An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf <comment><USER2> So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.

This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain.

Accordingly a determined actor with enough resources (e.g. a nation-state) can render the bitcoin value-less and use-less at will....

<comment><USER3> The data embedded in the blockchain can only be extracted using custom tools.

Custom tools can be used to extract any data from almost any other kind of other data, using steganography. You can extract illegal data from innocuous looking tweets, using the right tools.

<comment><USER4> That's a bit of a stretch. There's no reason to obfuscate anything (unless miners are actively and intentionally censoring content) and it'd be straightforward to make a browser.

For example, I don't think it's a defense for the owner of a website to say "this horrible illegal content I'm sharing is only accessible via a custom tool that downloads and decodes image data from me...such as a web browser."

<comment><USER3> You can make a browser extension extracting illegal data from innocuous images on twitter

<comment><USER5> Only by using your own stock of illegal data.

<comment><USER3> that's not true: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)

<comment><USER6> You don't seem to understand what Steganography is and how it works. Perhaps you should read that article. You cannot produce illegal information out of non-illegal information without having that illegal information somewhere else to use as a key.

<comment><USER3> [https://i.imgur.com/tn6dav0.png](https://i.imgur.com/tn6dav0.png)

the "key" is a very simple algorithm, that is obviously not illegal

<comment><USER7> But in that case the second image was already stored in (low significance portions) the first. A truly innocuous image won't have such stored data.

<comment><USER3> That not important.

My point is that you could unknowningly store illegal data, without blockchain being involved.

Anyone sharing the data by torrenting an apparently legal file, reposting an image, or quoting a text could redistribute potentially illegal data.

This problem is not constrained to blockchain.

<comment><USER8> > My point is that you could unknowningly store illegal data, without > blockchain being involved.

The problem with blockchain is that a full node will be _knowingly_ storing and distributing illegal content (or at least is likely to held to be, once the chain is widely known to be infested with such content.) The only way to.stop is to stop storing and interacting with the chain.

With a torrent, you could be unknowingly doing so, but very easily _stop_ doing so with the particular content once you discovered it (without abandoning torrents altogether), which may or not be a complete bar to liability but would probably result in generally more lenient treatment in any situation other than the government is targeting you and the actual offense is pure pretext, in which case the content hardly matters.

<comment><USER3> There are many non-blockchain scenarios where there is difficult-to-remove data. How would one deal with embedded illegal data stored in firmware? Public records?

And which subsets of illegal data are legal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This gets close to something else I've been pondering lately - how to deal with immutable data structures in the realm of GDPR.

Recitations in GDPR require systems to be designed with privacy in mind. Immutable structures like the Bitcoin blockchain or Merkle trees in other applications would seem to be fundamentally incompatible with some GDPR privacy requirements.

Let's say Google receives a valid right to be forgotten request for an entry in one of their Certificate Transparency logs? Then what? I don't see how it can be dealt with without destroying the integrity of the log.

<comment><USER10> Some immutable data structures can cope with missing data. Merkle trees are an example: to validate that a leaf is part of the tree, you don't need any of the other leafs (only their direct or indirect hashes). For the Bitcoin blockchain, it has been designed so that transactions where all outputs have been spent can be pruned, after the spending transactions have been validated. It wouldn't be hard to extend this to prune "illegal" transactions, even after they've been included in valid blocks; the only consequence would be that a node wouldn't be able to validate other transactions spending these "illegal" transactions (so it would have to risk accepting an invalid transaction, or rejecting a valid transaction, in both cases risking being on the wrong side of a fork).

<comment><USER11> You would still have the history of those transaction(s) before they were pruned though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not too long ago, I checked the number of images that were posted on the Ethereum blockchain and I also posted a test image ([https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3ee5575306ddc235b0586984172888b47e...](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3ee5575306ddc235b0586984172888b47e92789d672d1aa917f261395efb2495)). There were 74 images with headers that appeared as jpg, gif, or png already posted before my test image. It's very easy to post to the Ethereum blockchain: just convert back and forth from file to hex using a site like [http://tomeko.net/online_tools/hex_to_file.php?lang=en](http://tomeko.net/online_tools/hex_to_file.php?lang=en). You might also have to calculate how much gas will be used. I opened a few images and I saw a couple selfies but the oldest jpeg is a certain infamous image from 1999 that I don't think anybody cares to see. I anticipated the chance of illegal images (though it's not exactly a novel idea so I figured somebody would notice it has happened by now if an illegal image has been on the blockchain for a while), so I haven't opened others.

<comment><USER13> Does etherscan let you search the "Input Data" of a transaction? I can see somebody building a script to parse the blockchain for image headers and convert the hex to a file now that this 'idea' has hit the mainstream. Going to be interesting to see what happens with this.

<comment><USER12> I wrote the script to parse the Ethereum blockchain from a local copy myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some interesting graffiti on the bitcoin blockchain: [http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks- photo...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks- photographs.html)

I have always wondered this. What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? Will it then be illegal to store the blockchain in that country? Is a link to such an image much different to an actual image? It seems hard to ever stop this happening with a public permissionless blockchain, pretty much by design.

<comment><USER15> I haven't looked for obvious reasons but back in the day people were saying that there was already child porn embedded in bitcoin: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671894.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671894.0)

Which is why child porn is one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.

That we are trying to apply flesh space laws to bits just goes to show how stupid we still are: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime)

Until we change the laws we have to meet the needs of digital computers instead of the printing press we will have these ridiculous ways of attacking useful new technology.

<comment><USER16> I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised.

This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the way we do criminal law, because intent and knowledge are so hard to prove either way. Even where there's plenty of circumstantial evidence of intent it is not going to prove it either way.

You could plan to murder somebody for years, leave an evidence trail and then run them over by complete accident. Should that be premeditated murder or manslaughter? In the eyes of a jury it will almost certainly be premeditated murder. You could black out at the wheel and for a while have no knowledge that you have killed. From the philosophical perspective the lines are blurry: Only the individual can actually know, and given the amount to which people can self-delude themselves, even that isn't guaranteed.

Juries do not make decisions on reasonable doubt, and often default to balance of probabilities. Depending on the jurisdiction, when a unanimous verdict cannot be determined a majority one is accepted.

Let's say I have a HDD I write random data to as a block device. What are the implications for me in twenty years if somebody creates an image file format that can decompress some of the linear subregions of my random HDD data. I haven't the time now to do anything but a very simple analysis of this. Intuitively this depends on the size of the drive and the size of the compressed file. Let's say for arguments sake it can encode a prohibited piece of data in 10kB.

At what point of completely random storage material are you likely to have a forbidden piece of data? Well, each terrabyte contains approximately 1e12 such linear subsequences. And we need 1e3010 such subsequences to match a forbidden sequence. So that's 1e2998 or so TB if there is only one forbidden piece of data. With more I think the birthday paradox kicks in. Now if we can encode the forbidden data in 8 bytes or such then we reach the problem much sooner. I doubt that will happen somehow.

<comment><USER15> >I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised.

No I am making the very simple case that a number is a number and you can't make a number illegal.

All digital information is numbers and banning any of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse at mere possession will ensure we retard most useful technologies.

The only time that flesh space laws should apply is when flesh space actions are taken.

An example: terrorist training material is sent on how to build a bomb. Until a bomb is built, or a conspiracy to build a bomb is made, nothing illegal should have happened.

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't that make cyberbullying and slander even in its most extreme forms legal? In those cases often someone is being harmed (with real, flesh space consequences), despite the material being nothing more then numbers.

<comment><USER15> Slander and cyberbullying are civil law, not criminal law.

<comment><USER18> But it's just digital information, as you mentioned. It never enters flesh space as real.

<comment><USER15> Civil law is again very different to criminal law.

You can obviously have a contract between two people for sending digital information between them.

That this only happens in digital space does not mean the contract can't or shouldn't be enforced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't intent generally a big deal in law? If I argued that your innocent MS Word doc was illegal because it decoded to child abuse images under a special encoding scheme I just made up, I'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. It's technically true, but irrelevant. No crime was committed. Doesn't the same principle apply here?

<comment><USER20> In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of- consent SO.

As with illegal drugs and, in the UK, unlicensed firearms, this means the prosecution doesn't need to prove intent. (Mandatory — usually harsh — sentence terms are usually part of the package with strict liability offenses.)

<comment><USER21> I don't know enough about UK laws or laws in general, but it should be easy to discredit such law. It only takes one rebel tech savvy teen to send his nude sext to whatever celebrity/politician email/phone he can guess while alarming the police - and the press to stir as much shit as possible.

Actually, pardon me for a minute, I have sci-fi short to write :).

<comment><USER20> In the UK, the police and prosecutors tend to take a common-sense approach: the "rebel tech savvy teen" would be the one who ended up prosecuted for possession.

(Similarly: possession of an unlicensed gun carries a stiff prison sentence. But if someone chucks a pistol on your lawn and you without delay call the police and ask them to take it away, you're probably safe. Picking it up and taking it inside is another matter, however ...)

The USA is a bit different. District Attorneys being elected means they have an incentive to bring charges against "soft" targets who'll take a plea bargain, i.e. hapless teens and people too poor to afford a decent defense lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do you keep the blockchain uncensorable if you start accounting for child porn, and copyright, and all this other stuff that "needs to be taken down".

And if you do all of those things, why even bother with the blockchain and all of its cons in the first place? All that remains is the completely accountable surveillance of users, and I believe that becoming a bigger surveillance machine than even Facebook ever was wasn't the original vision for the blockchain.

I think that unless the main blockchain projects such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on, don't start implementing anonymity by default soon, in a few years they won't be allowed to do it anymore.

<comment><USER23> One can hope that the Monero market cap catches up with Bitcoin for this very reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When PGP was released in the early 90s, one of the arguments used against it was "child porn". When P2P networks using DHT became viable earlier in this century, one of the arguments used against the networks was "child porn".

The tech still remains and still functions, arguments or not.

<comment><USER25> The difference is between "the technology" and an "implementation of the technology". Sure, P2P DHT exists. Just like blockchains exist. But a specific blockchain, which is append-only, is trivial to make illegal by embedding illegal content in it, making every user of it technically in possession of illegal material. You can use a DHT w/o breaking the law. You cannot store child porn on your computer without breaking the law.

<comment><USER26> In some cases a link to a file is enough, which would implicate DHT, but due to the nature of the distribution would not compromise the whole network. Cf. Pirate Bay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> def- If you are interested in this kind of paper, it was in today's morning paper: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/19/a-quantitive-analysis- of...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/19/a-quantitive-analysis-of-the- impact-of-arbitrary-blockchain-content-on-bitcoin/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't this more like someone throw a stolen item in your bag without you consenting or knowing?

</comment><comment><USER28> For the cases where data is encoded as the P2PK address those tx should be safe the prune, although downloading them to verify the block would be necessary.

</comment><comment><USER29> The solution is simple. You need a cryptocurrency where the primitives are simple and predictable. Basically the same reason we don't use eval() on user input. This might very well mean the end for bitcoin if legal parties pick up on this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Abstract:

 _Blockchains primarily enable credible accounting of digital events, e.g., money transfers in cryptocurrencies. However, beyond this original purpose, blockchains also irrevocably record arbitrary data, ranging from short messages to pictures. This does not come without risk for users as each participant has to locally replicate the complete blockchain, particularly including potentially harmful content. We provide the first systematic analysis of the benefits and threats of arbitrary blockchain content. Our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal. Based on these insights, we conduct a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of unintended content on Bitcoin's blockchain. Although most data originates from benign extensions to Bitcoin's protocol, our analysis reveals more than 1600 files on the blockchain, over 99 % of which are texts or images. Among these files there is clearly objectionable content such as links to child pornography, which is distributed to all Bitcoin participants. With our analysis, we thus highlight the importance for future blockchain designs to address the possibility of unintended data insertion and protect blockchain users accordingly._

<comment><USER31> "illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal."

I see this as a very strong legal attack vector on full nodes and cryptocurrencies, probably a way around it, is to only allow meta information on a cryptographic form, even then the owner can publish the view key publicly.

A drastic solution is to just prune or don't even allow metadata.

<comment><USER32> You don't even need the ability to record metadata on-chain to encode arbitrary data. An agreed-upon method of encoding it into ordinary transactions is enough. Even if BTC-style transactions were just inputs/outputs (they're not), you could still encode information down into the satoshi-place of the inputs or outputs themselves. It's even worse for something like Ethereum: essentially the whole point of that blockchain is to encode abritrary (executable) metadata in the form of the contracts themselves.

<comment><USER19> You could do that with an ordinary bank account though, and call the cops on your bank. In fact, you could do it with any service provider who logs your activity. Simply invent an encoding scheme and encode something illegal in your actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Title is sensationalism. Actual paper title is "A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin" — see also Illegal Numbers [0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number)

<comment><USER15> The paper isn't wrong though. There are supposedly numbers that correspond to illegal jpg images in the bitcoin block chain.

<comment><USER34> > There are supposedly numbers that correspond to illegal jpg images in the > bitcoin block chain.

How did they come about? Do you have a source for this?

<comment><USER35> Thats's precisely what the paper linked in the OP describes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is obvious, even to the casual observer (who care to think beyond the hype.) If this did not occur to you, and you are into bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, you should get out as you're way above your head. (expecting down votes to the truth.)

<comment><USER37> Well, it depends on the design: the format of each entry might be fixed (think of a specific blockchain for a specific task). Yes, a generalistic blockchain is quite likely unable to avoid this.

But who knows.

<comment><USER38> _the format of each entry might be fixed (think of a specific blockchain for a specific task)._

As long as you can distinguish between a 0 and 1, or any two states in general, you can store and represent arbitrary data. This basic premise is what makes digital computers so flexible and powerful, and how things like stenography and crypto work.

<comment><USER39> I think you mean steganography.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > We thus believe that future blockchain designs must proactively cope with > objectionable content.

The MimbleWimble blockchain design [1] on the other hand doesn't leave any room to add freely chosen data, mostly due to the lack of any form of scripts.

[1] [http://mimblewimble.cash/](http://mimblewimble.cash/)

</comment><comment><USER41> If you can trade and breed Pokemon-esque creature in the blockchain, why not illegal content? It's practically untraceable and you don't have to go to trouble of running something like and onion skin router to obscure your identity.

CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162)

</comment><comment><USER42> god this is reposted so many times, SOO MANY TIMES

public service advisory: read the whole btc wiki, there's a lot of great stuff in there!

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agent](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agent)

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script)

Links of note: [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a- decentr...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a- decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i-1379644274/)

<comment><USER43> oh great cryptocurrency zealot, how must we repent for our transgressions against the faith?

<comment><USER44> Please don't make the site worse by posting like this, regardless of how annoying another comment may be.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Fred Smith on the Birth of FedEx (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2004-09-19/online-extra-fred-smith-on-the-birth-of-fedex <comment><USER2> Interesting bit about ZapMail -- prescient but also completely impractical in retrospect, a bit like Iridium.

As an aside, having been involved with negotiations slightly removed from Fred Smith, this is a guy you _really_ do not want to tick off -- when you have something he wants, even incidentally, then just give him a price and cut a deal. I can't tell any of my stories (in a public venue, anyway), but there were several times when FedEx (which had, to be fair, moved mountains for our client) just got (reasonably) exasperated with our client and pulled (what I considered unreasonable) tricks to force them to a decision point. By the time I called off our involvement I felt like I had pissed off a Bond villain.

<comment><USER3> > Q: So why didn't it succeed?

> A: Because the Challenger blew up in 1986.

Holy Hell, this is the most interesting bit of the whole article. To think that a company like FedEx in its young prime could have an endeavour* like that completely disrupted by such a _force majeure_... great tidbit in what is otherwise a bit of a stale article.

*Shuttle humor

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of my favorite businesses. Another thing they've always done is invest in their workers and expect innovation from within. At one point, they even paid people a percentage of what their ideas produced. These days, they just use regular rewards, recognition, promotions, etc. Even their cost-cutting was different than most: paying people to leave rather than laying them off.

Such things send a powerful message that lead to mostly loyal, hard-working, innovative people. Well, at least at the levels where one can be innovative. The positions like Ground drivers and people moving stuff on conveyor belts probably impose limits. They still work hard for decent pay or hours relative to other companies in their areas.

I'd love to see more companies take a page out of Fred's book.</comment>


Financial Instability in China: Possible Pathways and Their Likelihood [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.merics.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/191017_merics_ChinaMonitor_42.pdf <comment><USER2> this is from 2017, should likely be noted in the title.</comment>


No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean - <AUTHOR> http://www.lacnic.net/en/web/anuncios/2014-no-hay-mas-direcciones-ipv4-en-lac

<comment><USER2> google cache : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.lacnic.net/en/web/anuncios/2014-no- hay-mas-direcciones-ipv4-en-lac&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have a good feel for the numbers involved here. Things like this always report: "We are out!... only 4,000,000 or so addressed remaining!" Four million sounds like a lot to me. Some number of the IP addresses that are counted as gone are also still unused.

Can someone give me some idea of the situation with numbers that are easier to understand? Can we still limp through for a few years, or is this actually the crisis point?

<comment><USER4> It does seem a bit anti-climactic. "We're out! We only have a /10 remaining, and we'll only be handing out /24 - /22 allocations!". Which does seem an awful lot like "flowing freely" (I'd be happy with just a personal /27 myself) until you put it in context with those early non-aggregable /24 allocations in 192/8 being generally viewed as a mistake for router memory, and the subsequent move to only give out portable allocations to larger service providers.

IMHO all of the IPv4 exhaustion articles are basically scaremongering attempting drive adoption ahead of the real pressing need. Which isn't the worst goal, as it encourages people to become familiar (have YOU setup a tunnel from he.net, sixxs, or with 6to4/miredo and started playing around?). But I suspect we'll be hearing variations on the same "we're out! (but not really out)" story for the next 5 years at least.

But besides a larger address space, v6 doesn't really give new features (besides plausible deniability of what constitutes a host address) and just adds to packet overhead. So the only compelling reason will be the ever growing number of endpoints that are v6 only, and behind NAT (from businesses who decide that providing v4 addresses to new customers by default is too expensive). Other businesses wanting to better serve/track those customers (avoiding NAT64 etc) will then finally have a real reason to treat IPv6 as a first class concern.

<comment><USER5> I set up a HE.net v6 tunnel over 4 years ago now. Sometimes, I ask myself why I bothered.

<comment><USER4> Experience and familiarity, mainly. When Linode enabled native v6, setting it up was a no-brainer. I'd also be comfortable getting a v6-only server if it fit my need.

Also it's a nice backup link for NATted WAN machines in case tinc/autossh/etc accidentally goes down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what will happen when the pool nears exhaustion globally, not just in Latin America and the Caribbean. A few scenarios come to mind, would love to hear more scenarios/insights:

1\. The governments of the world push IPv6 legislation. Everyone invests the resources needed to migrate in a few years, overall everyone's pretty OK with this.

2\. Carrier-grade NAT becomes much more widespread. People who need a public IP (mostly p2p users, I guess) pay more for that. Again, overall everyone's pretty happy.

3\. Gradual, failover-friendly solutions are deployed. The network becomes fragmented, this plays out like IE6. After a few years, most of the people who matter get tired of this, pull support for IPv4.

</comment><comment><USER7> Time for IPv6 baby.

<comment><USER8> We won't see IPV6 for the next 10 years or so.

<comment><USER9> The US is at 8% IPv6, I think that's enough of a base of early adopters that I could believe as soon as there was some actual pain involved with v4 we'd see some fast changeover.

In other words, I believe the limiting factor on v6 adoption is no longer technical or interop, instead it's lack of problems with v4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the practical consumer-level implications of this? My understanding is that every internet-enabled device needs a unique IP address. If there are no more unique addresses, can no more devices connect to the internet in this region?

<comment><USER11> ISPs could start putting users behind a giant NAT.

One cable company used to do it in Brazil back in the 2000's

<comment><USER12> That's bad practice and complexifies a lot the creation of peer-to-peer infrastructures.

<comment><USER13> That might be a feature in the media provider's eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In US many ISPs are too lazy to move to IPv6.

<comment><USER15> Which ISPs? Most of the large ones already support it: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#United_States)

<comment><USER14> Verizon and Optimum for example don't have IPv6 support so far.

Note that your link says something about trials / tests and so on. Many did that, yes, but not all of them actually deployed IPv6 in result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> well, this is bad news

<comment><USER17> This is great news. This means IPv6 there is that much closer to being a reality.

<comment><USER18> Carrier-Grade NAT [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier- grade_NAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT)

As in what is (unfortunately) actually being used. ISP's have taken so long to even begin to look at moving to IPv6 that stopgaps like CGN have to be put in place. Then, of course, why break what is working so IPv6 is put off even further.

<comment><USER19> Reminds me of fossil fuels and other sustainability issues...

<comment><USER17> That's actually exactly what this is. Currently coal is the cheapest electricity you can get. However, as the price of coal, oil, and natural gas goes up, and as the price of cleaner alternatives (through research, scale, etc.) goes down, we will eventually arrive at using much cleaner energy. The big problem with this is that those two prices aren't moving fast enough to avoid a global climate disaster we will be facing within several decades.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/ <comment><USER2> Everyone at once

"Its' Crackers"

*Tips White Hat</comment>


Ask HN: Simple web app marketing - <AUTHOR>

One-liner: What are the best ways to go about marketing a web app?
Long version: I've perused various HN posts via searchyc, and have found some gems, such as the post from Balsamiq: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267639
However, it seems like it's pretty hard to get buzz or coverage about any random web app in a grassroots fashion. All the big tech blogs have channels for submitting tips, but it's more like sending something into the ether and hoping it sticks. People have mentioned e-mailing bloggers/journalists directly, big and small alike, but I'm unsure of how to start compiling a list of names. It's hard enough trying to attract users, and it's even harder to get taken seriously enough to get some coverage without a userbase. Chicken-and-the-egg problem indeed.
I guess posting about the web app to HN or Reddit is a start, but where does one go from there? I've blanketed various small and mid-level web app directories/blogs and experimented with AdWords, but I feel like there's got to be more. <comment><USER2> First, thanks for higlighting the Balsamiq post and related HN discussion. A lot of good insights: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267639>

My 2 cents: before a public launch, try to find discussion forums that suit your target demographic and try to recruit users for an alpha version, ask opinions and feedback. This way you can try to create an early adopter community before launch and at least get very direct feedback - much better way to start than shouting into ether.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice on the next move - <AUTHOR>

The site: http://vepler.com/access.php?c=yc
I had submitted my startup into the YCombinator summer program, but did not make the cut. However, I do not want that to be the end of the story.
The site is similar to other sites such as Chatterous or Facebook's new messaging platform, but provides a structure and functionality that is optimal for many niches (such as people looking to collect feedback or online gamers). This is sort of what you would get if you combined Meebo, Facebook's new messaging system, Chatterous, and Google Voice's texting.
(Before reading the rest of this post, it would be best to visit the site)
The challenge with this startup is getting things worked out with the phone companies or sms aggregators to be able to send the text messages. Companies such as Yahoo and AOL have been providing free texting for a while, so I know that it is economically feasible. Getting that connection is the primary thing holding me back from fully launching the site. I do not have access to a large scale texting system (short codes) so I am restricted to keeping the site in a closed beta (Hence the long url. The link will only work for the first few hundred people). Since I am using a text messaging system not built for high volume messaging, the site's messaging is not as scalable/stable as it needs to be for a full-scale launch (The site itself is scalable, just not the SMS API since it is not using short codes).
I am primarily looking for feedback on what my next move should be (who I should talk to, how I should present it, etc). I am an individual founder (I built Vepler on my own), but I am open to taking on a partner if they can advance the process of getting access to short code messaging; Short codes are expensive enough that I cannot afford them on my own. I am finishing up my undergrad in applied mathematics and statistics soon and have some good jobs lined up. However, Vepler is my first choice for what I want to do. <comment><USER2> From your comment, it looks like you think your primary goal is to find enough funds to get a short code. Couldn't you charge users a small subscription fee, either on a monthly or per-message basis, in order to get enough money to pay for a short code?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is definitely an option, but not the most preferable. Seeing other companies provide free text messaging demonstrates that it is possible to do so without a subscription fee. I just want to explore all the avenues to be able to do something similar before resorting to charging for the service.

Either way, short codes are still expensive and need to be paid for in advance. Companies that allow others to use already acquired short codes through an API charge relatively high per-message costs. Hence, I will still need capital.

<comment><USER3> > Seeing other companies provide free text messaging demonstrates that it is > possible to do so without a subscription fee.

Well, do you know that's actually sustainable for them to do that though?

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, I don't have access to raw data so I cannot make a fully informed decision on the matter. However, given that Yahoo and AOL have been providing the service for a long time, I doubt they would have been doing so if it were not sustainable. Even large companies like that have financial limits. Google Voice not only provides free texting, they also give each user their own phone number. Granted they are planning on charging for calls soon (from what I've heard), I will not have as high costs as them since I am only providing texting and don't need millions of phone numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start charging money. If you're providing a valuable service people will pay for the 1 cent it costs to send a text message. If you're not then how does knocking 1 cent off the price of a text message make the business feasible?

The primary thing holding your startup back is your lack of commitment, and the expectation that others take risks you are not willing to take. You're a student you have access to credit, get a VISA and put the text messaging bill on your VISA. The reason why you don't do this is because you know that more users will mean a bigger bill. Whereas if you had a business more users would mean more profit.

Why not make it work with twitter and just have the users enable text messaging? What is so essential about texting that makes or breaks the business yet is unimportant enough to your customers that they won't pay for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Please note that what I am about to say is not meant to be defensive. Rather, it is a list of facts.

It's not about me WILLING to take the risk, its about me actually being ABLE to take the risk. The short codes themselves cost upwards of $1000 (I need multiple) per month. A high frequency of messages can surge that cost much higher. Being a student, my credit limit will not be very high. With more capital, it is possible to buy messages in bulk or go into unlimited messaging plans that are much more economically feasible when scaling; That way, more users are sustainable. A high cost is fine as long as the cost to user ratio makes sense. With more starting capital, the cost to user ratio is greatly reduced.

If any company with an existing ability to send text messages at sustainable rates wants to work with Vepler, that is something that would be equally valuable to me as raw capital. I can come up with the funds for the servers and such on my own if necessary. Getting in touch with such companies is the tricky part.

As for the matter of charging for the service: As I said, I am open to it. However, I want to explore all options before going there. Having the site work through twitter involves an added layer of complexity to the site that might simply be beyond the scope of many people. Texting is a core feature of the site. I can launch it without it and I'm sure some people will still find it very useful. I just want to find out if I can avoid doing that, especially since texting makes the site so much more useful.

Also, the 2 job offers I have pay fairly well. Enough so that I can afford to pay for the site myself after a few months. However, I would not mind giving up an equity stake to an investor to accelerate the process and potentially have more resources available (investors often provide value through their connections and knowledge that exceeds that of their capital).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please reach out to me, email@example.com, I may be able to assist.</comment>


Ask HN: Please suggest a good CMS for a freelance journalist - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone suggest me a good CMS for maintaining personal website of a freelance  author/journalist?
I need following features
1. Support for publishing articles. (Not just in chronological order but more like a newspaper). 2. Support Downloads 3. Photo gallery 4. Integration with Twitter 5. Good Commenting Support. 6. User Management.
Assume that the user is expert with technology. <comment><USER2> A lot depends on how much technological stuff you want to do instead of focusing on writing, and how peculiar and exacting you will be in how you want to set up your site. If you can be satisfied with anything that fits a fairly simple list, and not be picky about small details, just go with whatever you can install and get working first.

If you are going to take time away from writing articles to be precise and picky, you need to write your own from scratch or choose something that is pretty flexible. In that case I would advise Drupal. I would also advise finding a good freelancer you can have do everything for you, and concentrate on reporting and writing, as soon as you can afford it.

</comment><comment><USER3> wordpress + newspaper theme + plugins</comment>


Ask HN: What did you achieve in January 2016? - <AUTHOR> A month into 2016, I think it's a good think to reflect. I actually followed through and completed my first pet project, a Wordpress plugin. I have also lived together with my wife for a complete month now, and it's going great so far (just married). <comment><USER2> Congratulations!

I recently launched my first ever startup. It's a server hosting company much like DigitalOcean but instead of paying $10 dollars for a 1GB server, you get the ability to create multiple 1GB servers (2, 12, or 32) for less than half the price you would pay if you bought them individually.

It's mostly targeted at businesses who need to spin up a lot of fast servers for their employees and don't want to spend so much money -- but individuals could also take advantage of this.

[0]: [https://ramgrid.com](https://ramgrid.com)

<comment><USER3> Do you have an API or vagrant provider? Maybe I can add this to my tutorial here [https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from- scratch/step-10-digital...](https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from- scratch/step-10-digital-ocean/)

<comment><USER2> Yes! We currently have one in the works. I'll shoot you an e-mail when it's ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quit drinking. After several years of battling alcoholism.

<comment><USER5> Awesome, much respect to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just "finished" writing my interactive tutorial on server configuration/deployment with Saltstack: [https://amfarrell.com/saltstack- from-scratch/](https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/)

As someone who struggled a lot with writing anxiety in school, I just feel really good about having gotten this out the door. I also feel like I've learned a bunch about how to push past writing anxiety.

I put "finished" in quotes because I still feel like I have a lot that I want to add and improve:

\- I approached this project as a UI design and I feel like I want to do a lot more user testing, especially for folks on Windows or who have poor connections.

\- I wrote a line-by-line comments system so that folks could let me know which parts didn't make sense. I want to improve that and turn it into a plugin so that other projects could use it.

\- I have some integration tests for some of the parts that I feel like need to be written.

\- There are a few trade-offs I made that I suspect I should go back and make the other choice.

\- I currently have students only deploy to DigitalOcean. I want to have instructions on how to deploy to AWS, Azure, and a bunch of other services.

But for now, I'm just really happy having gotten this up there. If you have feedback, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER6> Took our service, a geocoding API for the world based on various open geocoders, out of beta: [https://geocoder.opencagedata.com](https://geocoder.opencagedata.com) All feedback, positive or negative, very welcome.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on getting married! Care to share the plugin?

From Jan 1 to today we tuned our site and put in a lot of grunt work to grow daily organic traffic by 2x, daily uniques on the site by 3x, and average session time by about 20%. Also launched a few really interesting feature experiments that I can't share yet but we're hoping will end up making buying a home significantly less expensive. This week I've been learning about WKWebViews [0] and using them to retool our iOS app detail views to have feature parity with our web app. Work is still fun!

[0]: [http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/](http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Started dieting near the end of the month _and_ managed to stick to it (3kgs down so far). Will take me about two months to reach my target, but I'm right on track :)

Learnt to read/write around 250 Chinese characters. It was much easier than I thought it would be and quite fun. Walking around Chinatown is a whole different experience, even with the tiny fraction of characters that I know.

Not much on the techie side accomplished this month, but lots of little things started. Looking forward to some results in February.

Congratulations on the marriage :D

</comment><comment><USER9> I started education for the first time in too long. This involves leaving the house and talking to people, so it's challenging, but in a good way.

EDIT: Congrats on the marriage!

</comment><comment><USER10> I would not call it an achievement, per se, but my repository Timelined([https://github.com/andriussev/timelined](https://github.com/andriussev/timelined)) gained over 400 stars. Haven't really had a repository that had stars before.

I have yet to determine how I become a multi-billionaire from this _achievement_ :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Congratulation on getting married,

I have started a 3 days book challenge where i finish a book every 3 days, it's going great so far, also I am refreshing my skills with online education (although I am still following MS degree in Robotics and AI), but still the world is broader than only this, and I programmed few robots and made few contributions to the OSS (talking about ROS here).

</comment><comment><USER12> I made a combined CI and staging system for web app front ends based on Docker Compose, Git, bash, Node, and React, over a weekend.

I came up with a way of writing front end browser tests that works very well for us. It's based on React simulated events and a test runner that parses English Markdown for general steps, aided by simple data attribute markup that specifies semantic roles for elements. Plus a nice little React HUD for running tests in your browser while developing.

I also joined some friends to play in a band, moved to Stockholm, scheduled a date for this weekend, and mostly replaced coffee with tea.

Next up is an exercise habit...

</comment><comment><USER13> I built a really basic genome analysis pipeline. It's a super hacked together tool with the hopes of helping doctors make more data driven decisions on diagnosing patients based on empirical data: the individuals genome. I got a very basic version working that allows a doctor to search for a specific term (eg. ADHD) and see if the patient has any genetic mutations based on genes typically associated with that disease.

Super straw man, not clinically proven, and hacked together - but fun and learned a ton! Built on Redshift with a small R script and a ton of manual data ETL.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Started doing intermittent fasting. Of all the fat loss things I've tried, this has been the easiest to stick to. Will post about my experience in a couple of weeks.

2\. Started running regularly - 3 days per week. If anyone is looking to get into running I can't recommend the NHS Couch to 5k plan enough.

3\. Launched the private beta for my new online learning marketplace - [http://learnetto.com](http://learnetto.com) and got featured on Betalist.

Pretty excited about February!

</comment><comment><USER14> After 1 year and 14 days I finally released my (Nth) product. Here's a review/article/video about it [http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screenshot...](http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screenshot/)

It's kind of 'niche' in who can use it, but I've got quite a lot of dedicated users.

</comment><comment><USER15> Rolled out a huge update to Snail Rush ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iitianspac...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iitianspace.snailracer)) a quiz game that we at Eduisfun made. It now has tons of different topics to try out since not everyone is into Mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER16> I finally got over the hump with my BrainRunner and BrainHub apps (companion apps for my SnailLife snail simulation). The BrainHub manages queueing brain checks of living snails in the world and distributing them to free BrainRunners. This way I can have an unlimited number of BrainRunners (well, limited by my budget) running brain checks in parallel completely separately from the user facing app.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have read Cal's Newport new book about Deep Work ([http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/](http://calnewport.com/books/deep- work/)) and have been trying to adapt some of the strategies from it. So far I see positive results (less time spent working, but more done), even though I'm not doing very well.

EDIT: Congrats ;-)

<comment><USER18> What are your thoughts on this book? I'm always intrigued by it but end up passing each time I consider giving it a go.

<comment><USER12> I thought it was a good inspiration with some practical and serious suggestions. It gave me some good concepts (like just "deep work" itself) and really hammered in the point that it's good to take serious time for real deep work, that your life will be qualitatively different if you do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats on the marriage!

During the first month we'd released a second alpha of our project that allows to build real-time data processing/visualisation pipelines in the browser. And now we're on track to allow building those pipelines using natural language input (target is to create a pipeline from someone saying, e.g. "what people on twitter think about brand X?")

</comment><comment><USER20> I found a couple of great guys to build the Android version of my app and have attracted interest from a VC in Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER21> \- Lost 4 kilos;

\- Read 3 books;

\- Studied a lot of math (according to rescue time, something like 100 hours in Khan Academy); and

\- Finished a 45 hours/class discipline in Collge (did an intense program for that).

</comment><comment><USER22> \- Changed the company I work for

\- Also built some Wordpress and Magento plugins

\- Took on some freelance clients for advertising and have ramped up their spend, and profits, incredibly

\- Joined Dataquest.io in a consultancy capacity

</comment><comment><USER23> I gained 5 pounds.

</comment><comment><USER24> Started a new job for the first time in 14 years. I'm at a startup learning about and doing asp.net web api and angularjs.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wanted to read lots of books this year, but so far I just spent a lot of time in my smartphone, just like last year!

</comment><comment><USER26> signed up 3 major clients for my startup 5group.co . Its been a tough road but some light is showing

</comment><comment><USER27> Lost 6 pounds.</comment>


What is your ideal office? - <AUTHOR> I was thinking about how I dislike the current setup at my job.  We have desks instead of cubes in the main open space.  Many folks dislike cubes, but I miss the illusion of privacy they create.  I hate distractions, and the open desks only cause more of them.<p>Other than cubes, it's nice to have access to a clean shower and be in an area where you can run.  A kitchen is essential too (fridge, sink, toaster oven, microwave). <comment><USER2> My ideal office would have an ocean view, be close to everything geographically but never have any traffic congestion. Preferably the top floor (or at least a corner) of a large building with everything I need located inside of it (bathroom, shower, couch, kitchen). There would be two desks. One would be facing away from the large glass window (where the ocean is visible from) so that I can interact with the people who come to visit. The other desk would be against a wall (maybe a corner, or even a small hallway shape) where the real work gets done. In there I would have my computers, printers, and the other essentials. The couch would face the ocean, but rotate to face the flat screen TV. Scratch that. The Couch faces the ocean and when I want to watch TV the window is covered by a drop down wall with the TV inside of it. I'd also have a bed so I could stay the night comfortably when necessary.

As you can tell, I think it's healthy to dream big.

<comment><USER3> What, no girls fanning you with palm fronds and a little chamber music quartet? :)

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Good point. But I do need to be productive at some point. Maybe if the question was expanded beyond "Ideal Office" I could include those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A 12x12x12 private office (I'm 6'5", so high ceilings are a definite mood enhancer).

One wall is entirely glass, looking over a shaded garden with the Ocean in the distance (probably on the side of a mountain here).

The wall to the right of the window wall is a bookcase.

The wall to the left of the window has an extra long couch (that I could actually fit on) to sleep. That wall also has the door.

The wall opposite the window is at my back, with my 72x40 inch desk in front of me. On my desk are three 24 inch Dell LCDs, each running at 1920x1200. My chair is a Herman Miller Mirra (fully loaded).

Behind me and to my right is the door to the en-suite bathroom, complete with shower and closet full of clothes and a kitchenette (with tap that has Dr Pepper, Cherry Coke, Boulevard Wheat, Murphy's Irish Red, and Guinness).

Behind and to the left of my desk is a door to a wiring closet, where all my computers and stuff are.

The carpet is black and deep like grass, and all the lights are LEDs.

Between the window wall and the desk is an extremely comfortable recliner and table (for reading).

Outside the office itself is a common area with doors opening onto all the other offices (of my brilliant fellow coders). The common area has couches and big long tables for collaboration. At one end is a recessed movie-theatre-esqe area for group presentations and movie nights. At the other end is the entrance to the building.

<comment><USER4> An attempt at a rough diagram. Common area is to the left of this image.

       .___________window____________.
       /                             |
      /                              |
       |                reading     b|
       |                 chair      o|
       |c                           o|_________
       |o                           k| b       |
       |u                           c|  a      |
       |c         deskdeskdesk      a|   t     |
       |h         deskdeskdesk      s|    h    |
       |          deskdeskdesk      e|     r   |
       |              chair          \      o  |
       |                              \      o |
       |_____________________________|________m|
       |      |
       |wiring|
       |_clos.|

<comment><USER5> Upmodded for ascii image hack alone. I love how he uses slashes and backslashes to show that the doors are opened. lol

<comment><USER4> I'm at work, it was bound to happen. hehe

<comment><USER6> I absolutely love the deskdesk and the sort to show that it is the desk, and the size of the desk.

On that note, I love huge desks...that are mainly empty. But that probably relates to my insanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One with great colleagues that help, inspire, and challenge me. Everything else is optional.

<comment><USER8> _"... One with great colleagues that help, inspire, and challenge me. Everything else is optional. ..."_

Do you need other people to give you the core motivation & challenge to get things done? Individualism is at the core of Startups. Individuals first, team second. Why? Because designing & building stuff is a pretty much a solitary task. Sure you can have a team to assemble the bits. But in the end it's really down to how well one individual does particular job, task. You will fail where individuals fail, regardless of help by other team members.

        where failure is the norm an ideal office is not optional

The ideal workplace is an important concept for Startups. It's where you do your thinking and execute your ideas. Your thoughts are your product. The better the ideas, the better the product. Poor workplaces, no matter how good the team or individual is toxic to good thinking. A good workplace can be like wearing safety kit doing a dangerous job. It shields your thoughts from unwanted distractions. Filters the environment of distracting noise. It lets you get on with the job not having to stop, cough your lungs up, wipe the crap from your boiler suit every time you sit at your keyboard. Another concern. If you want to keep your co-workers, fellow hackers on the job, the office has to be close or a lot better than their own house. [0]

You have lots of hurdles in a Startup. An ideal, even good workplace is a core concern. It is not optional.

[0] This is a Phil Greenspun idea on building and keeping good engineering teams. There are a whole lot of good practical ideas here ~ [http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing- softwar...](http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software- engineers)

<comment><USER9> Thers's a reason most successful startups have two or more founders.

You don't build greatness yourself, you do it by leveraging other people.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure anyone has ever accomplished _anything_ when they set out to "leverage other people."

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure anyone has ever accomplished anything when they have not leveraged other people.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure anyone has ever accomplished anything arguing about leveraging people (whatever that means) either...

<comment><USER9> You win :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A large room with a desk, computer, sofa. In an old country house in the UK.

<http://xara.com/gaddesden/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I like desks instead of cubicles, if the office is silent (no phone calls). I like to have near some healthy foot (mainly fruit, coffee, milk, water and juices), and a shower appreciated.

Yesterday I was talking with a colleague that it would be also great to have a small room to relax/sleep. Sometimes, when I'm blocked or with headache a quick nap (20-30min) is magic.

Of course, good coworkers is a must!

<comment><USER3> +infinity for nap room

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"... What is your ideal office? ..."_

Hmm couch to the left, bookshelf in front. Large table. Places outside to walk and think.

           a quiet place that's a
           leap and a bound from
           a keyboard & monitor

Close to food, kitchen, stereo, whiteboard. With all these things I can move from idea to code quickly. Having said that it's a fair hike from the city central. Read these articles to rate your own environment: [0]

\- <http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>

\- <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html>

[0] btw I add these references not because of _"who"_ wrote them, but the quality of the descriptions.

<comment><USER13> i'll take a desk or a cube with a brick alley view where i can sit whenever i want to (within reason) over a pastoral mansion that looks at me funny when i show up at noon.

<comment><USER8> _"... i'll take a desk or a cube with a brick alley view where i can sit whenever i want to ..."_

I'll agree with the place you can sit anytime. But views are important, to me. I'm not sure why but having something natural to look somehow improves my thinking ~ <http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1270954109/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think Connected Ventures has the greatest office in NYC, followed by SkinnyCorp in Chicago.

Slide is packed like sardines, and Facebook has no style.

</comment><comment><USER15> Something on the beach, with an ocean view.

<comment><USER16> We're on Waiheke Island in New Zealand:

<http://www.waihekeweek.co.nz/logo4.gif>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have a theory that the day to day experience of at a company is what makes/breaks people's moral. If people like their environment, they will want to support the company that provides it. Normally one would assume that things like salary/stock options would be bigger motivators, but in reality those things are just numbers on paper and in bank accounts. And they don't make a bad office suck any less. The 8+ hours a day spent at the office are concrete and you never get them back. Few things are worse than not enjoying them. Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions, especially for people who have financial obligations to support non-work things. In this case people are probably more driven by financial opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER17> Short commute, good free snacks and food and drinks and tea (and soup!), within walking distance of lots of good restaurants, great coworkers, minimal distractions, no politics, flexible hours, occasional telecommute (but not so frequently that the office becomes a ghost town), free parking, great view, stacks of all useful computer books near your workstation, room to walk around and stretch, trust-based environment where you can leave all your stuff at your workstation and not worry about it, plenty of whiteboards available, freedom to personalize your workspace.

My new job features all of these (except soup! :'-{ ), although the commute could be a little shorter, and the hours a little more flexible. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Some place so boring I can do nothing but work all day everyday. As well as a full supply of water, gatorade, tea, crackers, pizza pops. A big desk, a pile of books, one or more whiteboards, my stereo/headphones, and of course my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is my startup setup. We have arcade games and every employee is given a 30 tokens a week to use on vending machines, air hockey, pool table and other games. It's their choice to use them all at once or spread out over the week. They can even hoard them and save them up. That way they are in charge of their time. We even vote on new games to be added as we reach milestones.

<comment><USER8> _"... We have arcade games and every employee is given a 30 tokens a week to use on vending machines, air hockey, pool table and other games. It's their choice to use them all at once or spread out over the week. ..."_

What tokens, you gotta be joking. How bl%*dy lame is that? The best fun I had at one Startup was playing the pin-ball machine and pool table. More mileage was taken in the press with a single pool table than the cost it took to put them in. More work, ideas & fun were generated around that table & arcade game than any meeting. Except the ones at the pub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Hmm. Maybe just this:

<http://www.stefandidak.com/office/>

</comment><comment><USER20> This may sound weird, but I've come to prefer lying face-down on the floor with a laptop in front of me. I think it's because that's how I did homework as a kid (in front of the TV).

So my ideal office would have to support that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Lots of different places to work - from a 24" monitor attached to the MBP in the "office" to the Eames lounge in front of a big TV. Add the coffee shop down the street and I'm set.

Note - don't forget about ergonomics!

</comment><comment><USER22> Ideally, a home office with a lakefront view. But I'd settle for elements from Adobe/Flickr as shown at:

<http://www.officesnapshots.com/>

</comment><comment><USER23> I kind of prefer desks instead of cubes and I'd really like a huge monitor that I can plug into my laptop. Plus, free food and drinks. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'll take the real privacy of an office over the "illusion of privacy" offered by cubes any day.

</comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't matter as long as there's an All You Can Eat Chinese Buffet within walking distance.

</comment><comment><USER25> something cool is wiki.coworking.info where you can collaborate with other hackers to share space.

my ideal office would have alot of light, a plasma, a couch, wifi and a wireless keyboard amd mouse.

</comment><comment><USER25> something cool is wiki.coworking.info where you can collaborate with other hackers to share space.

my ideal office would have alot of light, a plasma, a couch, wifi and a wireless keyboard amd mouse.

</comment><comment><USER26> Port City Java.</comment>


Stop working like an workaholic - <AUTHOR> http://imiodrag.com/stop-working-like-an-workaholic/

<comment><USER2> This reads like it is inspired by <https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/ef4772e3c628> (which is currently on the frontpage at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5487883>), but there is no attribution if this is the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your reply, I didn't saw that, just now, thank you again for your time :-)</comment></comment>


Quantum computers ready to leap out of the lab in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-computers-ready-to-leap-out-of-the-lab-in-2017-1.21239 <comment><USER2> What's the best resource for learning about QC and establishing foundation knowledge so that I might be ready to break into this field once they have broad availability?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation- Information-10th-...](https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation- Information-10th-Anniversary/dp/1107002176)

is the standard reference. It is well written and light if you have the math background (linear algebra + probability theory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> maybe I'll wait another year before I push my backups in to the cloud...

I wonder when we will know just how huseful they will be.

<comment><USER3> Regardless of how we end up building quantum computers, they will be useful. The theory behind computing with qbits is well established and many interesting quantum algorithms have already been developed.

Even a 32 qbit computer would be a very serious breakthrough.

edit: by a 32 qbit computer, I mean that the device should have 32 qbits of memory in total! I'm not talking about bus size.

That is one of the cool things about quantum computing. You don't need a big device to do interesting computations.</comment></comment>


Marionette - The Future of FirefoxDriver in Selenium - <AUTHOR> http://www.theautomatedtester.co.uk/blog/2012/marionette-the-future-of-firefoxdriver-in-selenium.html

<comment><USER2> Did anyone else see "marionette" and think this was related to the Backbone.js Marionette library?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, what? Is this analogous to the ActiveX crap from MS, with the only difference being that ActiveX allowed plundering the OS and this allows the same for the browser/WebOS? Could someone more knowledgeable articulate the contents of this article in plain- _er_ language.

<comment><USER4> No, it isn't.

Selenium [<http://seleniumhq.org/>] is a web testing automation tool that allows developers to automate the redundant bits of front end testing. The W3C wants to make this tool a standard so that more tools and test suites can integrate it with the confidence that it isn't going to go anywhere. This is not something that is for the average user or to power your website - this is just something that gets thrown into the build/testing process to ensure your app/site/plugin works as expected.

Now, rather than Selenium have browser specific code in the core executable, it relies on drivers for every browser you want to use. Mozilla has announced Marionette, which is a beefed up selenium driver that makes it easier to test the browser itself, rather than the browsers contents (think of automatically changing settings - turning off js, toggling plugins, etc).

This is in no way analogous to Active X because it is not meant for end users - just developers.

<comment><USER5> There's still the potential for security problems, as the OP acknowledges: "It still has to go through our security review since just having an open socket can drive the browser is quite scary and an opportunistic hacker could just run a selenium script and steal details. It will probably be preferenced off to start but is still a potentially scary problem."

<comment><USER4> Absolutely, I was just making the point that this was not /intended/ for public use, unlike activex.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Go's march to low-latency GC - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitch.tv/gos-march-to-low-latency-gc-a6fa96f06eb7#.9lsrreb5u <comment><USER2> Another very nice feature of Go is, that since 1.5, the whole runtime, including the GC is written in Go itself. So every Go developer can look at the implementation. The GC itself is surprisingly small amount of code.

<comment><USER3> Excuse my obvious ignorance, but how is the GC written in Go? The GC in Go is not optional, right? Does the GC use GC? Turtles all the way down?

<comment><USER4> How does one implement malloc in C? (Edit: ignore this. As pointed out in the responses, this actually different since GC calls are inserted by the compiler)

Unsafe code, direct syscalls, using only a subset of language features, and coupling to the compiler (both for generating data used by the GC as well as inserting calls into the runtime in appropriate places).

None of this would really be any different if implemented in C. C is clearly an unsafe language, the syscalls would still be there, as would the coupling to the compiler. The difference is that you have to have a fast way to call from Go into C. With Go this is unnecessary.

Of course if you're really curious, you can always check out the source :)

<comment><USER5> There is a pretty big difference between these two cases.

In C, calls to malloc() are explicit. You implement malloc() in C by not calling malloc().

In GC'd languages, the language runtime calls the garbage collector implicitly. So you need some more clever way of ensuring that these implicit calls do not occur. You also need to ensure that no garbage is created that will leak without a GC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to wonder - when you're digging down into this level of complexity in order to discover issues with the language you're using, wouldn't something like C be better? IRC isn't a very hard protocol and you know the language won't be getting in your way if you're using C.

<comment><USER7> Reading this causes me to experience déjà vu; years and years of reading stories and watching presentations about someone struggling with GC in the JVM. It's happening all over again with Go. The same 'discoveries', the same trade-offs, the same discussions about hardware resources, the same 'concurrent mark and sweep', the same 'more to do' conclusions. You could replace every occurrence of 'Go' with 'Java' and it would probably go undiscovered.

Maybe it's all worth it and this is how developers are supposed to spend their time, but it's no longer interesting to me.

<comment><USER8> It's because GC is a bad idea that's had 30 years of good research thrown after it. Advancing GC is building a faster horse instead of stepping back and building a car. It's time to move on, and I'm thrilled to see modern languages (Swift, Rust) abandoning it and focusing on building more intelligent compilers.

The goal shouldn't ever be to make the world's best GC, it should be to create the world's best way to elide lifetimes so that developers don't have to think about memory management. GC shouldn't be a goal, it's a technique for solving a problem, one of many that we should explore.

<comment><USER9> Seems like the opposite surely? We should be developing languages that more succinctly address the problems we humans are trying to solve not book keeping for the computer's hardware (that should be the computers job!).

<comment><USER10> I think you missed the bit where he said "more intelligent compiler". The compiler is the bit that does the bookkeeping, only in Rust (and evidently Swift--I haven't played with it much) it's done statically, ahead of time rather than at runtime.

That said, I think Go is a much more practical language than Rust for most problems. __That said __, I 'm still very excited about Rust.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say. Rust does all the bookkeeping at compile time, Swift keeps a lot of it at run-time although the compiler can easily optimize away a lot of lifecycle stuff too when it's in scope, so I assume it either does or will.

I agree that Rust likely does not have the be-all answer to automatic memory management, though what I love about it is that they're pushing the boundaries and getting people thinking differently about memory management.

<comment><USER10> > I agree that Rust likely does not have the be-all answer to automatic memory > management, though what I love about it is that they're pushing the > boundaries and getting people thinking differently about memory management.

Me too. I intend to use it for more of my hobby things, but Go is currently the best fit. Eventually I imagine Rust will pick up some decent GUI libraries or at least get decent editor support (vim-go is lightyears ahead of YCM+racer) and I'll be able to afford to justify using it more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This may be anecdotal but Twitch is an example of a service that just bloody works. I've been a user for awhile and I've yet to notice any noticeable service disruptions or issues. They were also one of the largest early adopters of EmberJS, pretty sure it was well before the 1.0 release when many bugs were still being worked out and the API suffered frequent changes, so hats off to the engineering team for continued awesome work.

<comment><USER12> Maybe if you have fast internet connection. I'm on a HSDPA+ connection and Twitch is unusable, not even the VODs. Then again, Youtube and Vimeo is pretty much the only sites from which I can watch video streams smoothly.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious, have you tried viewing the streams or VODs through an alternate player?

I've found that I can almost always improve the smoothness of their content by using Livestreamer[0] to play it in VLC (or Kodi, more often)

[0]: [http://docs.livestreamer.io](http://docs.livestreamer.io)

<comment><USER14> I use this on my netbook. Pretty much unwatchable otherwise

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So how does the GC performance of Go compare to something like Java/the Hotspot JVM?

<comment><USER2> The approaches to GC are difficult to compare, and Java offers a selection of garbage collectors. Overall, the Java collectors are very sophisticated and tuned over years, so in principle are excellent. The downside is, that the Java language itself puts a lot of stress on the GC. The biggest problem is, that Java offers no "value" types beyond the builtin int, double,... So everything else has to be allocated as a separate object and pointed to via references. The GC then has to trace all these references, which takes time. While a collection of the youngest generation in Java is extremely fast, a global GC can take quite some time.

Go on the other side has structs as values, so the memory layout is much easier for the GC. Go always performs full GCs, but mostly running in parallel with the application, a GC cycle only requires a stop-the-world phase of a few milliseconds (for multi gigabyte heaps).

All these numbers of course depend a lot on what your application is doing, but overall Go seems to be doing very well with its newest iterations of the GC.

<comment><USER16> Another strong point for the JVM is the availability of alternate implementations from several vendors. Is this possible for Go say in the future?

<comment><USER2> It is certainly possible. There are already two Go implementations, the official one, and a gcc based one. And due to the fact that the whole Go implementation is available under BSD license, allows anyone without any license worries to fork a custom Go implementation.

<comment><USER17> You forgot GopherJS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Posted earlier without the random hash in the URL [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12040349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12040349)

</comment><comment><USER19> That's interesting, but it would be even more interesting if the article contained some info about heap sizes, memory utilization and the number of CPU cores.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think that not using Erlang in this particular case was a mistake. Erlang is running some of the largest chats out there, including League of Legends and WhatsApp. They would have avoided all the hassle of GC pauses, since Erlang has per-process GC collection. And scaling single OS process to their number of connections was done for Erlang machines years ago.

<comment><USER21> Finding an erlang programmer available on site within 1-2 months is the hardest part of deciding to go with erlang. With go you can take a C++/python programmer and have them writing production code pretty soon, i think this is what inhibits functional programming in general, the learning curve bundled with the amount of work around prevents people jumping onboard also willingness of some employers to hire someone without a ton of exp. with erlang makes it difficult for a senior programmer to switch.

<comment><USER22> >> With go you can take a C++/python programmer and have them writing production code pretty soon

In my experience, learning Go (and by that I mean fully grasping the ways of Go, goroutines, channels, selects, interfaces, type switches, etc) takes at least a year for someone whose background is C/Python/Ruby. Then may be it's just me.

<comment><USER23> It took me a good 3 months of fighting with the language before it started to click for me, and then another 3 months to really start using it properly. It sucks to always read things like "I was able to write production code on the first day!" around here.

<comment><USER24> I think that depends on the mindset of how you see computer languages. I like learning new languages, every time I encounter some new language, I have to try it out and get at least something basic working.

I'm pretty decent at C, C++, Python and Bash scripting, have participated in larger projects in Java, Perl, Pascal/Delphi and Ruby, and have toyed around with Rust, Haskell, Clojure, Angelscript, Crystal, Lua and probably a bunch more that I forget.

Go for me was a breeze, everything just clicked. It helps that it got a lot of it's inspiration from other languages I already knew pretty well. When started toying around with Haskell for example, this wasn't the case, it took me quite a while to get me up & running with the basics, and I still don't think I know basic Haskell. Go on the other hand was easy, and within a week I was diving into the stdlib sourcecode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious why you didn't just use something like Redis for managing concurrent state and pair that to any of the various web apps that are good at concurrent connections? You could still use Go to serve the web requests/sockets/etc.

<comment><USER26> > But this isn't another article about how great Go is for us — it's about how > our use of Go pushes the limits of the current runtime implementation in > some dimensions, and how we respond to reaching those limits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Before Go I was web developing in Node.js but wanted to get "closer to the metal." Thought about using C for the back end but then heard about Go and have been in love ever since. My favorite programming language by far.

</comment><comment><USER28> There has been a ton of research for GC on the JVM. What are the differences between Go's approach and Java's? Are those differences due to linguistic differences or different goals?

<comment><USER29> There was a ton of research of LISP & Smalltalk GC's prior to the advent of the JVM.

<comment><USER28> So what are the trade-offs? Is each language re-inventing the wheel, or is it just a matter of implementation effort?

<comment><USER29> I've found each language, out of expediency, often starts with a comparatively crude implementation of GC, and then gradually improves upon their work, leveraging knowledge from other platforms.

That said, gc is very subtle, and each runtime has unique characteristics that mean that what works best for one might not be ideal for others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How do they prove correctness of their GC?

<comment><USER31> They run lots of programs and see if they crash/leak.

(Seriously, Go is not really an academic language caring for that kind of stuff, unless it comes off easily to prove it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Next up is runtime.scanobject. That function does several things, but the > reason it's running during the chat server's mark termination phase in Go > 1.5 is to implement finalizers.

How did you know that?

> We emailed back and forth and the Go team was very helpful with suggestions > on how to diagnose the performance problems and how to distill them into > minimal test cases.

Can you give us the link?

</comment><comment><USER33> Purposefully strolling to where the puck was in 2001.</comment>


Java profilers, heap dump analyzers and APMs do not work as intended? - <AUTHOR> http://plumbr.eu/blog/solving-outofmemoryerror-no-tools-will-help-you

<comment><USER2> Save yourselves some time and scroll down to the last paragraph of the article.

If you want to save even more time I'll summarise for you "all leak detectors suck, so buy our product which supposedly doesn't"</comment>


No download apps. Real? or someone is testing the waters? - <AUTHOR> http://nodownlo.kickofflabs.com/

<comment><USER2> I could imagine it being real. Some history:

When AT&T acquired ORL, makers of VNC, one of the projects VNC was applied to was the "Broadband Phone:" <http://www.qandr.org/quentin/att/bphone>

This turned the desktop phone into a thin client with its entire UI served up over the network via VNC, including the phone-number-dialing UI (not unreasonable, since if your network is down you won't be able to make a VoIP call anyway). This also means that there are no remote applications to upgrade and features can be added and removed at will: no-download apps.

This is in contrast to the "no-install apps" movement pursued by ventures such as Thinstall (an application virtualization system, now part of VMware) and Zero Install: <http://0install.net/>

VNC is a pretty expensive protocol; RDP is much more efficient, but requires the client to understand the high-level windowing system calls. But maybe for mobile phone apps, a well-compressed VNC stream is enough. You already have multiple web-based VNC and VNC-style codebases available as open source:

noVNC was discussed here a year ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463395>

Guacamole plans to support more than just the VNC protocol: <http://guacamole.sourceforge.net/>

But if you specialize you can get dramatic performance improvements, as discussed by FX PAL with their WebNC paper and demo, optimized for remote manipulation of web pages: <http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=1653>

And a high-level windowing system like GTK+ is in a good position as well, with their recent release of GTK 3.2, which includes their experimental "Broadway" backend, supporting rendering widgets and windows to an HTML5 canvas. A startup could pitch existing web developers on using Seed, GNOME's JavaScript binding, with Broadway output, or perhaps using one of the fledgling NodeJS bindings, but I'm not sure there are any big wins there over using regular web development practices.

The bigger win would be for allowing traditional desktop developers to write web- and mobile- friendly apps using their known solutions. Quick, cheap redeploys get the slower VNC-based solution, serving as a proof-of-concept to the higher-ups, and then you sell them on the more expensive GTK-based system (learning a new windowing system is easier than learning a new web- and mobile-development paradigm) where you write GTK apps and deploy using Broadway.</comment>


Video Solves Mystery of How Narwhals Use Their Tusks - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/drone-footage-narwhal-tusk-mystery/ <comment><USER3> I wonder how they knew whether this is just one narwhal's or one colony's modified behavior or the behavior of all narwhals'. Sea mammals are pretty intelligent, who's to say that this one or this colony hasn't adapted some use for their task that is restricted to just them?

<comment><USER4> I doubt that this is the whole story, on account of females not having tusks. If you take the position that the tusk is an adaptation to improve feeding, which implies that it is sufficiently effective in that role for it to be selected for, then you have to explain why the females' lack of the tusk is not selectively disadvantageous.

My guess is that it was selected for a different reason (probably some form of sexual selection), and has proven to be somewhat useful in hunting. Both the possibility of sexual selection, and the possibility of features, selected for their utility in one use, having uses for other purposes, were important insights that allowed Darwin to defend his theory of natural selection against critics (they also help defend Darwinism against the claim that it is a fatuous tautology.)

<comment><USER5> _then you have to explain why the females ' lack of the tusk is not selectively disadvantageous._

No -- sexually dimorphic characteristics cannot be in competition.

<comment><USER4> I am not suggesting that there is competition between males and females - <USER2> are in competition with the rest of their world, especially with their prey and others seeking the same prey. If one posits that the tusk was sufficiently advantageous in helping males feed that it was selected for, that seems to imply a corresponding disadvantage for tuskless females in their competition with the rest of the world. If the female ancestors could feed just as well as the males, then what was the source of the selective pressure on males alone? Perhaps the males' sexual competition between themselves demands more food or leaves less time to find it?

<comment><USER6> What if the mutation(s) that led to the tusk could only occur in males?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating! I wonder if they can move the tusk fast enough to cause cavitation, which could stun the fish, making it easier to catch.

</comment><comment><USER8> _" The tusk is a left canine tooth protruding from the heads of males and can grow as long as nine feet. The right canine stays embedded,[...]"_

Where's the template for the Stross rejection note?</comment>


Buy a Jeep, Fund a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/03/buy-a-jeep-fund.php

<comment><USER2> I wish securities laws were such that you could community fund your startup without running afoul of them. If you could, say, take a few hundred bucks for a tiny % of the company I might be interested in that, especially since you idea seems like it ain't half bad.

But having to donate $8k or more, and then being saddled with a Jeep, is going to make it hard. I bet you could get $8k and keep your car if the laws were different.

<comment><USER3> I think that as long as shares are to identified people the securities laws are pretty lenient.

It's as soon as shares are traded publicly and 'to bearer' that you get in to the trouble zone.

more reading:

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

[http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/financing/loansfromfriends...](http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/financing/loansfromfriendsandfamily/article51542.html)

[http://www.angelblog.net/Startup_Funding_the_Friends_and_Fam...](http://www.angelblog.net/Startup_Funding_the_Friends_and_Family_Round.html)

It's definitely possible I think, if the funding is structured as a loan then there is no problem at all, if it is in return for equity you have to be a bit more careful but I don't think that it is a requirement that every investor is an 'accredited investor', especially not if the individual amounts are small enough.

I'd certainly make sure that was 'non voting' stock, otherwise you have a real issue with share holder meetings right away, which (for instance) with 10 people supplying $1000 each would not be in relation to the investment.

<comment><USER2> You cannot even legally post on Twitter "I'm raising funding". Someone did this last year and got harangued for it. How can you crowdsource a funding round if you cannot do something that simple?

Also, I would never invest in a convertible loan like that, and if you talk to a lot of investors (even angels) you'll find that a common sentiment. Investors hate convertibles. A few have told me that if you do those, it's not a question of if you're going to get screwed but when and how.

<comment><USER3> That's because twitter is a public forum and by asking it in that way you are effectively making a public offering.

But mailing your buddies is a different matter.

Think of it this way: there has to be some - minimal - pre-existing relationship between you and your target investors.

<comment><USER2> Right, that isn't scalable, and it isn't crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is posting on HN "fund my startup". That's what I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You certainly put your money (and your car!) where your mouth is and I really respect that.

I bought back ww.com and associated stuff from partners/investors by selling my house, never regretted the decision.

I _really_ hope you succeed in your venture, let me know if there is some concrete way in which I can help you.

</comment><comment><USER4> you should list it on all the jeep and offroader forums, since those guys will be much more likely to want something exactly like that. And will be much more willing to pay something like that.

Car guys see a rare car with tons of mods and a great price.

Non-car guys see a 30 year old jeep.

<comment><USER5> Car guy here. (Working on an authentic 1917 model T speedster, also have a 1972 Jeep J-4000, 1990 Firebird, and a 1987 AMC Eagle in pieces.)

It's ... well, it's an interesting vehicle, anyway. I'm not sure how someone would say that they "restored" a 14-year-old vehicle by giving it Corvette colors; I'm not sure why you'd put a Chevy engine into an old Jeep and then mate that up to an _automatic_ transmission, and figure it's good for anything other than the easiest of Jeep trails. The fact that the seller uses the phrase "they tell me" when talking about bubbling paint being a sign of water leakage is somewhat worrisome -- if he's not sure about that kind of thing, then what does that say about the rest of the work done on it? And, blaming the vehicle's inability to brake easily on the engine's power and the size of the tires is just wrong. Braking distance is a function of the braking system, the vehicle's speed, the vehicle's mass, the vehicle's front suspension, and the vehicle's tires (where bigger tires are _better_ ).

Daniel and I disagree pretty strongly on environmental matters, and I'm trying very hard not to let that affect my reaction to this. But, as a car guy that can really appreciate a custom vehicle done right ... well, I sincerely wish him good luck on the sale at that price.

I also think that putting $30,000 into a car project to get that sort of result might, on reflection, provide some insight into what's holding back his startup ideas.

<comment><USER3> Car guy here. Restored several cars from the ground up, including complete strip-downs, body work, engine overhauls and so on.

When restoring 'young' but interesting cars (my favorites are 'minis' but I've done two Citroen DS's) it is not unusual to put a lot of money and time in to a car that you end up with a car that has a book value that is less than the money that you put in to it (and that's already valuing your time at '0'), that really doesn't have any bearing on anything else other than that restoring young cars is a thing you do when you plan to keep a car, or for sentimental reasons, not because you think of it as a business proposition. Hobbies _cost_ money.

Who knows why that engine and gearbox ended up in that car, it simply may have been what was available to him at his budget at the time, or it is possible that he got it in that state.

The fact that Daniel did that, and is willing to sell his car for it's market value in order to extend the 'runway' of his startup speaks volumes about him and his character and gives you an indication why he has quite a few people that wish him the best, apparently unlike you.

The ability to put sentiment aside and to look at a car as a liquid-able asset is really a pretty strong indicator of a business mentality that transcends simply asking others for their cash, plenty of us 'successful' entrepreneurs have at one stage or other in life done just that in order to be able to make something happen.

> Daniel and I disagree pretty strongly on environmental matters, and I'm > trying very hard not to let that affect my reaction to this.

I think you utterly failed at that.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. I'd delete the comment if I could.

I apologize, Daniel. That was uncalled-for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kickstarter.com is worth a look for funding a portion of what you're doing, for example the logo design or hosting fees.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good luck Daniel

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Eliot.

They say good startup founders improvise and come up with new solutions. I thought this might be something that would work, at least for the short-term.</comment></comment>


We Must Ban Facial Recognition Software Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opinion/facial-recognition-ban.html <comment><USER2> It truly won't matter because video based biometric ID is around the corner and in some cases is already here. Masks won't throw it off.

<comment><USER3> but inserting objects in your clothing will, also a good performance artist or dancer can do a good job.

<comment><USER2> Unlikely, clothing shapes don't tend to be biomarkers.

<comment><USER3> its not the shapes of the clothing, its the effect they have on posture and gait as well as range of motion. e.g a shirt a size too small , or a marble tack or small stone in your shoe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>