Munchery Stiffs Early Backers and Cuts Staff in a Bid for Survival - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-29/munchery-stiffs-early-backers-and-cuts-staff-in-a-bid-for-survival <comment><USER2> personal anecdote: I signed up for munchery after receiving some discount codes via marketing email, and a few more discounts from referral incentives. I found the food to be high quality and the delivery service to be adequate. However, once my discount codes were used up I stopped using the service because they could not provide competitive pricing even in my very expensive zipcode (a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn).

I really wonder what was going on. At a fundamental level, when competing in an ultra-competitive market (food delivery), you have to take price seriously, and they just didn't. Everything they were offering was 25% more expensive than similar delivery options from neighborhood restaurants.

<comment><USER3> The problem with competing in an ultra-competitive market, like food delivery is that you don't have the margins to pay multiple software engineers ~$100,000/year. (Not to mention office staff, executives, VCs, and all the other costs of running a firm.)

Pretty much everybody involved in food works like a dog, and gets paid an absolute pittance. That nice restaurant down the street? Their head chef probably makes ~$34,000/year, works 100 hours a week, and sleeps in the kitchen. Oh, and the restaurant is as likely as not to go bankrupt and shut down in <2 years. (And he's not doing it with the hopes that Ricky's Pizza Joint will IPO as the next Facebook.)

Yet, for some reason, people think that this business model has the margin to pay a team of developers, working out of a hip, air conditioned Market Street office, complete with a free beer fridge and a Foosball table.

<comment><USER2> well, they aren't running a restaurant. it's a delivery only service and the economics are very different.

For example, in the Brooklyn branch of the service the prep kitchen and delivery center was located in Gowanus (low rent, industrially zoned neighborhood) and they were certainly not running a full-compliment of front- of-house and back-of-house staff the way a restaurant would. They also don't have to pay high rent for a good location. They also don't have a head chef on premises, and they aren't locked in to a specific menu style.

I'm not totally familiar with the economics of it but I can easily imagine that it could, in principle, be a profitable operation even with the overhead of having a technology division to produce the website and app.

for point of comparison: [https://order.andofood.com/](https://order.andofood.com/)

that's David Chang's delivery-only food service, which also has a technology division that produces a website and app. the prices on ando's menu are in line with their competitors in NYC. Munchery was always overpriced. I don't know if ando is taking a loss on every order or what, but I doubt it.

<comment><USER3> That's the problem - they don't think they are running a restaurant. But they are - a restaurant with a ton of expensive, unnecessary overhead. That's why they will be out of business as soon as VC patience runs out. (And why Ricky's Pizza Joint, or a nearly-identical business will still be around.)

The lack of head chef isn't an upshot for their business. It's a symptom of the problem. Compared to the cost of an engineering team, it's penny-wise and pound-foolish.

If no-front-of-house-delivery-only could afford this kind of extravagance, then street food trucks would have gold-plated steering wheels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently canceled my membership after a year. I love the idea, and the food is good too, but the dish prices have skyrocketed recently. Now I know why. I liked to order 4 or 5 dishes and eat them over the next couple days for lunch and dinner. It tastes way better than frozen food, and is better quality than prepared dishes I could pick up at the grocery. However, their model seems to actively punish ordering multiple dishes. They have raised dish prices rather than delivery fees, and their rewards program rewards you per order rather than for dollars spent. Regardless, $10 is a psychologically significant limit for me per meal, and while they used to have a number of dishes under this price point, very few are now.

<comment><USER5> And that's why all of these companies are going to go under: as soon as they start having to charge real prices, instead of the artificial, VC-funded promo prices, people bail. Because, whoa, food delivery is actually expensive.

Did _none_ of these companies check, before moving in to "disrupt" the restaurant industry, that there was actually anything to disrupt? Restaraunts are not lazy incumbents growing fat on their unchallenged dominance: it's a cutthroat business. And their costs are almost entirely the food and the labor, which are, for all practical purposes, fixed. There are no margins to steal from here.

<comment><USER6> They're not going to go under per se, because I think the customers are probably pretty valuable. I think a more vivid hint as to their future is in their choosing someone from Simply Hired as their new (7/16) CEO: positioning Munchery for acquisition in a crowded marketplace.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, I don't agree that the customers are very valuable. There doesn't seem to be either loyalty or lock-in with these delivery startups: as soon as they raise their prices, people just uninstall the app and grab another one. I don't see anything worth acquiring here, so an IPO is pretty much it for an exit strategy, if they can last that long.

<comment><USER6> Could be, but the fact remains that they chose a new CEO whose most recent experience was winding a company down into acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To me this seems like a dead end business to be in, too many competitors in limited markets (like SF or NY), competition with brick and mortar options (Joe's Deli etc), and enormous cost of acquisition trying to outdo the competition. This seems like a market for one winner and lots of losers. Is investing $120M in such a business a good idea? You have almost zero ability to innovate and produce something better than your competitors, so why even get into this?

</comment><comment><USER8> We used to order Munchery all the time back in ~2013 because the food was really high quality. Then they dropped the price which I was fine with, then they the dropped quality too. At which point we stopped. There are a lot of options available for shitty food.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's hard to fathom how no one at any point just presses the pause button and says, guys, everybody STOP! Let's take a step back and make this damn thing profitable in one city before we scale it.

Sheer VC-fueled insanity.

</comment><comment><USER10> 650,000 prepared but unsold meals? I hope they were able to direct them somewhere worthwhile.

<comment><USER11> That is not the number to be worried about; that it is _" an average of 16 percent of the food the kitchen was producing"_ is, because _" Wasting an average of 16 percent of food produced is above the typical 4 percent to 10 percent that most restaurants waste"_ (both quotes from [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/munchery-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/munchery- s-struggles-show-how-hard-the-food-delivery-business-is))

Also, that was over a period of almost two years, so 'only' about 1000 a day, and the company claims most of it was donated to charities.

From those two Bloomberg articles, I don't think that's the main reason they need more money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What exactly is a recapitalization? It says the round doesn't value them but doesn't the $5MM note have a cap of $80MM?

<comment><USER13> a recap is when the company issues new shares to change the capital structure of the company (i.e., the ownership percentages). the early investors aren't getting any new shares, so their stake in the company gets "crammed down".

it might be to make room for a new shareholder to get a larger stake of the company for a given dollar amount than might otherwise be implied by the current capital structure (a down round).

<comment><USER14> Why is it legally easy for them to do this, but in other high profile examples it was difficult for companies to dilute a now-unwanted partner? For example, Gates and Ballmer pushing out Allen, or Zuckerberg pushing out Saverin.

<comment><USER15> Legally very easy because it's a down road (read up on "VC cram down"). They'd raised $120million prior, and now they're doing a $5-$15million convertible at a $80million valuation (significantly down round). All existing investors will either "play" (invest more at this valuation) or "pay" (suffer significant dilution). When valuation takes a down turn, all rules are off - the board has the fiduciary duty to do whatever it thinks is right for the company, even if it means getting rid of all previous shareholders who are not pitching in to help. VC backed companies are like drugs - feels great as long as you're high but could die in a second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems like it will be an extremely difficult business to turn around. Food delivery is an extremely competitive and low margin business with highly price sensitive customers. I've seen coworkers rotate to whichever new service was offering a discount to juice their adoption numbers. I don't see this ever being a lucrative investment, just good money being thrown after bad.

</comment><comment><USER17> The other Bloomberg article gets into the details of why this company has burnt so much cash (1). Shaking my head after reading this:

 _In August of 2015, Munchery held a party at the Line Hotel in Los Angeles to celebrate a new partnership with chef Roy Choi. He 's known for his Korean taco fusion food truck, Kogi, and for his L.A. restaurants, including two in the Line Hotel. Choi's new contract promised him more than $100,000 a month to design his own line of meals. He was also consulting on branding.

At the party, people lined up around the block for free kimchi pork fried rice served in Munchery's cardboard containers. Pishevar, Munchery's chief hype man and a major investor, arrived wearing a black cowboy hat. Hollywood filmmaker Jon Favreau attended.

By the end of the year, the startup ended Choi's contract. It cost the company more than $500,000, according to people familiar with the matter. Choi had provided Munchery with just two recipes. An agent for Choi declined to comment.

Around the same time, Munchery also terminated a contract with marketing agency West, according to former employees. The firm had helped Munchery offer free meals to attract new customers and to strategize about its branding.

Munchery spent heavily on direct to consumer marketing ahead of fundraising rounds, former employees said. In a month, the company could easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting flyers on people's doors offering discounts on Munchery, they said._

1\. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/munchery-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/munchery- s-struggles-show-how-hard-the-food-delivery-business-is)

<comment><USER18> A party and half a mil on Roy Choi recipes doesn't seem like a significant factor compared to a peak burn rate of $5mil/mo or millions in prepared but unsold meals.

<comment><USER19> Well, that gives you two solid data points...a few more and you've got a pretty reliable trend to explain that burn rate and wasted meals.

<comment><USER18> A data point and wishing for a few more does not give you a 'pretty reliable trend'. It does the opposite of giving you that.

<comment><USER19> You're absolutely right. Except that I said 2 data points and then waiting to see if there are more...in which case you would be able to argue for a reliable trend.

<comment><USER18> Yes, if you knew the company was throwing expensive parties every weekend and spending millions of chefs on a regular basis, maybe. But you don't. The point was, the stuff the commenter highlighted doesn't really explain their losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The startup has been trying to muster a turnaround effort under the helm of new Chief Executive Officer James Beriker, the former head of recruiting company Simply Hired. He has cut jobs across the company this year to stop the bleeding."

Ironic that the former head of a recruiting company has cut jobs at Munchery

<comment><USER21> i wonder if he sent their resumes over to SimplyHired

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> eww, processed snack food is gross, do they deliver fresh fruits?</comment>


Elizabeth Holmes Owes About $25M to Theranos - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-owes-about-25-million-to-blood-testing-startup-1491435009 <comment><USER2> From the company's POV, this is a _cashless exercise_. Theranos has loaned $25M to Holmes who paid it to Theranos. This is a common structure. Dunno why the WSJ didn't see that.

From her POV, she doesn't have _beneficial ownership_. I think that has tax consequences.

[http://www.financeandflipflops.com/cash-vs-cashless- exercise...](http://www.financeandflipflops.com/cash-vs-cashless-exercise-the- stock-option-conundrum/)

<comment><USER3> There is a lot of flexibility there. If they forgive the loan then she owes tax on $25M (as if they had just outright paid her). I am impressed that the board could use her shares as a way of getting the investors not to sue. Seems like owning more of a nominally worthless asset isn't really better than just getting some of your cash back.

<comment><USER4> They don't have to forgive the loan right? They just take the stock back? Then she would owe nothing and have no tax due.

<comment><USER5> That might seem like the common sense answer, but is the danger in exercising options and holding them. In this case, the previous poster was correct -- once they forgive the loan, the $25 million becomes taxable income.

The reason it doesn't seem to make sense is that no actual value was gained in the end. However, the IRS (and our tax laws) don't see it that way. Instead, they back at the value that was gained at the time of the transaction. They don't care what happens to the value in later years.

<comment><USER4> No I mean the stock is collateral regardless of its value. If it was worth more than $25m she would sell it. But it's not so you just give it back.

<comment><USER5> As stated before, it doesn't work that way. Google the horror stories on those who have excercised options (and held the stock) on a liquidity event who had to pay taxes on gains that existed at the time of the transaction, but later dropped in value. Even though they never saw a gain other than on paper, they get hit with a tax bill they can no longer afford. And the stock is unhelpful because it's current market value is no longer reflective of what it was at the time the IRS recognizes the gain. In your scenario, she could only cover her tax bill with the stock if it were at a equal or higher value as when she excercized them via the loan: [https://blog.wealthfront.com/exercise-stock- options-taxes/](https://blog.wealthfront.com/exercise-stock-options-taxes/)

<comment><USER4> That's not a risk if you early exercise at the time of grant where your strike price is equal to 409A price. Then there is no taxable value.

<comment><USER5> We can agree to disagree. As a two time founder, I had to go through a lot of discusssions with our legal and even my own to grasp the upsides and downsides of what Elizabeth did by trading risk against a lower future tax liability. My take is that you're confusing a normal cashless transaction versus a structured loan as an executive of the company to purchase stock today to hold for a long term horizon. The risks are very real and the liability is very real. I meant this to be a way to share some specialized knowledge I have on the subject to answer why she has an actual liability and why this isn't handed out to just any employee. This isn't coming from book knowledge, but real working knowledge of this arrangement. But at the end of the day, everyone is free to do their own research. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think this (loaning a founder or senior exec money to purchase shares) is that uncommon a situation. When my previous start-up employer was purchased, I read through most of the deal docs, hundreds of pages. One of the things they mentioned is that the company floated several promissory notes to the CEO to allow him to purchase more company stock. It was peculiar enough that I made a note of it, but I never stopped to puzzle out why they did it that way. Possibly to avoid a tax liability at the time of the deal? Or to increase his compensation without actually increasing it on paper?

<comment><USER4> Right but is it fair? Should employees not get the same deal?

<comment><USER6> Fairness, one way or the other, is hard to quantify here. CEO's get compensated a lot more than other employees, in a lot of different ways; you could just as easily argue that isn't fair either. Besides, at the bottom, the CEO is taking on debt that could find him/her bankrupted if the company fails. I don't think it would be responsible to even offer that facility to all employees. It might not even be legal, if the employees are not accredited investors, though I'm not sure about that.

I should add that I don't have any knowledge of who pushed for the deal, and how it was set, but I doubt the CEO strolled in and just asked for the loan. I'm assuming it was part of the compensation package that was proposed or negotiated by the board and their comp consultants.

<comment><USER4> The CEO won't go bankrupt.. these loans are backed by the stock as collateral. But there should be a law that all such plans and purchase agreements are available to all employees if available to the execs.

<comment><USER7> > The CEO won't go bankrupt.. these loans are backed by the stock as > collateral.

I couldn't actually find this out through a google search. What happens if the market rate does not allow the lender to recover the principle? I thought you'd still be liable for the remainder. It's just that they can force a sale if they want to.

<comment><USER8> This isn't an ordinary debt from a 3rd party; it's a contract with the company - they can put whatever terms and restrictions they like on that contract, including no other recourse for the debt other than proceeds of the sale of that stock, or it's forfeiture.

<comment><USER9> If the company forgives the debt, doesn't the IRS treat that as income?

<comment><USER8> Possibly, But there's a difference between a debt being written off (uncollectable) and forgiven. There's also capital gains losses that might offset potential income; the accounting for all of these cashless transactions is complex - that's what the accountants and lawyers are for :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The proposed deal involves Holmes's shares in Theranos? What value do those have now? I assumed the company is total loss at this point.

</comment><comment><USER11> At the current valuation, I wonder if this is enough to put her into minority shareholder status?

</comment><comment><USER12> Any paywall free source for this story?

<comment><USER13> Anything for you [http://archive.is/qDQRB](http://archive.is/qDQRB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Possibly they're just trying to get the page views.</comment>


Model 3 Mid Range Battery Available - <AUTHOR> https://3.tesla.com/model3/design?#battery <comment><USER2> Just in case anyone is wondering how this plays out pricewise, the base model is $46.2k, but they headline the price as $33.2k:

Price $45,000

Incentives: -$7,500

Gasoline savings: -$4,300

Price after savings: $33,200

Destination & doc fee: $1,200

It's rather disappointing that for all the talk from Tesla about disrupting the way people buy cars they maintain nonsense practices like adding on destination and doc fees, and add new ones like working gasoline savings into the displayed price.

<comment><USER3> I kinda get you, but just because there's a bunch of marketing gibberish on the pricing page doesn't mean they aren't being disruptive.

<comment><USER4> I think part of the point of being disruptive is that you don't need to sink that low.

<comment><USER5> The iPhone disrupted the phone buying process, and still showed you a discounted price, after phone carrier subsidy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It also appears they have removed the option for purchasing the "Full Self Driving" functionality.

<comment><USER7> Quite sensibly. It seemed pretty shady to me to charge customers for a feature that wasn't delivered or legally approved or likely even finished.

I suspect they're finding the shipped hardware isn't enough to accomplish what they want with the necessary reliability. Elon has already hinted that shipped 3's will need a computer upgrade to support full self-driving. They are probably wisely backing off on guaranteeing full self-driving on hardware that hasn't been proven to succeed to specification.

Total speculation, but I'd bet a chocolate chip cookie that they'll find they need to make changes to the sensor array as well. (If I were designing this from scratch, I'd want a wide stereoscopic baseline between cameras for optical ranging. They have multiple cameras, but they are narrowly spaced, and may have fields of view that differ too much for stereoscopic fusion. I'd aim for "larger number of shittier/cheaper cameras.")

<comment><USER8> > It seemed pretty shady to me to charge customers for a feature that wasn't > delivered or legally approved or likely even finished

It's still available for the Model X and Model S. The disclosure when you pay for it is very clear. They are not acting sketchy when they sell it to you. I'd guess it has more to do with not enough people ordering it, so removing the option streamlines fulfillment.

> I suspect they're finding the shipped hardware isn't enough to accomplish > what they want with the necessary reliability.

Yeah they already admitted to this. Anyone who has paid for full self driving is getting a Hardware 3.0 (HW3) upgrade for free. They said full self driving will require HW3.

> Total speculation, but I'd bet a chocolate chip cookie that they'll find > they need to make changes to the sensor array as well.

Yeah, as an owner I'm pretty worried that will be the case but I guess we will see. I doubt they will admit to this publicly though - they seem adamant that the sensors today should be sufficient.

<comment><USER7> > The disclosure when you pay for it is very clear.

IMO their marketing probably leads customers to be more optimistic about the expected payout of their $x,000 investment than is justified. Though that is not necessarily deliberate deception, they may be unrealistically optimistic themselves.

Misleading marketing or not, I'd say it's sketchy in the sense that it's an over-promise. If they eventually have to face a reality where their hardware doesn't it cut it, they might be on the hook for thousands of customers' respective thousands of dollars of pre-orders, which is a huge capital liability. Quite possibly 10 figures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is neither the short range battery (220 miles, $35k base price) or the long range battery (310 miles, $49k base price). This is a 3rd option: mid- range battery (260 miles, $45k base price).

<comment><USER10> Are these all not physically the same battery and the range is a software unlock? ISTR Tesla unlocking the additional range for free last time when there were storms in Texas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Model 3 Mid Range Rear-Wheel Drive $45,000

> Incentives - $10,000

> Gas Savings- $4,300

> Price after Est. Savings $30,700

This is good news, but it's still not the $35,000 model.

Also, what's the breakdown on the incentives? I thought the federal rebate was $7500 if they haven't run out of those yet. Are they including state rebates (which presumably aren't the same everywhere)?

Including "gas savings" in the price seems more than a little disingenuous.

<comment><USER12> Yes, they likely are. I only see $7500 as my incentives line. You can click "Learn more" in the Federal Tax Credit blurb to get more info on the incentives, it might include state information.

I assume the 35000 model is the "Standard Battery available in 4-6 months" that's below the options.

<comment><USER11> You're right, they're including a $2,500 California rebate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks like they've removed the long range single motor option. It used to be

\- Long range single motor: $49,000

\- Long range dual motor: $54,000

\- Long range performance: $64,000

Now it's:

\- Mid range single motor: $45,000

\- Long range dual motor: $54,000

\- Long range performance: $64,000

So it looks like a savings of $4,000 off the older long range single motor.

<comment><USER14> The RWD LR model 3 was my go-to and the one I was considering.

With this change, they have now essentially replaced that model with one that has 50 mile less range.

Now the long range version looks so much less appealing as the price is now over $60k($5,000 more for entry LR) for an AWD upgrade I have absolute no use for.

reply

<comment><USER13> I'm the opposite direction. I got a RWD LR model 3, but I hardly ever drive it. And when I do it's all local stuff, well under 100 miles per day. I'd rather have saved the $4,000 and gotten a mid-range.

If someone approached me and offered to trade their mid-range + $3,500 for my long-range, I'd happily take that deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has 260 mile range, and the webpage says 'Standard battery available in 4 to 6 months' so this still isn't the $35k Tesla. Its a sort of in-the-middle option.

Long Range > Mid Range > Standard

</comment><comment><USER16> They've probably exhausted RWD demand backlog so I wouldn't be surprised if this was (initially)a software-limited long range battery, so that they can sell their RWD inventory.

<comment><USER17> That would be incredibly environmentally irresponsible, considering the impact of mining lithium, cobalt, rare earths etc. You'd basically be wasting limited resources, which would run contrary to Tesla's stated mission of creating a more sustainable future.

<comment><USER18> My guess is that all the battery is used and the extra capacity allows for a "full" charge without really getting full. It could also let the range stay at the original level for a lot longer as the battery deteriorates. I would hope so anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just noticed they're now advertising the 0-60 of the performance trim as 3.3 seconds. Only a week or so ago, they were advertising 3.5 seconds.

I might have to test drive one soon. My wife is strongly disapproving me getting a Roadster in a few years. If I find that 0-60 in 3.3 seconds is enough, I might settle for a Model 3.

EDIT: They also removed the option to purchase full self-driving. Interesting...

<comment><USER20> 3.3 is pretty dang fast. People sometimes complain about how fast my budget EV (hint: not a tesla) accelerates when I drive them around.

I test drove a 90D and the acceleration off the line is heart-stopping. And that is listed at 4.7s.

<comment><USER19> I've been on roller coasters that launch from 0 to 120 mph in 3.8 seconds, which is quicker than a Roadster 2.0. I rode it enough times that even that kind of acceleration no longer felt mind-blowing.

I'm worried that getting a car that does 0-60 in 3.3 would actually feel somewhat underwhelming considering that I'm, I guess "calibrated", for something quicker. Maybe I'd feel different though when I'm in control with the power at my command.

I'll probably test drive a Model 3 next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's still $45k, now we will have to wait for the non-premium interior option for the $35k price.

EDIT: $40k price since it seems that there will be a smaller battery than this. Seems like a good way to make more money when people wanting the smaller range battery get tired of waiting.

</comment><comment><USER9> Enhanced autopilot is now $5k up front or $6k later. It used to be $4k up front or $5k later.

</comment><comment><USER22> I really can't bring myself to buy a new car but this would be about the most enticing. Even if I were wealthy I would probably still buy used cars (and my hobby is racing so it is not as if I don't appreciate cars).

<comment><USER23> at high 'racing' speeds, perhaps you should be aware that it doesn't have the best aerodynamics for road-holding (i.e. negative lift or downforce). also many people have reported some vibration issues that couldn't be resolved; [https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/vibration-high- speeds](https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/vibration-high-speeds)

<comment><USER20> Can you kindly recommend a good $40k-ish car that actually generates downforce?

<comment><USER23> BMW 3 series or Golf GTI - tried both on max speed. super stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> $6,000 for auto-pilot? When the sensors are already in all cars? Can I run my own models à la comma.ai?

<comment><USER25> Do you honestly think the biggest cost associated with this program is the sensors?

<comment><USER24> If it's only a software update, when most of ML efforts are open sourced, I don't see why I can't install my own solution.

<comment><USER26> > _I don 't see why I can't install my own solution_

You'd kill yourself and become Tesla's PR problem.

<comment><USER24> comma.ai seemed safe, technically is no different in term of softwares used. Tesla auto-pilot did kill more than 10 people now. Why pay for something that might be inferior than the free one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is mostly the end game of Elon's Tesla Master plan:

[https://solartribune.com/master-plan/](https://solartribune.com/master-plan/)

<comment><USER28> Regarding one of the last points in that, I continue to be baffled by Elon/Tesla's focus on shared personal vehicles, instead of public transport.

<comment><USER18> I continue to be baffled why people are baffled that most people prefer not to travel in cramped, enclosed spaces with random strangers and without the option to carry more than what you can hold in your hands. Sometimes people even have more than one small child with them. Is that really so hard to understand? The personal transport vehicle has been desirable from the beginning of time and now (almost) everyone can afford one. The big downsides are traffic congestion and space taken up with parking and roads. Those can be almost completely mitigated with cheap tunneling tech and automatic driving. Musk and friends are serious working on both of those projects also.

<comment><USER28> >I continue to be baffled why people are baffled that most people prefer not to travel in cramped, enclosed spaces with random strangers and without the option to carry more than what you can hold in your hands.

Transport is typically supply-led.

For roads, more roads encourage more drivers, and more drivers congest the system, leading to marginal overall improvement - there are only so many cars that can travel a stretch of road in any given period of time.

While with public transport there are also only so many buses/trains that can travel a stretch of road/rail at a time, we are typically well short of saturation - outside of some of the densest metros, there is often capacity for increasing the number of services. Investment in these forms of transport increases frequency and reliability, and simplifies connections. The 'downside' is that this increased efficiency tends to attract more users to the public transport system - which yes, means imperfect reduction of crowding, but still significantly improved throughput.

Also, the people on public transport are not 'random strangers', they are members of your community.

Re carrying, as a sibling comment says: backpack. Alternatively one of those granny trolleys. Plus, many buses/trains intended for longer transport (c.f. commuting) have luggage racks.

<comment><USER18> "More roads encourage more drivers"

Roads allow more people to do what they want to do. If we can eliminate the bad things about individually controlled transport (road noise, inefficient petroleum based power, huge parking lots, etc) why should we not let people have this great thing they desire. Are you anti-democratic?

Driving is not free. It takes time and money for gas and wears out your vehicle. People don't (generally) just drive around for the hell of it, especially at commute times when the roads a most full.

"the people on public transport are not 'random strangers', they are members of your community"

This I think is the main reason some people want public transportation to be mandatory. Somehow being forced to be with other people (who are all on their phones, desperately pretending no one else exists) is a good thing? Standing up for 40 minutes packed, hot, and smelly. Occasionally aggressive beggars; homeless people who stink up the entire train car sleeping; mentally ill people yelling at the ether, etc. Not all the time but at least once a month if you are a commuter. I guess it is a cool experience to have to see how the other half live, but a some point many people don't desire such things.

"backpack"

For the human race to continue, each couple must have greater than 2 children. Try taking 3 children under the age of ten by your self, walking to a bus stop, getting on the bus, getting on BART, walking to the doctors appointment, and then back again. Basically impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> RWD base price is $33,200 (after incentives), even less than the long quoted base price of $35k, though presumably incentives on the standard battery Model 3 (not yet available) would make the after incentives price even cheaper.

<comment><USER12> Only if you get the car before December 31st. With a 6-10 week turnaround, you'd have to buy it now and hope you're lucky, but cutting it close either way. And even then, it's not 33200, it's actually $37500 because of "potential gas savings".

From Jan 1 to Jun 30, it'll be $41240 and from Jul 1 to Dec 31 2019, it'll be $43125. As of Jan 1 2020, there'll be no more federal tax credit and the car will be full price at $45000.</comment></comment>


Vagina Oks self-driving car trials on roads - <AUTHOR> http://www.wearobo.com/2015/06/virginia-oks-public-road-testing-of.html

<comment><USER2> Lol, wonder how many people opened the discussion because of the typo...

</comment><comment><USER3> Vagina -> Virginia

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm okay with the incorrect and the correct title.

</comment><comment><USER5> Total clickbait title, or typo?

<comment><USER6> That there is the question!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did I read that headline right?</comment>


Ask HN: Encrypted Email Service. What Do You Use? Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I am biased because I work there, but I think Virtru is the easiest way to send secure email from my gmail account.

[https://www.virtru.com/](https://www.virtru.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> My own mail-server, accessed via desktop/mobile client. I also have GnuPG support on the desktop client. That's as good as it gets. If I had to use a web-based mail client, I would go with mailpile.js although it's far from a complete replacement.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use my Gmail account via IMAP with the native email clients on OS X and iOS. I use an S/MIME certificate from startssl.com.

All my email is signed. So far, I am not sure how to get people to send me encrypted email, so I never got any.

I do all this for no reason whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use ProtonMail because Lavabit shut down.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry what's the point of using super encrypted email service when none of your addressees are using one?

</comment><comment><USER7> GnuPG (Enigmail) with Riseup</comment>


The Big Brother Reading List - <AUTHOR> Books about a world where everyone is watched:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_new_world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag_Archipelago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farenheit_451
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men <comment><USER2> I would add some non-fiction books:

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

2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Factory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Factory)

In the short story category:

3\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_a_Little_Help](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_a_Little_Help)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's cool that the Puzzle Palace was popular within the NSA itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial)

<comment><AUTHOR> How could I forget Kafka! Good save.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(novel)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_\(novel\))

written by the same author as 'Brave New World', Aldous Huxley, the book details more of a Carrot approach to big brother.

</comment><comment><USER5> Someone should whip up a quick website listing all these books. I would do it myself but I have neither the money or knowledge to do so. I will be reading all the books listed in this thread post haste.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_n...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_\(Cory_Doctorow_novel\))

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm so glad that We is on there. Very few people I've ever met have read it but it's one of my all time favorites.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Could anyone suggest an additional title?

<comment><USER7> Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Proverbs for Paranoids: 1\. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2\. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3\. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. 4\. You hide, they seek. 5\. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations. \-- Collected from Gravity's Rainbow, V237, 241, 251, 262, & 292</comment></comment>


Fixing eBay? - <AUTHOR>

eBay is unsafe when one has to buy expensive products, especially from foreign countries. This is breaking eBay's business model. What if we could use a trusted third party entity that would check that the product matches the description and that the money is there to allow the transaction ? This would have a cost, but for expensive products it would be worth to pay a commission shared by both ends for such a guarantee. Requesting to use such a third party relay could also be a proof of honesty.
I guess it could be possible to build such a relay network by using small shops (i.e. press) for a small side income.
Would This Fly ? <comment><USER2> eBay actually lets you use escrow services for this type of thing: <http://pages.ebay.com/help/pay/escrow.html>

"Using Escrow.com can help keep buyers and sellers safe from fraud. When you use Escrow.com, they collect the money from the buyer and hold it until the buyer and seller agree that the terms of the sale have been met. Once both parties are satisfied, Escrow.com sends the payment to the seller. Escrow.com is licensed and regulated company, and the only escrow service that can be used for eBay transactions. "

</comment><comment><USER3> There are buyer protection programs run by eBay (in some markets) for this purpose. How would you do better?</comment>


Ask HN: it is me or Google is very slow now? - <AUTHOR>

It doesn't seem down but really really slow. I'm in italy <comment><USER2> Works fine for me here in Toronto, Canada.

Have you tried running a traceroute and/or DNS lookup to see if anything looks anomalous?

Was IPv6 recently enabled on your network? (Try visiting [http://test- ipv6.com/](http://test-ipv6.com/))</comment>


Information cascades in social news voting systems - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/z/information_cascades/ <comment><USER2> " _Try to avoid even noticing the score. (Maybe scores could even be occluded, like spoiler-text?)_ "

Hiding scores until after voting would be a cool HN experiment.</comment>


Erlang NOTP: a middle way - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ikura.co/posts/notp-a-middle-way.html <comment><USER2> Still no explanation whatsoever of what this is doing.

Anyone knows what mystery "the final few pages in the Joe Armstrong 2nd edition Erlang book" hold?

<comment><USER3> The "final few pages" are entirely module reference for zlib so that probably isn't what is referenced. Prior to that are miscellaneous bits about debugging, tracing, code-reloading etc.

I have version P5.0 from 2011 though, so it could be wrong altogether.

<comment><USER4> "Appendix 3: A Simple Execution Environment"

[https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/programming-e...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/programming- erlang-2nd/9781941222454/f_0233.html)

[http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang- questions/2014-February/0...](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang- questions/2014-February/077270.html)

In the book Joe explains that OTP loads 67 modules and starts 25 processes at startup, which makes it slow to boot. Then he demonstrates how to create a single module providing a very minimal subset of what these 67 modules do. This single module can then be used to create scripts that start and run very quickly, since they don't require the whole OTP machinery.

Some of the functionality the module provides are rpc, stdio, and very basic process registration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might make Erlang practical for FAAS. I also wonder if this will work with Elixir (since Elixir might have extra modules being loaded in too).

I'm not sure why one would do that as opposed to say, running things with JavaScript (ubiquity) or Ruby/Python (library support). I like Elixir, though I recognize that many of Erlang's advantages is in concurrency and control.

<comment><USER6> Why wouldn't you just use Mix tasks in Elixir? Once I discovered mix tasks, I have used them for all sorts of one off things.

<comment><USER5> I have not looked at mix tasks. It depends on its characteristics. FAAS isn't exactly a one-off thing and falls under a "serverless" paradigm. (I am a bit skeptical of FAAS myself). Mix tasks might have characteristics that makes it suitable for FAAS, or it might not.

<comment><USER6> Ah, for those sorts of things, they probably wouldn't work SUPER well, though I can see them made to work. Spinning up the BEAM is much cheaper than spinning up a JVM, though it is very much server-ey by design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems much simpler than what one would normally have to do, but still not as simple as getting started in Ruby or Python or Node.js (or even Java).

<comment><USER8> erlang (OTP) has a learning curve without a doubt, but this author seems to gloss over using escript which _is_ simple to use, although it has three lines of boilerplate

      #!/usr/bin/env escript
      %%!
      main(_) ->
        stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case you're like me and have no idea how to navigate bitbucket:

[https://bitbucket.org/nato/notp/src/efe882a3ff3eb2e6a00d7013...](https://bitbucket.org/nato/notp/src/efe882a3ff3eb2e6a00d7013b84f878063982fb6/src/notp.erl)

<comment><USER10> [https://bitbucket.org/nato/notp/src](https://bitbucket.org/nato/notp/src) no need to link to a specific revision.</comment></comment>


Toyota Mirai; Fuelcell for the masses - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ6zhWJaBgo

<comment><USER2> well, I really support clean technologies. But can they look a bit prettier?

Prius is already kind ugly, and then this thing ...</comment>


Ask YC: what do you do to get a promotion ? - <AUTHOR>

what do you do to get a promotion ? <comment><USER2> It depends on (1) who has the power to promote you and (2) what they measure for promoting someone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Earn it, and then tactfully make it known to the proper person(s) that you want it.</comment>


Ask HN: Enterprise SaaS UI Design resources - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working on an enterprise SaaS application that is targeted towards both medium and large companies.<p>Anyone have guidelines, contacts, recommendations for UI design. <comment><USER2> Whatever you use, have a template system to let your customers use their logos and company colors to brand their piece of the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good easily forgot idea. Thx.</comment></comment>


The word "dessert" renders as "stressed" in Chrome (bidirectional Unicode) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gro_tsen/status/1124032040029102080 <comment><USER2> I right-clicked to inspect it, and it was still "stressed" in the debugger. I almost didn't believe it until I copied and pasted it into a code editor, and sure enough, "dessert" appeared. Oddly, said editor was VSCode, which I believe is Electron-based. They must have some custom way of rendering text.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the twitter thread they mention that this also affects Electron and likely all Electron-based applications.

>Looks like anything that uses the Electron framework is affected as well since it uses Blink.</comment>


Ask HN: Good books on computational complexity? - <AUTHOR>

I am curious about computational complexity, P, NP and so on.
Wikipedia gives a good basic insight but doesn't go very deep.
What books do you recommend? Plus points for one that discusses how parallelism fits into this. <comment><USER2> The best book on the subject I know of is Introduction to the Theory of Computation, by Michael Sipser. Very readable and lucid. Great exercises.

<comment><USER3> Yes, definitely the best introductory book on the subject I've ever seen. Indeed, the Sipser book is a model for how to write a very readable, accessible CS theory textbook.

As far as how complexity theory on parallel computing, communication complexity is one related approach:

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

which provides a rigorous way to characterize how much communication is inherently required to solve a particular problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Blog of a quantum computing theorist: <http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/>

P vs NP Millenium Prize intro paper, which is fairly accessible: [http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/Official_Problem_...](http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/Official_Problem_Description.pdf)

Complexity Theory: A Modern Approach (out of Princeton): <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/theory/complexity/>

PRIMES is in P (famous paper): [http://www.math.princeton.edu/~annals/issues/2004/Sept2004/A...](http://www.math.princeton.edu/~annals/issues/2004/Sept2004/Agrawal.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> The solution manual to Sipser's first edition is available through bootleg bittorrent trackers, which makes it good for self-study.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.complexitytheory.com/>

Edit: The lectures don't seem to be up there anymore but he links to this book which is free online pre-publication: <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/theory/complexity/>

Rudich's lectures are up for his undergrad class though, [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/di...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/discretemath/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The definitive algorithms book is Cormen : <http://projects.csail.mit.edu/clrs/> I think you should study this book and here is the MIT course to go along with it : [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and- Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer- Science/6-046JFall-2005/CourseHome/)

Learning about NP complete problems is interesting to avoid certain pitfalls and mapping one problem to another is always a valuable technique, but it seems you are fairly new to analysis of algorithms so imho (having been a phd student focused on algorithms) this book and course is a great place to start.

[http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Creative-Approach-Udi- Manbe...](http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Creative-Approach-Udi- Manber/dp/0201120372)

this is also very good

</comment><comment><USER8> If you are in the mood for something advanced, take a look at Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft, Motwani, and Ullman.

It has a good amount of proofs and a pretty strong focus on automata thought so that may not be your cup of tea.

Hopcroft won the Turing award in 1986 so he knows what he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would suggest "Computational Complexity" by C.H. Papadimitriou

Great material, great exercises, very good bibliography

</comment><comment><USER10> As others said: Introduction to the Theory of Computation, by Michael Sipser

Together with Shai Simonson's lectures:

<http://aduni.org/courses/theory/></comment>


Meaningness - <AUTHOR> https://meaningness.com/ <comment><USER2> > If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create > your own meanings. If you take that failure seriously, and analyze what went > wrong, you may recognize that subjective meanings are impossible. Then—since > objective meanings are also clearly impossible—you will end up in nihilism. > > The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor > objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One > might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it > pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and > object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don't have > locations.

The word gymnastics used on that site to disqualify "everybody else's muddled middle" except for his own personal version of a "muddled middle" seems hypocritical. He talks in enough circles, and we are supposed to forget that his muddled middle is pretty much all the other muddled middles he says can't work.

I wasted so much time reading philosophy stuff in college. Its like a virus that infects the mind, "there must be a RIGHT answer!" and the infected mind goes in circles arguing with itself. Its an infinite recursive loop without a base case.

The base case is this: "would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?" its not meant to mean that we should all get on "brave new world" soma. what it does though, is get your mind out of that infinite loop of "i must know the RIGHT answer with certainty!". These sorts of topics have no certainty. They are topics worth considering, but trying to find "correct" is just missing the forest from the trees.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's fair to say that because the answer to the question of "there must be a right answer!" is very hard to find, that the question is not worth pondering.

What if we approached physics that way? And decided that we shouldn't bother trying to explain gravity because many people in college pondered the question in circles and couldn't answer it?

Hard questions may just be... hard. And maybe this is far harder than physics.

<comment><USER2> Its more than things being "hard". Its about the nature of the questions philosophers try and answer.

Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason has those 4 quadrants of "knowing". A priori vs posteriori. Synthetic vs analytic. Its literally a CRITIQUE of how far pure reason can take us. In the area much of philosophy dances in, pure reason simple cant take us very far!

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_dis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction)

Finding "a" reason to live matters far more than finding "the" reason to live. Would we rather be happy or would we rather be right?

I like this quote attributed to Kant: "Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for".

<comment><USER3> I'm generally interested in philosophy relative to most normal people as opposed to philosophers, and, to normal people, there are many very real questions that are worth answering, including those relating to meaning.

Those questions seem like they can be summarized as "What is going on, what should I do, and why?"

> Finding "a" reason to live matters far more than finding "the" reason to > live. Would we rather be happy or would we rather be right?

This framing seems strange to me.

When you make this statement you already make a claim: that _the_ reason to live is to seek happiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My go-to read when I find myself getting too lost in the question of meaning:

[http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731)

(Frost, "Maple")

</comment><comment><USER5> Greatly appreciate the author giving this topic a shot (purpose/meaning is the grand elephant in room for humanity at large), reading through the introduction I am so far positively surprised - concise and readable. Whether this holds when it comes to the meat of it.. who knows, I'm giving it try.

P.S. a compiled epub &/ pdf would be good (and once you got well formatted epub then the book can go on kdp.amazon.com as a bonus)

<comment><USER6> It was pretty easy to create a usable epub (not at all perfect but still very legible on an ereader). Make sure you have wget and calibre installed, then run:

        wget -r -l 1 -k -p https://meaningness.com/; ebook-convert meaningness.com/index.html meaningness.epub

<comment><USER5> Thanks, great one-liner!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A good post of David's to start with is "Developing Ethical, Social, and Cognitive Competence":

[https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical- social-...](https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and- cognitive-competence/)

<comment><USER8> > Postmodernism's accurate critique of modernity has had dire consequences for > the possibility of growing from stage 3 to 4. The very essence of the > contemporary, postmodern liberal arts curriculum is the claim that all > systems are merely arbitrary, self-interested justifications for power. That > makes positive identification with systems impossible. It's mostly only STEM > majors who can make this transition—which is probably part of why we are > taking over the world.

As a STEM major who has studied critical theory and postmodern thinkers, I laughed really hard at this. (because I think it's ridiculous).

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in reading your critique.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing to critique. It's a claim presented without supporting evidence. Trying to outright refute it is really hard because there's not much to grasp in all this alluring rhetoric. Here's another whopper occurring earlier than my last quote:

> Political leftism tends to monism, and rightism to dualism. The communal > mode tends to mistake the logic of stage 4 for rightish ideologies, > particularly capitalism. However, stage 4 is not inherently rightist or > anti-leftist. Marxism is a systematic, technical, rational critique of > capitalism—and therefore a stage 4 ideology. (Notwithstanding that campus > communists rarely understand Marxism's details, and often misuse it as a > simple stage 3 rejection of systematicity.) John Rawls' Theory of Justice is > an elegant stage 4 systematic justification for leftism. Conversely, stage 3 > rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to "protect our > traditional communities."

This guy thinks he's better at liberal arts than liberal arts majors and there is no justification for this level of arrogance presented here. This is just a constant stream of assertions that, I guess, are internally consistent but because they don't actually engage with the texts he makes claims about or the people who study those texts and ideologies don't actually say anything. The rhetoric is structured in a way that it gives everything a tinge of truthiness without doing any of the hard work of demonstrating something as true.

"Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to "protect our traditional communities."" Unraveling the condescension, the author clearly thinks everything in this world is driven by ideas and ideology. That doesn't _make any fucking sense_. For example, the resurgence of far-right politics in Europe and America didn't happen just because a bunch of people decided to start believing new ideas, but because they are driven by material circumstances, like the evolution of capitalism leading to large numbers of people in America's interior losing their middle class status and any hope of economic mobility, or the use of the "war on terror" as a justification for the expansion of the mass-surveillance state, the destabilization of the Middle East, and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe.

If he understood Marx _at all_ , and he _better_ if he's going to make claims about Marxism and have the _gall_ to note how much better he understands Marx than those "campus communists", then he'd know how deeply materialist analysis utterly eviscerates his ideas. Ah, tut tut. I must be incapable of _truly understanding_ stage 4 of his pokemon evolution of human enlightenment.

> The communal mode is characteristic of pre-modern ("traditional") cultures. > It's impossible to base a large-scale society on the communal mode, because > it's so ineffective at coordinating complex group activities. (If > individuals frequently fail to do their specific, agreed tasks, nothing can > get done.) Modern societies are based on the systematic mode (stage 4).

This is beyond hilarious and to be quite honest implicitly white supremacist. Let's ignore all of the Native American societies whose structures not only influenced but _directly informed_ many modern institutions. The examples I have in mind are the Iroquois and the Navajo. Show this text to any anthropologist and they will either roll their eyes so hard they pull a muscle or laugh until they suffocate and pass out. Only mild hyperbole.

In short, lots, and lots and _lots_ of assertions that sound nice together but have nothing backing them up and just end up being so much loquacious pseudointellectual masturbation. I hope he uses his intellect more solidly in whatever his STEM day job is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've so far found most of his articles to be a bit too abstract and lacking in concrete detail (often with a "of course I'll elaborate on this in a future article" disclaimer). However, I did really like the article on Bongard puzzles:

[https://meaningness.com/metablog/bongard-meta- rationality](https://meaningness.com/metablog/bongard-meta-rationality)

</comment><comment><USER11> Having a "meaning" that you have given to yourself, that you truly believe in, and that is used to guide your life as a "meaning" should is, I think the bedrock of happiness, productivity and mental stability.

Certainly, in a world where everything needs to be questioned and nothing faithfully believed, it helps to have a meaningful central anchor on which to moor your self and your actions.

It is amazing to me that so many people go about their lives and couldn't reliably answer basic questions like, "why are you still doing this(life)?", "what is your purpose?", "how do you justify the value of your continued existence?" Alas, you can't ask those questions too often as they have a tendency to induce some dark thought patterns. However, having a well- constructed sense of meaning/purpose hardens you against those questions and also the many other problematic questions in life and it would do many well to answer them.

<comment><USER3> It's amazing to me that anyone _could_ answer those questions: there's nothing basic about them and I have yet to see any kind of solid source of knowledge.

<comment><USER12> This will probably sound sophomoric, but I like Aristotle's answer to the question of purpose: that a living creature's purpose is to live the kind of life characteristic of its species, to the extent that it's able to. Whether or not there's more than that is a matter of philosophy and theology, but I think he does well enough proving that this is a bare minimum level of purpose for all living beings...

<comment><USER3> That seems to be an assigned purpose, where the will is attributed to some other process.

If a creature starts talking about having purpose, that usually means the creature's own purpose, not purpose assigned to it by something else.

I imagine nxc1 had the latter in mind, not the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having skimmed it over, this book summarizes a couple of traps that you can fall into if you're thinking too binary about meaning. The world is not 0s and 1s from a meaning standpoint.

The best way I can describe it is a quantum theory approach to meaning. No meaning in life is like saying light is a particle, and meaning in life is like saying light is a wave. In reality thinking those things can lead to incorrect systems that lead to all sorts of trouble, and you must learn how to live in that quantum zone in order to find inner peace or something.

Unfortunately, in the realm of self help which this is, you cannot avoid guru speak, which he falls into.

His definition of religion is eternalism, and I think that is historically correct. However, he states clearly that you can't believe in a God because it leads to eternalism, which I disagree with - it's not nebulous enough.

</comment><comment><USER14> > "Meaningness" is a word I invented, referring to the quality of being > meaningful and/or meaningless.

...

> The various dimensions of meaningness are discussed in religion and > philosophy; but, strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed.

I don't know anything about the author, but this feels like the classic sophomoric illusion of having discovered an entire field of "mysteriously neglected" ideas, combined with the classic sophomoric attempt at an overarching everything-fits-into-this theory of life.

<comment><USER15> tl;dr, but concluded it is sophomoric rubbish?

The author is pretty well known, technically, and has been applying Buddhist- style inquiry patterns to a western vernacular for a long time. I don't think the knee-jerk cynicism is warranted. You may disagree with his conclusions, but he isn't a superficial guy.

And the fact that you think a search for meaning outside traditional religious models is 'mysteriously neglected' is baffling. Nothing in your comment seems to correspond to David's work, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER14> Making a slightly better answer here. Your last observation seems to misunderstand what I'm saying. I only mean that it is common for people new to a field (in this case undoubtedly the art-science formerly known as philosophy) to imagine that they have discovered new territory of investigation.

In a sense I'm saying the opposite of what you think I am. I'm saying that the whole topic under discussion has been broadly under discussion since the beginning of recorded civilisation. So saying "strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed" seems a tad like a new minted programmer saying "strangely no-one has addressed the entire topic of OO programming".

<comment><USER16> When I was first getting into philosophy for the first year or so I was convinced I was brilliant because I was coming up with all these great ideas that people loved to talk about but then I realized that it was all addressed (largely by the existentialists and postmodernists, but also the German idealists and Plato) decades, centuries or millennia ago. Now when I have what seems to be a unique idea I spend a while googling different formulations of it to make sure it's truly original.

This isn't to say that philosophy has already asked and answered every possible question, just that the most obvious versions of these (obvious for the kinds of people who would bother doing this in the first place, i.e. relatively intelligent people) probably have good discussions going on and that the philosophy of those questions is more about joining that discussion and adding your perspective (if it's new) than about formulating original paradigms and meta-narratives for solving them, because that's been done already for a lot of questions.

<comment><USER17> > Now when I have what seems to be a unique idea I spend a while googling > different formulations of it to make sure it's truly original.

The problem is that you often can't really find this through Google, unless you know the name we've given it (or happen to phrase your question in almost the same way someone else did on StackExchange). That's why it is so valuable to have a good human search engine to talke to (say, a professor who knows their field really well).

<comment><USER16> For me I know the fundamentals well enough that I can kind of winnow it down to a couple movements that would be good to start looking around in, but I'm not sure if it's a strategy you can use when you're just breaking in. You first have to know the history, then you can determine how original your ideas are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the difference between this "meaningness" and, say, phenomenology?

<comment><USER18> That the author has not heard of the latter.

<comment><USER19> That's uncharitable and definitely incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In [https://meaningness.com/finding-god-in-a- casino](https://meaningness.com/finding-god-in-a-casino), he says explains religion as an addiction to warm fuzzies, kept alive by the brain's ability to everywhere find patterns.

I agree that such can describe many people, but orthodox Christianity doesn't prescribe wishful thinking or worse, blind faith. If you read the Bible, it is very much an evidence-based religion. A good summary is _More Than a Carpenter_ , by Josh McDowell (192 pages).

<comment><USER21> Does thinking that Christianity is "evidence based" require assuming that parts of the bible are not meant to be taken literally?

Without going into a litany of examples, surely even devout Christians understand that large portions of the Bible are difficult to match to reality/science/etc.

<comment><USER22> I think it requires stretching the definition of "literally". For example, "seven days" might not necessarily mean "seven human days" but rather it might be some kind of magical God-time unit. An "ark" may not be a literal ship; or maybe it is, and the "popular" version of the evolutionary tree is misguided. And so on.

<comment><USER21> > For example, "seven days" might not necessarily mean "seven human days"

I really didn't want to get into a point-for-point thing, but the "day" is just one issue. Birds and whales (great sea monsters) precede reptiles and insects, grass precedes light, etc. The Ark, and other stories, have similar issues that are hard to wave away.

<comment><USER20> > Birds and whales (great sea monsters) precede reptiles and insects

What's the problem?

> grass precedes light

verse 3: And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

verse 11: Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation . . . "

<comment><USER21> >What's the problem

Really?

> verse 3: And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

What are verses 14-17 about, then?

Edit: For clarity...

a) Birds preceding reptiles and insects seems obviously flawed.

b) Verse 3 "Let there be light" would almost have to correlate with the big bang...light somewhere, but not on the earth. Verses 14-17 seem clearly to be about the sun being created. Created millions of years after the grass (and other things that need light?), if we take the notion that "days" aren't literal, and are meant to match what we've seen in science.

This has the verses laid out in a way that's easy to follow: [http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis- Chapter-1/](http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/)

<comment><USER23> I agree with you regarding "Let there be light" referring to the Big Bang. However, it's not unreasonable to assume that there might have been another source of light for these plants to grow. Alternatively, even if there wasn't, do you not think that a God who could create the Sun and the Earth from nothing would be unable to make plants grow without the Sun? It seems that many so-called 'rebuttals' of the Bible try to disprove it by explaining why some events are physically impossible, but what _is_ impossible to an all- powerful God who created the laws of physics themselves? Is he not able to bend them to His will?

If one tries to nitpick on every little detail in the Scriptures, they will have a lot of occasions to do so. It is quite easy to find apparent contradictions by interpreting the Bible in a way that is suited to your goal. It is not, however, a proof that the Bible contradicts itself, as it relies on a specific interpretation. When it come to religious matters, very few things can be proven or disproven.

The way I see it, Christian faith is about being humble. You can't find God if you read the Bible with a self-righteous, know-it-all attitude, trying to disprove it line by line. I found this[1] page to explain this point of view quite well.

You cannot apply the principles of science to metaphysical matters, because science concerns itself purely with the physical, tangible world, and has no answers to offer regarding its origins, its meaning, etc. Science and faith do not contradict each other; rather, they complement each other. I like to think of myself as a highly rational individual; mathematics and programming, for example, delight me. Yet I have no issue believing that the Bible is true, and that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the creator of the Universe. Does that make me a fool? In the eyes of some, yes. Is it possible to be cognitively biased in a specific area yet highly rational in others? Absolutely. But to say that reason precludes faith is simply incorrect.

[1]: [http://www.christiananswers.net/q-comfort/contradictions- bib...](http://www.christiananswers.net/q-comfort/contradictions-bible.html)

<comment><USER21> I'm not trying to disprove the Bible. I'm trying to disprove the notion that Christianity is somehow "Evidence Based". You mention faith, not nitpicking, etc. Or, in short, you're pointing out that it's "Faith Based"...which I have no qualms with.

<comment><USER23> Then it would seem that we agree, because I don't either. Christianity is definitely faith based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Meaningness: the blog that all the cool kids switched to in order to keep our hipster cred, once Scott Alexander got too mainstream ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> I found the author's chauvinism unbearable: dismissing nihilism and eternalism as "obviously wrong" throughout just re-raised the same question in me every time - why?

I'll start with something that absolutely made me nearly snap my neck from shaking my head.

> The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor > objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One > might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it > pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and > object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don't have > locations.

First - what? This is the kind of drivel people in drum circles mutter about, not rigorous thought. This is pseudo-religious psychobabble, informed and supported by nothing but a hunch. To reject all of the worlds religious traditions, authors from Camus to Nietzsche, and several thousand years of disciplined human thought in favor of this guy's musings on a website would be the height of insanity. To be more specific:

I understand that eternalism is unfavorable in the scientific mind, and don't feel too much need to explain or defend it. Though I will say this: if we live in a deterministic and finite universe, then everything has some sense of meaning or purpose, at least insofar as its relationship to the other moving parts. Eastern philosophy hints at this sort of part-to-whole meaningfulness constantly, to dismiss it wholesale in favor of your prejudice for your own wonky beliefs is the height of chauvinism.

His bias towards nihilism was sickening as well as wholly circular. First, nihilists generally believe that "life has no meaning" \- which is a good place to start the debate. If we believe that rocks have no meaning, that plants or clouds have no meaning, then what makes us so special? What exactly gives _us_ meaning? Are we not a coincidence in the great book of history? Are we to just blindly commit the fallacy of placing ourselves at the center of our beliefs about how the universe works? I'm not saying that nihilism is the _one true way_ or anything (as I'm not with Eastern religion) but I am saying that it's more coherent and rational than this dude's blog.

Furthermore, it is okay to be a nihilist and have preferences about things while accepting that those preferences are either arbitrary, irrelevant to the world outside of them, pre-determined, unstable, or in some other way meaningless. In support of his belief that nihilism is obviously wrong, he generally points to a belief that "it doesn't work" or that meaning is obvious - when it clearly isn't. If meaning were obvious, why the hell would you have to write a half baked e-book about it? That which is truly obvious doesn't need the kind of straw-grasping this guy attempts to rationalize his worldview.

In closing, I give this article a 2/10\. I did like his emphasis on the practical, and on stances over ideologies. But the actual content is barren- marred by a need to make up new words while ignoring the work of others, as well as a totally lackluster conclusion that gets in its own way for lack of supporting detail. This is what happens when you give someone with apparently no formal understanding of the history of thought a platform to espouse their Freshman-level beliefs about the way the universe works to a crowd of interested onlookers.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Both these stances [eternalism, nihilism] are wrong, factually

citation needed.

Author throws around too many unsupported claims to be taken seriously. And then "nihilism is wrong" becomes "this stance is unworkable". Dubious logic at best.

<comment><USER27> This was the first page I navigated to and I too wondered how the author could make that claim. This is yet another case of someone projecting their personal belief system as objective truth. I'm actually pretty interested in having philosophical debates around the topic of existence, morality, religion, etc. in general, but I'm bored to death of people starting the conversation by assuming their position on the topic as fact without evidence.

<comment><USER28> For any debate of the sort, certain axioms must be accepted (otherwise, it's impossible to start a debate).

However, that's not the case here, as he _does_ explain why both of these are actually wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was this linked again for the humour factor of low quality philosophy? Please stop. 9 times in 2 years now.

We get it. It's mediocre.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is this on topic?

<comment><USER30> I think it is related to the many comments in "On Getting Older in Tech" thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060)

Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.

<comment><USER31> > Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.

This is a tool for presenting things meaningless. One can also say any sort of philanthropy and medicine as a whole are meaningless as we'll all die eventually.</comment></comment></comment>


Google's expert report in Oracle case explains complexities in plain English - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110907141407472

<comment><USER2> In this impressive document, Prof Astrachan also shows that he has an infinite patience. He explains (with great analogies) a huge pile of concepts along the way, which wouldn't be necessary for a technical audience.

The points 13-16 explain in 400 words that even if

      public static int abs(int i) { return i >= 0 ? i : -i; }

and

      public static int abs(int a) { return (a < 0) ? -a : a; }

look similar, they are as different as two different implementations of _Math.abs_ can be. Someone that has never seen a line of code could wonder how come they both use the words public, static, etc.

<comment><USER3> Prof. Astrachan has written a lot of the material for the high-school Advanced Placement computer science course (which I teach), and I agree that he has a rare gift and we (in the APCS community) are blessed to have his involvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. This is an extremely well written document. I wish other lawyers would write in such "plain" English.

Assuming (hopefully) that this leads to a better understanding of the claims by judges, juries as well as the media, do you folks see this document significantly helping Google in this case?

<comment><USER5> This isn't a neutral report, it's quite obvious that Prof. Astrachan is taking Google's side. If the judges, juries, and media understand the document in such a way to agree with the various claims:

> Google's implementation of the APIs at issue is not virtually identical or > substantially similar to Oracle's implementation

> The various Java versions that Oracle alleges were infringed contain the > same APIs as earlier versions or versions for other operating systems

> Parameter names are functional and not creative

> The organization of packages is functional and does not contain creative > expression

> C#, like Java, is unprotectable, and is also available as an open > specification and implementation

> Oracle's analysis of the files at issue does not discuss their qualitative > or quantitative importance, with one exception that is incorrect

I think it's safe to say that it would help Google significantly.

<comment><USER6> I think it would still be possible for a neutral report to end up helping either party significantly. After all, objective truth may be to someone's disadvantage as well as to their advantage. The whole point of a lawsuit is to try to convince a judge that 'your version' of the objective truth is supportive of your claims. When a neutral party ends up disagreeing with you that will help the other side.

In this situation that's likely not the case (since Astrachan is paid by Google it is clear on whose side he is), but most of what he writes strikes me as quite neutral rather than explicitly usable against Oracle. Google could find itself on the blunt end of those arguments just as easily in another lawsuit. These observations seem to use the evidence from the case as an illustration of a much more general case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why the Sun implementations of the examples from java.lang and java.util, which are distributed with the JDK, are labeled "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL" and redacted.

</comment><comment><USER8> Car analogy FTW!

<comment><USER9> There was an article about how 90%+ or something of the world doesn't know what crtl-c & ctrl-v do. I wonder if the jury (or the judge) will understand that part?

But at least, maybe, they'll understand that all cars give us a steering wheel, brake pedal, gas pedal and shifter even though the car companies don't copy each others' schematics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Section 59 has a nice shout-out to Python's TimSort. Nice!</comment>


Ask HN: What's the one simple trick to life? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A cliché. Getting outside your comfort zone.

David Goggins goes into this in detail [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY)

Essentially what ever you are afraid of you should probably doing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Highly reccomend this course. Free on coursera

The Science of Well-Being [https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well- being](https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being)

In this course you will engage in a series of challenges designed to increase your own happiness and build more productive habits. As preparation for these tasks, Professor Laurie Santos reveals misconceptions about happiness, annoying features of the mind that lead us to think the way we do, and the research that can help us change. You will ultimately be prepared to successfully incorporate a specific wellness activity into your life.

</comment><comment><USER4> From my fast food flunky days: Look busy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Produce things. Write, compose, code, build, make. Get good at it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Volunteering makes your happier.

</comment><comment><USER7> Avoid dying.

</comment><comment><USER3> be happy</comment>


The separation of advice and money - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/the-separation-of-advice-and-money

<comment><USER2> The other implication is that control will become unbundled from money and advice. An investor who offered money without requiring founders to give up control--board seats, rights to block acquisitions, etc.--would gain a competitive advantage when trying to get into the best startups.

Angel investors are already doing this at the seed stage. Crowdfunding will push it up to series A.

</comment><comment><USER3> The negatives posed in this post are hardly negatives. Companies will be able to raise the money they actually need and not have to deal with shitty advisors or gain great advisors and dilute a little more. To an extent, this separation will weed out the shitty VCs, which is an ultimate win for the industry. Is my logic correct?

</comment><comment><USER4> It's clear that well tuned campaigns with 10-100k seed capital can raise $1M+ for (partially) physical products.

One big question is how that will translate to software businesses. Successful non-game software projects are few and far between. And they raise a lot less [1]. Will JOBS act equity investing change this? I think it will take 4-6 years for a few people to win big with it before there is a bubble-level rush of speculators.

[1] Annecdotal plug: we just had a subscription fitness app crowd funded, but it took a lot of work and the median pledge level is way lower than in most hardware projects: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acgourley/bitgym](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acgourley/bitgym)

<comment><USER5> Do we know campaigns that invested 10-100K seed capital and failed?

<comment><USER4> Other than the ubuntu phone - I don't. It's hard to find good data as the amount invested to date is not shared.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is there room for an advisory-only VC that's not beholden to LPs? And if so, what would that look like?

<comment><USER6> Erm... Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "advisory-only VC" an oxymoron? If you're not investing capital, you're not a Venture Capital firm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I should have been a bit clearer on what I mean: VCs typically offer a lot more than just money. Things like their networks, advice, and positions on company boards for example. There could be quite a bit of value to companies that simply fill those roles, as an organization, similar to what individuals to as advisors.

I think that in many cases that might look quite similar to existing accelerators, except that accelerators generally target very early stage companies.

Sam discusses drops in the idea at the bottom of his post:

      The best VCs are great, and they will probably continue to
      do well.  In fact, they're so good that they could probably
      get away with only selling advice—they understand how to
      build big companies in a way that few other people in the
      world do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Curious where the evidence is that advice and money are becoming separate. The boards I've seen are very full of VC's, who have both invested and give plenty of advice.

Sam, if you're reading would love to hear your thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sam,

Well written article.

Just one small typo.

"Quick and painless fundraising, without advice necessarily being part of the package, is what many founders what."

want _</comment>


VeraCrypt 1.24 - <AUTHOR> https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Release%20Notes.html <comment><USER2> > Use Hardware RNG based on CPU timing jitter "Jitterentropy" by Stephan > Mueller as a good alternative to CPU RDRAND > ([http://www.chronox.de/jent.html](http://www.chronox.de/jent.html))

I have never heard of Jitterentropy but it sounds vaguely like previous attempts at RNGs.

/r/crypto had a good discussion about this topic a while ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/9dln0v/whats_the_pr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/9dln0v/whats_the_problem_with_dakarandtruerandtwuewand/)

My intuition is that this is dangerous and will likely result in security bugs in the future.

<comment><USER2> From [https://github.com/smuellerDD/jitterentropy- rngd](https://github.com/smuellerDD/jitterentropy-rngd)

> Using the Jitter RNG core, the rngd provides an entropy source that feeds > into the Linux /dev/random device if its entropy runs low. It updates the > /dev/random entropy estimator such that the newly provided entropy unblocks > /dev/random.

This is a red flag. Entropy doesn't run low. [https://www.2uo.de/myths-about- urandom](https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom)

I'm calling it now: Don't use VeraCrypt.

They made a very questionable decision based on the sort of ignorance that leads people to use /dev/random and haveged rather than RtlGenRandom (Windows), getrandom(2) (new Linux), or /dev/urandom (old Linux).

Cryptography engineering requires care and this sort of ignorance tends to undermine secure implementations.

<comment><USER3> Entropy running low is a frequent and actual problem for me on virtualized or headless servers serving https content. It slows everything, including ssh, to a halt.

You can see your current entropy level, which is probably high due to having a keyboard, with this command:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail

You can watch this number drain by reading from /dev/random continuously.

[http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/](http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/) Haveged has existed since 2003 and has lots of documentation and discussion of its randomness.

<comment><USER2> > Entropy running low is a frequent and actual problem for me on virtualized > or headless servers serving https content. It slows everything, including > ssh, to a halt.

Entropy running low is not an actual problem. AES-CTR doesn't "run out of key".

If your OS's "entropy estimator" is producing small numbers and your userspace applications are using /dev/random, yes, that will degrade your performance. That's the _actual_ problem.

The solution is for the developers of your software to stop using /dev/random, wholesale.

Saying that the actual problem is "entropy running low" is like saying "water is flammable". That might be true in extreme cases, but isn't in the general case.

<comment><USER4> You're right, except for an uninitialized entropy pool

Once the generator had been seeded (once), sure, read from urandom and don't worry.

The main issue is trying to read from it at boot time

<comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187044)

> If you're on an ancient Linux kernel, you can poll /dev/random until it's > available if you're uncertain whether or not /dev/urandom has ever been > seeded. Once /dev/random is available, don't use /dev/random, use > /dev/urandom. This side-steps the "/dev/urandom never blocks" concern that > people love to cite in their fearmongering. This is essentially what > getrandom(2) does.

This is outlined here as well: [https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/how- generate-secure-rando...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/how-generate- secure-random-numbers-in-various-programming-languages)

This is what randombytes_buf() does in libsodium on older Linux kernels.

This is actually the best of both worlds: Although /dev/urandom on Linux will happily give you predictable values if you try to read from it before the RNG has been seeded on first boot, once /dev/random is "ready" to be read from once, you know that the entropy pool powering /dev/urandom has been seeded. And then you can guarantee that /dev/urandom is secure and nonblocking henceforth.

If you can't just use getrandom(2), do the "poll /dev/random, then read /dev/urandom" dance and even the fearmonger's favorite issue to cite becomes a non-issue.

<comment><USER5> I don't think using poll on /dev/random is a good idea, here's why:

1\. /proc/sys/kernel/random/read_wakeup_threshold is 64 by default [1,2], but the kernel only considers the pool initialized with >128 bits [3]. So in an early userspace you're likely to be reading from an uninitialized /dev/urandom after waking up from poll if you're not also checking the entropy count to be >128.

2\. /dev/random could be a symlink to /dev/urandom, so the call to poll would return as soon as possible.

3\. The system could only be providing /dev/urandom.

So if you're going to have to check the entropy count anyway, a less convoluted approach would be to repeatedly retrieve it via the RNDGETENTCNT ioctl [1] on a /dev/urandom file descriptor and sleeping while it hasn't reached >128 bits yet.

Don't take my word for the feasibility of this fallback method as I'm not a cryptographer or implementer of cryptographic interfaces. Instead, consider BoringSSL (Adam Langley et al.) that does almost the same in its /dev/urandom fallback. [4]

[1]: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man4/random.4.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/random.4.html)

[2]: [https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/char/random.c?id=v5.3#n377)

[3]: [https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/char/random.c?id=v5.3#n770)

[4]: [https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/refs/heads/ma...](https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/refs/heads/master/crypto/fipsmodule/rand/urandom.c)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> slightly off-topic, but could someone verify a memory I have regarding the shutdown of TrueCrypt?

I vaguely remember after it was announced that the project was disbanded, that there was one single commit from the authors whose only change was a textual replacement of "United States" with "USA" everywhere it appeared.

Coming from the highly anonymous and secretive TrueCrypt group, this was interpreted in this most scandalous possible way. I.e. the US govt was somehow strongarming them. I'm not claiming that part is true, I'm just curious if my memory is correct about the whole incident.

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#TrueCrypt_release...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#TrueCrypt_release_and_controversy)

[https://www.wired.com/story/mastermind- excerpt/](https://www.wired.com/story/mastermind-excerpt/)

[https://magazine.atavist.com/the- mastermind](https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind)

It's pretty likely that Paul Le Roux was behind TrueCrypt.

<comment><USER7> It's interesting that he is from Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). Of course, his name gives it away (that's why I checked). But what I wanted to say was something else.

> he [liked] the video game Wing Commander [1]

Somewhere between 1990 and 1995 I recall that Windows PCs in South Africa shipped with a games CD. You would get Ultima (immediately banned by your parents), Wing Commander, Sea Wolf and other games and this would be your staple for a while. When Warcraft 2 (or it may have been Starcraft) came out I think it cost about R 350 (USD 90 in 1995) so you would need to be more picky in the games you could buy than today. One should mention the rand's historic dissonance with regard to the exchange rate and PPP, but whatever.

I remember buying some shitty Disney game for the same amount and regretting it instantly (I played Warcraft 2 instead). It was not until 1999 that I saw games "in bulk" with Tiberian Sun, ReVolt and a multitude of other games being shared on DC.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux), edited for sensational language. Note that he had the console version, but I am not sure which console that would be. The PS1 was the first major console in South Africa (apart from "video games", i.e. famicon or NES clones) but I may stand corrected.

<comment><USER8> I'm reading the Atavist piece and noticed that he was extremely racist towards Asians and yet two of his ex-wives were Asian. I wonder how he reconciled that.

I feel really bad for his kids. When I studying in Asia, I met a few mixed- race kids that had racist expat parents and they often had major identity issues. For those that didn't stay in the expat bubble, they would shun their "Western side" and try to completely blend in with the locals.

<comment><USER7> Well, where I come from, the racist people have a tendency to do that, so they themselves have identity issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really tried to use VeraCrypt on my main desktop Windows machine. But every Windows 10 major update was a chore to get working with decrypting everything, especially with GPT. (Did you know that if you leave updating Windows too long the calculator just straight up stops working?) Eventually I caved in and bought Windows Pro so I could use BitLocker (I'm aware of the problems of using closed-source encryption software but it's good enough for me). Another sad victory for Microsoft's anti-competitive practices.

<comment><USER10> I had that issue for a while but VC finally fixed it and haven't seen any problems since.

<comment><USER9> My computer had a problem (not uncommon apparently) that forced Windows to be the default EUFI boot option. Admittedly this is perhaps more of a laptop manufacturer bug than a problem from Microsoft.

I used a workaround suggested on the VeraCrypt forums: renaming the Windows boot loader, replacing it with the VeraCrypt one, and pointing VeraCrypt at the renamed option. This meant that any Windows update that updated the boot loader would break the whole arrangement and to fix it I needed to boot from a USB stick.

I think I most recently tried on version 1.22. It does sound like this version has some relevant fixes though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading this thread, what alternatives do we have to VeraCrypt? Or simply do we put our effort into improving the current version and help it improve?

<comment><USER12> I don't think there are any decent alternatives to replace TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt. There are some once you narrow the scope, like being fine with linux-only etc. With the same scope as VeraCrypt there's nothing better.

Additionally TrueCrypt has been out there and well known for a long time. It even had a pretty decent audit done. Even with its flaws this is a strong foundation to build on. Any brand new undertaking is pretty much guaranteed to have more flaws. Thus we should definitely focus on improving VeraCrypt. It would also be easier to do an audit on just the changes from TrueCrypt to VeraCrypt as opposed to a whole new program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> macOS Catalina related: Can Veracrypt read and write a completely Truecrypt encrypted drive? Asking because new macOS will not support the latest Truecrypt anymore because it is 32bit software :/

<comment><USER14> I'd suggest using an encrypted volume file, that's what I currently do and am using MacOS Catalina. So far, no problems.

The added advantage is that you can easily do backups of it.

<comment><USER13> I haver some legacy external drives which needs encryption (just for loss protection and nobody can steal the content) and need to support multi OSes. Otherwise I would agree.</comment></comment></comment>


The Brexit threat hanging over startups in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/29/the-brexit-threat-hanging-over-startups-in-the-uk-tech-sector <comment><USER2> Hadnt really ever thought about the GDPR thing before. Companies supposedly spent millions getting this in place and could also be for nothing.

Is there any likelihood of companies sueing the UK governments for drastically altering the market conditions? INAL obviously</comment>