Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coinbase.com/2015/11/20/introducing-the-shift-card/ <comment><USER2> I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher and they shutdown our account without notice and gave no real reason for their action. All support tickets took 3 - 5 days to get a reply and it was always unhelpful.

For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers.

Edit: For transparency here is my back and forth with their support ([http://imgur.com/CHeAEPP](http://imgur.com/CHeAEPP)) and the link to one of our books on Amazon I shared ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/1634420241/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1634420241/) [NSFW]). Ironically I've been waiting on a reply from them for 22 days and counting. They have about $5,000 in our disabled account along with all our customer/order information that we can't access.

Do not use Coinbase.

<comment><USER3> Coinbase CEO here, I can sympathize that this was probably frustrating but I think it stems from a misunderstanding about the service that Coinbase provides. In a purely bitcoin to bitcoin world, this sort of transaction would not be an issue and you wouldn't have a risk of an account being closed. But you're not trying to do a purely bitcoin transaction here - you are trying to _exchange_ bitcoin into your local currency and put the funds in your bank account (this is what we offer with our merchant tools).

To offer this service, we (Coinbase) work with those bank rules and that is why you are seeing our service act much like the traditional financial world. You might not like this, but we didn't make those rules, and it is the only way I know of that works if you want to exchange bitcoin in the traditional financial world. (John's answer from the support thread you linked also explains this).

Accepting purely bitcoin-to-bitcoin payments would be one solution that might work for this if that is what you want (there are plenty of other solutions other than Coinbase for this). I should mention that we are probably at fault for marketing it more as a bitcoin wallet vs an exchange which has different implications to people (I think this is part of the reason for the confusion).

Finally, I believe you may be mistaken that you can't access the $5k in funds. Are you sure? This page describes our policy on that topic: [https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/190568...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1905680-does- coinbase-freeze-accounts-)

<comment><USER2> I appreciate the response, but honestly I'm still disappointed. You have an opportunity here to create a new breed of payment processor and you are squandering it. I'm sure Coinbase is successful, but is that all you want? Are you okay being just _another_ payment processor that happens to accept Bitcoin?

I am quite familiar with banks having varying levels of comfort with different industries (ours being adult comics), but that didn't stop us from finding banks that were okay with what we publish and working with them. You should have relationships with multiple banks for situations like this. The fact that your company is locked into a bank that can arbitrarily deny merchant accounts, based on how comfortable they are with each business, is concerning.

More concerning is the fact that the first support email we received tried to pass our account closure off as a FinCEN issue, which only showed how little research was put into our case before the account was closed. How much effort is put into defending your merchants in situations like this?

Instead of closing accounts of small publishers or artists you should be defending them. You'd no doubt have a lot more adamant supporters. If you really do care, and you're not just commenting to save face, I encourage you to reach out to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund ([http://cbldf.org/](http://cbldf.org/)). They provide legal support and counsel for censorship issues like this. They have legally defended countless adult publishers, artists, and readers over the years.

As the CEO of Coinbase you have the resources to make a difference and fix situations like this for the future. Don't be afraid to stand up and defend merchants, publishers, artists, or whoever else decides to use your service. If you want to be another payment processor that's fine, but you could be so much more.

<comment><USER3> Response: [https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3u68oo/coinbase_ceo_re...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3u68oo/coinbase_ceo_responds_to_a_merchant/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a reminder to Bitcoin newbies:

This card looks like an OK product (still open questions about how much coinbase is gaming the ask/bid spread) but just realize that this card does NOT use Bitcoin, it uses "Coinbase Bitcoin"[1] which is Bitcoin for which the coinbase company is managing your private key: You only truly own Bitcoins if you own the private key for the account (users of MtGox learn this the hard way last year)

I do think Coinbase also offers a safer multisig account where you own an independent key and no one, including Coinbase, can withdraw money without your permission (was it called "Coinbase Vault?") If you put the majority of your funds in that independent system (or just keep them off Coinbase entirely) and put money in peace-meal to load up your coinbase Visa card you will greatly reduce your exposure to third-party risks.

[1] Reading the documents, it actually uses "Coinbase USD" which is the same difference.

<comment><USER5> Well no you're not really using bitcoin, not even Coinbase bitcoin. At the end of the day the creditcard simply uses a normal credit card transaction, which is denominated in dollars and paid for by Coinbase, in dollars, to the merchant.

All Coinbase does is 1) make sure you enough bitcoin to cover the transaction 2) sell your bitcoin to recoup the dollars they're paying on your behalf to the merchant

None of this has anything to do with the blockchain or bitcoin as a technology. It's purely a practical product to make it a bit easier to make payments when you have a lot of money stored in bitcoin. I doubt it'll be anything significant, various other players like Xapo did this in a similarly reasonably professional manner and none of that blew up, either.

The reason it's not all that interesting is 1) again, it has nothing to do with bitcoin/blockchain 2) you need to store your bitcoin at a centralised company, essentially creating the equivalent of a traditional bank or financial service with the same issues and with no real extra benefits 3) it solves none of the myriad of security and fraud issues that have plagued creditcards we've had for decades (creditcards are basically plastic sheets of text, the text being the password to your money vault, and you have to hand it over all the time to make payments. It's an insane security premise) 4) it's actually pretty expensive, not only are creditcards expensive (both due to fraud and because you're putting profit into the pockets of a middleman), but on top you're essentially doing a forex currency conversion (in this case bitcoin -> usd) everytime you make a payment.

They're advertising 'no fees' at the moment, of course that's not structural. In fact I'm a bit surprised that legal gave the OK to charge customers $10 for a product without communicating usage fees for said product on any specific timeline whatsoever, normally that's guaranteed trouble & customer complaints down the line. That's like your ISP charges you $100 to install your internet connection, then says 'no monthly internet fees for a limited time'. You can bet your ass it'll turn into a gigantic mess a few months later when you suddenly start charging usage fees.

Still, I welcome it. Making bitcoin more pragmatic for mainstream users is something I applaud. I just don't have high expectations for this particular product.

<comment><USER6> > creditcards are basically plastic sheets of text

Looking again at the site, there's no chip on the card. I thought the USA had finally introduced these — did I misunderstand something?

(All my cards have had chips for over 10 years.)

<comment><USER7> Slowly, one bank at a time.

When I legally changed my name last year, I got all new credit cards. Only two of my new cards have chips.

Earlier this year, one card expired, and the new card has a chip. A couple of months ago, one of my cards was compromised by identity theft, and the replacement they sent me has a chip. Both of those were still chipless after I changed my name, so it must've been a recent change.

Also, I applied for yet another card, and this one has a chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can now use Bitcoin anywhere VISA is accepted, so long as coinbase doesn't close your account, ignore you and close all the tickets you open. Even if you painstakingly collect and compile sensitive documents for them to review, which was a gigantic waste of my time, thanks!

I have for months encouraged everyone I know not to use coinbase and will continue to do so.

<comment><USER9> This might be a silly question, but did you use your Coinbase account to conduct any illegal transactions? The team there really cares about customer experience, so generally if they are ignoring you it's because your account has some connection to illegal/banned activity, which they can't disclose due to ridiculous financial laws.

<comment><USER8> They only appear to care about the customer experience when someone complains on social media, until then they have a history of being jerks to their users.

They closed my account after I made a (relatively small) wire transfer after not using their service for a while. The year before I made much larger transfers that didn't seem to concern them. Suddenly I needed to provide them with lots of financial information.

The law sucks and I don't blame them for this. But I have provided them with more than enough information to prove all of my income is legitimate, including years of tax forms regarding the income and other crap they absolutely did not need to look at.

What bugs me is that they continued to ask me for this information, which took time for me to compile for them, and they ignored me anyway after I provided everything.

Another thing that bugs me is that (they claim) their support desk software is the most secure method of sending them sensitive documents. Ridiculous. The icing on the cake will be when their system is hacked and I lose a lot of important documents that I was under the impression they would be removing, but clearly haven't.

<comment><USER10> But....did you use your Coinbase account to conduct any illegal transactions? You didn't answer a very straight forward question.

<comment><USER11> > I have provided them with more than enough information to prove all of my > income is legitimate

That seems like a roundabout way of saying, "No, I did not conduct any illegal transactions".

<comment><USER12> You can buy drugs with legitimate income. The fact he didn't directly say no the first or second time says the answer is probably yes.

<comment><USER8> That's a dumb, deliberate misreading of my comment and a ridiculous jump to conclusions. I have done nothing illegal.

I said clearly that I made _one_ transaction (a wire transfer) and I said clearly that they questioned me on my income. Their concern is "where did you get your money" to which I answered them thoroughly.

<comment><USER13> I had no idea that KYC now has such onerous proof of income requirements. It's mind boggling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The default PIN is the last four digits of your registered mobile phone number. Please call Shift support at 800-897-0717 to reset your Shift Card pin."

That's a terrible idea. This isn't a library card. You're PIN shouldn't be known by anyone who knows your phone number.

<comment><USER15> That's pretty horrendous. Should be inactive until you activate it, or randomly generated and displayed to you securely in some way.

<comment><USER16> The card actually is inactive until you activate it once it arrives

<comment><USER17> but if someone intercepts your mail, then they know your address and could possibly know your phone number. How secure is the activation process?

Why dont you send the card and PIN out separately like a bank?

<comment><USER18> > but if someone intercepts your mail, then they know your address and could > possibly know your phone number. How secure is the activation process

Every "normal" credit and debit card I've received in the mail has used this same procedure -- call a number on a removable sticker stuck to the card to activate it where the only verification is the phone number you're calling from (and caller ID is easily faked).

How is this any worse than how every other card activates?

And how do you propose they get around the mail interception problem? Have a courier deliver it to you and place it in your hand?

<comment><USER19> Holy shit, that's horrible.

Where I am, PIN and Card arrive in different letters, and the Card letter is only sent once you confirmed via your online banking interface (which uses 2FA) that you received the PIN letter. And you need to confirm online in your banking interface to have received the card to be able to use it.

<comment><USER20> For credit cards in the US you virtually never use a PIN. Debit cards only

<comment><USER21> That's changing as of this month. Most banks have already issued new chip cards, which require a PIN. If a merchant is still using the old swipe and sign system, now they'll be liable for any fraudulent transactions if the customer has a chip card.

<comment><USER22> All of the new chip cards in the US I've read about are signature only. It was decided that the US consumer would dislike the added complication of needing to use PIN.

I'd like a chip card that requires a PIN (and that is accepted widely in the US) because such a card would make unauthorized charges less likely after the card is lost or stolen, but was not able to find one.

<comment><USER23> I have a US chip card where I've set a PIN for transaction purposes, so it's not signature only, but it'll still accept both. That said, all of the chip card readers that I've used (few and far between still...) seem to have been configured for signature only, so I haven't been prompted for my PIN yet.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for clarifying. I agree that my "signature only" was inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've always found it ironic how companies like Coinbase are indirectly contributing to their own destruction with every passing transaction that's not purely based around Bitcoin. This is of course: assuming that Bitcoin gets as big as a lot of people think it will. If it does: their increased focus on centralization and traditional fintech services (which is completely incompatible with the philosophy behind Bitcoin) is like shorting the entire currency on a long position, and will eventually be unsustainable. But I guess if they're right: all they're doing is profiting from the hype. If we look at what Bitcoin actually is, companies like Coinbase couldn't be further apart from what they're actually selling (philosophy, economics, and technologically) so I consider them nothing more than a bunch of hypocrites.

I wonder what it's like working for a company that's so obviously full of shit? How would you reconcile the obvious contradictions in what you're doing every day? I guess it would be kind of like working at the ministry of truth and then getting paid directly in lies.

<comment><USER9> As someone who used to work at Coinbase, hopefully I can shed some light on this.

First of all, Bitcoin should not be seen primarily as a currency, but as a protocol. Therefore, bitcoin does not need to increase in value for it to be successful, and in the long term the price is irrelevant. Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange without regard to the price, and many people at Coinbase believe in this future (rather than bitcoin becoming a widely used currency held directly by end users, at least in the near future).

Secondly, many people at Coinbase believe deeply in the decentralized (and potentially anonymous/privacy-focused) aspects of using bitcoin as a currency (myself included). However, bitcoin cannot be successful as a currency unless it is easy to exchange between bitcoin and your local currency, and bitcoin won't gain worldwide acceptance until it is easy to (a) exchange bitcoin and (b) spend bitcoin. Therefore, Coinbase's primary goal is to make buying and selling bitcoin as easy as possible, so that we can enable a future where financial privacy is optional (versus today, where it is basically inescapable).

<comment><USER25> As a protocol, it's not great. There's a lot more flexibility in a lot of the new consensus protocols coming out that can run Turing-complete contracts etc. Look at all the hoops that need to be jumped through to do stuff like colored coins, payment channels, etc. in Bitcoin vs protocols with smart contracts.

Anyway, that's irrelevant. If Bitcoin is for some reason the best protocol to be used, why would someone want to enrich the current holders of Bitcoin (of which I am one, by the way). Transferring value to Bitcoin necessitates buying Bitcoins from existing Bitcoin holders, enriching them for no reason. Why wouldn't a bank or other financial institution just start from a clean slate?

<comment><USER26> Can you point me to some of the consensus protocol work? That's always seemed to be the more interesting aspect of BTC to me, but the other requirements of the currency have made that harder than just the smart contracts alone.

<comment><USER9> [https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/) and [https://www.stellar.org/](https://www.stellar.org/) are two interesting ones to check out.

<comment><USER27> Stellar has a consensus protocol?

Last I checked, there's a single blessed node dishing out verifiable data. It's nicer than having a remote API that just hands you a trusted number, but it's a far cry from Nakamoto Consensus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So

* you lose the psuedo-anonymity of Bitcoin (the card has your name on it). * It's a "debit" card, so it also has none of the protection of a normal credit card (eg: if someone steals my card or over-charges or whatever, my actual money is not touched). * It's not even real Bitcoin, it requires a Coinbase account (where, from what I understand, they manage your private key, so really own your bitcoins)

What exactly is the target market for this? The people who have no credit cards, the bulk of their cash in bitcoin, and also don't care about privacy?

I'm not into bitcoin, but even so, I am just not seeing the appeal.

<comment><USER29> How else do you think this could possibly work?

>you lose the psuedo-anonymity of Bitcoin (the card has your name on it) Nobody would ever allow anonymous card transactions. The security risks with that alone are ridiculous.

> It's a "debit" card, so it also has none of the protection of a normal > credit card (eg: if someone steals my card or over-charges or whatever, my > actual money is not touched). Nope. Debit cards have protection, as does a > coinbase account.

>It's not even real Bitcoin, it requires a Coinbase account My credit card isn't even real money either!

>where, from what I understand, they manage your private key, so really own your bitcoins Thats not how that works.

Its a transition between traditional cards and to new forms of money like crypto-currency.

<comment><USER30> > Nobody would ever allow anonymous card transactions. The security risks with > that alone are ridiculous.

Sure they would. The gift card and reloadable/prepaid debit card market is huge. In theory they try to avoid anonymous usage but in practice they don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious what the exchange rate looks like when purchasing stuff that's not in USD. If the conversion is the same as that of Bitcoin<->USD, then it would make this card super useful for people who travel a lot.

What I mean is, it'd be cool if the card would do:

        - Bitcoin<->CAD
        - Bitcoin<->EUR
        - Bitcoin<->BHT
        - Bitcoin<->HKD
        - Bitcoin<->AUD

So that we wouldn't need to do:

        - Bitcoin<->USD<->CAD
        - Bitcoin<->USD<->EUR
        - Bitcoin<->USD<->BHT
        - Bitcoin<->USD<->HKD
        - Bitcoin<->USD<->AUD

<comment><USER32> I'm curious if this could also be used to help with remittances. I have several friends who emigrated from countries around the world, and they struggle to find an easy way to remit to their parents. Bitcoin seems so close, but it's difficult for their folks to get it converted to local currency. The fees and hurdles they currently deal with are outrageous, and while it looks like the shift card is US only, it seems like there may be an opportunity here.

<comment><USER6> Since emigrating this summer, I've transferred about £25k ($40k) using TransferWise and been very pleased with the way the service works. I paid far less in fees than any other service I could find a quote for. I was concerned that being in a small European country with its own currency would mean payments took longer, but this wasn't the case.

They're based in the UK, and properly regulated by both the UK and US.

You get a free transfer using a referral link: [https://transferwise.com/u/61f8ad](https://transferwise.com/u/61f8ad)

Or use the non-referral link if you prefer: [https://transferwise.com/](https://transferwise.com/)

<comment><USER33> Seems to cost ~1% which is better than banks but still $400(!) on $40k. I use Bitcoin to transfer money from USD to THB and get better than spot if I time it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seems like nobody understands how this can work, or why would they do that.

Easy. You swipe your card, Coinbase pays with $, then Coinbase tries to sell enough of the bitcoins you have there to make it even (there might be a fee).

So you need to have a bitcoin balance in Coinbase when you want to use this card.

Now why would you do this? If you're asking yourself this question, there are high chances you are not the target of this product.

There are a lot of people who made a lot of money in bitcoins, and who hold a LOT of bitcoins. This is going to be an easy way for them to spend it on a normal day-to-day basis.

<comment><USER35> > There are a lot of people who made a lot of money in bitcoins, and who hold > a LOT of bitcoins. This is going to be an easy way for them to spend it on a > normal day-to-day basis.

It's a wonderful way to laundry your drug money!

<comment><USER36> As long as their business was conducted ethically, I have no problem with that means of obtaining bitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> According to the Shift Payments FAQ you must reside in one of the following states to spend bitcoin via Coinbase: AL, AZ, CA, DE, DC, GA, ID, IA, KS, ME, MS, NE, NV, NJ, NC, ND, OK, PA, PR, SD, TX, VT, WA, WV

[1] [https://www.shiftpayments.com/faq](https://www.shiftpayments.com/faq)

<comment><USER38> Can't help but notice that NY is not in that list. Oh well.

<comment><USER39> Maybe it is because of the BitLicense?

See [http://cointelegraph.com/news/115114/localbitcoins-stops- ser...](http://cointelegraph.com/news/115114/localbitcoins-stops-service-for- new-york-residents) for example.

<comment><USER38> Yeah - New York regulatory rules are rather strict - our company (based in New York) briefly had and then lost the ability to use bitcoin on our site due to said regulations. (Or rather, the company we were working with withdrew their support for us).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't get the point of this. I'm assuming it's going to be a slightly more expensive way of buying things with a card? As supposed to me being charged in $, I'm assuming it exchanges some of my BTC balance for $ which is going to come at some cost.

<comment><USER17> I assume it uses up BTC to the value of the $ amount at coinbase exchange rates. Whether that is the best exchange rate or not is debatable but it probably the only way for them to be sure they dont take a hit due to volatility.

Of course there could be some saving to the user as otherwise they may need to sell coins (paying fees to do so) then withdraw, again paying a further fee. So this is an immediate way to spend BTC with a merchant that does not accept BTC.

This would be very useful for people who use bitwage to get paid in BTC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I can't really find details on how this works. I assume the merchant still receives USD in the transaction along with the typical Visa card transaction fees. Which in that case, what is the point?

<comment><USER41> To be able to spend your bitcoin balance without a manual conversion and bank transfer?

<comment><USER42> Likely a considerably higher exchange rate + fee ... but hey, who cares when the people spending the Bitcoin are only spending it when it's likely only much higher than they acquired it for..

<comment><USER43> That only works if someone else is buying the bitcoin at the current exchange rate. Coinbase gets its dollars from someone to give to the merchant.

<comment><USER42> Right, however I'm sure they can float a fair amount, holding onto Bitcoin until it's at a certain value again. So long as the scheme keeps growing..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I couldn't find any mention on the website -- does it support one time numbers for online transactions? If not, I'd be very reluctant to use it. One breach and your bitcoin account is gone.

<comment><USER45> Nerver used bitcoin, but cannot you simply create another bitcoin account for petty cash VISA transactions and transfer funds when need be?

<comment><USER46> You can, but ironically, transfers are not painless in Bitcoin. It can take over 60 minutes for a transaction to be "confirmed", meaning the network has verified that the coins you spent were rightfully yours to spend, and there needs to be a transaction fee attached so that miners are incentivized to check your transaction.

Many bitcoin users prefer to generate a new incoming address for each transaction to improve privacy (Bitcoin is "anonymous" only insofar as your legal name is usually not directly attached to the transaction; in most other ways, it's more traceable than the alternatives).

<comment><USER47> If you have two Coinbase accounts, transfers are immediate (since Coinbase still owns the bitcoins, they just move them internally): [https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/139...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1392055-why- can-t-i-see-my-transaction-in-the-blockchain-?t=531816)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I hope they'll provide a convenient tax document covering the capital gains for all these transactions, given the IRS ruling that even small transactions have to be reported that way.

<comment><USER49> They do output an early tax document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I used an early prototype of this card and the experience is awesome. Super simple, it just works. App is a nice companion when you want to see the transactions you've made. Congrats to the team on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER51> Someone please change the title to Anywhere IN US :)

<comment><USER52> The text says "at over 38 million merchants worldwide" which seems to imply that it isn't limited to the US in the sense in which you want to change the title.

<comment><USER16> The card works both in the US and at merchants that accept Visa abroad!

<comment><USER17> but is only available to US residents, of whom less than half own a passport, so the worldwide merchant aspect is applicable to the subset of the US population that hold bitcoin and a passport.

<comment><USER38> > but is only available to US residents

Who live in one of 24 states. New Yorkers need not apply.

<comment><USER17> Even smaller, I commend their ability to offer new services but it should make it clear that this is a very limited offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> r-marques If I understand correctly it exchanges some btc to dollars in order to pay the merchant. But this relies on 0-conf transactions, right?

<comment><USER53> It relies on you having a BTC wallet with coinbase - where coinbase controls the private key.

<comment> r-marques So with coinbase you have no control over your private key? You can only spend your btc through coinbase?

<comment> r-marques If this actually relies on 0-conf transactions and assuming that you have control over your private key in coinbase, I wonder how replace-by-fee can impact this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> If you wanted to use a visa card, why would even bother with bitcoin?

Or vise-versa

<comment><USER55> Not only that, but there's a $10 issuance fee associated with this, and based on the announcement, there will be usage charges as well in the future. So it's Visa + fees. As opposed to the Visa I pull out of my wallet now and use without paying any fees.

<comment><USER56> Well, except for the 2% merchant fee of course (that's passed along to all of us in the price)

<comment><USER57> Which you won't get a discount on if you buy with BTC.

Meanwhile, I get 1-3% cashback...

<comment><USER58> merchant fees are significantly lower given that we're talking of a debit card _not_ a credit card

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> "The Shift Card is a VISA debit card that currently allows Coinbase users in twenty-four states and territories (see list below) in the U.S. to spend bitcoin anywhere VISA is accepted." \- So you have to live in one of the 24 states. And for California they only allow up to 1000 applicants...

<comment><USER60> I wonder how that works if you move into one of the other states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Oh wow I will sign up for one! I have been a Coinbase user since they started operating, and am currently in the middle of a year-long trip around the world so I have been looking for ways to minimize my international ATM withdrawal fees. My US bank (Wells Fargo) charge me a flat $5.00 fee per transaction, and my french bank (Crédit Agricole) charge me about $8.50 for the equivalent of a ~$220 withdrawal. I see that Shift has a flat fee of $3.50, so _yay_ for beating old legacy banks! Though I am kind of sad to see that the Shift debit card has no chip. Cards with only a magnetic track are becoming increasingly difficult to use in countries other than the US.

Also, it's worth noting that both Shift and Coinbase are YC companies.

<comment><USER9> This might be too late since you have already left, but check out Schwab bank - they offer free international ATM withdrawals, and will also refund any fees added by the ATM operator. I think it's mostly a loss leader for their brokerage business, but awesome for travelers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is it me, or does a requirement to provide your physical address ("Connect your Coinbase account, Order the card by providing your physical address and authorizing the $10 issuance fee") kind of miss some of the point about BitCoin?

</comment><comment><USER63> Maybe I'm being naive, but I felt like bitcoin was going to free us from credit card companies.

Wouldn't it be nice if almost-monopolies weren't able to raise prices on everything slightly in order to fund their rigged rewards programs?

<comment><USER9> That's the end game. I think this can be seen as the bitcoin industry following "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> The only times I tried to use Coinbase to buy Bitcoins, they stopped processing orders apparently because the Bitcoin value was fluctuating too much, so I never got my Bitcoins... and I never used them since then.

</comment><comment><USER65> Not super related to Shift Card, but I always thought big banks are terrible at customer service and how they treat their customers. Looking at complaints about CoinBase and how ShiftCard is setting pin based on phone number, you get a sense that this is all a bunch of amateurs and/or kids running the show.

Or maybe handling transactions is really hard?

Not sure what to think honestly.

</comment><comment><USER66> Any idea why only 24 states? Is coinbase following FINCEN regulations by filing as a money transmitter in each eligible state?

<comment><USER9> Yes, probably related to money transmission licensing (and various other state finance laws). See [https://www.coinbase.com/legal/licenses](https://www.coinbase.com/legal/licenses). There may also be some restrictions at the Shift end.

<comment><USER66> That's an interesting competitive advantage that coinbase has. Last I read on these laws, each license can cost ~$25k to procure. Many companies choose to "shoot first, ask questions later" and rollout their programs without acquiring a license in every state. For example Facebook only recently acquired money transmitter licenses (and may not even have one in every state), even though facebook credits / pay via facebook has been a feature for a long time.

The cost of acquiring these licenses is competitively prohibitive to startups, and honestly, there's no reason why it should be state by state. Money transmitter licensing should definitely move to the federal level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I've never used Bitcoin, although was mentioned by its original inventor on a research list once ;).

I have met the founders at Coinbase, and their vibe was more like that of an SF startup that will do anything to "win" and "exit big" than a world change agent. Bitcoin needs the latter, not the former.

</comment><comment><USER29> Where was that thread about making financial bets based on how many negative comments were in a HN thread?

</comment><comment><USER68> Devil's advocate: Ive had little to no problem with Coinbase for a good 80%+ of my bitcoin usage.

The only issue I had is my buy limit decreased suddenly because they added more security I had to verify for my identity and didn't notify me. Once I verified my ID it was instantly reinstated.

</comment><comment><USER69> Whenever I buy or sell bitcoins on Coinbase, I pay a lot both directly (via coinbase commission) and indirectly (via their super wide spreads).

If I get this card, am I going to still get screwed, or will it suddenly be cheaper to transact?

</comment><comment><USER17> will be interesting to see if they can make this available internationally.

</comment><comment><USER70> Pardon my lack of knowledge but wasn't the whole point of bitcoins being anonymous? How are you anonymous with a card connected to an account?

I'm not trolling I really don't see what I'm missing.

<comment><USER71> Decentralisation was (and still is) the point of Bitcoin; any additional perks (e.g. anonymity) are emergent. Here's a quote from the original paper:

>Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

<comment><USER72> The irony being of course is that Coinbase is literally a financial instution

but given confirmation time inherent to the network, I don't see a way around doing something similar to what coinbase have done here (minus the egregious part where _they hold your private key_ )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> You don't have bitcoin if you just have a balance in Coinbase, so this debit card really has no connection to Bitcoin at all. No transactions will reach the blockchain when you use this card.

<comment><USER33> That's silly, that's like saying you don't have USD if all you have is a USD- denominated deposit checking account at a bank.

<comment><USER73> That's absolutely true, though. You are trusting the bank (and the federal insurance backing it) that when you want to draw your balance that you can. It's no different when you have bitcoin in Coinbase.

I just can't see a scenario where buying bitcoin with USD on Coinbase and then using a debit card to spend it in USD is better than spending USD in the first place. Unless you buy into the pyramid-scheme "it'll be $10000 any day now" nonsense, in which case you have no incentive to spend bitcoin anyways.

<comment><USER33> 99.9% of people would disagree with you that the balance they see in their Wells Fargo account is 'not actually USD'. In a way Coinbase BTC is closer to BTC than Wells Fargo USD is to USD because Coinbase doesn't operate a fractional reserve.

> I just can't see a scenario where buying bitcoin with USD on Coinbase and > then using a debit card to spend it in USD is better than spending USD in > the first place.

Sure, that would be silly. But imagine you're a rich Chinese kid in California whose parents own a sweatshop in Shenzhen. To easily get around capital controls they buy BTC in China and send it to your Coinbase account. You pay for your day-to-day USD expenses on this card. Use your imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Has anyone answered the basic question of why anyone would actually use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange when the value of Bitcoin, despite fluctuations, is _designed_ to increase over time?

<comment><USER75> No KYC/AML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> [https://xapo.com/](https://xapo.com/) offers prepaid card which works everywhere too and is not such corporate asshole like Coinbase.

</comment><comment><USER77> Am I the only one who misread this as 'Introducing the Shit card'? For a full two minutes, I thought this was a parody site mocking bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER78> I just ordered one.

Will report about usage, quirks and tricks.

</comment><comment><USER79> I love it, use your bitcoin without all the hassle of making a transaction on the blockchain.

<comment><USER80> What is we could buy things without having to deal with banks? I have an idea...

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Though this isn't PERFECT, it's better than nothing. Just my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER82> after seeing this thread I login to my coinable account since I have check it in few months. Shocked to find my BTC balance to 0 although I had a few. emailed support this morning and so far no response.

</comment><comment><USER83> I guess someone will get some impressive mileage numbers.

</comment><comment><USER84> You still need a bank account. Beats the purpose imo.

</comment><comment><USER85> Anywhere visa is excepted, by which we mean ~half the U.S. because Americans have that much awareness of the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER86> Will this support Apple Pay?

</comment><comment><USER87> I can get the same "privacy" and not be subject to arbitrary Bitcoin/Dollar price fluctuations by simply buying Visa debit "gift cards" for cash.

<comment><USER88> As someone who first bought bitcoin at 8 USD, I'm quite enamored of the price fluctuations. Considering that it will be heading into the four and five digits relatively soon, I'm not sure this is a negative.

<comment><USER89> 4 and 5 digits? Please

<comment><USER33> It's already hit 4 digits.

<comment><USER90> So did tulips and beanie babies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> " in twenty-four States "

</comment><comment><USER91> Taylor Shift _chuckles_

</comment><comment><USER92> if anyone wants to sign up for coinbase here's a referral link to start off with free $10 [https://www.coinbase.com/join/songz](https://www.coinbase.com/join/songz) :)</comment>


Google is improving searches by using BERT and understanding language context - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20931657/google-bert-search-context-algorithm-change-10-percent-langauge <comment><USER2> _The way BERT recognizes that it should pay attention to those words is basically by self-learning on a titanic game of Mad Libs. Google takes a corpus of English sentences and randomly removes 15 percent of the words, then BERT is set to the task of figuring out what those words ought to be. Over time, that kind of training turns out to be remarkably effective at making a NLP model "understand" context_

Great example of "explain it to your grandpa" ability.

</comment><comment><USER3> > In one example Google discussed at a briefing with journalists yesterday, > its search algorithm was able to parse the meaning of the following phrase: > "Can you get medicine for someone pharmacy?"

Does that phrase have meaning?

<comment><USER4> It's not correct grammar but it has meaning. "Can I pick up medicine for someone else at the pharmacy?" is a proper way to ask but that's not how a lot of people end up searching (with correct grammar)</comment></comment>


Mercedes plans to let its self-driving cars kill pedestrians in dicey situations - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mercedes-benz-self-driving-cars-programmed-save-driver-2016-10 <comment><USER2> In my opinion, the car should choose the option such as to minimize damage for the person doing the correct thing. If someone walks out into oncoming traffic then there are consequences involved. However, if the car made a miscalculation then there is not much corrective action that can be done since it has already misjudged the situation and thus its world view is no longer reliable. It's impossible to say whether any corrective action the car makes will actually improve the situation since clearly objects are not what/where it thought they were.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it was my car I'd certainly prefer it to save my life over strangers, who'd buy a car knowing that at the first sign of trouble it'd ram you into a wall?!

MIT has an interesting simulator up, about the choices you'd make too [http://moralmachine.mit.edu/](http://moralmachine.mit.edu/)

<comment><USER4> yeah and the 2 takeaways were 1) most responders thought that the car and passenger should be sacrificed in favor of the pedestrian (common sense would agree, as the passenger is making a conscious choice to travel in a risky mode of transport, versus a pedestrian exercising their basic human right to exist and walk on the sidewalk, etc.)

2) most responders also said that they wouldn't buy a self-driving car, so at least they are consistent lol...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> typical mercedes driver</comment>


Insurance failed us; now we're crowdfunding to make them honor their promises - <AUTHOR> http://www.goliathmustnotwin.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> What happens when an insurance company decides to not honor a legitimate claim? 98% of the time, the victim gives up.

For the 2% of the cases where they take the insurer to court, the insurer can deny and delay, as they did with my family for four years. Finally, they bury the judge under pounds of paper and argument, distracting from the real issues. Insurance companies can exhaust the resources of the everyday person.

But can they exhaust a crowd? We're trying to show that people care about injustice, and prove to the insurance companies that denial doesn't pay.

Also, we used Strikingly, a YC company, to make the website :-)

</comment><comment><USER2> With all due respect, how will this help others in the same situation?

How will you establish a multiplier effect for donations?

How will a donation continue serving the cause in perpetuity?

How would a donation help me, if I got into a similar situation?

Even if the insurance company loses, they aren't going to suddenly come to the realization that they've been wrong all along, and start paying out more frequently.

I guess I don't see what this crowdfunding campaign is selling which would serve the greater good. Funding the EFF means that you're contributing to the greater good of privacy, etc. Funding the ACLU means that you're contributing to the greater good of civil rights, etc. Funding this campaign means that a single person can't or won't find a lawyer under any payment arrangement, contingency or otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are good questions.

I added a section here, on how this helps everyone.

[http://www.strikingly.com/s/pages/391635/edit?s=142622426534...](http://www.strikingly.com/s/pages/391635/edit?s=1426224265347#how- this-helps-everyone)

Foremost, I think that this will create an example. Wronged people will learn that they have another avenue to lean on; crowd funding. Insurance companies will learn that they cannot use the tactic of delaying and denial to exhaust a person's resources, without risking much more public disgust at how they've handled the situation.

Beyond that, what we hope is that this example will inspire a new form of insurance. In previous eras, insurance was managed by a local community. With modern social networking and crowdfunding systems, there is an opportunity for an Insurance 2.0; reliant on genuine social fabric to help people recover after loss. And instead of an experience consistent of abandonment and confrontation, the story will be one of the community rallying together, and everyone getting closer with each other because of it, developing real connections.

This crowdfunding campaign is just the first step -- a trial -- but if there is a really good response I think it will meaningfully show that people are fed up with the injustice of the current system and willing to help with their money to fight it. Insurance needs to be reformed, and this could be incite the movement to do it. There is the opportunity for a great startup to be formed -- honest insurance is something that people want.

<comment><USER2> So you're going to use the money to sue the insurance company. People sue them all the time, and it doesn't change their business practices. Those people could use more money, too. So what makes you and your case different from them and theirs?

Insurance 2.0, crowdfunded payouts... You talk about a lot of things that you think will happen, or hope will happen. Now tell me how you're going to MAKE it happen.

You're going to start an insurance 2.0 company. You're going to start a crowd funding nonprofit foundation for people spurned by their insurance. Tell me how this is a donation, rather than a handout.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mr. Hoffman, you are right to desire specifics, but you are dragging them out of me. Insurance 2.0 is a problem we want to solve, but we are not in a position to pitch a business plan today!

We both run companies which require our attention. We have this lawsuit. To make insurance 2.0 work it will require scale, capitalization, and attention.

I take commitments seriously. Here is what we can commit to, today.

\- in my capacity as a mentor of entrepreneurs independently and with the Thiel Fellowship and more recently YCombinator, and with my connections to major investors, I will do my best to advise, connect, and promote people working on this problem or struggling with it.

\- as a first step to insurance 2.0, we will put ourselves in the shoes of others that have experienced this and offer to help them directly and manually launch their crowd funding campaigns.

\- when it is possible to launch an insurance 2.0 company, given our other commitments, I will (unless someone already has definitely cracked this problem). I cannot make commitments as to the model because we have not yet thought it through or tested it adequately, but it is a huge problem in a legally mandated industry, and we must do better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turning web traffic into a Super Computer - <AUTHOR> http://ben.akrin.com/?p=5997 <comment><USER2> This is a great direction for a certain class of problems, but to call this a general approach for building a super computer ignores the biggest challenge of all: communication performance.

The leadership-class super computers have large budgets for network interconnects like Infiniband, because the hardest problems require ultra low- latency, high-throughput RDMA message passing between processes.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely true. Embarrassingly parallel problems are generally not the most interesting, because you can just throw compute power at it until it is solved. Most applications running on actual supercomputers are communication bound.

</comment></comment><comment> chroem- I actually made this a few years ago for an ill-fated application to YC (I was still a sophomore in college).

The first big problem is that you can't trust any of the results that you receive from the workers. You can alleviate this somewhat by not accepting job results until they've been replicated by at least several other workers (lowering efficiency of the system), but then you're still vulnerable to sybil attacks.

The second issue was the total lack of privacy for the data and computations.

<comment><USER4> Check 10% of submissions randomly - if some are wrong, blacklist that source.

You can send the checking to other nodes and check those randomly as well.

<comment> chroem- That's what you would initially think, but a clever adversary can produce arbitrarily many identities, so even if results agree, there is a non-zero chance that all of the agreeing nodes are compromised. Even if you begin blacklisting nodes, an attacker can simply spoof new ones.

So then you need a proof of work scheme to defend against sybil attacks, but even then an attacker could choose to only produce incorrect output when they detect that a quorum group is made entirely of their compromised nodes, and otherwise produce correct output. That would once again render blacklisting ineffective.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but securing this sort of browser-based grid computing scheme is a nontrivial task. And that's coming from someone who is very fond of this technology.

<comment><USER4> Use homomorphic encryption to ensure attackers can't tell when they get the same thing twice.

IPs are not so cheap, anyway. If you have enough legitimate traffic it would be tough to spoof enough.

<comment><USER5> You're thinking in IPv4.

<comment><USER4> Most traffic will be IPv4, if you only use them for work you'll do ok

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, this is similar to Gridcoin ([https://gridcoin.io/](https://gridcoin.io/)) , Golem ([https://cryptoslate.com/coins/golem/](https://cryptoslate.com/coins/golem/)) , SPARC ([https://sparc.network/](https://sparc.network/)) , et al. I could keep going, but the point is, something like this exists. And we are seeing the issues of what happens when you embed a program that takes advantage of processing power. You get things like Coinhive ([https://coinhive.com/](https://coinhive.com/)), which were meant to be benign, turned into botnets.

<comment><USER7> Tangentially related - [http://www.gomezpeerzone.com/](http://www.gomezpeerzone.com/)

This was one of the first attempts to _monetize_ spare CPU capacity and to build a business around massively distributed computing. It seems to be in a zombi mode now, but it was launched almost 10 years ago - [https://web.archive.org/web/20080529034258/http://www.gomezp...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080529034258/http://www.gomezpeerzone.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those having trouble viewing the site: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180303173013/http://ben.akrin....](https://web.archive.org/web/20180303173013/http://ben.akrin.com/?p=5997)

</comment><comment><USER9> This will only work if you can cheaply validate the work performed. Or send it to several distinct visitors and compare results, driving down the likelyhood that the results are bogus.

<comment><USER2> good point. my hunch is that the only way would be to duplicate work and check for consensus. it seems like there isn't any way to cheaply validate results for any interesting work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something like this could be a way to get finally rid of advertisements, and help finance free services in a novel new way if the CPU isn't over committed. I thought the same around crypto mining... Many people might prefer the resource providing/computation option compared to ads.

<comment><USER11> Good luck getting people to not double-dip.

Also good luck making it so I don't spend 10 cents of electricity or have my phone die early to give a site <1 cent of value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Unlike a regular computer cluster, the nodes are very ephemeral (as website > visitors come and go) and can't talk to each other (no cross site requests).

Not sure how that would actually help but they somewhat _can_ talk to each other through WebRTC. I wonder if that would change anything here

</comment><comment><USER13> This could be a good alternative for SETI or that protein folding project but if it somehow turns into a plague of attempts to shift the computing requirements of running the backend onto the users, our content blocking lists will have to grow a little bit longer again.

</comment><comment><USER14> opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win

<comment><USER15> The big problem I see to be solved with p2p computation is trust. In the example, the problem to be solved is "Do any of these strings hash to a known value?" An adversary can accept the job, sleep for a second, and report "Nope" and collect their payment, without ever doing any work.

In contrast, I trust that if I run code on AWS, it'll actually run the code I give it.

These are solvable problems, but important to think about.

<comment><USER16> A bigger issue than lying (and randomly failing) clients is the fact that you're farming out your users data to third parties. You might be willing to trust a single entity like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, who have a reputation to maintain / can be sued (for potentially a lot); but if your farming out to essentially anonymous individuals, there's no repercussions for, say, using their credit card information.

Now, there are definitely use cases where you don't care; which would be a cool application for this; but unless we figure out how to do homomorphic computing, this doesn't seem immediately likely to impact cloud computing prices; even if it was cheaper to simply use excess compute capacity (which I'm not convinced it is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I should code a fractal renderer that combines the work of many clients...

</comment><comment><USER18> What are the performance numbers for work distributed like this?</comment>


Lessons from Apple wallet failure - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lessons-from-apple-wallet-failure-sudeep-kanjilal <comment><USER2> "that was not the main reason for eventual failure of ApplePay."

Lol. Apple Pay has been anything but a failure.</comment>


Evolutionary Timeline, to scale - <AUTHOR> http://andabien.com/html/evolution-timeline.htm?=9738234

<comment><USER2> It seems like there's a whole lot of nothing going on for the first 2 billion years. But what I think we miss is during that time, a lot of the complex biochemical and organic pathways were being developed--without which none of the other classifications of lifeforms would have appeared--and none of these bio pathways manifest themselves in the fossile record.

If we were somehow able to classify organisms biochemically instead of by their physical features, I wonder how different the picture would look?

<comment><USER3> That's true, many of those pathways are shared between all current species, so they must have evolved in that early period. I wonder how (for lack of a better word) _inefficient_ organisms must have been before they evolved the modern citric acid cycle, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has always been the best explanation of why we don't see evidence of aliens. Any detectable species is less than a pixel on that timescale. Combined with likelyhood of getting wiped out by natural (comet/asteroid) or technological(nuke, pollution/climate, custom disease, etc).

<comment><USER5> I think this timeline tells a different story: Intelligent life is very rare. Typically, life doesn't evolve beyond single-celled or primitive multi-celled organisms before the star goes red giant.

The chances of general intelligence evolving are so small that we're probably the first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are Homo Sapiens NOT the pinnacle of evolution? What are we then, the hind-end? Brick wall? Full Stop?

<comment><USER7> We're the species currently dominating a niche.

Calling anything the 'pinnacle' of evolution implies some sort of progress towards perfection. Evolution does not work that way.

<comment><USER6> Says a member of the only race in 2 billion years that CAN argue about it...

<comment><USER7> You misunderstand how evolution works. It is not a progression towards perfection.

You're conflating biological evolution with creationism / 'intelligent design'.

<comment><USER6> Any anyway, how do you explain going from single-celled creatures to working organisms with a trillion cells? Darwin claims species are driven by their environment to better compete - is that not something like perfecting them?

<comment><USER8> No. Perfection implies a scale with a top end.

We compete for spaces in a niche, we don't compete to be all round "better".

<comment><USER6> Ok, but Pinnacle describes a local maximum, which seems to describe us perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, he said "Domestic Asses." Huh, huhhuhuh.</comment>


Esketamine Drug For Depression Treatment Nears FDA Approval - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/first-big-depression-advance-since-prozac-nears-fda-approval <comment><USER2> So, it's just enantiomerically pure S-ketamine - not really a new drug discovery. The drug is already around as an anesthetic but it is almost finished with the FDA's approval process for treatment-resistant depression. When used as an anesthetic it is administered intravenously, but the anti- depressant formulation is a nasal spray. Cool! That definitely makes it more accessible.

I wonder if J&J got a patent on S-ketamine? The patent system is often abused this way. First you sell the racemic mixture, then when that patent is about to expire, you start selling a new product that is just the active enantiomer. And you can tell customers that it's new and improved: that you only need to take half as much! See Prilosec/Nexium, Celexa/Lexapro, etc.

Although, maybe it's difficult to manufacture just the one enantiomer, at scale?

<comment><USER3> It's even more confusing: R-ketamine is the more effective enantiomer, with less dissociative effects.

<comment><USER4> Sweet, I like that J&J is using S-ketamine then. I think the dissociative effects of ketamine are fantastic and beneficial, even though they can be surprising. At a low dose it likely won't be an issue.

<comment><USER3> Personally, I have no issues with the dissociative effects per se. However, studies have determined that they aren't related to the antidepressant effect. Fwiw, a full clinical dose feels like ~1/4 of a 'rail'. There's no introspective trip here, just slight drunkenness.

(Incidentally, we have some evidence that the metabolite that causes the effect can be blocked via concurrent CBD administration - without reducing the dissociative effect)

The standing appointment to get slightly high for a couple of hours every three days does get inconvenient (though it's not as problematic as the resultant insomnia). I expect esketamine will be more so, for less antidepressant effect. And, being a controlled substance, I'm concerned I'll be unable to increase my dosage to make up the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" But Meisel said he was convinced by a patient survey Johnson & Johnson conducted. 'We don't take the patient voice into account enough,' he said."_

I suppose it didn't occur to him that the company trying to get their drug approved might not have taken the patient voice into account enough either? Or maybe under-reported certain patient voices? (The adverse ones. Hey, it's not like it has never happened. At least take a closer look!)

<comment><USER6> This.

Evidence and studies like this should not be done by the company itself. The OxyContin claims about low addictiveness should be a timely reminder for independent clinical studies. Reading that set off alarm bells for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It might be a realy big milestone if it comes to market. Especially if it could come out as soon as within this year.

Sometimes I hear people mention that ketamine's special effectiveness (in those whom it is effective, which isn't 100% of people afaik) wears off over the length of a treatment protocol. It'd be nice to hear more about that, especially in comparison to the long-term effectiveness of traditional antidepressants and SSRIs in particular.

<comment><USER8> This. I've read some horror stories about patients that received infusions which for a time, gave them their life back, and suddenly for all intents and purposes it became ineffective. Some people described going back to feeling depressed after seeing the alternative to be even less bearable.

I'm eager to see it come to market, and for it to work, but I'm scared to work with my doctor to try it based on those stories.

<comment><USER9> Can confirm that this happens.

To put it mildly, not the most pleasant experience of my life, but still looking forward to seeing where the next iterations on rapid-acting antidepressants go, and whether they turn out to be any more durable.

(Also quite curious to see what research crops up about why the effects are sometimes not durable, but that's gonna be a decent wait.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r So rather than approve the existing drug that's off patent, they approved a knock-off that will undoubtedly cost 100x as much. How typical.

<comment><USER10> Is there anything stopping doctors from prescribing or administering ordinary ketamine off-label? I don't think the controlled substance issues would differ between the two.

If the answer is "no, but the marginal differences between ordinary ketamine and the new drug are enough that you'd want to prescribe the new drug instead"\--well, that's new value added, isn't it?

<comment><USER11> Ketamine HCl can and is dispensed off label, both for in office IM/IV treatment and at home nasal spray, or sublingual troche.

<comment><USER12> that requires the pharmacy to somehow obtain nasal spray. Unfortunately, no manufacturer actually sells a nasal spray variety (yet) as there was no FDA- approved use for intranasal ketamine. That being said, compounders have been able to make intranasal ketamine formulations for a while now, since this treatment for acute depression has been well recognized in the literature for at least a decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who we the 14 people who approved?

<comment><USER14> I'm curious as to who voted against this. I mean, sure, abuse of this could be bad. But suicide caused by depression is far, far worse.

People who want recreational drugs will find them anyway. Letting innocent people die from treatment-resistant depression is a perverse priority.

<comment><USER15> It's slightly worrying the language from pharma is very similar to the early opiod days.

"The voice of the pain patient is underrepresented! We should approve opioids"

Now is

"The voice of the depressed patient is underrepresented! We should approve nasal ketamine".

I'm all for new therapies but ketamine can be highly addictive and causes really nasty side effects in high quantities (bladder problems being horrific from what I've heard). I hope we don't see a huge spike in ketamine abuse in 10 years time like what happened after overprescription of opioids.

I also think this will be extremely popular. Current antidepressants are not very effective and take a long time to work. This seems to work very quickly. Who would want to wait 8 weeks Vs hours to get better? It would not surprise me if J&J have massively downplayed the potential addiction risk of this.

<comment><USER16> Ketamine is plentiful on the street and you can legally buy ketamine analogs online. I don't see this new route of getting it from a psychiatrist as a huge abuse risk.

Subjectively, it's not as good a "take the pill and forget your problems" drug as opioids, benzos, and alcohol are. It can be used in that way if you take a huge "k-hole" dose and dissociate completely, and some people do get addicted. But at common doses, certainly whatever they are going to prescribe, it's more of a "think about your problems and figure out how to solve or accept them" drug like mushrooms and LSD.

<comment><USER15> You could use the same argument for Oxycontin surely. Heroin was always out there on the street, but it's only when opioids were prescribed to the masses via doctors that it reached ecedemic proportions.

I'm not saying it is addictive as heroin etc but it's definitely addictive. And will people start increasing their doses as they become tolerant to the antidepressant effects, etc?

<comment><USER16> I think responding to this requires giving a summary of the effects of different drugs, to build a simple mental model of how they could cause addiction.

Group A: Drugs like benzos, alcohol, and opioids provide pleasant sensations upfront, killing your pains and anxieties, but those problems return in even worse form when the drug wears off. It's as though your brain's baseline for what counts as suffering had been lowered by the experience of being coddled. It's very clear how this leads to compulsive redosing and addiction.

Group B: Psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD induce unpleasant feelings as they take effect, followed by a more positive (perhaps euphoric) experience once the brain adjusts to the presence of the drug, and then less potent pleasant after-effects when the drug wears off. It seems like the brain has raised the bar for suffering - suddenly the fact that you can see things in the correct color, gravity is pointing in the right direction, and you have clarity of thought makes life feel easy. You might redose to extend the peak effects, but you aren't going to take any more for a while once it wears off. It would be tough to get addicted to these. However, a depressed person might have trouble with the come-up, and could experience a panic attack. You'd want a very skilled therapist if you're trying to treat depression this way.

IMO ketamine kind of straddles the line here. The onset of the dissociation can be stressful, but it's not that hard. You don't forget your problems, but they feel like the problems of somebody that you know closely and care a lot about, so you can try to solve them from a different perspective. You can feel that you are doing something great, which can lead to compulsive redosing, but you keep the lessons you learn when it wears off. It's not as though your problems come back in even worse form like you get with group A. Although if you really blast yourself, the dissociation can get so strong that you don't care about your problems at all, which gives you more of a group A experience while you are peaking. I'm not a scientist and I may be wrong about this, but I think the antidepressant effects are not caused directly by the drug or metabolites that one could become tolerant of. I think that they are a result of the brain's recent experience of looking at life from a non-depressed perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "... lower than the abuse rates for other hallucinogens like ecstasy and LSD."

Ecstasy is a stimulant, not a hallucinogen. I thought bloomberg was generally considered to be better at fact checking than that.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, also LSD doesn't have a measurable abuse rate. It is literally anti- abuse.

<comment><USER19> I think that in the article, abuse is used to mean illegal unintended use, rather than abuse in the conventional sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm but Prozac was never that great anyway.

There is very little evidence that depression is caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, it's something that big pharma have sold you so they can sell their drugs.

Great book on the topic, check out lost connections.

<comment><USER21> There's very little evidence for a broken leg being caused by the lack of plaster around it, yet nobody questions its efficacy...

<comment> wu-ikkyu How is that comparable? Seems like a non sequitur

<comment><USER21> The treatment of a condition need not be the "inverse" of its cause.

A broken bone can be fixed by immobilizing it via a plaster cast. Did the bone break due to the lack of plaster?

Eczema can be fixed by applying topical steroids. Did eczema develop due to the lack of topical steroids?

Depression can be fixed by inducing changes in neurochemistry. Did depression arise due to an imbalance in neurochemistry?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open vs. Closed Pipes – Flutes vs. Clarinets (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/flutes.v.clarinets.html <comment><USER2> If you want an simple algorithm to model this, waveguide synthesis can give surprisingly convincing results, including the difference between open and closed pipes. In short, a waveguide model involves delaying the signal (to simulate the signal traveling down the pipe), inverting it (to simulate _wave reflection_ as described in TFA), and adding back to the pre-delayed signal.

Open pipes have two reflections, therefore two inversions in the corresponding algorithm, which can be combined into a simple positive feedback loop. Closed pipes only have one reflection, which is simulated by a negative feedback loop.

Here's an explorable where you can test it. In particular, in the "controlling the pitch" and "note transitions" sections, you can try changing the feedback between positive and negative values, and hear the corresponding flute/clarinet change in timbre.

[https://www.osar.fr/notes/waveguides/](https://www.osar.fr/notes/waveguides/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you. That page's few simple examples did a lot to clarify my understanding of waveguide synth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So that's why clarinet "squeaks" sound so grating: the higher overtones don't fit cleanly into the twelve-note scale.

<comment><USER5> I pity the family of a beginning clarinet student, like mine when I was learning to play it. Gaining control of the amount of wind to put into the instrument along with understanding how the mouthpiece and reed interact with your mouth, lips, and teeth takes a lot of practice during which time, mostly squeaks are produced. But, it's like riding a bike. Once mastered, you rarely fall off. It just takes practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Was expecting to see something related to unix pipes, was pleasantly surprised

</comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating!</comment>


Announcing Chrome Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/chromebook/chrome-chromebook/ <comment><USER2> Yawn. Another April Fools joke. I wonder how much this cost Google.

<comment><USER3> It's cheap, as "Our lawyers asked us to make clear that Chromebooks aren't made out of chrome."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I might buy one.</comment>


We should all be supplementing with vitamin D - <AUTHOR> https://simonsarris.com/sunlight?v2 <comment><USER2> After blood tests showed I had low vitamin D levels, I've been making an effort to get at least 15 minutes of direct sunshine every day.

I think the biggest problem is that wearing long sleeved shirts and trousers means you only get sunlight on your face. This is a double whammy - not only do you not get enough exposure for vitamin D, but you also increase the risk of skin cancer (or just general sun damage) on your face.

I've since moved to Singapore, where it's too hot to wear anything but shorts and a T-shirt. This makes things a lot easier.

Couldn't we do more to encourage public sunbathing, to allow greater skin exposure over the whole body (back and upper legs in particular)? I suspect we would see non-negligible improvements in public health, such as those referred to in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been supplementing with Vitamin D for years now since I tested low by my doctor. I get plenty of sun exposure but for some reason I'm always low. Maybe because of sun screen? In any case, every once in a while I'll stop taking it and usually end up feeling like garbage.

I think it's the only vitamin where I have ever experienced that.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I open source my html5 games? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
A few weeks ago I started a pet project: build one new html5 game per week [0]. I already submitted this project to HN, and got a lot of positive feedback [1].
A few people asked me to open source my games. That sounds great, but I basically know nothing about open source. Do you have any advice on this? Here are some of my concerns/questions:
1. I don't want to see people submitting my games on various app stores
2. I'm not a very good developer, so my code is not super clean
3. Can opensourcing help me getting more people interested in my project?
Thanks for your help!
[0] My project: www.lessmilk.com
[1] Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036486 <comment><USER2> 1\. If you open source your code, there is always the chance of others 'stealing' it. If this concern is a deal breaker, don't open source it.

2\. With a project like yours, this can be a way to catalog how you've grown as a developer.

3\. Open sourcing will provide an additional perk for people that might be interested in your project (especially developers).

</comment><comment><USER3> Be careful about open sourcing art as it allows anyone to basically use your art. You can do a lua style license where they have to mention somewhere that they got code/art from you and link back to your page.

I'd really recommend using separate licenses for "academic" and "commercial" use.</comment>


Self-hosted, OSS logfile analytics? - <AUTHOR>

After looking at a few solutions for web log analytics, I'm not closer to choosing a solution than I was a few days ago. I've looked at Webalizer, OWA, and Piwik but none of them really offer a logfile integration the way I was anticipating.
Right now I'm looking at Logstash and Kibana but don't really understand the use case for both solutions - Logstash gets my data into elastic search, and Kibana helps me analyze that data?
What's the best tool for the job right now for web analytics (no eCommerce, no ad tracking)? <comment><USER2> If your log files are generating <500MB of log files per day you may use Splunk for free.

I wrote and published free splunk app - which i actually built specifically for my dedicated hosting server analytics:

[https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2676/](https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2676/)

This way you're fully in control of your data

</comment><comment><USER3> Hello! I didn't quite understand -- are looking for a log analysis tool that also helps with related web analytics? Disclosure: I work for Logz.io ([http://logz.io](http://logz.io)) and our log analytics platform can do exactly that.

To learn more about the intersection of log analytics and web analytics, you might want to see this Moz post I wrote a few weeks ago on using log data to analyze search engine crawl rates, crawl budgets, bad response codes, crawl priorities, duplicate URL crawling, and more:

[https://moz.com/blog/technical-seo-log- analysis](https://moz.com/blog/technical-seo-log-analysis)

I hope it might help! (Again, full disclosure repeated. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Kibana, not Kobana. And no, it doesn't help you _analyze_ that data. It only helps you browse/search that data, with a limited charting on top.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed.

I'm really only looking for things like response times, server errors, etc. Will Kibana be able to provide that?

For example, I'd want to run a query for "All requests that took longer than 1.5 seconds that did not return 500 status codes." Is there a way to do that?

<comment><USER5> You can see a live demo of Kibana here: [http://demo.elastic.co/packetbeat/](http://demo.elastic.co/packetbeat/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Take a look at Graylog: www.graylog.org</comment>


The Case for Investment Grade Wine as a Strategic Alternative Asset (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.fa-mag.com/userfiles/docs/whitepapers/2012/Investment-Grade-Wine-A-Strategic-Alternative-Asset-Class.pdf

<comment><USER2> I seriously looked into doing this years ago as I have a friend who is really into wine.

Many popular California wineries only sell to those on their list, and often the prices are much below what you can get on the open market.

If you're on the list, every year you get a certain allocation. If the wineries are having a good year, usually you can turn a profit on every bottle. If they're having a bad year (where you would lose money) and you don't buy your allocation, they will reduce it in the future and if you don't buy anything that's when you likely get removed from the list. Sometimes in bad years you'll get an increased allocation, and if you buy it, they will increase your allocation in the future.

The wait times to get onto a list, or even just the waiting list can be substantial. For one winery, my friend has been on the waiting list since 1992 and he said getting on the waiting list itself was an accomplishment. Since my friend truly enjoys wine and is good with people, he's often able to move up in the waiting lists or just convince the proprietor to put him on the list even when there are other people waiting. He's also been able to call them up and convince them to increase his allocation.

He also spends time looking for new wineries that are going to blow up, much like hunting for startups.

My friend could easily make a nice little profit, or even just make enough to pay for his consumption, but chooses not to.

I chose not to do it because I hate wine and it's too much of a time investment. There's also the issue of not legally being allowed to sell the wine privately because it's not old enough. Nobody's going to bust you for a few bottles, but at a certain scale I could see it being an issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the problems with wine as an investment is it is not very liquid - sorry I could not help myself with this one :)

Actually the bigger problems are storage costs (the back of your cupboard just won't cut it) and the less than reliable advice you will get buying in the futures market (the number of "vintages of the century" we have had in the last 15 years defies statistical plausibility). Of course if you like fine wine then even if it turns out to be a disaster of an investment you can at least drown your sorrows.

<comment><USER4> That's really true of many small assets. I collect historical collectibles and my purchases a decade ago have done extremely well just based on a lazy "buy at a price you can't so no to, then hold" strategy. On a basis of probably $2.5k I've had the average asset appreciate a ballpark-guess ~100%, which outperforms the DJIA over a similar timeframe.

Is that the right valuation? Yes. Is it liquid in the sense that I could get cash for it tomorrow? Nope. What are the storage costs? On the scale I'm working at - a lot of manual labor and some home shelf space.

It's not a scalable strategy. Could I park a couple grand, maybe tens of grands into it per year? Yes. Could I park millions into it? No way, that would have a noticeable impact on my purchasing markets.

Of course - in the Plutonomy strategy [1] [2] [3], it's wealthy buyers who really determine the value of assets. And they like good wine.

[1] [http://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf](http://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf)

[2] [http://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-2.pdf](http://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-2.pdf)

[3] [http://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-3.pdf](http://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-3.pdf)

<comment><USER3> This is true. The one thing about wine compared to other collectibles is wine is perishable. It really is much more like speculating on agricultural commodities like corn or pork bellies than buying other collectables like antiques or artwork.

The super rich (and the not so super rich like myself) do like good wine. The problem with wine is once you know and appreciate good wine it is hard not to spend to what you can afford. I guess I am lucky in that I can find at least a few wines I like under $20.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this on HN? From memory the market fell a lot just after this was written. By the time you throw in management fees, storage and fraud costs it was never a good investment anyway let alone as an active management strategy.

<comment><USER3> It is actually great to look back on investment advice a few years after it was made to see how the advice lines up with reality. If you do this a bit you become both a better investor and more cynical person :)

<comment><USER5> Not for bullshit stuff like this. I used to work in investment management I am already cynical though.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but the only way people get cynical about investment advice is either by being burned or by check how the advice panned out. Personally I favor the the second option :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tragedy of the WebKit Commons - <AUTHOR> http://blog.methvin.com/2013/02/tragedy-of-webkit-commons.html <comment><USER3> One problem I've run into is not being able to submit bugs because my own codebase is relatively huge.[0]

For whatever reason, the bugs I see manifest as edge cases in Chrome's new compositing system, but only under "load". I've tried to get small examples that show the bugs, and failed.

But since the developers will only accept tiny programs that demonstrate the problem, I'm SOL.

UPDATE: Also, there's no such thing as "WebKit", as though rendering issues, once fixed in "WebKit" are suddenly fixed as long as everyone updates to the last release. It doesn't work like that, because there are numerous rendering implementations built-on top of WebKit -- the ones I run into have to do with Chrome's compositor vs. Apple's compositor. They behave quite a bit differently, and those aren't the only two in use. The same is true of WebKit JavaScript engines and the APIs supported.

There's just no way, as a developer, to treat "WebKit" as a platform. You have to deal with every browser using WebKit separately.

[0] <https://github.com/erichocean/blossom>

<comment><USER4> > I've tried to get small examples that show the bugs, and failed.

Have you tried setting up an automated process which tries to gradually reduce your large codebase to a small one which still reproduces the bug?

Some similar existing projects: Tigris Delta for C/C++ code, Bugpoint for LLVM, and my own DustMite (<https://github.com/CyberShadow/DustMite>) for D code. I wonder if something like that already exists for HTML.

<comment><USER3> I haven't, although I'm sure with enough effort, I could build a one-off tool to figure out what exactly the problem is.

If I was developing Chrome's compositor, sure, I'd do that.

One difficulty is that the "bad" code is actually generated HTML and CSS. Well, the generated code is fine, it's the browser that eventually has problems with it, but you get what I mean.

There's probably a way to capture that output in buffers over multiple event loops, and then do something like Bugpoint over that output and see if I can't reproduce/reduce the issue.

I'm also not sure if the Canvas drawing I'm doing is part of the issue or not, so I'd probably have to capture that as well...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's really interesting to get the opinion of a jQuery core contributor on this whole thing. I can't imagine very many people are in a better position to comment on the state of current WebKit bugs than the folks writing the most popular DOM/AJAX library on the web.

<comment><USER6> He had me until he put bloated (as a description of jQuery) in quotes.

<comment><USER7> Admittedly, he was refering to the 2.0 line, the goal of which was to drastically lower the size of the codebase by cutting out support for non- current browsers.

<comment><USER6> Feature bloat is still bloat. jQuery is a DOM library, an XHR library, an animations library, a functional library, a promises library... as far as I know 2.0 doesn't do anything about that issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> In either 1.9 or 2.0 you have the option to exclude XHR or animations as well as several other functional modules. More feature-lopping capability will be coming soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit > implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don't have the fix. We've > had to put back several of these as users reported problems with the beta. > It's starting to feel like oldIE all over again, but with a different set of > excuses for why nothing can be fixed.

I am fairly new to web development, but this consistent droning (whining) about having to develop for a myriad of inconsistent platforms seems like braying from rather entitled web developers. I don't understand when in the history of software development developers weren't forced to dick with platform and legacy problems. Can someone explain what, if anything makes web dev different? And if they can't, can we please just stop bringing it up like it's ever been a new problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> Before getting into web dev I spent a lot of time doing development in C/C++. That code needed to be portable across systems and versions but it was an entirely different kind of portable than we grapple with on the web. For C code we could handle the issue with conditional compilation, build scripts, or dynamic loading.

On the web it's all dynamic; all the code for handling every situation you might encounter comes down to the client when the page loads and you sort out the details at runtime while the user taps their fingers on the table. If there is a large amount of code to fix one specific browser you can break that out and pull it down only for that browser, but the kind of bugs that jQuery works around tend to be of the death-by-a-thousand-little-cuts variety where it just doesn't pay to refactor that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> He touched on something that few will appreciate.

UIWebView, (and android's webview) is on older implementations of webkit, and the gatekeepers of modern apps (Google included) have incentive to keep it that way.

They want devs to build apps for their own 'ecosystem' that are not interoperable on all platforms (eg: the web). They have disincentive to push for adoption of newer versions of browser tech as it encroaches on their respective babies (the OS').

<comment><USER10> No it's not. Both you and the original article author are astoundingly wrong here (with regards to UIWebView; I don't know anything about android). I don't even know where you got the idea that it's somehow older.

UIWebView is precisely the same WebKit that powers MobileSafari, which is typically kept in sync with WebKit for the corresponding OS X release (so iOS 6.0 and Mac OS X 10.8 have roughly equivalent WebKits).

Pretty much the only difference between UIWebView and MobileSafari is the fact that MobileSafari runs JavaScript faster (by virtue of being allowed to mprotect pages, which almost no other app on the system, including 3rd-party apps, are allowed to do). But aside from a speed difference in JS execution, UIWebView _is_ the same WebKit that's used in MobileSafari.

<comment><USER6> Mobile Safari is only updated once a year.

<comment><USER11> Nope, it's usually updated with every single minor and security release as well.

<comment><USER6> Only receives new features once a year. Safari (mobile or desktop) isn't exactly a model for rapid releases. It's missing a lot of stuff that Chrome has had for months, sometimes years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like jQuery could benefit from committing their own fixes to WebKit rather than working around them. If the bug Opera fixed really was just one line then why did they have to wait for Opera to do it?

<comment><USER13> 1\. Just because a bug is fixed and accepted doesn't mean it will make it into a shipping browser anytime soon.

2\. Even if it were to make it into a shipping browser quickly, there is no guarantee any reasonable amount of people will run that upgrade anytime soon.

Hitting browser bugs really sucks for this reason. The bug has to be worked around _no matter what_ , since there will probably be people running that bug for a long time (this has gotten much better with things like Chrome's auto- update which is why if you talk to people from that team they are such big believers in it). Regardless, you have to remember that the jquery team is providing a product to clients. If a client's site is broken because jquery hits a bug in a browser, the priority is to have that site work asap. Its unacceptable to say "Oh we fixed the bug in webkit, Safari users will see it whenever the new Safari ships which we have no idea when that is since its an apple secret. Bug closed." The best response is "Fixed in new jquery version whatever, just update the script on your site". And once you've fixed the bug for your own concerns, it just doesn't make sense to then spend time fixing it in WebKit as well vs. spending those resources on fixing another jquery bug.

<comment><USER14> So, moral of the story is don't fix bugs because it might take a long time to make to the end user?

<comment><USER13> There is no moral, its just an observation of realities. From these circumstances judgement calls are made on a case by case basis. Maybe someday when all browsers have auto-update like Chrome it will absolutely make sense for everyone to focus their efforts on fixing bugs in the engine vs. writing workarounds. That is not the reality we live in today.

I mean, I could argue that people shouldn't work around iOS bugs and should instead apply for jobs at Apple and fix UIKit itself so that everyone can best benefit from their labor. But that's absolutely absurd. It's also more than a little unfair to judge members of the jquery team for not going into a project like WebKit that's _millions of lines of C++_ and acting like they're coming up with excuses for "not fixing bugs". This is a symbiotic and healthy relationship, browser vendors benefit from groups like jquery that make those bugs livable _today_ through workarounds so that their products can be more usable in the immediate and they can focus on the "real" fixes for the future.

And don't forget that there are people who are running old OSes that would require buying a new computer before being able to upgrade their browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find the negative tone of this article very odd.

He is (rightly) upset that bug fixes are not glamorous, and not submitted as often as they should be to WebKit.

Yet the fact that Opera has moved their team onto an open source project, and is actively submitting bug fixes at all, is surely a positive thing?

The alternative is they continue to develop the Presto rendering engine, to which no one but Opera can submit bug fixes, and this bug fix wouldn't have been submitted to WebKit at all.

So surely this move is a positive gain from any perspective? I'm not sure why the negative spin.

<comment><USER16> I think he is arguing that most browser vendors don't fix common bugs as much as they add features.

<comment><USER15> I understand that point, and agree. Just seems odd to use the news of Opera adopting WebKit as a platform for complaining about vendors not fixing WebKit bugs.

As far as I can see, Opera's adoption of WebKit can only result in more bug fixes submitted for the framework.

<comment><USER17> No, it could even mean fewer fixes, because coopetition is a delicate balance. Every man-hour you put into the common project helps your competition as much as yourself (outside competition like Mozilla and Microsoft excluded).

So if you remove some coders from the common codebase and shift them towards other parts of the browser that have more to do with your specific brand (JSC in Apple's example, V8 or cloud integration in Google's), up to a certain point you gain a net benefit - your brand develops faster _and_ your partners invest more.

Of course, if each party acts like that, the common project gets stale - <USER2> tragedy of the commons.

From my completely unfair outsider view, it seems to me that Apple, for example, has more or less lost interest in WebKit and tries to stifle progress to defend their lackluster Safari against Chrome and MobileChrome.

<comment><USER15> Do you have specific examples of how you consider Apple to be "stifling" progress to defend Safari?

I use both Safari and Chrome (and WebKit nightlies). I vastly prefer Safari to Chrome, but their underlying use of WebKit seems quite similar.

Competition has seemed to help WebKit in the past (especially between Apple and Google). If you recall, they both contributed a new process model to WebKit ([http://betanews.com/2010/04/09/the-big-change-coming-to- safa...](http://betanews.com/2010/04/09/the-big-change-coming-to- safari-5-kernel-level-multi-processing/)). It could be argued that Apple's contribution in this area was more useful to users of the WebKit framework, while Google's was restricted to Chromium. That said, Google makes many great contributions too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love how this post is the total opposite of John Resig's article about how WebKit is the jQuery of rendering engines: [http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is- the-jquery-of-browser-engine...](http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery- of-browser-engines/)

And how the "bloat" added by adding WebKit specific hacks to jQuery is just 3 half-lines of code, I think it would be safe to assume that if Opera was as big as WebKit is jQuery would also need a lot of hacks for it.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is indicative of a systemic problem with end-user software in general, not just browsers. In my experience in the audio world, the DAW-maker's rush makers to crank out features to the neglect of the functionality of their product has been simply horrific. I've used 4 of the top programs (ProTools, Sonar, Cubase, Logic) in paid sessions, and new releases of each one _always_ leave old bugs unfixed as well as introduce new bugs, some of which are crippling. Each one of these programs cost over $500 (at the time they were used, Logic is less now, I believe but also the buggiest and most unstable.) The author is right that fixing bugs doesn't get headlines, but the neglect exhibited by many in the software industry is downright shameful.

<comment><USER20> I was really shocked when one of the main features of the latest version of Adobe Illustrator was "we went in and rewrote a bunch of old messy core programming and made it lots faster under heavy loads".

Of course, they also rebuilt the whole UI from scratch and introduced some new bugs in that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The way this is going WebKit is the new IE.

Blogger like to refer to WebKit as if every browser in this planet would be using the latest version, which sadly is not the case.

So one ends up coding multiple hacks to support several versions of WebKit.

Even with help of jQuery, there are CSS and HTML rendering issues to work around.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't really understand the difference between WebKit and Chromium. Is Chromium the browser implementation using WebKit?

I reported a bug to Chromium last year which was to do with using screen.availHeight in Windows. The value returned ignored the taskbar which made this setting unreliable. Using it to open new Windows meant the Window would fall behind the Taskbar.

Its still bugged. Since then people have periodically confirmed it. It doesn't surprise me that WebKit has the same problem with edge case's being ignored in the rush to add more functionality.

This does actually make me want to get in and fix some of things. Perhaps if some free time opens up I could make a difference here.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you are going to reference "Tragedy of the Commons", do it correctly by pointing out what a horribly simpleminded fantasy the whole fiction is.

EDIT: for those that care, the original paper by Garrett Hardin simply explored the idea. He did not use real data and it was not scientific in any way. It was a thought experiment. And generally proven wrong.

Why it it relevant to mention this? Because the article mentioned here about Webkit references it in some attempt to connect it to the idea that Open Source or Free Software is an example of Garrett's argument.

However, if anything, Webkit is a counter example in an interesting way. One typical example of given to TOC is global fishing. However, if anything, global fishing is an example of large corporations exploiting a resource owned by nobody (vs a resourced owned in common). In a similar fashion, WebKit might be an example of corporations exploiting code owned by nobody.

Incidentally, this is not the case for many Free Software projects (vs Open Source). Because Free Software projects ARE owned by a group of people in common. And typically the governing structure is less exploitative, and more cooperative than corporate controlled projects like Webkit.</comment>


The Green New Deal in the United States: What it is and how to pay for it - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620301067 <comment><AUTHOR> Article published here:

Energy Research & Social Science Volume 67, September 2020, 101529</comment>


Golang Proposal: Compile-Time Functions and First Class Types - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/15292/2016-09-compile-time-functions.md <comment><AUTHOR> This is not my proposal, but I think this is one that I like most with regards to Go and metaprogramming/generics.</comment>