Virtual reality flopped in the 1990s – This time it's different, apparently - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21662481-virtual-reality-flopped-1990s-time-its-differentapparently-grand <comment><USER2> It may flop in the mass market, but as one who has had 18 hour goggle sessions in elite, there _is_ a market, it may just be more niche for the time being than vr firms are betting on.

So - I don't think it will ultimately flop, but it may be a slower start than the hype hopes for.

</comment><comment><USER3> can't wait for VRML to come back. It was _included_ in browsers back then.

It's always great to remember that we had realtime chat and 3d worlds running in the browser in 1997, [http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/book/fullbook/chch/ch1f....](http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/book/fullbook/chch/ch1f.jpg) ... on systems with 0.1% the ram, 0.05% the disk space on 0.2% the bandwidth of our modern systems.

<comment><USER4> Which browser included VRML support? I just remember the plugins.

Edit: It was Netscape - [http://docs.tpu.ru/docs/html/html32/ch28.htm#NetscapesLive3D](http://docs.tpu.ru/docs/html/html32/ch28.htm#NetscapesLive3D)

<comment><USER3> netscape struck a deal with SGI in the day. Here's the press release of the shipment: [http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cosmo-player- ships-a...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cosmo-player-ships-as-an- integral-component-of-netscape-communicator-40-75892222.html)

And here's the press release of the deal: [https://books.google.com/books?id=aToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.com/books?id=aToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=netscape+navigator+cosmo+player&source=bl&ots=yAv2lxh18U&sig=Xqw7_SNIG89IUnLhdXyfIBKTOG0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBGoVChMIjsfT6ojYxwIVEFmICh2k8Q6m#v=onepage&q=netscape%20navigator%20cosmo%20player&f=false)

for IE: "Microsoft integrated the Intervista VRML 2.0 viewer in Microsoft(R) Internet Explorer 4.0." [http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft- releases-v...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-releases- vrml-20-authoring-tools-cd-74871142.html)

edit: I can't find an actual build with it. I did find a version bundled with AIM, WinAmp, RealPlayer G2, and PalmPilot utilities though. Here's the glory screen shot, in an appropriately old window manager [http://i.imgur.com/nacQMCX.png](http://i.imgur.com/nacQMCX.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A counterargument: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/i-tried-vr-and-it-was-just- ok/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/i-tried-vr-and-it-was-just-ok/)

TDLR; it seems as though people are excited about VR being exciting, instead of being excited about VR itself.

<comment><USER6> In actual real-world user tests, I've found that 95-95% of people say "Holy OMFG this is one of the coolest things I have EVER SEEN!!!1"

There are "always a few" who shrug their shoulders and say "so what is the use-case for this anyway?"

<comment><USER7> We developed a piece of software for use at a pharmaceutical trade show and had nearly 1000 people use it over three days.

This was exactly our experience. There was certainly a 10% who were absolutely blown away and we almost had to rip the headset off them after 20 minutes. Around 80% who were quite amazed and engrossed in the whole thing and certainly a 5 to 10% who were just meh, or felt a bit queasy very early on.

We deliberately programmed in an early section that would separate out people likely to feel sick early on. Our thought here was to get them out early on, rather than let sickness creep up on them.

I think the 5 to 10% will shrink quite quickly with new hardware. We couldn't calibrate IPD for everyone - new headsets make this much quicker and easier to do. Reduced latency, etc. is all going to help here as well.

<comment><USER8> Its almost a given that a tech gizmo gathers healthy interest today. The real question is whether the general population want to integrate it into their life when the novelty wears off.

Do you you have any reason to think your experience differs from say, doing a trade show with force-feedback sticks in 2000, wiimotes in 2006 or kinect in 2011?

<comment><USER7> That's a very good question and one I may struggle to answer properly.

I think with the other technologies there was always a feeling of using technology for the sake of technology. My experience with VR was that once somebody put the headset and noise cancelling headphones on, they were immersed. That is, they couldn't talk to a friend, fiddle with their phone or anything else that would distract them. Seeing people move their head for the first time and look shocked/awed that there was a feeling of presence is like nothing I saw with the other technologies listed. People would say "oh that's neat" or "that's cool". With VR, some people take the headset off and just sit there in a kind of daze at what they've just experienced. Seeing people try and reach out and touch stuff is always funny as well.

Funnily enough, the three technologies you list I see being used in conjunction with VR in some form or another as it grows - Valve's lighthouse tech is broadly similar to Kinect, the new Oculus/Steam controllers are somewhat in-line with Wiimote technology. It's starting to feel like all of the pieces of the puzzle are beginning to align for the very first time.

The real challenge to make the technology shine is going to be content creators adapting their thought processes to a new medium. They won't be able to apply the tricks that grew up out of cinema. The toolbox needs rebuilding. I'm eagerly awaiting trying what Oculus have been doing in this area with their Story Studio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Biggest issue - It takes work to use. People are lazy, standing and moving is not fun.

One of the reasons the minority report interface sucks. It's way to much effort to use compared to a mouse.

But it'll take off thanks to the internet, it allows a lot of old tech to start working, just it'll be narrower than people think.

<comment><USER10> Technically you can just swivel chair and a gamepad. That could be enough for like 80% of use cases.

You can watch tv in a virtual theater from a couch, you can observe 360 videos/panoramas and play most of the games from swivel chair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I played with the Oculus for about 1.25 hours while drunk, and felt sick for about 20 minutes afterwards.

My guess:

When good headsets hit with 4k and ~20ms latency (2017?), with great cross platform support (2018?), at a reasonable pricepoint, comfort level and UX (2019)? we will _all_ be using them to code.

In a few years when you are pair programming with someone remotely, I'd be surprised if you didn't point to line 12 with your hand.

<comment><USER12> Kind of like here in the Post PC world where we are all coding on tablets while sitting on the beach.

Sorry, but no. I just don't see this happening. People don't want things on their face for that long. Even eyeglasses bug me and I've been wearing them most my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> personal anecdote:

\- the resolution on the Oculus DK2 is painfully low -- it's like sticking your face 1 inch from a 640x400 CRT monitor. This made me car-sick after a few minutes.

\- the sense of "presence" and natural neck movement is very good and it feels natural.

\- the notion of a headset is a bit clunky but i don't know of a better solution.

</comment><comment><USER14> A handful of games developers I know that have used Oculus Rift complained of sickness after 20 minutes or so. Apparently it's better with recent revisions of the hardware, but to put it in perspective the prior revision had one chap needing to lie down in a dark room he felt so awful!

<comment><USER15> I played Valkyrie on the DK1, it was awful, I felt sick for about two hours afterwards.

I played it on the DK2 about a year later. I felt a slight twinge, especially when the head-tracking hitched, but afterwards I felt fine.

Also played a racing game on the DK2 around the same time with no ill effect. I think the head-tracking really helps here.

<comment><USER16> When my mate finally got in DK1(and we finally got HL2 working with it) I found the load a terrible user experience. Going from head tracking and immersion to a sudden frozen image that is fixed in your view while your head moves.. Crazy vertigo. I didn't really get sick from it, but it definitely was not the most fun I have had playing a game.

These things will get sorted out relatively quickly though I imagine.

<comment><USER17> I imagine that's the kind of thing that can be solved with more design experience - some kind of low-computing-load "loading room" that at least gives you control of the camera, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just don't think putting screens in front of a person's eyes is going to be the solution for VR.

The technology needs more direct access to our biology to truly deliver on the expectations it creates.

<comment><USER19> Can a patch on the skin induce currents in the nerves below the skin?

<comment><USER20> Yes. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPNXUfOkt2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPNXUfOkt2A)

You would probably want more fidelity, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's a step in the right direction, but I personally don't think the tech is there yet - just look at the millions that go into creating 3d games for a 2d surface, how does that scale to 360deg of motion?

Additionally, you have M$ marketing campaign which does videos like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA) (even though it's AR, the point still stands that VR/AR are being marketed as more than they actually are).

<comment><USER15> I don't understand the question. You've already got a 3D environment, all you have to do is implement camera control for the headset. For simulation games where the user is stationary (planes, cars) you can pretty much stop there.

Other games will need to be designed with VR in mind, but it's not going to balloon art budgets or anything. On the contrary, what a lot of developers find is that they can get away with less sophisticated graphics while maintaining a sense of presence. See Superhot for a good example.

[https://superhotgame.com/](https://superhotgame.com/)

<comment><USER21> Yes you have a 3d world, but now everything in it needs to be interact able. Knock your fist against a wall for example, it makes subtlety different noises everytime - how do you program for that? Everything in the environment should have physics too. In a survival game if I pick up cello-tape and a gun and flashlight I'd expect to be able to attach it all together myself with my hands.

All this stuff you can hide behind a button press on a gamepad+tv, but in VR it's so much more jarring when the world you are walking around can only be somewhat interacted with - the techniques we use to fake stuff today just don't stand up when you can look at them from a mm away. The idea of VR+gamepad just doesn't make sense to me - If I can't see/control my hands/feet as I'd expect then all these reports of VR induced sickness come as no surprise.

<comment><USER15> Good point. I thought you were just referring to graphics, but yeah, the bar for interaction is definitely going to go up once our hands are involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing about VR Cinema?

Shameless self promotion: [http://www.Sphericam.com](http://www.Sphericam.com) is the ONLY spherical camera with 4K resolution and 60FPS, providing the nateve resolution needed for VR cinema in today's and next year's VR headsets. We are now taking preorders after raising nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter in july.

<comment><USER17> RTFA

"That the new generation of VR's first software products will mostly be games, then, seems in little doubt. But the industry's boosters point out that it could have plenty of other uses as well. One is film. All of the proposed headsets will come with cinema apps that put the user inside a virtual picture palace with an ordinary flat screen. But immersive films that place the viewer at the centre of the action, and which are made with special panoramic cameras, are possible too. One, called "Clouds over Sidra", which chronicles life inside a refugee camp in Jordan, has already proved a hit online."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> No, it's still going to flop. The kind of people that think VR is a good idea also thought Ouya is a good idea, so yah, it's doomed.

Didn't personal injury lawsuit concerns kill VR back in the 90's?

And then there's the limited field-of-view..</comment>


Advancing our amazing bet - <AUTHOR> https://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-bet.html <comment><USER2> This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in:

> And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is > solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect > that growth to continue.

"We're not yet profitable."

> We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It > entails us making changes to focus our business and product strategy. > Importantly, the plan enhances our focus on new technology and deployment > methods to make superfast Internet more abundant than it is today.

"Building fiber infrastructure in cities isn't a viable business model."

> For most of our "potential Fiber cities" — those where we've been in > exploratory discussions — we're going to pause our operations and offices > while we refine our approaches.

"We're not going to build out any more cities using this approach."

> In this handful of cities that are still in an exploratory stage, and in > certain related areas of our supporting operations, we'll be reducing our > employee base.

"We're winding down Google Fiber operations and putting it on life support."

> As for me personally, it's been quite a journey over the past few years, > taking a broad-based set of projects and initiatives and growing a focused > business that is on a strong trajectory. And I've decided this is the right > juncture to step aside from my CEO role.

"I'm getting out of this while it still looks good."

\--

That's too bad. Google Fiber has put a lot of needed pressure on existing telecommunications mega-corps to improve their services. I really wanted to see it take off well enough to result in some major improvements to infrastructure around the country, but having worked for an ISP in a previous lifetime, I was skeptical that they'd be able to do it profitably. Last-mile fiber is expensive, expensive, expensive.

I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief.

<comment><USER3> This is why I read the comments first, just avoided another painful article.

Do people who communicate in spin-speak start to think that way on the inside too?

<comment><USER4> Oh that's an interesting question. When I speak a different languages I switch to thinking in that language (this goes for human and computer languages). If I talk with a Russian friend, I think in Russian. When use a functional programming language I switch to thinking in functional concepts (maps, folds, list comprehension, closures). When in an OO language think about composition and so on.

So when they write that stuff I imagine for an hour they switch to "CEO mode" and think in those concepts, write things down. Then they become themselves [+].

Also the best propaganda is propaganda that is internalized, people often brainwash themselves, because it makes things easier and is much more effective than pretending to speak one thing but think another.

[+] One can argue there is no such thing as "oneself" and we are all just a sequences of such personas or roles we play. But that's for a philosophical aside.

<comment><USER5> That's absolutely fascinating, because I personally always think the same "way." Are you aware of any research on this subject?

<comment><USER6> I always think in the language I am currently speaking/listening to. And I'm pretty sure everyone else does.

As for programming languages, I myself haven't done functional programming, but I'd imagine if I did, I would temporarily discard any OO programming knowledge I have, while busy coding something in a functional way. Because OO concepts are mostly irrelevant in that case, so why would you be thinking about them?

<comment><USER7> Discarding OO concepts is easier said than done. I'm betting that inability to discard OO concepts is the main hurdle people have while learning FP.

<comment><USER8> The good ones generally map to (pardon the pun) equivalent functional concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is terrible corporate speak.

It should be titled "We are killing Google Fiber for any new cities".

Why do companies do this? Why sugar coat all of this and why make me think your actually going to expand only to let me down. It's terrible double speak and it does not help your cause, it just makes me dislike your company for two reasons now. One for canceling a service I was excited about and two for being, in my opinion, dishonest.

<comment><USER10> It turns out saying "we failed and are canceling a product, again" hurts the stock price more.

<comment> s8-0913458 No, that's not how the stock market works.

If a company's project/product were failing and/or losing money, then investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago.

If a company announces that it is ending a money-losing effort, then investors will value the company more highly.

In theory, therefore, this announcement should raise the stock price. In practice, who knows.

<comment><USER11> > investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago

That's a misconception. The investors had done expectations. They were either met or unmet. But unless there is insider info, a project going bad won't get priced before the news is known.

Stuck prices isn't some magical thing that knows all. It's simply an average of what everyone believes. Beliefs are sometimes wrong.

<comment><USER12> Thinking about your last statement:

If the price were an average of beliefs, we would have people that believe it's worth more and people that think it's worth less. Those that think it is worth more would, logically, buy Google stock, and then the price would increase until we reached the price where people are somewhat on agreement that it isn't worth more. So, either there is a lack of funds to make the purchases, or the given price reflects the highest price someone is willing to pay for it, right?

<comment><USER13> Every stock trade reflects a _disagreement_ between two parties about the value of the company, not an agreement on what it is worth. The buyer would rather own that stock than that amount of money. The seller would rather have the money. They can't both be right about which is more valuable.

<comment><USER14> > They can't both be right about which is more valuable

Actually, they can. As a simple example, they can agree on both price and volatility projections, but simply have different utility functions in terms of how much volatility they are willing to accept. Most simply, one of them might be 64 and about to retire while the other is 22 and just starting to invest in their retirement fund.

I expect that a majority of stock purchases/sales are in fact driven by such considerations and not fundamentals analysis...

<comment><USER13> You're right, of course, they don't just disagree about the value of the stock, they disagree about the value of money, and the meaning of 'value'.

But my point is that when you see that a stock is trading at a particular price, all that tells you is that one person has a utility function that values that amount of money higher than a unit of the stock, and one person has a utility function that is opposite it. There's no guarantee either of them have a utility function anywhere near your own. Which leads me to conclude that the net information content of a stock trade is, fundamentally, zero. And yet prediction markets work - go figure.

<comment><USER14> > There's no guarantee either of them have a utility function anywhere near > your own.

Yep.

> Which leads me to conclude that the net information content of a stock trade > is, fundamentally, zero.

It might not be if you have a bunch of trades, averaging over lots of people with different utility functions. Maybe. Depending on how average your utility function is.

In practice people end up with heuristics like "100 - age" and diversification out of stocks or hedging of their stocks to deal with the imperfect matchup between their utility function and the averaged one.

It's hard not to think of the whole thing as a house of cards sometimes.

> And yet prediction markets work

Sometimes they do. As long as everyone involved has broadly the same utility function: that of maximizing their money above all else. If enough people, or more properly enough monetary units, come in with a weird utility function (e.g. valuing a particular prediction more than their money), you get prediction market failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I won't be surprised if this news is met with the usual sentiment that Google abandons everything that isn't immediately hugely successful, and while I often share that criticism of Google, I can't really fault them too much in this case. Getting a nationwide ISP up and running from scratch just seems like an almost impossible task. This is disappointing to me nonetheless.

Can someone with knowledge of the industry explain to me what the biggest hurdles were for Fiber and what if any mistakes Google made in it's rollout? Am I correct in assuming telco interference or hostility played a part? What could Google have done differently for Fiber to be profitable, or is this simply not an industry that you can hope to be profitable in unless you look 20-30 years out?

Basically I'm curious to learn whether this is a result of mistakes on Google's part, Google just not having the long term wherewithal for the rollout, or market/regulatory forces making such a project impossible at this time?

<comment><USER16> I worked briefly on the Fiber team when it was very young (basically from 2 weeks before to 2 weeks after launch - I was on loan from Search specifically so that they could hit their launch goals). The bottleneck when I was there were local government regulations, and in fact Kansas City was chosen because it had a unified city/county/utility regulatory authority that was very favorable to Google. To lay fiber to the home, you either need right-of-ways on the utility poles (which are owned by Google's competitors) or you need permission to dig up streets (which requires a mess of permitting from the city government). In either case, the cable & phone companies were in very tight with local regulators, and so you had hostile gatekeepers whose approval you absolutely needed.

The technology was awesome (1G Internet and HDTV!), the software all worked great, and the economics of hiring contractors to lay the fiber itself actually worked out. The big problem was regulatory capture.

With Uber & AirBnB's success in hindsight, I'd say that the way to crack the ISP business is to provide your customers with the tools to break the law en masse. For example, you could imagine an ISP startup that basically says "Here's a box, a wire, and a map of other customers' locations. Plug into their jack, and if you can convince others to plug into yours, we'll give you a discount on your monthly bill based on how many you sign up." But Google in general is not willing to break laws - they'll go right up to the boundary of what the law allows, but if a regulatory agency says "No, you can't do that", they won't do it rather than fight the agency.

Indeed, Fiber is being phased out in favor of Google's acquisition of WebPass, which does basically exactly that but with wireless instead of fiber. WebPass only requires the building owner's consent, and leaves the city out of it.

<comment><USER15> It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory capture, that is certainly depressing.

This leads me to another question that maybe you or someone else can answer, although I understand if you can't for various reasons. There seems to be a ton of very smart people working at Google and I can't imagine that they would go about trying to set up their own ISP without taking into account the huge pushback they would get from existing telcos, so I would imagine they had plans to deal with all of this. Did Google underestimate the amount of pushback they would receive, did they feel they could effectively lobby for changes which turned out to be unsuccessful? Or has something else changed in the proceeding years since Fiber originally rolled out that makes Google think it is no longer worth the fight?

<comment><USER17> > It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory > capture, that is certainly depressing.

Why is that depressing? Do you feel any company should be allowed to build a phone line above your street, instead of being a regulated monopoly?

This is what happens when you do that:

[http://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when- thousands-o...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-of- cables-crowded-t-1629961917)

<comment><USER18> You know, returning home to the USA a couple times a year, I am really struck by how many freaking power and phone lines are everywhere. It seems like every single street, except for the very core of cities downtown, and only the very wealthiest neighbors, have buried lines. In Germany, almost every town and every highway is free of these (IMO) ugly poles with lines everywhere. It's really an eyesore when you finally glance up.

<comment><USER19> Germany is also a significantly smaller area with more of the population in high density zones compared to most of the USA.

Aboveground cables are easier to repair and much less expensive to string up over thousands of miles.

<comment><USER18> I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't really hold water. Essentially every little town, village, city, even along highways, everywhere in Germany, the cables are buried. Even in low density towns. Even to farms out in the country. Pretty much the only things that aren't buried are high-tension lines.

Lines exposed to the elements wear faster than buried lines and are subject to more outages due to weather and accidents.

It's just that in the USA towns and cities are either too disorganized or too cheap to invest properly in infrastructure. Burying lines seems like such a small thing until you realize how ugly lines strung everywhere are. It makes me feel like I am coming home to a third world country sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That was kinda impressively worded.

Like, it took me a while to realize that what they were saying is "hey, this isn't working, we need to cut expenses. Also, I quit."

So, good job framing this about investing in R&D. Any clues as to why they're actually doing this? Competition, regulation, ???

<comment><USER21> Money. Specifically infrastructure cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This may be one of the worst PR releases I have ever read. Others have already complained/translated/etc. so my comment is redundant. But I'm jumping on the bandwagon anyway. Because I want Google/Alphabet to know my displeasure at being treated as an ignorant child incapable of recognizing doublespeak when they see it.

But frankly, as this is a surprise, yet one more half-assed Google project that gets killed off within a few years of starting. Add it to the pile.

And to Google PR people: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M)

...just planting seeds...

<comment><USER23> Leave it to PR department to take 50 words of bad news and obfuscate it into 450 positive-sounding words that barely deliver the real message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://ouramazingbet.tumbler.com/](https://ouramazingbet.tumbler.com/)

can be the big company version of

[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think my experiences as a Google Fiber subscriber here in Provo might help illustrate why things haven't gone as well for Google as they (and we) initially expected.

It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be.

It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed in the home are even remotely provisioned for gigabit residential connections. ESPN.com loads about as quickly as it always did. Your Netflix streams don't look any different (the absence of buffering, while nice, is a pretty subtle thing). Even Google services, which you'd expect to be optimized for Fiber subscribers, are no faster than before. Downloads from Google Drive at my home are just as pokey as they are on my Comcast connection at the office.

A few things are amazing (Apple downloads are so fast you feel like you must be on the company LAN in Cupertino) and, if you're the rare person who can make use of it, the fact that Google Fiber also provides 1 Gbps UPSTREAM... well, words don't exist to express what that's like.

But those are the exceptions. And those exceptions are only achievable by the rare person who actually wired the house with Ethernet. Oh, and it turns out that you've also got to upgrade all of your NICs (every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box).

If you're on wifi, forget it, especially if you're one of the vast majority connecting solely via the underpowered 802.11n wifi router that Google provided.

It was a source of enormous community pride when Google made the announcement. (And a source of validation for the politicians who years earlier had pushed through the municipal fiber network that Google purchased for a dollar.) Everyone was so excited to sign up, and it was great to celebrate with your neighbors as the blue and white Google Fiber vans slowly moved up your street.

But now, a couple of years in, no one really talks about it anymore. It's definitely nice. The Google folks are great to deal with if you ever have an issue (which, in any case, is exceedingly rare). The pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. But, to your average household here in Provo, on an average evening doing average things on the Internet, it just doesn't seem very different than what we had before.

<comment><USER26> > every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that > Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit > Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box

Really? I have a chromebox (CPU is Haswell Celeron 2955U, NIC is Realtek 8168), running Windows and can hit about 950M down/833M up on dslreports speedtest when my ATT fiber is having a good day. I thought Realtek nics were considered poor, but getting to 95% of theoretical over the internet seems pretty ok to me. In a browser and going through my NAT box, plus ATT's mostly useless residential gateway.

What are good examples of junky gigabit nics that don't cut it?

<comment><USER25> Macs also do pretty well with stock NICs.

This is well outside my area of expertise, but I think it may have been as much a chipset or bus issue as anything (e.g. other limitations presented by the motherboard), as all the issues I've observed or heard about have been with onboard NICs. Even the cheapest add-on cards performed loads better...

<comment><USER26> I guess most of the iffy onboard NICs I've had weren't 1G. But I do now recall some issues with speed on an nForce integrated nic, although it was still fast enough, much faster than 100M anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27>
      For most of our "potential Fiber cities" — those where we've been in exploratory discussions — we're going to pause our operations and offices while we refine our approaches

NOOOOOOOOOOOO. Being trapped with either Time Warner or AT&T with max speeds of 40mbps had me really excited as a San Diegan for Google Fiber.

<comment><USER28> On the plus side, you'll soon be trapped with just AT&T! Oh wait...

<comment><USER29> Time Warner Cable is a separate company from the Time Warner AT&T is acquiring. A previous spinoff.

<comment><USER28> Dang. Good to know :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Google Fiber has been such an unqualified success that we're stopping all work on it, and also I quit."

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, this blog post feels like a giant nothing-burger. We're going to continue what we're doing by pausing what we're doing so we can grow. Mumle mumble marketing speak.

</comment><comment><USER32> At what point does corporate speak become nonsense gibberish? This post is amazingly close.

</comment><comment><USER33> As a consumer, the last/most recent product from Google that I "trust" (to be reliable and to stick around) is Google Docs (whatever the current branding). Because they are still "dogfooding" it -- using it internally.

I don't have current cloud app deployment needs -- and until this year, the Google "cloud" seemed to be kind of marginal, anyway, as an impression based upon "osmosis" from various articles and commenting.

I've tried to stick it out with Android, but support and consistency.

Google pushes these projects for a while, to meet or explore its own objectives.

But I don't count on them, anymore.

As an individual consumer, I'm just the product.

P.S. Removing the + operator from search. Still missing it.

P.P.S. Yes, the nature of this comment is a bit rhetorical. But in a serious sense. The occasional comment on HN is the only way I feel I have any maybe effective feedback -- at least, to some individuals at Google who happen by.

Although, after months and months and months, including _repeatedly_ using the error reporting feature within Android to report instances... And finally, shortly after a comment about the behavior on HN, the crashing of the Google Camera app upon "zoom out" on my Nexus 5x, appears to finally be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER34> There is no good money in delivering bits. That's why AT&T wants to buy Time Warner and that's why Google Fiber is shutting down. The only way to make money is price gauging in areas where there is a competitive market. There is really no way to stand out from the competition other than a better price per bit. Obviously there isn't much money in that. There also is really no way to make your customer actively happy other than pricing. Even if you do anything right the only time you will be noticed is when something is broken which is often times unavoidable (storms, lighting, broken equipment, incompetent customers, etc.). Bottom line it's a shit market to be in. The only reason to innovate is because some competitor was foolish to sink money into better, faster infrastructure that most customers don't care about and now you gotta catch up. So there are only incentives to screw customers one way or another and integrating innovation as much as possible. I'm not sure how this can possibly be turned into a functioning, competitive market.

<comment><USER35> There's enough market in delivering bits to make it worthwhile. The problem is the challenge from the existing people in that market who do everything then can to block you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A model that seems to work pretty well in Europe (or at least, over here in Italy) is having utility providers (which are already used to handle infrastructure at a scale) taking care of deploying fiber everywhere to then sell access back to the ISPs (bitstream).

In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable). I have no data but I am also quite sure that those companies are receiving funds from both the Government and the EU.

Anyway, they're building the digital highways that we miss and the result for the consumers is not bad: here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for 20 EUR/month.

Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.

<comment><USER37> We have a lot of those networks here in Sweden. The thing is though, it is much more expensive than simpler networks where you have a "group connection" to an ISP. I think its usually double the price to use a service platform fibre network, and sometimes the group connections can be had for 1/4 the price!

Although I have to say these new platforms are kind of awesome. The city I live in has a city-wide (and beyond) network where you can choose from 1-1000 Mbps service from several ISPs. And it has "local peering" which means if you send data to/from your neighbor, no matter which ISP they have, the data will only hit your local router in the basement/close by. No need to send data via the internet, or even an IX. In practice though, that performance is not much different from just sending the data on a much longer roundtrip, which makes me sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The title should be:

> Google winds down its fiber operations

<comment><USER39> I think Hacker News would be improved if there was a way to add a subtitle for submissions. The title could be unedited from the original, and the subtitle could be a brief note explaining what the link is _really_ about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If Fiber does shut down it's going to be pretty devastating for Google's reputation going forward. We're talking about upsetting a whole different demographic of people that fall outside of typical Google users. These are going to be average Joes and Janes most of whom probably don't even use other Google products. They simply jumped on the internet deal because most of their neighborhood did. You abandon these people and they'll never buy any other of your products again. If Google thinks this is going to go over similarly to the shutdown of Reader than i think they'll be in a for a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER41> Again Google is shooting themselves in the foot.

Google Fiber, like Android, is a moonshot to keep their line of business alive. Failure doesn't mean that Google doesn't profit off a new line of business. Failure means that Google can be shut down.

Google lives off open internet. Their profit is primarily off:

1\. Android 2\. Search 3\. AdSense, AdWords.

A closed internet means that 2 out of 3 is dead. All they have in Android.

If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them).

In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless.

<comment><USER8> _> If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them)._

 _> In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless._

That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them. It would cost many orders of magnitude more to create a blacklist and/or to track down and attempt to collect payment from the owners than just to continue serving them as before. It's the 25 GB 4K 6-hour Netflix binge-watching sessions they'd want to be subject to throttling/charges.

Whether that's a good thing for the consumer is debatable — it probably isn't — but there's no reason for fearmongering. Many countries, including the US for most of the past several decades, have no or have not had "strong net- neutrality laws" without "migrat[ing] to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by [ISPs])."

<comment><USER41> >That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them

Or you create a white-list (which is slowly being made). Your average Wordpress site counts against data. Want it to be "free"? Pay AT&T some money? Can't because it's too complicated for anyone but CNN? Too bad.

Oh, you only get 200 MB per month? Not a big deal, because CNN/BBC/YouTube pay money not to be counted against data limits.

We didn't have this for decades. Really, it started about a decade ago when dial-up died.

Under dialup, one could switch providers on a dime, so you could switch from anyone pulling such shenanigans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Quick story: here in Apex, NC, Google announced they'd bring Fiber here and everybody was really excited. A few months later when the website went up, everyone I know entered their address to check availability and it turns out that Google decided to draw the "line" just outside our town, stopping short of including Apex (a suburb of Raleigh) but including other suburbs like Cary and Morrisville.

The whole town was pissed. We were excited for Google Fiber and then had it taken away from us when they had previously said Apex would be included.

Fast forward another few months and we heard rumblings that AT&T might be debuting their GigaPower fiber service in Apex. Soon after, AT&T verified this rumor then started running fiber lines all over. My neighborhood (and others in Apex near me) all got gigabit fiber for under $100/mo, _AND_ it turns out Google dragged their feet with the surrounding suburbs and they didn't get Google Fiber till months later, but by then everyone had just signed up for AT&T GigaPower and forgot all about Google.

<comment><USER43> That sounds like it was deliberately orchestrated by AT&T to me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The weird thing is no one will buy it and every media company out there will lead with "Google fiber is dead". So why be so convoluted at all?

</comment><comment><USER45> I was a big supporter, however now I wonder whether the cities that they've started rolling out to will get half-assed because their budgets are cut or morale has dropped. It's freaking Google- I don't understand how they didn't do the due diligence ahead of time to prepare budget for costs adequately.

But, if they ever come, I'll probably buy in, because I can't believe that AT&T is saying things like this- do they actually understand that PR 101 is you don't gloat?: [http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/fcc/broadband- investmentnot-f...](http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/fcc/broadband- investmentnot-for-the-faint-of-heart/)

<comment><USER46> I believe the intention of Google Fiber project was not to make money directly, but to put pressure on other ISPs by showing that Google can actually enter the market and act as viable competitor if they don't behave.

For me this sounds like somebody just made a high-level decision that this thing is no longer important for Google's mission. As we have seen, they have been trying quite hard to focus on fewer things. It's not necessarily even about money. Each individual business requires some attention from the (top) management and they are competing on talented people inside the company.

<comment><USER45> Understand that they would have assumed some loss in the front of nationwide rollout, but they seem to have overestimated adoption and underestimated the costs required to rollout.

The one thing they did right, imo, were t-shirts. Compared to billboards, TV commercials, etc. a well-designed t-shirt lasts a really long time and gets more attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It is a shame that Google Fiber did not build a EPON network like the ones that major ISPs in South Korea, Japan and China either have built or are building. The equipment is cheaper because it is free of legacy cruft. They could have opted for 10G-EPON to have been able to put more users on each node too.

That said, the biggest advantage that fiber seems to have in those countries is that the government is pushing for it. In China for instance, I have heard that all new construction must have fiber available. It is possible to order 200Mbps down and 20Mbps up fiber service in Shanghai even in old constructions. I have only seen the situation in Shanghai firsthand, so I cannot comment much on South Korea or Japan. However, I do know that they deployed EPON technology and are migrating toward 10G-EPON. 10G-EPON is superior to the GPON that we use in the US:

[http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30519466-PON-EPON-or- GPON-o...](http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30519466-PON-EPON-or-GPON-or- GEPON)

</comment><comment><USER48> This sounds like Gavin from Silicon Valley.

"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."

<comment><USER49> Except the CEO is also leaving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is very similar to Verizon. They also stopped their FIOS roll out when they realized it was a bad business.

[http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Verizon-says- FiOS...](http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Verizon-says-FiOS-roll- out-stopped-because-of-6591620.php)

</comment><comment><USER51> NY Times article is a bit easier to parse...

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/technology/google-curbs- ex...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/technology/google-curbs-expansion-of- fiber-optic-network-cutting-jobs.html)

</comment><comment><USER52> What alien language is this written in? I can't make sense of this soul sucking prose.

</comment><comment><USER53> Associated reading - [https://www.theinformation.com/inside-the-battle-over- google...](https://www.theinformation.com/inside-the-battle-over-google-fiber) (Aug 2016) (paywall)

<comment><USER54> Since it is paywalled, you want to share a few of the key points that didn't show up in the other stories?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I feel like Google set the wrong goal. Most people don't need symmetric 1Gbps connections, and won't need them for decades. They could have started with something like 200Mbps down / 50 Mbps up, and covered way more customers for the same cost.

That would still be very disruptive.

It would also be great if some high speed / high bandwidth wireless tech took off to eliminate laying fiber altogether. Like that Japanese terahertz 5G 100Gbps.

<comment><USER56> its really the same cost. the actual fiber itself is cheap compared to the costs of laying it.

<comment><USER55> Yes, that's what I said. But you can hook up 5 times the customers at that same cost.

<comment><USER26> I'm sure 100 mbps (or whatever) fiber has cheaper equipment on both sides, so if you ran that instead of 1g, you'd be spend the same money and build out to more customers, but I would be shocked if that was five times the customers. Most of the time, expense and headache is spent in getting sites for your equipment, surveying and planning the runs, and getting access to run the fiber near the homes (poles or underground). Running the drops to the homes is also time consuming.

You might as well spend a bit more on equipment and run 1G, so you you're competitive with what the incumbents will upgrade to next.

Edit to add: The bandwidth out to the internet from the wherever the access goes to really isn't a major cost factor. Access from a decent exchange point isn't that expensive, and you can oversubscribe by a significant factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Well, RIP another Google product I guess.

I'm certain that Google Fiber is what spurred At&T to offer Gigapower fiber in Miami though. So thanks for that.

</comment><comment><USER58> Posting as rampant speculation: The thought occurs to me that Google may be finding that achieving its aim of improved broadband service through regulatory mechanism might be cheaper than building their own. Armed with the data from the response of entrenched broadband monopolists, making the case to the FCC of a market and/or regulatory failure seems plausible. That _could_ actually cast this as a win.

Background: With Google's strong ties to the Obama administration, the exceptionally high likelihood of a Clinton administration (also with strong Google ties), another item today of the resignation of the (now former) head of the US Copyright Office under the Library of Congress (seen as a loss by old-guard copyright interests, especially Hollywood, the RIAA/MPAA, and possibly book publishers -- which would also include Apple and Amazon among thsoe affected), a current and sustained (for at least 4, and quite probably 8 years) favourable regulatory inclination to Google's goals of widespread, high-speed service might be expected. This would serve Google's general interests (serving more ads, surveilling more data, running high-speed and omnipresent services such as Google Now), and as noted, put several of Google's major competitors back on their heels (though I'm not sure how big books are for Amazon any more).

Another theory is that Google have worked out a fiber-to-wireless concept which removes much of the need for last-mile connectivity.

Again: no source other than my own fevered brain.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think the basic problem is that people do not need 1000 Mbit connections at home. What would your average joe need that for?

Interesting times. We seem to have reached a point of peak everything. Almost nothing that is very technological has much more growth left.

All growth seems to come from not all that technologically amazing things: uber, snapchat, airbnb.

</comment><comment><USER60> A lot more details here: [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/google...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/google-fiber-laying-off-9-of-staff-will-pause-plans- for-10-cities/)

</comment><comment><USER61> It still boggles my mind why they didn't offer a mid-range service level, say 50Mbps for $15-20/mo. I know more than a handful of students here (including myself) who would pay for that.

I have to admit, it's weird that they came here with such a big hoorah and now they're almost nowhere to be found.

<comment> mark-r It doesn't cost any less to offer a lower speed, so all they'd be doing is losing money by offering it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> TLDR; Google Fiber is closing down.

</comment><comment><USER63> [http://cdn.leanblog.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_0136-...](http://cdn.leanblog.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_0136-540x304.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER64> A nation-wide rollout would have been one of the most transformative things Google could have done. Growing their profits now depends on a thirty year bet on unproven technologies.

</comment><comment><USER65> I live in Austin and they literally just yesterday marked up my yard where the fiber is supposed to go. Does anyone know if they will finish the job or am I left out to dry here?

</comment><comment><USER66> Dang, I've been waiting and crossing my fingers here in San Francisco for Google Fiber. I despise Comcast XFINITY (not to mention my bill has soared to nearly $180 a month).

</comment><comment> a-no-n So when will Google Fibre fix the embarrassing Starbucks WiFi at:

        247  reviews$$$$
        3605 El Camino Real
        Santa Clara, CA 95051

It's slower than communicating with smoke-signals in a hurricane, or boxing up each bit and sending via the post.

Alphabet/Google needs to work on finishing an actual business that they start and scaling faster. Search, email, maps are mobile are pretty good, but the million other areas lack business drive, passion, hustle and focus, competing in areas with much deeper pockets (ATT+DirecTV+Time Warner+..., Verizon+AOL+Yahoo+XO+..., Level3, ...)

<comment> a-no-n IOW... They're going to make all Starbucks' WiFI slooower, just like they did with the city of Mountain View.

Thanks for almost nothing, Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> In other words, no new Fiber cities.

</comment><comment><USER68> Have been seeing a lot of dead LinkNYC kiosk's in Manhattan. What's up with that?

</comment><comment><USER69> so when he says he steps aside, what will he be doing as CEO cause clearly this didn't work out - a tons of mistakes were made at least here in ATX where they keep pushing flyers through my door but...all killer no filler.

</comment><comment><USER70> This post is a masterclass in buck-passing and spin.

</comment><comment><USER71> Another google product abandoned halfway

</comment><comment><USER72> How can you be both an SVP and a CEO?

<comment><USER73> He was/is an SVP of Alphabet and a quasi-CEO of Access, which is (in the process of becoming?) a "separate" company under the Alphabet umbrella.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> @thaumaturgy Did you translate that yourself? Is there a website that offers such bidirectional translation? I want to be a CEO too!!

</comment><comment><USER75> >it's been quite a journey

Boom, headshot. There it is, google fiber will be closed down soon.</comment>


Presentation2.0 – Quickly prepare and present presentation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deepsadhi/presentation2.0 <comment><USER2> Interesting project, curious about what inspired it.

If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

While I was in college, many times I could not present presentations to mass because the lack of projector. Seeing the need app that could help us present presentations even in the absence projectors, I started working on Presentation2.0. The project also got momentum from hackathons, realizing the need of preparing and presenting presentations instantly.

Yah I have posted to Show HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438232)</comment></comment>


Let's nominate Salman Khan to speak at TED - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/nominate/speaker#KHAAAAAAAAAAAN

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on the recent Khan Academy lovefest, I'm finally doing what I've only talked about for a while -- actively campaigning for Salman Khan to speak at TED.

The online form only took me a few minutes to fill out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just spoke with Chris Anderson at TED :) Well done, everyone. You certainly got their attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Im totally for it. Let's do it.</comment>


Think Twitter's the biggest microblogging service? Take a look at SMS GupShup - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/19/think-twitters-the-biggest-microblogging-service-take-a-look-at-sms-gupshup/ <comment><USER2> Enough with GupShup already. It's a different site, with different needs architectural needs. Wasn't something like this posted already?

</comment><comment><USER3> Size is not everything. And SMSGupShup shares the same problem as its American counterpart: how to generate profits off a utility (mostly - for GupShup) free service

<comment><USER4> This confuses me. Why is it free?

Here they have a transaction and thus an obvious way to monetarize.

Why not charge a fee per SMS? Will everyone run to a different service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please do a cursory search at SearchYC.com before you post. :)</comment>


CSS Working Group Adds Many Math Functions - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bdc/status/1100921258839953408 <comment> B-Con Some of these are ambiguous without the function signature. calc? hypot?</comment>


A Perspective on C++ Standardization in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://thephd.github.io/perspective-standardization-in-2018 <comment><USER2> The problem is that C++ is already too much bloated (in its complex rules and the standard library) and some people (primarily gamedev) would want things more to be removed, changed, and simplified rather than continuously added to the pile. But the philosophy of C++ standards development was always about adding new things while maintaining backward compatibility. So even if the gamedev people ask the committee to change its philosophy and remove the bloat, I feel that it would only result in tribal wars between developers and not constructive change.

So right now there are two kinds of gamedev: the ones who would suck it up and just use C++ (although not the modern one), or the ones who move to greener pastures. I've heard some gamedev people are moving to Rust (although having the potential to rival C++ in complexity, is nicer because of its fresher base). And Jonathan Blow is currently creating Jai, so maybe that could be a hope of light for gamedev people...

<comment><USER3> _So right now there are two kinds of gamedev: the ones who would suck it up and just use C++ (although not the modern one)_

Why can't there be a third kind: the ones who suck it up and just use C++ including modern features? (honest question: I don't know anything at all about 'gamedev')

<comment><USER2> Using modern C++ with STL in gamedev is quite difficult because it results in atrocious compile times and slow debug build performance (For making a game, iteration speed and debuggability can be pretty important.) Also if you want to develop for consoles there are some limitations: most notably you are forbidden to use exceptions, and the platform's compiler usually doesn't even support the latest C++ standard...

That said, I think a third kind might also exist, although rare for AAA studios and more common with mid-size/indie game developers...

<comment><USER4> The compiler for Xbox one is MSVC which supports modern c++ quite quickly, and the compiler for PS4 is based on Clang which also supports modern c++ very quickly.

Exceptions are supported and we use them for any non-gameplay code paths. That is to say, you can and should use exceptions for all loading/initialisation paths unless they are during actual gameplay.

This ends up feeling quite natural as that is mostly what exceptions are good for, and honestly, they would practically never fire in a non-development scenario because they are almost always some kind of error in data files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A very thorough breakdown of the trials and tribulations of getting things through the C++ Standardization Committee.

The article leaves us with the advice that if we care what goes into C++, then, whether we like it or not, we'll need to get involved somehow.

This could mean joining things fully, or just communicating your needs to existing members who are aligned with you in some fashion.

Sadly, I don't think we'll see much of an uptick in C++ Standards participation in relation to C++ standards complaints.

</comment><comment><USER6>
      > Use C++98
      > Complain it's too simple to be expressive.
      > Get C++17
      > Complain it's too expressive to be simple.

Sometimes I think the real goal behind these complaints is not learning anything new or programming anything interesting.

<comment><USER7> Oh I absolutely love C++11, 14 and 17. It's just that there are always some really dumb parts that are shipped together with the good parts. Like mandatory begin and end iterators for list comprehension, iota, unreadable syntax of C++20 ranges, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What, precisely, are the warts that folks want to get rid of in C++ but cannot?

<comment><USER9> The preprocessor: Bjarne Stroustrup has been willing to get rid of it for a long time. C++20 modules are a step in this direction. However - as pointed out by John Lakos - you still need macros to build zero-cost logging facilities.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's necessarily true, using constexpr facilities you could make a function do nothing according to a compile-time variable value

<comment><USER11> Is IO allowed in constexpr functions?

<comment><USER12> I don't think so, but for zero-cost logging you just need the conditional for your branch to be constexpr. If the branch is known not to be taken at compile time, the compiler can just throw it away.

Something like:

      void MyDebugLog(text) {
        if (<constepxr check if logging enabled>) {
          // actually log...
        }
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To what extent is the creator of C++ involved with its Standardization process these days?

<comment><USER14> He's the Evolution Working Group Chair. [https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/wg21#bjarne- stroustrup](https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/wg21#bjarne-stroustrup)

<comment><USER15> And Chair of Direction Group in 2018. [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p093...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0939r0.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Fred Wilson: Saying No - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/10/saying-no.html

<comment><USER2> Totally agree. It is always good to tell the truth so that person on another side stops guessing the reason.

We got rejected by YC and I am just guessing the reasons. Thinking that all founder aren't ready to move to SV for three months and also few are not ready to leave their full time job...etc... but still it is just guessing game... hey could you tell PG to tell everyone about reason for rejection ;)

Few people might not able to digest the reason..but all are not same...many can take that as a advise and that could help in future..

<comment><USER3> YC can't and shouldn't provide reasons why. They've already said as much. In their case, it's different from Fred Wilson. YC has to say no just twice a year. For Fred Wilson and any other VC, it's an ongoing thing. There's a difference.

<comment><USER4> The YC approach to "no" is easier when your only point of contact is a web form anyone can fill out and submit.

Most VCs (and I've never met Wilson, but I'm guessing this applies to him) meet people in person, because they've gotten introduced or referred by someone in their network.

So in that context, it's tougher to reject people without providing more details.

<comment><USER5> _it's tougher to reject people without providing more details_

As I've explained over and over, the reason we don't provide more details is that there often are no details to provide. Often the sum total of our reaction to an application is "we don't understand this."

The main difference between us and Fred Wilson in this respect is that he might evaluate 1 or 2 carefully screened deals a day, while we evaluate several hundred.

<comment><USER6> _"... we don't understand this ..."_

Is it the lack of communication skills conveying the idea? Or is it something more fundamental along the lines of, "we don't understand this _'foo'"_?,

Where _"foo"_ is 'idea is too derivative', 'you have no users in mind'... etc?

<comment><USER6> for a better understanding of the mindset read Matt Maroons, *"Advice for Y Combinator Interviewees" ~ <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=283>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> He's right. If you are in a position that requires you to say no a lot, you should learn to do it quickly and honestly. It probably helps him keep his sanity, and shoot-the-messenger type entrepreneurs aside, probably makes his relationships less messy.

</comment><comment><USER7> I went ahead and sent them an email, this vc firm gives you a reason when they say no. Fred Wilson seems to be a polite and down to earth guy just to take a random email from someone he doesn't know and give it some thrift.

</comment><comment><USER8> So how do you get VCs to seek you out, instead of the other way round?</comment>


Nokia's dead and Microsoft killed it - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/8796783/the-final-nail-in-nokias-coffin

<comment><USER2> Verge lamenting the loss of Nokia?

Anyone spotted some airborne pigs?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> i want the 3310 back:(</comment>


This Miracle Fuel Has a Few Problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-05/california-should-focus-on-electric-cars-not-hydrogen-fuel <comment><USER2> This misses the point that hydrogen is not only zero-emission (aside from water vapor) but it can be produced using excess electricity from any source (solar, hydro, nuclear), allowing excess electricity to be "saved" in a form readily usable by vehicles.</comment>


The Toronto Raptors are using IBM's Watson in the draft - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/toronto-raptors-nba-draft-day-ibm-watson <comment><USER2> I have the feeling the reporter doesn't know what they're talking about:

"For example, if the Raptors were measuring college basketball prospects, Watson could quickly crunch the numbers and display a comparison of their stats on shooting, assists, and rebounds."

One most assuredly does not need Watson to do this.

Moreover,

"Compare that to drafts of past years, in which the Raptors would use whiteboards with player stats printed on magnets, and call up statisticians each time they wanted new information"

Does not seem it could be remotely true, given...

"Even before Watson came along, the Raptors were tech-savvy. They have access to one of the NBA's leading analytics teams, and have developed a wide range of tools, including a way to use data from the SportVU camera tracking system to model the best moves a player could make."

<comment><USER3> I suspect the problem is not entirely with the reporter. The reporter is probably paraphrasing a press release describing a really minimal effort to apply Watson to a something that would grab some publicity. IBM and the Raptors' PR people probably put in more work than was done on the implementation. Which is why it sounds like something you could whip up in a spreadsheet. It probably does "display a comparison of their stats on shooting, assists, and rebounds" on a Web page with the Watson logo on it, and the reporter faithfully reported what he saw.

Watson is more of IBM's tool for creating the impression that IBM is a technology company and not just a systems integration shop than it is a serious deep learning project. Eventually it will become another tragic chapter among many in the decline of technology at IBM.

I predict sometime in the near future, when Apple and Google and Microsoft and others build some real businesses on deep learning systems that there will be a mournful article published about how sad and left behind Watson has become.

<comment><USER4> The name might be worth something. Everyone knows Watson due to the Jeopardy stuff. "New from IBM and Amazon, Watson in your home!"*

*It's just Alexa with a male voice and some tweaks from IBM.

<comment><USER3> At this point, IBM is the Radio Shack of computing. nobody knows what the brand means anymore.

<comment><USER5> That's because they're better known as a hardware and systems company, but they're trying to pivot to an analytics and cloud services company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've spent more time than any sane person should trying to model fantasy sports for the purpose of making money as a psuedo hobby/second job.

My day job is essentially practical applications of simulation and machine learning so this was a natural way to broaden my modelling capabilities.

I'd love to chat with anyone who has any specific insight as to what the raptors are doing. If you're in Toronto I'll buy lunch!! Contact info in my profile.

Specifically a focus on methods applicable to selecting teams for Fantasy Hockey and Football with applications to weekly/daily fantasy is mostly what I'm concerned with.

I've spent alot of time/money figuring out what doesn't work very well so I can offer 3 years of failed experiments as a trade:)

<comment><USER7> They are using the "Watson Tradeoff Analytics" product as the underpinning [1]

As others have mentioned, "Watson" is a brandname/pillar at IBM, similar to Infosphere (anything information management), Websphere (anything middleware-y), etc. It's a bunch of simple and complex, in-house-built and bought products, some of which play together well some of which don't, some of which were pretty impressive and some of which aren't.

To play with Watson Tradeoff Analytics, you can check out the documentation or get a free account with Bluemix [2]. They used to have a subset-of- functionality demo for Raptors on Bluemix as well. It seemed nifty but not groud-breaking.

My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit, i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on paper.

[disclosure: I work for IBM... nowhere _NEAR_ Watson, in the plain-ol'-ERP department, but I've been curious myself to figure out what the hoopla is or isn't all about]

[1] [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/tradeoff- analytics.html)

[2] [https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/services/tradeoff- ana...](https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/services/tradeoff-analytics)

<comment><USER8> > My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson > Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit, > i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on > paper.

This seems reeeeally unlikely, considering both the inaccuracy of Watson sentiment analysis, and that one would need to collect a rather substantial personal writing sample from each candidate.

<comment><USER9> The article mentions that they mine social media accounts of the players for the text. That could easily qualify as a substantial personal writing sample :)

<comment><USER10> That's great for college players, but not necessarily good for pro players, many of which don't control their twitter output (or have to sensor themselves much more than a college player would).

<comment><USER11> Well at least Watson will pick players who have complimentary PR firms...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok, here's the deal

Let's stop helping IBM by publishing their press-releases

Watson means _nothing_. They have some APIs and that's it

Others players have a better product.

I'm not one to help IBM advertise for free

<comment><USER13> I love it, because two things are abundantly clear to even the most casual observer:

1) everyone at IBM has been told to pretend they are this huge, leading "cloud" company

2) 1) is a clear falsehood

And so you see marketing struggle to come up with all these ridiculous "case studies", because it's difficult if you have to invent them out of thin air instead of real customers.

<comment><USER14> As someone who works for IBM I'd have to disagree with you there. No one has ever told me we are a huge cloud company, I mean obviously I've been told we're investing buckets of money in cloud technologies and that we have made it a key strategy point to focus on growth in the area, but not once has anyone even intimated that we ' _are_ [a] huge cloud company'.

What IBM is, realistically, is a ridiculously large (and I actually mean ridiculous in the sense of 'how are they not under _more_ anti-trust investigations because they seriously own roughly everything") company with an unbelievably large number of very vert wealthy clients who are scared beyond reason of losing their market share if they don't start using <Insert "new" technology here> so internally everything that happens and looks like a publicity stunt is usually met with a response of "Well no shit we could do that. Why the hell didn't our marketing team point out that we had that capability in the 90's when it would have been impressive"

A lot of the Watson hype seems to actually be because a lot of the companies who traditionally would say 'hm, I dunno about this whole analytics thing. Shouldnt we just stick to spreadsheets and man hours' now have a named _thing_ they can buy that really just covers up that they are actually just investing in a platform with some hadoop clustering and some racks full of P8s (obviously theres a little more to it than that).

The fact that watson can do seemingly cool stuff is actually just a nice way of saying 'anyone can do cool stuff if they invest a bit of cash in technologies that have been around for ages but large companies now have a small window where they can start investing in these technologies and they even get to act like they are an early adopter, of course sans-risk'

I find it amusing that our sales pitch to a rugby team in australia to sell them analytics tools and services failed about 4 years ago, so we gave it to them for free then said we would tell them who the next 10 players to get injured would be and how they would be injured. After the predictions were exactly correct at about injury 6 they were suddenly very interested in buying the stuff. Interestingly, if we sold the same thing now it wouldn't be an analytics platform, we would probably use watson (read: not rebuild that thing, just use the existing stuff because its easier) and it would be marketed as a "watson solution".

<comment><USER15> Because it's so big, there's a lot capable engineers, but also deadwood. I think Watson has attracted many capable devs. There's definitely too many execs flailing around with buzzwords.

It's a great brand, it has potential. The problem is that a) it's being overhyped and b) yet again IBM doesn't understand that if you want it to be used for truly mind-blowing stuff, you have to make it easy for developers to use (or maybe they do, but suck at making it easy to use, see [1]). Then it generates its own, real hype.

For an example of this, I'd say MQ vs MQTT/RabbitMQ, DB2 vs Postgres et al., NoSQL, analytics, Bluemix vs Amazon/GCE/Heroku, Softlayer vs Amazon/Google/Azure. I get that selling to traditional, conservative, and very rich/big firms is a viable strategy - but one that's failing for e.g. Bluemix, Softlayer.

\---

[1] The Google search results for "Watson API" suck. The documentation sounds like it was written for managers (" Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) "). Stop getting me to use Bluemix, Amazon/GCE/Heroku work better. Just look at this mess: [https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...](https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/getting_started/gs- full-nodejs.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it's great that there continues to be a stream of "Watson partners with X" or "Watson is used for X" articles, but in actual usage, it feels like Google is winning the ML race. I feel like corporations are using Watson for easy PR wins. Is that just me living in my own development bubble?

</comment><comment><USER17> My limited understanding with basketball stats is that they are only somewhat useful, as it favours player who have direct impact to the game, those who can score/assist/rebound/etc, and encourages players to game the system.

However it does not reflect how a player defends, how he fits into a particular style/role, how much support his teammates get from him other than assists, etc.

It'll be interesting to see if they use deeper analysis to figure out which player is actually better.

<comment><USER18> Honest if potentially naive question: why can't you just measure points per minute by the player's team's opponents when the player is on versus off the court?

<comment><USER19> Because this doesn't guarantee a uniform background.

Let's say we have two teams, the Ayyys and the Bees; each has two defenders, Schlub and Superman play for the Ayys, and Scrub and Slacker play for the Bees. Let's assume that they all suck equally, except for Superman, who is great.

Now we run your statistic: we compare how the Ayyys do with Schlub on/off against how Scrub does on/off.

The problem is, when Schlub is off, Superman is playing, whereas when Scrub is off, Slacker is playing. This means the Ayyys do quite well when Schlub is off, but the Bees do about as well when Scrub is on compared to when Scrub is off. By this comparison, Schlub is a much _worse_ player than Scrub, even though in actual fact they might be equivalent.

<comment><USER20> ESPN introduced a stat called real plus-minus in 2014, which adjusts for teammates and opponents. It also takes both offensive and defense plus-minus into account. The top two players in RPM this past season were Lebron James and Draymond Green, followed by Chris Paul and Steph Curry [1]. It was received with a lot of skepticism back when it was introduced, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

1\. [http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM](http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _For example, if the Raptors were measuring college basketball prospects, > Watson could quickly crunch the numbers and display a comparison of their > stats on shooting, assists, and rebounds. Compare that to drafts of past > years, in which the Raptors would use whiteboards with player stats printed > on magnets, and call up statisticians each time they wanted new information, > recalled Lenchner, who visited the Raptors' headquarters while IBM was > developing the software. In the days before Watson, the whole process was > much more laborious and time consuming._

I like Watson and it's not their fault for getting publicity...but as for the reporter, c'mon, there's no way you could write that above paragraph without being ignorant of computers pre-Macintosh (or iPod) days. Perhaps the Raptors are old-fashioned but computers have been used for exponentially reducing laborious and time-consuming activities since the dawn of the airlines for solving scheduling problems. And that was much later than the era of computing used for early censuses and cryptoanalysis during the World Wars. But if you've grown up in the "there's an app for that!" age, I guess it's easy to forget how infinite the use cases for computers.

<comment><USER22> The use case outlined is solvable by a spreadsheet. IBM continues to put marketing first, product second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember seeing Watson on Jeopardy years ago. He is not quite in the same league as Mr. Butlertron from Clone High, but he's pretty good all the same.

</comment><comment><USER24> > "[Watson could be used] for the mission to Mars," he said. After all, that > small crew will be crammed together on a spaceship for a few years at least, > and getting along will be essential. "You can't make changes once they're up > there."

So IBM does end up making HAL...

</comment><comment><USER25> Shit is hot up in the 6

</comment><comment><USER26> Catchy story that solicits moneyball storyline to NBA draft and takes it to the next level... Wait for the movie</comment>


Intuition behind permutations and combinations - <AUTHOR> https://buildingvts.com/intuition-behind-permutations-and-combinations-db6ffa5272be <comment><USER2> I'd[0] be fascinated to know people's reactions to this. Material explaining this sort of thing has been around for what seems forever - do people find articles at this level useful?

I know it won't be for everyone - some already know it, some don't care and don't want to bother - but some _will_ find it useful, I'm sure, and I'd be interested to see some feedback.

[0] I'm neither the author nor the submitter, but I'm interested nonetheless.</comment>


Because of the database of ER bills that we've crowdsourced this past year - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/1082336132757626880 <comment><USER2> Terrible headline - but interesting twitter thread. Glad I clicked.

I wonder why Zuckerberg SF General Hospital ER is so anomalous.

<comment><USER3> Supposedly it's simply because the city runs it that way [https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/1082360904350658560](https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/1082360904350658560) (different thread by same author)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an awful headline but a great series of posts.

From an HN perspective I could imagine formalizing a system similar to the Vox DB. The system could ingest, anonymize, and analyze user submitted medical bills then it could provide a public service to highlight how ridiculous medical billing and payment are in the US.</comment>


We're Not Prepared: Californian Homeless Communities and Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/california-coronavirus-homeless-communities <comment><USER2> You can always tell those Brits; they (more properly, I suppose) use "Californian" instead of "California" as the adjectival form. Our use of "California" must annoy them the same way that "woman" engineer annoys me.</comment>


Manna – Crypto Basic Income - <AUTHOR> http://mannabase.com/ <comment><USER2> According to the whitepaper, the vast majority of existing monetary base is held by the founders and close associates:

-19% directly by the founders

-36% donated to Mannabase, a company directly controlled by their foundation

-17% paid to "dozens" of developers and technical staff

Another 9% was mined into circulation, and there is a strong probability that the early miners and the founders are one and the same. A grand total of 6% was given away as UBI but they promise to give more away by a complex process that seems very centralized.

It's essentially a UBI-branded premine: if you make us filthy rich we promise to make the world a better place. Certainly a splash of color in a crypto space that seems to be dominated by those who exploit more basic human impulses.

<comment><USER3> From the "whitepaper": [https://i.imgur.com/YJ1KhMj.png](https://i.imgur.com/YJ1KhMj.png)

If they actually want to make the world a better place (or deliver the message), perhaps one founder (among many) shouldn't have a piece of the cake bigger than the whole humanity combined. One can't have the cake and eat it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The entire founding team has literally no experience (or really any advanced, post college education), outside of working in cafes and small newspapers. CTO's LinkedIn is just this job.

Not that experience is tantamount to success, but this isn't a simple undertaking.

<comment><AUTHOR> They have been working on this since 2015 and did a trial run under the name GrantCoin. (Which as far as I know went smoothly) While it is a huge undertaking and even if this project fails, it would be interesting to see more robust CryptoUBI projects rise up from the ashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given the number of cryptocurrencies devs have struggled to get their coins in front of the community. Some of the devs have tried distributing free coins and this is known as "airdrop" in the cryptocurrency community. Though most of them use some criteria to stop people from falsely claiming coins.

I forgot the exact name but there was a cryptocurrency which did an airdrop for citizens of a particular country.

This coin seems to be in a similar mold. Though the pitch is that it is Universal Basic income.

Looking at the history, it seems it is just a re-brand of an existing coin called Grantcoin which has been in circulation since 2015.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, this is the second Basic Income coin in circulation. The first is based on a WoT and is mostly in France.[1] The overall concept is refered to as "universal dividend" or a 10%/year inflation equally distributed to the WoT members justified by a "Relative Theory of Money".[2]

I have been skimming the "whitepaper" of Manna but haven't really seen how it works; it seems to just give a fixed amount of Manna per week to all members. Regardless, would love to hear pros, cons and see what ends up happening.

[1]: [http://duniter.org/en/](http://duniter.org/en/)

[2]: [http://vit.free.fr/TRM/en_US/TheorieRelativedelaMonnaie.pdf](http://vit.free.fr/TRM/en_US/TheorieRelativedelaMonnaie.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Page 13 which shows that this is a struggling coin since 2015 with barely enough "approved recipients". Two years in and they have 3446 participants.

But the glaring mistake is pointed out by cornholio already. So we already know what will end up happening if this ever takes off. These guys with their more than 50% stake will strike it rich.

As I said, most devs struggle to find an audience and need a pitch to sell it to the people. This coins pitch seems to be "UBI".

<comment><USER6> As for Duniter, I invite you to do more than just watch the train pass by. ;)

<comment><USER6> [https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/theoretical-underpinnings- dun...](https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/theoretical-underpinnings- duniter-g1-project/2018/02/05)

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%9E1](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%9E1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A UBI _tax_ is pure theft, but because I can voluntarily participate in Manna, it solves the dilemma of a UBI. I wish them luck!

If anything this will be very interesting experiment in macroeconomics.</comment>


The American Aristotle - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/charles-sanders-peirce-was-americas-greatest-thinker <comment><USER2> While Peirce, when he is known at all, is usually known as one of the early philosophical pragmatists, I believe by far his greatest contributions are to formal reasoning. His discovery of the universal and existential qualifiers (for which we use his notation), as well as taking de Morgan's study of relations to what is essentially its modern form both stand out.

His semiotic is not the postmodernist bullshit (in the sense of Harry Frankfurt) that is usually denoted by the term. It was a pragmatic attempt to understand why symbolic reasoning works and the specific mechanics by which symbols signify their referent mediated by an interpretant. His obsession with clarity is the exact opposite of postmodernist "semiotics."

<comment><USER3> Peirce is, sadly, much underrated. His work on abductive logic/explanation is another rich area for exploration. I actually think it's somewhat unfortunate that he's labeled merely as an american pragmatist. While true, such a classification misses the many ways his work outstrips that school of thought (and outstrips that tradition so much more than Dewey's or James' work, say, could be said to outstrip american pragmatism).

<comment><USER2> And this is largely because his "friend" Simon Newcomb did everything he could to destroy his reputation[1]. It's fascinating and saddening that a little piece of nastiness like that has reverberated through the decades.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Newcomb#Peirce_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Newcomb#Peirce_family)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been reading a lot of Peirce lately. His range of knowledge and method of thought is truly breathtaking. He was obsessed with taxonomy, and it is almost poetic how he organizes and reorganizes the bodies of scientific knowledge according to his thought. He was like Adam naming all the animals in the garden of Eden. Truly the most under appreciated philosopher of our time.

</comment><comment><USER5> The author claims that Peirce "surpassed [all other scientists born in the 19th century] in sheer intellectual virtuosity"; then goes on to laud Peirce's contributions to the towering scientific field of "semiotics."

I'll stick with Einstein, Darwin, and Maxwell, thanks.</comment>


Show HN: static-json-db, The Native Jamstack Database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jlxw/static-json-db <comment><USER2> How do you secure your data? If you can update it client-side, what stops people from writing their own scripts in the browser console to arbitrarily re-write your data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Browsers can't write, only read. So you would need another way to get client input into the db if that is the requirement.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tilt Out – iPhone Game - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tilt-out/id911341844?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Tilt Out is my first work in Objective-C / IOS (and likely my last - all Swift from now on :-)).

It is a variation of the classic arcade game Breakout (Arkanoid). Controls are via the accelerometer (hence the name Tilt Out). I have tried to create a highly paced game avoiding some of the dull one brick and one ball moments of the classic.

It uses OpenGL for graphics. Sounds are synthesized realtime according to gameplay and how you the tilt the phone. It is free and runs an iAD every third game you play.

Hope you like it.</comment>


Interview with Jim Keller - w-m https://www.anandtech.com/show/13048/an-anandtech-exclusive-the-jim-keller-interview <comment><AUTHOR> What Keller says is super vague. For one he's with Intel for only two months and obviously he isn't allowed to talk about anything remotely interesting.

</comment><comment><USER2> With the title "rockstar" used in the article. It made me think of what must be an army of engineers and scientists involved in a successful foundry architecture feature size shrink. I guess recognition is for the few.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title is confusing:

 _Interview with Jim Keller Interview_

To me it sounds like one of those parody interviews done on late night comedy news shows.</comment>


The Musical Gopher - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/golang-nuts/OJ7oUi6lWUA

<comment><AUTHOR> Howdy!

I'm participating in Binghamton Startup Weekend

For one of our demos, I turned lake data (dissolved oxygen) using Go

I'd like to thank the creators of pulseaudio-go and goop for sharing their work and the creators of Go for making a great language for rapid prototyping and everything else great about it

Thank You!

Wish us luck!

Best, Tony Worm

Check us out on facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/SoundsmithSoftware>

___please take our survey if you do anything with music:<http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YKSQBK7> ___really helpful

Binghamton Startup Weekend <http://binghamton.startupweekend.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> link to the demo song <http://camden.cs.binghamton.edu:8080/MendotaFugue.mp3></comment></comment>


Images of Bike-Share Oversupply in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This seems overblown. Half of the photos are from a single city (Xiamen).

And the reporting seems sloppy: "Bluegogo was recently acquired by Didi, another bike-share company"

Didi is primarily a shared car service similar to Uber. It operates under two brands in China: Didi and Uber.

No one in China would describe Didi as a 'bike-share company'.

</comment><comment><USER3> I mean.... I'd mistake those photos for fractal images.

When heard mentality venture capitalism meets the manufacturing might of China (?)

How many have never been ridden...</comment>