Getting started with Spark on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://blog.insightdatascience.com/spinning-up-a-spark-cluster-on-spot-instances-step-by-step-e8ed14ebb3b <comment><USER2> I chuckle whenever is see the acronym RDD, I can't shake the joke a while back that it stands for 'resume-driven development.'

With the largest EC2 instances having 1TB of RAM, many problems that used to require distributed compute can be more efficiently run on one machine with a variety of software: R, Python/Pandas, scikit, julia, etc.

When you've cleaned and filtered your data to meet the problem space, you may well find you don't have big data -- and be relieved that you dont need to hire distributed systems engineers to keep everything running.

There are important use cases however, for example small-world graphs.

<comment><USER3> 4TB nowadays:

Model vCPU Mem (GiB) SSD Storage (GB) Dedicated EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)

x1e.32xlarge 128 3,904 2 x 1,920 14,000

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not use Amazon EMR directly instead of installing Spark on EC2 instances? [https://aws.amazon.com/emr/](https://aws.amazon.com/emr/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is a much easier way to get started with Spark on AWS for free: [https://community.cloud.databricks.com](https://community.cloud.databricks.com)

<comment><USER6> This link requires a login.</comment></comment>


Chromium: Add support for Animated PNG - <AUTHOR> https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/7d2b8c45afc9c0230410011293cc2e1dbb8943a7 <comment><USER2> I've been waiting for this for 9 years :-)

A nice feature of APNG (and GIF) versus the more modern CSS/SVG animations is the CPU efficiency. It's _really_ easy to accidentally waste a ton of battery life by adding a tiny spinning gear to a page.

It varies depending on the browser and whether the GPU is used for compositing, but it's much easier to optimize blitting a rectangle each frame versus blitting a rotation of some complex vector shape on top of the page.

<comment><USER3> Animated GIFs often burn huge amounts of CPU on my machine. A page full of GIFs can bring a modern computer to its knees. (This is one reason many image sharing sites convert uploated GIFs to proper video files, mp4 or webm or whatever.)

I've never quite understood why implementations of GIF viewers in web browsers were so bad. In many cases it seems like they could cache every frame in GPU memory somewhere and very cheaply loop them. Caveat: I haven't studied this in any detail, and am not an expert on image/video formats.

<comment><USER4> While the browser vendors haven't done this - some of the image hosting sites (who are far more directly affected) have.

Imgur automatically converts larger GIF files to "GIFV" (WebM or MP4). The size difference is nuts: their example is a 50MB gif being reduced to 3.5MB

Their announcement post about it: [http://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing- gifv/](http://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/)

<comment><USER5> It's such a mess though.

You have gif with all its quality loss (256 colors and etc.), and then to make matters worse it's getting shoved through webm/mp4 encoding.

And then there's everyone from Imgur to Twitter missing the point of why gif is even a thing. Because it is _simple_. Because gif is treated as an image and not a video format. Because you can right click it, and save it for later use. Can't do that with "gifv" (seriously, I had to use curl just to get the video file from Imgur), and definitely can't do that with Twitter.

Neither webm nor mp4 can kill gif _yet_ \- mp4 is a patent mess, and webm comes closer (4chan for example has a quite big SFW community of people trading videos), but there are issues with Apple refusing to support it, and lack of hardware support.

<comment><USER6> >Can't do that with "gifv" (seriously, I had to use curl just to get the video file from Imgur), and definitely can't do that with Twitter.

youtube-dl works with basically everything that matters, including imgur gifv and twitter videos.

      youtube-dl https://twitter.com/Footballogue/status/841905302438043648

      youtube-dl http://i.imgur.com/te50Z9W.gifv

youtube-dl is the best thing since sliced bread.

thanks to youtube-dl it is simple to download videos in a nice format instead of as gif.

gif as a format has served it's purpose. let gif die.

<comment><USER5> That's not user-friendly at all.

<comment><USER7> There are untold number of GUI and web wrappers around youtube-dl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case anybody is wondering how to roll out server-side support for this with a fallback to GIF: they've added "image/apng" to the Accept header for image requests. It's now "image/webp,image/apng,image/ _,_ /*;q=0.8". Sites like Imgur could start serving APNG images today.

<comment><USER9> > Sites like Imgur could start serving APNG images today

I think there'd be a problem when customers copy/paste an image from the site into another application that doesn't support APNG. Seems like a common use- case that would cause a lot of customer confusion.

<comment><USER10> How is this worse than the "gifv" that Imgur introduced?

<comment><USER11> gifv isn't a new file format at all. It's simply an mp4 video with gifv as the extension.

<comment><USER10> Exactly--but you can't reliably copy and paste it into another unknowing application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> APNG started in 2004, I am not sure why it took so long, 13 years before it is landed in Webkit and Blink / Chromium. The fight with MNG only lasted few years. PNG rejected the APNG proposal multiple times ( Why ? )

This is 2017, and when we look forward to 2020, we still dont have anything to replace gif, jpeg, apng, png. With Video we went from MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ( Divx, Xvid, Rmvb, WMV, VP8 era ) H.264/AV to H.265/HEVC. Our Screen went from Low Res to 4K.

Surely all these browser Vendor can sit down and at least talk about this. How about supporting bpg for a start?

And lastly, I was naively thinking having APNG now would means x years before it is roll out to large number of consumers. But to my surprise even Chrome has a very high usage in China, 60% and growing. China is historically a region of IE6, I remember IE was still 40 - 50% in 2013 or 2014. You could now start to use APNG and soon have 60%+ of your users seeing it. Amazing.

<comment><USER13> _> PNG rejected the APNG proposal multiple times ( Why ? )_

Because it is not a still image, and therefore should have a different file signature, MIME type, and file name extension. It is simply out of scope for PNG. When designing PNG as a replacement for GIF, they very deliberately and decidedly dropped the animation feature. Implementing APNG as an extension of PNG confuses categories that should not be confused.

<comment><USER14> You have to admit it's a little funny that if PNG's one goal in life was to replace GIF, they chose to not support the one thing GIF is used for today.

You had one job PNG. One job!

<comment><USER13> The popularity of animated GIFs, or the use at any scale of them at all really, only came after PNG was finalized.

The design of PNG started in January 1995 and PNG 1.0 was published in October 1996. Netscape Navigator added animated GIF support in September 1995, and if I remember correctly, it wasn't immediately used at large scale. Anyway, by that time, the PNG team had IIRC already decided to put animation in a yet-to- be-designed MNG.

<comment><USER14> And to be fair GIF was used in many many places where we now use PNG.

None the less, a funny end result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So Firefox, Safari and now Chrome. Provided image hosting sites start accepting APNG this may finally mean the end of GIF. Why now though?

<comment><USER16> I assume Google wants to push their own image format (animated webp) instead of supporting an old format nobody has been using for years.

This is good news though; finally we can start to abandon the cruddy old GIF format and move to something more modern.

<comment><USER17> > something more modern.

Technically it is _more_ modern — replaces 1989 tech with 1995 tech.

But it's far from being modern. It's very lacking even compared to MPEG-1 from 1993.

<comment><USER18> > It's very lacking even compared to MPEG-1

Not if you have aliased frames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could anyone more familiar with the field explain why is this better than the now-forgotten-well-i-guess MNG?

<comment><USER20> It is said that the MNG decoder uses a few hundred kilobytes of code whereas APNG reuses more code from the PNG library. APNG is sort of a hack where the first frame is a normal PNG and subsequent frames are hidden in custom chunks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple- image_Network_Graphic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple- image_Network_Graphics)

<comment><USER21> It's not that the first frame is a normal PNG and that the rest of the frames are hidden. That's close, but it's not exact.

PNGs are stored as files with multiple kinds of chunks inside. The relevant one here is the IDAT chunk, which holds image data. Most PNGs have just one IDAT, but APNGs carry multiple (one for each frame). Readers that don't care about animating will simply display the first IDAT and stop reading there.

So it's a bunch of PNGs, coalesced into one, with some frame timing data. And the code for reading them is tiny if you already have a PNG library, because you display them like you would a regular PNG, but making sure to read out every IDAT, at the speed denoted by the acTL and fcTL chunks.

<comment><USER22> Hopefully there's some delta compression between the frames. Or something other than a dumb array of independent images.

<comment><USER18> There's no true inter-frame compression, but frames layer on top of each other by default. Unchanged areas can be transparent.

<comment><USER23> So a player is basically compositing many alpha-transparent images on top of each others to create the video?

<comment><AUTHOR> Something like that: [http://littlesvr.ca/apng/inter- frame.html](http://littlesvr.ca/apng/inter-frame.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds good, but I think they should add MathML support before this. It strikes me as absurd that Chrome doesn't yet support MathML. :-(

</comment><comment><USER25> When testing APNG for a local project last year which involved only Firefox, I was trying to save some space and have better color support using APNG.

I found it to be quite buggy, slow, and even occasionally leading to crashes. I switched to webp. APNG was never given enough love, despite being a very useful format.

</comment><comment><USER26> Benefits of apng vs. video?

<comment><USER17> Hard to find any. It's a primitive format ignoring 20 years of video compression research. It tries to be replacement for GIF by repeating its mistakes: it has very basic inter-frame compression, lacks motion vectors, doesn't guarantee keyframes, RGB-only, and frame decoding isn't parallelizable.

In 8-bit mode it supports even fewer colors than GIF (GIF can combine frames to achieve thousands of colors), and in 24-bit mode it's larger than GIF.

For full-motion video it requires 10x-15x more data than VP9 to be decompressed by the CPU, and there's no hardware acceleration.

[https://kornel.ski/efficient-gifs](https://kornel.ski/efficient-gifs)

There's false dichotomy between "animations" and "videos", mostly due to historical reasons and that older codecs (and AWebP) used 4:2:0 subsampling which made them blurry. VP9 supports alpha, 4:4:4 mode, and it's cheaper to decode (it's more complex, but using 10x less data offsets that), so it'd be best to forget that GIF and APNG ever existed.

<comment><USER27> Which makes the timing all the more inscrutable. AV1 is supposed to have its bitstream finalized this month. Why now, when WebM is so widespread and there are new formats on the horizon, resurrect APNG after neglecting it at the only time it was relevant?

<comment><USER28> APNG is the format Apple is using for sticker packs in iMessage. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess Google is ramping up to announce a sticker store for Allo... sticker pack devs could port them over without any effort.

<comment><USER29> What is a sticker pack and why do you need to buy them?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's serious business.

[http://www.ubergizmo.com/2016/06/line-270m-a-year-sticker- sa...](http://www.ubergizmo.com/2016/06/line-270m-a-year-sticker-sales/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> APNG is great, but animated FLIFs[1] would be even better. Looks like many of their former todos have been completed, and from the remaining ones, only three are related to the file format per se. Hopefully these, too, get completed in time. Although, seems like getting support for new file formats in browsers takes time...

[1] [http://flif.info/animation.html](http://flif.info/animation.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Why? I thought animated WebP was superior in every aspect.

<comment><USER32> It is, but WebP has lots of politics involved since it is closely related to WebM, and there are staunch non-supporters of that.

I would hazard a guess this is getting implemented now to try to make WebP look worse.

<comment><USER33> Why would Google implement something in their own browser to make their own image format look worse?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fucking finally! I've been following this bug for at least 5 years. 5 years ago, when it was first proposed, this could have been a big deal. Not sure these days.. but I sure would love to see GIFs disappear..

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd like all formats for both IMG and VIDEO tags.

The gif animations are really video. They play in IMG tags; they are silent and do not have video controls. Put them in VIDEO tags and they ought to get video controls.

Putting a proper video format in an IMG tag should work like an animated gif does: silent, without video controls.

A plain image is a 1-frame video. It should work in a VIDEO tag, just to keep things consistent and orthogonal and all. A 1-frame video is an image; it should work with an IMG tag.

</comment><comment><USER36> If Edge follow we can almost use APNG in production [http://caniuse.com/#feat=apng](http://caniuse.com/#feat=apng)

</comment><comment><USER37> What about interframe compression?

<comment><AUTHOR> Supported [http://littlesvr.ca/apng/inter- frame.html](http://littlesvr.ca/apng/inter-frame.html)

<comment><USER38> Thanks for this link. Also a good test case for Chrome Canary (59)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'd be curious to know why they chose APNG over MNG.

</comment><comment><USER40> been waiting for this FOREVER</comment>


Centsable Mom's - <AUTHOR> http://centsablemoms.weebly.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> CHECK OUT MY NEWEST GIVEAWAY AND ENTER TO WIN YOUR OWN VERY HEALTHY SPIRAL SLICER BY VARIETYLAND, SUPER EASY ENTRY AND THIS IS AN AWESOME PRODUCT, EAT HEALTHY THIS YEAR AND MAKE IT FUN WITH YOUR OWN SPIRAL SLICER BY VARIETYLAND</comment>


How to Report Bugs Effectively - <AUTHOR> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

<comment><USER2> If everyone reported bugs this way my life would be over 9,000 times better</comment>


What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www-users.math.umd.edu/~jkolesar/mait613/floating_point_math.pdf

<comment><USER2> Here's the most recent submissions of this article:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051062>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982332> <\-- comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1937182>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1746797></comment>


Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was funded by the US government - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/ <comment><USER2> There's a lot of tantalizing material to read, but when you're covering the history of an entire project, even in a longform article, it's still possible for an author to cherry pick enough "moments" to build a case that doesn't match the hype of the headline/summary.

I don't know enough about Tor, I don't use it on a regular basis, don't even know enough about the technical details to assume that there's automatically more proof than hype about the implementation of its safeguards...but this anecdote by the OP stood out to me:

> _Case-in-point: In December 2013, a 20-year-old Harvard panicked > overachiever named Edlo Kim learned just how little protection Tor offered > for would be terrorists. To avoid taking a final exam he wasn't prepared > for, Kim hit up on the idea of sending in a fake bomb threat. То cover his > tracks, he used Tor, supposedly the best anonymity service the web had to > offer. But it did little mask his identity from a determined Uncle Sam. A > joint investigation, which involved the FBI, the Secret Service and local > police, was able to track the fake bomb threat right back to Kim — in less > than 24 hours._

This was a pretty interesting, and amusing incident...but to use it as circumstantial evidence to how Tor might be out-and-out compromised? The suspect used Tor on Harvard's network to cause an incident, in real-time, on Harvard's campus...that's not the situation in which Tor would ever claim to be the "best anonymity service the web had to offer"...and to conflate it as some kind of evidence that Tor is compromised doesn't give me much faith that the OP is accurately portraying the context for all the other facts.

To put it another way, it's no secret that the entire Internet basically owes its birth, and perhaps its existence as we know it, due to the U.S. Defense Department. Now imagine you had the task of explaining the Internet to someone who had never used it and knew none of its details...how hard would it be to describe a comprehensive history of the Internet, since the 1980s, that made it sound like the Internet was most definitely intended since conception as a vehicle for state surveillance?

(...ok, that it has nearly become so is besides the point, I'm referring to intent from its humble origins)

</comment><comment><USER3> Almost everyone involved in developing the Internet was funded by the U.S. government.

</comment><comment><USER4> The US Government, and even just the military, is an extraordinarily large and heterogeneous organization. The State Department and Military services desire network security and anonymity to protect free speech and democracy around the world. Intelligence services (NSA, CIA) want the exact opposite, penetrable and observable networks. Yes, believe it or not the entire US Government is not perfectly coordinated in a giant conspiracy. Different groups within the US Government have different goals.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't say I find this very surprising. For those who would like more details on the flow of funds, 990finder.com will let you browse though nonprofit organizations' historical tax filings, with only minor redactions (like the personal contact details of signatories, which could otherwise be used for nefarious purposes). You can learn all kinds of interesting things there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some comments on the original article seems to place the blame of the de- anonymizing on user errors.

As a crypto newbie, what is the 'correct' way of using Tor to minimize security risks?</comment>


SoftBank's $375M bet on pizza went bad fast - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-the-firings-at-softbank-s-robot-pizza-startup <comment><USER4> Is this really all that significant? It seems that since the WeWork fiasco, all of SoftBank's failures are being covered by news organizations. But isn't that simply the nature of venture capital? Invest in a lot of different things, most of which will fail, and make up for the losses with the Ubers of the world. (edit: It sounds like Uber was a bad example to use)

$375 million sounds like a lot of money, but it's 0.3% of their investment fund.

I'm not sure if SoftBank is suddenly performing worse than they have been in the past or if people simply just care more about the losses since they had such a major one recently.

<comment><USER5> > Invest in a lot of different things, most of which will fail, and make up > for the losses with the Ubers of the world.

Ironically, SoftBank is one of few investors to _lose_ money by investing in Uber.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't aware of that. So it's a bad example but the idea behind VC investing still stands.

<comment><USER5> I understand your point. My point (which I didn't really explain, so that's my fault) is that SoftBank is an especially terrible VC firm - at least when it comes to making money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Matt Levine's comments on this yesterday [1] are comic genius:

 _Presumably many local pizzeria owners have never heard of Masayoshi Son; presumably many more just would never have thought "oh we're actually a pizza tech company and we need hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital funding to scale." But if you have the proper mindset, if you believe in yourself, if you are not a guy opening a pizza place but a founder who previously sold a tech company, if you hire a strategic and retail consultant, if you test out various combinations of "[giant tech company] of [broad category including pizza]" for the pitch, if you call your pizzeria "the Gigaranch" or "the Pizzaplex" rather than "Al's Pizza & Subs," and sure sure sure yes fine if you employ some robots to careen around town sloshing cheese around trucks, then maybe you can be the pizza proprietor to rake in Masayoshi Son's millions._

 _You craft a pitch calculated to convince Masayoshi Son that your pizza delivery business will change the world. You meet with Masayoshi Son. He convinces you that you will change the world. Now you are all believers, all in it together. He hands you piles of money. You go home and weep to your friends, "I am going to change the world." The friends are like "wait what with the pizzas?" But it is too late for skepticism, you have the money, the robots are in the trucks, they are fanning out across town, the cheese is everywhere, they cannot turn back._

[1]: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-14/robot-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-14/robot- pizza-trucks-hit-some-bumps)

<comment><USER7> this is one of those moments where i really, really feel like we are all characters living in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

<comment><USER8> Domino's pizza was one of the fastest growing big companies in the world with a 30 minutes guarantee. It's quite similar to the pizza chain in Snow Crash actually. I would say Snow Crash predicted it before it became so successful.

<comment><USER9> I think you may have it backwards. Domino's was well known for their 30-minute guarantee when Snow Crash was written in 1992. Indeed, Domino's was in the midst of a lawsuit regarding it while the book was being written; it resulted in a $78 million verdict against Domino's. [0]

I give Stephenson credit for taking that guarantee to its logical extreme. And while I _love_ the book, it's funny how basically none of the predictions in it came true. No computers that project images on eyeballs, no 'poon guns, no losers walking around scanning retinas with backpack-mounted lasers, and book features working payphone booths!

0\. [https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/22/business/domino-s-ends- fa...](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/22/business/domino-s-ends-fast-pizza- pledge-after-big-award-to-crash-victim.html)

<comment><USER10> > _No computers that project images on eyeballs..._

Actually, we have something close to that now:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic- ta...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-tabletop- gaming)

It doesn't use lasers though.

The tech is basically working, and they're ramping up to production this year.

And no, you can't just walk around arbitrarily, but you couldn't do that in the book either (you could walk out of range). Also, Stephenson didn't worry about just turning your back to the laser projector...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a spoof book in 2008 called "Manifold Destiny," which consisted of dinner recipes that could be wrapped in aluminum foil and placed under your car hood, near some hot part of the engine -- to be nimbly cooked in the course of an hour's drive to your destination.

I skimmed it in a book store, back in the day. Quite funny! (Where else could you learn about Hyundai Halibut With Fennel -- cooking time 55-85 miles.)

Shoot me for not realizing that it was a visionary guide to getting funded by Softbank.

<comment><USER12> There's a good Top Gear episode where they tried 'cooking' with a car engine (apparently the food tasted awful)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9vhGiSL904](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9vhGiSL904)

<comment><USER13> They should have gotten Alton Brown to do their cooking for them!

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Some hires came directly from coding schools that specialize in quick boot- > camp-style training courses. One adviser recalls being surprised to learn > that some Zume coders had last worked at the porn-and-hookup site Adult > FriendFinder, known for a security breach that exposed the data of 412 > million users.

I kinda get the bootcamp concerns, but what's wrong with being a programmer at a porn site?

I also highly doubt the problems were with the software team either.

After the robotic delivery truck problem failed, which I think was a critical piece of the puzzle as they were essentially replacing retail pizza stores with mobile robotic food delivery machines. Which is something new - <USER2> critically something actually scalable with VC funding.

Instead this ended up requiring a sophisticated infrastructure if it was going to compete with pizza stores on every corner, who already have ovens and drivers close to the last mile customers + these old pizza companies already have central marketing funnels from mobile apps, phone calls, and online orders which then distributed "leads" to the various local franchise locations. So an Uber-style play is pretty pointless.

I'm curious if they should have tried a bit harder to solve the robotic pizza truck problem, so they didn't need to build out a centralized facility or a bunch of smaller delivery shops. Especially on the cusp on automated driving, these could just automatically pick-up food restocks at the central location and stay mobile as long as possible.

I'm convinced too many startups give up too easily as soon as they face hard problems then pivot to boring old-industry style companies that aren't real startups/VC companies. Replacing minimum wage workers with robots will never be exciting by itself.

<comment><USER15> I don't think the issue they worked on adult sites. I think the issue is they worked on AdultFriendFinder, who basically didn't care about user privacy.

<comment><USER16> Having previously been in the adult biz it is now considered a black mark on your resume. It was all mostly black hat work at one point or another.

<comment><USER17> That is a load a bs. If anything, it has been enabling for me. Any business that wouldn't want to hire me based on the incredible scalability experience I gained from working on a super high traffic/revenue project, isn't a company I would want to work for anyway. Nothing I did was black hat.

<comment><USER16> I was in the business pre-tube. I learned a lot too.

It's probably very different now but affiliate shaving, spamming, cpc fraud were all ubiquitous in the late 90s/early 2000s.

<comment><USER17> May 2006 - April 2010

Yes, we had to deal with all of that as well. Also built a lot of automated tools to deal with those sorts of things. My favorite one, I named 'the cockblocker'. ;-) This sort of experience you just can't get elsewhere and has been extremely valuable for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow a pizza compNy that delivers and cooks on the way to your house, all done by robots. I can see the pitch. All cooking is automated and in a few years we will become a self driving car company also and automate everything from taking order to cooking to even delivering to the door. There will be no human involved except to refresh the bank account to look at the money we are making!

Instead they ended up increasing their costs multiple times by cooking in parking lots and delivering over scooters. Wow. Classic example of not understanding what they are doing. Both the founders and investors have no understanding of either the tech or pizza marketplace and blindly jumped in. I guess it's great for the founder. They make money almost for free.

<comment><USER19> > They make money almost for free.

And the employees too, they got fat severances. All of this reminds me of a government jobs program. Strange, isn't it? If the free market wasn't so distorted in the US (primarily because of government involvement), companies like this would never get funded in the first place. Instead we have government jobs programs popping up all over, due to QE by the Fed. Next time they should just helicopter the money directly to everybody. Way more efficient.

<comment><USER20> SoftBank is a Japanese company heavily invested in companies all over the world. I am not clear on the direct link between US Fed QE and SoftBank's Zume Pizza investment.

If you are going to blame the US government for this bad investment, then you'll also need to give them credit for all of SoftBank's good investments too, right?

<comment><USER19> What good investments are you taking about? Nuro? Give me a break. WeWork? These are malinvestments.

<comment><USER20> Alibaba, Yahoo Japan, SoftBank Corp, ARM, Boston Dynamics

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> AI is the biggest scam of all tech pitches. Get some data, make a neural network, slap a single-page app on front of it, and BOOM - disrupt [insert sector that employees N-thousands of people]. "Once we scale, we won't have employees - and you'll own a percentage of the black box that disrupts the whole industry."

The parts of any business that can actually be automated by "AI" (aka machine learning, aka automated statistical analysis) are not the pieces of the business that justify its existence and value to customers. Self-driving cars are the most obvious debacle, but it's the same story everywhere - <USER3> capital to get the data and engineers to automate, but even the "good" AI still gets it wrong much of the time, necessitating endless edge-cases, human intervention, and eventually it's a giant ball of poorly-understand and impossible to maintain pipelines that don't even provide a better result than a few humans with a spreadsheet. Imminent implosion to the AI sector is incoming, sell now before the hype completely wears off.

<comment><USER22> Yet AI _within_ large companies is producing enormous benefits. If your AI startup is helping customers implement AI on their own data, you may have something. A one page web site on top of your own startup data? Yeah that sounds risky.

<comment><USER21> Do you have any examples of "enormous", tangible benefits from machine learning own data? I can see some benefits on the margins, but I have not found any evidence of disruptive productivity enhancements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am honestly surprised that nobody mentioned the critical quote:

"The fund is less than three years old and we've already had eight IPOs and returned $10.6 billion to our limited partners."

I would be willing to believe that. Maybe SoftBank is making money and paying out profits, despite some of their companies publicly failing in spectacular ways. In that case, they are absolutely correct to ignore public opinion and continue doing what they were doing before.

<comment><USER24> Unless they spent $20b to make back $10.6 :-) [In some circles it's called 'Selling a dollar for fifty cents."]

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's worth remembering that Vision Fund's apparent thesis wasn't just to have a many-losers-compensated-by-a-big-winner portfolio like most VC funds, but that they would pick winners by sheer scale of their checks. That should imply a smaller shares of outright failures (if Uber, Wework et al can even be called that, which I'm not sure) Unfortunately to test said thesis they HAD to raise that much money (maybe half was enough, but then again, if they could raise 100Bn, why not?) and HAD to burn it like they did. _Apparently_ the result is that scale alone can't bring the kind of outsized returns VCs rely on, even if they do end up creating juggernauts. But to learn that, someone had to try.

<comment><AUTHOR> > but that they would pick winners by sheer scale of their checks

So, $10 billion cargo-culting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Of course it did. The notion of some capital intensive robot to make pizzas is and was absurd on its face.

What problem was this company solving?

<comment><USER27> I think it's even narrower than that. Mobile pizza robots. Since non mobile ones surely already exist in the frozen pizza world.

They seem to have been solving for a delivered pizza that's maybe 10 minutes more fresh. I don't think there's much value there.

<comment><USER28> The way to do automated pizza is to miniaturize and streamline like what Wozniak was great at doing at Apple. Retain the storefront and physical location. Push the storefront to be more community driven as an open plan restaurant and pickup location. Develop tech to generalize automated food prep and inventory storage. Build up from the basics engineering disciplines for a fully custom assembly pipeline.

You don't want to lose the place in the community or the accountability of having humans to hold responsible for your food. A storefront can carry that. I don't understand buying a robot arm and calling it a day. Or cooking pizzas in black-box trucks that may arise suspicion in their cleanliness or quality. Being able to see your food being made adds a lot.

How you do all that and compete with the big dogs is an interesting question.

<comment><USER27> I typically only see 2 or 3 people manning a Little Caesar's. I don't know how much cheaper a robot could make an operation like that.

Here's an actual work schedule: [http://i.imgur.com/ukj47cs.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/ukj47cs.jpg)

<comment><USER28> You're not really building a robot, instead filling in the line between already automated sequences like the oven and chiller. Costco has a saucing mechanism, the biggest transformations are storing delivered inventory, managing dough proofing, topping pizzas accurately and self-cleaning. Cutting, boxing, delivering and taking orders is all straightforward.

I know what a schedule looks like, I used to make them for some of the busiest pizza shops out there. Shops next to universities and large business districts are the easiest to make the financial savings argument. The shops that benefit from a 24/7 model can make savings and increase throughput. Delivering on-time and without error can be massively improved. Making a cost reduction on the huge amounts of tiny shops out there is a great place to prove the tech financially, not where you'll see the most dramatic impact.

There is another automated pizza startup out there that has taken big frozen pizza factory tech and shrunk it down to retail size. It's not the right answer either. That tech makes too much sacrifice in accuracy, flexibility and quality for quantity.

There are more factors that go into this, maybe something better pursued elsewhere than discussed here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've actually interviewed with Zume in winter 2017/2018, they've initiated the contact through one of the platforms that only accepts the top-5% of applicants in the first place.

They've set me up for a failure during the initial phone screen by asking a tricky set of two simple questions that noone else has ever asked together and in that order, where you have to answer the first question before you see the second one:

* "You've worked at company X. Rate your performance on a scale from 1 to 10 for how your supervisor would rate you."

* "What is the reason for your separation from company X."

(Try doing these two questions in the above order if you've ever been let go from any job, and when the answer to the first question is fixed before the second question is revealed.)

These bros then went ahead and made a hard rejection right there on the phone, waiting for my reaction as if I'm a zoo specimen (it was kind of a shock to me at that time, as I've never been hard-rejected and humiliated like that before or after this incident).

Am I now surprised or disappointed these folks have failed? Not really. You get what you preach. The whole idea seemed kind of stupid and overblown in the first place.

<comment><USER30> >(Try doing these two questions in the above order if you've ever been let go from any job, and when the answer to the first question is fixed before the second question is revealed.)

I just always assumed people made things up for these questions and rehearsed their fake story ahead of time.

<comment><USER29> > I just always assumed people made things up for these questions and > rehearsed their fake story ahead of time.

How could you do that if you've never heard of the questions? (I did hundreds of screens, and it's never came up before.) Does everyone always research what questions each company asks? I guess if you're aware of the trap, it might be possible to avoid, indeed. Then it becomes a test on whether you've researched the company or not prior to the call; whether or not if have ever been fired; and whether or not you're a good liar.

Also, even if you're aware of the question — do you rate yourself below 7, or hide the fact that you've been let go by the person rating you 7 and above?

<comment><USER30> I've found questions about past jobs and why I left to be common enough. So I feel it's beneficial to have a narrative that paints one in the best light (ignores the negatives, promotes the positives, etc.).

>Also, even if you're aware of the question — do you rate yourself below 7, or hide the fact that you've been let go by the person rating you 7 and above?

That depends on your ethical views on lying. Personally, I don't owe companies anything and they will lie to my face about things if it benefits them (like layoffs, financial state, worth of options, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 2005: We will have fully-autonomous cars by 2020

2020: Making pizza automatically is so damn hard

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting hit piece. I know Alex from the gaming industry - he's very smart, very driven and very nice.

3 thoughts: 1\. 375mm is a huge number. 375mm is also 1/3 of 1% of the fund... so small potatoes. Any numbers they throw around are going to look enormous and make great headlines.

2\. If some of the investments don't sound a little crazy to you, then what is their differentiation or thesis? Remember PG's essay about good companies often start off sounding like terrible ideas.

3\. Yes, anyone that can raise large amounts of money, well, that may be their core strength. Raising money. They need to pair that with someone that can build a team. It's not a bad thing to be able to raise funds.

Every SoftBank funded company must have an army of reporters looking for weakness. One of the cons of getting money too easily I suppose.

That said, I did not / do not understand Wag, and I have 3 dogs and I pay for dog walkers. Against my will, I'm married, she insists. I'm not totally craZy.

<comment><USER11> It's the cognitive dissonance of your Point 1 that makes this so fascinating. I think we're all at peace with the idea that a $100m venture fund will periodically write a $375,000 check to a couple crazy dreamers -- just to see if they can make their long-shot idea come good.

And when funding is tiny, it fits into our sense of what risk-taking should be. These are garage/spare bedroom startups with no salaries, a count-the- pennies reliance on AWS to get it going, and an MVP that's "brought to market" via some brave/crazy little scheme that's very dependent on other people's goodwill and tolerance.

If it works, hurray, and if not, everyone regroups fast and moves on.

Multiple all the numbers by 1000x, and the distortions get very strange. Yes, the fund is still making a "tiny bet." But the founders now can goof around with more money than most serious presidential candidates enjoy during primary season. And that feels like a pretty unfortunate misallocation of society's resources.

<comment><USER33> > And that feels like a pretty unfortunate misallocation of society's > resources.

Unsuccessful startups don't do much damage to society. It's the successful startups that you have to watch out for!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> SoftBank sounds like they didn't get the memo startups involved in physical world don't really work because you can't "disrupt" complex logistics networks

</comment><comment><USER35> Wouldn't it make more sense for the VCs to make 375 bets of $1M each rather than 1 bet of $375M?

Just the other day we heard about the troubles of 23andMe that had $786M in venture funding. Are there any examples of startups that got >$300M in early funding that went on to become a huge success?

<comment><USER36> There aren't enough companies for the $1m bets. The Softbank Vision fund was closer to making 375 bets of $375m each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Those pizzas were not good but I don't think it had much to do with the robot. I don't know why they didn't just spend a bit more on ingredients.

<comment><USER38> I found them okay-ish. In fact, I felt the cooking was not uniform because it felt more "bready" towards the periphery (yes its supposed to be like that, but this was more than standard pizzas).

NB: things may have improved, I had ordered in Jan 2017, after seeing one of their vans going by in Mountain View.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It would be interesting to know the number of pizzas sold. What did each one cost SoftBank?

</comment><comment><USER40> So, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but how was this supposed to work? The pizza assembly apparently was done at a central location, which means they can deliver to a limited area. Let's say max 30 minutes for delivery, how far is that in a metropolitan area? The factory is not going to be cheap.

It seems like they figured making pizzas was the bottleneck, when really delivery is it.

</comment><comment><USER41> > In January, Zume cut 360 jobs, leaving a little over 300 employees, and said > it would focus on packaging and efficiency gains for other food delivery > companies.

Am I understanding correctly that they went from an idea to 660 employees in 2 years? How common is this in VC funded startups? I can't imagine this would be easy to manage effectively.

</comment><comment><USER42> Where I live they have this TV show where startups have 2 minutes to pitch their idea to some investors. I remember people who built a fully automatic pizza machine. They asked for a few thousand euros and failed. I wonder how much money they would have got from Masayoshi Son. Somebody should make a TV show for/with him.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is very odd to read as a founder. On one hand, you have VCs and Angels telling you you have to be "10x of everything's that's out there!" to get a 1M seed check. On the other, you see someone who's arguably 10x worse getting a medium sized bank given to them.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's really peculiar. It's the nature of venture capital that your moonshots will pay off the dozens of trash companies you invested in, but what happens if some presidential candidate decides his media organisation is going to write an article about every single one of your investment failures? Is this a matter of a media eco-system that doesn't understand a business mdoel sticking an oar in where it doesn't belong?

</comment><comment><USER45> I researched Zume quite deeply for interviewing with them and I never could figure out how they intended to make money. They had a vast plan that was way to big to execute all at once and none of it was ever going to be complete. I got the sense that they had received way too much funding and had gone on a feature-creep binge as a result. I learned a neat lesson from that: you can kill a startup with too much money up front.

</comment><comment><USER46> Has SoftBank made ANY bets on American companies that are on trajectory to make significant returns?

<comment><USER47> They purchased most of their Uber stake at $33. It's at $40 now, so they've made money on Uber despite what the media wants you to believe.

<comment><USER48> Yes, they technically did. But they are congratulating themselves on an 18% gain, having invested in early 2018. The S&P 500, with reinvested dividends, is up 22% over the same period.

<comment><USER47> Upside for Uber is higher than S&P at this point. Could easily go above IPO price given the general upward trend + their good earnings.

<comment><USER49> Then they could have bought S&P500 first, then buy into Uber now

<comment><USER47> That's just called hindsight. If anyone knew at the time of decision what the perfect investment was we'd all be billionaires.

<comment><USER49> Right, we don't. But no one buys the S&P500 because it's the perfect investment. It's diversified. Much less risky then buying an individual stock like Uber.

<comment><USER47> You're wondering aloud why a VC firm doesn't just buy the S&P. I think you can figure that one out yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> FYI: Uber is back to around $40 after a good earnings call. Softbank purchased most of their shares around $33 (though I think they also purchase some around $48), so they are mostly profitable on their Uber investment.

Not out of the question for Uber to reach $50+ by end of year.

</comment><comment><USER50> Would it be a sound investment strategy to short everything that is fianced by SoftBank?

<comment><USER51> AFAIK they only invest venture capital meaning the stock is very rarely publicly traded meaning it can not be sorted, or generally even invested in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think you need to be seriously stupid to spend $375M on something like a pizza chain. To me it looks surreal seeing people giving somebody like him $100B

</comment><comment><USER53> Has SoftBank made _any_ profitable investments lately? All I hear about them is going bust (WeWork, pizza...).

<comment><USER23> "SoftBank Vision Fund has had 12 exits. SoftBank Vision Fund's most notable exits include NVIDIA, Uber, and Flipkart."

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank-vision- fund](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank-vision-fund)

<comment><USER54> Didn't SoftBank buy high and sell low for nvidia, though? (and maybe uber, too?)

<comment><USER55> Not for Nvidia, they sold at $218/share with an average basis of $105/share.

I can't find a number for Uber alone, but they posted a $6.5B loss for Uber and WeWork together.

<comment><USER54> Ah, thanks. I didn't realize they had options to sell at $218, so I was thinking of the market price in Feb 2019.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Despite the poor company, fanboying over getting a Levine callout in the "blockchain" bit heh [0]

[0] - tbtc.network

</comment><comment><USER57> Is there a list of successful Softbank companies? It's starting to feel like the only time I ever hear about them is when some batshit Web 7.0 gig-economy company that should never have existed starts losing its shirt, and then it turns out that Softbank has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in it.

</comment><comment><USER58> That robotic arm looks like it could lift something 100 times as heavy as a pizza.

</comment><comment><USER59> Sometimes I pity masayoshi son, while I fail to earn a hundred thousand properly.

</comment><comment><USER60> Sounds like Zume would have been a perfect merger partner for Juicero!

</comment><comment><USER61> SoftBank will go bankrupt. Such bad and incompetent investments...

</comment><comment><USER62> ok so how exactly do you pitch to softbank?

</comment><comment><USER63> Best quote from the article:

        "I've never seen data to suggest that being charismatic
        and confident and overly brash is linked to a
        successful business," says Kellie McElhaney, founding
        director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and
        Leadership at the University of California at
        Berkeley's business school.</comment>


Why New Relic Is Raising $80 Million Now - <AUTHOR> http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/02/05/why-new-relic-is-raising-80-million-now/ <comment><USER2> They seem to have missed the most important reason:

\- Because we can raise it now at a good valuation and the future is uncertain

<comment><USER3> Definitely a contributor! These are favorable times to have a solid business model and a bunch of healthy growth. Capital was pretty cheap and allows us to try to build a long term, sustainable biz!

Patrick Moran - VP, Marketing, New Relic

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They sent me, a customer, an email announcing the funding. Congrats to them, but why are you emailing me...

<comment><USER5> Ditto, seemed a very odd thing to notify us of but then they do seem to be quite spammy in general.

<comment><USER6> Same thoughts here. They use fairly aggressive email marketing, which is difficult to unsubscribe to.

I clicked the 'unsub' link in the footer of this particular marketing email and hit: 1) an SSL warning from Chrome, and 2) a 404 on accepting the SSL warning.

<comment><USER7> Doh! I'll check that out. I'm New Relic's Director of Product Management and work closely with the marketing team. Apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last week I was standing behind a couple guys wearing New Relic shirts and I overheard a conversation like this:

      Larry) We just got a brand new 9TB storage array for the intranet
      Moe)   Wow 9TB is really huge!
      Larry) I know right, but the graphics department needs like 3TB and keep asking
             for more, don't they know that 9TB is huuuge?
      Moe)   Man that's insane, the marketing guys are already over a terabyte!
             What are we going to do?
      Larry) I dunno man, we'll probably have to tell them no.

I'd guess they need the money to buy a larger filer.

<comment><USER9> 9TB, huge? My NAS in my home office holds 12TB and that's just Virtual machines, snapshots and random work related data + some music/movies.

<comment><USER8> We were trying not to crack up laughing. Days like that make standing in the Senor Sisig or Special Xtra lines well worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think they have a RC helicopter manufacturer to pay off.

<comment><USER11> I still haven't gotten mine! but it's only been a week.

<comment><USER12> I was promised a book or a t-shirt. Haven't received anything after several months :(

<comment><USER13> You should follow up. I received a shirt and it's really nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They send me so many emails. It's a joke, I probably put in a fake number but I hear they also call a lot of people. Offer a free 'data t-shirt', make you install their product and call/email you constantly.

</comment><comment><USER15> New Relic needs competition not funding. Their prices are ridiculous and there's nobody to keep them honest because they're the only game in town.

<comment><USER16> If you are running a JVM or CLR stack, check out AppDynamics - much deeper visibility, more deployment options, more depth in feature-set etc.

PS: I work for AppDynamics

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should use some of that money to decrease their absurdly high subscription price when you run 10s of dynos on heroku

<comment><USER18> Agreed. We have 100 dyno's running and it was around $7k a month! This effectively doubled our dyno cost. We turned it off as it wasn't really telling us anything we didn't already know.

<comment><USER19> If you are worried about cost, just run it on a subset of your servers. 10-20% of your servers should be enough to gather most information you need... unless you are using new relic as the only aggregator of server status/monitoring... and that should be heroku's job.

<comment><USER18> We were battling a specific type of Heroku error (H12) that really required all of our dyno's to be monitored. We turned NR off and went with a (much) less expensive service that ended up telling us exactly the information that we needed across our entire cluster of machines. Hopefully with this extra cash, NR can improve their service because I honestly wasn't that impressed. It didn't live up to the hype at all for me.

<comment><USER20> Mind noting which service? We're a New Relic customer but oh yeah, frigging expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> New Relic has the most aggressive sales staff I've seen after CDN providers. With their absurdly high prices, I'm surprised they need any funding.

<comment><USER22> i agree.. they sent me so many follow up emails i had to unsubscribe. i can't understand how a supposedly modern software service would not understand what is appropriate email frequency.

turned me off totally.

<comment><USER23> Count me in as another lost customer. They were even calling me to try and upsell their service to the point where I started avoiding their calls.

The whole thing just felt so high pressure, spammy that I'd rather not deal with them anymore.

<comment><USER3> Ugh... as a marketing guy trying to build an awesome, lasting brand, I hate these comments. We talk about it a lot internally and do a lot of coaching to make sure we're not too aggressive. It is a balance though - growth and aspirational goals to be a meaningful long-term business coupled with wanting to be a healthy participant in our community... Sounds like on occasion we've failed.. Please know we're listening to feedback like this - it doesn't mean we're going to stop contacting people who use our product, but it does mean we care, and will work to REFINE our commercial tactics.

firstname.lastname@example.com VP, Marketing New Relic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So I just saw Lew speak and I wanted to share this awesome anecdote about the origin of the name. Lew was in a meeting with a VC and before the meeting he asked him what the name of the new venture was. Thinking on his feet, he plugged his name into an anagram finder online.

Lew Cirne=New Relic.

</comment><comment><USER25> 5\. They need to keep pushing tweets into my timeline that I always ignore.

</comment><comment><USER26> 5\. We want to give fellow nerds awesome t-shirts for free.

<comment><USER27> They still owe me gift cards for referrals. Though I did get two t-shirts from them. (which were quite nice!)

<comment><USER3> email firstname.lastname@example.com or email@example.com and they will hook you up!

Patrick Moran VP, Marketing New Relic

<comment><USER27> Thanks, Patrick - I went ahead and shot them an email. My ticket ID is #30057.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To put up $100,000 billboard signs next to the 101?

<comment><USER3> Just a tiny FYI, We occasionally buy billboards at discounted rates, but not near $100K. We have one up right now that cost about $8,000 on the 101 in San Francisco. Sounds like you've seen it!

\- Patrick Moran, VP, Marketing New Relic</comment></comment>


Bjarne Stroustrup had his Reddit account suspended - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/blelbach/status/1295018218298335232 <comment><USER2> I made a twitter account once. I followed maybe 4 people basically as a way to subscribe to whatever they were saying, then liked a few posts.

I got banned the same day and told that I had violated their tos in an undefined way and that attempts to contact support would be ignored. My only tweet was to say that I had finally made a dumb twitter account.

Maybe the assumption was that every human on earth must already have a twitter account, so any new account must be a bot?

These platforms are just ridiculous and we shouldn't use them.

<comment><USER3> Were you using tor, brave, strong adblocking or a disposable email and refused to give your phone number? All these things will get you banned now when trying to open a new account.

<comment><USER4> uBlock Origin (with roughly default settings) has never tripped Reddit's new account security stuff for me. I could see how it would make financial sense for social networks to ban account creation from Tor and disposable emails given the high spam-to-legitimacy ratio, although it's understandably frustrating for people who want anonymity.

<comment><USER3> Reddit is fine but parent was talking about Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't know impersonating someone else on Reddit was a bannable offence... I thought the whole point of sites with throwaway usernames is everyone can pretend to be someone else, and provide proof of their identity (or not) as they see fit.

<comment><USER6> That may have been true in the past, but now AMAs are an important part of Reddit's business model. Here's an example [0]. Allowing randos to impersonate celebrities undermines that.

[0] [https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/nfl-reddit-ama-video- rev...](https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/nfl-reddit-ama-video-revenue)

<comment><USER7> AMAs ask for proof

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ken Thompson's Reddit account: [https://www.reddit.com/user/unixken](https://www.reddit.com/user/unixken)

He also has a Github account with 3.4k followers, but no repositories: [https://github.com/ken](https://github.com/ken)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love Reddit, it's one of the sites I spend hours a day on.

Out of curiosity I went to an on-site interview there, because it would be fun to work at a site I felt so strongly about. I was never more turned off from working at place as I was when I went. They weren't horrible at all, but there was this level of arrogance that I didn't enjoy, plus a level of complete unreadiness. Some of the teams I talked to were completely understaffed and the "old timers" felt detached. It seemed like they aren't solving the problems that users want solved, and are driven by this alternate goal of "increasing engagement" even though they are one of the top sites on the Internet. Instead of making subreddits easier for moderators to manage and make better, they are taking an orthogonal route that benefits them but doesn't help the real content creators on Reddit. It was very disappointing.

I got an offer but it was a "take it or leave it" one, so I left it.

<comment><USER10> It's not very noble work but it does sound fun to work on a team with resources. I interviewed at Google for a year and it was for a team trying to squeeze a half a percent more juice out of ads. It was dreadful.

<comment><USER11> >interviewed [...] for a year

Yikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a clickbait. I was expecting him to get banned for having an opinion contrary to the popular ideological consensus or something but the reality is even more ordinary: his Reddit account was suspended because Reddit does not believe it is him. This happens to celebrities every now and then as social networks struggle to get rid of thousands of people impersonating them for fun or evil. Real Sharon Stone (or Julia Roberts, I can't remember already) had her OkCupid (or Tinder or something else, I can neither remember this) account terminated in minutes after signing-up. I just wonder how do ordinary people actually having the same names do.

</comment><comment><USER13> It looks like the account isn't fully banned. It's just exhibiting undefined behavior.

<comment><USER14> I very much hope that was a joke about C++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks fixed now.

Earlier, his user page ([https://old.reddit.com/user/bstroustrup](https://old.reddit.com/user/bstroustrup)) said, "This account has been suspended". Now when I load it, it looks normal.

</comment><comment><USER16> As Reddit has ramped up their own activism, embraced political bias, and enacted heavy handed censorship, their actions against users have become increasingly imprecise and often absurd. It's hard to peek behind the veil but mods of subreddits have lots of power these days. I wouldn't be surprised if they can also take site wide actions at this point. They can also act as a hive mind due to mod meetings and mod orchestration from the admins and since the top subreddits share many common mods (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018)). It's time for alternatives: [https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/)

<comment><USER17> I would enjoy a Reddit clone that had a simple sitewide ban on politics. The problem with politics is that it's infectious: either a site keeps it highly contained and controlled or it slowly takes over most communities over time and dominates. This happened to Twitter and it's happening to Reddit. I'm curious to see if it will happen to TikTok, which for most of its existence managed to avoid politics.

HN has avoided this fate by being extremely selective about which political topics are allowed and frankly by banning most of them.

My thinking is let Reddit continue down its course toward a site specifically for politics or politically-driven conversation about various topics and let all substantive non-political discourse move elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Did he upvote something on an undesirable subreddit?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595&goto=news)

</comment><comment><USER19> Someone must have failed to learn C++ so miserably

</comment><comment><USER20> Overzealous mods run amok. Power tripping does weird things to people

<comment><USER21> Moderators can't suspend accounts; only administrators can do that.

<comment><USER22> If there is one thing I see folks persistently misunderstand, it is the separation between mods and admins, and which powers each group has. It is really unfortunate for mods, who end up getting blamed for all sorts of things that it is impossible for them to know or do.

<comment><USER23> Public moderation logs might help make this distinction more clear.

<comment><USER24> Is there a reason why mod logs should be private at all?

<comment><USER25> Brigading, mod harassment, doxxing, etc.

<comment><USER24> >Brigading

???

>mod harassment

It doesn't have to contain who did it

>doxxing

Then make it so you can't see what was deleted if the deletion reason is "doxing". Also make it a bannable offense for mods to misuse that reason. Also make it so that if there's a pattern of it happening in the subreddit, the whole moderation team will be replaced (to prevent mods from using sockpuppet accounts to do their dirty work).

<comment><USER26> You're reading it backwards. Its to support that kind of stuff, not discourage it. Reddit is pretty toxic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cancel culture claims another victim.

Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for nerds. Introverted nerds and intellectuals created the technology that enables social media to exist. That same technology is being used to exclude nerds from the internet.

What's left for nerds in the modern world? Nothing.

I don't use C++ right now but I might want to later and I don't like seeing its creator ostracized.

<comment><USER28> >Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for nerds. Introverted nerds and intellectuals created the technology that enables social media to exist. That same technology is being used to exclude nerds from the internet.

WTF are you talking about? Social media has been an unqualified blessing for nerds. Practically every pastime that used to belong to nerds (video games, programming, D&D, anime, _using a computer_ ) has exploded in popularity since the dawn of the web and become far more mainstream. There is no conspiracy to exclude nerds from the internet, at all. And I see no indication of "cancel culture" having any involvement here.

Reading your past comments, you seem to be suffering from a persecution complex tied to identifying as an "introvert," and a belief that some conspiracy of "extroverts" is persecuting people like yourself. That's not happening anywhere but in your own mind. Seek help.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SaaS or mobile game? - <AUTHOR> If you were equally skilled at crafting games and and SaaS products (assume you enjoy creating both), which would likely be more profitable? <comment><USER2> Assuming you identify an area for SaaS for which there is minimal competition, I would tend towards SaaS because it probably would take less effort to get to MVP and then with some upkeep it would have a longer revenue generating life.

Games and Apps need to be more polished to sell (if at all) and then if you don't have new releases new sales will rapidly decline. All successful apps and games end up getting a lot of on-going upkeep.

BUT ... in either case, it really depends on the marketing investment (money and effort). It's rare to create something that _just sells itself_.

</comment><comment><USER3> If your SaaS does $10k/month you're paying expenses proportionate to how many people use your service and you've probably got upkeep.

If your app does $10k/month that can be pure profit and not even have a website.

<comment><AUTHOR> True-- I keep hearing the game (or app) market is incredibly competitive, but what market isn't? The way I see it, with SaaS you can get to 10k "easier" with fewer customers. I feel a game may require many more customers and isn't reoccurring revenue, but the "no upkeep" is a nice perk for "passive" income.</comment></comment>


To Break RSA 2048 and RSA 4096 - <AUTHOR> https://alberto.mobirisesite.com/index.html <comment><USER2> What are the factors of 2519590847565789349402718324004839857142928212620403202777713783604366202070 7595556264018525880784406918290641249515082189298559149176184502808489120072 8449926873928072877767359714183472702618963750149718246911650776133798590957 0009733045974880842840179742910064245869181719511874612151517265463228221686 9987549182422433637259085141865462043576798423387184774447920739934236584823 8242811981638150106748104516603773060562016196762561338441436038339044149526 3443219011465754445417842402092461651572335077870774981712577246796292638635 6373289912154831438167899885040445364023527381951378636564391212010397122822 120720357 ?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cyphers RSA2048 and RSA 4096 can be easily broken, 90-97% easier with a new algebra designed to find very large primes.

</comment><comment><USER3> If true, this is big news. Do you have more info? Examples, code, academic papers?

</comment><comment><USER4> ...what is this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cyphers RSA2048 and RSA 4096 can be easily broken now. 90-97% easier with a new algebra designed to calculate very large primes.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Interesting launching soon page - <AUTHOR>

In the world of social networks, Sometimes you just want to get the most right information out @right place, to tell everyone that 'Hey, this is me!'. Digixcard is for those situations.<p>Any thoughts ? <comment><USER2> i hate these lawnchrock pages. Very little to no insight into product or even barely scratches the surface on what you are actually trying to accomplish. Scrap the canned lawnchrock service, put up a useful page with a few screenshots, and better information.

<comment><AUTHOR> do you know any another better service ?

<comment><USER3> My brother, dad, mom, and sister for starters. That and a $20 themeforest launch theme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does this sound better ?

In the world of social networks, Sometimes you want to exchange the most precise information at right place in just few seconds,to tell everyone that 'Hey, this is me!. Traditional Business cards are not enough. Digixcard is for those situations.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://digixcard.com/> here is the link

<comment><USER4> Careful with the grammar and phrasing on here. As a social networking site, communication is key.

 _edit_ Also just realized that this was a "template" landing page of sorts. If you have access to a designer, have them take a few minutes to whip up something unique to your app. A landing page like this is a serious turnoff (especially for the geek crowd who will be early adopters).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback. Any idea's on templates we should use.

<comment><USER4> No templates. Come up with your own, something unique to your product. Templates are a great indicator of someone who doesn't really care about their product. If you don't have a designer, hire one. I'm available =) <http://www.wellroundedgent.com></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Achieving Accessibility Through Simplicity - <AUTHOR> https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-27-accessibility-through-simplicity/ <comment><USER4> This article hit on a number of issues I have with today's Web development.

The Biggie:

>Remember that the browser is the user agent, not the developer agent.

Others I find significant:

>"trust the web browser".

>Don't mess about with the scroll wheel

>don't override default behaviors on the right click and text selection.

>Don't use JavaScript to create custom input elements like text boxes, combo boxes, or scrollbars.

>Try not to use a purely visual representation of information, such as an icon: these should always be paired with text.

>Also avoid moving information around — animations and visually complex state transitions.

>When adding images, always include an "alt" tag with a plain-English description of the image.

When using correct document structure and semantics, it can be amazing what you get for "free" with respect to usability.

Additional issues I deal with on a daily basis which exist because some folks weren't satisfied with the default, correct behavior:

\- A div with a "click" event is not a button or link

\- A div with nested span elements is not a select

\- The ad hoc "click" event handling does not handle auxiliary/middle click behavior

\- An icon, with no accompanying text, also has no title attribute or anything else to convey its purpose to the user

\- The ad hoc navigation implementation does not recall scroll position

\- The ad hoc navigation implementation does not allow me to "back" out of the website

\- The scroll event handler, called tens/hundreds of times per second, so that it can update the sticky "progress" bar that someone thought was necessary to inform me how far along the article I've come, increases my energy bill and the ambient temperature inside my home

Sometimes I just want to grab these folks by the collar and yell "Stop touching it!"

<comment><USER5> I would append 'unless you do it really well' to a lot of these statements. In fact, I bet you use websites on a daily basis that do many of these, but you don't even notice because they do it well. You only notice those who do it badly.

Except for stealing the back button. There's a special hell for any dev who does that.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that you can do it well enough that no one using a browser in the normal way would notice, but people doing things differently, whether by necessity (e.g. because of a disability) or preference, would still notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing stood out to me, from reading the post and the HN discussion. I think there's a real distinction to be made between web pages and web applications. HN seems to have a bias against web applications which is probably unfair.

Most web developers today do not set out to build web pages. They start with full-on experiences they would like to bring to users, and the web stack is their tool of choice in doing so. There is nothing wrong with this! And different considerations apply in the development of such applications versus a web page.

Philosophically, SourceHut is about non-browser-based workflows (e.g. using email for merge requests). Since SourceHut users do far less of their SourceHut-related work on the actual website, SourceHut can afford to take a web page approach. GitHub, in contrast, focuses on browser-based workflows. They actually do a pretty great job at it - and this is something that they can do only because they take a web application approach. I like their keyboard shortcuts, for example, but these would be difficult (impossible?) to implement on a simple HTML page.

No single user can say that one approach is right and the other is wrong. All they can do is assert preferences. At the end of the day, traffic does the talking.

But thinking in terms of web pages vs. web applications makes things like this:

> Many companies have written checks with an uncomfortable number of zeroes on > them to get the job done.

more understandable.

<comment><USER8> > HN seems to have a bias against web applications which is probably unfair.

It may be unfair, but I think part of it is a pushback against the cultural zeitgeist that the web is meant as a platform to deliver content to passive users. If web authors assume that users are out there to just passively consume content, then yes most of the web will just be elaborately designed applications designed to guide the passive user.

> All they can do is assert preferences. At the end of the day, traffic does > the talking.

I think this simplification is part of the problem. Traffic doesn't dictate anything. Just because The Bachelor receives more eyeballs than War and Peace doesn't mean that The Bachelor is a superior product to War and Peace, or conversely that War and Peace is a better product than The Bachelor. Each has its place in our species' cultural milieu. The web has a growing culture of trying to erase media plurality and embrace a single hot, or dominant form of publishing, and I think this specifically leads to the outgrowth of these sorts of big flamewars. Different forms of media can coexist, and traffic isn't the only mark of success.

<comment><USER7> Your reply really made me think - you are absolutely correct about traffic not being the end all and be all measure of successful content. Thank you for pulling me out of the echo chamber. :)

It isn't just about guiding passive users through content, though. My comment was motivated by a little dilemma that I have been wrestling with:

I'm building a search engine and have written the first version as a React app. I've been wondering if we shouldn't switch to a more traditional web page structure.

Drew's post made me realize that I want to give my users - not passive - <USER3> application experience so it's okay to stick with the current setup.

<comment><USER8> > Drew's post made me realize that I want to give my users - not passive - <USER3> > application experience so it's okay to stick with the current setup.

Yup, and I think that's fine! I love using the web applications that I do use. I think we just need to take a hard look at what should be an application and what shouldn't, especially given the target audience. Having SPAs with infinite scroll to display a blog post really is just unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The user is already comfortable with the way their browser works, and you > will fail to capture the subtle nuances of their user agent with your pretty > imitations.

Amen! One form of browser imitation that particularly annoys me is client-side page loading. This is where JavaScript code intercepts activation of links, loads the new page using XHR or the like, then updates the current DOM in- place. Yes, this gives web developers the opportunity to prefetch pages or do fancy animations. But the accessibility problem here is that there's no way for an implementation of this technique to signal to a screen reader that a page loaded just as if the browser itself had loaded the page. Yes, you can use an ARIA live region to make a screen reader read your own message when you've finished loading the page. But I want my screen reader to be in control of what it does when a new page loads, e.g. automatically reading the contents of the page, possibly in a user-configurable way. So I think it's better to let the browser just load the page.

<comment><USER9> That sounds like a problem with the accessibility APIs then. I'd imagine that the script that replaces the DOM in-place also uses History API to tell the browser that this is a new page. At that point the browser should announce that it's a new page and do whatever you've configured it to do, but I just tried it in ChromeVox and it doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we all recognize that the web today has become overcomplicated. That said, a lot of Drew's advice here is dogmatic.

 _> Leave the page at its default font size and avoid using custom fonts, preferring to use vague selections like "sans-serif" and "monospace"._

Why? These are all easily customizable by the user.

 _> Try not to use a purely visual representation of information, such as an icon: these should always be paired with text._

There are plenty of near–universally recognizable icons. Do your OS's windows say "close" in the title bar, or do they simply have an X?

 _> Also avoid moving information around — animations and visually complex state transitions._

Animations can be overused, but they can also serve an important purpose: displaying the transition between states.

For example, when you scroll your mouse, does the window just snap to the next page? Or does it go bit by bit so you can see where the new information comes from, and where the old information goes? Which do you think is a better experience?

<comment> phoe-krk > _Try not to use a purely visual representation of information, such as an > icon: these should always be paired with text._

Curious and purely technical question: are screen readers not using the alt text of an  tag? Does something like this not cause the "foo bar baz" text to be read out twice in a row?

Foo bar baz

<comment><USER11> Icons are often included using different methods that don't support the alt attribute. Icon font systems like Font Awesome use CSS like this: .fa- trash::before { content: "\f1f8"; }

Screen readers these days have good support of the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements and most can the values of content properties but if the icon font is using the Unicode private use area, a screen reader can't read it. There's a new standard for content properties that allow for inclusion a text alternative within the value but it's not broadly supported and in browsers that don't support it, the visual content is not rendered.

Icons are also sometimes included using a background-image (maybe one that's part of a sprite sheet) so a text alternative needs to be added somewhere.

aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes can provide text alternatives but generally including the text in an adjacent element that's visually hidden is more robust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course. Analogous to how your closet is a lot easier to keep organized when there's _less crap in it._

</comment><comment><USER13> Drew, if you are reading this, please add Gogs/Gitea and OneDev to this list of benchmarks on the performance page. Otherwise it is somewhat disingenuous by comparing against Gitlab and GitHub since Rails and Ruby are hardly known for their speed when it comes to web apps. Compare against Go and the JVM if you want an honest comparison.

[https://forgeperf.org/](https://forgeperf.org/)

[https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

[https://gitea.io/en-us/](https://gitea.io/en-us/) (Gogs fork)

[https://onedev.io](https://onedev.io)

</comment><comment><USER14> Simplicity is difficult.

I use a comparison that I call "Nakamichi vs. Adcom."

Those of us...of a "certain age"...will remember these as top-shelf stereo brands. They used to cost a bundle.

Nakamichi amps tended to be...engineer-friendly: [https://audio- database.com/NAKAMICHI/amp/amplifier2.JPG](https://audio- database.com/NAKAMICHI/amp/amplifier2.JPG)

Adcom amps tended to be a bit simpler: [https://www.hifiengine.com/images/model/adcom_gfa-585_power_...](https://www.hifiengine.com/images/model/adcom_gfa-585_power_amplifier.jpg)

Both were pretty awesome, but they definitely "spoke to" different crowds.

I think that the debates over which is better would never be resolved.

I like to take the tack of "Make it simple, but no simpler than absolutely necessary to get the principal task done."

This is really important in both usability and accessibility.

There's a famous quote from Josef Albers: _" In design, sometimes one plus one equals three."_

Every element that we add to a design; whether functional or ornamental, can have a combinatorial impact on complexity.

<comment><USER15> Off topic, but I noticed something funny: the simpler amp looks is closer to what professional audio engineers use. We expect not having treble/bass controls in our mixing monitors because we expect their response curve to be as flat as possible.

(In practice some have controls to compensate for room issues, but we rarely use, and just blame the room)

<comment><USER14> I'm not surprised. The Adcom amp relies almost entirely on its preamp, which, though simpler than the Nakamichi one, is a bit more complex.

On the other hand, this is the Nakamichi preamp: [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/7b/d6/b97bd60bcbedd59ddf4e...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/7b/d6/b97bd60bcbedd59ddf4ea972d17094c1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _Also avoid putting text over a variable background, such as a gradient or > tiled background._

For sure. And especially don't have text over a background image that scrolls beneath it. Since the image isn't likely uniform in color, you will end up creating color/contrast problems.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _< meta charset="utf-8" />_

I'm curious: why do many people continue to use the trailing slash in many places? As far as HTML parsers are concerned, it's _completely_ useless. (On HTML tags, that is. It's still significant on MathML and SVG tags.) Doesn't seem to me that it will help authors to understand what's going on, either—if anything, it muddies the waters so that people will think that you can close tags that way (you can't).

</comment><comment><USER18> Accessibility is one of those things that isn't taken seriously enough by many people. It's good to see this on the front of HN.

<comment><USER19> I share the same sentiment, but it would be even better if what's shared was more factual / less dogmatic – or in this case if sourcehut itself was a better example. At a high level it's somewhat correct that sticking to HTML- only features is better, but otherwise there are a lot of issues with the specific guidance in the post:

> Don't use JavaScript to create custom input elements like text boxes

Sure. But some JavaScript would be valuable, for example to display validation errors without a full page reload (try typing special characters in [https://git.sr.ht/create](https://git.sr.ht/create)). This means screen reader / keyboard users have to navigate back through the page, to the field, and discover what the error is. A skip link would be nice too, that only takes HTML.

> A good way of simulating the screen reader experience is to view your page > with Lynx. Conveniently, Lynx does not support JavaScript.

Please don't waste time in Lynx if you want to simulate the screen reader experience – if you're knowledgeable enough to have Lynx installed and use it, you can learn to use a screen reader. There are good, free ones with every OS these days. They are much more capable than Lynx, and support JavaScript just fine.

> Avoid littering marketing garbage, superlatives, and ads for other parts of > the site (or even ads outright) throughout your page, as skipping these is > more difficult for a screen reader than for the typical visitor.

If your ad is wrapped in a `<section aria-label="My ad">` or aside, then it should be very easy to skip.

The general guidance here is to focus on plain language. Sourcehunt should avoid error messages like "Name must match [A-Za-z._-][A-Za-z0-9._-]*"

> In summary, if you want to get accessible quick, a good start for your new > website might eschew npm install in favor of this:

Please update this template to have the `html` element with its `lang` attribute defined. Not having "lang" defined means screen reader users have the page read out in their browser's default language, rather than the page's language, which can make the content unintelligible.</comment></comment>


Atari Declares Bankruptcy  - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/atari-declares-bankruptcy <comment><USER2> Who cares? This thing called Atari is really just Infogrames with a borrowed name. And Infogrames is really just GT Interactive. So it's more like "company currently in possession of borrowed and reborrowed name declares bankruptcy."

</comment><comment><USER3> As it was pointed out to me a day ago, here are a few more versions of the story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090807> (venturebeat.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092088> (telegraph.co.uk)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092123> (bloomberg.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092327> (guardian.co.uk)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092447> (latimes.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092764> (lohud.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092889> (bbc.co.uk)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093489> (cnn.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094529> (wsj.com)

<comment><USER4> This covers the convoluted history pretty well: [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/01/todays-atari- bankruptc...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/01/todays-atari-bankruptcy- latest-in-a-long-history-of-corporate-deaths/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "People, once upon a time, would use 'Atari' in place of the term video > games,"

I'm a little young for Atari, but a decade or so later, when I was a kid, we would use "Nintendo" or "Mario" as synonyms for "video games".

"Hey want to play Mario?" "Sure, what game?" "Double Dragon/Zelda/Excite Bike/etc" Was a common conversation among my friends circa 1988 or so.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the best of Atari: <http://www.atariage.com/> <http://www.atari.org/>

Atari Force go! <http://www.atariage.com/comics/index.html>

I still have a working Atari 2600 system and some carts.

Too bad the Atari company is but a name for Infogrames and is nothing like the original Atari.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wished they would re-issue the 2600 console and games.

<comment><USER8> I think there was an Atari "Joystick" available a couple of years ago that included an emulator with lots of 2600 games.

<comment><USER9> There's been a couple generations of the Atari Flashback console. From the second generation onward, they were replicas of the actual hardware. You could solder in a cartridge port and play your original games.

<comment><USER7> I did not know that. Thanks! (Heading to ebay to score one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> wow, didnt know they were in trouble - they had <http://atari.com/arcade> (which i thought was cool).

<comment><USER11> They are not.

Atari US ( real Atari ) is doing a legal maneuver to get rid of the parent company Atari France ( that in reality is just infogrames thinking using Atari name will help them somehow )

<comment><USER12> This would seem to be a pretty important point missed completely by the article. Do you know a better article we could read?

<comment><USER13> This article is a bit better.

[http://www.dailytech.com/Atari+Files+for+Bankruptcy+Looks+to...](http://www.dailytech.com/Atari+Files+for+Bankruptcy+Looks+to+Escape+French+Parent+Company/article29705.htm)

Having worked for a company which publisher was Atari and having Atari cancelled all other games in development with the excuse of going just mobile... I can't say I am surprised :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Space: A sudden light - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/space-2016#section-2?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/asuddenlight <comment><USER2> The real problem with the space economy is that there are really very few business plans:

\- Space Tourism

\- Imagery Acquisition

\- Communications

\- Science

\- Astroid Mining (pending)

... And it turns out that none so far have been good businesses, and the small sat form factor is really limited. I really really love space stuff, but I don't see any of these creating explosive growth in the short term. Eventually the costs will come down, but it will probably take a long time.

*EDIT (as pointed out by pjungwir):

\- Zero G manufacturing

<comment><USER3> I keep daydreaming about what a killer business might be. A few other ideas that probably won't pan out but are interesting to think about:

\- Since nuclear reactors are dangerous, what if we build them on the moon instead? Is there any way to generate energy there and get it back to earth?

\- In _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ the moon-dwellers fight earth by hurling rocks (maybe just threatening?), which strike with more force than nuclear weapons. What if you could use the gravity gradient to generate electricity instead? Instead of windmills we could drop rocks. :-) Of course if this actually worked we would solve global warming just in time to discover global massing.

\- Or if we had a way to transfer energy, we could just put big solar arrays up there.

\- I keep hoping that something will turn out to work much better in zero- gravity, like manufacturing or farming or energy production or some medical procedure.

\- Since superconductors require low temperature, what if we put them in space? What if our biggest supercomputers were in orbit? What else might superconductors be good for? What if quantum computers are easier to build in vacuum?

As soon as something gets a toehold, then there will be economic incentive for mining, so that you don't have to launch all the stuff the other industries need.

<comment><USER2> \- Zero g manufacturing ( _good edit_ , has some potential)

You have something with the spaced based solar (SBSP). The unsolved problem there is the microwave power beaming, which has some technical hurdles (synchronizing microwave frequencies across multiple dishes is apparently hard, but necessary for power beaming, and there is an ozone problem). Any other space based power system has this same transmission problem (people have proposed attaching conductive tethers to orbiting NEOs to drag through the magnetic field).

The "nuclear reactors are dangerous" bit hasn't really been true in a long time (Chernobyl was the worst disaster, but killed a lot fewer people than hydro/coal/etc).

Space is actually not great for computers. Dielectrics change in vacuum, and cooling is actually a big problem (turns out space isn't actually "cold" in the traditional sense, it is insulating, and heat tends to build up). Quantum computers are probably a red herring, there is vey little difference on an atomic scale in/outside of micro-gravity.

<comment><USER4> Even if you solve the synchronization problem, you still have the main problem with power beaming of the massive sizes needed of the transmitter and receivers at space scale distances, thanks to diffraction.

Microwaves need prohibitively large transmitter/receiver arrays if you go beyond LEO (drag is an issue in LEO). While putting a kilometer^2 scale transmitter in orbit isn't a problem, putting the similarly sized receiver for it on the ground is. At optical or smaller wavelengths, the arrays can be much smaller, but they will still be large structures.

Disclaimer: I worked with a company that does terrestrial optical power beaming.

<comment><USER5> > putting a kilometer^2 scale transmitter in orbit isn't a problem, putting > the similarly sized receiver for it on the ground is

Wow, I would have guessed the exact opposite. What's the reason(s) for the higher difficulty on the ground? Planning permission? Cost of the land? Needing multiple sites in multiple countries for non-geosynchronous orbits?

> Disclaimer: I worked with a company that does terrestrial optical power > beaming.

That sounds fascinating. Could you elaborate? What's the power level and the application?

<comment><USER4> Building the structure itself isn't too hard as it will be mostly empty space. For microwave it will be an area packed with odd looking antennas, optical is basically an off the shelf solar farm (though the cells should be tuned for the application rather than general sunlight).

The hard bit getting all the regulatory ducks in a row, as you will need ground->space no fly zones, environmental approval, not be sited near anything else in case of alignment/focus/astigmatism (side lobes for rf) issues, etc. Generally out in the middle of nowhere there is some endangered animal (or its migration pattern) that will cause no end of issues regulatory wise for something this big/dangerous to wildlife unless you keep the energy density down below that of the sun (at that point you might as well use normal solar). You will also need controls to rapidly shutdown the system (or shunt to new location) in case an aircraft violates the no fly zone or another satellite is about to pass between the transmitter and receiver.

> That sounds fascinating. Could you elaborate? What's the power level and the > application?

What they did when I was there was fairly diverse. The biggest was delivering 1kw at a distance of 1km with ~5-10% plug to plug efficiency. The primary application for that system was inflight refueling of electrically powered drones. They normally do much smaller/simpler (10w over dozens of meters) systems for oddball applications (eg: sensors that are sitting on something charged to 500+kv, etc) and power over fiber-optics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reads like a big PR release for a budding industry....but since I am a huge fan of space exploration... I'm totally cool with it.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's so interesting to me is that the more we want to do and further we want to go in space the more unity and collaboration we seem to need at the planetary level

</comment><comment><USER8> In Elon Musk, we trust!

</comment><comment><USER9> What problem do space flights solve?

<comment><USER10> Long term continuity of the human race, by backing up to another physical medium, I.e. planet

<comment><USER11> Anyone looking to invest in the long term continuity of the human race would be foolish to invest in space travel. There are practically limitless terrestrial investments which would offer much better ROI.

I have yet to see anyone describe a single scenario of even low probability where Mars is more habitable than the entirety of Earth.

<comment><USER12> The idea is to have our eggs in more than one basket so that the next mass extinction event doesn't take us all out or set us back hundreds of years. Whether life on mars is fun or not is a separate question. (I do agree with you. We can barely manage to live in Antarctica. Mars will be much more difficult.)

And in becoming multiplanetary, we can start gaining the tools that could help us avoid some of those extinction events.

<comment><USER11> I get the idea. I'm saying we're better served by improving our Earth baskets than trying to add a Mars one. Moving 1% of your net worth out of your home currency doesn't make any sense if 99% of your money is invested in a Ponzi scheme. You want to move some of it to a safer investment before worrying about outlandish economic collapse scenarios. Not all diversification is created equal.

Not sure what you mean by extinction avoiding tools or why you think developing them on Mars will be easier than on Earth.

<comment><USER13> Different fundamental goal. Putting 1% in another market is an amazing way to increase the odds somebody survives. In terms of optimizing for "maximum likelihood of humanity's future existence" local improvement are marginal, versus colonization which essentially ORs the odds of survival together. The ideal is to have as many people as possible living sustainably in poverty in the asteroid belt as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is notable because The Economist penned this a few years ago: [http://www.economist.com/node/18897425](http://www.economist.com/node/18897425)

Of course economists are on par with Ouija board users at predicting the future.

<comment><USER15> The typical Economist staff writer is probably a 25-30 year old journalist with a B.A. and a prestigious-sounding alma mater, not an actual economist.

<comment><USER16> And an Oxford Dictionary on a hair-trigger.</comment></comment></comment>