Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-things-it-was-supposed-to-be <comment><USER2> The high transaction fees are forcing Bitcoin in this direction. If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too.

Seems we're stuck in this situation so long as the block size remains where it is. That artificially reduces the supply of transactions, forcing the price up. No matter how many miners there are competing for those transaction fees, there can never be more transactions. The transaction market is really one half of a market, or a market with a "supply ceiling".

It's ironic that Bitcoin's transaction count is essentially limited _by fiat_ ---by fiat of the Bitcoin code that implements the block limit.

But given the relative failure of forks that increase that block limit, it seems Bitcoin is what it is and other coins will have to pick up that slack.

<comment><USER3> No one who owns BTC wants it used for transactions. They want it to be an investment and go up forever, so they'll never go with a fork that allows it. It's like home owners in a neighborhood locking out new construction so their own homes raise in value.

<comment><USER4> Of course Bitcoin is the digital crypto analogy for SF Bay Area NIMBYism :)

<comment><USER5> Christ, that's some deep snark!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Responding to problems with this article as they appear:

1\. Coinbase buckling is a failure of a web application grappling with unprecedented load. Not with bitcoin.

2\. The dark web mostly uses Monero, which would not exist without Bitcoin coming along first. Also the notion of a $65 fee on a $250 tx is ridiculous, not to mention a 24 hour wait time.

3\. The existence of exchanges and dark web websites that allow you to convert fiat to bitcoin and facilitate trades (middlemen as the authors calls them) is a failure of Bitcoin? Building a centralized exchange/facilitator will ALWAYS come before a decentralized alternative because decentralized apps are hard.

4\. Applications that provide immeasurable convenience at the cost of a little privacy and security are an inevitable step in the road towards a better system. This is the equivalent of RMS bemoaning the existence of Ubuntu because it uses a few propriety programs, when whatever free distro he recommends is straight out of 1992

5\. "retains none of the exciting features"? Rapidly increasing prices does not remove the most innovative features (smart contracts, off-chain transactions, etc) of the crypto world. It accelerates them if anything by providing the capital to finance their development

Feel free to attack Bitcoin for its shortcomings, but don't act like things could have easily gone differently. Bitcoin still has tremendous potential for privacy, security, and everyday use --- if you get past the clickbait headlines.

<comment><USER7> What is your source for #2? Only a single market on the darknet currently accepts Monero (libertas). Monero currently lacks any multi-sig capabilities so it is useless for the newer distributed DNM systems such as openbazaar. At most Monero is used to obscure the trail of bitcoin as someone will buy some Monero with bitcoins puchased from a site like Coinbase and then sell those Monero back for bitcoin to avoid Coinbase banning their account for transferring to a known DNM Bitcoin address. Bitcoin is still used for the vast majority of DNM transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.

People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).

That's why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.

The fundamentals for Satoshi's vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.

<comment><USER9> What, then, exactly is the difference between your scenario and Coinbase being the bank?

<comment><USER10> Coinbase can't print money.

<comment><USER11> Banks can't print money either, and this isn't some "ackshually it's the Mint" thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn't special, because you and I also have the power to create debt. What makes a bank special is that debt is its business (so most of its operation concerns the management of debt), and much of its debt can be called on demand, and so we call banks' debts to us demand deposits.

Fractional reserve is just a particular kind of regulation placed on banks' creation of debt, and it usually isn't the most important one. The practical limit of banks is that they have to be able to extinguish their debts (which we call withdrawal), including being able to transfer them to other banks in exchange for cash (which we call clearing), at the whim of the creditors (you and me).

The problems with banks are the problems with debt generally, but that's much trickier than some glib remarks about monetary policy.

<comment><USER12> You can't really create debt with money that you don't have, as the banks do.

You can't make 1000$ appear on my bank account and say " you now have a debt of 1000$ to me". You need to give me physical money. But bank can create this money they don't have.

<comment><USER13> The bank isn't creating that money. When you deposit $1000 in a bank account, you lose that $1000 and gain 1000 FunnyMonies instead. The bank can then turn around and give that $1000 to someone else. At the end of the day, there's only $1000 running around.

What makes it look different is that we treat 1000 FunnyMonies as if it were $1000. So instead of saying "there's $1000 and 1000 FunnyMonies" we say "there's $2000, oh look, the bank created money." But it hasn't, and when the difference really matters, and the bank doesn't have the ability to give you back $1000 for your 1000 FunnyMonies, that's when bad things happen.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely not. The bank can lend those 1000$ to several people.

I think it can lend it up to 10 times the money it has in its vault (not sure about the exact amount)

<comment><USER14> Let's be careful about what scenario we're talking about.

> You can't make 1000$ appear on my bank account and say " you now have a debt > of 1000$ to me". You need to give me physical money. But bank can create > this money they don't have.

This scenario doesn't involve real money at all. It's just two IOUs in opposite directions. You and I could make such an agreement trivially.

> I think it can lend it up to 10 times the money it has in its vault (not > sure about the exact amount)

So this involves real money. But it's not a special bank power. You can loan a friend some cash, which they give to you for safekeeping. Then you can loan another friend the same physical dollars, which they also give to you for safekeeping. Then another, and another...

Now you have $10k in cash deposits even though there's only $1k in physical cash.

The only reason you can't do it in practice is that nobody wants to give you their money for safekeeping. You don't lack the ability to multiply money. You lack anyone handing over money to do it on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article repeatedly quotes statements to the effect "this was supposed to show what a truly free market looks like. Instead, it's a shitshow."

The word "instead" doesn't belong there. Really.

<comment><USER16> Wasn't that the exact point of the tweet that was mentioned in the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As we learn more about cryptocurrencies, more evolved altcoins will emerge, with much more sophisticated economics.

As it is, none of the developers of cryptocurrencies really understand economics and the majority of them believe in heterodox economic ideas that are probably wrong.

But currently people are just trying to get rich. At this point in time I'm more bullish about GNU Taler. It is not a cryptocurrency but it shares some of the objectives.

<comment><USER18> Hey Lumberjack - I'm curious to learn more about the economics most folks in the space are ignoring.

Are there any particular economic theories or resources you would recommend as a starting point for someone interested in studying up?

Email in bio if you feel so inclined. Appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The best criticism I've seen on Bitcoin is, by far, Paul Krugman's "Bitcoin is Evil" [1]. In essence: Bitcoin doesn't have "monetary policy" to regulate it's supply. That's why it is prone to speculative bubbles and very dangerous as money.

[1] [https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is- evil...](https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/)

<comment><USER20> Painful to read. Paul Krugman is a laughing stock in the crypto-world, which he has been wrong about so confidently, so many times.

As an aside, the US had active monetary policy for about a century, and it has enjoyed plenty of bubbles and crashes. Some of those were worsened by monetary policy (e.g. easy money in the early 1920's swapped to deflationary monetary policy in 1929 as soon as the easy money bubble popped, low interest rates fueling real estate speculation in the early 2000's, etc.)

<comment> pseudonom- Can you give an overview of or pointers to critiques? My prior is that Krugman is more likely to by correct than the average crypto person, even after adjusting for interest in and attention to crypto.

<comment><USER20> For a celebrated economist, Krugman has a poor grasp of certain facets of economics. It's probably a subconscious way of rectifying his political views, which many of us are guilty of.

In this case, he does not understand how Bitcoin can be a store of value, because it is not backed by a government. How come gold or any other commodity has value? Value it what the market decides, not the government. He obviously did not understand the intrinsic value the technology provides, which previous media of exchange do not provide, such as immutability and full control of funds. He is happy to pass judgment without understanding the technology.

<comment><USER21> How are immutability and "full control of funds" intrinsically valuable?

<comment><USER22> That's like asking why laws firms & and security agencies exist.

<comment><USER21> _Intrinsic value_ has a well-understood meaning in economics. Bitcoin, like any currency, has no _intrinsic value_ , regardless of these neat features.

<comment><USER20> > Intrinsic value has a well-understood meaning in economics. Bitcoin, like > any currency, has no intrinsic value, regardless of these neat features.

I don't think you understand the definition of intrinsic value -- it has nothing to do with being physical:

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp)

Key quote: "The intrinsic value is the actual value of a company or an asset _based on an underlying perception of its true value_ including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and _intangible factors_.

<comment><USER21> Where did I imply intrinsic value requires physical presence? Businesses produce cash flow, and therefore ownership stakes (stocks) have intrinsic value. Gold is used in manufacturing and has an intrinsic value (lower than its _traded value_ ). Bitcoin has 0 intrinsic value. This is not a slight against Bitcoin, it's just a property of most currencies. Bitcoin is no exception.

A good thought experiment for whether something has intrinsic value is: would <thing> still be useful if nobody else on the planet wanted it? A share in a business would continue paying out dividends, and would absolutely be useful. A dollar bill would be useless (especially if it's an electronic dollar). A bitcoin would also be absolutely useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fact that the majority of people only trade/hold bitcoin to exchange for centralized currency i.e. USD tells you something, no?

<comment><USER23> The dollar remains the easiest rosetta stone for figuring out what you've got, i.e., what your bitcoins and other assets are worth. It will continue to be easier to use a more stable currency for that purpose, unless something goes wrong with it.

<comment><USER24> You're missing the point. Everyone just holds the currency because they treat it as an investment. In other words, they are speculating.

People invested, in both the financial and emotional sense, tell others to hold because that drives the price up more. The subculture's vernacular even includes "HODL", a joking way to tell someone to keep doing their part to drive prices up.

It's painfully obvious what people are doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >Bitcoin was designed so that users had to take care of their private cryptographic keys for every address they used, and Nakamoto advised making a new address for every transaction. This proved too confusing and burdensome, so along came wallet services, which stored users' Bitcoins like a bank account and substituted a password for the private key

wut? if you used a online wallet, you still had to manage addresses. the only advantage comes in the form of not having to wait hours/days for the client to sync up (back then there weren't any thin clients), and not having to back up a wallet file.

>Whether it was out of incompetence or an attempt to save itself from selling at an inflated price (at one point, the price of Bitcoin was $3,000 higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges),

that's not how exchanges work. the counterparty is another buyer, not the exchange. coinbase is getting x% fee regardless if the price was $1000 or $10000.

>this was exactly the kind of thing Bitcoin was supposed to prevent.

sounds like a strawman. i don't think anyone realistically thought if bitcoin came along, all the AML/KYC laws around handling fiat will magically evaporate

<comment><USER26> "i don't think anyone realistically thought if bitcoin came along, all the AML/KYC laws around handling fiat will magically evaporate"

I disagree - I've seen and debated far too many people claiming essentially that viewpoint; IMHO it's a naive and unrealistic expectation, but a lot of people did think that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is anyone else getting the same sense with Bitcoin as with Trump leading up to the election? Everywhere I go everyone has negative things to say, everyone is going on about how it's going to crash. They all seem like sensible arguments.

But here we are, Bitcoin keeps following an exponential curve and Trump is president. The one thing I know for sure is there's an awfully noisy signal out there.

<comment><USER16> People also predicted that Iraq and Afghanistan would be quagmires. Those predictions came true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Remember how Coinbase, the San Francisco-based startup which raised more than $200 million in venture capital, put a freeze on my money? Whether it was out of incompetence or an attempt to save itself from selling at an inflated price (at one point, the price of Bitcoin was $3,000 higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges), this was exactly the kind of thing Bitcoin was supposed to prevent._

Um no, I don't think so.

Coinbase.com is not the Bitcoin experience, just like Facebook is not the internet experience. Nothing in the Bitcoin whitepaper mentions Bitcoin solving problems inherent with a central currency Exchange or hosted, custodial wallets.

Use localbitcoins.com and a non-custodial wallet if you want to experience Bitcoin per it's original specification.

Exchanges != Bitcoin.

<comment><USER29> Coinbase, and similar sites, may as well be Bitcoin for the average ("retail") investor. It's far too complicated, not to mention resource intensive, for the average Joe to set up and run his own node.

My uncle wants to "invest" in Bitcoin. He wants to trade it like a stock. You seriously think he's going to mess around with private keys and wallet pass phrases? Many technical people can barely handle that.

And, yes, for a lot of today's youth, Facebook _is_ the internet experience. The Internet experience, for me, was telnet, gopher, and Usenet news. We're along way from those days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bitcoin seems like just another medium of exchange. Almost all the properties of bitcoin - decentralization, anonymity, worldwide acceptance - apply equally well to gold bullion. The one additional property bitcoin _had_ was convenience. But as transaction costs increase this is becoming less true.

Given the above, why would anyone expect bitcoin to behave differently than physical gold in the real world? The world of gold is chock full of middlemen, dubious financial instruments, and companies taking advantage of those that don't know better. Bitcoin is just following the same well-tread path.

<comment><USER31> You can't send $50M of gold halfway around the world for $3.

<comment><USER32> You can't send $50 million of bitcoin with only $3 in transaction fees either

<comment><USER31> Why not? The cost you pay is proportional with your transaction size in bytes, not the amount of bitcoins you're sending. So it depends on how many inputs and outputs you're using, not the quantity you're moving.

<comment><USER32> The cost you pay isn't just dependent on how many bytes you want to send. Each block maxes out at 1MB and there's only 144 blocks a day. If you want your transaction to be confirmed, you have to outbid everyone else who wants their transaction to happen (as long as there's more than 7 transactions / sec). I don't think it is doable to try to do a transaction with a $3 fee, you need something like $20 worth of BTC to get it done within the next block or two, and maybe $10 if you're willing to wait a while[1]

[1] assuming [https://estimatefee.com/](https://estimatefee.com/) is correct. Based on the transactions of some of my friends it seems pretty accureate though

<comment><USER31> It only started skyrocketing this week. Last week average tx fee was about $6-7. You can see the historical averages at

[https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin- transactionfees...](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin- transactionfees.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Bitcoin is trying to move transactions off the blockchain to fix this issue... bitcoin cash is what bitcoin was supposed to be (increased block size)...

</comment><comment><USER34> It's not Wall Street's fault or whatever boogie man's fault that the Bitcoin tech doesn't actually work as some idealistic libertarian creator imagined it would; the fault is in Bitcoin's design itself. Even if the price wasn't fluctuating like crazy it simply doesn't work well as a currency due to technical limitations (eg, the time and cost it takes to process a transaction in the real world has always been impractical), but it shows promise as something that holds value (like gold).

The Outline creates articles with pureed facts written in a carefully standardized "no-nonsense", language-as-spoken-today linguistic style for mass consumption that are often deceptive, political or just technically wrong. Don't trust it.

<comment><USER35> I feel like it's a parable about lofty libertarian ideals -- everything's peachy until there's large sums of money involved. Bitcoin is fixable but now there's a financial incentive for never fixing it.

<comment><USER36> I should google it but I'll just wonder out loud, how would libertarians use money anyway? Doesn't money need something to back it up, i.e. a central bank?

<comment><USER16> Libertarians still believe in government, I believe the normal solution to this they propose is to move the money back to the gold standard with the gold held by the government issuing the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I am by no means an expert in any of these things - but philosophically was bitcoin written w/ the expectation that an individual is inherently good, and running smack into the reality that individuals are inherently focused on their own self interest?

<comment><USER38> Bitcoin was actually built under the assumption that you couldn't trust anyone else. You store your own money with your own private key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what percentage of the individuals who are opining here know about Monero.

</comment><comment><USER40> Allow me to make a farfetched analogy: Bitcoin is like Obamacare. Obamacare wasn't made perfect the first time; this is normal. The way you fix issues with complex legislation, is you have it passed by significant members of both parties, so that you can revisit it the next year and fix things. But, with no trust between parties, the Dems had to get everything right in one go, when they had both houses and the White House, and guess what, there were problems. Which we can't fix.

Bitcoin wasn't made perfect the first time. No problem, all software that becomes popular does, and all new financial arrangements (money, credit, credit cards, etc.) had unforeseen problems that had to get worked out. But, with no government involved, there is no mechanism for working things out. It's not surprising that everything wasn't perfect, or that things need fixing later; the issue is that no one has the mandate to do it.

<comment><USER16> The problem I see with that analogy is that Obamacare has been actively undermined at every step by the Tepublican party.

Nothing like that is happening to Bitcoin.

I think this was all inevitable. How could you make a new currency and not expect all the people who take advantage of monetary systems to move in? I'm not sure it's preventable.

<comment><USER41> I think the undermining of Bitcoin's original promise by speculators is just as inevitable as Obamacare's undermining by conservatives. Both are driven by hype. Both are primarily driven by greed ("temporarily embarrassed millionaire" greed, in many cases). Both are aspirational. Both run counter to the cynical "humans will always subvert" narratives of their times.

That's not a judgement on either one. Just an observation of similarities. They're very different in many ways, too.

<comment><USER16> What I meant about undermining is that I don't think the speculators are out to sabotage bitcoin, it's a side effect of what they're doing. When it comes to Obamacare it's very clear that the sabotage is intentional.

The more I think about it the more I wonder if bitcoin could have ever worked. The way my name works pretty much guarantees a individual or small group would end up with the majority of the hash power if bitcoin was ever actually valuable. And that immediately undermines the peer-to-peer decentralized no one in charge of it aspect.

Without something that disincentiveses people with significantly more cpu power people are just going to run away with it. That kind of seems like a flaw in all of these crypto currencies, even if it's not CPU power that you use.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2035 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-global-trends <comment><AUTHOR> The Global Trends web page: [https://nicglobaltrends.tumblr.com/](https://nicglobaltrends.tumblr.com/)</comment>


Is Elon Musk Prepping for State Failure? - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/elon-theory.html <comment><USER2> Regardless of whether he actually is prepping for disasters, he is definitely exploiting the fear of systemic collapse in the marketing of some of his endeavors, from the design of the new truck/atv, to powerwalls, to space colonies.

The current marketing angle is an interesting mix of utopian (renewable energy, EVs), and dystopian (Mars colonies and cyber trucks). And this itself a pivot from Teslas original marketing angle, which was eco luxury and performance.

He is to the eco-prepper crowd what Levi was to the gold miners of the California gold rush - ready to sell supplies to people who will probably not experience the success they expect.

In a real systemic collapse, your Tesla gear is going to be just as useless as the rest of our machines. You'll survive - or not - based on the collective goodwill and decency of yourself and people around you, not some gadgets. In a period of state failure, your immediate community's social fabric, to the extent it exists, will effectively be your state.

But hey, if the marketing pushes other car and energy companies, and all of us, toward lower carbon future, then I say let people indulge their eschatological fantasies.

<comment><USER3> In the same vein, his next business might have to do with selling immortality to those Silicon Valley dudes that believe they deserve transcendency. Will end badly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The bullet proof thing is just a gimmick to give you a retort when a retard questions your manhood for driving an eco friendly car.</comment>


Is GPU Database a Hype? - <AUTHOR> All GPU based databases boast hundreds or even thousands of times faster than traditional databases. From their annual revenues and growth in recent years, however, they have obviously been going nowhere. Will GPU databases be pits of hypes that simply burn VC cash? <comment><USER2> The crux here is the transfer of data into the very limited RAM of the GPU. If the data is already conveniently placed on the GPU, they are indeed thousands of time faster. But this is mostly a situation that is artificially created for benchmarks. If the transfer is taken into account, usually CPU-based systems win.

Database query processing (SQL) usually requires a very low amount of compute cycles per byte of data (e.g. filter, hash table builds, ...), which means that the GPU cannot really take advantage of its compute power.

For ML this is a very different situation, lots of compute on few bytes, which is why we see GPUs and TPUs seriously being used there.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point that ML requires lots of compute on few bytes makes senses as ML performs mostly repetitive matrix operations, but doesn't a series of SQL queries on database data with a "star schema" also require lots of compute on the same bytes?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much did you invest in your bootstrapped startup? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious how much others have put into their own business.<p>Also, did you see a return on that money? In other words, get the investment back plus some? <comment><USER2> So far, I've spent about $40, all on hosting charges. As someone with design and development skills I was able to do all the work myself. I can't imagine how a non-developer could do anything similar without a huge budget.

Having said that, I haven't had much success. Although I've had a fair amount of traffic and a significant number of comments to the effect that my site is really well executed, I haven't had any sales so far two weeks after launch. I guess it's early days but it's hard not to be disheartened and question if the idea is viable. It's hard working alone and not having anyone to motivate and bounce ideas off of.

My site is <http://www.devtest.net> if you're interested in having a look.

<comment><USER3> Do you mind sharing a little of your hosting details? How are you hosting it? How much traffic/ how many users do you think you can manage at this hosting level?

I am asking because I expect hosting costs to be my most expensive item while in the MVP stage, and I don't have a lot of cash to throw at my project.

<comment><USER2> I'm hosting it on linode, using 2 vps instances at the moment, one for the site and another isolated instance to run the code. The code running VPS is disposable so I can boot up new ones / restore from a snapshot if there are any problems with it.

With this setup, I've tested 200 concurrent users with no major problems, and would support easily tens of thousands of hits per day.

Having too many users is a problem I would love to have!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the specifics. It's been really hard for me to sort out whether to go with a VPS, or something like heroku. Heroku is appealing but seems to get expensive quickly. VPS has a bit higher learning curve for me, but might be worthwhile. Am I correct in understanding your hosting cost to be about $40/ month until you gain a significant number of users?

Good luck, and I hope you end up with a scaling problem to solve.

<comment><USER2> I was really close to going with Heroku, I decided not to as I wanted full customisation options and I've been hosting rails apps for a long time and know what I'm doing.

If you're inexperienced in server administration, go with Heroku I'd say. It's a great service and works really well and if you do get a load of traffic, it's really easy to scale up. There's a guide here to using unicorn to get 4X the performance out of it:

[http://blog.railsonfire.com/2012/05/06/Unicorn-on- Heroku.htm...](http://blog.railsonfire.com/2012/05/06/Unicorn-on-Heroku.html)

You're correct in saying $40 per month for hosting until I gain more users. If someone would sign up to my "pro" plan I'd be breaking even :)

However I don't think that even if it does take off it will be as profitable as it sounds. It seems customer acquisition is going to be my biggest problem and so I'll probably end up spending lots on adwords and other promotional avenues.

<comment><USER4> It was good to meet via the chat box on your site. I've spent a little more than you, but not a great deal. Thanks for the design tips - much needed!

That marketing plan I sent you covers only the basics, but perhaps with enough consistent effort the basics might be enough to drive initial traffic.

As I said, if there's anything I can do, let me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have invested $70k, and spent around $15k so far over the last few months.

I am a unique case because I am also applying for a E2 Investor visa, and $70k was the number recommended by my immigration attorney to satisfy the visa application. If I didn't have that requirement I would have spent less on legal fees and hopefully would have launched the MVP for around $10k. I still haven't launched, but am about to start a closed beta program.

<comment><USER6> Would love to get in touch with you regarding the visa application. Got an email?

<comment><USER7> I would also like your email. I'm incredibly surprised that your attorney considers $70k enough, all the attorneys I have talked to have said upwards of $120k~.

Very interested to hear how it goes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So far, about 1100 USD. A MacBook Pro and the domain name. It is an open source project and there is no biz angle as of now really.</comment>


U.S. Websites Go Dark in Europe as GDPR Data Rules Kick In - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-websites-go-dark-in-europe-as-gdpr-data-rules-kick-in-1527242038 <comment><USER3> Looks like strictly specific to Tronc publishing, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tronc#Newspapers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tronc#Newspapers)

Anyone else blocking?

Additionally, blocking access to the site that already has the data from the people of EU is violating GDPR more than simply keeping the site alive. GDPR is not about the data that is collected only after the May 25th.

<comment><USER4> Why block EU users instead of just disabling analytics and ads for them?

<comment><USER5> Because that would result in the EU users burning bandwidth and processor time without any offsetting revenue.

I'd imagine that the cost of providing (say) the Los Angeles Times to the EU is non-trivial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Aggressive potential penalties are likely to affect some business decisions.

Aggressive user tracking and nonchalant attitude to users' personal data seems to be less problematic to them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty sure WSJ is non-compliant to GDPR by not providing the option for EU readers to opt out of their cookie policy, ironic that that will be a reason for Tronc blocking EU readers altogether.

<comment><USER8> GDPR doesn't apply to WSJ or any other site that doesn't "envisage" offering its services to users in the EU. See recital 23.

Edit: apparently they accept EU currencies, which means they have subjected themselves to it.

<comment><USER9> What? It says the opposite - if you are providing services to EU residents outside of the EU GDPR applies to you.

[http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/recital-23-GDPR.htm](http://www.privacy- regulation.eu/en/recital-23-GDPR.htm)

> In order to ensure that natural persons are not deprived of the protection > to which they are entitled under this Regulation, the processing of personal > data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or a processor > not established in the Union should be subject to this Regulation where the > processing activities are related to offering goods or services to such data > subjects irrespective of whether connected to a payment.

<comment><USER8> You completely ignored the relevant part of that recital:

 _In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union.

Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller's, processor's or an intermediary's website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union_

If you are not "offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union" then you are not subject to GDPR. As stated in the recital, the mere fact that a site is accessible from within the EU DOES NOT make it subject to GDPR. This recital tells you the test that is used to determine whether or not you are. It isn't necessarily even required to block EU traffic to be immune from it, though it's a good idea since you're playing with fire. You simply can't translate your site to EU only languages, create content or services that might appeal specifically to EU residents, etc.

No targeting of EU residents = no GDPR liability.

<comment><USER9> >No targeting of EU residents = no GDPR liability.

I'm gonna have to disagree with that interpretation.

If I can use their services from within EU then they are providing services to EU residents regardless whether or they explicitly say that they want EU customers and thus are subject to GDPR.

<comment><USER8> Read the part of the recital that you seem to be ignoring on purpose for whatever reason. It literally says that the mere accessibility of a site from within the EU does not by itself mean that the site is offering services in the EU for the purposes of GDPR. It's not really up for debate - it is written right there in black and white.

I've been through this with actual lawyers. There are things you can do that make you subject to GDPR without explicitly saying you want EU customers - <USER2> example might be creating a site in English but that exclusively reports German news. But, for example, if you have a US news site that doesn't sell subscriptions to EU citizens, isn't based in the EU, doesn't specialize in news arising from EU countries, and doesn't translate its content to EU-only languages, you aren't subject to it. Again, as stated in the recital, the mere fact that an EU resident can access the site does not by itself trigger GDPR exposure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just in case you're not a WSJ subscriber, use this to bypass the pay wall: [https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...](https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fu- s-websites-go-dark-in-europe-as-gdpr-data-rules-kick-in-1527242038)

<comment><USER11> This leads straight to the Facebook login form.

<comment><USER12> That just opens the page via a FB referral, basically this bookmarklet:

        javascript:window.location.href='https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This regulation has been on its way for 2 years, and before that it was discussed extensively. Any big corporation not complying or making such a move as simply blocking EU users is ridiculous. Lobbying obviously didn't work so now they want users to revolt against EU lawmakers, or what is the endgoal here? There was enough time to comply, I find this behaviour unfair and short- sighted on the mid to long run.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a non-European who has no problems complying with the GDPR and has resources at his disposal: Please, If someone knows of a list of all companies and services that refuse to comply with the GDPR, please point me to it.

To me, this seems like an incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get into previously captured markets.

</comment><comment><USER15> To add some flavor to this, there are only a handful of vendors that sell cookie opt-in software in the US, and implementing one on our own tiny site was a nightmare. If the business model revolves around ads or third party services, I can't imagine how much worse it would be to get running.

</comment><comment><USER16> Japanese forum giant 5ch (formerly 2ch) has also decided to IP block all of EU in order to "comply" with GDPR, as of a few days ago.

I've been hoping it wouldn't spread, since it's depressing to be confined to a little internet bubble in this day and age. Guess I'll be needing a VPN.

<comment><USER17> Careful which countries you go to with that VPN. You don't want to intentionally circumvent an access control restriction. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm actually looking forward to seeing less US news. One of the downsides of being on the global English-speaking internet of social link propagation- discussion sites is that it's incredibly US centric. We need to pay more attention to our own countries and localities.

</comment><comment><USER19> So what happens with all the open-source projects that EU citizens are involved in? Some of those are (more or less) based in the US. Are they also covered by the GDPR or is it just businesses?

</comment><comment><USER6> > We are engaged on the issue

Dear Tronc,

You had two years to comply. You are being ridiculous. Good luck with complying.

EU Users

<comment><USER20> As a European who has many time been asked to comply with the various sillinesses coming from US legislators, I must say there is some strong schadenfreude on this current event.

And for once, I think that the law that annoys everybody actually comes from a good intent (protecting users instead of profits)

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I've got to agree on this point. Whenever I hear complaints from US citizens, I think to myself: imagine having your whole country need to learn another language in order to do business...we are _very_ lucky that much of the world does business in English, and we are able to benefit greatly from that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If your core values are we don't give a f.. to our user's privacy, obviously you don't do anything in 2 years for them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, good riddance to all of those companies which do not want to comply with a law made to protect citizen's privacy. Europeans now have an antispam, anticrooks filter for free.</comment>


Apple's Rounded Rectangle Patent To Protect Design Of Original iPad  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/apple-rounded-rectangle-patent-ipad_n_2092439.html <comment><USER2> "Alas, this design patent appears to be quite narrow. According to Ars Technica, Wired and the wisdom of patent lawyer-cum-Internet commenters, the granted patent can really only be used for the precise design of that first iPad, so that no company replicates the exact shape of that tablet, slaps its name on the back and sells the knockoff as its own work."

tl;dr - YHBT. HAND.</comment>


Summary of new patent bill (America Invests Act) - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2011/09/16/summary-of-new-patent-bill-america-invests-act/

<comment><USER2> A very interesting provision that has not received much publicity is the changes to joinder. Joinder is a procedure for combining lawsuits involving multiple parties. As Wikipedia describes it:

       Joinder is a legal term, which refers to the process of
       joining two or more legal issues together to be heard in
       one hearing or trial. It is done when the issues or parties
       involved overlap sufficiently to make the process more
       efficient or more fair. It helps courts avoid hearing the
       same facts multiple times or seeing the same parties return
       to court separately for each of their legal disputes.

Patent trolls like to use joinder when they sue several different defendants over the same patent to have the suits handled as one suit. The patent reform bill specifically disallows that--you can no longer base joinder on just the allegation that the defendants all infringe the same patent (and courts can no longer consolidate cases on that basis unless the defendants consent).

When this is combined with the rules that went into effect a couple of years ago that made it easier for defendants to get venue changed in patent suits, and the net effect is going to be to significantly raise the litigation costs of the trolls.

Before today, the troll could sue many companies in one suit in Texas, or in separate suits and get them combined. Individual defendants might have tried to change the venue to someplace more convenient (such as where they, and all their witnesses, are located), but the courts would have favored keeping the cases together as one suit where filed, rather than multiple suits in multiple locations. Now those will stay separate suits, and many more defendants will get to transfer them out.

In addition to raising the litigation costs of the trolls, this significantly raises the chances they will lose their patents. If they sue, say, 10 companies and that results in 10 trials now instead of 1 trial, all it takes is for _one_ of those juries to determine that the patent is invalid, and that's the end of future trolling with that patent. (You might think at first that it wouldn't work that way, because district court decisions just determine the result among the parties at that trial--they don't set precedent on legal issues or on facts between other parties, but it works different for patents. I don't fully understand why, but my educated guess is that it is because the patent office is sort of a party--the jury is finding that the patent office did not consider the proper prior are or misjudged non- obviousness or whatever, and so that changes the status of the patent itself).

Unfortunately, the joinder change only applies to suits filed after the bill was signed so this will have no effect on the Lodsys cases that have already been filed.

</comment><comment><USER2> There have been a several good posts about various aspects of this bill on Patently-O: <http://www.patentlyo.com/>.

These are a good counter to the vast amount of misinformation circulating about this bill. It seems nearly everyone has an opinion on this, whether they know anything about patent law (current and how it is being changed) or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone have insight into why this approach is being adopted after so many years without change? You'd think if we were going to change anything, we'd at least make it harder for patent trolls to sit on filings without actually having built what they've "invented".

Edit: the more I read about the changes, the more it sounds like it benefits large organizations with the resources to file vs. startups busy building new things.

<comment><USER4> Yeah (to your edit) - quelle surprise!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> imho, the primary problem with the current patent system is that the people who grant patents don't have even a rudimentary understanding of the technologies related to the patents. that is the only explanation for some of the patents that have been granted recently.

this act might improve the system in general, but it won't fix the gross incompetency of the patent office.

</comment><comment><USER6> If I'm not mistaken the first to file requirement during the 70s would have meant no PC industry as the Eniac patents would have survived and IBM could have killed the entire homebrew scene.

So how does prior art work now? I mean, does the prior art need have been patented to invalidate a new patent?

<comment><USER2> I don't see how anything would have been different with the ENIAC patents. They were found unenforceable on several grounds, and invalidates on several grounds, none of which that I can see would have come out different under first to file.

As far as prior art goes, it will now be easier to find prior art against patents. A summary of the changes is here: [http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/09/guest-post- defining-...](http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/09/guest-post-defining- prior-art-under-the-leahy-smith- aia.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatentlyO+%28Dennis+Crouch%27s+Patently-O%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)</comment></comment>


Destroyers will break down if sent to Middle East, admits Royal Navy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/07/destroyers-will-break-down-if-sent-to-middle-east-admits-royal-navy <comment><USER2> Is the problem that the cooling systems are undersized when the ship is in warm water? That doesn't seem like it should be an insurmountable problem, although pretty embarrassing for the contractor.

Why is this such a difficult problem for the Royal Navy? Is the system so complicated that cutting an additional coolant input and installing an additional pump to increase the flow rate isn't a viable solution? The article didn't really get into the interesting details.

Edit: Apparently it's an issue with the intercooler. They don't say exactly what the problem is, but it sounds like it's just straight up undersized.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls- Royce_WR-21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_WR-21)

<comment><USER3> Rolls Royce claims the engines perform within the specs they were given. Sounds like the issue may not be with the contractor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "We have £1bn destroyers trying to sort out pirates in a little dhow with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] costing $50, with an outboard motor [costing] $100"

Where can I get one of those $100 outboards? If it can move a rowboat with five guys faster than a container ship cruises it's good enough for me.

<comment><USER5> Craigslist

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Gen (now Lord) David Richards, the former chief of defence staff, repeatedly questioned the relevance of expensive kit procured by successive governments. "We have £1bn destroyers trying to sort out pirates in a little dhow with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] costing $50, with an outboard motor [costing] $100," he said.

You sure would hate to find out your ship has total spontaneous breakdowns during its first (and, probably, last) foray into combat with a competent adversary. Every mission during peacetime is useful for training and evaluation.

<comment><USER2> If we were serious about stopping piracy we would bring back the Vietnam era PT boats and flood the waters around Africa with patrols. Unfortunately, that's not what the Navy plans for. They're still preparing for the big cold war battle against the Soviets.

<comment><USER7> Ship-board drone systems are likely to be the standard deterrent here. A small swarm of these things capable of sounding an alarm and launching a flare over the detected craft would give you a lot more time to prepare your defenses.

These things show up on thermal imaging quite well, so finding them is not the problem. It's having systems that constantly scan and can alert reliably in the case of a problem with sufficient warning time that's tricky.

<comment><USER3> Between small boats, and drones, boats are more immediately available. Given the fact that the threat is ongoing, it seems wise to employ boats for now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yours in distress, Alan - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/yours-in-distress-alan.html <comment><USER2> About the whole "machines can think" debate, I love this quote by EWD:

"Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."

([http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html))

Let's not fall prey to the temptation of thinking:

      Turing believes machines think
      Society acted terribly towards Turing
      Therefore machines do think.

EDIT: formatting.

<comment><USER3> Turing in fact dismisses the question in the famous letter. The Turing test isn't proposed as a test of whether machines can "think" but a test of whether they can imitate a person.

Turing considered the question of whether machines could think as being "too meaningless to deserve discussion".

[http://books.google.com/books?id=CEMYUU_HFMAC&pg=PA317&lpg=P...](http://books.google.com/books?id=CEMYUU_HFMAC&pg=PA317&lpg=PA317&dq=turing+test+chomsky&source=bl&ots=dNkaRT24fG&sig=6I-Kx8yVpAg277E5Ayhc3-ksEQI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LIWyUb_bB6uh4APg5oH4DA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=turing%20test%20chomsky&f=false)

Also

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing- test&#x2F](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test&#x2F);

Sorry this links quote Turing, I couldn't find the original source.

<comment><USER4> So while we're at that, how do the proponents of Turing test respond to the lookup table argument? Say I make a giant lookup table, with keys being all possible conversation prefixes and values being the answers. E.g., h["Hi"] = "Hi.". h["Hi. / Hi. / How are you?"] = "I'm OK, how are you?" etc. Sure the lookup table would be big but definitely finite, since its size is bounded by the maximum possible length of a Turing test conversation (which is at most the length of a human life--we would like humans to pass the test, right?) Will we be morally obligated to grant such hash table the same rights a person enjoys?

<comment><USER5> [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf) , section 4. I consider that to be essentially the final word on the topic; it is an objective, mathematically, philosophically, physically meaningful distinction drawn between a lookup table and a computing machine.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the link. I just read section 4 and I don't really see how it addresses the argument. It mostly seems to argue against the opinion that computer programs cannot be sentient. My point is much weaker: that it is manifestly absurd to insist that all computer programs which can pass the Turing test must be presumed sentient.

The article acknowledges that a lookup table could pass the Turing test--the author even uses this argument for his own ends. At the same time, clearly he doesn't think we should presume the lookup table sentient. The only passage which might be interpreted as an "objective distinction" is this one:

 _Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially- bounded program with exactly the same input /output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded._

And yet in the next paragraph the author says he's reluctant to stand behind such thesis.

Do you, unlike Scott Aaronson, want to adopt this amended postulate--i.e., do you believe all computer programs which can pass the Turing test should be granted personhood as long as they scale polynomially with the length of the conversation?

<comment><USER5> Hypothesizing about the lookup table is an irrelevant question, because no such thing can exist in the real universe. Not even in theory. Moreover, your lookup table contains some amount of information in it; either it was generated by a relatively small polynomial process, in which case for as large as the lookup table appears to be, it actually isn't, and is indistinguishable from simply using the program that was used to generate it, or it does indeed contain exponentially large amounts of information, in which case hypothesizing an exponentially large source of information for the mere purpose of passing a Turing test is a bizarre philosophical step to take. Where is this exponentially large source of information?

Recall that in information theory, being a bit sloppy but essentially accurate with the terms, the amount of information something has can be expressed as the smallest possible encoding of something. The entire Mandelbrot set, as gloriously complicated as it may _look_ , actually contains virtually no information, a mere handful of bits, because it's all the result of a very simple equation. No matter how gloriously complicated your enormous hash table may look, if it was generated with some humanly-feasible program and nigh- infinite amounts of time, the information content of the entire table, no matter how large, is nothing more than the size of the program and perhaps a specification of how long you let it run.

Basically, the whole "big lookup table" has to have some sort of characteristic to it. Either it was created by a program, in which case the program itself could pass the Turing test, or it is somehow irreducible to a program's output, in which case in your zealous effort to swat a fly you vaporized the entire Earth; you can't agree to the possibility a machine might pass the test (or be sentient or whatever) but you can agree to the existence of an exponentially complicated source of information? That's only a gnat's whisker away from asking "Well, what if I use _magic_ to create a philosophical zombie," (I'm referencing the specific concept of a philosophical zombie here, you can look it up if you like) "that looks like it's passing the test but it really isn't, what then?" Well, I don't know, when you're willing to invoke magic in your defense I'll concede I haven't got much of a response, but you probably shouldn't call that a victory.

The lookup table argument only makes sense nonconstructively, if you merely assert its existence but then don't allow anyone to ask any question about where it came from, or what properties it has.

<comment><USER4> So pretty much your argument boils down to, "such a lookup table cannot exist, therefore any argument using it is irrelevant." Note that even Scott Aaronson disagrees with you in the article you cited.

If we were having this debate in the XVIII-th century, you could equally as well assert that any machine capable of playing chess should be considered a person. The motivation is exactly the same as with the Turing test: so far only humans can play chess, humans are sentient, QED.

Say someone said, "But what if a machine used a minimax algorithm." To which you could respond, armed with your knowledge of XVIIIth century technology, "Such thing cannot exist therefore it's an irrelevant question."

As for the creation of such a table, not that I consider _that_ question particularly relevant, but here it is: Say a crazy scientist in the future created a program that actually simulated a human brain, then ran it (on future super-fast hardware) on every possible input (once again, the size of the input is bounded by the maximum length of a conversation a human can have), and stored the results on future super-large hard drives. Then he deleted the human brain simulation program, and gave you just the lookup table. The act of deleting the original program we may very well consider murder. But what about the generated lookup table?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://25.media.tumblr.com/7b17076580461a288bccd99b2118057c/...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7b17076580461a288bccd99b2118057c/tumblr_mirg34g9pE1qzyty1o1_1280.png)

</comment><comment><USER7> Quoted for emphasis:

 _Turing believes machines think / Turing lies with men / Therefore machines do not think_

Society can be sometimes wonderful, and sometimes so incredibly terrible.

<comment><USER8> For what it's worth, it was a fear of his that this might come to pass, and I think anyone making an argument like that would be (rightly) dismissed as a loon.

<comment><USER9> Though the same argument was used against Keynes earlier this year by Niall Ferguson.

<comment><USER8> True, but he was called out for it and that viewpoint is considered loony. It prompted an apology from him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related, I highly recommend seeing a performance of _Breaking the Code_ [1] if the opportunity presents itself. It's a play about Alan Turing, dealing with events in his life from his involvement in WWII through his death.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat related, the person to whom (presumably) the letter was addressed (Norman Routledge) recently (April 27th, 2013) passed away:

[http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2013/norman- routledge.html](http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2013/norman-routledge.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> i'd like to think we've gotten past this kind of shit, but my senses tell me we've yet a ways to go.

RIP AT. everthing i've read suggests he was a really nice man.

<comment><USER13> This was 70 years ago, I think we're past it

<comment><USER14> Homosexuality is no longer persecuted as a crime in the industrialized Western world. However, if by "past it" you mean homophobia no longer exists or is not significant enough to worry about — absolutely not. This story of horrific treatment of gay teens in Anoka, Minnesota, near where I used to live, comes to mind: [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-towns-war- on-g...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-towns-war-on-gay- teens-20120202)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interestingly the house where Turing lived and died is up for sale:

[http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for- sale/property-383496...](http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for- sale/property-38349665.html)

(source: you can see the plaque in the first picture, I attended the unveiling at this house)

</comment><comment><USER16> Just goes to show you we were animals a little over fifty years ago. We still are. There are many examples of this, including the treatment of women and homosexuals in the Middle East. Humanity needs to get out of the caves before making real leaps forward. We talk about fighting poverty and hunger yet can't do a thing when faced with blatant in-your-face abuse. We respect the idea of women being mutilated, killed and having to walk under tents in public, even as immigrants in the Western World, out of respect for religion. Sad, considering the delusionary nature of all religions.

<comment><USER8> You are delusional if you think we have to look to the middle east and religion to find 'people acting like animals'. Take a look at treatment and sentencing of criminals in the west - I think in the future they will wonder how we managed to rationalize it for so long.

<comment><USER17> I presume he was listing things in order of the magnitude of outrage, not geographic distance from his person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To me the biggest thing driving acceptance of gay people is the realization that being gay is not a choice, but rather something you are born with.

In a recent poll by Pew last month, 41% of the country now believes people are born gay. 8% believe it is the result of upbringing and 42% believe it is a choice.

Source: [http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy- pdf/06-06-13%20LGBT...](http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy- pdf/06-06-13%20LGBT%20General%20Public%20Release.pdf)

To those that believe it's a choice, the natural question is, "When did you choose to be straight?" For me, I knew I was attracted to the opposite sex as early as 5 or 6. I didn't make a choice. Nobody makes a choice. You're attracted to who you're attracted to. If anyone says that is not the case, ask them at what age they chose their sexual orientation.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S14VRjVDPcs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S14VRjVDPcs)

<comment><USER19> I think considering the question of "is it a choice?" relevant is almost as bad as believing homosexuality is somehow wrong either way.

 _Why should it matter?_ Was I born a programmer or did I choose to become one? I was born physically (to satisfy the gender-sensitive) male. I was born human. I was born with blue eyes.

Beyond the physically obvious, if you're OK with persecuting people for a choice that _does not affect you_ (e.g. "that guy is a blue-eyed human, and that's fine, but he CHOSE to be a PROGRAMMER, and that's just wrong!"), then you are making things worse.

"It's not a choice" doesn't make it more or less right or wrong. It's how people are. The failure to accept that (or at least ignore and tolerate it) is the problem, and it will _not_ be answered by "well it's genetic."

[edit: Full disclosure: This post was made while listening to Queen, but I didn't CHOOSE to do that, the restaurant did that to me; please judge appropriately.]

<comment><USER2> Yes, a thousand times yes.

Whether it's a choice or not should be irrelevant. However, used as it is in the modern political context of "gay harassment issues", I believe we're actually doing a great disservice to the gay community by using "they didn't have the choice" as an excuse.

Maybe it's just me, but every time someone argues that we should accept gay people because they didn't have a choice, I can't stop myself thinking: "So if they had a choice, would it be okay to harass them? Would it be okay to ask them to change?". The problem is not that gay people can't _change_. The problem is that it's f*cking wrong to ask them to change. Even if they could _change_ (whatever people mean by that), it's absolutely nonsensical to ask them to.

As a society, we ask murderers to change, criminals, people generally harmful to others. But gays? Since when is it okay to criticize the choice of someone that affects nobody but this someone?

I like pizza. If that bothers anyone, should I just say: "There's nothing I can do about it, I was born this way?"

<comment><USER20> Even if I could change, I wouldn't want to.

If you gave me a pill to turn straight, I wouldn't take it.

I like being gay and wouldn't change it. That's why we have fucking great big parades and talk about 'pride' and all that. That other people are assholes and bigots ain't my damn problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yet another giant intellect felled by the ignorant Athenian polity.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like Haiku.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I see it forward that one day Churchill will be dug up, made apologies for Turing and be buried back upside down.

Figuratively speaking.

Geek does not forget.

</comment><comment><USER23>
      "Chemical castration is the administration of medication
      designed to reduce libido and sexual activity. Unlike
      surgical castration, where the testicles or ovaries are
      removed through an incision in the body, chemical
      castration does not actually castrate the person, nor is
      it a form of sterilization."

      "Chemical castration is generally considered reversible
      when treatment is discontinued, although permanent
      effects in body chemistry can sometimes be seen, as in
      the case of bone density loss increasing with length of
      use   of Depo Provera. Chemical castration has, from
      time to time, been used as an instrument of public
      and/or judicial policy despite concerns over human
      rights and possible side effects."

      "In the United Kingdom, computer scientist Alan Turing,
      famous for his contributions to mathematics and computer
      science, was a homosexual who chose to undergo chemical
      castration in order to avoid imprisonment in 1952. At
      the time, homosexuality was still illegal and
      considered to be a mental illness that could be treated
      with chemical castration. Turing experienced side
      effects such as breast enlargement and bloating of the
      physique. He died two years later, with the inquest
      returning a verdict of suicide, although recent
      research has cast doubt on this result. In 2009, the
      then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, issued a
      public apology for the British government's "appalling"
      actions, after an online petition seeking the same
      gained 30,000 signatures and international recognition."

Source:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration#Europe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration#Europe)

      "Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and
      codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have
      committed suicide, as is widely believed.

      Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland has questioned the
      evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.

      He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as
      sufficient to establish a suicide verdict."

Source:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-18561092?print...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-18561092?print=true)

Edit: Added last portion.

<comment><USER24> Here is the HN discussion about the BBC link

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150495)</comment></comment>


Gartner and IDC dispute Android's dominance over Symbian in Q4 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/10/gartner-and-idc-dispute-androids-dominance-over-symbian-in-q4-2/ <comment><USER2> A strangely overblown story. The different sources put the crossover point at most weeks apart. One of them had to cross first, it's just random that one of them crossed before the Q4/Q1 transition rather than all crossing within the same calendar quarter.

It's not helped by engadget showing the yearly sales table (in which time period Symbian sold double Android) in an article about Q4 performance (in which Android either very slightly over- or undersold Symbian).</comment>


A simple distraction-free, no gimmick writing tool - <AUTHOR> https://skadimoolam.github.io/Simple-Writing-Tool/ <comment><USER2> I've tried perhaps a dozen of these writing tools, as I'm looking for one for my Android tablet. I've yet to find one where I can write more than a page worth of stuff without being forced to crane my neck to stare at the very bottom of the tablet for the entire rest of the time I'm writing.

Sublime allows me to scroll past the end, and I didn't realize just how important that feature is until I had to trudge through the endless morass of apps that don't. Predictably, this app doesn't either. I wonder how much actual writing these writing app devs actually do.

I'm not asking for an option for the cursor to stay in the middle or two thirds of the way down the screen, though that would be really really really nice. But scroll-past-end is essential.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will surely look into this feature.

Answering your question of "I wonder how much actual writing these writing app devs actually do?". I am not sure about other developers but I love to write and I write about 1000 words everyday. From my point of view this is the tool I would love to have found earlier. This was the need for me to build this tool in the first place.

I really appreciate you sharing your opinion will surely look into what's possible.

Thanks

<comment><USER2> There's money in this space. I've spent maybe $30 just looking for the right app, only to come up empty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I agree with you, I too have spend a few dollars here and there trying to find the perfect writing utility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The perfect combination for me for a writing tool would be a combination of notepad++ and evernote. I've tried tons of tools, but none of them are completely satisfactory.

Np++:

Pro: extremely flexible editing, moving lines around, structuring thougths with tabs and keeping the indentation level when pressing enter.

Con: Having tons of tabs of notes like "new23", "new25" makes it difficult to keep track of stuff.

Evernote:

Pro: convenient naming of snippets, tags, auto saving everything, cloud sync between devices (optional: embeddig images, or files).

Con: horrible editing experience (compared to np++ which I'm accustomed to)

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this bring anything that is not part of [https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)?

I'm in no way affiliated with this project but that's what I use to write and I absolutely love it, but I'm always open to trying other tools should it make sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice tool. I would add a dark theme to it, people love a dark theme. I'm the developer of Poe, a distraction free writing app for windows, and a dark theme is the default. I regularly get email from users telling me how much they adore the colour scheme.

<comment><USER6> It's good to have options. I personally cannot stand dark color schemes, my eyes cannot handle it somehow, it's very difficult for me to read light on dark for more than a couple of seconds.

<comment><USER5> And a lot of people are exactly the opposite and can't stand black text on white background. Options are good. of course the challenge is knowing where to draw the line between having lots of features and being a simple app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Certainly the UI is unobtrusive - which is a good thing. But what seems missing is how to go back to view files that were saved...unless I'm missing something. Also, aren't there other tools for distraction-free writing, such as Windows' notepad, or the open source nano (on *nix), or something along those lines? Again, kudos for the base UI, but i think it might need a tad little more as far as next steps (e.g. retrieving already saved text files, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great to hear your opinion. I built this tool for my own purpose. I wanted to practice writing long essays that's all this tool does. But I will surely look into permanent saving options and sharing of these notes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool, it doesn't persist after you close the browser, which is fine. Anyone can copy/paste.

But one killer feature would be to sync it with Google Docs. Or make it a feature of Drive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, will look into saving the content on Google Drive or other storage options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the UI.

Couple of ideas to think about:

* remove save/restore and save on every keystroke

* create new URL for each new document, restore when visited

* save content in localStorage only, if it's not meant for sharing

<comment><USER10> LocalStorage is a very small space(can't recall the numbers right now) I've come to learn. And it varies between browsers.

<comment><USER11> Plain text is small, and the smallest limit appears to be on the order of 2MB, which is enough to fit several NaNoWriMo novels. (And that's if you're storing them uncompressed.)

(source: [https://stackoverflow.com/q/2989284/1223693](https://stackoverflow.com/q/2989284/1223693), [https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota- resear...](https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-research/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is another one that I've been using for years [https://draftin.com/](https://draftin.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This ones great, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What are the privacy policies of websites like these? I use a word counter website when writing responses that are supposed to be a certain length and have wondered about the business model. I only ever paste in text that isn't confidential since I don't really know.

I see this site has a word counter, so if it has a good privacy policy I'd be inclined to use it instead!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry for not explaining the site's privacy policy.

I can assure that I collect no data about any user, there are no cookies what so ever. About the word counter, it uses 10 lines of JavaScript to look for the number of spaces in your text and that's all the logic that power this tool. When you save the content, it never leaves your browser.

Hope this clears you doubt.

<comment><USER13> Great — you've become my new word counter website! I'll give it a try for drafting also.

<comment><USER3> Why dont you simply use notepad++ and count the spaces?

<comment><USER5> It's not that easy. Line breaks, huphens, double spaces, punctuation etc all make it tricky

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm somewhat amazed by the amount of votes writing apps like this get here on HN. That is the second time I see such an "app" on the front page.

It's a nice little project, don't get me wrong.. I just don't see the use case to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER15> I do not get what is purpose of this? Write and what? Is the purpose to share? Or the purpose primarily is to "capture" the thought? If it is the latter, I think getting on web and accessing a URL is a good path to distraction.

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this tool for my own purpose. I wanted to practice writing long essays that's all this tool does. But I will surely look into permanent saving options and sharing of these notes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have been using Left [https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/left](https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/left)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is cool, I appreciate the minimal aesthetic. Having the ability to persist and retrieve would be a value-add for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback, will look into saving to Google Drive or other storage options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> i am not sure what it is supposed to do. is it just a textbox or does it do something i'm not seeing?

</comment><comment><USER19> In my opinion one of the best writing tool / distraction free is [http://telegra.ph/](http://telegra.ph/)

It looks like your tool but the text formatting is Medium-like and you can share it really easily and anonymously by clicking on publish.

<comment><USER11> A similar tool, but even simpler: [https://txt.fyi/](https://txt.fyi/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about using a text editor?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sublime Text in Distraction free mode is the best, but I wanted something online.

<comment><USER20> ssh into a VM and use vim? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hmm. The other 120 open browser tabs aren't a distraction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, but I not a 120 tabs person.</comment></comment>


The Great Climate Migration Has Begun - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html <comment><USER2> This is one aspect of the climate cataclysm that most people really fail to grasp; the changing climate will create a population migration the world has never seen before. And there has never been a kingdom in the history of the world that was able to do anything about migrating peoples.

If you thought that the Syrian refugee crisis -- with its few million refugees -- was bad, think about almost half a billion people on the run. This will destabilize whole regions and bring governments to theirs knees.

It's bringing tears to my eyes. There's so much we could do and there are still morons out there dragging out the debate about the seriousness of the situation. It's like our global civilization is getting filibustered by suicidal idiots.</comment>


JQuery SocialSharePrivacy: Protect your visitors from share button tracking - <AUTHOR> http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/

<comment><AUTHOR> German text. Sorry, couldn't fit that into the title. See an example of this working in the footer here: <http://www.gpgtools.org/gpgmail/index.html></comment>


GM hopes to sell its cars through eBay - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/10/autos/gm_ebay/index.htm?postversion=2009071016

<comment><USER2> I really, really don't understand why car makers don't sell cars online like Dell (for example) sells computers. Have some small dealerships with a few pre-made cars for people to test drive (or for impulsive folks to buy), and then let people custom-order their cars online.

This would solve the over-supply problem and also keep people from having to 'settle' on a particular car because it's the only one the dealer has in stock.

<comment> old-gregg Because car dealerships have successfully lobbied for state laws that make it illegal for car manufacturers to sell directly to consumers.

Back in 2000, Ford (IIRC) have tried to fight the cartel and sell directly through ford.com but lost in courts.

<comment><USER3> Is it actually illegal or just a violation of their contact with dealerships?

I understand that legacy agreements with dealerships are a contributor to The Failure as are (we keep hearing) legacy agreements with unions. But overall I think that people are very quick to believe a "they lobbied dumb politicians" story over "they signed dumb agreements stories."

If you had bought a _license_ to sell Ford cars, you might want an agreement not to go around you at a later date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do they need the dealers again? It seems to me that the dealerships are an even worse ripoff than real-estate agents.

<comment><USER5> They don't. But, dealers are an unstoppable state-level lobbying force.

<comment><USER6> They got a majority in the House to vote for a bill that reverses a federal court allowing GM to shed dealerships in bankruptcy. Can't say I blame them - dealerships are the biggest source of sales tax revenue in every single rural area that they're in.

<comment><USER7> > Can't say I blame them - dealerships are the biggest source of sales tax > revenue in every single rural area that they're in.

I don't know about other states, but California sends the sales tax money to the city/county of the registered address, no matter where you buy the car. In short, if every car was sold from the same dealership, each city/county would get the same sales tax as it would with a dealer in every city/county.

One side effect of this is that you can't get a discount on car sales tax by buying in a low-tax area if you live in a high-tax area like you can with most other purchases, such as car parts, books, computers. (Sales tax varies by city and county in CA.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill Prediction: "Reserve not met"

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually don't understand how people can buy cars from eBay, or any other online outlet. I could not imagine buying a new car online, and even less for a user car.

When I put $20K in an item, I want to try it, make sure I can actually talk to the seller if anything goes wrong, and be able to exercise the warranty easily.

<comment><USER9> most people find the car on eBay, then go in person or pay someone else to try it out before buying.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. I bought both my classic Mustangs on Ebay. In both cases, I got the online description and photos, asked the sellers for additional information before bidding. I probably went through some part of this process on over 2 dozen cars, and bid on 5-6 of them

Then in each case, at the close of the auction I basically said "So long as the car basically meets the description as you laid out, you're getting paid, but before you get paid, I'm verifying the basics." In one case I flew down to get it and paid actual cash. In the other case (much farther away), I had a car club buddy go check it out for basic conformance (title/VIN match, runs/drives, rust no worse than described, etc) at which point I wired the money, my buddy took the title, and I arranged the car transport pickup. One of my cars is as-good/better than was described all around. One of them had a moderate issue which I chalk up to "well, I still got a smoking deal on it, it's fixed now, and knowing everything, I'd still have done the deal, so..."

If you know what you're doing, and want a (relatively) rare particular car, and don't have Barrett-Jackson type money, Ebay's a great place to buy cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The power of the eBay brand mated up with the four core brands from GM could be a really good thing," Docherty said. "It takes the shopping process online up about 4 notches because you've got a lot more information at your fingertips."

PR language is getting _seriously_ out of hand.

</comment><comment><USER9> doing this through ebay is stupid as hell. GM should have built a brand new website for this.</comment>


New Dyno Networking Model - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/5/2/new_dyno_networking_model

<comment><USER2> A nice follow up to this would be NATing external access from all dynos (web and worker) for an application through a single unique IP per app. That way external resources (eg your app's database) can be white listed by IP. One of the reasons the major Postgres bug last month was so bad for DBaaS providers (like Heroku Postgres) was that most leave inbound access totally open. That's great when you're first getting started as you don't need to explicitly configure firewall settings but it's terrible for production.

I'm not sure how economical it is to provide this for the free tier though I think a paid option would be viable. AWS charges $3.60/IP/month so it's not _that_ expensive and I'm sure there are plenty of folks who would pay $10, $20, or even $50/month for a unique outbound address.

<comment><USER3> Funnily enough this happened with Heroku and Facebook just a couple of days ago - a bunch of apps got blocked from using the Graph API until Facebook removed the banned AWS IPs.

<https://addons.heroku.com/proximo> does what's needed, but at a serious price for high volume.

<comment><USER2> Wow that is pretty steep pricing. The lowest tier that seems usable is the $75/mo one. Then again if you're locked into Heroku then even $1,250/mo isn't _that_ much for piece of mind and added security. I'm sure whoever is paying for it is happy it's available.

This was one of the reasons we handled server deployments ourselves for our startup. The cloud version of our app runs in production on AWS in a VPC so all outbound traffic is NATed through a single public IP. With reserved instances it costs about $22/mo for the NAT gateway and setup was pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER4> > all outbound traffic is NATed through a single public IP. With reserved > instances it costs about $22/mo for the NAT gateway and setup was pretty > straightforward.

I've considered doing this myself so I'm curious: are you getting good network performance through the NAT gateway? What instance type are you using?

<comment><USER2> No issues to speak of so far. Our app databases are in the VPC itself so our own traffic does not get routed through the NAT gateway but I haven't heard any issues from users either.

At the moment we're using an m1.small for the NAT itself though if you have perf issues you can bump that up as well. I would guess a c1.medium would be more appropriate though as I said we haven't had any issues so haven't considered changing anything yet.

Here's a speed test through from a m1.small through the NAT (27.5 MB/s):

        $ curl -o /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip
          % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                         Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
        100  500M  100  500M    0     0  27.5M      0  0:00:18  0:00:18 --:--:-- 29.2M

Here's a speed test from a m1.small vanilla EC2 instance outside the NAT (38.2 MB/s):

        $ curl -o /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip
          % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                         Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
        100  500M  100  500M    0     0  38.2M      0  0:00:13  0:00:13 --:--:-- 34.1M

<comment><USER4> This is great info - thanks! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bit puzzled why people would use the local IP address for inter process communication on a single host, rather than unix domain sockets.

<comment><USER6> Not all services support unix domain sockets. It's one more option on the table, but I agree that domain sockets should be favored in most cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems to go contrary to the idea of managed processes. Wasn't Heroku supposed to abstract the idea of host all together ?

<comment><USER6> It is still abstracted, nothing changes from the point of view of most applications.

It just opens more possibilities and increases the isolation.

<comment><USER7> From the article:

> A dyno should let you run any application or set of processes that you would > run on your local machine or on an old-school server.

As soon as you allow multiple processes per dyno the abstraction becomes less clear. It means that now a dyno is more like a small VPS and I have to know which process is on which dyno for communication.

<comment><USER8> You don't have to run multiple processes if you don't want to. You shouldn't have to change the way you do anything of you're happy with your app now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You used to be able to peek at how many other dynos you were sharing an instance with by running

        netstat -l | grep lxc | wc -l

I sampled the resulting number a bunch of times and usually got 100 ± 25. I'm guessing this isn't possible anymore – not that it was useful, just interesting.

<comment><USER10> Back in the day you could just do "ps -x" and see every process running on the machine :)</comment></comment>


Balsamiq Mixergy Interview - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/balsamiq-peldi-guilizzoni-interview/

<comment><USER2> This was one of my favorite interviews so far. There was a nice back and forth. In some interviews I have seen Andrew and jl do interviews where the guests are allowed to ramble for too long on a particular topic. This interview has a very nice tempo to it. Nice work.

Also, I watched it live after I found <http://mixergy.com/coming-soon/> a few day's ago and subscribed in ical.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the balsamiq stories (and use it). Thanks for this.</comment>


Tech talents from India, other countries leaving Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-05-10-tech-talents-leave-silicon-valley_n.htm

<comment><USER2> I think the idea of people leaving Silicon Valley to go to India is ridiculous, unless they want to take an 80-90% pay cut.

However the idea that companies don't need to hire just from Silicon Valley and in fact can hire from anywhere in the world is an emerging trend that is about to get a whole lot more prevalent.

The concept of hiring from the city or country you live in is an antiquated notion.</comment>


IPhone XR: The best iPhone Apple can't sell - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/iphone-xr-revisited-the-best-iphone-apple-cant-sell-11546886742 <comment><AUTHOR> Apple has been jacking up prices on ALL products for 3 solid years, and stiffing suppliers like Qualcomm. If Steve Cook isn't careful he'll change Apple's walled garden into a WALLED GRAVEYARD where customer pocketbooks go to die!

</comment><comment><USER2> WSJ links should get the paywall warning, shouldn't they?</comment>


Ask HN: How much did it cost to setup the legal foundations for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

Our startup is based in Toronto, Canada. We're looking at getting our legal foundations put in place and want to gauge how much that might cost.<p>By legal foundations, we mean items like a shareholders' agreement, sorting out IP rights, etc. <comment><USER2> Our total costs for all the initial docs from Silicon Valley lawyers were $2,000. I have seen costs range from $2,000 up to $15,000 (the higher range was usually because fees were deferred until fundraising or more IP was involved).

</comment><comment><USER3> Waterloo, Ontario startup chiming in.

Incorporated for $200(ish) online with Industry Canada. Very simple process. To do our term sheet/NDA/employment agreements we turned to James Smith from Labarge Weinstein (Ottawa). Excellent startup lawyer who travels all over Canada. No upfront costs for the minor paperwork, he's into building longterm relationships.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have no affiliation with this site, or any experience with their services, but Pinsky Law in Toronto is offering several promotions for startups right now: <http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/startup_legal_package.htm> there are several more promotions for trademarks, IP etc.

Also take a look through their site, lots of information there for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Incorporation in US would cost between $200 - $400.

The other stuff you mentioned come under Formation Services package (fixed fee) offered by most startup law firms - the fee for this generally ranges between $3K - $5K. And you can negotiate to defer this fee with most of the law firms, until one of these triggers occur - funding, or revenue, or exit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Vancouver here.

$15,000 - incorporation, shareholders agreement, minor angel investment, and employment agreements.

</comment><comment><USER7> anyone know of the main differences between setting up in the usa vs canada? is it better to set up in one or the other (if you're coming from the canadian side)?

anyone set up shop in both?

</comment><comment><USER8> ours was about 2K. although, they overbilled us at nearly 3K so make sure you get estimates in writing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Orrick offers startups a package that costs nothing until they raise 500K+ in funding, and then they take their fee.</comment>