Soylent's Next Chapter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soylent.me/post/108074810737/soylents-next-chapter <comment><USER2> Soylent is approaching the 'meal replacement' as an outsider to an industry that is rife with subsidization, existing partnerships, preconceived notions, and vast mires of bureaucracy. They are dogfooding their product, iterating based on feedback, publishing their findings and recipes, and still this isn't good enough for the "disruptive" community of HackerNews.

The two biggest competitors in this realm according to these discussions seem to be Ensure, a product from a 127 year old publicly traded company (Abbott) with 90k employees and 40 billion in revenue, and Carnation Instant Breakfast, a product from a Swiss candy company with a laundry list of other products that don't give me a lot of faith that they have my health as their primary interest.

Soylent isn't perfect yet, but neither is our understanding of the human body. I'm glad to see them get infused with more cash that will allow them to add more expertise to their roster and shore up better distribution. I'm more at ease with Soylent and it's backing than I am with the current DIY movement, at least until things settle down.

I'm glad its an option. I'm even more glad that it's fostering the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still am optimistic about the idea and principles behind Soylent, but I got to say, I was not impressed with their initial product (v 1.0 and 1.1).

It gives users horrific smelling gas, and honestly, I generally felt worse on Soylent than after any other type of food I have ever eaten, including junk food. (I didn't mind the taste though.)

They are already at v 1.3 though. Here's hoping that this capital influx allows them to rapidly improve the recipe.

<comment><USER4> I honestly can't understand the appeal or novelty in it. Ready meals have been available for years. Vitamin tables have been available for years. Where exactly does the difference lie?

<comment><USER5> It is a completely self-contained eating system. If it works as advertised you just eat that and you're done, no spreadsheets, no calculating up to make sure you're consuming what you should be, and so on. You should be getting everything you need.

You're paying for the 100% system, not 98%, not 99%: 100% that is the USP. The price is only a little more expensive than eating out ($3.33/meal roughly).

Plus most off-the-shelf "Ready meals" are extremely unhealthy. Many contain transfats and other foot preservatives which are quite bad for you.

<comment><USER6> How can they sell the 100% if we don't have enough knowledge to determine what _is_ the 100%?

<comment><USER2> I think its based on FDA allotments. I completely agree though that we're still in our scientific infancy of understanding what the body needs and how best to get it those resources.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree. People have lived for millennia on completely different diets due to their geographical location. To say that one diet has the correct amount ignores this fact completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just wish they would do a low-carb version. I tried soylent for a couple of weeks. I then had my annual physical and my blood sugar level was much higher than it had been in the past. So much so that my doctor asked me what I had been doing and what I was eating. He said I was now suddenly "pre-diabetic." I stopped soylent immediately. I _really_ wanted it to be a legitimate meal alternative. I'm disappointed.

As a side note, I now have four boxes of soylent for sale if anyone wants them... :)

<comment><USER8> I have never heard this before. Haven't people tried it for a month with health checks before and after? Couldn't it be anything else (did you run exclusively on Soylent)?

I've been thinking of ordering some for when I don't have time for lunch or don't feel like cooking or something, but this would obviously make it a no- go.

<comment><USER7> It was not exclusively soylent, I was having it for lunch every day. I was eating well otherwise for dinner. Of course everyone is different and some bodies react differently than others.

<comment><USER9> Seems like the cause / effect here is a little shaky, since you were eating so little, and were only on it a couple a weeks.

<comment><USER7> I sort of wigged out at the news and bought myself a blood sugar testing kit afterwards. I tested myself for a few days after ending the soylent and my blood sugar returned to normal (around 85 in the morning after waking up).

My next step is to try soylent again and test myself to see the direct effect... every hour or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been reading HN's overwhelmingly negative treatment of Soylent (as the concept) with some amusement. I'm glad they're successful, and hope they become even more so.

That said, I was really underwhelmed with the taste of Soylent when I finally got mine. I understand that I can improve it by e.g. blending a banana into the shake, but if I need to take out my blender and prepare other food to add to Soylent, I might as well make a smoothie out of available fruits and veggies.

The next time I order Soylent will be when their price comes down to the point where it's cheaper than the food I buy.

<comment><USER10> _I 've been reading HN's overwhelmingly negative treatment of Soylent (as the concept) with some amusement._

It's interesting. HN is supposed to represent some of the world's most dynamic, forward-thinkers. However almost every truly disruptive development is greeted with small-minded negative thinking and parochialism. Bitcoin is scam money for paranoiacs who don't trust banks. Inflation is good for economies. The rich are too rich. We need more and higher taxes and more socialist redistribution of wealth. Soylent tastes bad and destroys traditional food cultures. Uber is too powerful and going to become a monopoly. Google is evil. Without the protection of friendly governments capitalism will exploit the poor. People are too stupid to protect themselves from predatory opportunists (and the government is somehow a perfect vessel to counteract them.) Everything is scary and the way things should be is how a small group of white men who are very good friends with the US government tell us how it should be, which happens to be very similar to today but with more friendly government intervention to fix everything white male programmers are scared of and don't understand.

I guess it'll be entertaining to watch people changing their tune over the coming decades.

<comment><USER11> You're using this as a platform to address other issues than what I think the OP is hinting at.

Soylent isn't "new". It isn't "disrupting" anything. Meal replacement alternatives have existed for decades and there are numerous brands out there that have a medical proven trackrecord that can be obtained for _cheaper_ than the Soylent we're seeing pushed today.

What we have here is a case of "forward thinkers" believing that some crackpot idea from the startup culture is suddenly revolutionary because they marketed it best to this subculture of life. You're a sucker to believing Soylent offers anything revolutionary yet paying above market to have them feed you that lie.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/tLIC_oIeeORWgna6kbpW1...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/tLIC_oIeeORWgna6kbpW1ug/htmlview#gid=0)

<comment><USER10> Hey, pretty good! Let me have a go. Ahem:

The iPhone isn't "new". It isn't "disrupting" anything. Smartphones have existed for years and there are numerous brands out there that have a commercial proven trackrecord that can be obtained for cheaper than the iPhone we're seeing pushed today.

What we have here is a case of "forward thinkers" believing that some crackpot idea from Apple is suddenly revolutionary because they marketed it best to this subculture of life. You're a sucker to believing iPhone offers anything revolutionary yet paying above market to have them feed you that lie.

How did I do?

<comment><USER12> Smartphones did exist for years before the iPhone. Take a look at Windows Mobile sometime.

The main problems with them were that the screens sucked.

<comment><USER13> The whole system sucked. Those things has little memory or CPU. Windows Mobile didn't have memory protections or preemptive multitasking. Pocket Internet Explorer sucked even worse than Internet Explorer 6. It was challenging to find apps for them.

But the real disruption was the disruption in the carrier relationship. A lot of smartphones didn't have WiFi, and the carriers would nickel and dime you for every kilobyte. Apple convinced them to do the flat rates and big chunks of data. Apple introduced manufacturer control of the user experience, instead of Verizon disabling every feature that would allow you to avoid the carrier's fees. When the iPhone was announced, the feature I was most impressed by was the visual voicemail. Voicemail was so tedious and inefficient before iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People in their 80's have been "hacking eating" for quite some time now. It's called Ensure. I think I know what's next. Depends (adult diapers) for the young tech set so you can just go to the bathroom and not disrupt that epic coding session. Because disrupt.

<comment><USER10> What if Ensure had a cool name and didn't carry connotations of age and disease? What if it was sexily marketed? What if it was easy to flavour and make delicious? What if you signed up for a subscription and never thought about it again? What if you got it from vending machines that were everywhere you went and recognised you as you approached, having a glass perfectly formulated to your tastes and needs at that precise moment ready? What if it came out of a tap? What if your home 3D printer could form it into a multitude of shapes and textures (bar, cookie, cereal) and it would still be nutritionally balanced? What if it was surrounded by a devoted and inventive community of DIY hackers? What if the creator of Ensure was rapidly iterating it and discussing engineering microbes to produce pure versions of it?

Oh, or is it easier, instead of using your imagination and a bit of enthusiasm, to point to how it's similar to a crappy product that nobody bothered to market, and imply that it won't be sucessful - because we all know the success and impact of a product has nothing to do with the creativity, perserverance and vision of the creators, right?

<comment><USER15> Ensure is heavily marketed. It is not irresponsibly marketed. Ensure does not claim to put you in good health. It doesn't claim o be suitable for everyone.

By the way: Ensure is available in unflavoured versions to allow users to add it to other food or add other food to it.

<comment><USER10> Cool story. It's not vegan though so it's useless for me. Plus I would far prefer to buy from a company (eg Soylent) that has a vision of clean, futuristic food production, rather than a company that stupidly accepts the dirty, nasty way we make food now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe they can use some of their millions to ship orders faster than, I don't know, 3-6 months? Get it in the Amazon supply chain and have next day delivery. I'm still waiting on a reorder from a month ago and haven't heard anything since I emailed customer support.

<comment><USER17> Amazon just "picks and packs" your product. They don't manufacture it for you. I'm sure 90% of Soylent's supply chain issues aren't in the shipping process but in raw material procurement and manufacture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Soylent's website claims they've shipped "over 3 million meals" (1 million bags) since launch. From what I can tell, the first bag was shipped in May 2014.

That's roughly 111/k bags per month since launch. For the first nine months of a company, that's operationally extremely impressive.

The delays for new customers (3-6 months, yikes) seem ridiculous, but if you do the math, I'm surprised it isn't more.

</comment><comment><USER18> Serious question: Do they have any actual nutritionists working on the product yet or just a bunch of hybristic 20-somethings who think they can "hack" the nutrition space without any real education, cause, you know, "disrupt!".

<comment><USER19> Per [https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en- us/articles/200789315-Nutrition](https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en- us/articles/200789315-Nutrition) \- The Soylent recipe is based on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and is approved as a food by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Soylent 1.2 was developed under the close guidance of our nutritional advisor, Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, M.D., MPH. Pi-Sunyer is professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. At St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center he serves as chief of endocrinology, diabetes, and nutrition, and is director of the New York Obesity Research Center. Dr. Pi-Sunyer is also a senior attending physician at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

<comment><USER5> Being created by a nutritional advisor and a professor of medicine is legitimately credible.

I just want to add that this:

> is approved as a food by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Is utterly meaningless. All that means is that everything that goes into the product is "food grade" and that it was prepared in basically sanitary conditions. Nothing more. I highly doubt the FDA has examined their health claims (namely that you could live exclusively off of it). And likely won't unless there is public or political pressure to do so.

As an aside, I wonder if they could get a military or relief effort contract? Seems like the type of product perfect for both, as you "just add water!"

<comment><USER20> > As an aside, I wonder if they could get a military or relief effort > contract? Seems like the type of product perfect for both, as you "just add > water!"

A lack of readily available clean water may be a challenge for use in relief efforts. There are also already products out there e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut)

<comment><USER5> The relief will have to bring in water regardless (so people don't die). If they add it to the product that isn't "wasted" water as your body just re- extracts the water and uses it like normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hoping this includes eventual international shipping. I'm an Australian, been eager to give Soylent a whirl. I've ordered a batch from a 3rd party to see how I go with it, but would be nice to have access to the genuine article.

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing they're so overwhelmed by domestic demand that they don't feel the need to open up the market even further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope that, as an international customer, they will expand not only their manufacturing and shipping capabilities in the time-domain but additionally in the location-domain. There are a number of competing products that have come to market since Soylent became huge, and their one advantage over Soylent is they are offering a similar product but will ship nearly world-wide, effectively beating Soylent "by default" which is kind of sad considering these products originate in Europe. This also means potentially setting up manufacturing facilities in other parts of the world so that shipping and customs costs remain low for everyone, regardless of location. I love the idea of Soylent but haven't had the chance to try it out because I live a 1 hour's drive outside the US border in Canada. Congrats to the team on their funding!

</comment><comment><USER23> Great time for me to say that I'm selling all of my Soylent! 6 soylent bags, 6 fish oil canister guys and the original pitcher. zachfeldman (at) gmail dot com. Make me an offer!

</comment><comment><USER24> Lots of GMO soy and carbs, this does not seem healthy at all.

<comment><USER25> You say "GMO" as if it's a bad thing.

<comment><USER26> I think there is a valid argument against GMOs, but it revolves more around the dangers of creating a monoculture (i.e. one bad crop disease could then wipe out a large fraction of the food supply), rather than health risks, since as I'm sure many HN readers are aware, humans have been genetically modifying food since they've been cultivating it.

<comment><USER27> I know even Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been pushing the "we've been genetically modifying food for thousands of years!" line but I think it's a bit disingenuous.

Crossing a tomato and a deep sea fish is fundamentally different from crossing two strains of corn and we should expect different risks.

<comment> shawn-butler Are you engaging in hyperbole or is there a link you can provide where someone has spliced fish genes into a tomato intended for human consumption?

<comment><USER27> It's a thing, though it didn't work. (Wiki links to more in depth sources):

> An early tomato was developed that contained an antifreeze gene (afa3) from > the winter flounder with the aim of increasing the tomato's tolerance to > frost, which became an icon in the early years of the debate over > genetically modified foods, especially in relation to the perceived ethical > dilemma of combining genes from different species as the tomato gained the > moniker fish tomato.[18] The antifreeze protein was found to inhibit ice > recrystallization in the flounder blood, but had no effect when expressed in > transgenic tobacco.[19] The resulting tomato was never commercialized, > possibly because the transgenic plant did not perform well in its frost- > tolerance or other agronomic characteristics

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tomato](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tomato)

<comment> shawn-butler Thanks for info. Yes I would have been surprised if such a radical transfer would have been found not to actually harm the agronomic viability. Skeptical a promoter could even be found, but anything is possible.

Helpful characteristics approaching commercial reality involve nothing of the kind such as the recent StAs1 and StAs2 Simplot potato or the AquAdvantage salmon opAFP-GHc2 construct.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Use Twitter and Not Be a Douchebag - <AUTHOR> http://www.darowski.com/tracesofinspiration/2009/05/26/how-to-use-twitter-and-not-be-a-douchebag/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who couldn't get past the author's tone. I'll paraphrase the way I read it: "Hey kids, I've been doing this a long time, and I know what do to, and you are doing it wrong, so listen to me... And by the way your a douchebag." He comes across as elitist -- about Twitter!

Twitter is an open service and you can do with it what you like as long as it is within the terms of service. That is it.

<comment><USER3> It was kind of condescending, but I see where he's coming from. Basically, he's saying "a lot of people on Twitter tweet annoyingly. Here are some major offenses that people should avoid."

And the tone probably made it a more effective piece of writing. The putting- off effect of his tone is counteracted by people being more likely to read it because it sounds more extreme/interesting and people's desire to avoid being a "douchebag", which is stronger than their desire not to be "someone who tweets kind of annoyingly."

That said, it was kind of annoying and elitist. But for accomplishing his goal of getting the most people to remedy these poor tweeting habits the most, it was probably more effective than just complaining about annoying ways people tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The @ reply information is useful, the rest is obvious and I'm guessing that if you are a douchebag then you won't follow his advice.

<comment><USER5> I'm not so sure... some people jump into Twitter without knowing much about it. If they "meet" the wrong people at the beginning, they may adopt behaviours that those noisy and spammy individuals think are ok, without actually being comfortable with them themselves.

Sometimes, you're a douche because you're a douche. Sometimes, you're a douche because you don't know better (yet).

<comment><USER6> I don't see much of it as "douchebag" on Twitter, obviously there's some who are just playing the numbers game etc, but Twitter is obviously also an effective marketing tool.

Using Twitter to make money isn't really the same as being a douchebag. Of course for users at the receiving end, it's irritating, but you can't blame people who have flocked to Twitter to promote and market.

<comment><USER7> or can you ?

I never understood this mentality, how is it ok if it's for promoting/marketing purpose ?

how is making money always ok ?

<comment><USER6> I didn't say it's ok, I'm just saying it's not necessarily 'douchebag' behavior, if Twitter is setup in a way that makes it very attractive for marketing/promotion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I didn't know the details of the reply stuff. That's good to know. I also hope people stop the automatic DM with each follow. That really is annoying.

<comment><USER9> If I follow somebody and they auto-DM me with some canned message, I immediately unfollow them. It really is a douchebag-indicator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The point I liked the best was 6. Don't break the system. I know people loved the see all tweets option, but 97% of us had it turned off for a reason. Adding a character to the front of a tweet (which thankfully seems to be stopping) just inconveniences your followers because you're trying to make a point. I don't appreciate that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Twitter is infested with these "social media experts", aka multi-level marketing assholes. It's quite annoying.</comment>


MakeSpace, A Dropbox For Real Life Storage, Launches In NYC, Raised $1.3M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/26/makespace-a-dropbox-for-real-life-storage-launches-in-new-york-today-having-raised-1-3m/ <comment><USER2> It's a storage company that provides free pick-up and paid drop-off. How is that "Dropbox For Real Life"? Can I "sync" my stuff between multiple apartments?

These "It's like X for Y" comparisons are so frustratingly dumb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I'm Sam the founder of MakeSpace. It's been a long day so my apologies for the delay.

3D printer jokes aside, I had the problem of not remembering where things were in my girlfriend's storage unit. A lot of storage customers have trouble remembering what's in the storage unit in the first place! (The lifetime average $PSA customer is 3 years and 50% of customers > 1 year). So the "access anywhere" analogy to Dropbox is what people (and not just tech people) like to reference when they hear us talk about it.

Also, to your point about "x for y," it works only for a certain type of crowd if both things are well known (and Dave McClure mentions that here: [http://image.slidesharecdn.com/howtopitchavc-090321140851-ph...](http://image.slidesharecdn.com/howtopitchavc-090321140851-phpapp02/95/slide-4-728.jpg?1244822814)). A lot of YC companies do it when they pitch investors because it's a great way to connect quickly _to their audience_. When customers call up my 1-888 number; however, "Dropbox for real life" aren't the first words out of my mouth.

<comment><USER3> > A lot of YC companies do it when they pitch investors because it's a great > way to connect quickly to their audience.

It works really well when there are strong parallels. When the comparison is weak (such as in this case) it can serve s a distraction with the audience spending time dissecting weaknesses in the metaphor.

If your metaphor sets up false expectations, explaining that 'actually, it's not like that' becomes a burden.

<comment><USER4> In support of this viewpoint, I offer an anecdote about the development of our product messaging.

Our product is a software + services reverse auction procurement solution (go, go enterprise market!). When we started out, our sales staff used a metaphor: "like eBay, but in reverse". Our current training instructs sales staff to avoid that metaphor at all cost, because there are more differences than there are similarities.

Your description is concise, and incredibly apt. That metaphor became a burden. Time during a pitch is incredibly valuable, whether it's in front of a VC or a customer. Time spent explaining how your product is _not_ like something else involves a lot of negative language.

It's not like this...

... only it's more like...

You don't want to spend your time on these conversations. That's why we now train staff to avoid the metaphor, and to shut it down immediately if someone introduces it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Pick-ups are free, while deliveries cost $29.

Unlimited upload, paid download. Definitely sounds like these guys were in the tech space before getting into the storage game. It's a good model for them.

And since this is being pitched as a real-life Dropbox, can they "sync" my things between different storage facilities using 3d scanners and printers? ;)

<comment><USER6> Manhattan Mini Storage does free trips to/from your storage unit, you just have to book in advance and fit into a van. It was awesome when I was using them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Manhattan Mini does provide a free storage taxi, which I presume you got into and moved your stuff. We're trying to make it so you don't have to ever visit the storage unit again. So the van got you there, but you're still spending that beautiful saturday inside the concrete storage prison climbing over boxes to find that one thing you're looking for.

Also, from MMS regarding the van: _Keep in mind that the Storage Taxi provides a one-way trip, not a round-trip. For example, if you need to bring more items into storage, you would book the storage taxi to help you get the stuff there; getting home, though, you 'd have to rely on the subway, a cab, your bicycle, or your own two legs to carry you._

This is sucky.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's not the best, but it was good enough for my needs. If I was looking again I'd probably choose your service if you were cost-competitive.

Another place I looked at did storage by the cubic foot, so you'd never see the stuff in storage (and they could presumably save money by packing it better). Seems like that would be a great model for you to use for people who never actually go to their unit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those of you in the Bay Area who want to try this out, Boxbee ([https://boxbee.com/](https://boxbee.com/)) is a similar service that operates in SF. Self-storage is a massive industry ($22B) and if you dig into the numbers they're pretty wild. Best of luck to them!

\- Total self storage rentable space in the US is now 2.3 billion square feet

\- 9% of all American households currently rent a self storage unit

\- 7.3 sq.ft. of self storage space for every person in the US

Source: [http://www.selfstorage.org/ssa/content/navigationmenu/abouts...](http://www.selfstorage.org/ssa/content/navigationmenu/aboutssa/factsheet/)

<comment><USER8> Or in London with [http://www.boxload.co.uk/](http://www.boxload.co.uk/)

Note: I have nothing to do with that company :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I fail to see the use. This has nothing to do with cloud. Cloud is not "store your stuff elsewhere", cloud is "access your stuff from anywhere".

<comment><USER10> Heheh, if I move to Des Moines, and press the 'retrieve' button on the website, will they still deliver for $29?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll ship them to you. But it may _slightly_ more than $29 which is for local delivery

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The phrase "Tech Crunch" brings to mind one of two things: uncritical, breathless pr regurgitation, or a huge hassle."

Onward valiant disruptors...

</comment><comment><USER12> If only we could. I could put one box at home and the other one on my desk. I could call my wife at home and ask her to put an awesome sandwich in the box, and then I could open _my_ box at work and bam, there is my sandwich. Sweet.

But that's not what they did. Where's the "here's to the crazy ones"?

</comment><comment><USER13> The pricing seems a lot more reasonable than I was expecting, at $300/yr + $29 per delivery (pickups are free).

Are there any competitors in this space, or is this a new concept?

<comment><USER14> $6.25 for a 3-cu ft. box (presumably something close to 18" per side) sounds like a really terrible deal.

Put it this way: as long as you let me look inside first to make sure you aren't storing anything that will get me arrested or burn my house down, you're welcome to store four 18" cubes in my garage for $25/month.

<comment><USER15> Will you deliver for $29 too? :)

I agree, it doesn't sound like a good deal, although I don't have experience living in NYC.

For comparison, this wine storage place charges $3.35 per carton, about the same as a 18" cube, and $10 per delivery. [http://www.vinfolio.com/services- storage-overview.jsp](http://www.vinfolio.com/services-storage-overview.jsp)

<comment><USER14> Sure, subject to reasonable limitations on the delivery radius. As long as I can call a cab and have them deliver your box(es) for $29 or less, we've got a deal.

I like the idea a lot, in principle, but the rates amount to robbery. Hopefully some other competitors will disrupt this particular "disruptor" by offering the same service at a more reasonable price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's something of a win here for just not having to deal with the storage facility, at all, yourself.

The contracts for those things are long and confusing, the people I've dealt with there are incompetent, and the one on 12th Ave in Seattle smells like piss pretty much constantly.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thats probably more money than the size of the whole European self-storage industry. I'm really curious, why are these services so popular in the US? What do you store there? When? E.g. when I have something I don't want to get rid of just yet (furniture, spare parts...), I put it in the basement of our apartment house. Although, I can imagine using self-storage when moving.

<comment><USER18> New York apartments can have very little storage space when I was looking for a studio some had one small closet and no bathroom storage at all. People I know use them for out of season sports stuff and clothes, especially couples where two people are sharing one small closet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Recently a storage unit in a luxury building went for $300K. Not kidding.

[http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/new-yorkers-spending-300g-on- st...](http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/new-yorkers-spending-300g-on-storage-in- the-basement-of-luxury-skyscraper/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> All right, so I faced the storage problem during last year. I moved 2 times and I will move a third in March. I am single, live in Europe, I change countries a lot.

I would use this service if it were more flexible. For instance, I have a 20kg inflatable canoe that I carried around from Frankfurt to Munich, from Munich to Bruges and in March from Bruge to Munich. I use the canoe only few times a year. If I could pay few bucks per month to live it somewhere and then ship it with UPS (at good prices), it would be big for me.

More importantly, if I had a place somewhere in Germany, I would buy a foldable canoe. The same with other stuff like furniture and all, all stuff I would have liked to buy but I couldn't as I move so much.

</comment><comment><USER20> "The cost for four bins, each of which occupy about three cubic feet, is $25 per month."

At that price why not just rent a 2nd apartment, it would be cheaper. I can already see next weeks TC headline: "2ndAprtmnt: Hetzner for storage"

</comment><comment><USER21> I am sure they are really taking advantage of single instance storage here. If they get two copies of the same thing there isn't any reason to keep both around.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can I assume the boxes are locked and sealed somehow by the customer before pickup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The boxes have eyelets (for locks or heavy duty zip ties + security tape) and are sealed in front of the customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Free pick up and paid delivery?

That's a good incentive to declutter your life.</comment>


Would you pay for startup marketing software? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an online marketer by trade with lots of experience working with startups. I'm considering making software that would automate a lot of what I do.<p>Would you pay for marketing software in addition to, or instead of, hiring a human marketer? <comment><USER2> One thing that human marketers did for us was to establish a plan for tradeshows, publications, advertisements, and ultimately launches.

My cofounder and I had tension related to whether we should continue to polish or whether we should shove the fledgling application out into the wild. The marketers helped balance that with a roadmap based on trade shows and purchasing scenarios.

It is of course helpful when the marketing firm is very well connected, but we would not have had any concerns if we had one marketing expert with technical leverage.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't mind me asking, how did you find those human markters? It's my impression that startups have a difficult time hiring FTE markters, and so they either go without or hire agencies.

<comment><USER2> We found an 'agency' that was really one guy with _awesome_ connections to designers, trade show staff (so we ended up at least 'Bronze' sponsors to every show with almost no outlay), where to spend money on presence, and a really good sense of ability when it came to young talent.

He projected costs on a monthly basis, and we had the ability to say whether we were OK with the amount or whether we needed him to find lower-cost options.

We were pretty well capitalized (my co-founder and I are old :-)) but we paid between $8k and $25k/month, most of the high-end occurring when we were hitting competitive trade shows for premium placement. Even then, he was smart about finding spaces that were on an arterial aisle leading to refreshments and surrounded either by totally JV firms or large constructs that had a history of understaffing (so we would catch their overflow).

Edit: Just to reinforce my original comment, if we had a tool that could help this guy be superman and trim our costs even further, we would be all over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Probably not, since - as a startup - we don't yet know _how_ we need to market our product(s).

<comment><AUTHOR> But what if the software helped you figure that out?

I'm not talking about current marketing software that mainly automates very specific marketing functions like email, social media, PPC management, etc.

I'm talking more about software that would help you build a marketing strategy road map and track what's working and what's not, and then how to adapt.</comment></comment>


Taxpayers Paid Millions to Design a Low-Cost Ventilator for a Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-to-design-a-low-cost-ventilator-for-a-pandemic-instead-the-company-is-selling-versions-of-it-overseas- <comment><USER2> This is the tip of the iceberg with these sorts of contracts, and many of the issues aren't specific to ventilators or the current pandemic.</comment>


Show HN: WebArcs – Discover and keep up with websites - <AUTHOR> http://webarcs.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here,

The idea is to have one site that can brings you everything you check for into one place but also helps you discover great sites you've never seen before.

Just finished this today so Im super keen for any feedback anyone might have.</comment>


The Unbundling of Ethereum - <AUTHOR> https://multicoin.capital/2019/05/24/the-unbundling-of-ethereum/ <comment><USER2> Software is _not_ "the encoding of human thought." It's the encoding of instructions for a computer. Big difference.

Like everything about ETH, this post relies on far-out fantasy concepts and wildly overblown declarations of success. The most popular dApp of all time is _Cryptokitties._

Solidity is full of conceptual holes and has massive security risks. And Buterin, despite his personal wealth, refuses to hire and pay developers to fix bugs. These problems make ETH entirely unsuitable for financial transactions, a fact borne out by the lack of any real present day use case.

<comment><USER3> > far-out fantasy concepts and wildly overblown declarations of success

Much like the tech industry unicorns then.</comment></comment>


Talk About An Unprofessional LinkedIn Response - <AUTHOR> http://www.406northlane.com/blog/2014/02/talk-about-an-unprofessional-linkedin-response/ <comment><USER2> Much ado about nothing. The individual who was on the receiving end of the LinkedIn request is _right_ , even if her response to the 20-something went overboard.

If she had stopped at "Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky" we wouldn't have even known about it. While that would have been a brusque response, it was still correct.

I _hate_ cold calls, because every single one (for me) involves somebody trying to get something out of me without anything substantive in return. My experience may be atypical, and I acknowledge that not every cold call is like that.

But _this_ one reeks of "let me try to leech onto your network". The 20-something got backhanded, and has run crying to the social mob so that that mean, mean lady will get punished.

Both parties could have handled this better. Unfortunately, the instigator of this whole affair has simply been rewarded for her clumsy and clueless actions by a) getting attention and b) ensuring that the person who hurt her feelings has been tarred and feathered.

<comment><USER3> > Both parties could have handled this better.

Bullshit. Kelly was a complete a-hole and deserves everything she gets. There were 100 different ways to handle this without insults.

I don't even treat telemarketers this rudely.

<comment><USER2> "And deserves everything she gets"

Yes, let's ruin a woman's livelihood over a bloody LinkedIn exchange because _somebody 's feelings were hurt._

<comment> shock-value The only thing that happened to her was that her email (multiple similarly worded emails, in fact) was posted publicly. If that's all it takes to ruin her career than maybe she shouldn't have written the email the way she did.

<comment><USER2> And what was the purpose of posting the email?

To punish and embarrass. Careers _have_ been ruined in such a manner.

<comment> shock-value The point is that posting the email wouldn't have been a punishment if she would have responded in a socially acceptable manner. She brought it on herself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Summary of this tempest:

Girl applies to join a "job bank" email group in Cleveland, in order to find a job. Girl feels like it's also a smart idea to connect with the operator of the email group on LinkedIn.

Operator absolutely eviscerates girl for requesting the LinkedIn connection. Girl spreads operator's rude response around the internet. Operator is now sad, and has apologized.

<comment><USER5> This is not a summary. It's an explanation that lacks a great deal of important context. If you're considering taking this at face value, go read the actual content of this exchange: You'll see very quickly why an apology was warranted, and how incredibly shallow it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> She's clearly serious about this. From her blog:

 __* 6\. LinkedIn. Please do NOT shop through LinkedIn for all the important sounding senior practitioners in town, and ask them to connect. It comes across as bush league, it shows poor judgment, and you are ignoring the fundamental rule of connections – reciprocity. Networking is conducted between individuals who have met or worked with each other, and who can provide equal levels of help to each other. If I would be only the 5th connection you have on LinkedIn, and I'm bringing 800+ connections to the table, what you would get is the ability to harvest my contacts for job leads, and I get – absolutely nothing of use or interest out of accepting your invite.

These types of wishful connection requests come across as self-serving and tacky. Of course, if you've been an intern for someone, please ask them to connect. Every professional I know bends over backwards to help their interns, give them recommendations, etc. However, if the only way you met a business leader was because they came to class to speak, please hold off on the presumptuous urge to ask them to connect with you. Right now, your LinkedIn connections should be classmates, professors and the people you worked for at internships or part-time jobs. ___

<comment><USER7> It's just linkedin, don't take it so seriously. It's just a website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As much as Blazek acted completely out of line, I applaud her for making a real apology:

"I sincerely apologize for the harsh words and unprofessional, unwarranted actions in my response to you... I should have lent a hand, as well as hope, and I failed at that. You and many others, both strangers and colleagues, have reminded me that my personal journey in humility and gentleness is far from complete. I wish you all the best in your job search. Respectfully, Kelly Blazek," [0]

It's not one of those lame "I'm sorry if you were offended" or "I used the wrong choice of words" non-apologies, which are all too common these days.

[0] [http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2014/02/kelly_bl...](http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2014/02/kelly_blazek_restarts_her_job_bank_twitter_account_with_an_apology_and_the_hashtag_letcitydown.html)

<comment><USER9> Almost. I hate any variant of the phrasing "I apologize." It still serves to distance yourself from the apology. An _apology_ is a thing. You can say that another person _apologizes_. But "I apologize" is not, in itself, an apology. An apology is saying "I am sorry."

The reason I care is that I think it takes more humility to say the simple words "I am sorry" than "I apologize." Saying "I am sorry" is an admission of feeling. Saying "I apologize" is trying to narrate at event that did not actually happen.

<comment><USER8> I think you're taking the words too literally. Colloquially they mean pretty much the same thing, though "I apologize" has a more formal tone.

<comment><USER9> They mean the same thing colloquially because people are uncomfortable saying the words "I'm sorry." They want the formality to separate themselves from the awkwardness and frankness of admitting an emotional state.

<comment><USER10> #nitpick

<comment><USER9> Yes. I am particular when it comes to sincerity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel bad for this lady: [http://i.imgur.com/reEDRLx.png](http://i.imgur.com/reEDRLx.png)

<comment><USER12> Anyone who has an MBA and puts it in their title is asking for it. I mean really, who does that? Not anyone with an MBA from anywhere worthwhile...

<comment><USER5> That's phenomenally backwards...

<comment><USER12> Not really; if you got your MBA at a good school you learn that putting "MBA" in your title is a low-class thing to do. In most of the business world, everyone just expects you have one and will look up your LinkedIn profile to see where you went if they care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Link is down, cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:75RHpg6...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:75RHpg6MOnYJ:www.406northlane.com/blog/2014/02/talk- about-an-unprofessional-linkedin-response/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER14> _> "...if I shared my 960+ LinkedIn connections with you - a total stranger who has nothing to offer me."_

It never occurred to me that someone could have so much self-worth tied up in their LinkedIn connection list.

Funny thing is, it's actually reassuring that this is notable enough to go viral and universally decried.

Just swap jobseeking for technology help, 960 connections for 27,000 posts and you're looking at one of millions of noob scorchings that have been taking place since BBS. Being smug, needlessly nasty and aggressively dismissive isn't just ignored in these circles - it's often applauded.

<comment><USER2> _Funny thing is, it 's actually reassuring that this is notable enough to go viral and universally decried._

I believe the opposite.

Before online social networking trivialized human relationships, rude behavior in a private exchange would have resulted in the recipient of the rudeness evaluating the other as an a-hole and might share the story with a few friends.

Now it's a front-page story. It is a perfect example of how thin-skinned and polarized our society has become.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So... people actually use linkedin? I was under the assumption, after years and years of emails from linkedin, that it's really just a crowd-sourced spam generator. Is that not the case? mind.blown(<really big number>)

<comment><USER16> Um, yeah... LinkedIn is an amazingly useful tool in many ways. Yes, being on there can result in the occasional incoming spam message, but a lot of us find the value far outweighs that minor detriment.

<comment><USER17> _Occasional_ spam message? I have yet to get a linked-in notification that's not spam. "Hi, I noticed you ask to connect to people who you've worked with before, but I'm a recruiter so I don't give a shit."

<comment><USER16> I don't know what to tell you. All I can say is that for me, the benefits outweigh the negatives. But then again, maybe I care less about spam than a lot of people, as I lean pretty heavily towards the "no big deal, it's easy enough to ignore" worldview. Or maybe it's just normalized pain, who knows? I just know I wouldn't quit LinkedIn over spam messages, at least not as things stand today. _shrug_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one who never heard of a job bank before?

<comment><USER19> I've never heard of one either, but it sounds like someone needs to start a competing one in that town...

<comment><USER20> Looks like someone just did:

[https://twitter.com/OtherNEOJobBank](https://twitter.com/OtherNEOJobBank)

So far, it appears to be just a Twitter account that shares local job listings, but perhaps they are working on a formal email list and website too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like a "senior professional" is taking LinkedIn a little too seriously...

</comment><comment><USER20> I've always taken an approach of "always be respectful to everyone" \- not just to be a kind person, but also because you never know when someone may reciprocate that kindness.

In some cases, mere acquaintances have turned around to introduce me to job candidates, customers, business partners, etc.

This approach works in the social world too, in terms of dating ;-)

</comment><comment><USER22> The excessiveness of the response suggests that the writer has some kind of mental health issues. If you're in the "help people get jobs" business, this is exactly the type of connection that you should want.

</comment><comment><USER23> Typical Millennial response. You hurt my feelings so I'm going to shame you on social media!

Good luck to anyone willing to step in the legal & PR minefield of employing this girl.

<comment><USER24> > Typical Millennial response. You hurt my feelings so I'm going to shame you > on social media!

I'm not sure you understand how shame or social mediaworks. You can't shame someone unless they've actually done something shameful. Things don't go viral unless there is something there.

<comment><USER23> Not sure how a rude LinkedIn message qualifies as "shameful," but a deluge of nasty anonymous messages is surely a proportionate response!

<comment><USER24> You are the one that brought up shame. I'm not sure how you know that the anonymous messages are from the millennial. If anyone is sending the anon messages, it's probably not the young girl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow. I'm "Senior Level" and I absolutely love speaking with people who are interested in entering my field. I even teach classes and hold relevant meetups.

I expected the comments about her reply to be exaggerated, but they aren't. At all. That was absolutely disgusting to read.

</comment><comment><USER26> Link is down - here's to file: [http://imgur.com/gallery/71sQ92K](http://imgur.com/gallery/71sQ92K)</comment>


For Many, a Grad-School Stint Doesn't Pay Off in Job Market - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704699604575342751927334436.html <comment><USER2> While not extremely glaring, this is just another hint of the education bubble waiting to burst in years to come.

[http://chronicle.com/article/Will-Higher-Education-Be- the/44...](http://chronicle.com/article/Will-Higher-Education-Be-the/44400)

<comment><USER3> Is it? The argument around an 'education bubble' seems to be more around two things:

1) Students racking up enormous debt in esoteric disciplines that don't directly translate to jobs. 2) An absolute deluge of students in certain fields (like 'marketing') from thousands of universities that effectively drag everyone down to the mean. Since a degree is so common it ceases to be a unique differentiator...making it worthless. The 'bubble' here is in the perception of utility for degrees meaning kids will abandon college for other paths.

Here we have a MIT grad in a hugely in-demand field that can't (or won't) find a job. My hunch is that she actually can find a job, she just lacks the qualifications that she thinks she has. She probably needs to take a lower- responsibility job and actually build those skills... that doesn't mean her degree isn't a great investment (it probably is), it just means she's approaching this from a very unrealistic perspective.

<comment><USER2> I agree that a lot of this is her being unrealistic / overachieving / etc., but I think we're going to see a lot more of this to come.

More telling though is the fact that they framed it in education bubble terms, not as much recession terms, which perhaps shows the media's ethos to be friendly to the concept - at least the WSJ.

<comment><USER4> Here in DC my fellow alumns are having some difficulty finding jobs, and they are ready to work just about anywhere. They eventually get sucked up into the big consulting firms though. They will do well enough in 10 years' time.

I think the biggest problem has been for international folks who can't get anyone to sponsor their visas except for, say, the World Bank, which is all too familiar with the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even MIT grads are having trouble? That surprises me. There seems to be a lot of work for web coding monkeys. Are people just being stupidly pedantic about requiring X+ years of experience in random trivial technology Y?

<comment><USER6> For the MIT graduates, it's not as much "finding a job" as "finding a job that they will take." Their standards are pretty high and in some markets, the downward expectations-adjustment process takes some time.

Also, as an MIT graduate myself, I can say that there are people who have Master's in Engineering in Computer Science and can't even be a code monkey.

<comment><USER5> Way to shatter my illusions! I thought you were all lisp gurus that could code an NLP processor in 10 lines of code.

I suppose I'd have pretty high job expectations with a master's from MIT too but I'd still rather be working than unemployed.

<comment><USER7> It's a bit of a dirty secret, but at a lot of top schools with reputations for brilliant students, it's not always true of masters students, at least to the same degree. Undergrads and PhDs, yes, but schools often seem to see masters students as cash cows, because more of then pay full tuition (there aren't the same financial aid packages as for undergrad, or RA/TA stipends as for PhD students).

Though this doesn't relate to the situation in the linked article, which is someone who got both a bachelor's and masters from MIT.

<comment><USER8> afaik, MIT EECS does not have a 'cash cow' master's-only degree program. in order to do a terminal Master of Engineering (MEng) degree in EECS, you must have been an undergrad there as well. the only way to get a terminal MS from MIT EECS without having been an undergrad there is to be admitted into the Ph.D. program and then drop out after 2 years.

however, the practice of having a 'cash cow' master's-only program is fairly common amongst many other US universities

<comment><USER9> When I was there, this was true, and probably still is. I did an MIT EECS MEng and I'll be honest with you: its probably not worth it if you dont land a TAship or RAship that covers all costs.

Getting into the MEng program is not done by application and decision, its purely 'decided' by your ugrad GPA. The theses dont have any sort of committee, just your advisor signing off. Many advisors cant/wont pay for your tuition unless you are the Bomb so the key is if you can get a TAship, just keep doing that. 1.5 to 2 years later, write a 40 page LaTeX paper about something and you get an MEng

Personally, I did it because you get to polish off your ugrad degree with a bunch of fantastic grad classes and if you play it right, the whole thing is free and comes with a stipend. its a bit more education and lets you stick around but I wouldn't say its thought of as a way to boost income or job status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Data point: In 1999, I was making $60k doing entry-level sysadmin work at a major pharma. Now it's 2010, and I have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in cognitive neuroscience, and I'm making ... $60k again. (I like my job a whole lot better though.)

</comment><comment><USER11> The nice part about Canada is we have federally sponsored jobs programs in the IT sector exclusively for those with degrees so they don't face competition from those with out higher education.

<comment><USER3> How is that a nice thing? Why shouldn't you have to compete on fair and level ground with folks just because you have a piece of paper?

*note: I don't have a degree.

<comment><USER11> It was meant to be sarcastic. I don't have a degree either. It's especially ridiculous when you consider the public resources that go into providing higher education.

<comment><USER3> That flew right over my head:)

<comment><USER12> Judging from the upvotes, I'd say it flew over everyone's heads ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not everything is about how much extra x% wage you can pull by going to grad school. I'll admit that that was my thinking when I initially decided to do a masters but in my second year now, I realise the incredible amount of knowledge and experience I gained. After undergrad I thought I could take on the world. I was actually surprised that I couldn't get a job at the all the cool high-tech companies. Only now do I realise how dumb I was. Only now can I safely say that I can do the job that is required.

<comment><USER14> > After undergrad I thought I could take on the world … Only now can I safely > say that I can do the job that is required.

Given that history, would it not be wise to complete a PhD to make sure you're not having the same mistaken thought once more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The more I read about grad school the more I can see that it's not something you want to do in the hope of landing a better paying job when you get out.

As people have mentioned to the sense of entitlement of a masters graduate from a top uni are probably keeping them out of the job market to. Unless the narrow field you researched is exactly what your applying to do at a company experience is probably going to look better.

</comment><comment><USER16> Education system should ideally create employers and not employees.

<comment><USER17> Why is that? Would you like to run a company that employed mostly uneducated people? More over, would you like to be part of an economy where most available goods/services were the product of unskilled labor? What about shopping around amongst an appalling number of undifferentiated providers?

The "we educate entrepreneurs" is an abdication of the higher education establishment's mission. It profits by producing a bunch of graduates without regards for the needs of society. This includes not only the contents of the curriculum, but the yearly amount of graduates as well. It is a bubble in the making, or so it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wondering why Govt is not offering software development services for small businesses?

</comment><comment><USER18> Somehow I read the title as Grade-School Stint.</comment>


ThePirateBay.org is making users mine Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-PIRATE-BAY-OFFICIAL-SITE-MINER <comment><USER2> A friend of mine has written a very popular open-source JavaScript library and has been hosting a copy on his website. Turns out that a few high-volume news sites have started using the library, but instead of downloading a copy and serving it themselves, they've been hotlinking the one on his website.

As a result he is getting several million hits a day on his library's js file, directly from these website's pages.

We've been tempted to include a JavaScript miner in the library he is hosting, but we're unsure of the legal implications, i.e. would the fact that he's hosting the file on _his_ website and that the other websites have simply hotlinked it, be a valid defense?

<comment><USER3> I did an experiment like this in 2011 on one of my websites. The sites was free to use for the end users but had a few ads (between 0 and up to 3 depending on the pages and sections).

I wanted to see if I could replace the ads with a bitcoins miner and get enough revenues to continue operating the service. FYI I was making about 900€ per month at the moment.

So I installed a JavaScript miner, removed the ads and waited. The result I got was unexpected: Avast Antivirus (very popular among my visitors) flagged the site and blocked it's access. I immediatly lost about hald of the traffic. I tried with a few other opensource miners and the sentence was the same every times: users locked out by zealous anti-virus and traffic cut off by (at least) half.

<comment><USER4> Zealous antivirus? More like good antivirus...

<comment><USER3> Why do you think that? Compared to ads that are heavy on the user's network and CPU, track them, get them tons of unwated spams and other shaddy stuffs; why do you think giving some CPU power for a background miner is any worst?

When I did the experiment I thought it was a good deal for users.

<comment><USER4> If you can't see the difference between showing an ad and mining bitcoin using your visitors' computers without their knowledge, you deserved to lose half your visitors.

<comment><USER3> Who said it was without their knowledge? It was clearly stated in my TOS and I even sent a newsletter about it.

Also I had a (sort of) premium plan that allowed to pay a small fee (2€/month to remove the ads and get some extra featues. When I made the BTC mining experiment they still had the option to choose between the free plan (BTC mining) or paying 2€ to get it removed.

<comment><USER5> Hiding something in things you know people don't read doesn't mean it's suddenly an 'OK' thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

What if this was legal? It could be an alternative way to pay for website costs. We get rid of ads and replace it with a client side miner.

<comment> aaron-lebo This discussion comes up every once in awhile. It's horribly inefficient.

Six years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365)

 _Additionally, does this automatically hook in to slush 's pool or something? Bitcoin mining is practically useless on CPU; even the fastest CPUs out get way, way less than 10mhash. The average length of time to find a block at 9999khash and current difficulty is 1200+ days, so even that estimate is over- optimistic, so this isn't worth anything if your users don't sit on your site for 5 years+, unless it's hooked into a pool or some other contraption to pay on shares instead of blocks._

It hasn't gotten better.

<comment><USER7> This isn't bitcoin. The mining is completely different.

<comment> aaron-lebo You're right.

 _Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs.

There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser. _

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Use uMatrix from gorhill: [https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix)

to block all third party connections unless required. It will stop the coin- hive mining script.

<comment><USER9> Lol, now that is a cranky maintainer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found the Proof of Work Captcha on Coinhive's signup page to be quite interesting:

[https://coin-hive.com/account/signup](https://coin-hive.com/account/signup)

[https://coin-hive.com/info/captcha-help](https://coin-hive.com/info/captcha- help)

I'm not super familiar with the inner workings of the world of spam protection, but I'm curious if people think increasing the cost of spamming through extra workload for the machine as opposed to the human in this manner would be helpful to deter spammers in general? Seems like the lack of a human intervention requirement means that the spamming workflow can still be automated, but maybe the extra workload could cut into profits/throughput enough to make the site an unattractive target?

The other aspect of a solution like this where you can potentially recoup part of the damage done by spamming through their contribution to your mining operation, so you say hire a human moderator, is super interesting as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> I know people will say this is inefficient, but based on the current climate I think this may have potential if:

1\. The service provider (Coinhive) used not just BTC but all kinds of cryptocurrency

2\. they make sure they switch over to the most lucrative cryptocurrency at the moment in realtime

3\. makes sure the user (In this case thepiratebay) can cash out immediately, as in every day.

In this case, mining as a business model may make sense. I think it's impressive that they built something like this to begin with.

<comment> aaron-lebo BTC isn't made to be mined on consumer machines and it hasn't been profitable for like 6-7 years. You are basically heating the planet for nothing.

Unless the person has a decent GPU and the currency supports that, it's still worthless, but it's a lot of trouble (and disrespectful to unaware users). But you're talking about a business plan that relies on new, worthless, speculative currencies to come and go for the next decade. Does anyone benefit from that? Does that sound stable?

<comment><USER11> That's why i said there should be a way to cash out immediately.

Of course if you were actually to do something like this, it will require a lot of thought, and I personally won't touch anything like this because I don't believe in junk currencies and would rather spend my time working on something meaningful.

But I think the idea itself is interesting and worth thinking about instead of just discounting it as "not efficient".

<comment><USER7> It is well thought out. Today, bitcoin is mined on ASICs. GPUs and CPUs do not provide enough processing power, since they are not efficient at this algorithm in comparison to ASICs that are purpose made for this algorithm.

<comment><USER11> This brings us back to my point 1 and 2. I don't know why people keep telling me about Bitcoin when the whole point of my comment was about non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin mining is not economical anymore for minor miners, which is why we have mining pools, but there are other cryptocurencies that are just starting out and need miners. Not sure if you're aware but everytime a new promising altcoin starts out GPU mining __does __work for a bit in the early days. And then it doesn 't.

My point was if you could identify these promising altcoins during the early stages it may make sense. I said nothing about using Bitcoin to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It appears that it is Monero, not BTC.

<comment><USER13> Mining monero would make much more sense than BTC. (Apparently monero mining uses alot of memory and so can't easily be ASIC-ed.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminder that if anyone's too lazy (or too paranoid) to download an extension that disables Javascript, you can do so manually via about:config in Firefox by toggling the "javascript.enabled" preference.

</comment><comment><USER15> Of course you can block coinhive.min.js with your ad blocker to avoid this. Or just use NoScript.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have been doing some back envelope calculation on this. Using the formula on the coin hive website and the current difficulty. At an average of 60 h/s per user you need 2k users to run the miner for 24hrs straight * 30 days to get any where near the 60 XMR promised in the example.

That is not to say the example is incorrect. Rather the difficulty in Monero has doubled in last month alone. In that case those 2k users needed to run this miner for 12 hours.

Tthe average increase in the difficulty on Monero is also surprising. Chart here: [https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/monero- difficulty...](https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/monero-difficulty- chart)

It seems the spike in last month has been huge. All thanks to this miner?

</comment><comment><USER16> This would make a good selling point for freelance website developer. "Make people come to website, to pay bills"

</comment><comment><USER17> I won't begin to pretend that I'm a lawyer, but ESEA was fined $1MM for this not too long ago: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_fine/)

<comment><USER18> Something tells me TPB won't be deterred by fines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This must be some incompetent developer who didn't even added the script tag.

</comment><comment><USER20> > _DO "THEY" REALLY SAY: "TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS IS SLOWING DOWN"?_

Why is computer memory getting more expensive? DDR4 is now almost twice more expensive compared to 2016...

<comment><USER21> Because supply availability has decreased as it always does when there are major purchase orders made by everyone from Samsung to Apple.</comment></comment>


Minimum Viable Personality (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2011/09/minimum-viable-personality/ <comment><USER2> I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values.

However lately, I've felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements. For people as individuals and as groups.

I guess of course that I'm especially thinking about our politics and social emphases these days. And maybe it's just gotten slightly worse that you notice it, fueled by Instagram and sound bite technology. Maybe even the way we market products and companies (come for the values!) contributes to our political discourse.

Think about any movement out there at present -- MeToo, conservative agenda, liberal agenda, organic produce, gentrification, almost any major movement. If you really get into the issue, you find that the symbol of the thing is actually a very, very small almost non-representative case of the situation as a whole.

Immigrants are not invading in hordes. Men at work are not harassing every female employee. People are not trying to kick out elderly widows to turn the block into a shopping mall. They're all symbols of the most extreme cases, and we latch on to them because they're recognizable, inflammatory, and get us riled up to want to do something. As always the rare, incredible threat dominates our minds so much more than the mundane everyday threat.

But sometimes I think, a society needs to think about the whole and not the extreme cases. And give up being obsessed with achieving symbolic victory, and instead actual (minor, boring, incremental) achievements for the whole. That's much harder to get people inflamed to vote for.

The current climate is why we got tax breaks for a couple of billionaires at the expense of millions of people with mortgages. It's a symbol of someday when I'll be a millionaire! (Never going to happen, on average) . When did you last thank the policymaker who came up with the mortgage deduction, something that you take advantage of every day?

Your shoe is not going to make you a star athlete. An immigrant is not knocking on the door to take your job -- that was decided decades ago. For every policy you put in place to protect the imaginary elderly widow, you make it harder for 10 young people to have an affordable place to live.

Stop believing so much in symbols.

<comment><USER3> MeToo is an interesting example.

I suspect that Facebook and Twitter have their own linear algebra models of who is interested in what, and that factors into their choices of what content from your friends makes it into your stream.

After the wave of MeToo posts on Facebook and Twitter had died down, I asked my friends on Facebook to characterize how many MeToo posts they'd seen. Liberals reported seeing far more MeToo posts than conservatives did.

Something I didn't ask about, but have seen after the fact, is that conservatives and liberals seem to have a totally different idea of what MeToo is about. Algorithmic balkanization may have contributed to these differing ideas, and cordoned most of the MeToo-related activity in a liberal cluster of the social graph.

I saw a lot of personal stories of harassment and abuse from my friends. The sheer volume of them was undeniable. I could never say, given the experiences my friends reported, that it was mostly symbolic. Those experiences were very much concrete. It is possible that my particular subset of the social graph is disproportionately affected by sexual harassment and assault, which would affect the validity of any conclusions about the broader society I might draw from what I saw. But, for the subset of the social graph I observed, there is simply no way to call it symbolic.

<comment><USER4> I would say it is both a mostly symbolic movement and a collection of real personal stories that most people know a victim that is either have a friend or friend to a friend.

Lets imagine we had a movement like metoo here in Europe talking about violence from immigrants. You would get thousands of personal stories documenting people being robbed, beaten, threatened, raped or target of other forms of crime. The people behind the movement would highlight the over representation that those immigrants have in the crime statistics, and the crimes would be very concrete. What would the conclusions be drawn about the initiative by the broader society? I predict that the difference between conservatives and liberals would be a mirror image of the same difference conservatives and liberals has over metoo.

<comment><USER3> I would be very surprised if these situations would be mirrors of one another. The way MeToo played out in my social media, I never saw friend A sharing an experience that friend-of-friend B posted. Rather, friend A shared their direct experience. Re-shared stories would have no doubt caused an inflated sense of actual prevalence... but that's simply not what I observed.

I have many friends that reported their own direct experiences with sexual harassment and assault. I would actually be pretty shocked if anything like that number had directly experienced violence from immigrants.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. I have the opposite experience with no friends talking about sexual harassment but several who are victim of crimes committed by immigrants.

It make some sense however given that data here in Sweden. 6% of people are victim of either sexual assault or harassment and around 6% of people are victim of either assault or robbery. Sexual assault has mostly female victims and assault and robbery has mostly male victims.

And the blame towards immigrants shows up clear in the data. Immigrants in Sweden are 400% over represented for assault and robbery and almost 500% in regard to sexual assault. For those cities which has a very high proportion of immigrants this translate to directly to a lot of people being victims of crime committed by immigrants.

The data is what the data is. We can discuss different interpretation of it, but the general point is that movement like MeToo is not about informing the public about crime statistics. It is a symbol by one political side about an issue they find important, which they highlight through the use of mass reports of personal experiences. The right could do the exact same thing, and I remember a few times they tried and failed to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I disagree that the world is full of products that work, and that most people want more "interesting" products.

Maybe at a certain age when one is full of naivety, that is true. But at this point, I prefer products that are stable and work well, even if they are a bit "boring". This is not limited to tech: no amount of marketing is going to convince to prefer a thoughtless but glitzy cafe than a cozy one where I am made to feel comfortable through attention to detail.

I suspect I am like most people who have more than a certain level of experience in life, but maybe I may be wrong. The more I consume various products, the more I realise just how horribly bad most products are: insurance that barely works, software that is insecure, etc.

<comment><USER6> You're just not in the market for every single emotional appeal (nobody is) and you probably have somewhat of an "outsider" or "underdog" preference.

Different emotional appeals still work on you and are being exploited without you knowing. For example:

> ...a cozy one where I am made to feel comfortable through attention to > detail

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are we doing to ourselves?

If you were in the market for a new pair of shoes, what would be the sensible thing to do to get the best pair? Would you look at the glitzy ads, or would you try to choose something that is durable and comfortable for its price? Would you compare celebrity endorsements or spec sheets?

There's no one in their right mind who would say the right way to buy a computer is to look at advertisements. The right thing to do is compare specs and functionality.

This is good advice for how to make money. But bear in mind that, if you try to build a personality for your company, you are choosing something for your customers that you would never choose for yourself.

<comment><USER8> Hardly anyone is capable of drawing meaningful conclusions from comparing specs and functionality between computers. Advertisements are the way the vast majority of people understand what products can do. There's a reason iPhone commercials focus exclusively on some single, insignificant functionality like a facial recognition emoji generator.

<comment><USER9> Ironic that we've made it to that place, given that one of the huge differentiators in the early generations of iPhone was how it was advertised. The carrier ads flogging alternatives showed 3D models of the devices whizzing around the screen (the emotional play), while Apple's iPhone advertising actually showed the UI; they showed what it looked like to use it and showed it being used to do something useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think that by "personality" he means "story".

Like, a cool story that you can somehow attach to the product. So when people see the product they also think the story.

And then they think, "woah, what a great product!". (But what they really mean is "woah, what a great story!")

I see this in the art scene. It's like the art-piece isn't enough for people. They want an artist's statement. A philosophy. Who made it, why did they make it, where did they make it. Tell me the 20-chapter story of your heroic struggle from ugliness to beauty...

(Personally, I think what's going on here is either dim art or blind people. Either of which will produce a failure to make that connection)

Which is to say, it's like people don't care what they see, hear, smell etc. What they care about is what they think. It's all about the story.

And that certainly says something about people and how they interact with reality.

<comment><USER11> Without cultural context, you might as well be looking at a mysterious ancient artifact from a lost civilization, or maybe procedurally generated random content from a video game.

It's nice when you can get the joke without it having to be explained to you, but that just means you share enough culture to get it, where a foreigner wouldn't. It doesn't mean you're smarter, it means you happened to have the education needed.

<comment><USER10> The thing here is, there is no joke. There is no associated story or explanation necessary for appreciating the artwork. The artwork contains the whole of what the artist intends to deliver.

We've got this weird situation where people can't just look with their eyes and hear with their ears. For them it's all about thinking. They want something to think about. They want a story/joke/explanation. For them the action is all in their head.

<comment><USER11> It's almost never self-contained. At the most basic level, if you don't know the language, writing is just meaningless scribbles. Scales and chords have no particular meaning by themselves. Associating a major scale with happiness and minor with sadness is something you learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sort of ties in nicely to the "WOKE BRANDS" video[1] that came out recently from H. Bomberguy. It's a bit lengthy but it goes into a very poignant discussion of the problematic underpinnings of brands adopting a particular aspect of a "personality", namely a hypocritical social conscience.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg)

</comment><comment><USER13> I like how the author used Minimum Viable Words to convey his point.

</comment><comment><USER14> Aww, I hoped for a talk about presenting the minimal needed personality as an introverted coworker to his team.

<comment><USER15> That's both easy and hard.

It's not that extroverts are magically better than a neurotypical introvert, but rather that extroverts have had more practice. The irony is that I can see an introvert be quite extroverted during a D&D session, because it's a place they have practiced their social skills.

For neurotypical people, I don't believe in extroverts versus introverts per se, but rather practiced with a social group versus unpracticed.

For most people, authenticity and vulnerability is the way to go. I am a goofball, and I present as such. I've brought juggling balls to standup (and also juggled remotely) and people smile. (I'm not a great juggler.) My coworkers know that I don't watch much TV or movies because I don't like them, so they can do all the spoilers without worrying about me.

When showing your personality, it's about what to hold back rather than presenting something that isn't part of you. (For example, if your personality involves illegal activities, that shouldn't show up at work.) Personality should never be about presenting something you're not. Be you to everyone, just not _all_ of you.

But don't try to be something that is _not_ you.

Fortunately, the rest is just observation and practice.

<comment><USER16> I worry about this framing, because it suggests that what I (and many other people who I have spoken to) experience, is somehow atypical. I have no objection to talking to people, and I have groups of friends who I like talking to and engage with well.

They're going out this evening and I'm not. Why? It's not because I don't like them, or because I don't "gel" with them - it's because it's the end of the week, and social interaction is a tiring event for me. I find it nearly impossible to concentrate on other people or what they are saying, and it only becomes more difficult over time.

It's not about practice.

To address your comment on D&D, the reason introverted people are more engaged and outspoken during a game is because that is what the game demands. If you were to ask such a person, they would say it is fun, of course, but tiring - and I know that because I am much the same way when I play D&D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This short talk by Steve Jobs communicates the same idea in a far more eloquent manner, IMO.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNYbcqyyj68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNYbcqyyj68)

Edit: (long) transcript with minor edits by me:

To me….marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is! And so, we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.

The way to [build a great brand] is not to talk about speeds and fees. It's not to talk about bits and mega-hertz. It's not to talk about why we are better than Windows.

The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. It's a lie, but they tried anyway. And the sales were falling. And then they tried "Got milk" and the sales went up. "Got milk" wasn't even talking about the product. In fact, it focuses on the absence of the product.

But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes!!!

And yet, when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don't ever talk about the product. They don't ever tell you about their air soles and why they are better than Reebok's air soles.

What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics. That's who they are, that's what they are about!

Apple spends a fortune on advertising — you'd never know it….you'd never know it! So…when I got here, Apple just fired their agency and there was a competition with 23 agencies that…you know…four years from now we would pick one. And we blew that up and we hired Chiat\Day, the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago and created some award winning work including the commercial voted the best ad ever made, 1984 (by Advertising Professionals).

And…we started working about eight weeks ago, and the question we asked was, "Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for…where do we fit in this world?"

And what we're about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done — although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody, in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that! Apple at the core…its core value — is that, we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That's what we believe!

And we have had the opportunity to work with people like that. We've had the opportunity to work with people like you; with software developers, with customers, who have done it. In some big, and some small ways.

And we believe that, in this world, people can change it for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do!

And so, what we're going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in several years, is to get back to that core value!

A lot of things have changed. The market is in a total different place than where it was a decade ago. And Apple is totally different — and Apple's place in it is totally different. And believe me, the products, and the distribution strategy, and the manufacturing are totally different…and we understand that.

But values and core values — those things shouldn't change. The things that Apple believed in at its core, are the same things Apple really stands for today.

<comment><USER18> Ironically, the shoes that Steve Jobs wore along with his trademark jeans and black sweater were New Balance.

<comment><USER19> Steve Jobs wasn't an athlete nor did he aspire to be one. He was smart enough to know there are millions who do have those aspirations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As markets get more crowded and people's attention span shorter it really helps to think more about branding and positioning.

Interesting read: Positioning, the battle for your mind

</comment><comment><USER20> For more on human irrationality in product choice you can try the documentary 'Century of the self' by Adam Curtis. You can find it on youtube.

</comment><comment><USER21> I absolutely thought this would be an article on building just enough pesonality in user interfaces. I still think that would make an awesome article.

</comment><comment><USER22> That giant robot dinosaur absolutely nailed it!

</comment><comment><USER23> Would really love to hear people's perspectives and experiences with this.</comment>


How we used Rails & Backbone.js to build a lightning-fast webapp. - <AUTHOR> http://adrianpike.tumblr.com/post/25812863078/how-we-used-rails-backbone-js-to-build-a

<comment><USER2> Awesome to see you guys utilizing a few different technologies to their strengths and not going the "silver bullet" route.

Regarding your "Update resource B when A changes" situation you can use Backbone's callback hash

      var self = this;
      this.save(null, {
        success: function(model, response){
          self.trigger('updateResourceB', response);
        },
        error: function(model, response){
          //Error handling
        });

saving Resource A to fire an event that Resource B can listen to and perform a fetch to get back in sync.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually what we're doing right now.

Resource B doesn't always require an update though, and we'd like to be able to pass back to the client some better information on whether or not that needs to happen. Unfortunately, I haven't had a brilliant epiphany yet how to do that without adding some virtual attributes or something similar to the JSON representation of Resource A that gets passed back.

Thanks for the kind words on our choice of a bunch of technologies - it's most appreciated. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great story and congrats on the progress thus far! I have been building an application using a very similar Backbone+Rails stack, and your decision making at the top of the article matches up almost identically with mine.

One thing I'm curious about is the performance aspect. When you say "lightening fast", I assume you're talking about the front-end user experience, since persistence to the server is performed asynchronously? The one major problem I've had with using Rails as my JSON API provider has been the performance of rendering the JSON itself. Many of my API calls return a fairly large amount of nested JSON, and the request times are far from ideal.

As you mention you are placing additional data into the results for some API calls, so I guess you might have encountered this yourself.

What, may I ask, are you using to render the JSON from Rails? I'm using JBuilder at the moment, which as it turns out has some performance issues: <https://github.com/rails/jbuilder/issues/45>

</comment><comment><USER4> I would love to read about how you handled the "modular code" problem. I'm using Backbone and I find that there are many questions that are left for the developers to answer. With no conventions, every app starts doing things their own way, so even if I know Backbone, it might still be hard to work on someone else's code. Questions are: Where do we fetch data, in the view or in the controller? Do we keep a central "repository" of data for the whole app to use, or each widget maintains its own data? On page (re)load, do we favor one large call to the API or many small ones? How do we structure code in the filesystem? How do we handle authorization (ex. hiding links or entire modules from certain users)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Painful truth time: We haven't. :(

It's still ugly in there, and while we've been making pretty decent strides (heyo!), it's not where I'd like it yet. To answer some of your specific questions/comments though:

\- We're fetching data in the views. We don't really use the Backbone router/controller concept that heavily.

\- For data, we're exposing everything through a REST-like API exposed from our Rails app. It's not versioned yet, but we'll be versioning it in the future. Every Backbone model is responsible for just its own data - collections are responsible for any extra data that might not belong on a specific model. Things like client-calculated values, etc.

\- On reload, since we're shoving it out from our Rails app, we're pre-seeding with some data, but then it fires off a bunch more requests. I don't feel super strongly that this is the right way, we'll probably experiment with other options soon.

\- We've got views/ and models/, and the structure's pretty flat inside. It runs through the Rails pipeline to minify and make a single file, which as of now isn't CDN'ed.

\- We're not incredibly worried about secrecy for things that aren't enabled and that users can't see, since our main value prop is still server-side and under our control. We've got a global User object that we're populating with flags for what they can & can't see, and their user limitations.

Hope this helped, or if not, at least gave you some stuff to think about. If you want to chat Backbone sometime, drop me a line!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback!

Up until recently, I was a one-man dev "team", so I didn't get a chance to discuss these topics while developing our app, and I just went with what seemed right. I'll be thinking about your ideas moving forward. I especially like the bit about the global User object with flags! (In hindsight, it seems almost obvious there should be one!)

This fact that every team ends up doing things their own way, and many times re-inventing the wheel, is the reason why architectures like Marionette and Aura have appeared. Also coming from Rails, I prefer using a framework that helps with these decisions up front, so I'm seriously considering moving to, for example, Ember.js (which was still called SproutCore 2 when I started developing...). Interesting times ahead though,.. with so much exploration going on in the Single Page App "arena", it's really hard to tell how things will end up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hello, guys. For the sake of curiosity, why do you not use Websockets?</comment>


Ask HN: What tool do you use for personal bookkeeping? - <AUTHOR>

I had a customized MS Excel spreadsheet back in the days, my roommate would use Microsoft Money, then I tried Quicken, now I see there are many interesting apps out there to keep track of your expenses.<p>What do you use? What do you recommend? <comment><USER2> For keeping track of signups/revenue/expenses/profit on a daily/monthly basis, I use custom widgets on a GeckoBoard status board. They poll a handful of scripts that combine some SQL queries into various products' customer/payment databases, with arrays of fixed expenses and some formulas to estimate variable ones like payment transaction fees for the current month.

For actual bookkeeping, QuickBooks Pro.

<http://www.geckoboard.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I use gnucash. It works fairly well, but the leap to double-entry accounting might be a little strange if you've only used quicken (but a good thing to learn in the long run).

I've been meaning to switch to ledger/hledger, which is command line based, but haven't switched yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ledger and Reckon on the command line

[http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2013/02/16/command- line-a...](http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2013/02/16/command-line- accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Excel/OpenCalc.</comment>


Anonymity Trilemma: Anonymity, Low Bandwidth Overhead, Low Latency – Choose Two - <AUTHOR> https://freedom.cs.purdue.edu/anonymity/index.html <comment><USER2> It's no accident that one can see a similar result in timing attacks and information leakage from computer systems (e.g. Spectre and prior art), because in both cases, statistical inferences are being made from observable state.

Though this is an accessible paper that explores communication networks in detail, I'd still like to see more of these analyses conducted from a more abstract, information-theory perspective, and for these results to be broadly applied in various concrete settings.

I wonder if these sorts of fundamental underpinnings don't interface nearly as much with the daily mainstream line-of-business work that much of IT has evolved towards as they do in some other fields of applied science and design.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the paper itself (PDF): [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/954.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/954.pdf)

Boiler Up!

</comment><comment><USER4> I always assumed that the lower bound for continuous required bandwidth on a minimum latency anonymous network is the same or more than the peak required bandwidth, as you essentially have to run fixed bandwidth number stations between all nodes with either constant time between packets, or timing being dependent on a high frequency stochastic source.

Does anyone know if any lower bound has been shown to be possible?

</comment><comment><USER5> Would it be fair to say that Bitcoin picks anonymity and low bandwidth overhead? Or does it not even qualify as anonymity in this sense? It definitely has the high latency.

<comment><USER6> > We leverage an indistinguishability-based anonymity notion for sender > anonymity: the adversaryhas to distinguish two senders of its own choosing

Bitcoin doesn't provide that; a transaction involving one wallet can (if I understand Bitcoin correctly) be distinguished from a transaction involving a different wallet trivially.

It has anonymity only in that personal information is not required, but all the information you do provide (that is, the key that identifies your wallet) is entirely public. A wallet is a pseudonym.

The anonymity of Bitcoin is not the cause of its latency - instead, getting anonymity out of Bitcoin requires extra work by the user (making more wallets, and transferring money between them to avoid having to cluster them all in a multi-input transaction that would identify them all as probably belonging to one person). Getting anonymity would thus require an increase in both latency and bandwidth (from the extra transactions plus any other money-laundering work).</comment></comment>