Rape charge dropped against former Uber driver – Chicago Tribune - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-driver-rape-charge-dropped-met-20150406-story.html <comment><USER2> Good for the guy. Now, is the lying chick gonna be prosecuted for making up this thing and attempting to ruin someone else's life?</comment>


Notetaking as a way to stay smart - <AUTHOR> http://peterc.org/blog/2010/248-notetaking.html <comment><USER2> Check out PersonalBrain [1] for a great way to keep all your notes organized and connected. It's like a mindmap, but every node can become a root node.

As an example, if you're reading a dystopian novel you could create a node for "Dystopias" under æTypes of Literature" that has "Brave New World" and "1984: as sub-nodes with notes for each book in their node. Those could link to nodes for the authors with maybe writing advice from Orwell and/or Huxley. Then you could link from them to a node about a current event or article that seems to fulfill their somber predictions... etc.

The same "Brain" could also have notes on topics as disparate as programming languages, biology or travel, all in one searchable, non-siloed place. You can create connections between nodes at will.

I've used it for several years now and can't recommend it highly enough. I wouldn't, however, mind seeing competition in the area as they seem to be the only company that makes software like this.

[1] <http://www.thebrain.com/>

Shameless plug for my blog post from several years ago about the software: [http://marcusvorwaller.com/blog/archives/2007/09/04/personal...](http://marcusvorwaller.com/blog/archives/2007/09/04/personal- brain-4-review/)

<comment><USER3> I don't see what's so great about such a program other than it's a "shinier" version of the basic folder layout in any modern OS. I mean, you can do all the same stuff using files and folders from your C:\ and add shortcuts between them if you need to and it can be made instantly searchable and indexed without being locked into one program file. I'll admit you cannot easily make things look as nice and colorful as PB seems to do but if you're really that interested about learning and keeping notes, this just seems to be another of the countless procrastination-forming pseudo-notetaking programs which already exist. Furthermore, the amount of time it would take for me to reform my current notes and files into this program would be a huge kill to other things which I could already be doing. I'm curious to hear responses to this.

<comment><USER2> It's not for everyone. Watch the video in the blog post I linked to, or download it and give it a try if you like. Or don't. It may just be that it's not your thing.

Personally, I've found it to be anything but a "procrastination-forming pseudo-notetaking program."

<comment><USER3> I have tried both PB and Freemind and I still have trouble grasping the use.

I say Procrastination-forming because in my experience with these kind of tools you end up spending more time formatting and aesthetic-izing your stuff than actually doing notetaking. Look at the demo video on the main homepage and one thing they emphasize is on putting small icons beside the bubbles and having neat background colors.

I say Pseudo-notetaking becuase this tool is actually more geared towards structure than creation. Your video for instance doesn't show anything related to my idea of notetaking. Notetaking means you are writing down quotations or details upon ideas that you're listening or reading about because you wish to remember them or study later. Notetaking, in my mind, is not limited to linking Ayn Rand as an author and 1902 as a birth year. There's no depth to anything.

In the end if you say it works for you then go for it. But I'm just saying that if it's really notetaking you're interested in then I really don't think this is the program to use.

<comment><USER2> If try PB for more than moment or two, you'll see that one of the main features is that every node allows notes. Selecting a node displays a note field with full formatting and unlimited length. Nodes can also have attachments that can be any type of document.

Aesthetics are a factor, but the icons, for example, are generated automatically by favicons when you link to a webpage. No procrastination involved!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just make sure you use org-mode to take your notes: it's both more powerful than your current note-taking app, and it stores files as readable plain text. No proprietary lock-in, and no fear of data corruption in case of bugs. :)

<comment><USER5> Except it does not handle graphics well.

While researching a subject, I take notes intertwined with graphs and diagrams. Can emacs handle that type of data?

<comment><USER6> Diagrams could be done using artist-mode (<http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode>). Images themselves can apparently be embedded/displayed:

\- [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp/html_node/Images.htm...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp/html_node/Images.html)

\- [http://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Showing- Im...](http://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Showing-Images.html)

\- <http://obsidianrook.com/codelife/emacs_image_mode.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Notational Velocity. Effortless note-taking and search.

<http://notational.net/>

Edit: combine it with dropbox to keep your notes synced and backed-up 24/7

<comment><USER8> Or combine it with a Simple Note account and have sync to all your nv installations as well as Simple Note on iOS and other platforms as well.

It works rather flawlessly.

<comment><USER9> Or, store your .txt files in Dropbox and sync with Simplenote. Double the backup / accessibility :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree so much that I'm building a startup around this and related ideas. Hoping to have the MVP in the next couple of months.

<comment><USER11> I'd be interested in using that. Got a mailing list I can sign up to?

<comment><USER12> The importance of an email list!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Taking notes is very important as it forces you to think twice about the information as you write it down using your own words ("copy-paste-and-dump" information does not have the same learning effect).

In addition, you use different "senses" (writing in addition to reading) which enhances learning.

And of course (unless you only write it down on paper) you will be able to search for it and find it again when you need it (because you will _not_ be able to remember every detail).

So, it isn't that important _which_ tool you use, as long as you keep most notes in one place (so you know where to look for it later).

(shameless plug) Of course, as the number of notes grow, many people will experience information overload and have trouble finding the forest for all the trees...this is where using specialized tools that are optimized for finding what you need will help you.

My blog post regarding large amounts of information \- <http://www.ppcsoft.com/blog/iknow-efficiency-scalability.asp>

(/shameless plug)

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://www.snaptic.com> is also in this line of thinking even though one could think they are trying to emulate evernote

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a great idea. The article just talks about taking notes on books, but it's just as worthwhile for movies, podcasts, lectures, presentations, etc.

I've generally found that taking notes during something like a lecture or presentation (anything that I can't pause, in fact) actually hinders my understanding. I think it's because I have to divide my concentration between writing and listening/watching. But for these things, writing up notes immediately afterwards is tremendously helpful.

Sometimes it's just the action of taking notes which provides the benefit, even if you never re-read them again.

</comment><comment><USER16> Excellent tip! I can recommend to apply this _technique_ to lecture notes, too; it'll work wonders during the preparations for exams.

Although in a slightly different context, take notes as a way to get better advice; see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635064> and [http://lifehacker.com/5270397/get-better-advice-by-taking- no...](http://lifehacker.com/5270397/get-better-advice-by-taking-notes)

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree with that the consumption of knowledge helps us learn. But I am not sure just taking notes does the trick. I think in aiding us learn more the knowledge has to be work and thought out. I believe learning is hard and you have to do something more on the lines or writing articles on the subject or course work to really force your brain to absorb it all.

<comment><USER18> You're right but I don't quite aim to _learn_ the material as I do to "remember" that I read it and that I can come back to it again in future.

There's only so much space in my brain for specific facts, and I'm pretty poor at dealing with them, but I thrive on knowing _where_ to find the answer to things. The notetaking method I use helps me remember _what_ I've read and to "re-remember" the material rather than to learn it per se.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree. I actually now take notes with my live scribe pen while reading books and record myself giving commentary around important poiints. I go over the notes when I have free time. It seems that I retain a lot more when I do this.

</comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, I didn't go into how my system works but it's just a nanoc powered site rendering to plain HTML from Markdown files. No serious structure.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was thinking about building something like Instapaper, only you would be able to add notes about pages you read and share with people...

<comment><USER21> Have you seen Diigo [<http://www.diigo.com/>]? Does more or less what you described.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> vi ~/notes/category/what.txt

next problem...

<comment><USER23> I like to keep pretty much everything about everything in one file and rely on search to find it.

<comment><USER24> grep -R what ~/notes

<comment><USER25> Funny, I do the same thing. Recently my notes moved to ~/Dropbox/Notes and I also use git.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


$new_salary = fn($current_salary); //? - <AUTHOR>

// Actual email conversation with recruiter Recruiter: This position offers great pay and competitive benefits... Me: Could you describe "great pay" in more details please? Recruiter: The pay will depend on what you are making now...<p>Your reply on that? <comment><USER2> Move on and stop wasting time with this scumbag recruiter, but always let them make the first offer.

"I will consider any reasonable offer for my given skill set and experience."

<comment><USER3> I agree whole heartedly! If they are trying to sell you on salary alone this recruiter isn't worth your time. You want someone that is gonna be intent in helping you gain what you want in your next job.</comment></comment>


Amazon, Whole Foods, and what it means to be a tech company - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-whole-foods-tech-company-2017-8 <comment><USER2> As far as I've read, the ordinary definition of a tech company is one that pays employees partially in stock (options).</comment>


Y Combinator's Paul Graham On The $150K Per Start-Up Offer - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/02/01/y-combinators-paul-graham-on-the-150k-per-start-up-offer/ <comment><USER2> "Graham is known for his 'pizza profitable' mantra".

It seems ramen isn't even a conceivable foodstuff for WSJ's readership. 'Pizza profitable' has a nice onomatopoeic quality though.

<comment><USER3> onomatopoeic -> alliterative? I don't think anything makes a sound like "pizza profitable" :)

<comment><USER4> I have a friend who, every time he tell someone what onomatopoeia means, points out that, oddly enough, onomatopoeia is not itself onomatopoeic.

<comment><USER5> >onomatopoeia is not itself onomatopoeic.

It would be very difficult to do that since onomatopoeia is a concept and concepts don't make sounds.

<comment><USER6> which is ironic, given that a cucumber is saying it.

<comment><USER4> Hint please

<comment><USER6> Well, my thinking was: Euroclydon's friend likes to be technically correct about the term onomatopoeia, and jimmyk chimes in with the same level of technical correctness on the matter. So for levity, I point out how it is 'ironic' in a nonsensical way - hoping to hit their OCD nerve a bit. As it is clearly not an ironic statement, and we only have anecdotal evidence of cucumbers being able to mutter a sound.

<comment><USER7> Run for office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's assume that they have invested since the beginning of YC with the 250 startups:

       250 * 150 000 = $37 500 000

So far, 20 YC companies have been acquired generating $401 500 000 (data taken from yclist.com). If the investors own an average of 5% of the startups, their current position would have been about 50% loss:

       401 500 000 * .05 = $20 075 000

I don't think this is a bad position to be in since there are still great companies that have not been acquired or exited. The $150k investment may also reduce the failure rate.

<comment><USER9> 5% is high.

If the Series A rounds were 1 on 3 ($1M on $3M pre-money valuation), then $150k would get him 3.75%. For hotter startups, 1 on 4 or 5 might actually happen. Presumably they would have the option to put more in, but that would increase their basis.

But your assessment is right. Average time to liquidity for a VC backed startup is 7+ years-- older than the oldest YC company, right? There is a TON of value locked in in previous YC companies.

<comment><USER10> According to the article, the average YC company raises $700k in seed funding. Assuming your $3M pre is correct, that would be about 18% total and 4% for the $150k investor.

The question is, does a quick and easy $150k delay fundraising until a company is looking at a $6M pre? For the super hot ones I bet it does. For those startups that are more worried about not getting early traction they probably won't delay fundraising.

So if we are going to throw a number around... my fuzzy math says 2% of the hottest companies and 4% of the others.

<comment><USER11> The first post-YC fundraising is usually made up of convertible notes. So in your example, that $700K at $3M pre would not trigger the conversion of Start Fund's note, which would instead convert at the valuation of the _next_ round of fundraising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We fixed that mistake:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/02/01/y-combinators...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/02/01/y-combinators- paul-graham-on-the-150k-per-start-up-offer/tab/comments/)

Scott Austin wrote: @Andy - I think we mean the same thing. But we actually changed "pizza" to "ramen," since "ramen profitable" is the correct term that Paul Graham uses. It was actually the founder of Y Combinator alum Airbnb that used "pizza profitable"! [http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/06/10/from- crash-pa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/06/10/from-crash-pad-to- pizza-profitable-entrepreneurs-target-budget-travel-market/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, I wonder if this bulk micro financing of start ups could become a new financial product. Find 30 - 100 small start ups, give them all a whack of cash that's backed by a bond. Sell the bond and repeat.

<comment><USER14> I don't think there are enough worthy start ups to make this a viable plan.

<comment><USER15> Just make sure you're the one selling and rating the bonds, easy money!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this negatively change anyone's mind who was thinking of applying to YC? I always thought YC was special, they give you less money, take less equity, and typically value you out of the gate at over 100K. Part of the appeal was seeing what kind of company could be grown from such humble roots.

The 150K offer on the table is nice, and the terms are such that you would be foolish to turn it down, but also in my mind it changes the dynamic of YC a bit.

Was wondering if others felt the same.

<comment><USER17> It changes the game a lot for startups that would fail 4 months in.

I don't see any downsides though for YC candidates; I don't subscribe to the idea that getting only the initial seed money from YC is better than having the option of the follow on $150K.

      If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly. - David Hackworth

<comment><USER16> How many YC companies fold four months in?

The only reason I've heard for a YC company closing is "not enough traction", or some variation of "not enough passion" - I've never heard "not enough money", although I'm sure it happens too.

<comment><USER18> "not enough traction" = "ran out of {money|energy} before finding the right product/market fit"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So if there are now a whole lot more applicants to YC, more good ones will get turned away than ever before. Suggesting rival seed-funds (or whatever you call them) will crop up to absorb the surplus. Unless YC just increases its intake proportionally (but that could be an unwanted dilution of the guidance/mentoring available to each one).

<comment><USER20> YC will probably increase its intake proportionally, or close to it. They've been begging for more applications lately, even extending the application deadline for the last round. It's sounds like they've got capacity for more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish, it was like a mutual fund.

I would happily put let's say $10,000 that will give me a .17% share of the total 40 companies.

<comment><USER22> Thats an excellent idea. A startup could be made out of that. Sort of "private" stock market open to public? I'm sure this has already come up, but why can't there be a private unregulated "stock market", just as individual lending(as opposed taking a traditional loan) is possible eg: LendingTree

<comment><USER23> Regulation. There has been a huge number of scams based around selling stock so the amount of regulation has grown over time.

PS: Invest in wonderful Iowa beach front property.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It was great to see Paul make the very first connection that I made upon hearing the news. The deal had to be absolutely fantastic for the founders otherwise some portion of the best wouldn't take it. Having looked at the deal, it looks like it qualifies.

I agree with wave that it looks like something that should have worked so far, and one can presume they're getting better at what they're doing and hopefully will have a better economic environment for these current startups.

It's really cool that this happened.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could someone help me run the numbers? What will $150,000 be used for on an average YC startup?

$150,000 will allow the startup to hire 1 or 2 engineers in the short-term. Is that the real use of the $150,000?

What other expenses do they spend good money on?

Another way to look at this question: If you were a new startup in YC, what would you spend the 150,000 on?

<comment><USER26> hiring engineers is not a good idea, your startup team should have enough talent to do 90% of the work. Some use of the money could be for design art work, or marketing (free swag). For example if you were planning to launch your startup on iPhone only, you can now use the money to contract someone to develop for Android, WP7, blackberry, this money can make the startup more complete at launch.

<comment><USER10> uh, wouldn't that be "hiring engineers"?

Or do you want the designers to build the blackberry app?

I think spending it on swag would be a horrible idea. I can't think of any company that succeeded because they had really great swag in the early months.

<comment><USER26> I meant not hire full time engineers, $150 can only get u 2 engineers, get a app done on contract basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Virtually all of the companies that go through the program receive seed funding after participating in the popular incubator program... The average Y Combinator company raises $700,000 after the program."

Had a hunch about the funding success rate and amount, but it's good to have these confirmed. Helps in appeasing queasy spouses, risk-averse cofounders, etc.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe I'm the only one, but I always thought pizza-profitable (or ramen- or sushi- or whatever) referred to the fact that a company was pulling in enough revenue such that the founders could cover the cost of pizza (or sushi, or ramen). When used that way it's also more informative; sushi means more revenue than pizza, which means more than ramen.

<comment><USER29> It means that you're making enough to cover living expenses, provided that you are living extremely cheap -- so the different food gradings still apply. The article's description is correct but ambiguous.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> s/pizza/ramen/

</comment><comment><USER31> I for one would not want to associate myself with Russian wealth regardless of how squeaky clean Yuri or his firm might potentially be. On that latter point, I would try to conduct extensive due diligence on them and their investors. It strikes me, however, that there are too many potential skeletons in the closet when it comes to Russian wealth that even the best of due diligence may not reveal. I would just want to stay away from any possible connections with ill- gotten wealth of the sort that is widely known to have occurred in post-Soviet Russia. I am not willing to sacrifice my principles or reputation for the sake of business -- nor would I want to directly or indirectly benefit shady characters or associate myself with potential ill-gotten wealth that could be very difficult to detect when entering into such a relationship.

<comment><USER32> Honestly, I think this is a little racist. I agree that there is risk there, but surely there are legal frameworks in place to insulate the YC companies from that risk? (If "the best of due diligence" doesn't uncover anything shady, what more could they have done?)

If you want to talk about "ill-gotten wealth" or "shady characters" do you really need to look any further than American investment firms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> even though pg says "there's no reason for companies to turn it down"

There would be an advantage to being the only company not to accept the funds. i imagine the press and standing out in the herd might be well worth passing on the 150k.

Plus i think others angles and VCs will through money at you knowing you turned down the easy money.

<comment><USER34> If you're looking to stand out, you could also stab yourself in the eye with a fork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any company that is really hot will have people offering them money at a cheaper valuation than Yuris offer. Cos the other investors already know the line they have to undercut.

So the ones who take up the offer are the ones that don't appear hot enough for anyone to undercut that offer.

<comment><USER36> There is no way to offer better terms than a convertible note with no cap and no discount.

At least no current way. I suppose you could have a valuation floor instead of a cap, or a negative discount. I've never heard of that happening. It would be something if things ever came to that.

<comment><USER37> The convertible note insists on a pro rata right on future rounds. Someone who removes that would be offering a slightly better deal.

Pro rata rights cause more dilution in later rounds, but they are pretty standard and at seed rounds most people don't think about removing that term.

<comment><USER36> They don't intrinsically cause more dilution in later rounds. The buyer has to pay whatever the price is in the later round. So they'd only cause more dilution if the lead in the later round insisted on getting a specific percent of the company. VCs often insist on that sort of thing in A rounds, but less often in later rounds.

<comment><USER37> Agreed situation is the worst on the first round that involves a VC. It can also arise in later rounds if you take strategics or new VCs.

Given that most YC companies will still go on to raise a seed angel round after this 150k, they will be hit by extra pro-rata dilution. If we assume a $5m seed round post money, then the 150k translates to 3%. If you raise a VC round with a VC that insists on a 20% stake then the overall affect is 0.6% extra dilution. Every point hurts at that stage, but not that bad :).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the default sorting of comments on HN set to 'new' and not 'best'? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> No I think it's scored like the stories are in that new comments get a bonus to get to the top but as they age they're weighted on upvotes.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the info

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you click "new," you get the new stuff sorted by newest.

If you click "Hacker News," you get the current "best" according to whatever algorithms decide that.

If you click "lists" at the bottom of the page, you get some other options, like most active discussion.</comment>


Who Smashed the Laptops from Zucotti Park? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.tv/2011/11/18/who-smashed-the-laptops-from-occupy-wall-street-inside-the-nypd-s-lost-and-found

<comment><USER2> And who is going to investigate and prosecute this quite evident, probably felony property theft and damage (from the amount of theft and damages, if nothing else)?

If "law enforcement" is going to engage in this level of hypocrisy, they shouldn't wonder when they no longer garner any respect.

And those who "didn't do" this but continue to support the organizations that did, become ever more complicit.</comment>


Show HN: Parseur - Turn your Emails into an API - <AUTHOR> https://parseur.com <comment><AUTHOR> Feedback, of course, is appreciated.</comment>


Why Google Fiber Is To Expensive for Your City - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/04/google-fiber-next-city/64048/

<comment><USER2> The only part about this post I found informative was the citation from Google on California laws. The other points were just garbage. Google deployed in rural Kansas City, there's demand. Perhaps this post should be called "If You Live In California This Is Why Google Fiber Is Too Expensive for Your City".

</comment><comment><USER3> *too expensive</comment>


Facebook, Google, and Twitter Have Agreed to Apply Germany's Anti-Hate Speech Law - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/575268/facebook-google-and-twitter-have-agreed-to-apply-germanys-strict-anti-hate-speech-law-online/ <comment><USER2> Simply deleting people's feelings does not make them disappear. There will be unintended consequences to pushing totalitarian measures such as these.

<comment><USER3> Yep. Like making people think that 'the man' is trying to shut down opinions they don't like/facts they consider inconvenient and hence driving people to real extremists who want to capitalise on people's hatred.

Every attempt to 'censor hatred' simply drives people to far right/far left/facist/whatever political groups that claim to be against censorship and for the 'common man'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can change the opinions of people by blocking them. Internet must be always free</comment>


Ask HN: How do large companies decide which bugs to ship? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Our PM would identify and prioritize customer requirements (so creating a foobar in the UI is P1, renaming it is P2, showing a loading spinner is P3, etc). Then our QA tester would "bug bash" and assign priority to bugs according to the requirement it violated. We had a policy of "GA releases cannot contain any >P2 priority bugs" or similar.

This system worked well with a technical PM, proper release planning (allocating time to test and fix bugs), and the autonomy to bend the rules a bit in either direction (e.g. "this bug is technically P4 but it's embarrassing and will be easier to fix now"). At times we had an additional ongoing policy of pulling several non-blocker bugs into each sprint to ensure they weren't neglected.

</comment><comment><USER4> Step one sort bugs into categories. 1) Critical failure ... 10) typo in help page no one reads. Obviously #1s need to be fixed. Usually anything that yields bad press needs fixing. Things that have easy work arounds are acceptable. This is balanced against competitive edge. If an opponent will grab a major market share if you do not ship now .... I guess it always gets down to dollars. Hard part is determining value of reputation - <USER2> perfect (which it will NEVER be, verses ever getting the product out.

</comment><comment><USER5> They don't. They ship when the top brass wants them to. The developers can fix them later by working 80+ hours a week.

<comment><USER6> The Silicon Valley way:

1\. Start working on a brand new project.

2\. Optimize for delivery and thus write garbage code.

3\. Get recognized/promoted/a big bonus for delivering on time.

4\. Start working on a new project or leave to a new company while others are forced to deal with your mess.

5\. Rinse and repeat

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Image of Kayode Ewumi grinning and pointing to his temple_

You can't ship a bug that hasn't been identified as such.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is this amateur hour? Just don't create the ticket</comment>


Ask YC: Why was the WIRED tech gender gap article killed? - <AUTHOR>

WIRED recently put up a post doing interviews with female founders discussing their issues with raising rounds, it was on the front page around 10 minutes ago but when I tapped "comments" it ended up going to a dead page. Here's what the link used to be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096988<p>Why was the article removed? It was a decent read, extremely related to the topic, and I was interested in reading more comments on it. <comment><USER2> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) :

        Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something
        (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to
        ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say
        something to us, please send it to firstname.lastname@example.com.

You are asking what happened to your item, and only the moderators can know for certain.

However ...

In my experience there are lots of people on HN who are unhappy with the number of articles about gender issues. As a result, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that users have flagged the item to death.

But if you want to know for certain, ask the mods.

</comment><comment><USER3> Articles are auto-killed when they either massively trip the voting detector or they get a lot of flags.

In this case, it could be either/or.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your event tracking and analytics? - <AUTHOR> - Do you not do this? - Do you integrate individually with specific platforms like Mixpanel/GA etc? - Do you use Segment?
I am a Segment.com customer, but their new pricing model is going to cost me 10x the plan I'm currently grandfathered into. There don't appear to be any alternatives to Segment - so much so that I'm thinking of building a similar service with a different pricing/business model.
What do people think about that idea? <comment><USER2> We used Mixpanel [0] in our frontend some time ago. But there was no real business strategy behind it. That's why it got abandoned eventually.

Now we experiment with Keen.io [1] to track events for different/new features in our tool. We started to track events from our backend, but for user behaviour we would use it to track events from the frontend as well.

[0] - [https://mixpanel.com/](https://mixpanel.com/)

[1] - [https://keen.io/](https://keen.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on your particular use case and integrations (especially how many you use), there are two alternative hubs that come to mind: Astronomer [1] and mParticle [2]. Astronomer is more focused on building a router for any type of data and enterprise-level use cases. I have not used mParticle personally, but founders from Segment and mParticle gave thorough answers on how they differ on this Quora question [3].

Disclosure: I've done dev work for Astronomer.

[1]: [http://www.astronomer.io](http://www.astronomer.io)

[2]: [https://www.mparticle.com/](https://www.mparticle.com/)

[3]: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-key-differences- between-S...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-key-differences-between- Segment-and-mParticle)

</comment><comment><USER4> You probably need to find an alternative to mixpanel. Segment works well w.r.t pricing if the services you are connecting with segment are relatively cheaper than segment. Mixpanel for example will be as expensive as segment. for e.g.:

if you have 100K users, track 10 Events mer month, you are at 1M event, which will cost you $ 100 on segment based on MTUs and $100 on mixpanel based on 1M events.

What are the services you are currently using?

[Disclaimer] I am working on building a new analytics platform myself, purely on the data drill-down, dashboards and reporting etc. Cost of ingestion is relatively high, and segment is actually one of the cheaper pure ingestion service I am aware off.

</comment><comment><USER5> Snowplow and GA. Used KissMetrics, not a fan.

I'm interested in how people use a combination of server side and client side tracking. Everything in my jurisdiction is front end.

<comment><USER6> We use new relic to track backend stats in addition to frontend performance.

GA for frontend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.popcornmetrics.com/](https://www.popcornmetrics.com/)?

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not for everyone price wise, but we use NewRelic and I absolutely love it.</comment>


Hunter S. Thompson on finding your purpose - <AUTHOR> http://yourfriendshouse.com/uncategorised/hunter-s-thompson-on-finding-your-purpose/ <comment><USER2> Perfect quote for a developer sitting in a cube:

"....no one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company."

</comment><comment><USER3> After reading something like this, I always wonder if the author later decided "yeah that was pretty much bullshit". Especially if it was written in their youth. I mean, people change their minds - I'm 33 and I know that I think radically differently to when I was 23. When I'm 43, who knows.

<comment><USER4> He had a remarkable sense of worldview from a young age. At 17 he wrote:

"As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer."

His views changed a slight bit, but not much. He was truly a person who knew himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Thomposon would probably look with wry amusement on the orgiastic capitalism of the enterpreneuring and wantrepreneuring class.

I'd love to see _Fear and Loathing in Startupistan_ , but I'm not a tenth the writer that Thompson was.

</comment><comment><USER6> > there's no better example of a life fully realised than the one of Hunter S. > Thompson.

I wonder how much more he would have realized if he hadn't killed himself.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes people are just done. He couldn't live the way he wanted and was ready to go. His note:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won't hurt."

His son went outside and fired a shotgun in the air afterwards. He had known it was coming and was ready.

Personally I'd like to go out on my own terms as well. Though I've no idea when I'll be happy enough with what I've done to be 'ready' for such a thing.

<comment><USER6> Good points. He may have done this "rationally" (quotes because of huge controversies and arguments, ignoring).

But the question remains, what might he have done if he lived. He may have been done at that moment, but as his essay observes, people change with experience. He may have been a completely different HRT in a few years, if he had been open to it.

Maybe sometimes it's worth watching the grandchildren or the grass for a few years, until you finally recognize a change in the world.

<comment><USER4> True, but compromising part of what made him great and sticking around 'because you might miss something' would also be the antithesis of how he lived his life until that day. He wrote the following quote when he was quite young, about a baseball player IIRC:

"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final."

I find it quite interesting he became the embodiment of this himself. His attitude of "Buy the ticket, take the ride" is what he embodied until the day he died and knew the ride was over.

I personally would have loved to see him live on. Especially with regard to the end of the Bush presidency and further actions in the middle east.

<comment><USER7> See my comment about Nash Bridges.talk about legends dying hard...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://sharetv.com/shows/nash_bridges/trivia?mode=desktop](http://sharetv.com/shows/nash_bridges/trivia?mode=desktop)

He also made Nash Bridges with Don Johnson.

America had largely turned its back on this brilliant writer. He also wrote for ESPN, I think? He should have been able to do whatever he wanted by the end of his life. Instead...ESPN and Nash Bridges.

<comment><USER4> He actually loved writing for ESPN. His page 2 column was renowned. He actually wrote one of the most eloquent and accurate statements on 9/11 the morning of in that column.

[http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751](http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751)

He was an excellent sportswriter, and an even more extraordinary political one. His influence is now gone in Rolling Stone, but he gave them their entire ethos alongside Jan Wenner for years.

<comment><USER7> Right on. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For what it's worth, this letter can also be found in The Proud Highway, also known as The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume I, which is a collection of Thompson's correspondence.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Let's assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let's assume that you can't see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN — and here is the essence of all I've said — you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH._

 _But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance._

That right HST quote always seems to materialize right when I need it.</comment>


BMW i8 in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://car.playcanvas.com <comment><USER3> Really nice work. This doesn't seem to an official site of BMW, though!?

Porsche[1] and Renault[2] did something similar lately. It's great to see WebGL used for this in production. Honestly, I'm surprised it took so long. Visualizing cars with WebGL seems like a no brainer, especially when most current websites load dozens of images for their "360° views".

[1] [http://www.porsche.com/microsite/911/germany.aspx#showroom/9...](http://www.porsche.com/microsite/911/germany.aspx#showroom/911-carrera-s/3/3/0/0/0)

[2] [http://www.littleworkshop.fr/renaultespace/](http://www.littleworkshop.fr/renaultespace/)

<comment><USER4> This has to be lifted from some internal BMW models, though - or maybe the creator wants to get a job there?

<comment><USER5> Plenty of BMW i8 models out there:

[http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Index.cfm?featureID=5360209...](http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Index.cfm?featureID=5360209c-aed8-4173-add6-4de214570042)

This was done by PlayCanvas, so the goal is marketing of their platform / engine.

<comment><USER6> PlayCanvas also have a site that lets you view an iPhone in 360°, presumably for marketing that their engine can be used for product demos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember waiting 30 minutes for a crappy vrml model of the Enterprise to download over a 28k modem years ago.

This is both impressive, and makes me feel very old.

<comment><USER8> It locks up my browser and takes 20 seconds to render one frame. (I guess that would be 0.05 FPS.)

So: no, not really impressive. Feels like a regression, actually.

(At least the mobile devices of 2015 managed to do 3D acceleration properly. Too bad that desktop never caught up and that the mobile landscape formed by accident due to commoditization, not due to an understanding of open standards.)

<comment><USER9> What device are you testing this on?

<comment><USER8> A Linux machine with an "Intel Integrated Graphics Controller".

I doubt an equivalent Windows machine would fare better.

<comment><USER10> Rendered just fine for me.

Linux machine with i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz and i915 integrated graphics, running Chrome.

If it's as slow as you say, it sounds like you're getting software rendering.

<comment><USER11> Software rendering is ~20x faster, or 1 fps.

(If you are on Mesa drivers you can try it with env LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 firefox [http://car.playcanvas.com/](http://car.playcanvas.com/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To whoever it was a few weeks back who said it looks like the i8 was "giving birth to a Porsche", you were right: Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

As this visualization demonstrates in nice 3d form.

<comment><USER13> I think the design has a few too many un-necessary flourishes, and it probably won't age very well.

It definitely grabs your attention, but in a few years when electric cars are less rare I bet it will look kind of gimmicky.

<comment><USER14> Generally cars in this segment don't age well to begin with. For example a new BMW 750i will cost you $100k+. A used 2009 750i with only 60k miles though? $30k. Not just BMW, either, a certified-used 2009 911 Turbo can be yours for $70k, less the half the starting MSRP of $150k.

But the people who buy them don't care. They'll just buy whatever the new thing is.

<comment><USER15> Meanwhile the people who buy 2009 7-series for $30K get a ridiculously nice car for the price of a Camry... but they pay maintenance costs which are a lot higher than the Camry driver's. There's a reason not everyone is buying cheap used luxury cars.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely, I certainly wouldn't recommend it. But the maintaince aspect is yet another argument in favor of my point, which is that people dropping over $100k on a car typically don't care if it holds value.

It's irrelevant if the i8 is still cool in 5 years to the people that can afford an i8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am perplexed. Modern games are fantastically more visually appealing and contentwise impressive than this. Modern films utilize computer graphics that are far more impressive still. What is it about single model viewer that makes it headline material? It looks nice, though.

<comment><USER17> WebGL is like the dancing bear; even if it doesn't dance very well, there is nevertheless endless fascination when it dances at all.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't be that dismissive of WebGL precisely. It's a real time graphics driver frontend- a few generations old DX 9 equivalent. Once the shaders and vertices are uploaded to the GPU it's not that consequential what the front end is (within a _very_ charitable margin but still).

I think there is probably a slight shearing layer in the way WebGL integrates with the rest of the browser programming interfaces since it's the lowest level API by far that is exposed. Thus, platform developers who are served ala carte technologies that provide a facade for traditionally very non-trivial things (layout, font rendering and font server, vector graphics rendering, etc. etc.) are suddenly given raw substrate which requires one or two abstraction levels before it's near even SVG which itself can be considered really low level when compared with HTML and CSS.

Traditionally, web developers expect a higher level experience and I think the organizations that usually serve web development services have not taken into account that you need a team of computer graphics experts if one wants to develop anything on top of WebGL.

I'm not dismissing web developers - I'm a graphics programmer myself - <USER2> basically, for a non-genious level person like me even grokking the transform stack requires re-orientation every time I'm not touching linear algebra code for a couple of weeks.

It's not a fault of webgl, per se - the other graphics aspects a browser serves do have pretty well figured out conventions and grammar that can be standardized to provide the ala-carte publishing experience a browser provides. But we don't really have any "standard" conventions in computer graphics yet that could be formalized to the level a page layout can. And is it surprising? Publishing has a history as an industrial craft of 500 years. All the conventions have been figured out, and are implementable in algorithmic form.

While realistic art has been practiced thousands of years only 2D graphics really has the industrial basis where we can say that everyone understands and can formalize what they want from their image.

3D graphics is a whole new ballpark. When pixar introduced their shader language 30 years ago they laid out the foundations for formalizing the colorization in visual grammar. The concept of a scene graph is pretty formalized, as well as the perspective projection of a camera. There are some "usual" convention in 3D interaction like the arcball rotation in an editor like scene.

But other than that? The visual world is infinitely rich. We are not ready for a "standard" representation of an infinitely rich universe of expression.

Of course, that does not mean there are no representations that could not be formalized - there are the standard materials of 3D engines and so on, and physical rendering approaches are slowly converging on the best model - but, I don't know if we can ever reach the standardization of desk top publishing in 3D graphics.

<comment><USER17> Thinking about your comment made me realize that the lackluster performance often seen in WebGL pages has very little to do with overhead in WebGL itself, and a lot to do with the application developer's failure to optimize for performance.

Native Quake III on a Pentium 4-era system was much smoother than most of the WebGL stuff I see on a modern system, but the fact that a WebGL demo [1] of a subset of Quake III is very smooth seems to support this idea.

You make a lot of good points about the difficulties that the low-level nature of graphics programming present to standardization. I agree that there probably isn't necessarily an easy solution to this which doesn't unnecessarily restrict the space of possibilities in the name of performance or interoperability.

[1] [http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/](http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You wouldn't download a car?

<comment><USER19> Im just curious, do people know that the original is actually "You wouldn't _steal_ a car?"

I only every see it as 'download' in comments.

<comment><USER20> that's the joke. Some explanation here: [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy- its-a-crime](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When you enter and steer the driving wheel and then get out, the wheels are also turned :)

<comment><USER22> But you can't honk :)

<comment><USER23> I think this might not be a real bmw...

<comment><USER24> > I think this might not be a real bmw...

Yeah. It's been a half-hour and it hasn't needed maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well done. This one reminds me [http://helloracer.com/webgl/](http://helloracer.com/webgl/).

</comment><comment><USER26> One of my friends noticed you can see the city skyline cubemap they used, but haven't used as the actual sky in the demo: [http://i.imgur.com/NbREnqS.png](http://i.imgur.com/NbREnqS.png)

<comment><USER9> The sky used in the demo is actually the same as the reflection just a very blurred version of it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very nice render there. That is one of the few cars which I have to say looks so much better up close than in pictures.

</comment><comment><USER28> MIND BLOWN - this is using WebGL? Unbelievable!

The only thing I wish it had was more interactions, but as is it demonstrates that WebGL is not just a toy, but something to be taken more seriously in the GL community.

<comment><USER6> > this is using WebGL? Unbelievable!

What, have you never seen a WebGL demo before?

> it demonstrates that WebGL is not just a toy, but something to be taken more > seriously in the GL community.

It already is taken seriously. WebGL is merely a variant of OpenGL ES for JavaScript. Heck, the whole of Unity and the Unreal Engine can run on it.

<comment><USER29> Unity and Unreal Engine don't support the mobile browser.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. That's presumably just due to performance issues, there shouldn't be a technical reason.

<comment><USER29> It's because Unity and Epic cross-compile large codebases to many MBs of JavaScript. This simply overwhelms the JavaScript engines on mobile. The PlayCanvas engine on the other hand is hand-written and is 125KB of JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome, especially in black I think. But WebGL still has an aliasing problem, made worse when we introduce movement. It was the same in the watch movement sim on HN a few days ago. Not to take away from the amazing work of the authors, but are there higher quality anti-aliasing options which won't cause my eye to distract to the high-velocity pixel movements on the car's shutlines as it moves along? (Full HD machine - dunno if this issue disappears at HiDPI).

Oh and another thing. PlayCanvas looks great but also looks _properly_ expensive. I'm having to cough some pretty serious dough as a single experimental developer, without even getting above bronze support. Not hugely garage-outfit friendly though I will say it looks very professional.

<comment><USER29> The engine itself is open source (MIT license): [https://github.com/playcanvas/engine](https://github.com/playcanvas/engine) If you want a fancy editor to build more quickly, it's free to work in public. And for 'garage-outfits' that want to work in private, it's $15/month. I wouldn't call that serious dough. My gym membership is $70/month!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The scene looks very nice albeit I'm not sure what's so spectacular about displaying a single model? I've noticed someone saying in the thread that it's impressive because you can view it on mobile, but why wouldn't you? Modern phones are equipped with hardware better than the one we had over a decade ago, and we had 3D games back then, so displaying a single higher poly model on way better hardware doesn't really amuse me. Besides, I don't really dig the whole idea of WebGL, but the damage's done already.

<comment><USER32> I'm sorry I'm not keen on making games for only one platform at a time.

<comment><USER33> Unless you're talking about casual games that reality is never going to be realized. AAA games are written as close to the hardware as possible/feasible, as you probably already know. For every developer willing to develop against an abstraction like the Web, there will be others unwilling to give up that performance.

<comment><USER32> For every indie who has made it trying to make AAA games... wait, there aren't any. AAA games are for companies with the resources to port code to every platform they can imagine.

I'm not a diehard gamer, myopically focused on only AAA to the detriment of my livelihood. I'm a developer. There is more business for me in "casual" games-- whatever that actually means, because it seems to only ever be used as a pejorative that means "not Call of Duty"\--than is realistically possible in AAA.

<comment><USER33> My point is just like you aren't keen on porting, other people aren't keen on throwing performance away.

What you're really really after is a single OS, single hardware platform world. That would require the least amount of porting effort which is your goal.

People (and you might not be one of those) think that the Web is going to bring about this great cross-platform revolution, but its a lie except for the basic UI, low-perf applications for two easy-to-identify reasons. First, the standards themselves are poorly specified and contain ambiguities (by design to give leeway to implementors on different hardware). No standard body even puts out a reference implementation. Second, each platform implementation will be implemented differently causing people shipping cross-platform to care about weird implementation quirks that cause the performance of their game to tank in weird ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I LOVED the Orangey-Brown colour scheme so much that I went straight to the BMW website to see if it was really an option that you can buy. Sadly, it's not. /sadface

<comment><USER35> BMW Individual. For a good amount of money, any color scheme, exterior, interior, leather stitching, etc. can be yours. They can do a lot as their "custom" shop is kinda separate. You're almost getting a "hand-built" car. On their website they list a few common Individual options, but if you actually work with a rep, they can do whatever you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ah, the car that fakes internal combustion engine noise when it's running on electric... No thanks. Nice demo though!

<comment><USER6> > Ah, the car that fakes internal combustion engine noise when it's running on > electric

Cars are legally required to do so, aren't they? Otherwise, electric vehicles would be quiet enough to kill people.

<comment><USER36> > Cars are legally required to do so, aren't they?

As an owner of a Tesla, no, there is no such thing (at least in the US), and please stop spreading misinformation (if you are talking about the US).

And the car is not COMPLETELY silent... the wheels make noise on the road. I've driven a completely electric car for at least a year, never got even closely into a pedestrian "situation", and I live in a highly populated area (NYC and its suburbs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Super cool! Do the camera controls 'invert' when you hop into the car, however? When outside the car, grab a point on the car and drag, and that point roughly tracks where you drag your mouse pointer to. Inside the car, the opposite happens. Grab a point, drag the mouse, and the point moves away from the cursor.

</comment><comment><USER38> In Firefox I get "Loading...". In IE it shows only a blurry picture of what appears to be the front lights?

</comment><comment><USER39> I am a little bit disappointed that it has automatic transmission. But this is probably catered to an American audience, of which the common denominator doesn't even know that manual cars exist. Other than that, really impressive. This only needs some controls and motion, and then you have basic gameplay!

</comment><comment><USER40> Very nice. Runs full speed (60 fps or so as best as I can tell) on Chrome/Galaxy Note 3.

</comment><comment><USER41> Semi-related, are there any "accurate" WebGL models of a working V6/V8 engine?

</comment><comment><USER42> I love camera behaviour! Good job

<comment><USER43> Just wanted to chime in and agree, the camera control is slick. So many 3D apps have atrocious camera controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> In case anyone is having similar issues, this loaded a LOT better in Firefox than Chrome

</comment><comment><USER45> First time in a long time that my laptop fan peaks a little :P

</comment><comment><USER46> If the author is around, How long did this take? It's slick, but what impresses me most is when I customize the interior from the inside view.

Well done!

<comment><USER47> Really? IMO the interior looks absolutely dreadful. The knobs aren't even round!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Very cool. The look of the turning steering wheel seemed a little off to me though. As if it's slightly off-center.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why I love graphics programming! Math & Art come together into a holistic whole! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER50> This is stunning. Excellent work!

</comment><comment><USER51> Beautifully done. I particularly like the lights glow effect.

</comment><comment><USER52> On an iPad, I can only see the top left quarter of the view.

</comment><comment><USER53> It's a cool demo but I wish it wouldn't autorotate. Makes clicking the door interaction point much more difficult than it should be. A pretty picture over usability decision.

<comment><USER54> Autorotation turned off for me once I dragged the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Impressive... Congratulations guys at PlayCanvas!

</comment><comment><USER56> Just sat at loading screen in Chrome Win 7 x64.

</comment><comment><USER57> That is just gorgeous - nice work!

</comment><comment><USER58> Runs about .1 - .2 fps on my iPhone 4s equivalent potato. They've certainly lost _MY_ expensive-new-car business!

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure what's up with your iPhone 4S (although you do say 'equivalent') but on my 4S, I get around 10FPS. Not fast, but usable.

<comment><USER58> Interesting. It's an android, and the cpu/gpu specs seem close to the 4s, with most 3D openGL apps being fast and smooth. I wonder why you're getting 100x better performance? Could be JS performance, but I'm using the latest FF, which is usually good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> That looks really cool

</comment><comment><USER60> Loading...</comment>


Andrew Ng: Machine Learning in Robotics - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=AY4ajbu_G3k

<comment><USER2> Here is a more in-depth presentation he gave on the same subject at a Google Tech Talk:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk> (April 11, 2011)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

Also found related tutorials:

<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/tutorial.html>

<http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great non-technical overview. What early-stage startups are working on these types of problems?

<comment><USER5> The technique he uses is called deep learning. one startup is binatix.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How complex is this technology ?

Is it possible to offer it via simple api, useful by someone without knowledge in machine learning , where you give it data to train , and you get get a trained algorithm that can do perception stuff ?

<comment><USER4> The implementation of these algorithms is relatively straightforward. The challenge is the state of the art in computer vision is not currently at a point where it is possible to reliably detect 10s-100s of object categories in real time on current systems. It is currently possible to build systems that get decent real-time performance on detecting a few categories concurrently, or offline systems that get around 60% accuracy across hundreds of well- defined categories. Thus, (1) faster general purpose hardware, (2) better algorithms, or (3) running the best algorithms in ASICs designed for CV is necessary. The top labs now typically use GPU clusters to train / run their algorithms, with the computationally expensive stages usually being feature extraction and/or classifier training.

Google Predict (<http://code.google.com/apis/predict/>) offers a general machine learning API geared towards those who want to apply machine learning to their applications without subject-specific knowledge. I've not used it so I can't speak to its accuracy, but it is not geared towards computer vision and I imagine it would fail miserably at such tasks (since computer vision is highly dependent on domain-specific feature extraction techniques), and I imagine it performs well at NLP tasks. The primary limitation of such a system is that it acts as a black box - you throw data in and get answers out without any knowledge of the process behind it.

This black-box model is limiting for three major reasons. First, depending on the domain, incorporating domain-specific knowledge can greatly improve performance. Secondly, it is hard to understand the limitations of such a system. Many ML algorithms can fail catastrophically when the input is substantially different from the training data, and the black box makes it hard to understand when the system is likely to fail and adjust accordingly. Third, in many cases you face a tradeoff involving speed, memory, and classification/regression performance. This tradeoff is automatically determined for you and is not transparent.

I've been considering a general ML system that offers an API similar to Google Predict, yet is transparent in the feature extraction / model selection stages for those that would benefit from digging deeper into the system. Is this something that you would pay for?

Specifically for computer vision, there's a variety of startups and companies working on providing a system for object recognition and classification. One example is <http://www.numenta.com/>, though when I tried there software about a year ago it did not seem to function very well compared to the state of the art. Others that are making visual search type applications include <http://www.tineye.com/> and <http://www.kooaba.com></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which large banks don't use 2FA - <AUTHOR> Capital One Bank is ranked 10th on the list of largest banks in the United States by assets and has its name on the Capital One Arena in Washington D.C.  So, as 2019 begins, why don't they use 2FA for user authentication?  What other large banks still rely on username and password for authentication? <comment><USER2> 3 datapoints of banks with no mandatory 2FA: BofA, CapitalOne, Wells Fargo</comment>


Ask HN: Time tracking app - <AUTHOR> Most of our team members are having a flexible schedule and getting paid per hour. We use slack, so we tested few slack apps, but all of them seem not so intuitive, too manual, we are forgetting to turn on/off a timer. What are you guys using? <comment><USER2> I've found Billings Pro works well, but the timers are mostly manual. It will ask you about pausing/stopping timers after a period of inactivity (i.e. you forget to his pause when you go to lunch, then come back, it will ask what to do now, and what to do with the time since you were last active on the computer)

Having said that, I'd also love to hear about an open source option (ideally a native client-side app that can integrate with a self-hostable server-side component - basically Toggl but open source I guess)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://wakatime.com](https://wakatime.com) if you're tracking programming hours. It's automatic so you won't forget to turn on/off a timer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI: we are testing mesasix.com for slack.</comment>


How Berlin can become Europe's No. 1 tech hub - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/how-berlin-can-become-europes-no-1-tech-hub/ <comment><USER2> Berlin has a rich and varied startup community but it's not a tech hub by any means - not Europe's and not even Germany's. Media hub maybe. In Germany all the important tech companies are in Munich or Hamburg.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... again! :)

I'd prefer a german page. And a less clickbaity page.</comment>


Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/coinbase-dabbles-in-shitcoins/ <comment><USER2> Let's call a spade a spade.

This market is a bust, and there's no value-driven economic model to justify cryptos collectively being worth $50B-$100B.

With any startup, there is an expected future value of the company discounted back to the present. It then just becomes a risk-weighted probability question of whether that startup will achieve that expected future value in the expected timeframe.

Conversely, the valuations of the crypto market are driven mostly by momentum and prayers. It's ultimately a case study of what happens when you mix unsophisticated investors, no regulation, frictionless market entry, memes as an investment philosophy ("HODL") and the psychological highs of winning a lot of money. It's gambling, not investing.

In terms of Coinbase - sure, they're selling pickaxes during a gold rush, but gold rushes end and the pickaxe salesmen go out of business too.

<comment><USER3> Indeed Warren Buffet made a similar point: if you buy a farm, you're buying the land, the potential to grow crops that people actually consume, etc. whereas cryptocurrency doesn't really have a purpose except as a store of value. It's not a productive asset; it doesn't produce anything. It is a bit like buying gold.

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

<comment><USER4> It's nothing like buying gold. Gold is widely considered to be beautiful, and was considered a store of very high value in many cultures that were completely isolated from each other, and human desire for it has remained consistent for literally thousands of years.

Astonishingly, crypto even less defensible.

<comment><USER5> Golds value comes entirely from the fact that we as a society give it value.

The beauty line doesnt work, because then platinum shouldnt have any serious value despite its rarity (it just looks like silver basically)

The industrial value is laughable, but read comments below/above to debate that more at length.

The scarcity line doesn't work, because you have elements like bismuth which are also (Arguably) more beautiful than gold [https://66.media.tumblr.com/61ce390242a79a767772d4b2027eb902...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/61ce390242a79a767772d4b2027eb902/tumblr_miukex8tDs1qam8b5o1_1280.jpg) but command prices far less despite being .025 vs .0031 on the PPM abundance on earth. Or even look at ruthenium which has a similar look to platinum and is even rarer than gold. Did I mention it also goes for about 400 an ounce? Quite a savings over gold.

The only thing that makes sense is that we as a collective have decided gold has value of X.

<comment><USER6> > "Golds value comes entirely from the fact that we as a society give it > value."

thats true for anything. that includes currencies, what you get paid, the value of a hockey card, the value of a car, the value of a banana, etc. sure, if society doesn't want to pay you anything for 'it', you can do with it what you want, like eat the banana (before it becomes worthless to anyone).

I am not a gold bug, i personally dont think its a great investment. its not a hedge against a declining market, and its difficult to own in large quantities. however; statements like 'its only valued because people give it value' are not very informative. everything is valued that way. everything.

also, the industrial value of gold is not laughable. its negligible because we have plenty of gold to meet industrial needs. but its not laughable, its in your smart phone, its in your desktop / laptop, etc.

<comment><USER7> > that includes currencies

Currencies have value because entities with monopolies on force (countries) give them special legal status to be used conveniently as means of exchange. This is one of the hurdles for Bitcoin, and was a big source of debate in 2016-2018. Every time you spend Bitcoin you have to keep track of the avg. acquisition cost and resulting realized capital gains for every transaction to be able to declare the appropriate gains or losses on your taxes at year-end. A heavy burden for a "currency".

> statements like 'its only valued because people give it value' are not very > informative

If you go to first principles, sure, everything is an illusion. But gold, crypto, and other "stores of value" derive their value in fundamentally different ways than everything else. Our existing models and body of knowledge do not apply to them. This is worth investigating. All other things are consumed in some way or another, and the rate at which they are consumed, relative to their supply, determines their price. The consumption of gold relative to its supply is much too low to justify its price using the same models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Coinbase Abandons Cautious Approach" seems a bit hyperbolic as a title. In fact, it sounds like they're still being cautious. They aren't saying they will list a ton of new "currencies", they just listed a number they might want to explore, and they are going to take their time deciding which are reasonable:

> Coinbase recently revamped its policy on new token listings. [… Coinbase] > now goes public with its intention to "explore" the potential to list new > assets in order to lower the impact of a listing. It also doesn't guarantee > which, if any, will make it through and be listed.

> "Adding new assets requires significant exploratory work from both a > technical and compliance standpoint, and we cannot guarantee that all the > assets we are evaluating will ultimately be listed for trading," the company > said.

<comment><USER9> "It makes sense that any company out there who has a cap table… should have their own token"

That doesn't seem long term cautious…

<comment><USER10> It's the end game for sure. The whole ICO utility token thing we've seen over the past couple years has just been an intermediary step while companies navigate the regulations.

The idea is that stock certificates, and the Depository Trust Company will be replaced by block chain tokens and dividends would be paid directly to the holder on the block chain. When he says it makes sense for everyone with a cap table to have their own token that is what he is talking about he isn't suggesting that every company in the world should jump on the ICO bandwagon.

There are a bunch of companies pursuing this right now Coinbase is one, that's why they bought a broker dealer. Overstock / tZero is another.

<comment><USER11> Or it could be replaced by Carta, and it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you ever want a fun simple math problem. Calculate how much hashing power you need to accumulate in order to 51% attack some of the lesser quality cryptocurrencies. It is very feasible for the right actor.

<comment><USER13> And if you don't want to bother doing the math, go to [https://www.crypto51.app/](https://www.crypto51.app/)

<comment><USER12> Interesting site. Only thing I would change would be to find the attack cost based on block time. Ethereum has a block time of 15 seconds whereas Bitcoin has a block time of 10 minutes. This changes the amount of damage that can be done in a given amount of time.

<comment><USER14> I welcome pull requests [0]! :)

[0] [https://github.com/tdickman/crypto51](https://github.com/tdickman/crypto51)

<comment><USER15> Nice! I didn't realize you were on HN, I've sent your site to friends before. I'm curious -- has your traffic increased or decreased lately (due to the bust)? Do you track your traffic or graph it at all?

<comment><USER14> I track it via Google Analytics -> here's a screenshot of the last few months [0]. Traffic has been pretty steady over time with a few spikes from Hacker News or Twitter mentions. I believe the most recent spike in traffic is related to the 51% attack against Vertcoin [1].

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/UwFrpgs.png](https://i.imgur.com/UwFrpgs.png)

[1] [https://bitcoinist.com/vertcoin-vtc-51-attack-100k-double- sp...](https://bitcoinist.com/vertcoin-vtc-51-attack-100k-double-spend/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many coin projects hope for a Coinbase listing as a way to boost exchange rate. Broader markets mean more liquidity, which in turn means more investor interest.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint: that Coinbase listing is likely to kill the tokens that get listed.

Shitcoin speculators are attracted to volatility, not technical merit. The wilder the swings, the more engaged they become. By adding liqudiity to a token, Coinbase dampens volatility. Projects must then compete on technical merit, which means most will fade away as new tokens not listed on Coinbase emerge.

Second, shitcoin speculators trade with the understanding that they can evade taxes by trading on unregulated exchanges. By muscling out competitors, Coinbase will drive middle tier exchanges out of business. Given its strict guidelines around AML/KYC, Coinbase will make it very difficult for speculators to conceal their tax liabilities. This in turn will drive out most speculators who will see little advantage of cryptocurrency over traditional forex or penny stocks.

Bottom line, this move will not increase demand for trading more mature tokens, but dry it up. Speculation will instead take place on thinly traded, unregulated exchanges.

<comment><USER17> Interesting point of view, although crypto market has proven irrational most of the time. But indeed liquidity tends to bring the price closer to the real value, which is much lower than the current traded value for most of these tokens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Crypto may have its usage but the coins themselves aren't worth very much and the market does not value them very much. Why? Only maybe 3% of crypto buyers understand the technology, understand the boom/bust cycles, and essentially understand what exactly it is they are buying. The other 97% are irrational actors. They are common people who hopped onto the craze after the wild media frenzy, heard from their colleagues about a magic coin that exponentially increases in value, poor and lower middle class from other countries who really don't understand it, and the tech pseudo crypto literate community who repeat the similar phrases: the technology is legit, but some coins are overvalued, alt coins are useless but etherum and btc are useful, crypto is like the dot com bubble and a few coins will survive and turn into the next tech behemoths. I belong to this latter group though my ego might think otherwise.

In my eyes the valuation is due to the volatility from the 97% of irrational actors, many who pump and dump, and the big players who can do sketch actions with little oversight. This is not an investment class I feel confident in purchasing if it's almost completely irrational. I am at the mercy of others and chaos and long term these factors will likely converge to a significant loss for me. The one hope being that there comes to be significant value unknown to us now but comes in the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe previously they could survive off BTC alone, and it benefited them to focus on the healthiest currency, but now BTC isn't doing too hot, so they feel the need to cast a wider net so they can get a head-start on the next craze, should it come?

<comment><USER20> Bitcoin is doing much better than all those other scams. Coinbase has lost its credibility in the crypto space long ago, not much risk for them to go all in at this point.

<comment><USER21> Who is the main alternative to Coinbase when it comes to Bitcoin? (I've used Coinbase in the past, and would like to know for the future...)

<comment><USER20> There are several options depending on where you are geographically. Bittrex and Gemini are exchanges that're also big in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The recent market crash is partly the exchanges' fault. Listing every possible coin out there exposes people to unfinished and shady products. Just looking at that list things like Storj and Tezos, or even Eos and Cardano are very questionable choices.

No one seems to take a stance against this garbage. While Coinbase is currently more selective, with this type of move they'd probably join the rest of the pack.

Also I'm not sure why they don't include Nano in that list, which is one of the few cryptocurrencies that can actually be used as a currency.

<comment><USER22> Even highly regulated exchanges don't vet for quality like you're suggesting. Exchanges merely set disclosure requirements so investors can make their own informed decision but even that only goes so far. Herbalife is on NYSE and Tesla on NASDAQ, for example.

<comment><USER11> Tesla is an actual car company making actual fun awesome cars. Dentacoin is... a coin for dentists to...

<comment><USER22> Don't get me wrong: Tesla the _technology_ is awesome. The veracity of Tesla's financial disclosures[1], on the other hand, leave much to be desired.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-sec/u-s- securities-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-sec/u-s-securities- regulator-subpoenas-tesla-on-model-3-production-estimates-idUSKCN1N71QY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jf- I wonder, how low does crypto need to fall before coinbase becomes non-viable?

<comment><USER23> It's an interesting and complicated question, but it seems like the coinbase business model should be pretty dramatically affected by the massive sell-off. First, as prices go lower, the average value of a transaction is (probably) declining, so the money they make on fees is (probably) going down as well. Second, as the market looks worse and worse, the number of people casually entering or trading is likely declining too. The have a lot of correlated risk with the decline.

<comment><USER24> The impact of the variables you mention can't be assessed without understanding the internals of their business. For example, if they have a lot of fixed or hard-to-change operating costs (like headcount) that have been taken on that now assume a certain amount of transaction volume, you may be right. But if they have just had their average revenue per employee spike over the last 18 months (after all, ETH is trading where it was in May last year) then what we just went through was more of a windfall-laden anomaly for their business to accrue a rainy day fund not necessarily something they were dependent upon.

In any case, given the volatility of crypto and the survivorship of Coinbase vs all other exchanges, it'd be surprising to me if they didn't manage their business in a way that assumed a 10X cut in price could happen at any time.

<comment><USER25> Greg would it really surprise you if a tech startup turned out to have done something stupid

<comment><USER24> Haha no not in general, but at this point Coinbase has survived some pretty severe market swings, so if you ask me with no additional info (of which I have basically none on Coinbase) I'd assume they at least have some institutional awareness that a 90% drop in all the coins they offer is _not_ perceived to be an "INF sigma" event. (Which it probably was perceived as for a vast number of the know-nothing ICO schemes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> they're doing so so that their same investors who have investments in these garbage tokens, can off load them - and leave retail people holding those bags full of non-sense.

Ethereum and 1000 other coins have simply created too much hype first and then bad reputation for the original cryptocurrency i.e. Bitcoin. There are people who think Ethereum is Bitcoin 2.0 but they don't understand that Bitcoin is built with the strongest fundamentals.

First of before making guesses, if you really want to know about this industry - try the applications, try to play with it (even if you put $10) - run full nodes, try wallets, try sending transactions. Trust me it is fun and you understand the basics then.

Secondly, separate out the financial markets side from the technology and it's potential itself. Even gold use-case initiated at some point in history. Not everyone started thinking of gold as store of value, so initially it price must have fluctuated quite a bit as well.

Third, try to understand how Bitcoin actually works - what is proof of work and why it is such an innovative idea to implement a decentralized network. I mean this is a very large network with almost 100% uptime, close to 10 years of history, storing Billions of dollars of worth of value and that people have moved 100s of millions of dollars worth Bitcoin with very little tx cost and time. I mean this alone requires a lot of credit as technology - no one needs an affirmation from someone like Jamie Dimon to know it is valuable or not - he doesn't know, no one does at this point. Statistically speaking, most experiments fail so it is a risk-averse position for someone in that position to say it will fail IMO. But opinions don't matter. Rome was not built in a day. Even the central banks and modern banks were not built in a day. Whatever these cryptocurrencies can replace or improve, let them take their due course or even if they fail. People are too much stuck on the financial market side of it, it is important to bootstrap it and take it mainstream but what happened in 2017 was a unsustainable and hack-ish way of bringing hype to this industry.

Please read if you're really interested : book:Bitcoin standard, please read works of Nick Szabo, read upon origins of digital money and cypherpunks behind Bitcoin

<comment><USER26> I should also mention that biggest technical debate to understand right now is scaling in this space for most part. Smart contracts is not that big of deal at the moment IMO. These are all open-source developments, adding proven features from one to other is always going to happen over time.

For scaling - you need to read understand a bit about pros and cons of on- chain scaling(ex. bigger block sizes,proof of stake, sharding etc.) and off- chain scaling (ex. layer2/lightning).

You might be surprised to learn that Bitcoin might be the only one or at least one of a couple that has/have the right fundamentals in terms of technology, which of course can still fail.

<comment><USER26> Finally, lightning network seems to be having a good growth at the moment, if it holds up for another year or two - i think Bitcoin will be in a very sound position for adoption in places where it is most needed. Financial markets will def react accordingly at that point. Until then I think it will cycles of busts/capitulation with speculators and wall-streeters.

<comment><USER27> Lightning development is taking much longer than I had hoped. There are still some serious issues with the implementations. But what I miss most is focus on UX. If we ever hope for wide-spread adoption we need to start to focus on regular users: Offer nicely designed wallets, good UX, teach new users about how LN works during onboarding etc. The current generation of LN-wallets is poorly designed and often confusing, even knowledgeable about how lightning works. I was however positively surprised by [https://lightningjoule.com/](https://lightningjoule.com/), it is going in the right direction (even though it's not a full wallet, just a UI for lnd).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The crypto market is going bust. Quick! Toss in everything you can!

<comment><USER29> It is already busted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They seem to be in a rush to make as much commission as possible before the bust.

<comment><USER31> Coinbase was founded in 2012, I'm sure they will be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bitcoin is losing its luster isn't it? They're thinking it's time to diversify.

<comment><USER33> diversify into what exactly? The entire cryptocurrency ecosystem seems highly correlated. Take a look at coinmarketcap.com, the charts are essentially the same for nearly all the listed coins.

<comment><USER34> They're trying to take more slices of a shrinking pie, hoping to capture enough of the long-term cryptocurrency market share to justify their current size and valuation. It's also a really good time to muscle-out some of the weaker players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Strange timing. Most of the cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin look terrible right now. Why get into the lower-tier ones?

<comment><USER36> Why not? If the market goes through another boom-bust cycle, Coinbase is at the forefront and makes bank. If this really is the end, they're fucked anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Many comments here about investing in crypto is same as gambling. So what if it is? (and it is in my opinion). I buy a little bit of crypto each month and are just leaving them for a couple of years to see what happens. Why? Because the odds in the crypto lottery is better than any other lottery that I know of.

<comment><USER38> The difference is, investing is nothing like a lottery. When you invest, you're putting money to productive economic use. There is some chance of loss, but that chance doesn't define the investment.

When you gamble, you're putting money on a random number.

Bitcoin is "meant" to be a currency, so it's really neither thing. But people are definitely gambling on its price fluctuations (just as people gamble with stocks, bonds, real estate, and other commodities).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> That's quite the url TechCrunch chose for the story.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is this Coinbase throwing a Hail Mary on the way down?

What happens to the wallets if they go under? Is it hard to disentangle the coins?

<comment><USER22> It doesn't look like it would be easy. From their FAQ[1]:

>U.S. Customers - Coinbase stores all customer fiat currency (government- issued currency) in, custodial bank accounts, or in U.S. Treasuries.

>Non-U.S. Customers - Coinbase stores all customer fiat currency (government- issued currency) in segregated, custodial bank accounts.

You'll notice the non-U.S. customer cash is held in _segregated_ , custodial bank accounts while the U.S. customer cash is held in custodial bank accounts and U.S. Treasuries. This leads me to believe the corporate cash is co-mingled with cash that's earmarked as belonging to investors.

That might not sound like a problem but if Coinbase goes under then creditors will stake a claim against the _entire_ account. The best case scenario there would be that Coinbase keeps meticulous records and a bankruptcy court would return client funds in a few years.

[1][https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1662379-how- is-coinbase-insured-)

<comment><USER40> That is if there are funds, no? I'm surprised they can do this. Is it because US laws are more lax or vague on crypto?

<comment><USER22> You're correct, that's all assuming they don't "accidentally" spend customer funds on corporate expenses which is obviously fairly easy to do when all of the funds are in the same account.

I'm honestly a bit surprised this hasn't come up with regulators yet. Even under current U.S. law I'm not sure how Coinbase can take custody of client funds without being either an OCC chartered bank or an SEC (or NFA) registered broker. Coinbase is absolutely functioning as a bank and there's a pretty strong argument they're operating as a forex broker.

Banks and broker-dealers have strict rules around segregation of client funds _and_ securities for the exact purpose of protecting customers' ability to promptly access their funds/assets in the event the custodian goes under.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> More emotionally charged anti-crypto commentary that will not age well. If you've ever spent time as a quant, you'd know everything about crypto is about it being a trading vehicle with global public market exposure. Capital is raised from the capital markets and if it swells, ride it.

</comment><comment><USER42> How come they don't list Monero? They added a bunch of less popular coins, I wonder what's going on with that.

<comment><USER43> All the ones listed are ERC20 tokens on Ethereum. Maybe Ethereum's much greater security against a 51% attack was a factor in the decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> In an ideal world, initiatives like this one would be properly regulated to protect consumers from exploitation.

I don't know if Coinbase is to blame or not; certainly, lots of people will lose money in the crypto game. They might deserve it (because of greed!), but still...

<comment><USER45> In an ideal world, people are free to buy and sell what they want. You feel patronizing to the people who need to be "regulated", but I feel that people should have their own agency.

<comment><USER46> In an ideal world everyone would be perfectly informed, no one would ever runs scams, all food and medicine would always be safe no matter what, and cars and weapons would only affect the people who purchased them.

<comment><USER43> No one ever argued that in a free society, no one would get scammed. The argument is that freedom is worth its inconveniences.

<comment><USER45> HN thinks it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Seems odd they didn't include Dash

</comment><comment><USER48> seems like with the collapse of crypto prices they see no room for growth in the near future except to open the flood gates to any coin with even a bit of value. It seems kind of desperate, but is there a downside in this for them? Apart from their own infrastructure costs to implement.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is an agony. An attempt to support falling volume.

</comment><comment><USER50> Google, Microsoft, and AWS together have enough spare compute to 51% even BitCoin.

<comment><USER51> No they don't.

<comment><USER52> > _No they don 't._

Can I ask how you came to that answer?

[https://www.crypto51.app/](https://www.crypto51.app/) says a one-hour 51% attack on Bitcoin would cost only $237K as I type this, which doesn't seem like much for tech behemoths (much less nation-states).

<comment><USER53> He said compute, you responded with money.

You are not comparing the same things.

Specifically: Bitcoin is done on specialized ASICs, while the tech companies have general purpose CPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Desperate times call for desperate measures

</comment><comment><USER55> And yet they don't support Bitcoin SV, the only coin that's still Bitcoin (the idea) at this point, and gives their company its name. How ironic.</comment>