my full recipe: "megadose" of B-vitamins (4-5x RDA), 1g vitamin C, 400-800mg ibuprofen with 200-400ml of water and some carbs/sugar (I prefer a slice of bread). Highly recommended - 15 minutes of stretching/sit- ups/dumbbells/walk outside/anything to get your blood going. Optional - <USER2> coffee after 30-60 minutes.

Now, you can do it with only ibuprofen/paracetamol, but it won't remove all the hangover effects (it barely subdues the headaches for me).

</comment><comment><USER20> Benzodiazepines work extremely well even when one is vomiting etc. the next day. They also work well for the DTs that serious alcoholics experience. I'm pretty sure doctors know this but probably don't want to prescribe them for something that will pass on its own. I can't blame them considering how quickly dependence can form and other risks.

</comment><comment><USER21> Another anti-inflammatory (there are many) that may play well in this case is diet cranberry juice. Added bonus of some hydration.

</comment><comment><USER22> Drink water while drinking alcoholic drinks and then afterwards before bedtime. Also have antacids.

Alcohol -> acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. Antacid neutralyses the acid.

Alcohol dehydrates the body leading to electrolyte imbalance. Drinking water between your brandies and afterwards prevents that dehydration.

</comment><comment><USER23> N-acetylcysteine and Thiamin supplements taken the day of a night of heavy drinking has proven quite effective in my experience. Sometimes it didn't seem to work, but usually it was a substantial improvement.

</comment><comment><USER24> For some reason eating mangos before going to bed and the morning after seems to work, dunno why.

<comment><USER25> Lots of B vitamins in Mangos I believe? I've heard B vitamins help hang overs a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> All I need is alka seltzer and two glasses of water. Works every time.

</comment><comment><USER27> My cure: pickle brine / cold water surf / ibuprofen

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't the real cure to just not get a hangover to begin with? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER29> TLDR anyone?

<comment><USER30> > after drinking but before sleep – milk thistle, for the liver; the amino > acid and immune system aid N-acetylcysteine; vitamins B1, B6 and B12, which > boost metabolism; and that famous gift to Jesus, frankincense – an anti- > inflammatory.

Note that milk thistle and probably a few other of those have interactions with othe drugs. (emphasis mine)</comment></comment>


San Francisco Home Prices Fell for the First Time in Four Years in March - <AUTHOR> https://www.redfin.com/blog/2016/04/march-national-housing-market-tracker.html <comment><USER2> Weirdly, I own a house and think I'd be better off if prices fell-- fell a lot. I bought a few years ago and would be happy if prices uniformly dropped to those levels.

Why? I want a 50% bigger/nicer house in the same area. But bigger/nicer houses have increased in price proportionally to mine. So the gap in absolute dollars between what I have and what I want has expanded quite a bit. My income has increased, but not really enough to cover the gap.

Strong increasing prices really only help homeowners to the effect that they're eventually willing to downsize or move to a lower-cost area.

If prices rise strongly and proportionately I suspect it just causes stagnation. I can't really upgrade without a windfall, thus my house stays off the market. So other folks can't upgrade to my house.

<comment><USER3> It's even worse than that. If your house has appreciated more than $250k (or $500k if you're married) then you have to pay capital gains tax on the rest. And this is a fixed amount regardless of how long you've owned your home, so the longer you stay, and the more your house appreciates, the greater the penalty when you ultimately sell.

<comment><USER4> "Penalty", yeah because people have put in sooo much hard work to make their house values go up. (Sure, some people will spend money on renovations, and there could be tax credits for that. But I don't think that sitting on an asset and letting it appreciate should be a free lunch.)

<comment><USER3> "Penalty" because someone who sells their house and buys a new one every time it appreciates $250k pays zero tax whereas someone who buys and holds pays significant tax despite having the same net gain over the same time period.

<comment><USER5> There's a two year minimum that you must hold the home to qualify for the exclusion. So it's not "every time" it appreciates, but it is "once every two years".

[https://www.irs.gov/publications/p523/ar02.html#en_US_2015_p...](https://www.irs.gov/publications/p523/ar02.html#en_US_2015_publink1000200611)

<comment><USER6> Seems simple to apply the tax rate pro-rata rather than on a cliff. Then the rule works more fairly and gaming is somewhat limited. Government seems to love rule cliffs for some reason.

<comment><USER7> Artifact of a pre-digital tax/legal system?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reaffirming once again that if "nobody can afford to buy them" the actual prices start coming down. A more interesting thing for me however was that owner occupied (which is to say the person buying the house lives there) has not been growing[1]. Instead third parties are buying the houses as investments and renting them. That is a really risky strategy in a place like SF with rent controls as the floor can fall out of the market, and you're unable to raise rents to cover your balloon payment (or other over leveraged strategy) and that squeezes the investor to default.

[1] [https://www.homeunion.com/blog/investment-home-prices- rising...](https://www.homeunion.com/blog/investment-home-prices-rising- faster-than-owner-occupied-home-values/)

<comment><USER4> Remember that rent control only applies to buildings built before 1978, so it's not _all_ rent controlled.

<comment><USER9> It's scary to think that in 20-30 years nearly the entire available housing stock will not be covered by rent control. My landlord wanted to raise my rent 40% in one year here in Oakland until I pointed out the laws. Eventually the entire middle class will just be landless peasants again, allowed to live wherever the rich say that they can.

<comment><USER10> It's only scary if you believe rent control is a net benefit.

<comment><USER11> No, facing a 40% increase in your rent without an attendant increase in your wages or salary is scary no matter what the macro situation is. Anybody working on or thinking about housing policy needs to keep this in mind -- no matter how right your policy prescriptions may be, you need to keep in mind that they may do massive harm to individuals in the short term. And the failure to even _try_ to ameliorate those harms is one of the reasons why things like getting rid of rent control are politically impossible.

<comment><USER12> Advocates for the reverse ought to bear in mind that however noble the goal of avoiding harm to individuals in the short term may be, the harm done to individuals in the long term is even more massive, and then much harder to fix.

Two case in point examples: Prop 13, and rent control.

These are not, as popularly concieved, great ways to protect the poor and disadvantaged. They are simply examples of very short term thinking becoming public policy, which has the unintended and paradoxical effect of harming the poor and disadvantaged much more in the long run.

<comment><USER11> Right, and I agree with you, but the fact that it would be better not to have them in the long run doesn't do anything about the short term harm of thousands of people losing their homes all at once. "It will be better for everyone in the aggregate, eventually" doesn't do anything for someone who just became homeless.

What I'm saying is, if you want this policy, start thinking of ways you could change it while accounting for the harm that changing it would do.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes the only way to fix systemic issues is via strategic planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's always hard to believe the numbers, but I trust Redfin since I used them to purchase my home. I think the problem is comparing what's turn key and not. For example they say:

> Portland, OR had the nation's highest price growth, rising 16.1% since last > year to $325,000...

The problem is you're fighting 100's of people for that one house in Portland that is livable at $325,000. Most houses that cheap need a ton of work.

SF on the other hand is just seeing their ceiling come into play. Only so many people can justify raising a family and purchasing a home in The Bay. Why not change jobs to Seattle or Portland and make around the same money, but spend half on a house? I think that's what we're seeing.

<comment><USER15> A bit off topic, but how was your experience with Redfin? I'm thinking of using them.

<comment><USER16> I don't know anything about this company. I have an idea what market they are trying to crack. I can't believe it's taken this long.

I've always felt paying a Realtor 3% on the biggest item most of us will buy in our lives is crazy. I just don't know what they do for that commission. I don't know what makes one successful--just because he/she sold more than the others? Pay them more because they know how to network?

I missed getting my RE Brokers license a few years ago. I procrastinated. The Realestate lobby got to Jerry Brown, and got their bill though. A rediculious bill that just made it more difficult to get a license, essentially cutting down on supply. Enough said. To get a licence. It's about eight courses, and couple of years of doubious experience, and a simple test.

Now what does a good Realtor do earn that huge financial jackpot when they sell/buy you a house? I haven't a clue. Maybe a good omissions/errors insurance policy? I don't have a clue.

I've been told to pay full commission, and you will see what they bring. Then again, this sounds like something the King of Realestate came up with?

So, to all you young, hungry developers. I really believe the Realestate Agent is long past it's due date. I would love to see a safe way to exclude them, and their commissions form the home/commercial buying experience. A fool proof way?

I will now look into Redfin. If it's half what I believe it to be; there's much room for competition?

<comment><USER17> you pay them a commission because real estate deals can get ugly, fast, especially in competitive markets like in the coastal US.

a good agent has seen it all before, knows what to do when the seller or buyer starts making threats or is trying to angle the deal somehow. he knows what lawyers to call, what finance people to call, and yes, networks and has relationships with agents to get you properties that haven't hit the market yet.

out of my peer group who has ever bought property, i'd say a good third of them had some kind of issue during the deal that required an expert to mitigate.

of course a shitty real estate agent isn't worth their pay - but that goes for any job. but otherwise, it's the same old shit -- things are going great, what am i paying you for? things are going shitty, what am i paying you for?

<comment><USER18> I have a great real estate agent. He knew the math equations that HUD used to price their homes at auction, and what percentage of that price they'd take. Our first house (bought in 2008), he suggested that if we waited to make a bid on a house until a certain day, the price would drop, and they'd take 80% of the asking price. He was correct and we made a lot of money by selling when the market came back.

On the next house, he looked at the roof and knew that the house probably had a recalled shingle on it, and we couldn't even get insurance on the house with that shingle. The homeowner was stuck between replacing the shingles or taking a chance that the next buyer would have less attentive real estate/home inspectors.

Twice I have greatly benefited financially by his expertise. I'm not paying him a lot for his services necessarily (although he's great at it), I'm paying him for his expertise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article seems to imply some meltdown in housing is around the corner, but it seems more like the housing market is just leveling off as a result of market forces. You can only drive home prices so high before there aren't enough people who can afford them anymore. Hopefully that means that rent prices will also level off in the area in the near future.

<comment><USER20> From the article:

>> "...historically low inventory"

>> "...many sellers are sitting this year out."

>> "...The median sale price ... fell by 1.8 percent..."

The article's authors are confused. Their explanation for falling prices consists entirely of "Supply is down."

That's exactly the opposite of how supply, demand, and prices are related. If they wanted to claim that low prices are scaring sellers out of the market, since those sellers are hoping for a future rebound in prices, I might believe it. But the article claims the causality is going the other way.

<comment><USER21> In Cambridge, a faction of candidates for city council promises that they will make housing affordable by opposing the construction of new housing.

Apparently you can just tell people that supply and demand work the opposite way in the housing market, and people will believe you.

<comment><USER22> The reasoning might be that if a place gets luxury apartments, rich people will flood the area. Then the crime rate per capita goes down. The criminal population becomes diluted. It starts a snowball effect where crappy apartments in the area looks more and more attractive to the upper middle class as more upper middle class outbid previous poorer renters for the old housing.

<comment><USER21> I know that's the argument, but it doesn't make much sense to me. It's comparing to a fictitious alternative where rich people _don 't_ move in. Why wouldn't they? It's already a desirable place to live, so rich people desire it too, and by definition they can afford to act on that desire.

It is not hard for a rich person to outbid a poorer renter. I mean, this doesn't require a complicated explanation. Whether or not there's new housing, rich people can already outbid current renters because they _have more money_.

And when this happens without new housing, not only does a rich person move in, someone else moves out. By trying to prevent gentrification from indirectly causing displacement, you just cause the displacement right away.

This still sounds like supply and demand doing what one would expect, not doing the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A bit of an anecdote because the article mentions my town specifically - Tacoma:

We put our house on the market Friday, April 8th, a bit below the "redfin estimate" \- I saw it had gone live by 11am and we already had an interested party set up a viewing by 12pm. We showed the house 11 times by Monday morning and had 5 offers, some 12k above asking price. We accepted an offer by Tuesday (April 12). My head is still spinning from how fast this was and how many calls we were getting for appointments for viewing. This in a central Tacoma location, not exactly prime location (like the Proctor District or Stadium). We only had 3 other homes as comps in the area (1 mile radius).

Port Orchard / Gig Harbor area is very low on inventory too, which is where we are moving (Port Orchard, we looked in GH though).

<comment><USER24> This plays out daily in hot real estate markets. I've been casually observing the Boston/Cambridge market and I have to scratch my head when I see properties on the market for only a few days and agents demanding offers by 2 days after the open house. Typically, I see listed on Thursday, OH Sat/Sun, offers due Tuesday evening.

If I were a seller I'd think that we priced the property too low, then again I can imagine sellers just want it over and done with and who cares when it's the difference of locking in 100% appreciation or 108% appreciation.

<comment><USER25> As mountineer22 points out, this is a strategy to concentrate serious offers and play them against one another. The lower you set the price, the more initial interest you get, the greater chance two or more potential buyers get excited. With competitive bids, you can find the true 'market' price pretty quickly.

In a hot market this apparently works well.

Anecdotally, when my wife and I were looking for our eventual home in Cambridge a few years ago, we went to more than a couple of "open houses" which were _pro forma_ : Despite being listed on Wednesday, by Saturday the sellers already had an offer they were prepared to accept without even waiting for competitive bids!

<comment><USER24> Yup, a family member sold their condo in southie in 2014 and got an offer they accepted on the condition they cancel the open house...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe it's just redfin not having this in their own data, but I'd really like to see these graphs from 1998 and up. Only going back to 2012 isn't very useful in my opinion.

<comment><USER27> Trulia has some of the more basic data going back to 2000 [http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco- California/m...](http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco- California/market-trends/)

<comment><USER26> Wow. Number of home sales for 3 and 4 bedrooms currently at it's lowest level since 2000. I guess that's expected. Really validates my decision to move out of the bay area to raise my 3 kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meanwhile in Canada: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-house-prices- march-1.35...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-house-prices- march-1.3537143)

<comment><USER29> Pretty incredible bubble price increases, given the growth rate of the Canadian economy. How can that end any other way but in a massive crash?

"The average price of a Canadian home hit $508,567 in March, a jump of 15.7 per cent compared to the same month a year earlier."

vs

"IMF downgrades forecast for Canada's economy in 2016 and 2017"

"Canada's GDP will expand by 1.5 per cent this year and by 1.9 per cent next year. That's better than the 1.2 per cent performance clocked in 2015, but a pullback from what the IMF was expecting in January, which was 1.7 this year and 2.1 per cent next year. The unemployment rate is expected to rise to 7.3 per cent by the end of this year before ticking up to 7.4 per cent next year, the IMF now says."

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/imf-canada- forecast-1.353186...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/imf-canada- forecast-1.3531869)

<comment><USER30> Most markets in Canada are in slow decline, which reflects reality. Then you have the two special markets of Vancouver, which needs no introduction, and Toronto, which fits somewhere between Vancouver and reality.

It would be interesting to examine the fundamentals of each separately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think that SV has probably been in recession for the last few quarters judging from some friends I have who have been interviewing. Everyone is interviewing like crazy but few are hiring.

<comment><USER32> I've noticed a (perceived) spike in the number of foreclosures in SF on Zillow as well over the last 6 months.

<comment><USER33> I'd say in the last 6 months, for sale signs have gone up all over my neighborhood in SF. There are at least 3 on my block alone. Despite this, there is a 3 bedroom apartment two doors down from me that is asking for $10,000 a month rent, $30,000 due at lease signing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Plummet 22%" comes off as extremely alarmist.

Median sales price dropped 1.8%. The number of sales dropped 22%.

It's a signal, but of what? That's uncertain.

<comment><USER35> It's worth noting how tiny these numbers really are in a month like March. I just checked Zillow and 105 houses were sold in SF in the last 30 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Talking to a notary based in SF this week, she saw an increasing # of Bay Area clients buying a home in Portland or Seattle and moving.

<comment><USER37> My brother in Portland has been complaining about the area receiving all these ex-San Fransisco residents and how they've been driving up prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is this just a reversion to the mean following a one-time jump due to IPOs from, e.g., Facebook and Twitter?

I guess what I'm asking is, did SF housing prices merely fall back to where they were in 2013? Or all the way back to where they were in, say, 2009?

<comment><USER39> Not even close. More like they dropped to a few months ago. 1.8% seems like a rounding error. Probably the middle to high end is seeing most of the drop. In the 2-5 million range, houses have been staying on the market longer. Houses around where I live are still selling for $100,000 + over what I paid in 2013...

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As a Brooklyn resident (who rents), I hope this trend picks up steam and continues. Maybe I could be a homeowner some day after all!

<comment><USER41> As a foreigner, I don't understand this attitude. Why would you want all your wealth to be invested in a single leveraged asset that's also depreciating, requires your constant attention and ties you to a single locale?

<comment><USER42> In addition to what reverend_gonzo said, there is the simple fact that rents (mostly) go up and mortgage payments don't.

<comment><USER4> Interest rates aren't guaranteed to stay low. Here are the historic rates: [http://b-i.forbesimg.com/phildemuth/files/2013/07/image001.p...](http://b-i.forbesimg.com/phildemuth/files/2013/07/image001.png)

Though if you have a long-term fixed-rate mortgage, you are probably OK.

<comment><USER42> True, I was assuming fixed rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> SF had another real estate bubble during the dotcom boom, and as far as I know, the bust was regional in scope.

</comment><comment><USER44> Developers are finally building in SF..

[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real- estate/201...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real- estate/2016/04/s-f-s-10-largest-residential-projects-of-2016-will.html) [http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/04/san-franciscos- hu...](http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/04/san-franciscos-hub- heights-2-0-and-potential-for-a-600-foot-tower.html)

This is very good news, my prediction is that this wave of supply is going to reduce the prices for a while. There is actually still a lot of space in SOMA/Mission Bay/Central Waterfront to build. New construction is all going to be condos rather than single family homes, people who want to live in single family homes and drive to Costco on the weekends (nothing wrong with that) will continue to move to Seattle or Portland.

Money is flocking to SF from all over the world through VC companies and mutual funds, still. It used to be VCs with previous exits who already live in the region but in the last 2 years a lot of dumb money coming in. At some point in the next 5 years Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, Dropbox, Slack, Palantir and Stripe are going to have exits, even if 3 out of 8 lives up to their potentials these exits are going to create a lot of potential home buyers. Facebook, Google, Apple and Netflix (yes, netflix) are going to continue growing their empires. If SF's city officials can pull it off, with the increased investments in public transportation eventually San Francisco is going to become a global A+ city. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city))

Only a 'black swan' event can stop SF's medium term growth. We already had a 'black swan' event in tech in the recent history, burst of 2000, everyone is expecting a similar story here. It's the nature of 'black swan' events that if people are already expecting things to fall apart, the magnitude is much less. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory))

<comment><USER45> > If SF's city officials can pull it off, with the increased investments in > public transportation eventually San Francisco is going to become a global > A+ city.

This is the most hilarious comment I've read on HN in a long time.

<comment><USER46> They must not know SF's history...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> East Bay - My neighbors on either side sold their homes recently (last week). The house on the right sold for 75K above asking price. The one one the left sold for 90K above asking price (around 20 offers for each house). Listing price for both houses were already high.

<comment><USER48> That really just means that both houses had too low of a listing price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wouldn't hold your breath just yet. In the peninsula prices are up $100k in my neighborhood. Interest rates are still low so it will take some time.

</comment><comment><USER50> Sales plummet 22% in SF, yet there's a bidding war on every property? This implies that demand still outpaces supply so I don't see how you could predict a crash, yet. In reality, prices only dropped 1.8% y/y. And that was for March, which is traditionally a low-inventory month. I personally think the correction is still a year out.

</comment><comment><USER51> From the article you can see its a local equalization in process

While San Francisco had the highest median sale price in the nation at $1,042,500, that number actually fell 1.8% year over year, and declined by 0.7% month over month, an unusual change from February to March. * In neighboring San Jose, prices rose 3% to $860,000 and Oakland rose 5.4% to $590,000 _

</comment><comment><USER52> More like: distribution of sales prices fell. I don't think many individual homes sold for less.

</comment><comment><USER53> An Uber, Dropbox or AirBnB IPO would quickly make prices go up again.

However, these companies don't seem to be preparing for an IPO anytime soon.</comment>