Finally, some good news about the Silicon Valley housing crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/3/7/11173750/google-silicon-valley-housing-crisis <comment><USER2> I think in some ways that this is one of _the_ issues facing the US right now.

Economists generally suggest that easing the shift from low productivity areas to high productivity areas is very beneficial, but NIMBY housing policies stand in the way.

And these things have repercussions all throughout the country. Here in Oregon, there is a steady stream of people who are bailing out of California in part because of the housing prices. This causes resentment here, because it is pricing locals out of certain markets (Portland and Bend, likely others). Ultimately, without dealing with the root causes of the issue, the process will just keep repeating itself elsewhere.

My view is that there should be a wider range of densities, and more walkable, bikeable neighborhoods. Ultimately, it is a supply issue - you cannot keep that steady and increase demand without forcing people out. Granted, maybe not everyone can have a ranch house with a large yard and a two car garage, but... not everyone _needs_ that, either.

Here are some sites I'm fond of:

[http://marketurbanism.com/](http://marketurbanism.com/)

[http://missingmiddlehousing.com/](http://missingmiddlehousing.com/)

[https://clubnimbyblog.wordpress.com/](https://clubnimbyblog.wordpress.com/)

and of course Matt Yglesias' book: [http://amzn.to/21hwbb6](http://amzn.to/21hwbb6)

<comment><USER3> Portland, Bend, Boulder, Austin. People are looking for the same young, urban, progressive environment that the Bay Area has provided since the Gold Rush, it seems.

There is something innate the Bay Area that has nothing to do with tech, but tech is in the middle of it and has become the boogeyman of ails to those currently living in SF. It's a misdirection for NIMBYs to focus the agitation towards because the more they deny, the more valuable and scare the homes in this special market become.

I think fighting NIMBYism is a sisyphean obligation for the Bay Area. People will always want to live here -- tech jobs or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in Mountain View and follow some of the city council discussions here. While the city council approved high density housing, many residents are doing their best to stifle any development up there.

This city's home owners, especially the older ones, are very active politically and also very anti-development. There's this attitude, which I consider to be very selfish, that "I bought into Mountain View for how it currently looks, and I don't want it to change", all the while, these same residents bemoan the high prices of housing and everyone except techies being priced out.

As of today, we're probably going to see a decade of environmental review challenges before a single unit gets built, since this is the most effective way to block development with red tape in California.

<comment><USER5> To play devil's advocate, protecting one's (likely) most significant investment is not selfish - it is reasonable. The fact that you do not like their actions doe snot make them any less reasonable and sane.

<comment><USER2> > protecting one's (likely) most significant investment

Because some additional housing is going to completely crater house prices in the area?

I don't buy it.

<comment><USER6> You can get more out of a house than resale value, and thus "protecting" doesn't pertain only to resale value.

If you buy a house because it has a nice view of the mountains, fighting billboards that obstruct your view is "protecting your investment".

<comment><USER2> I can understand protecting genuinely historic stuff, but Silicon Valley? The area is all about change. If there weren't constant change, the area would still be rural.

I can understand wanting to channel it to some degree, too, but it's ultimately an iron triangle where something has to give. Right now, it's the less economically fortunate who are getting turfed out and losing access to an area that generates a phenomenal amount of wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With 3 miles between Google <-> Caltrain, maybe a light-rail project could also help push a project like this forward (connecting the new densely populated Google housing with the rest of the area).

<comment><USER8> This so much. Public transit doesn't stand a chance if it's not accompanied with sensible zoning that favors high density near the stations. Very often I was the only rider in my VTA lightrail on my commute to Intel, passing by block after block of office parking lots.

<comment><USER9> We'll never get significant ridership on VTA light rail unless they find a way to speed it up. It's just so _slow_. That would require buried or elevated tracks separated from cars and pedestrians so that it can safely run at higher speeds. But building grade separated light rail tracks would take years and cost tens of billions, so politically it's a non-starter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a San Franciscan, I heartily approve. A lot of the conflict in San Francisco is driven not by people who work in the city, but by people who reluctantly commute to places like Mountain View. One study of corporate bus commuters said about half would rather live closer to work.

I think the next step is to create more urban life down there. I frequently hear of people who hate the commute but think the areas near their office might as well be in a desert.

</comment><comment><USER11> Those who understand the Law of Rent know that artificially increasing supply is not a real solution to the problem. Rent is set by the differential between the locational value over and above the best available rent-free land.

The most effective policy for housing affordability is to exempt improvements from taxation and heavily tax the value of the land, thus encouraging idle speculators to sell it off cheap.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is good they are going to support the building of more housing. However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for the lower priced housing. As in, everyone else pays more. It might be better to work otherwise as those moving into the new housing would surely be vacating other housing. Yes there will be people totally new to the area moving into the new housing but the majority should be local movers.

Before some throw out the idea that its needed to have the developers sell below market it will push some out of the market as well as the cost of the market value homes have to increase to pay for the subsidized homes. In other words, politicians do this to gain votes all the while hoping those who are adversely affected are not annoyed enough to vote against them

<comment><USER10> > However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is > simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for > the lower priced housing.

That's not necessarily true. Future purchasers are one source of money, but others include builders, investors, and landowners. If the 20% requirement is typical and historically consistent, then presumably that has already been priced in by the property market. In other words, the parcel value may already be discounted from your alternate-universe value to reflect the below-market requirement. In that case nobody really pays more; it's just that whoever held the parcel when the requirement was created wasn't able to sell it for as much as they might have.

Even if it were 100% true, I don't think anybody involved would be shocked to hear it. If you have a limited commodity that you sell at auction, the richest people will get the commodity. With housing, that means you may in effect create a community of only rich people. Presumably the citizens of Mountain View want a different outcome. If you just don't like the mechanism, you should suggest a different one. But if you're disagreeing with their goal, then the mechanism's mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER13> Beautifully written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like bus rapid transit (BRT) could be a great solution for SV. If they could get dedicated bus lanes (which is probably politically impossible) you could really clear up a lot of traffic and establish a way for people to forgo owning a car.

<comment><USER15> The problem with BRT is that according to California's definitions, it has an unavoidable negative environmental impact. It took six years to do the environmental assessment for the Van Ness BRT in SF.

[http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/07/transit-projects- are-...](http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/07/transit-projects-are-about-to- get-much-much-easier-in-california/374049/)

<comment><USER16> So essentially this 2013 environmental report says that it'd make traffic tougher - assuming the same number of cars and no decrease due to bus ridership.

Note: "The encouraging news is that this law is about to change. California will soon reform traffic analysis under CEQA by replacing "level of service" with another metric more in line with its environmental and urban mobility goals. "

Does anyone know if this has indeed changed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What're the legal requirements if Google chooses to make a "company town" \- ie all the other benefits are included already, perhaps they'll start throwing in a 1BR apartment within spitting distance of the campus and a tram / peoplemover connection between the two. Would they still be required to meet the Section 8 / Affordable provisions if the units were only available to employees?

<comment><USER15> I imagine the city would pick who gets to stay in the affordable units through a lottery or similar; IIRC, Facebook has a similar development next to their "1 Facebook Way" building.

10k housing units might be enough to give one or two years' worth of Google new hires an apartment; there's no way that it's sustainable to just throw it in as a benefit (plus the tens of thousands of existing employees would be outraged). I imagine they'd use it for temporary new-hire housing and/or intern housing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The "city" of Magarpatta outside Pune, India, seems to have worked out a good option of "walk to shop, walk to work" (though vehicles are still allowed). I've been there a bit.

Google the name and check the first few results.

I'm not saying that their model can be a solution for the SV issue, just mentioning it as an interesting related story.

What makes it more interesting is that the people behind it are from a farming family (but educated), not city types.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's not a real solution, because its not scalable. They should literally be scaling horizontally rather than vertically. There's a lot of less densely populated space around.

</comment><comment><USER20> >The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase.

It's a little disappointing when the only solution to housing prices is to cram thousands of new dwellings together in a pile. My experience has been that quality of life suffers in such "developments" but maybe it will surprise us all to the contrary.

<comment><USER2> If the population increases in an area, how _else_ are you going to deal with it besides density, or simply telling them 'GO AWAY', which most economists agree is a terrible idea, given that adding people in highly productive areas is such a win.

Population density is generally very low in most of the US. It can go higher without too many problems.

<comment><USER21> Modulo the load on transportation and infrastructure--which seems likely to be substantial--to the degree that you're going to add that much housing, this seems a pretty sensible way to do it. It's generally impractical to bulldoze a large tract of low-rise housing to build slightly higher housing. So just about the only solution is to put high-rise housing somewhere that it has a minimal [EDIT: the least] impact.

That said, I wonder how well it will work to build a bunch of high-rise suburban housing while making it difficult for residents to have cars and without great transportation options.

<comment><USER22> If anything, the load on transportation would actually go down. One of the big problems in Silicon Valley is that many of the cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino) are adding tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of housing units. Which means that the only option is for people to either commute ever longer distances or crowd ever more people into the existing housing. And while it's not practical to bulldoze housing for even a 100% increase in density, there are plenty of single family houses that can be replaced with 6-10 unit apartment buildings. Even in SF itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is a whole country full of beautiful affordable places to live.

Silicon Valley? Yuck. I will never live there again (thank goodness).

</comment><comment><USER24> i only wish the federals followed the suit and let 100M (1/3 of the US population, about the same as MV new allowed units ratio to existing) new immigrants into the country</comment>


Calendar and contact syncing for iPhone and Windows Mobile devices - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/calendar-and-contact-syncing-for-iphone.html <comment><USER2> Just set it up; note that you have to hit m.google.com/sync from your iPhone Safari browser to pick which calendars to sync. Outbound works fine without it, but inbound sync doesn't do anything until you select calendars.

With BusySync keeping my iCal synced with Google, it takes about 4 seconds for my iPhone to update after I add an event to my iCal.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had this through nuevasync.com which was pretty awesome. I want to support them as a startup but this is all they did, and so what if they did it 2 months ago, google now does it and I am far less worried about google disappearing than I am a tiny startup.

I hope they come up with something else it was an awesome product.

</comment><comment><USER4> It appears to be implemented as an Exchange server!

Push Gmail can't be far behind.

[http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=13...](http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252)

<comment><USER5> apple's mobileme service suddenly lost a lot of flair (and probably a few paid subscribers)</comment></comment>


Why to switch to Git from Subversion - <AUTHOR> http://markmcb.com/2008/10/18/3-reasons-to-switch-to-git-from-subversion/

<comment><USER2> Because Subversion is awful. You can't do anything without access to the server, and branching in SVN requires permission from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

</comment><comment><USER3> one word: branching</comment>


Rejecta Mathematica goes live - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2009/07/23/rejecta-mathematica-goes-live/ <comment><USER3> This is a great idea.

There is inherent bias in academia and unwillingness to accept ideas that go against the canon. That being said the worst case is still scary - <USER2> could be given an apparently legitimate platform. The best case is exciting, an alternative outlet for radical ideas that lost the battle to get published. Some reasons I've heard for not being published: the paper is obscure and thus the audience is limited, the paper is obscure and thus it doesn't fit this journal, the author is unknown or it doesn't follow our guidelines. All these types of papers would be perfect for a journal like Rejecta Mathematica.

EDIT: added last few sentences

</comment><comment><USER4> If you actually look up some of the authors in the first issue <http://math.rejecta.org/vol1-num1> , you'll see that some of them are pretty legit scientists (eg Stephen Boyd who has a very nice book on convex optimization on his website)</comment>


Routing on OpenStreetMap.org - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/02/16/routing-on-openstreetmap-org/ <comment><USER2> I worked on this problem for a private company. We ended up doing quite a bit to accomplish this: hired a team to edit OSM data, and wrote our own router. What we learned is that OSM data can be quite terrible at times in minute ways that made it look decent but made routing nearly impossible. I believe this effort is still ongoing and in at least the areas where that company has clients the OSM data is now much more pristine.

I sort of wish the router got open sourced, but then again it was not great for long distance routing since we were doing mostly local stuff. For example, routing across the US would have taken pretty close to exponential time.

Interestingly, we could not make Google Maps, or any other maps work for this besides OSM for two reasons: the data wasn't good enough and the roads were not uniquely and stably identified in the routes these API's produced.

Lastly, I will say that the biggest challenge to using OSM at scale, aside from varying quality of data was lack of good servers and documentation. Some of their secondary services run on one-off slowish hardware with pretty strict rate limits. We would run our own, except the documentation (and the packaging) for OSM software was leaving something to be desired. That is to say if you want to help OSM, there are plenty of ways to do so.

<comment><USER3> "What we learned is that OSM data can be quite terrible at times in minute ways that made it look decent but made routing nearly impossible."

This is exactly why we've exposed routing on the front page of osm.org.

I run my own site with OSM-based routing, [http://cycle.travel/map](http://cycle.travel/map) . When I first got the routing engine up and running, I literally spent the next fortnight fixing routing bugs in OSM - "I'd go that way, why doesn't the router agree?".

By putting routing front-and-centre, we're hoping that our dedicated contributors - and OSM contributors are nothing if not dedicated! - will do exactly that: they'll find an error and fix it. In the UK and Germany this'll just be little slip-ups, turn restrictions and so on, but in the US there are whole counties that need serious fixup.

That's why I submitted the pull request for this[1] and why I'm delighted it's now live. OSM is already a great display map; by making routing more visible, we can make it a great routable map too.

[1] [https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap- website/pull/...](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap- website/pull/716)

<comment><USER4> It says it uses a 3rd party service. Can you clarify why OSM isn't dogfooding it's own router? Though I'm a huge fan of OSM that sounds like a bit of a let down.

<comment><AUTHOR> OSM is primarily a data project. There isn't currently any notion of providing centralized end user services.

The various services on openstreetmap.org don't have terribly strict usage policies, but they all pretty much ask heavy users to set up their own instance (or use other resources; for example, Mapquest has quite generous free usage, and there are lots of paid OSM tile hosters).

If you click the stack on the right tool bar, you get a layers menu, where 4 of the styles are rendered and served by other projects. So the routing is similar to that, showcasing how the data can be used.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it's great that it's possible to use OSM for many different purposes.

However, all these compromises on the front page are too complicated for end users and scare them off.

End users expect services that seamlessly work together. If centralization is needed to achieve that, then yes, OSMF needs centralization.

<comment><USER6> The front page isn't intended for end users in the sense of "people looking for a map or directions", it's mainly focused on people who intend to map.

People find it hard to get out of the "Google Maps" mindset, just as everyone approached Linux as a "Cheap Windows" when in reality it can be so much more.

OSM's strategy (and data) aren't perfect, but they're growing the pie rather than fighting for a larger slice and doing pretty well with it. Just like using Linux has become a no-brainer for all sorts of projects from smartphones to supercomputer clusters to educational toys OSM is well on it's way to being the default peer-produced commons for geographical data. Whether that usage happens on one site or a million different commercial, government, non-profit and amateur sites isn't important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly off topic, but is there a way to make the OSM website use high-dpi images on devices like iPads? The map tiles look blocky when viewed on mobile safari. What's annoying is that when you zoom out, the tiles are shrunk and 'become high-res' but then the website loads lower-res tiles to draw over the top!

<comment><USER3> No; at present the osm.org tiles aren't generated at a retina scale.

This is most likely to be fixed in the medium term by moving to vector rendering via WebGL et al.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like this thing has quite a ways to go before it's ready for primetime, but this fills in the last gap I needed filled in order to switch fully over to OSM as my day-to-day map site/software/data/etc. Pretty spiffy; just needs some kinks worked out with the underlying data (I think) ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> OpenStreetMap genuinely amazes me. I know their data is still a bit inconsistent, but in some areas they vastly exceed other online maps, but they are lacking in other areas.

It looks as though OSM is making great inroads as far as routing and addresses go, and so the next big thing will be getting the iD editor working well on mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great to see public rights of way being included in the walking directions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> At the moment there is a mixed content bug in the place lookup, so it doesn't work over https. I guess it will be fixed in short order though.

There's also not much fuzziness in the search. For example, "Tolado Ohio" will not be found.

<comment><USER11> Yeah for me it's trying to make calls to [http://www.openstreetmap.org/http://nominatim.openstreetmap....](http://www.openstreetmap.org/http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=london&format=json)

It kind of demonstrates how far behind they are with things like navigation, search etc. It's a shame because the actual mapping data behind OSM is absolutely fantastic.

<comment><USER12> We working to fix this right now ;-) (OSM sysadmin here)

<comment><USER12> Fixed thanks to TomH: [http://git.openstreetmap.org/rails.git/commitdiff/2b7529a3f1...](http://git.openstreetmap.org/rails.git/commitdiff/2b7529a3f1dd5dd1e4f06d34ac43bb3e267f4832)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We currently run two graphhopper routing servers in production for our bike route mapping website. They work fantastic and are fast even without the contraction hierarchies tricks used to speedup routing at the expense of flexibility. We occasionally get user reports of odd routing anomolies due to the underlying data, but they are actually not much more frequent than reports about google maps. I also evaluated osrm but the graphhopper folk run a great open source project. Felt much more comfortable throwing in with them than anyone else. Happy to share any details if anyone has questions, email in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER14> First impression was pretty bad. Tried to get a route from my place to my parent's house a couple cities south, and it took a lot of fiddling with the string to get it to understand where I live. Didn't have any trouble finding my parent's home, but once I got both in the instructions it gave were pretty poor: [http://a.pomf.se/msawni.png](http://a.pomf.se/msawni.png)

I really want OSM to be good for this sort of thing, so I'll probably end up poking around and fixing the errors that led to this mess.

<comment><USER8> I've found it to be pretty hit-and-miss. For example, it doesn't know where my house is, either, but it knows where my old apartment is (in the same town), and where the houses of several relatives are in other cities.

It's probably issues with OSM's data rather than the routing mechanism itself, however, so yeah, it should be possible to poke at it a bit and fix things up (as I likely will do, being no stranger to OSM editing myself).

<comment><USER15> Try inputting your address without any sort of "area" or suburb. I.e. just type in street number + street name + city. I had such a tough time wondering why it wouldn't recognize a certain address, then noticed how it auto- corrected the previous one that worked.

Instead of picking up that the address was in suburb "A", it put it inside "Ward 47 of Tshwane", Tshwane being the city/municipality. Perhaps the data for suburbs is not up to scratch in my particular area.

<comment><USER8> In all my testing, it was with only the number and street name (i.e. "1234 Somesuch Road") - no city, state, zip, etc. I tried again with "1234 Somesuch Road Somecity" ("Somecity" being the city) for my own town, but that didn't seem to work, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used to work on the router used in VZ Navigator and related products (I wrote the part that used real-time traffic data to route around slowdowns, plus several other bits). After leaving, I started writing my own router on top of OSM data (fall 2008). The difference in quality of Navteq and other vendor data vs. OSM was substantial, and I abandoned the project simply because shit data is impossible to optimize for. It looked great on a map, but disconnected road segments, incorrect road categorization, incorrect directions of one-way streets, missing intersections, ... I wasn't at all surprised at Apple falling on its face in 2012 with its OSM-backed maps product - it was a virtual guarantee from my experience.

Likely a missed opportunity for a big exit for me, but life's too short to work against poor-quality crowd-sourced data as a one-man startup in Venice.

</comment><comment><USER17> Routing belongs on a mobile device. Now all I need is a usable Android app for browsing maps and navigating. OsmAnd seems to be the benchmark, and it's freaking terrible.

<comment><USER18> Can you elaborate on why you think OsmAnd is terrible?

<comment><USER19> IMO, so cluttered and stuffed with... stuff ... that the useful functionality is buried under a baffling pile of UI elements and surprise actions.

It's a classic open source problem: pack in the functionality, but not be entirely sure how best to present it, so provide everything with lots and lots of switches for power users to toggle what they want.

Starting out with less stuff might help; starting out remembering to go to the _map_ would, I suspect, be a great UX experience for a map app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems to only work by street name. If I put in two UK postcodes the results are almost always wrong. This seems to be a problem in normal OSM anyway, if you search for an exact postcode, a list of nearby streets come up and the street you actually want is incorrectly listed. Where should I go to fix this? Seems like it should be a simple enough edit.

<comment><USER21> Re _where should I go to fix this_ :

* [https://alpha.openaddressesuk.org/](https://alpha.openaddressesuk.org/)

...which is still only in alpha, so don't expect much. Read their posts about the data sources ([https://alpha.openaddressesuk.org/about/docs](https://alpha.openaddressesuk.org/about/docs)) to see why this is in such a bad state.

<comment><USER3> This won't fix the data in OSM; this will contribute to OpenAddresses UK which is a separate (though worthy!) project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This doesn't appear to be working for me in Chrome. I'm getting a ton of "XMLHttpRequest cannot load" errors related to this in the console:

      No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://www.openstreetmap.org' is therefore not allowed access.

</comment><comment><USER23> What server is being used? Is it OSRM?

<comment><AUTHOR> OSRM is the default, but there are a number of other profiles available (foot, bike and car from Mapquest and foot and bike from GraphHopper).

<comment><USER23> How very cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is very good, I've been wanting this for a long time. But it still has some serious shortcomings:

Car routing only for OSRM. Is this something which will be fixed?

Also egregiously missing is the ability to create a link to a pre-made route.

<comment><AUTHOR> Linking is all Web 1.0, all you have to do is copy the URL:

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=osrm_car&rout...](http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=osrm_car&route=39.529%2C-119.814%3B36.166%2C-115.149)

<comment><USER24> Oh, nice. Did I miss this, or is this changing of the URL in the address bar a recent addition?

I'm assuming I missed it. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does it use pgrouting ?

<comment><USER26> No. Nobody serious uses pgrouting.

<comment><USER27> What makes you say that? Honest question.

<comment><USER26> Have you read the documentation for pgrouting?

<comment><USER28> Agreed. I cannot agree more. I similarly build a system using the routing capabilities of pgRouting with OSM. While the outcome has bbe absolutely awesome (managed routing on the entire OSM dataset with pretty fast queries) and was done in quite a short timespan, chugging through the documentation was horrible - especially when I ran into errors.

Do you know of any other alternative routing libraries that can be used with OSM data similar to pgrouting?

<comment><USER26> There are many OSM routers. [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#Developers](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#Developers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Really like what OSM are doing</comment>


So you didn't get into Y Combinator, now what? - <AUTHOR> http://imars.posthaven.com/so-you-didnt-get-into-yc-now-what <comment><USER2> For the people that believe that getting into YC is a necessary part of startup success: This site is not giving you an impartial view of the startup world. Obviously we are on the site for Y combinator right now and note that I have nothing against this site and enjoy it very much.

But stories relating to YC companies get a lot more upvotes than stories relating to other companies based on both systemic and natural patterns. This leads to a casual observer believing that YC companies are doing incredibly well and all other companies are not, because you aren't hearing about their success as much. This could not be further from the truth.

The majority of successful startups didn't go to YC just based on sheer volume. I have no doubt YC is a very valuable thing, but I've both seen and participated in groups where a bunch of people who had no idea what they were doing figured it out without YC's help. What current and potential customers think of your company is a heck of a lot more important than what a bunch of YC advisors think of your company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Companies will be successful with or without YC if they are determined to succeed. YC alone won't make any company successful, only the founders and their employees can do that.

I share this same view with founders of current YC startups [http://imars.posthaven.com/so-you-got-into-yc-now- what](http://imars.posthaven.com/so-you-got-into-yc-now-what)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are there any meta-analyses of YC "I didn't get into YC" / "I got into YC" posts that can give a more objective conclusion to this kind of thing? We almost always see these posts from individual founders who did [not] make it into YC and what _they_ think the reasons are. It's all anecdotal.

I realize the plural of anecdote is not data, but it would be nice to see some real scholarly analysis of what happens to YC applicants, as opposed to a series of anecdotal and speculative blog posts. Denis is both a founder and a YC advisor, so maybe his anecdotes are a little higher quality than others, but even so, they're still anecdotes.

Which brings me to my other point: every couple of months we get flooded with "I didn't get into YC" and they all basically say the same thing (or at least variations on the same thing). It seems to me that anyone who is applying to YC would already read up as much as they can about YC applicants, which includes reading every "I didn't get into YC" post they can find. After reading 5 or 10 of them, they'll quickly realize there are the same 5 lessons from each one. Why read any more? (Which translates to: why post another "I didn't get into YC" post?)

Anyway, just kinda thinking out loud here. I would love to see a more comprehensive, multi-applicant analysis instead of yet-another-anecdotal-blog- post.

[Edit: Next up on a Jemaclus post, how many times can I use the word "anecdote" in one comment? Stay tuned...]

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, although, the aim here is not to focus on the 'why' part? It's to focus on the 'where to go from here' part. The 'why' will always be anecdotal as it's one perspective vs another. The key to this post is really honing in on the fact that the best entrepreneurs can take setbacks yet still move on to succeed in their endeavors to build amazing companies with our without YC. Which 'anecdotally or otherwise' makes for the best YC applicants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My cofounder and I were rejected by YC last year. YC provided great feedback, and we took it into consideration, but decided we still thought the idea was solid. We kept looking for funding and eventually found an accelerator that specialized in education startups (co.lab), and it turned out to be better for us in every way -- better terms, better ongoing support, so on and so forth. So, it's actually good that we were rejected.

I would definitely apply to YC again, though. Even if you're rejected it's still 10 minutes of concentrated feedback from smart, experienced people, which is always worth something.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work on the software team at MassChallenge, a nonprofit and startup accelerator in Boston. We work hard to make the process of applying as valuable for startups who don't make it into the 128 that actually come into our space for the summer. Multiple companies have gotten rejected, used the feedback our judges give them, and gotten in the 2nd time around, won money in the end.

The criteria we look for are slightly different since we don't take any of the company's equity and thus look at broader impact than just profitability but everything said here is true for us as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I applied for Y Combinator 5 times since 2008.

Now I serve coffee.

Just kidding, I'm pretty successful.

</comment><comment><USER7> Drew was rejected on his first application?

Anyways this is obvious because if you don't you fail and go back to employee land more than likely.

</comment><comment><USER8> Entrepreneurs make companies, not accelerators.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup - see [http://imars.posthaven.com/so-you-got-into-yc-now- what](http://imars.posthaven.com/so-you-got-into-yc-now-what)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Determination is by far the strongest attribute of successful entrepreneurs, so stay focused, and keep going."

That's it.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's an incredibly useful data point to YC if the applicants get rejected and then quit building. If that happens, the entrepreneurs are basically confirming YC's decision not to invest. Ain't no way to succeed without persistence.

</comment><comment><USER11> > So you didn't get into Y Combinator, now what?

Hmmm...maybe build your company anyway and keep more equity for yourself.

ycombinator != only route to startup success, obviously.</comment>


Evidence of 'risk-taking' brain - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7802751.stm <comment><USER2> How does this study do by Peter Norvig's checklist?

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html></comment>


Show HN: Zoom Redirector - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector <comment><USER2> I'm guessing this is related to the "Zoom monitors activity on your computer" story [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22657384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22657384)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's something I've wanted to write for a long time, and that tweet finally spurred me to do it. Hadn't seen the HN thread though!

<comment><USER3> So web-based Zoom cannot detect if Zoom window is not active?

<comment><AUTHOR> It can still do that, but it can't get what programs you have running or the other data collected by the desktop client.

Beyond the privacy concerns it's a security risk. Their desktop client had a remote code execution vulnerability last year:

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/researcher-says-zoom-web- serve...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/researcher-says-zoom-web-server-is- vulnerable-to-remote-code-execution/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had no idea there was even a web version. Does it work in Linux? Zoom often leaves me with broken audio and I really dislike having to have more rarely used software trying to stick around in memory. I uninstall it after each use, purely out of spite. This is great.

<comment><USER5> On Ubuntu + Firefox I can see other people, but I can't hear anything, nor can they hear me (I don't know if they can see me)

<comment><USER6> I believe they recommend Chrome, so you might want to give that a try

<comment><USER7> It's like we're back in the 90s again.

<comment><USER8> Except now the webapp is real time video and voice chat

<comment><USER9> The joke was (at least to the best of my knowledge) that nudging people to use chrome is further reinstating their monopoly, leading to a browser landscape comparable to IE days, which would not quite be the 90s, but close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I highly recommend using solutions based on WebRTC, which is present in all modern browsers and is _really_ good (see [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFil- ZPE0-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFil-ZPE0-g) for a comparison with Zoom).

Whereby (formerly appear.in) [https://whereby.com/](https://whereby.com/) has a really nice and simple system. No more jumping through a dozen hoops, no more installing software with glaring security holes and borderline malware behavior (looking at you, Zoom).

<comment><USER11> How does WebRTC compare when you have a lot of callers (e.g. 20 people in a call)? From my understanding, it is p2p, so the network throughput required would be a lot higher, correct?

<comment><USER10> TBH, I have no idea, I have done calls with up to 8 people only. I would be interested to know myself. Whereby seems to support up to 12 video streams, with the rest being audio-only.

<comment><USER12> we've been using jit.si in 2016 which worked well but it might be overloaded today idk. we hit some bottlenecks when trying to scale up and improved the situation by running our own jitsi instance on a DO droplet but that too would not scale to a large audience. I think that if you have more than 10 participants in the meeting then you have anyway other problems (the same issues when you have too many people in a f2f meeting).

from a technical pov I still wonder if running jitsi (or another similar solution) on dedicated hardware which is better tailored to a GPU intensive operation. This could then be easily deployed in-house (with all the benefits: full control and eliminating a lot of attack vectors). Seems like a cool problem to solve while in corona quarantine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This inspired me to finally figure out how to be able to one-click Zoom links, with no external protocol prompt or leftover useless tab in Chrome.

[https://github.com/tristandunn/one-click- zoom](https://github.com/tristandunn/one-click-zoom)

<comment><USER14> [https://medium.com/zoom-developer-blog/zoom-url- schemes-748b...](https://medium.com/zoom-developer-blog/zoom-url- schemes-748b95fd9205)

<comment><USER13> The official Zoom Scheduler extension automatically adds [https://](https://) links to Google Calendar. I suppose I could hijack the URL earlier, but you'd still need the external protocol prompt setting. And I guess depending on how it's handled it could potentially avoid the need to close the tab, although it might require permissions for every website instead. I think I'll stick with my simple solution for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't zoom also support h.323 and SIP[0]? There are open client available for this [1]. Don't know how good these actually work.

[0] [https://support.zoom.us/hc/en- us/categories/200110033-H-323-...](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en- us/categories/200110033-H-323-SIP) [1] [https://www.gnugk.org/h323-endpoint.html](https://www.gnugk.org/h323-endpoint.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I used to get pretty annoyed that Zoom made download the stupid client to join a video chat but now that I'm using it constantly I'm learning that there's a pretty great reason, the native app is so superior in terms of user experience.

<comment><USER17> Or is it just that the Zoom web experience is really poor? Google Meet and BlueJeans web UIs are great.

<comment><USER18> Isn't BlueJeans just a wrapper around zoom?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really want to try this out for the specific reason of testing to see cpu performance differences. The MacOS app is a massive CPU abuser with ~50-60% use in meeting or sharing on my iMac 4k, it makes demoing work much slower than reality and makes my work look slower than it even is IRL.

</comment><comment><USER20> Would be great to add tampermonkey/greasemonkey support. Opened a ticket for it

<comment><AUTHOR> The current implementation uses the WebExtension apis to perform an _internal_ redirect. When you navigate to a Zoom meeting, before the browser opens a connection or sends a single network packet, the extension rewrites the url to navigate to their web client.

On the other hand tampermonkey/greasemonkey are content scripts that get injected into loaded pages. An implementation here would look like: the user navigates to a Zoom meeting, they load the entire page, and then a script gets injected to perform a `window.location` redirect. This will be slower and depending on the timing of events you may even still get the Zoom file download prompt.

So I don't think tampermonkey/greasemonkey is a good fit here.

<comment><USER21> Tampermonkey, I believe, can also intercept HTTP requests. Maybe that's sufficient/necessary for redirecting to another client.

<comment><USER22> I can't find any information around this except an open issue ([https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/397](https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/397)), you got any links?

As I understand issue linked above, they want to support it but currently does not, in official releases. What's supported is catching all requests in a page, but that's after the contentscript has been applied to the page, which means what arkadiyt wrote would still be accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Made a WebView wrapper for Windows, that has an additional benefit of having a separate browser profile (e.g. no crosstracking): [https://losttech.software/Downloads/FuZoom/](https://losttech.software/Downloads/FuZoom/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish there was a solution for Cisco WebEx. To join in a browser and avoid their application. On macos it automatically adds itself to the launchagents (or whatever that autolaunch on login is), it is not the easiest thing to get rid of (regular users might be stuck with it forever.

</comment><comment><USER25> I once used Zoom's web interface and the video quality was horrible. When I switched to the downloaded app, it was much better. Not sure if this was a one-off problem or an underinvestment in their web interface.

<comment><USER26> The web version will be using WebRTC with whatever codecs your browser ships while the native version is able to use custom codecs.

<comment><USER27> This is incorrect. Zoom doesn't use webrtc audio and video channels, only data channels, and has reimplemeted audio and video channels on top of that, doing the decoding in js and probably wasm.

They also limit the resolution to 480p for the web app, probably because of performances. Browsers and zoom both use h264, but browsers usually use vp8 instead.

There is no reason webrtc cannot offer the same quality (or better) than zoom, at the same bit rate, but it all comes down to the actual implementation of browsers and web apps. webrtc-based apps work well, these days.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the information, I also realized that a while after writing the comment. No wonder the experience is worse than in their native client, data channels are still terribly unoptimized (sometimes even broken in some aspects).

Edit: [https://bloggeek.me/when-will-zoom-use- webrtc/](https://bloggeek.me/when-will-zoom-use-webrtc/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I saw the title I thought it was something else. At a previous company we had a nice url: mooreds.example.com

which would redirect to a standing zoom url. Made for a nice way to easily start a video conversation.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't seem to figure it out: what is the URL pattern that leads to a web meeting rather than an app launch? I don't want a widget. I just want to type it in myself.

<comment><USER30> Looks like prefix the id in the ptah with /wc/ and postfix it with /join though if I look at a real Zoom invite with both links it's prefix with /wc/join e.g. [https://example.zoom.us/j/<numbers>](https://example.zoom.us/j/<numbers>) is [https://example.zoom.us/wc/join/<numbers>](https://example.zoom.us/wc/join/<numbers>) for the web link.

<comment><USER29> That works! The "join" can go before or after the numeric ID. I just tried it both ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Solving Zoom's Dark Pattern no 1... great work!

</comment><comment><USER32> Oh, cool. I really need this. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER33> Never zoom for me ever again with their malware.

I refuse to use or install their product.

<comment><USER34> That is great for you. For a lot of people it's becoming a requirement of their jobs, and quitting in a global pandemic over an app seems like a non- optimal response.

<comment><USER12> this attitude is actually a major part of the problem - if engineers would consistently speak up instead about this not meeting security / privacy standards maybe we could have nice things. unfortunately people either really are this incompetent and don't know or lack the balls to do so. Either way we all lose out.

zoom seriously needs to die. no friggin way I'd ever engage in a responsible disclosure with this company - no matter who gets thrown under the bus.

<comment><USER34> No one is saying don't speak up.

You're commenting on a post that is about a link that helps people use a web version of Zoom, which by its definition doesn't have the malware issues that people talk about (unless they are breaking sandboxing in the browser which would be pretty major).

What I was replying to was the "no grey area allowed" black and white dying on a hill response to the existence of the tool at all. This is why non technical people roll their eyes at technical folks and ignore us, because so many of us live in this world where we aren't willing to negotiate or hold more than a single thought in our heads at once.

I don't want to use Zoom, I bring up alternatives at my org all the time, and meetings that I control do not use it, and I do not install their binaries on my own devices, instead opting to use the web client when required. But the reality is that I don't get to make that call all the time, and if it's a choice between using Zoom on the web and not communicating at all, then the choice seems pretty clear to me.

<comment><USER12> I understand your sentiment and am even inclined to agree with it. but I have been there before just too many times. there is always a momentum for such a discussion as long as the product hasn't yet fully saturated the market. that said, even if that window of opportunity is utilized by critics (e.g. engineers and early adopters) there still is a high risk that this type of behavior (by Zoom) gets normalized. it's the same old pattern: we create small hacks and workarounds which nobody except a minority knows or cares about - eventually they'll release features which we're no longer able to workaround - by then employers consider it as a "critical software to do business" \- by which any discussions about flaws have become impossible. (too big too fail)

if we don't speak up now and give them FIRE, then the covid19 crisis will have been the reason why another surveillance technology gets normalized. working under tracking a la "upwork.com" \- where marketeers decide how to screen capture and key-log all input is somehow normal.

note: I'm not attacking your point and didn't think you agree to Zoom's way of doing things. I just feel really strongly about not giving them any benefit of the doubt because they have already got a history of abusing trust.

my comment in the sibling thread mentions why this literally can't be fixed with a browser add-on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662212)

again: not an attack on your comment, not attacking OP's work either. and we probably agree on more than we disagree here by what I can tell

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Will the drive to mass online meetings finally revive multicast?

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't want to diss an effort made with good intentions. though this is like using duct tape on fatally flawed design - it doesn't solve the problem. We're dealing with an inherently hostile company which aggressively uses dark pattern, ignoring privacy and security best practices. Not only are they ignoring these things they actively bypass the security control on the host- system where it is installed - this is literally what malware does. You don't put duct tape on malware so it works better for you!

If they would be a Chinese company they'd be banned and probably even sanctioned. Stop using this shit and stop justifying its use just because your employer makes you use it. Grow some balls (or eggs) and speak up naming it for what this is (malware) - so that we can all have nice things and not be forced to engage in endlessly justifying ourselves because _" team or company XYZ is using it too and it works great for them ..."_

<comment><USER36> I have absolutely no idea what you're on about. How is Zoom malware?

By "actively bypass the security" do you mean "it's a program that you need to install on your computer"?

Can you elaborate why Zoom is malware in ways that VS Code, VLC Media Player or Photoshop aren't?

EDIT: I mean the question honestly, as a question. I might have missed something. I mean, I saw yesterday's HN topic on a tweet that claims it sends info about all active programs to a server. But I saw nothing to substantiate that other than an "attention tracking" feature which is way less invasive than what's described in that tweet and off by default.

Did I miss the evidence, or some other damning privacy invading misfeature?

<comment><USER37> The videoconferencing industry seems to believe it's necessary to bypass regular OS protections to make the UX "better".

For example: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/8/20687014/zoom-security- fla...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/8/20687014/zoom-security-flaw-video- conference-websites-hijack-mac-cameras) By design, instead of using a URL handler, they run a HTTP server on your machine to bypass the "open with" dialog. There are good reasons not to trust the binaries they ask you to run.

Here, it turns out they offer a web client after all, which is nice and sandboxed, but they default to trying to run a binary on your machine where you have less control over what it does.

<comment><USER38> > Update, 5:15PM ET July 9th: Zoom has published a blog post detailing its > response to this vulnerability, including how it will patch its software and > uninstall the webserver it has installed on Macs. More details here, and > original story follows.

Seems like they don't, and haven't since July.

<comment><USER37> This is an example. Why would you trust an organisation that engineers "solutions" to security measures but does so without due care and attention leading to a widespread critical security bug?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Samsung Electronics forecasts 60% fall in quarterly profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29516806 <comment><USER3> One tidbit not mentioned is that Samsung's Emperor Lee Kun-hee is in a coma (most likely brain-dead) for several months, and his son is not officially the Emperor... I'm sorry, I mean the _CEO_ of Samsung group yet, because Lee the father is not officially dead.

So, many mid- to high-level managers in Samsung could be postponing highly visible projects until the new leader steps in and clears up which way the company will be heading. (I once heard, from someone in a different Korean company, that there are implicit agreements to not be "too good" on the book in such a situation: if your company does just as well when the beloved leader is on bed / in prison / whatever, then the leader might not be the reason for the company's success. Can't have that.)

<comment><USER4> I don't understand the Emperor and 'beloved leader' references in your post?

<comment><USER5> I suppose it's just a reference to the absurd deference which leaves him as CEO with no replacement when he's in a coma. And the fact that his position will be inherited by his son, no questions asked.

<comment><USER6> Apparently there are _some_ similarities between North Korean and South Korean culture (which is not very strange, since the border between them is an accident of recent history).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a side note in this article, but those unfamiliar with Xiaomi should do some light reading on the topic. It's a controversial company that publicly aspires to be the "Apple of China," and is often accused of simply ripping off Apple designs. My hunch is that we'll hear a lot more about Xiaomi in the American press in the next few years, even if in passing, and just as a curiosity.

Xiaomi is not the only reason Samsung's been hurting. But its dirt-cheap pricing strategies have taken a serious bite out of Samsung's position in the crucial Chinese market.

<comment><USER8> Xiaomi just overtook Samsung's market share in China. It sells cheaper priced phones with similar specs. Samsung's margin was hurt because of that. Xiaomi is expanding internationally. Samsung's margin will be further eroded.

It's like the war of the clones back in the PC days, where Compaq the clone leader was cobbled by other better priced clones when all the clones had essentially the same feature.

<comment><USER9> My prediction: Xiaomi is only two years away from a serious entrance into the North American or European market and that entrance will be very disruptive for the existing market players, just like it has been in other markets that Xiaomi has entered.

<comment><USER10> Xiaomi can't really enter western markets until its designs are more original, otherwise they would be sued out of existence. It will be interesting to see if and how they manage that transition.

Also, Xiaomi is not a very good value. Meizi provides better quality for a similar price if you are into the low end.

<comment><USER11> Xiaomi releases models in Europe...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe we are confusing lots of things here.

Profit isn't everything. Samsumg electronics is investing in semiconductors and also in OLED screens production.

I see OLED as the future and just Samsumg and LG investing on them.

OLED are very expensive today because there is no mass production of them, and because they are so expensive nobody buys them on TVs as they have hi def LCDs way cheaper.

It is catch 22. I for one am waiting for OLED TV prices to be reasonable to buy 4 of them.

Samsumg has a very good position as he is using the phones and tablets market to start mass producing OLED panels.

When people change to OLED, and they will(because it is amazing tech), Samsumg will have a big advantage.

<comment><USER13> I disagree. Customers will buy OLED simply because the price is right in comparison to other options. Consumers don't want 2k, 4k, OLED, bend-y screens or anything else, which is why OLED is not emerging. Distributers want 2k and 4k so they can sell licenses to previous license owners. (Maybe mobile device manufacturing wants OLED for battery efficiency but it's not a huge power savings anyway.) There are also a number of technical hurdles that become pronounced on OLED screens as big as 50". Polls indicate consumers are quite happy with the current LED LCD HD at the associated price point.

A perfect example is the average consumer doesn't even know what OLED is or what benefits it offers. The fact that you do, means you are not average, and are not considered as the majority buyer group. In fact, the benefits OLED offers, the customer already thinks they have, because screen manufacturing sales lingo is so completely f-ed up. The current top of the line HD LED tv is not backlit. Its edge lit. I did extensive research only to find out actual backlighting, what they call "active matrix backlighting" is only on LED TVs starting around $7k to $15k. All this is an example of 'here is the newest best technology that you need to have'. The bad news is, the customer just spent 2k on a big ass TV 3 years ago and they aren't going to by a new one for at least 3 to 5 more years... OLED is going to take it's sweet time getting here, 3 to 5 years. Meanwhile 2k and 4k is going to arrive in the next year or so because of pressure from distributers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a full time Android developer. I have to wonder, what % of the slip is Android overall and what % is Samsung specifically. I have to say I'm not pleased with the quality of the latest Samsung devices. Motorola, LG, and HTC all seem to be making higher quality phones.

<comment><USER15> But at this point the other Android manufactures (at least that have a good presence in the US) aren't making any money off Android phones, only Samsung was.

If Samsung's profits are falling as an Android manufacturer where does that leave users? It's not like Samsung was selling below cost. Without them the others would have a higher market share but would they actually become profitable?

Or is there just a glut of Android devices on the market to the point that no one would have an easy time making a profit in the current environment? Is this just a sign of a shake-up?

<comment><USER16> On your not making any money comment, HTC has been profitable the past two quarters ([https://gigaom.com/2014/10/03/by-managing-costs-htc-sees- ano...](https://gigaom.com/2014/10/03/by-managing-costs-htc-sees-another- profitable-quarter/)) and LG has also been profitable in part due to their mobile division ([http://www.lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/64590](http://www.lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/64590)). Motorola seems to be heading towards profitability as well.

Perhaps Samsung's decline has been in part to the success of these other handset manufacturers?

<comment><USER15> That's good to know since Samsung used to be eating everyone's lunch and it was becoming a two horse race.

As an outsider to this whole thing (Apple guy with little interest in buying an Android phone at this time) it has always seemed like there was a pretty big oversupply unless you only considered the flagship phones (and even then it's still arguable).

The market share between the various Android manufacturers starting to even out sounds good to me, but I wonder what it would do for prices and how that would effect Android vs. iOS.

<comment><USER17> The market share may even out in the low end segment, where many local manufacturers in different countries build cheap (and possibly outdated, from a first world perspective) hardware and slap whichever Android version they can accommodate (it may not be the latest).

But overall, Samsung still holds a big chunk of Android market share and it would take several years for that to come down to something we can consider as stiff competition. Samsung has a lot of muscle and money to continue its "hardware machine gun" spraying tens of devices to see what sells, which is also aided well by a big marketing budget (probably the largest marketing budget among all, including Apple and Microsoft in the mix).

The push to make Samsung more equal to other Android device makers could be from different directions. One is Samsung's desire to go with Tizen and sunset Android. This may not sit very well with the user base since the app market for Tizen needs to be built, and that's one reason why Tizen may likely shine in the nascent wearables segment than in the established smartphone, phablet and tablet segments. The other push is really good devices from HTC and Motorola that come with the latest version of Android and (especially for Motorola, in my knowledge) the ability to easily get updates easily and quickly. If HTC and Motorola survive for a few more years and continue whatever good work they're doing, then they do stand a chance to improve the overall market for the benefit of everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There have been parallels appearing now for some time, showing Samsung alongside Nokia's doomed path. Samsung have neglected their software development just as Nokia had (in terms of interface not being iterated and updated). On top of that, hardware has not seen dramatic improvements. The public and loyal journalists have been becoming increasingly disgruntled (since the S4).

If they don't innovate dramatically with the S6 there is trouble on the horizon for this behemoth. Samsung also need to position their experimental products (the new edge and the old round) as their lead products and fully get behind them. I always get the feeling they are hesitant like a person testing the water by dipping their toe in, when they just need to take a dive. The development is done and its in production so why not take a leap. If it fails at least they will be known as a company with innovation at its forefront and they can regress to their current practice.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cell phone seems to always be high revenue, high margin business but ONLY for a few years for any one company.

Whoever won the top slot in cell phone biz can get tremendous revenues and profit boost - Motorola, Blackberry, Nokia, HTC, now Samsung. Apple might last a bit longer because of app/iOS infrastructure - but it will be tough to compete with Android.

</comment><comment><USER20> Something to note in this article - this is Samsung Electronics - <USER2> mobile, TV and various other electronics manufacturer.

I wonder how bad the mobile division is doing if the entire electronics company is forecasting a 60% profitability drop?

</comment><comment><USER21> Some high-tech industry sectors are actually labor intensive, such as the mobile OS. I only see 3 mobile OS with real potential now: iOS, Google Android, and MIUI (actually adapted from Android). Samsung is doomed because they don't have the whole ecosystem. Their lead on only the hardware part is not sustainable forever.

Sooner is better than later, see whether they can fix it...

<comment><USER22> Curious to see how Amazon's fork fares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Samsung has rested on its laurels for too long and has ignored important criticism of its products. So I'm not even sad about it. They also own _too much_ of the Android market, and there should be more equilibrium, or at least have someone else dominate the market for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER24> good. hard to find a more corrupt and unethical company.</comment>


The next big programming language feature after closures - <AUTHOR> http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?show=The-next-big-programming-language-feature-after-closures.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if the author realizes how funny this title sounds.

</comment><comment><USER3> "A testament of how effective aggregate operations is demonstrated by the success of the array-oriented languages APL, J, and K. "

This must be some new usage of the word "success" of which I was previously unaware...

</comment><comment><USER4> Compared to the aggregate operations mentioned in the article, I think virtualization techniques and primitives would be more useful as language extensions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I sure am glad those Java boys (and girls) are there to drive the state of the art in programming language /sarcasm.

</comment><comment><USER6> He almost got there on the end. Concurrency.</comment>


Ask HN: Can anyone suggest great examples of continuation passing in JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for simple, clean, easily readable and understandable implementations of continuation passing style in JavaScript.<p>Can anyone suggest any code to read? I'm wanting to learn and be inspired. <comment><USER2> That's just "Promises" right?

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/es6/promises/](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/es6/promises/)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Promise)

Also, don't follow implementation. Follow the spec, and implement against it, not against an existing implementation.

[https://promisesaplus.com/](https://promisesaplus.com/)</comment>


Russian Spies Hid Secret Codes in Online Photos - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100630/sc_livescience/russianspieshidsecretcodesinonlinephotos <comment><USER2> Since when is steganography hypothetical? Or rather, how does hypothetical mean "previously undocumented in the wild"? There have been practical tools for digital image steganography since at least the early '90s.

Heck, it was on Law and Order last year: [http://allthingslawandorder.blogspot.com/2009/10/law- order-s...](http://allthingslawandorder.blogspot.com/2009/10/law-order-svu- hardwires-recap-review.html)

<comment><USER3> Neils Provos did a study of all of Usenet (I think?) as part of his PhD thesis, as an input data set for stegdetect, which used statistical (I think?) techniques to detect steganography. Long story short: nobody uses steganography.

It's really not that much of a win.

<comment><USER4> stegdetect isn't all that great. I've been working on an improved steganography technique (actually, an alteration to pretty much any existing methodology) for the past 6 months as a side project.

stegdetect is jpeg-only (yes, LSB steganography on raw audio/video is really, _really_ lame, but it's really easy, too) and it really depends on the input media. Using stegdetect itself on the sender's side with various source media makes it easy to avoid detection in-transit.

Plus, _any_ statistical analysis tool is only useful for long messages (higher signal:noise ratios). If you're sending one-liners in a 2MB photo, for all intents and purposes, the original photo hasn't been modified and is really difficult to catch.

<comment><USER3> I'd sure hope you can do better than stegdetect, in that you've had over 10 years to improve on it!

I was overly terse in dismissing steg; I didn't really provide a rationale for my comment. But I expect you'll agree with me anyways. Image steganography is a pet trick. Given the constraints of a meaningful image file, it's unlikely you're going to come up with a technique for encoding a covert channel that will be truly hard to spot.

Meanwhile, it's a lot of added effort for a very minimal theoretical gain (and a very likely severe practical loss) in operational security.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Perhaps with today's multi-GB media (video) files, steganography will see a new surge in popularity. But then again, we'd probably have already seen that by now.

(and I'm working on a steganography technique, not steganalysis - if I can get my act together and focus some, I'll be submitting it to a security conference in next month... I hope :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The meat of the article is in these two paragraphs:

 _The accused spies posted the seemingly mundane photos on publicly accessible websites, but then extracted coded messages from the computer data of the pictures, according to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI. Although computer scientists have theorized about the existence of this communication technique for over a decade, this is the first publicly acknowledged use of the technique._

 _"There have been occasional claims in the press about al Qaeda using it, but never with any evidence or even attributed to specific government officials," said Steven Bellovin, a professor in the Columbia University department of computer science. "Here, we have court papers filed by the FBI under penalty of perjury that says these folks were doing it. The threat, in other words, is no longer hypothetical."_

<comment><USER5> Is itthat this means that the steganography tools they were using did not prove effective? Or did the FBI discover their use by other means?

<comment><USER6> According to [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/063010-russian-spy- rin...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/063010-russian-spy- ring.html?hpg1=bn) law enforcement officers found a 27-character password written on a piece of paper at one suspect's house, and then used that to get into the stenography program that the suspect had, which then let them extract the hidden messages from the images.

Therefore the cryptography does not seem to have been the weak link. (In truth, it seldom is.)

<comment><USER7> So... the flaw in their security model is that _they wrote down their password_. If people can memorize hundreds of digits of Pi (I personally got past ~80 out of boredom (before I found programming), though I've since forgotten most), _they_ could memorize 27 characters to protect everyone else in the system.

Were I russia, and if these _are_ their spies, I don't think I'd be too sad to lose that pair.

<comment><USER6> You can make a secure enough password that is much lower than 27 characters pretty easily. Let me give an example.

My brother is named Aaron. First I think of a memorable sentence about him. "Aaron got me to take money from a wishing well when I was 8." OK, that's memorable to me and not many people know that story. Now I'll just take first letters and make a few obvious substitutions. "Agm2t$fWW@8"

That's 11 characters. It includes capitals, small letters, numbers and punctuation. It would be easy for me to remember. And would be a pretty hard password to break. If they had passwords like that, I doubt that the FBI would have ever broken into the program. (Though there must have been some other reason to be suspicious.)

(For the record I just made that up. It has no relation to any password I have ever used.)

<comment><USER7> Or you could've just used that whole sentence as a password. I'd be willing to bet it's _significantly_ more secure than those 11 characters, even if a dictionary-based attacker used ideal grammar rules and a bit of knowledge about you (say, family + pet names, ages, etc; only public knowledge).

<comment><USER6> True, but typing the whole sentence gets very, very annoying, quite quickly. Plus the short version will eventually become muscle memory.

It is counter-intuitive, but frequently making security more convenient makes it more likely to happen, which improves security. Conversely measures that should increase security cause users to work around the annoyance, which reduces security.

(For instance in this case the users could just leave a session running.)

<comment><USER8> That's not true if you do touch typing. Since you are using ordinary words you can type it quickly almost immediatelly without need to wait for muscle memory to develop. This way you get password which is both easy to remember and easy to type and at the same time is long enough. See Diceware method (<http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html>) if you are interested in this scheme.

<comment><USER6> I disbelieve.

I touch type at about 60 wpm. (Where your top is depends on your coordination, but for lots of people that is about the top.) Therefore it takes 5-6 seconds to type in an 11 word password. By contrast a frequently typed 11 character password typed from muscle memory takes no more than a second or two. That's substantially faster.

In fact even when I'm still learning the password, I type it faster than I can type the original sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would this work for sites (such as Facebook) that compress photos when uploaded? Wouldn't the compression affect the embedded code?

<comment><USER6> No. If you've hidden the details in the finest image details, then any form of lossy compression would ruin the message.

But there is no shortage of popular sites that will let you post innocuous seeming files unchanged that could serve this purpose. So that is not a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious - if you encrypt the message before embedding it in the image, it should be impossible to prove that a message exists (unless prosecution has its hands on the original), because changing only the lowest-order bit of each byte of image data probably has less impact than the noise from the camera itself, especially if it's an old camera. Alternatively, given any image and any message small enough, you could prove the message is hidden in the image.

<comment><USER6> That is exactly the idea.

Incidentally any form of encryption becomes even harder to break if you compress the message first. Furthermore this results in a shorter encrypted message, which is easier to hide. So the correct strategy is always compress, then encrypt, then encode.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think this is correct, at least if you're using a decent algorithm.

What's more, if you encrypt by using, say, ZIP, then the resulting file will have a known header, and that makes it tremendously easier to decrypt.

I've read that one of the factors that led to breaking Enigma was that Germans would habitually end their messages with "Heil Hitler". By assuming that _was_ the ending of most messages, the mathematicians were able to work backward to find the key.

<comment><USER6> In truth if you're using a decent algorithm, then breaking it is effectively impossible anyways.

But that said, techniques for breaking encryption rely on identifying redundant information in a message. The less redundant information there is, the harder this is to do. Sure, the known header on a ZIP is useful redundancy. But the amount of introduced redundancy is much, much less than the redundancy you got rid of by moving from a document in English to binary gibberish.

Underlying this is a fundamental fact of information theory, which is that messages with a high information density look like white noise. A slight mistake in the message you have results in something that looks like another potentially valid message rather than something that is obviously wrong. This makes it much harder to verify that you're on an intermediate step towards properly decrypting the message.

Therefore increasing information density makes an attacker's life harder. Compression increases information density by a lot, and so makes the encryption harder to break.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'm understanding your argument, but I don't think it's correct.

A well-encrypted message -- whether pre-compressed or not -- is indistinguishable from noise. If it was not pre-compressed, then its information density is lower, which means the S/N is lower. Information theory tells us that the worse the S/N, the harder it is to extract the information.

<comment><USER6> Whether or not you agree with it, the argument is believable enough to have been presented in a graduate level course that I was in a number of years ago. (The course was on wavelets, but background review on information theory was presented at the beginning.)

You are correct that a _perfectly_ encrypted message is indistinguishable from noise. Decryption is the art of distinguishing imperfectly encrypted messages from noise. Anything that makes the message harder to distinguish, makes decryption harder. Which means that the more the message looks like noise, the harder it is to decrypt.

Your attempted counter argument fails on the fact that a redundant message has very little noise, and therefore has a high S/N despite having not that much signal per bit. However that said, it is true that if you take a redundant message, remove some redundancy by adding some random noise to it, then encrypt it, the result will be harder to decrypt than if you just encrypted the original redundant message. Of course the fundamental reason behind that is that detecting redundant information is at the heart of decryption.

In that light it is interesting to compare the two known perfect encryption mechanisms. The first is the one-time pad. In that case the transmitted message has absolutely no redundancy because the definition of the encryption method contains as much information as the transmitted message. The second is for the two end points to have a list of pre-agreed messages of equal likelyhood, which they will refer to in binary code. This offers perfect compression with absolutely no redundancy, and therefore the attacker again has absolutely no way to guess what the pre-encoded messages are. (This is much harder to do properly in practice than one time pads, which themselves are pretty tricky.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The flaw in the defendant's procedures was that the data containing the steganography message existed on their machines at all. There is no longer any reason to do this. A foreign power could have their agents do the following:

        - stego the messages locally in photos
        - upload photos to a small photo sharing site set up by the agency
        - use a secure erase program on the photos

The software on the "photo sharing site" can remove the steganography data from the photos before displaying them on the site. All of the steps can even be written into the "photo sharing" desktop client software provided to users on the site. If a scheme like this had been properly implemented, the US government wouldn't have the contents of any outgoing messages to use in their case. The stego can be disguised as a fun easter egg to let site users play secret agent. (Press Ctrl-Shift-0-0-7 to reveal the "invisible ink dialog.")

A challenge: can one use a scheme like this to also refuse government counter- spies' access to incoming messages?

</comment><comment><USER12> It's completely underwhelming to see 'real life spies' use the same technologies you used _for fun_ with friends a decade ago...

</comment><comment><USER13> DIY: <http://mozaiq.org/encrypt/>

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get why they wouldn't just use e-mail + PGP.

<comment><USER2> Nothing says "Hey I've discovered classified information" quite like an encrypted email to the KGB. A primary goal of steganography is to disguise the act of transmitting sensitive data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Russians spies? Al Qaeda and porn? Ancient Greek messages? 9/11?

<comment><USER15> Steganography is not a modern invention and if you don't get the hint, neither is linking unrelated terms to get a hot title on a tabloid.

This Yahoo post is not far away from one.</comment></comment>


Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.freightwaves.com/news/exclusive-mass-layoffs-reported-after-starsky-robotics-fails-to-find-buyer-investors <comment><USER3> Wow, I interviewed with Starsky for a summer internship position back around the beginning of December. The interview went well, but I never heard back from them. I just assumed that I didn't quite clear the bar, but it looks like they got the news that funding wasn't coming (timetable from the article matches up) and just shut hiring down.

During the interview I asked my interviewer about Starsky's long-term prospects, and he said that they would have near doubled in size come summer. Lol

<comment><USER4> What I find LOL that in December, the interviewer thought "long term" meant 6 months from then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Our approach is taking the drivers out of the truck and have them working > remotely to make high-level decisions while the truck is on the highway," > Seltz-Axmacher told FreightWaves in May 2019. "To be honest, I don't think > that a super-computer can be built that is smarter than a truck driver."

Probably why they didn't get funding. VCs don't want to hear that (even if it may be closer to the truth than _anyone_ wants to hear).

<comment><USER6> This seems like a setup that while a logical architecture decision, would be reliant upon really rock solid mobile broadband on the routes driven by its trucks. Like, seven nines reliable. I saw videos of their test setup with a driver at a desk workstation/"cockpit" which was driving a remote truck.

Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the LTE network where the truck happened to be at that moment was having a hiccup.

It's much worse than a cargo drone that might have a 12-14 satellite GPS+GLONASS lock, that could be programmed to stop and hover in place, or retrace its flight path breadcrumb style back to base in the event of brief loss of WAN network connectivity. It's something with possibly 20,000 kilograms of mass moving at 70 mph with live humans in traffic all around it, and a lot of inertia.

It's an external technical problem that the company itself can't solve, because they're not in control of LTE/5G network operators, they don't make LTE radios/modems/antennas, etc. The only places that I'm aware of using fully remote driven trucks are giant open pit mines in western Australia, where the mining company fully owns and operates in-house the network linking the trucks.

I personally know very little about self driving technology, but working in network engineering, the idea of relying upon the normal publicly-accessible nationwide LTE network operators for something that could be a life-critical safety function really scares me. Even with a max-priority service like Firstnet on ATT it would be sketchy.

<comment><USER7> The trucks could have AI that worked most of the time. Not well enough to rely on for normal operations, but good enough for a fallback in case of losing connectivity.

Some made-up numbers to explain my point: Consider a situation where the remote operator will make the right response 99.9% of the time, failing 0.1%, and the AI is 20 times worse, making an error 2% of the time. The actual error rate will be (0.1% * connection reliability) + (2% * (1 - <USER2> reliability)). For 3-nines reliability, which is pretty poor, the error rate will be about 0.102%. For 4-nines it will be 0.1002%.

Those sorts of figures would effectively pay for themselves in terms of safety, once you factor in the benefits for monitoring and work conditions for a desk-operator vs a physically present driver, and they don't require either a particularly reliable connection or a particularly good backup AI.

<comment><USER8> Ah yes, the mythical "AI" that has yet to be invented.

 _Let 's just sprinkle in some AI and it'll work!_

<comment><USER9> The exact cases where human reaction times fail are already taken care of by local subsumptive AI† in cars. For example, collision avoidance is "AI"; lane- keeping and adaptive cruise-control are "AI"; etc. For that matter, an automatic transmission is "AI" in the sense of abstracting away a clutch and gears under a prediction of when you'd want them used.

† ...which doesn't actually imply anything to do with Machine Learning. Your computer downclocking when it overheats rather than catching on fire, is an example of "subsumptive-architecture artificial intelligence", even though it's a hand-coded algorithm doing the subsumption. The "artificial intelligence" in this case refers to the emergent property of the layered subsumptive processes, not to the processes themselves.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget anti-lock brakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article omits the size of the company. Apparently 54 people were employed at some point[1]. LinkedIn now lists 36 employees[2].

1: [https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotic...](https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotics+employees&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSI812SI812&oq=company+info+starsky+robotics+employees&aqs=chrome..69i57.5416j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

2: [https://www.linkedin.com/company/starsky- robotics/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/starsky-robotics/)

<comment><USER12> Starsky was definitely hiring. They posted on every "Who's Hiring" on HN for a considerable amount of time.

Unsure if it was ever 54, but they definitely were aggressive in hiring (job postings also kind of reflected that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow... that was pretty unexpected.

But to be honest they haven't done anything too notable within the last year (Plus.ai is pretty much the biggest thing I can think of right now and maybe Ike in the trucking space).

Really interesting to see how everything in the AV space plays out: Deepscale/Drive.ai were both aquihires, Cruise/Torc/Argo/Aurora were bought out mostly, and the others are either just starting (Ghost and Voyage) or doing something that aids them (Renovo).

So essentially: either you're bought out by an OEM or funded by VCs hoping to get acquired (I don't think you can surivive in this space without being bought out or aquihired).

Disclaimer: I worked at Renovo.

<comment><USER13> Zoox was supposed to announce a new funding round by the end of last year, and still crickets. The further into 2020 we get the more I think they might not get any more money.

<comment><USER14> Just checked out the demos on their website. I have always been curious what graphics they use to represent what car sees. Are there any open source versions of these out there to explore ?

<comment><USER15> Stiching cams like this has started to hit the back up camera market. Takes a few hours of setup. Stop at an RV dealer and check out the cams systems on the $$$$ units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Website still says they're hiring. They signal robust growth, you pay for it in wasted time. I wonder how many jobs I've applied for have been like that.

<comment><USER17> Fake vacancies is a huge and underreported problem for jobseekers. It is impossible to tell just from the job description.

<comment><USER18> I know of deep fake employment opportunities designed exclusively for identifying opportunities for IP larceny. This is a huge reason for locking down everything if you have any relatives of important people in your organisation as interns. This is the oldest privilege escalation hack I know of, and you might want to see if your outside legal will support a fake interview process for your own people via a headhunter. Reciprocal and wholly legitimate arrangements exist like this in many industries. It's frightening how much we found we were leaking over family breakfasts in seemingly innocent ways like revealing meeting details and simply mood responses to eager-junior inquiries. Send your sons and daughters to start their own business and learn to value poker playing before they get inside the "family" business. BillG played poker rather well I've read...

<comment><USER17> Not sure I understand what you are denouncing ?

The fake vacancies I had in mind are not so malicious. But for the candidates, in aggregate, they are a waste of precious time and energy.

\- Company has still opportunities on their website, in order to look healthy, when they are in fact laying everybody off (as is the case in the OP)

\- Company publishes an offer for legal reasons, but in fact wants to hire a cheaper resource from abroad once they've "proven" that they "couldn't get any local talent"

\- Company publishes non-urgent offer, in the hope to fish for resumes, and/or waits for years for the "perfect" talent to knock on their door

\- Company forgot to take down vacancy, someone got hired 3 months ago

<comment><USER19> Those are all real problems but there is an insidious one where you pretend to poach an employee from a competing firm but instead just do everything you can to brain dump them during the interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've never been involved in fundraising, so I have to ask: how often to investors balk at the last minute? Seems like a dick move.

<comment><USER21> What it probably means in this case is that they had a term sheet, but that during due-diligence (1-3 months between term sheet and signed contracts) they pulled out. It's possible they found things they didn't like in DD. It's not uncommon to find oddities, but normally not a big issue at all.

It's a really bad move. It looks very bad to companies who might be seeking investment, and could get a VC a name for causing issues in deals, so they only do it when they really need to. It typically means the company closes down as most companies raise when they have ~months of runway left, and raising a new round would take too long in most cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why couldn't they raise more money or get acquired? I thought self-driving car startups were worth $1mil per engineer (at least!) in an acquihire let alone semi-functional tech. Was it a scam?

<comment><USER23> [https://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps- nearly-10-...](https://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps- nearly-10-mile-unmanned- run/?utm_medium=single_article&utm_campaign=site_click&utm_source=in_story_promotion) It's possible that they relied too much on remote assistance. Really hard to say what state their tech is in and what stage investors want to see before putting in cash.

<comment><USER24> > "We beat Waymo. We beat all the big OEMs. We've beat just about the whole > industry," says Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, founder and CEO of the San Francisco > based start-up.

I find this statement pretty disingenuous when Waymo is trying to tackle the part of the problem Starsky isn't able to solve with their own self-driving tech - driving without a human in the loop for the last mile.

<comment><USER25> Given they beat all these big players their valuation should be extremely high

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hutch knew this would happen. Those trucks are no Gran Torino.</comment>