Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/confessions-of-an-id-theft-kingpin-part-i/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295501)

</comment><comment><USER3> > (from TFA) stolen identity records that included a consumer's name, date of > birth, Social Security number and email and physical address.

Scary how little you need to steal an identity in some places...

<comment><USER4> Are there places that it would require more to steal an identity?

What countries and what type of information do they ask for?

<comment><USER5> I'm gonna rant here, but a big problem is that SSNs were never designed to be used as an identifier. It was simply used to allow someone to receive Social Security, hence the name. They literally used to have the text "Not to be used for verification."

As for its problems, there's quite a few, but the two big ones IMO are (1) no check digits and (2) (up until relatively recently) they're sequential. I don't know when the change was, but if you take a SSN issued before 2000, you could add _one_ to your whole SSN and it would be a valid one. They may even have been born on the same day as you _in the same hospital_. Also, you could find out a general area where someone was living when it was issued (usually birth) using the first 3 digits.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that they get relied on for authentication.

(Name+SSN is likely to be unique, the issue is that knowing a name+SSN doesn't prove you are the person with that name and SSN...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I regularly wonder why we don't have some form of physical verification token which signs things with our identity, the whole system is broken in that regard.

<comment><USER8> That would be quite nice, but I'm not sure I'd trust the government to not store and then lose all the secret keys near instantly.

If they can overcome that, sign me up.

<comment><USER7> The beauty of public key cryptography is they don't need to hold your private key, ever :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The usual, credit agencies ARE JUST AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT. They exchange all of our information with each other, and their security is so absolutely horrible that a 20 something hacker in Vietnam who just learned English could stay in their systems for years and build a business off of reading queries directly from these databases. It's actually insane.

<comment><USER10> The existence of these databases, especially given how insecure they are is, of course, a real national security threat, but the lack of reaction from the government is telling.

<comment><USER11> Yet everyone is freaking out and moralizing about nonfinancial data voluntarily given to Facebook. If only the credit bureaus kept our financial and identity data as Facebook kept your list of favorite movies and your selfies.

<comment> grey-area Facebook _sell_ your favourite movies, friends, political views and anything else they know about you to advertisers. it's a very similar business model.

<comment><USER11> They actually don't, unless you define selling as they allow advertisers to select what demographics/attributes their ads target. But the actual data stays on the Facebook servers. If you're referring to the apps having access to user data, that was not selling at all, but instead a permission originally granted by users by probably forgotten about. Basically, unless you contort the definition of selling to a very different meaning, that's simply not true.

And if you do use that definition of selling, then everyone is selling your data. All the politicians who decry tech companies are selling your data using the same definition. Every advertiser, retail store, bank, basically every large business offers other businesses a way to access a specific subset of their users.

<comment> grey-area Yes, that's how I define selling in the context of that sentence, as the only other way to read 'they sell your favourite movies' is the wilful misinterpretation that they actually sell movies, which would be a non-issue.

I think it's pretty clear they sell your preferences to advertisers and let apps misuse your data (there have been plenty of scandals where people didn't understand what apps would get).

This is emphatically not the business model of most businesses large or small.

<comment><USER11> I think I see the confusion between us. You don't see the difference between selling data to a company, and selling ad space where the advertiser can choose for what demographics it shows up for.

Let me try to make it more clear. Do you see the difference between "hey Chase Bank, do you want to buy this file containing data about grey-area's interests, age, political stance, credit score, purchasing habits, etc." versus "hey Chase Bank, do you want to put an ad on my website that is only shown to people with credit scores above 600 and are interested in savings accounts"?

If they both seem the same to you, then I don't think your perspective is one that a reasonable person would take. If you do see the difference, then Facebook is doing the latter, but the word "selling data" conjures the former, which you do recognize as a different matter.

I'm going to ignore the nonsensical definition you gave of selling data = selling movies, being the only other definition of selling you could imagine, in hopes that it was just an oversight.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Carrier IQ Speaks Out: We ignore extraneous user Data - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20111201/carrier-iq-speaks-our-software-monitors-service-messages-ignores-other-data/?reflink=ATD_yahoo_ticker

<comment><USER2> They are hiring an "Extreme Analytics Architect", to work on datasets measured in petabytes[1]. Would be interested to know what they consider extraneous.

[1] [http://www.carrieriq.com/company/careers.htm#ExtAnalyticsArc...](http://www.carrieriq.com/company/careers.htm#ExtAnalyticsArch)

</comment><comment><USER3> This explanation is very interesting. I'd like to be able to share with my carrier when a call is dropped and when a web page doesn't load, but I don't want that being done automatically. Make a list for me, and I'll send it along to the carrier once a month after making sure there's nothing I want kept a secret there. Also, I should be getting paid to do this, because my job as a customer is not to make some big company's product better.

It's a nice try to include software to do this in the background with no way to opt out, but with the cat out of the bag, the carriers are going to have to figure something else out. (I use Cyanogen Mod so I doubt this affects me at all. But it's annoying to discover that the reason behind closed bootloaders and firmwares is to spy on me behind my back without permission. Good thing they employ shitty developers to write that code!)

</comment><comment><USER4> The key question for them is "Why can't users disable Carrier IQ on their device, and why does it run if the cellular antenna is disabled?"

<comment><USER5> Two plausible answers:

(a) Because the carriers don't want you to, if only because it would increase support costs to have to walk users through turning it back on, but probably mostly because normal people don't really care about the stuff CIQ is intended to do.

(b) Because the feature for disabling CIQ with cell service disabled makes zero money for any party involved and therefore has slipped every MRD given to its engineering team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> you ignore extraneous user data?!??! what!?!?! why do you get it in the first place if you're only interested in a subset? bunch of lying rootkit developers

<comment><USER7> How do you capture a subset of data without capturing it all (and discarding what doesn't match)? If you are doing a find in a document, don't you scan through the entire document and discard whatever isn't what you want? It sounds like that's the explanation they are trying to give.

<comment><USER6> the thing is, given the context, you can do this without looking at everything the user is doing, you can basically wait for the trigger (error, call drop...) to happen before trying to submit error reports. that's the way it's done in software applications

<comment><USER7> Just to be clear, I'm not saying they are right, I'm just trying to look at this objectively. If you read what they said, I don't think your solution works:

"During a support call a technician asks a customer to enter a short code, CIQ will be listening for it"

Without knowing a ton more, maybe there's a _much_ better way to do this..like having the user explicitly launch a program rather than having something always running and always listening. No argument there. But if you're thinking they should abstract away some "code_entered" event, ultimately something lower-level is going to be listening to each keypress and looking at sequences to raise those events.

Some of this stuff happens at a lower level than a lot of us might be use to programming nowadays. I'm not sure that there's necessarily a pretty error event they can hook into. Something about all of this reminds me of using stuf like Spy++ on Windows and you see just how much raw data is available at the lowest levels

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, of course, they only gather information requested by the carriers, and we all trust the carriers. What could go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER9> Based on what I've read, none of the investigations actually looked at what data was reported back.

My money is on Carrier IQ providing a valuable service in a somewhat sub- optimal way with regards to privacy, and carriers probably doing a really shoddy job of integrating it into the phones they distribute.

<comment><USER5> I'm more or less convinced that you're right about this.

CarrierIQ brought some of this on themselves by reacting terribly to a security researcher's claims regarding their software. Trevor Eckhart claimed CIQ was a "rootkit", and they freaked out and threatened to sue him.

Naturally, everyone now assumes that CarrierIQ is evil, since suing security researchers is almost invariably an evil thing to do.

People are paying less attention to the fact that CarrierIQ subsequently issued a _formal apology_ to Trevor (from experience: companies stung by security researchers virtually never do this; they just back off quietly), and that nobody has really refuted CIQ's claims about what their software does.

The "there's this evil big brother company nobody has ever heard of that a security researcher found out and got sued over" narrative is a lot more fun than the banal reality, so that's what we're all going to run with.

It's also a little amusing to see people wigging out over the privacy of their SMS messages. Their SMS messages have no privacy. The carriers see and log _all_ of them. Lord only knows what other tools they have on their network explicitly for the purpose of mining data out of those messages.

<comment><USER10> I guess CIQ just happens to be the outrage-flavor-of-the-week. This looks so much like a public pile-on whenever Facebook screws people over with sneaky settings changes. The classic cycle plays: breaking news, genuine anger, hipster outrage, slow smoldering disinterest, and finally apathy and collective amnesia ... until the next outrage-of-the-week comes along. The Zuck was right: "dumb fucks".

If anyone is really all that outraged, what concrete steps have they taken to make sure this crap gets sorted out?

Oh and BTW, do you have a link confirming the _formal apology_ ? Couldn't find it with a simple DDG search. Maybe my search vector was wrong.

<comment><USER11> It's in <http://www.carrieriq.com/company/news.htm>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be interesting to see their agreements with the carriers.

Presumably the carriers could request any data, not simply diagnostics.

It certainly sounds like CIQ is prepared to deliver whatever a carrier might ask for: CIQ's rootkit can capture everything.

<comment><USER5> At (grave) risk of being repetitive: if you don't trust your _carrier_ with your personal information, you shouldn't be using Android phones on their network. CIQ or not, carriers have vastly more information about most people to work with than e.g. Google.

<comment><USER12> At least you have an agreement with your carrier. Alas, you have none with CIQ. Even though you're using their software.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Am I getting hosed by a CEO? - <AUTHOR> I've been working for a startup for about 7 months now for free.  I was on board at the first day, with the other founders, and before any execution on ideas had begun.  By most yardsticks, this would make me a founder.  I'm a technical one (engineer), and yet I'm treated as an employee, with 3% equity, and stock that vests over 3 years.  Just to get this, I had to push pretty hard and negotiate with the CEO and COO.
I've gone back recently to try to change the equity share I get, as I understand that most founders on board when I was typically receive anywhere from 10 to 30%.  The CEO tells me that I'm the only one with any kind of agreement, and that makes me far better off (?!).  Apparently, no one else has anything in writing.  When I ask the CEO about this, he not only seems to hint that people will be very tied to the company (executives will have a 6 year vesting schedule...what?), but he seems to think that if anyone gets any equity now, it will turn off investors.  He wants to maintain majority control in the company so no investors can come along and "steal" it from him, AND he wants to set aside a monstrous chunk of equity for these investors.  He hints that employees will get some "down the road", but that this is an effective way to get investment.  He tells me I'm too "9 to 5" security focused (which, honestly, I do tend to be.  I'm working at a full time "real" job while doing this near full time).
He keeps telling me that I need to trust him and that he'll reward people down the road based on their performance.
I'm all for tying incentives to actual performance, but this is just so loosely defined.
Am I being overly rigid not trusting this guy while proving my worth?  The more I read, the more it seems this is a bogus deal.  Is there any merit to this idea that having employees with equity will turn off investors?
Does this make any kind of sense, or am I completely a chump?
Thanks <comment><USER2> Yes, and your CEO is clueless. That's not how equity _or_ investment work (you don't "reserve shares" for an investor, new preferred shares are issued and everyone holding common gets diluted). Good investors _want_ to see founders with roughly equal shares; a large discrepancy indicates that some founders are insufficiently incentivized and probably won't be around long. The best way to maintain majority control of the company is to be profitable - percentage ownership means nothing if you're about to go bankrupt and the only way to save the company is to negotiate a deal where the investors get control.

Stop hanging out with this loser, build up your technical skills so you have a track record of projects built from scratch that you can show people, and then partner with someone who'll actually value you like a partner.

</comment><comment><USER3> Four year vesting and one year cliff is a market term for founders and employees in funded and pre-funding startups. Vesting over 3 years is totally reasonable in your situation.

3% though? Not in bounds. If you're the technical guy there on day one and you don't receive a market salary or reasonable facsimile thereof every two weeks, you're a technical co-founder whether you want to be or not. Your deal is exploitative. You will likely not successfully negotiate a non-exploitative deal. (Presumption should be 33%, not 30%, and very definitely not 10%. No difference between the cofounders is meaningful as T approaches 5 years from now; if there is a meaningful difference, that person probably shouldn't be a co-founder.)

Everyone in this conversation is a businessman. They've underbid for your services. I strongly advise turning in your two week's notice and washing your hands of this. Your equity, whether or not you've actually been issued it, is equity in a company run by operators who are not dealing fairly with their technical co-founder and who are either comfortable with lying or clueless. No fact which I've just recited would cause me to think "This equity is worth more than typical startup equity", which is worth nothing.

>> He tells me I'm too "9 to 5" security focused

This is a common line. It is just that: a line. It gets cynically deployed against engineers on a regular basis by people who are not willing or able to pay market wages. You should interpret this line as nothing other than "I am unwilling or unable to pay market wages" and act accordingly.

>> He keeps telling me that I need to trust him and that he'll reward people down the road based on their performance.

99% of the people told variants of this line will be screwed by the people offering this term. As a direct consequence, entrepreneurs who are presently cash-poor but who want to incentivize employees/partners/etc _do not say this_ ; they say variants of "Here's a third of the company" or "I will commit to consequential cash payments in writing contingent on us achieving milestones together."

"I will pay you a number amenable to me, at a time of my choosing, if and only if I feel like paying you" is not an offer.

I will close with the observation that now is among the best times in the history of ever to be an engineer capable of shipping projects. You have better options. Exploring them for two weeks ROFLstomps the value of continuing to work for this company.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone for your views. They confirm what I think I've known for a while, I just needed some experienced perspective to validate these thoughts. I think what's made me re-think many times is that I'm surrounded by 5 other people in this company, all of whom are about 10 years older than me except one, and they seem more than eager to step up and offer this guy their near full time allegiance unquestioningly. It makes me pause and say "am I not seeing something here? Am I just naturally more distrusting than these other guys I started with?" So I've slowed down and quadruple re-thought every time I was ready to walk, trying to see it from a different angle. Still, the nagging discomfort remains. Glad to know I'm not too off base.

Update: yesterday, CEO tells me he will offer the guy who started 2 weeks ago the same equity I have, because he's done "such a good job". He has been kicking it hard, it's true, and he does really well, but he's fresh, and the CEO's perspective is so skewed based on what's bright and shiny in front of him at the moment that he totally disregards the contribution of people working for him 7 months for free who got him to where he's at now.

The sad part is I think he knows this damn well, and his strategy well may be to operate a company on a string of trusting people who he will continue to cycle in as the disenchanted ones before them leave.

<comment><USER4> What's the track record of the CEO? Have they had multiple previous successes? Have people followed them from their last success to this new company? How much do you believe in the idea? Do you love working with the others at this company? Are they top tier talent? If the answer to all of these is yes, maybe it's worth staying.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the reason people are so willing to stick around is 1) I don't think they really know what the norm is for compensation in a startup, 2) the others seem to have been friends with him previously (usually a bad idea to go into a startup with friends, but I digress), and 3) to your question, he was once the CEO of a company that made the same product, so he has connections in the industry, relationships with distributors, and quite honestly, he's a sales animal. He has already pre-sold a shipping container of the product (far, FAR before us engineers will have it ready - a pending potential trainwreck of its own).

In that previous CEO role, as I understand it, he left on bad terms over some kind of compensation disagreement (ironic?).

A red flag in the beginning was that one of our engineers still runs an authorized service center for that former company's returns. Yet, when the CEO started our company, one of the first things he went about trying to do was to smear the last company in the press (which would have been technically hurting part of the business of the engineer I mentioned, who still made income servicing that company's products). The guy just doesn't think about other people, yet he's good at bringing in the dollars.

I think people are seeing the sales and letting that put off their concerns (if they have them) about whether they will be compensated and when. I have to be honest - I have seen him get us out of some sticky situations by pivoting at the last minute. He used his industry experience to do that, which also contributed to the ability to even do that. It gives him a perception of knowing way more than anyone else, and so they are inclined to trust him when he says this compensation strategy will be acceptable. With this experience, he has an aura of wisdom that makes people feel almost foolish for broaching the subject of pay (I know, I've tried it).

What's doubly ironic is that he insists on air-tight contracts with suppliers and customers, and mentions it being okay to "bend them over" once in a while, since we're paying them and they're locked in. Yet, for an employee, I had to fight tooth and nail just to get the lame contract I have with him for pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cut your losses, leave, and make sure the deal makes sense next time BEFORE you do any work. I get offers every day from people that want me to do 90% of the work of their startup for no pay and 3%. Passssssssss.

</comment><comment><USER6> > am I completely a chump?

It's human nature to trust people, until proven otherwise.

Your CEO might even have magnetic charm on par with Richard Branson or Steve Jobs. Their gift for words hit the right buttons. Who wouldn't want to go into partnership with those guys? Time reveals if they actually make good and deliver.

We should all think in terms of highest & best use of our time. Relative to proving your worth-- imagine what this position might have yielded had you been paid at contractor rates. You've invested your time in the CEO. Has he proven his worth back to you?

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow Johnny! You are being taken advantage of. First, how would the company fair if you weren't there? Do you have any documentation (i.e. emails, text, etc.?) that eludes to what they promised you. If so you may have an opportunity to visit with your attorney to see if their is a way to get back compensation?

Good luck, I hope everything works out.

</comment><comment><USER8> > He keeps telling me that I need to trust him and that he'll reward people > down the road based on their performance.

I heard, and believed, that for years. I got nothing.

</comment><comment><USER9> You're not being treated like an employee, employees get paid. You're being treated like a useful idiot.

</comment><comment><USER10> Trusting other people is not a flaw in your character. The character flaw is in people who take advantage of that trust to your detriment.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER11> "He'll reward people down the road based on their performance" -> you're being taken advantage of.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cut your losses, get a paid gig right away. Sounds very dodgy to me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope these comments give you the reassurance you need to assert yourself. Your partner isn't respecting you or your contribution. Sometimes you just have to walk.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been chumpier than that. Get out while you can.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hey man I'm in roughly a similar situation, I didn't really know either and it just sort of happened. I was just excited to be doing real work, you know?

Here's to hoping what ever decision you make works out.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just gonna say +1 to what everyone else has said here (particularly nostrademons & patio11). You are not getting a fair deal. You should leave.

</comment><comment><USER8> You're being screwed.</comment>


'Hateful Eight' Pirated Screener Traced Back to Top Hollywood Executive - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hateful-eight-pirated-screener-traced-850899 <comment><USER2> Quoting:

        Andrew Kosove, co-CEO of production-finance company
        Alcon Entertainment, was sent the "screener" copy ...
        signed for by an office assistant and later shared
        ... been able to pinpoint Kosove's copy of the film
        as the source ... from a watermark on the DVD ...

        "I've never seen this DVD," Kosove tells THR in an
        interview. "It's never touched my hands. We're going
        to do more than cooperate with the FBI.  We're going
        to conduct our own investigation ... "

        Indeed, it is likely that Kosove is a victim in this
        leak rather than the perpetrator. ...

So, no, it hasn't been traced back to him, and the article explicitly says as much. So the title is a lie.</comment>


SpaceX successfully catches both fairing for the first time - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/space-x-falcon-9-005622474.html <comment><USER2> "Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, told reporters last year that the fairing costs around $6 million."

Pretty good if they can recover them and refurbish them. Could save a few million dollars per launch, even more if they can be re-used more than once.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps even more importantly, they are a big bottleneck on their flight rate. They require a massive autoclave (for curing the composites), and it wouldn't be practical to scale up their production significantly.

Even if it didn't save them a penny, my guess is it would still be a priority.

<comment><USER4> ^ This.

The second stage (which is not reused on a Falcon 9), the fairings, and the grid fins are three of the longer lead time items for the Falcon series rockets. Reusing as much as possible helps keep their crazy launch cadence up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dumb question I'm sure has been asked... we've been throwing stuff into the sea for awhile then going and picking it up later as it's bobbing gently in the waves. Why not just have some inflatable buoys that deploy in the water and have it float? Catching it seems pretty difficult, albeit pretty sweet.

<comment><USER6> First: saltwater damage. Ever tried to run a car or a laptop or an airplane after it was dunked in saltwater? Hardening for saltwater immersion isn't always practical and will always add some weight.

Second: They already do float. They recover them quickly (& sometimes reuse them) if they miss the catch. But the fairing halves are 800km down range. You need to have a boat nearby anyway, so might as well try to catch it before it lands in saltwater and screws it up.

<comment><USER7> It's not the water per say. A car, laptop or airplane that is in fresh water will not work without an overhaul.

The salt water produces corrosion that fresh does not. That is why military aircraft operated near the sea get washed so much. Both inside and out, including the engines.

We would come back from overwater flights over the Atlantic and either go through a 'bird bath' which is basically a car wash for aircraft. Or they would drag a fire hose out, hook it up and spray everything down. It was pretty cool to watch the exhaust gas temps when the started dumping fresh water into the engine inlet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So are the fairings passively falling, or are they guided to the ships in some way? Ships are very slow compared to even a parachuting object from the sky.

<comment><USER9> They use steerable parafoils.

<comment><USER10> Do you know how the steering is being done? Is it controlled from a computer on the fairing or is it remotely guided?

<comment><USER11> IIRC it's automated GPS to a staging area and the local ship takes over control when it comes within radio range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article just links to [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1285338582849208320](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1285338582849208320) and adds a bit more context, if you don't want to blindly accept the Verizon GDPR wall.

<comment><USER13> I am just amazed that NASA turned around a shuttle in 54 days, I don't even recall it. Apparently these were the first two missions flown[0]. However I also read almost suffered Columbia's fate on one of its flight due to a large loss of tiles

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Atlantis#Flights...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Atlantis#Flights_listing)

</comment></comment><comment> the-dude Techcrunch : [https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/spacex-successfully- catche...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/spacex-successfully-catches-both- fairing-halves-for-the-first-time-on-its-latest-launch/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Did they ever try catching it mid air? Something like a hook to helicopter perhaps? $6 mil is big number not to try.

<comment><USER15> Depending on the launch trajectory, these fairings come down between 40 km and 1400km offshore. So you either need a helicopter with incredible range and dwell time, or a boat with a helicopter pad AND a place to put the fairing if you catch it.

Say you catch the fairing. Great, now you have a giant composite/plastic sail, the size of school bus, bouncing around in your rotor downdraft. Not exactly the safest thing, and you're over water so you can't just put down anywhere.

So, it's complicated, and SpaceX decided to go with a boat rather than a helicopter-and-a-boat.

[https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-mr-steven-renamed-falcon- he...](https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-mr-steven-renamed-falcon-heavy- fairing-catch/)

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21213917/rocket-lab- rocket...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21213917/rocket-lab-rocket- electron-helicopters-reusable-mid-air-catch)

Rocketlab first stage catch demo; they've got a heavy stage to catch (with heavy engines at the bottom to act as a counterweight) and it's not nearly as big as the Falcon 9 booster. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3CWGDhkmbs&feature=emb_titl...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3CWGDhkmbs&feature=emb_title)

<comment><USER16> Balloons! But yeah, the boat is probably simpler / cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> page is just blank for me...

<comment><USER18> Try enabling JavaScript.

<comment><USER19> That's some top notch developing to not be able to display anything for non-JS enabled viewers.

<comment><USER20> By viewers you probably mean "people they aim to track"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This website is not trustworthy and doesn't respect GDPR as it redirects to [https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId)

Engadget, stop this nonsense and change the responsibilities of the team who decided to put this into production.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure why you were downvoted, I hate sites where the only option to "do you want to be tracked?" is "yes" too.

<comment><USER23> There's always the ctrl-w option. It seems better that you have to consent rather than them just assuming you consent since you opened a link.

<comment><USER22> > There's always the ctrl-w option.

That is usually what I resort to.

> It seems better that you have to consent rather than them just assuming you > consent since you opened a link.

Yes, but one of the two is completely illegal, and the other is slightly illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> there were a couple guys using acrobatic parachutes and some control code to fly high power model rockets back to the pad saving an hour walk. I wonder if SpaceX could use the same technique and fly the fairings to the ships.

<comment><USER25> That's what they already do. It's a steerable parafoil. How would they be expected to get the ship lined up underneath the parafoil in time to catch it otherwise?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't understand why they don't just use an inflatable parachute with a radio beacon antenna sticking out the top. Then they could just drive up anytime and fish it out of the water. Would immersion in salt water for a few hours damage a fairing?

<comment><USER27> Or grab them with a hook dangling from a C-130 like the film from old-timey spy satellites.

<comment><USER25> They considered doing that to reuse the Saturn V with a giant helicopter with rockets at the end of each propeller. It didnt go anywhere. Though people have been using air capture for more reasonable use cases, and rocket lab is going to be air capturing their electron rockets.

<comment><USER28> I haven't heard about this giant helicopter idea before. Here's an article I found about it:

[https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1045/1](https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1045/1)

<comment><USER29> Very cool article. The Hiller Air & Space museum mentioned in the piece is well worth visiting if one happens to be in the Bay Area.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Means to Many Ends: 10+ Years of Haskell at Galois (Lang.NEXT 2012) - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/A-Means-to-Many-Ends-10-Years-of-Haskell-at-Galois <comment><USER2> <https://github.com/galoisinc>

[hipp-hopp, jön vukk! [http://corp.galois.com/blog/2012/4/4/galois-open- source-proj...](http://corp.galois.com/blog/2012/4/4/galois-open-source- projects-on-github.html)]

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm, Xen systems programming in Haskell. Interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: How does a TV show recording get to the networks? - <AUTHOR> I was watching this clip from Colbert's new show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72yDA3-m4y8), and he says "when we tried to send it to the network [...] the computers kept crashing" - so my question to someone in the know is: how does Colbert's production company get the show to CBS? Dropbox? FTP? Some antiquated video transfer protocol? <comment><USER2> I may be wrong, but back in the day it was done with links to satellites:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_network#Overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_network#Overview)

<comment><USER3> It's satellite from the network to the affiliates, but from the studio to the network it would seem to be much simpler to mail a tape or maybe use Aspera.</comment></comment>


Money-laundering oligarchs bought all the real-estate to clean their oil money - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/01/27/cz-edwards.html <comment><USER4> "Money Land" by Oliver Bullough is a well researched drive through through various ways global financial system facilitates money loundering. It's a fantastic read! Almost made me want to become a corrupt third world government official - the services are that good!

Real estate is just one of the forms of fixed assets that can be used to store wealth after loundering.

[https://www.amazon.com/Moneyland-Thieves-Crooks-Rule- World-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Moneyland-Thieves-Crooks-Rule-World- ebook/dp/B01NBWDPW8)

<comment><USER5> thank you for the recommendation, it surely looks like an amazing book

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to understand more about the money laundering world, check out the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). They've impacted > 5B$ of assets.

Great people, they accept donations, and they are often looking for technical talent. [https://www.occrp.org/en/about-us](https://www.occrp.org/en/about-us)

</comment><comment><USER7> If this is actually happening on a large scale, there should be secondary evidence. Like, do a lot of REITs have financial ties to banks in low enforcement jurisdictions? If an investigative journalist were to show that there were networks of actors who share links to suspect institutions ( Cypriot banks known to be controlled by Russian oligarchs for instance ) that could form the basis for forfeiture proceedings to free up that housing stock and help fix the housing crisis.

And as a note a "clean ownership" policy that requires REIT's operating in the US of A to divulge all individual owners sounds like it might be a policy win.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand how the behavior described in the post raises rents. Clearly demand from investors would raise sale prices, but why would renters pay more to rent in buildings owned by shady oligarchs? Seems like it would just push up the price-rent ratio, which we definitely can see in the data. If anything, that indicates renters are getting a better deal, paying a smaller portion of the capital cost of living in a scarce asset.

Ie. if big city real estate is a particularly good place for oligarchs to park cash illegally, they ought to be getting less real returns then they could get on normal investments like the stock market. If they are overpaying for these properties, they are transferring wealth (on net) to the domestic sellers and/or tenants.

<comment><USER9> As sale prices go up, more people can no longer afford to buy but still need somewhere to live, causing the rent market to become more competitive, and the rents go up because owners charge what the market can bare. Which in turn justifies investors paying even higher prices, so it spirals up, until it plateaus when not enough people can actually afford to pay the rent. And if the behavior described in the post is real, it goes even higher because a decent investment return is not the goal.

<comment><USER8> >more people can no longer afford to buy but still need somewhere to live, causing the rent market to become more competitive

It seems like you are double counting here. If high prices result in units becoming investor-owned and rented out instead of owner-occcupied, that means the rental supply is larger, so the foiled-owner-occupiers shouldn't be crowding out more renters.

To put it simply, we are fitting the same number of humans in the same number of buildings here, and just changing whether the person who lives there is the owner.

> and the rents go up because owners charge what the market can bare

Landlords always charge what the market can bear, how does the sale price of the unit move that number (other than the double counting argument above)?

<comment><USER10> At least in London, I have heard it claimed [1] that foreign investors buy properties and leave them vacant, as London's rising house prices represent a sufficient return on investment and remove the inconvenience and risk of dealing with tenants.

Of course, it's hard to measure this stuff precisely, because given the current attitudes, if you were doing that the last thing you'd do is report yourself to the government.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/01/names-of- wea...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/01/names-of-wealthy- empty-home-owners-in-grenfell-borough-revealed)

<comment><USER11> Why on earth would somebody who's interested in profit leave a property empty, rather than cash in on rent from tenants? In other words, why would investors choose loosing money over getting income? It's not like its hard to get tenants. It's not like it's hard to manage tenants, and it's even easy to get rid of them if you need to in the UK (unlike in some other countries). There's a whole support industry for finding and managing tenants. It's almost effortless.

I'm afraid I don't believe stories like that quoted above. As an edge case it may occasionally happen (especially at the high-end, e.g. flats that cost > £2 mil), but the normal case is that buyers cash in on rental income. Moreover, I posit that the number of properties left vacant is so marginal that it doesn't affect London's housing market.

For example there has been lots of building activity in Aldgate, near Old Street, around Stratford (former Olympic area), and in the Docklands. They are mostly studio flats, 1-, or 2-bedrooms, all tiny, and all quickly snapped up. London public transport (e.g. Central Line) is insanely busy now in parts because so many new people have moved to e.g. Stratford.

Source: Anecdotal, I speak with a lot of builders, property developers, and architects in London.

<comment><USER10> I've worked with letting agents as a tenant, and it gave me the impression they're all borderline scam artists whose business model revolves around charging BS fees and penny-pinching with shoddy workmanship.

Do you suppose, when you're a foreign landlord with a poor command of English and no ability to visit the property in person, that the letting industry somehow becomes honest and straightforward?

<comment><USER11> Yes, there are a borderline scammers, I've been working with such people myself, as a tenant and a property owner.

       foreign landlord

Why on earth would you buy in London in these circumstances, why not put you money in an ETF?

Let's quantify: what fraction of the London property market does that apply to? My hypothesis: < 0.2%

<comment><USER10>
      Why on earth would you buy in London in these
      circumstances, why not put you money in an ETF?

Because you're a money-laundering oligarch (or a upper class person in an oppressive regime, worried the state will appropriate your assets) and if you're spending £10 million or so on a property, you can afford to conceal your identity with an intermediary in Jersey, Guernsey, BVI, Panama...

<comment><USER11>
        conceal your identity

You can also conceal your identity when buying an ETF. An EFT almost certainly has a higher ROI than empty property.

And if you are investing via intermediaries, then they can handles the letting process so as to maximise the ROI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This makes zero sense. If your money's clean enough to get it into an REIT, it's clean enough for anything isn't it?

<comment><USER13> No, at least in the US. The Realtors have lobbied very hard to make sure that the real estate industry doesn't have the same reporting requirements that banking does. So a lot of dirty money has made it into the US real estate system. The government finally started looking into it a few years ago. "By 2017, 30 percent of cash purchases of high-end real estate by LLCs in New York, Miami, LA, San Francisco, San Diego and San Antonio were involving suspicious buyers, according to FinCEN."

<comment><USER14> I believe that it's even worse here in Australia. We're actually on a Transparency International list of countries with insufficient controls because we have basically no reporting for real estate, whereas banks, brokers for financial products etc. do. It's reportedly very common for people to fly in (mostly from Asia, just given where we are located), choose a property and buy it in cash, and be back out of the country in two days or so. A lot of them don't even bother renting it out - just hold for a few years empty and then sell it later.

The party in power doesn't seem to care - they have a lot of property themselves (I think the average is 2 per parliamentarian, but one National party MP has 35) so have a vested interest in keeping money flowing in to inflate prices. Being the conservatives, it's also good for their base - <USER2> of the older/wealthy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What puzzles me is why the money used to purchase the property portfolio by a foreign investor is not subject to money laundering checks? Is this just corruption/government looking the other way?

<comment><USER16> Historic assumptions maybe? Namely that they may not even have records to check and it was outside their domain anyway.

If you were to ask someone in the 19th century to audit the legitimacy of someone from across the ocean you would certainly get an askance look - <USER3> just because of different values but because of how bizzarely involved the task is for something that /might/ be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Didn't Vancouver have to slap a big tax on non-domestic property sales because of something similar to this? Also I've heard ~20% of the BA real estate market is overseas buyers parking cash, was in a report recently.

<comment><USER18> It's all hypothetical. The provincial and municipal govt had to do something because of public panic due to the media. All of the stuff I've read and heard is conjecture. Quite a tragedy.

<comment><USER19> Half of flats in highrises never showing any lights at night is also a pure conjecture. Hypothetical my ass.

<comment><USER20> I keep saying:

1\. The land tax or property tax on everyone (so there is no need to determine occupancy)

2\. Use the money for essential services like garbage and infrastructure like subways, roads, and fiber optic cable.

This makes sense to me because I think it is not realistic for a government agency to accurately determine which units are unoccupied. It is much easier to raise taxes on everyone and make the market unsustainable for anyone who isn't using the real estate productively.

Of course, the other side of this is reducing waste in government spending but that's a topic for another day.

<comment><USER21> > make the market unsustainable for anyone who isn't using the real estate > productively

That only works if the purchases are actually an investment. When real estate is a form of money laundering, you expect to lose a portion of the value to the process of making dirty money clean. Also, a portion of the purchases are by people, say from China, who just want to park their money some place in a form where it can't be seized by the government, losing some of its value is again okay. A tax high enough to change these behaviors is unsustainable if applied equally to everyone and all properties.

<comment><USER20> > That only works if the purchases are actually an investment. When real > estate is a form of money laundering, you expect to lose a portion of the > value to the process of making dirty money clean. Also, a portion of the > purchases are by people, say from China, who just want to park their money > some place in a form where it can't be seized by the government, losing some > of its value is again okay.

This is the beauty of taxation. It is an ongoing commitment. We can use it to our advantage. Even bumping taxes to something like 5% of value should wreak havoc (in a good way) to the market.

> A tax high enough to change these behaviors is unsustainable if applied > equally to everyone and all properties.

Assuming the retail market cost is as much as people can afford (that's the entire point, right? people can't afford any higher rent?), there is no slack which means the people in the middle have to absorb the extra cost without passing it on. At least that is my naive position until proven otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What isn't clear is how exactly is this laundering the money?

How do they buy billions of RE for cash? If it's not cash, then these must be traceable electronic transactions?

Why do they need to rent it? Seems like it'd take forever to launder the amount. Can't they just buy and sell from each other?

Buyer A buys one unit from B, sell to C. B buys from C sells to A. Etc.

<comment><USER23> Buy real estate with clean money. Raise rents frequently and rapidly; once the current tenants leave, have pretend tenants that pay with dirty money. Voila, clean rent money, no need to maintain the building.

Or buy real estate for some clean money, reported as the purchase amount, but also some dirty money, under the table. If you sell it, the you've got clean money for the difference between the reported sales price and the reported purchase price. You could even give the buyer dirty money to raise the sales price.

<comment><USER24> This is the first thing I read here, including the article, that actually makes any sense explaining how this might increase rents

<comment><USER25> If you buy apartments and don't rent it because it doesn't matter, you take away potentially rentable places, decreasing supply which increases rent for everyone.

<comment><USER24> This is very true. Also, not an argument made by this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l Not the same as Real Estate Investment Trusts, but in the UK a lot of properties are bought by shell companies registered in tax havens. These aren't necessarily for money laundering, but if not they're for tax avoidance or evasion. There's an interactive map at [http://www.private- eye.co.uk/registry](http://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry) which lets you zoom to street level.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand how the dirty money is allowed to be used in purchasing real estate to begin with. When I purchased my home there seemed to be pretty extensive checks to see where the money I was using came from. REITs are mentioned but wouldn't the money being invested in a REIT be under similar scrutiny?

<comment><USER27> Hedge funds are also exempt from money laundering requirements: [https://www.propublica.org/article/why-arent-hedge-funds- req...](https://www.propublica.org/article/why-arent-hedge-funds-required-to- fight-money-laundering)

The billionaire class has captured our government. This is just one more consequence of their control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Compelling argument, but I wonder how much of that can ever be proven. Sure, this is enough simply to make some people believe that the 0.001% are 'bad people', but this is the difference between investigative journalism and opinion pieces. One directly links pieces of evidence to make a claim, the other is simply an explanation of their thoughts. I like where the piece is going, but its an idea rooted in one possible explanation of reality, not an idea rooted in a discovery of something within reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I wonder how much of that can ever be proven

One can imagine a scenario where the Mueller report creates so much outrage that it causes reforms to real estate laws in certain markets, which creates a natural experiment that allows the affect on price to be quantified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> what a perfectly crafted narrative for the a very specific audience.

oil tycoon monopoly man is the reason i cant afford a condo in california or new york. peak quality at hacker news

on a more serious side note: does anyone remember the panama papers? how many high profile people have been arrested?

<comment><USER30> It's almost as if the political and financial elites are treated differently by the law than you or I. Oh wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why does oil money need laundering?

<comment><USER32> In my country, government officials steal from the national budget, which is funded by oil revenues.

<comment><USER33> And to put a tech spin on it - being the postmaster general or minister for telecoms in a third world country was a coveted position as you could divert dollars from the interconnect fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's just stupid. What's killing rent is inheritance.

</comment><comment><USER35> The chink in the armor of that theory is that, at least in the West, those apartments are quite well rented out.

So as long the rents are paid willingly, there is no reason to think money laundering increases rents. I'd even expect the opposite because the investors would have to pay a premium while the tenants' price elasticity doesn't change.</comment>


Computational Power Found in the Arms of Neurons - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/neural-dendrites-reveal-their-computational-power-20200114/ <comment><USER2> I don't think any serious deep-learning researchers believe that their artificial models represent the reality of how an actual brain (or even the individual neurons) actually work.

That's an idea, I believe, that has been perpetuated in the general public's mind by popular science articles and descriptions about deep learning and neural networks, in a (largely successful) attempt to attract and gain attention for the subject and those articles.

One thing that did capture my imagination from this new research, though, as applied to deep learning, is whether this would necessarily cause any change in actual deep learning models?

That is, even if the dendrites are performing more complex computations, does that change anything about the "standard" layered model of deep learning systems, or does one simply add more artificial neurons to the model to compensate (and thus, nothing is really gained)?

Finally - and I know this is not the focus of this research - this new understanding doesn't seemingly do anything to advance our knowledge of how actual brains and neurons learn; as mentioned elsewhere, our current artificial models implement "back propagation" for learning purposes. While that has been a radically successful method, even its creator (Hinton) believes it to be wrong (and is working toward a different model of so-called "capsule networks" in response). As far as I am aware, no form of back propagation has been found to be performed in natural brains or neural networks, so we really don't know how this aspect works. Plenty of competing theories and ideas have sprung up regarding this.

Hopefully one day we'll figure it out; I'm of the opinion that, like so many other things that have been discovered in the past, when we do figure it out, it will probably be something extremely simple and curious as to how it remained overlooked for so long.

I kinda have a thought or idea that its done via "societal feedback loops" \- that is, brains talking/interacting with other brains - though how you integrate this with a feedforward system isn't apparent to me. I'm also certain, though, that this idea isn't something new or unique (and it very likely is wrong, too).

</comment><comment><USER3> I have written a short, clear, and dense book about this exact subject. It's free! Read it here:

[http://www.corticalcircuitry.com/](http://www.corticalcircuitry.com/)

<comment><USER3> A preprint that came out after I released the book that I would have mentioned:

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/613141v1.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/613141v1.full)

They model a single cortical neuron as a deep neural network with 7 hidden layers consisting of 128 hidden units each.

Biological neurons are A LOT more powerful than "neurons" in neural networks. If you hear a claim about computer-brain parity being close - the people making it almost certainly don't understand the power of cortical neurons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I find interesting about this finding: I wonder if intra-dentrite vs. inter-dentrite vs. inter-neuronal learning has different learning rates, activation functions etc. If that's the case, maybe artifical networks could benefit such variety.

<comment><USER5> More than the computational aspects of neurons (which might be abstracted computationally), the learning process is something that seems it's still more of a mystery.

The brain doesn't backpropagate. So how do you do it?

<comment><USER6> Well part of it is local unsupervised hebbian learning, fire-together-wire- together, as it's succinctly put. In particular, neurons will try to fire more like upstream neurons and less like downstream neurons as determined by time- delay in correlation.

Then there is also the brains reward center, the one that famously goes wrong when you get addicted to drugs. It releases chemicals which reinforce behavior.

And finally some parts are "hard-coded" to be a certain way our DNA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See earlier discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718)

</comment><comment><USER8> Actually, single layer/later free networks can learn XOR under naturally occurring modulated learning conditions[1]. I am the author and was able to demonstrate 6-dimensional XOR learned in a Hopfield network using Hebbian learning.

[1] [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4mS_4vzf5mycQez76O_mmpQDpT...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4mS_4vzf5mycQez76O_mmpQDpT3DiZz/view?usp=drivesdk) (PDF)

</comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone ever tried to develop (or more appropriately, grow) an actual artificial biological brain, instead of a computer program?

Perhaps trying to grow something like a brain may give us an insight on the actual algorithm used.

<comment><USER10> Yes, and they've trained neurons to do tasks successfully. But the way they trained them is very different to how they naturally work. I don't think we know how to train a collection of neurons the "natural" way.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells- in-a...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish- fly-fighter-plane/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully this research will boost deep learning.</comment>


Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/07/software-eats-software/ <comment><USER2> I think I get it. Look at their pricing:

[https://gigster.com/pricing](https://gigster.com/pricing)

Most software development shops don't ever scale past a few dozen or a few hundred developers. As a result, they don't have much project overlap. If you were able to scale to handle tons of similar projects, and be picky about which projects you take on, you could re-use 90% of the code needed for each project without ever dropping prices, essentially charging over and over again for hours that were only actually worked once.

All marketplace codebases are pretty similar, all dating apps are pretty similar, all daily deals sites are pretty similar, etc.

I think all their talk of Artificial Intelligence is nonsense to throw people off their trail.

<comment><USER3> I read through their terms of service and you as a developer hand all rights to your work over to them. That's normal.

But there's little mention of the rights of their client. So maybe they are trying to get a bunch of reusable ip on the backs of consulting engagements, like every consulting shop ever. But maybe doing it in a more scalable way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Send Gigster your app idea and it sends you back that app._

So you don't have to talk to developers and they know exactly what you want from your written description of your idea? What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER5> It also farms the code around a bunch of non-communicating developers. No, problems on the horizon, keep running towards that iceberg.

<comment><USER6> Or it could use a really good developer who also can design - on a contract basis. Several iOS developers can do that well enough to ship an MvP. Even more can also spin up a backend with an admin interface on Heroku in no time. Even without any background jobs. I think you guys my underestimate the concept here.

I am just mad I didn't come up with it first :-/

The developer doesn't need to manage invoice, other peoples schedules and any questions. That's taken care of by the service in question.

Specific ideas in. App Out.

This would be great for a developer who wants to get an outlet for creative (design) ideas as well.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that there is often/always a disconnect between what a client says they want, what they think they want and what they actually want/need. What separates a great developer from a merely competent developer is being able to talk to clients and negotiate that disconnect.

A company that simply takes a spec sheet and implements it as written will end up with many very unhappy clients.

<comment><USER4> This is why outsourcing fails. Generally, outsourced developers will just implement exactly what the spec says to implement, no more and (hopefully) no less. You can't communicate with them synchronously and answer their questions in real time because they're located on the opposite side of the earth. Time is money and waiting for your answers would be too expensive, so they just don't ask questions, instead they make guesses and assumptions about anything you haven't clearly specified.

Then you slowly realize that it takes about as much time and effort to write a comprehensive, detailed specification of the software, as it does to actually write the software itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now.

That is compound by the millions of youngsters who grew up with computers, have unlimited access to unlimited teaching materials and are entering the workforce each year..

The demand for software may be growing (although that should peak at some point too), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the demand for programmers will follow the same trend.

Quite the opposite it seems...

<comment><USER9> > I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future. And that puts > software developers next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if > their skills will be required in a decade from now.

I'm fairly sure that programmers will be employable for the foreseeable future but in a way this is fair play, we - the programmers - did this to an immense number of people it would seem that we ourselves should not be immune to becoming superfluous as well at some point. After all programmer is not some kind of protected status, if it's ok for programmers to automate away whole segments of the job market why should programmers expect that their jobs could never be automated away? If anything we should be _more_ aware of such risks having been in the drivers seat on this one for the last 50 years.

<comment><USER10> More automation more of the time! The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while working less / relaxing more.

Having said that, I think automation of software development has a long way to go before it's particularly effective. Though it's certainly going to be an interesting space to watch. It's somehow weird to imagine a future in which we disrupt ourselves.

<comment><USER11> > The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while > working less / relaxing more.

The world doesn't reward working less. More automation might lead to lower average work hours, but the reduction comes from people losing their jobs and not finding new ones.

So, yes, you get to work less, but you almost might go bankrupt, lose your house and car, and be reliant on government welfare, if you're "lucky" enough to live in country with a decent safety net.

<comment><USER12> I think he was saying that automating all the things is good, but we need to rethink the economic system that we currently have. Imagine the logical extreme of our current trajectory: a world in which robots/computers do everything that humans currently do. 100% automation, 0% employment.

This _should_ be a good thing, giving humans unprecedented leisure time and producing a huge cultural boom. The problem is that in the current economic system 0% employment means the world would be impoverished, except for the few that owned the robot/computer production systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real problems with this idea (which isn't new) come after a project has been delivered: It looks nice but you find a bug. What now? What's the turnaround time for getting that bug fixed? What's the cost? What about adding new features? What about scaling? And if you ever want to hire your own developers they have to learn a codebase that you yourself don't even understand.

<comment><USER14> It is better suited for "throw away" app, for example, something linked to an event or conference. Or maybe a brick & mortar business that wants a very basic app, e.g. a bakery wants an easy way to take cakes order. It is not targeted to people who want to build a long lasting business primarily based on the app.

<comment><USER15> > It is not targeted to people who want to build a long lasting business > primarily based on the app.

This is a vast oversimplification, but the general idea in business is to _identify your core value and make that your core competency_.

Whether the rest of the business can be outsourced, or staffed by a low-paid expendable grunts, or downloaded onto your vendors, is a question of tactics.

If we buy that general idea, we buy that some businesses may have software, but its not their core value proposition, and therefore that it's ok to outsource it.

(I once met two founders who wanted to do a daily deal type business with high-end fashion items. I know nothing about this business, but I recall they were adamant that their "secret sauce" was sourcing the product to sell, not selling it. Thus, they were talking to consultants about building their deals site for them.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The idea here seems to be that the value is in the management. Or owning the problem and delivering the solution rather than having to act as the manager of your project.

Gigster places itself in two areas which independent developers often fall down. Selling their services and managing the project. What often ends up happening is that neither the client nor the developer are able to manage their parts and the gap in the middle is the disaster.

In return for taking these spots, Gigster is removing the ability for the developers to build their own businesses. For many of the faceless contractors who compete with each other on Odesk and Elance, this might be a good thing.

Even if this model were to blow up, it still doesn't touch the top X percent of agencies / developers who can manage the entire process, deliver and demonstrably contribute to the bottom line.

If you are going to be an outsourcer, you need to keep your game moving. There are too many people out there who shouldn't even be landing gigs. Those of you who are solid, keep rolling.

<comment><USER17> I know people who built up a business by freelancing on gig sites. It's tough, but by delivering quality results in a timely fashion, they found a few clients who were willing to engage them outside of the gig sites at higher rates. And once you have a few clients, you get more through referrals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I need a simple program that would create startups + landing pages Andreessen would invest in

<comment><USER19> there you go: [http://tiffzhang.com/startup/index.html](http://tiffzhang.com/startup/index.html)

keep reloading the url to get random startup landing pages.

<comment><USER18> Nice. The next logical step would be to generate the ProductHunt listing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The company finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project > managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only > accepts 5% of applicants.

Why would such individuals be willing to work as a contractor for this company in a great enough number and at a low enough rate to make this model scalable and profitable? Something doesn't add up here.

<comment><USER21> Take a look at the pricing page: [https://gigster.com/pricing](https://gigster.com/pricing)

Gigster is anything but cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This type of progression in software development is inevitable. Groups of people writing individual lines of code for bespoke apps will one day go the same way looms in factories went after the industrial revolution.

I run a software company, and we've actually moved away from fixed price projects and only provide development on a day rate. Fixed price/scope/timescale projects are _incredibly_ risky, require massive amounts of project management resource, and can be insanely unprofitable if the specifications for the work are not watertight and the client isn't managed well.

Knowing the industry very well, and having completed hundreds of bespoke projects for all sizes and types of clients I have so many questions about how the Gigster model works. Off the top of my head:

* What language are the apps built in? This is important to me if I want to hire my own people to continue to build out and support the app going forward. I presume the mobile apps are native, so this question is probably more specific to the web development.

* Do I own the intellectual property on the finished app? * What does the support and maintenance agreement look like and provide? And at what cost?

* What does the contract for development look like? The devil will be in the detail here. For example, I'd be interested to know what happens if my project overruns and deadlines are missed.

* What if I want something built that doesn't fit one of their various examples here [https://gigster.com/pricing](https://gigster.com/pricing)?

* Who writes the specification? Who creates the wireframes for the app?

* Who performs quality assurance testing? What happens if the work I receive is excessively buggy?

Bespoke development of software is _hard_ and it's great to see somebody take this on. I wish Gigster luck but I fear for their sanity as they attempt to scale.

<comment><USER23> > This type of progression in software development is inevitable. Groups of > people writing individual lines of code for bespoke apps will one day go the > same way looms in factories went after the industrial revolution. > I run a > software company, and we've actually moved away from fixed price projects > and only provide development on a day rate. Fixed price/scope/timescale > projects are incredibly risky, require massive amounts of project management > resource, and can be insanely unprofitable if the specifications for the > work are not watertight and the client isn't managed well.

These two sentences don't seem to make sense. On the one hand, you say it's inevitable. On the other hand, as someone who has RUN a software company, you say you couldn't figure it out. Is that correct?

<comment><USER22> It is of course inevitable that somebody more intelligent than me is going to automate the development of bespoke software.

We don't automate software development, we still do it the old fashioned way. As such rather than attempt to tackle the problems associated with fixed price projects, we changed our business model to charge a day rate and reduce risk that way. We took this approach because we don't have millions of dollars of investors money in the bank to allow us to trial and error other solutions.

<comment><USER23> Perhaps. A lot of meatspace architecture has been automated as well so you may be right in your prediction, but I think it will come about more organically through the use of specialized software tools. Eventually developers/engineers will be just like plumbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've worked on gigster. Throwaway account to avoid this being linked to my account.

A few thoughts:

1) The talk of an AI to price things marketing fluff. There is no magic AI that can price, for example, the fact that a client changes his mind, or that legacy code has unexpected bugs.

2) The reusable component stuff is not fully deployed yet. I think where it has potential is as app templates. A lot of apps have similar starting points, and it makes sense to encapsulate those starting points in project templates. I am doubtful that this will evolve into a magic solution that makes software engineering easy.

3) The big innovation, from my perspective, is that they are harnessing the spare work capacity of software engineers. It is very easy for a full time employed engineer to hop onto the platform and make some extra cash. I think this separates them from traditional outsourcing shops, or oDesk.

4) Another innovation is that they capture the reputation gains from their work. Traditionally a freelancer would build relationships with their clients, the freelancers reputation improves as he does good work. With gigster, you as a freelancer do not have an external reputation. Gigster gets the benefit of your good (or bad) work.

Largely because of (4) I would be cautious as a freelancer on gigster. The pay is project based, not hourly, which means there is high variance/randomness to the hourly pay.

</comment><comment><USER25> Turning the creation of derivative apps into a unique business model. Which sounds great as long as people continue to desire creating derivative apps en masse.

<comment><USER26> 99% of apps is data entry + usable interface + communication with a rest interface (meaning, there isn't a lot of 'intelligence' within)

Seems very replicable

<comment><USER27> especially when you use MIT graduates to do the actual work. lol...

<comment><USER28> What MIT grad want's this job..? My guess is that they exaggerate this quite a bit. The xyz graduates are probably the founders :)

<comment><USER21> Why wouldn't an MIT grad want to work flexible hours from anywhere in the world?

<comment><USER7> If all you want to do is sit on a beach an hack on trivial CRUD apps why would you bother to go to MIT in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Discussion of Gigster (YC S15) "Prolancer" business model from 4 months ago - 188 comments, including responses from the founders:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931596)

</comment><comment><USER30> Two quotes that I like and think are relevant to the discussion:

"Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification." \-- Fred Brooks

"If you don't understand precisely what you need to do, what makes you think you can tell a computer how to do it?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10173640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10173640)

For a highly standardized product, maybe the "specifying what you want" isn't a big problem, but in other cases I think it is.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why invest 10M when he could've just asked Gigster to make a better Gigster?

<comment><USER32> Good question; I think you were going for funny, but you highlighted what they can and can't do there.

They build apps. So I'm sure sell you 90% of their code, but they can't re- code their brand name, repeat costumers and the staff that they seem to take some pride in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As much as I want to snark in this thread as well – it's an audacious goal.

When I was in school at Georgia Tech, one of my professors talked a lot about SmallTalk and Alice. Both were ways to make coding more accessible to a larger audience.

I can't help but think that the future is going to continue to make development more accessible to people. I definitely think Gigster has their work cut out for them; nevertheless, I'm one for the fact that it would be pretty awesome if I was never asked to 'build a webpage' again.

<comment><USER34> Lots of tools make coding more accessible to large audience. IDE, higher-level languages, better tooling, libraries/frameworks/modules, stackoverflow.

However this didn't result in less work for the programmers, on the contrary. Same thing may apply here. Just the pressure points will change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Should be software eats project manager. the code is still done by people.

</comment><comment><USER35> If I was younger, and cheaper, I'd consider working as a freelancer with these guys. Seems like a possible way to funnel in work while offloading a lot of the PM responsibilities.

I will say one thing though - fixed pricing on projects is tricky. I would be interested to see how they set and meet expectations, while also not charging for overages. It seems like the developer might have to be the one to eat the costs if it goes over.

<comment><USER36> Exactly, a lot of the freelancer workplaces used to work like this. Vworker.com comes to mind, but there's a lot of others.

Arguing about work not done was a major hassle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> From a pure economic division-of-labor standpoint it makes sense. However I thought the modern business approach was to move away from strictly defined boxes of job roles and have everyone involved with everything (with some fuzzy focus on a particular role). With the hope that some cross pollination of ideas results in some synergistic result where the sum is greater than the individual parts.

However the upshot of this seems to me that now people can focus on ideas and idea generation instead of having to worry about maintaining programmers. Like what cloud did for hardware/computing.

What we need now is a simple program that takes normal human text and outputs a program. Input "write me a program that adds the numbers 1 to 100" and you would get a program that did that. Then what we need is to hook that up to an artificial neural network that takes human text and outputs new ideas for apps.

Hey andreesen I'll be taking my $10mm check now. Thanks.

<comment><USER38> > What we need now is a simple program that takes normal human text and > outputs a program. Input "write me a program that adds the numbers 1 to 100" > and you would get a program that did that.

The problem is normal human text is ambiguous and flawed. Case in point:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=write+me+a+program+that...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=write+me+a+program+that+adds+the+numbers+1+to+100)

Correct, but probably not quite what you intended.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, but when the latency from description input to program output is in seconds, then you could iterate on the description quite fast. It would be like programming, except you don't need to know any algorithms and all the plumbing takes care of itself.

<comment><USER32> "Write me a web-site that allows users to login using Facebook and sign up for my mailing list."

It's a program that I think can be written in an autonomous fashion, but I just wanted to point out that as soon as you start coding non-trivial programs, testing and debugging you're non-specific language is going to be hell. So bad that I think you are going to have to write thousands of sentences, and eventually decide you want a more specific language than English when you can't determine which of the thousands of words or grammatical elements you and the computer disagree on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> They mention that the "the client base moved to enterprise" and I think that, if Gigster is ever reasonably successful, it will end up as a shop making niche products for enterprises who find it difficult to fit such development activities into their budgets and schedules. They will then be directly competing with consultants who today do not provide an 'end-to-end' solution, so to say, to the development problems plaguing these enterprise companies.

But it is mighty difficult to do this kind of niche work because developers will then have to spend an inordinate amount of time acquiring relevant domain knowledge to implement these niche solutions. Hard earned knowledge that will be useless after the project is complete. And the effort of acquiring this domain knowledge will often be under-appreciated and underpaid, cause it is very very difficult to estimate this effort no matter how good an AI have you.

</comment><comment><USER41> Can someone explain how their AI produces even remotely accurate quotes? Also what is the price range of these projects?

<comment><USER42> I can see no reason why asking developers (or whomever) would get any better estimates than AI does. Trick is that quotes are rarely ever even remotely accurate. You could probably get better estimates from written description with random number generator if tuned properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> "Within two weeks of its launch in late July, Gigster already had $1 million in sales booked."

Can someone walk me through how this is possible? As in, what does a company like Gigster focus on to reach sales so quickly?

<comment><USER44> This isn't Roger Dickey's first time starting a business so that certainly helps. Estimating the cost of their service to be around $5k, to reach $1 million in sales would mean 200 apps shipped. That seems like a reasonable feat as long as he plays his cards right.

<comment><USER45> I don't think it even means apps delivered, started or even necessarily paid for. I'm guessing that a number of people who could optimistically be presumed to represent this amount of sales signed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer- aided_software_engine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer- aided_software_engineering)

Maybe it IS different this time around. I can see for very simple apps this might be possible. But one of the first questions that often gets asked on projects that I am on is "Is this even possible?"

<comment><USER47> Technology is filled with plenty of idea that have their second comings: consumer tablets, grocery delivery, etc.

<comment><USER46> Totally agree! I have seen VR be hyped 3 times now, lets hope thing on sticks. Personally I don't believe in computer estimation of anything but the simplest project

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> People who want software built are usually (in my experience, almost always) incapable of describing what they want. But they know what they like or don't like when they see it, and then they get ideas for changes. Unless Gigster (really?) gets that part figured out all they'll be capable of creating is the next app that sits in the middle of the the app store charts that no one cares about.

<comment><USER49> The first two lines of this comment should be written down on every wall of every dev shop in the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wish the article's author wouldn't sound so naive - why wouldn't he discuss all the other similar attempts at automating app development, their shortcomings, and how Gigster is going to find a way to do better? People might think from reading his article that this hasn't been going on for a decade+.

</comment><comment><USER51> So, core technology is an AI system that, given a project, will automatically determine how long it will take and what sort of work will be required?

Great, I'll buy a license and tell my buddies here in New Mexico about it so we can compete with Gigster at probably 25% of whatever they're charging for apps, because New Mexico is cheap as all hell yet still remarkably beautiful. Don't tell too many of your friends, we're trying to keep it that way.

But seriously, this is nothing more than a development agency that happens to have a very cool piece of tech on hand that enables them to essentially productize development. That's cool. But eventually that same piece of tech will eventually be replicated and available to freelancers the world over, probably as a subscription-based service.

It doesn't even have to be that smart.

</comment><comment><USER52> Gigster + [https://stamplay.com/](https://stamplay.com/) (Drag and Drop backends) + A front end automator is going to lead to the commoditization of the software developer.

<comment><USER53> We've done this before, RAD tools in the early 2000s and then a few years after that it was workflows.

It doesn't work.

One of the skills of being a programmer is to change a business workflow, which are often very vague and even very inefficient and open to interpretation, into a logical workflow.

Business people just don't have that skill, so what happens is that you need a bunch of programmers to operate the RAD tools. But the RAD tools have a bunch of restrictions and quirks and don't quite do what is wanted so the programmer is asked if he can just tweak it a bit.

And soon those little 'tweaks' are taking longer than building the whole thing from scratch.

<comment><USER52> Wow I was just waiting to ask someone who's seen this stuff about this.

I'm planning to create some tools ease CRUD workflows.

I think my point was not properly conveyed. The goal is not to get the pointy haired boss programming your expense report app. But instead of paying someone with 4 years of experience , you just use a team of people you trained in 3 - 4 months to do most of the screens using such tools .

Is that unrealistic ?

PS : Yup any code generator needs to have a lot of extensible points so you can change it.

<comment><USER53> I haven't seen any modern ones, but back in the day it was generally a complete and utter disaster.

And having extensible points doesn't work.

The whole problem is that if they're complicated enough to actually encode a client's project, they're so complicated that they're really just a visual programming language.

But that means all the code conditions are hidden in drop-downs and checkboxes. But in reality that's the logic, those options are the code, but you can't easily read the code. If you can't read the code, you can't understand the code. So increasingly no-one has a clue what the system is really doing and you have to test it like crazy.

It also makes it very hard to know what has and hasn't changed and even if you can diff it somehow you often can't even understand what the change means.

Other problems include the 'extensible points' not being atomic enough, or too atomic, or badly documented, or badly coded, or just plain insanely coded. And if there's a bug you've got to wait for the code generator to be fixed.

And finally you are locked in to your vendor. Which becomes a big deal.

What happens is that you'll start writing your own code to fix these problems, or edit the auto-generated output somehow (if you're lucky enough to be allowed to) and it'll rapidly turn in to a complete mess that only 1 or 2 people really understand what's going on and it takes a month to do changes that should take a day or two.

ORMs are the closest we get to auto-code generation and there's a reason we stop there. We learnt from bitter experience. And even they can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Still, I guess we've got to try again every now and then, one day someone might nail it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> "project management is the place where the most human error happens."

Note sure about that. I mean PM's don't write bugs, right?

<comment><USER55> When their requests lack clarity and specificity, they definitely do.

<comment><USER56> And sometimes the requirements are clear, specific, and wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Hasn't software been eating software development ever since the first compiler was written?

<comment><USER57> Kinda. Things like compilers increase software produced per hour but the total quantity of software demanded is open ended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Isn't this called outsourcing ? But still someone has to write the code.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone understand the pricing? : [https://gigster.com/pricing](https://gigster.com/pricing)

<comment><USER59> Those are the prices to build clones of those sites (I think).

<comment><USER28> yeah, that's what I though at first as well, but Instagram on the Web > Facebook on the Web? =?

Tinder > Facebook ??

<comment><USER57> I guess that's a pretty simplified Facebook rather than the 20m+ LOC actual

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I wonder why you can't pick design related skills in the signup form... is this just for devs and PMs?

</comment><comment><USER61> I constantly have this Facebook-Ad for the last couple of weeks that says "We build your MVP for 5k".

</comment><comment><USER62> It's the right track, but we haven't met the goal yet.

</comment><comment><USER63> Now if someone would do this for the desktop...

</comment><comment><USER64> interesting that this wasn't titled "Software Development Eats Itself"

</comment><comment><USER65> The COBOL vision lives on..</comment>


Trapped in 99M-Year-Old Amber, a Beetle with Pilfered Pollen - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/beetle-amber-cycad.html <comment><USER2> > Pilfered Pollen

> Bees and butterflies are praised for their pollination prowess.

> before they ever flirted with a flower, beetles were one of the world's pre- > eminent pollinators.

I'm pretty sure writers at the NY Times hold alliteration competitions.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps if passing as pedestrian prose, a pair of prefix-sharing words might prompt praise. But at full force, falling short of four forecloses on a fulsome flight of fancy.

In other words, two in a row is barely trying. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://archive.is/Wdp3Z](http://archive.is/Wdp3Z)

</comment><comment><USER5> /me wonders how many base pairs are still intact in that pollen. That would be one really nice heirloom seed to have.

<comment><USER6> It's not exact, and depends a lot on conditions, but the half life of DNA is reportedly around 521 years. Maybe if it was frozen that would slow down considerably, but in this case I'd guess were at least 98 million years too late.

<comment><USER5> That's the whole point. Plant DNA tends to have large numbers of repetitions and that works out to redundancy. Think of it as 'RAID for DNA', you just might have an intact copy of short segments of remaining DNA. DNA degrades gracefully, not all at once and the 'half life' is for the whole (very long) molecule, _not_ for individual base pairs or shorter segments. So some of it might still be recoverable, hence the question 'how much'.

See previous threads about ancient DNA.

<comment><USER7> Well, I tend to think of the repititions in two ways, each with its own context. One is allele frequency, such that gaps of funtional utility are created with ineffective codons, to create timing effects and distance oriented partitioning of productive segments as enzymes crawl the unzipped, live genome.

The other is more about radiation hardening, and those are full, bulk duplicates of chromosome sets, like the hexaploid grain genome that was recently being discussed last week.

But I wonder when that sort of radiation hardening aspect was selected for? Millions of years ago? Billions of years ago? Or was it all just an accident, never selected for or even put to use? If we, as humans, only have a set from each parent, I'd estimate that bulk duplication doesn't seem to offer real benefits in the radiation hardened sense, or everything would have more copies for billions of years.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robot Therapy for Hallucinated Voices (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/what-its-like-to-hallucinate-voices/383607/ <comment><USER2> That quite insightful.</comment>