F.lux v4 - <AUTHOR> https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/?v=4.55 <comment><USER2> Hi everyone--developer of f.lux here.

I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. We have been consumed with the idea that if the human circadian system is controlled by light, and if nobody knows what the numbers are in real life, then it is vitally important that we figure it out.

Our main effort since then has been about people and understanding how they react to light over time, and how technology can fix it. f.lux is intended to be a seed that will explain how all of our lighting can work better. It's a big project that extends beyond screens, and we think software is central to fixing the problem.

People who wake up at the same time need different timing and amounts of light, and it's not really about matching the color of a screen to a room. We've learned that almost every room is already too dim (during the day) or too bright (at night). And the trouble is that most people can't figure this out by looking around - they need some tools to help out.

This system that controls sleep and alertness is nonvisual, which means that everyone's intuition about what looks good might be pretty far off from what it does to your body. This certainly is borne out by the last 100 years of electric lighting.

Electric lighting has shifted sleep schedules by >4 hours, and people are not sleeping nearly as much as a result. We think this is connected to ADHD, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and many other serious problems.

So while it is true that other people have turned screens orange like f.lux did in 2009, the truth is we didn't do nearly enough back then. Our goal is to understand the biology and make something that actually works for a wide variety of people.

We have tried to address this question ("people, not screens") in little pieces, e.g., why we are making big changes to f.lux's schedule default settings on our "big update" page:

[https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/](https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/)

But it is hard to talk about outcomes when nobody at all expects you to be thinking about them. Snake oil is not what we're about.

We have a _lot_ of work to do -- apparently including a lot of writing and explaining, and I appreciate your support.

<comment><USER3> What's the best way to get flux or a flux like experience on mobile: is it a rooted android with the flux app?

Ios night shift isn't nearly as good, and jailbreaking ios is much harder than formerly.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it natively supported at this point? I switched through several ROMs and all had it. It's just not enabled by default.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it's quite the same blue shift. It certainly isn't on ios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminder that both Mac OS and Windows include blue light reducing as a built- in feature. In case you don't like installing applications for something the OS already does like me.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT207513)

[https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night- light-o...](https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-on- windows-10/)

<comment><USER6> And both of them work better than flux and have more customization options. There's literally no reason for flux to exist anymore.

Edit: also android and ios

<comment><USER7> I can't speak for the Windows implementation, but this is far from true on the Mac OS 'Nightshift' implementation. Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it, misses the Hue integration, misses having multiple levels for particular times of the day, general quick disable, disable by application, disable when in full-screen application... The list goes on. There are plenty of reasons to still be using Flux on Mac.

<comment><USER8> > _Nightshift won 't get nearly as warm as I prefer it_

Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays.

> _general quick disable_

There's a toggle in the Notification Center, at the top (may have to scroll/pull down.)

<comment><USER9> >> Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it

> Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays.

The whole problem is that it isn't configurable to get as warm as many people (myself included) prefer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just wanted to take a moment and thank the developer for their hard work. It Really started a movement and is now standard on pretty much every OS now.

<comment><USER11> I just sent them $15 through the donate link at the top of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I once was a regular streamer on Twitch.tv and would regularly plug the use of blue light reducing tools. Another fun thing you can do is wear orange safety goggles to completely block all blue light from the room. You look pretty silly, and I'd wear them on stream sometimes. And people would always ask me, "what's with the orange goggles?" There were a few times when I'd get someone to install F.lux, they'd use it for a bit, and then turn it off, and they'd instantly get it. If you try this experiment for yourself, the difference is incredibly jarring.

If you have any trouble sleeping at night, I'd highly recommend trying one of these strategies. My orange goggles made their way into my digital nomad one bag, they were so useful for my sleep. Occasionally I'd actually sleep in them.

If you want to get really crazy, you can order a bit of a material called "rubylith" (just do a Google search for it) and put it over your laptop or phone screen. It makes things really red, but if you are just reading your Kindle books in bed it can really help prevent staying up until 2am on accident.

<comment><USER13> If you want to get really _really_ crazy, you could stop using your computer at night and try reading (paper) books before bed.

<comment><USER12> So interestingly enough, wearing the orange goggles or using the rubylith on a device that lights itself can get less blue light into your eyes than reading a book with a lamp on next to you (or of course, wear the goggles with a lamp on works too). Could be a further way to fall asleep faster. I've been fascinated by this phenomenon for a while - the theory I've heard is that humans evolved during a time when the sun was the only source of light besides maybe fire, and so darkness or light the color of fire signaled the time for being sleepy. When you get the blue colored light into your eyes at night the brain gets confused and doesn't know what time it is.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for a genuine answer to my snarky reply :)

Re fire, another thing that's helped me is using candlelight in the evening. It keeps things darkish (and of course it's a warm color of light).

<comment><USER12> Haha, no problem! And yeah, candles would definitely then work. Some people I've read suggest that if you can don't use any artificial lights at night (obviously kind of difficult), and if you do you'll naturally start getting tired at sunset. Then you get to wake up at 5am! Hard to have a social life though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> just a reminder that redshift exists: [https://github.com/jonls/redshift/](https://github.com/jonls/redshift/)

no phone home/automatic updates (plus it's open source)

<comment><USER15> For Windows there's also:

RedshiftGUI.

Small, portable, sometimes a bit buggy but absolutely irreplaceable.

There's also a .NET based one, but it's so slow it feels like you are starting Photoshop, so it's crap IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was using f.lux/redshift for a few years because everyone else was using it. During a reinstall of my system I forgot to install it and it took me about a week to realize it was missing...

I never bothered to install it again because I realized I did not gather any benefits from it.

<comment><USER17> Interesting, I really can't stand using a system at night without it.

<comment><USER18> Same here. It's like staring into the sun when it's off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > There's one big slider, and you can adjust it whenever you want to change > it. f.lux will remember what you choose during the day, in the early > evening, and at night.

Does that mean I can't adjust the preferred temperature at night if it's currently day time? If so this is a huge regression. If not, the two sentences are badly worded. I already find the current f.lux interface badly designed[0] and this might just make it worse.

[0]: First, its main interface has a slider and a button group _below_ it. That makes no sense because the button group affects what settings the slider display. It really should be a tabbed region enclosing the slider instead. Next, options like "fast transition," "sleep in on weekends" really shouldn't be placed in the menu bar. It makes the initial setup a lot more troublesome, and really makes no sense given you already have a window to configure it. And some options aren't really clearly described in the first place.

<comment><USER20> You can adjust daytime/sunset/night-time under one view (via upper right "grill"-options icon / "Adjust day & night colors together") as 3 separate sliders - works fine for my use-case scenario. What I'm most happy about is that they've fixed the stuttering issues when using special graphic modes (games..etc.) in v4! :). Also, for the lazy Win upgrade: [https://justgetflux.com/dlwin.html](https://justgetflux.com/dlwin.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have been using f.lux for years and loved it. One of the first things I would install on any system. But this latest update fundamentally broke for me. It goes dark an hour or more early, gets light again at sunset. It brightens up an hour before sunrise, and darkens as day rises. I end up manually enabling and disabling it to get things right, and half the time just kill the process.

Most likely the combined settings of some combination of my wake time and/or daylight savings time has something to do with it. I'm not sure. But before this last update, it always "just worked". And now that is no longer true.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am a happy, satisfied, long-term f.lux user. And I doubt that will change in the near future.

That said, I still deeply miss the long-dead Nocturne for its "night vision mode", which was perfect for working in the dead of night. Closest I can find to a good description: [https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision- mode-with-...](https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision-mode-with- nocturne)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'll go against the grain here and say that I see no benefits in Flux. I used to be in the hype train, but I've noticed it annoys me more than anything, and every time when the night would come I would just disable Flux until it just didn't make sense to have it installed on my laptop.

I don't know if it's just me, or if it's just a trend marketed by pseudo- science claims.

<comment><USER24> Former neuroscientist here: it's just you. You may not respond sufficiently/differently to cutting out blue wavelengths, but for many people, it helps.

It's not pseudo-science, and I'm not even sure why you said that. There's quite a bit of literature at this point demonstrating that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (the primary timekeeper of the body) is heavily entrained by specialized retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), that are most sensitive to blue wavelengths.

Here's a publicly-accessible review paper if you wish to learn more: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1)

<comment><USER25> Increasingly though daylight-frequency lightbulbs are becoming mainstream. Our house has them fitted everywhere, as does a new development of 100+ homes nearby.

I suppose that may affect sleep patterns in the short term but after several years of using exclusively 6500K lighting I don't have any problem falling asleep after turning-off the bedside lamp even though there's no graduated transition from 'blue' light to darkness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Biggest problem with F.lux used to be that it was tied to geo-location. As a Finnish person (with sometimes only a few hours of sunlight per day), you had to fake your location to something that would approximate the desired circadian rhythm. I hope this has been addressed by now.

(E.g. on macOS and iPhone you can simply just set the daily time when Night Shift activates.)

</comment><comment><USER27> What an incredible milestone. Really glad to see the team still updating this after so many years.

</comment><comment><USER28> Too bad it's proprietary spyware.</comment>


Star wars theme played by a floppy disk hack. - <AUTHOR> http://vodpod.com/watch/799407-hacked-floppy-disk-plays-star-wars-music-as-awesome-as-it- <comment><USER2> Maybe this is the right time to pimp my "Super Mario Bro's theme for laser engraver":

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq4VLwLFXaE>

I'm very interested in the idea of electro-mechanical music. We've all heard machines playing human instruments and machines synthesizing sound, but very few machines built to be novel accoustic instruments in themselves.

<comment><USER3> This is amazing. I'd like to hear more about this, specifically what gave you the idea and how you did it.

<comment><USER2> The story behind the laser itself is pretty interesting. It was largely built by people at a hacklab in Toronto. Here's a writeup from another member:

<http://www.andrewkilpatrick.org/?p=laser_cutter>

During the build, we noticed the sound of the stepper motors was unusually melodic. The sound it made while tracing an arc was inescapably musical.

One night, I just hacked up a Ruby script to translate a simple ASCII music notation into movement commands. This is actually quite simple. Feed rate * DPI gives you pitch and distance / feed rate is note duration. All the axes are intersected to create a single list of movements. When multiple axes are moving, a bit of trig is used to calculate the right feed rate.

The acceleration limits also have to be disabled on the machine.

Here is the code. It should work with any G-code based CNC machine:

<https://github.com/jedediah/lasermuzak>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you haven't seen this yet, this is probably the best example of a hack like this that I've seen. It was submitted for a contest that radiohead held, and I believe was the winner (it takes about a minute to get rolling):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ>

The sound of the scanner is pretty awesome.

And the original by radiohead in case you need some context.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ky1td3_6LY>

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmoDLyiQYKw> phantom of the opera

<comment><USER6> That would be Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

<comment><USER7> Actually, it's Toccata and Fugue in D Drive. Common mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> direct link to the video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE>

</comment><comment><USER9> Listen to Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4>

</comment><comment><USER10> What's a floppy disk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hum... born after 96 ?

It was the famous B:\ drive discs, they could keep 1.44Mb of data, yes that stands for Megabytes

I had a game called Rex Nebular that was 25 discs :D hahaha it toke forever to install.

<comment><USER8> A: was the 3.5" 1.44MB micro floppy as pictured in the video, B: was the 5.25" mini floppy

<comment><AUTHOR> No way. A:\ mostly was for those big square ones that could only fit 750k and were thin like a cardboard.

<comment><USER11> 750k? That is a pretty uncommon "big square" disk.

(5.25" were 360kB and 1.2MB).

<comment><USER12> 5.25 DD was 360 KB, and HD was 1.2 MB. However, there were also QD 5.25 disks which held 720 KB. But there were no 750 KB disks.

Man, I feel so old right now just for knowing that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Um isn't that the Imperial March?

</comment><comment><USER14> This would be more ominous if it played All Along The Watchtower.

</comment><comment><USER15> I did something similiar by switching on and off (with BASIC code) the relay in a BBC B, which turns the tape machine on or off. It kind of goes clickety click very rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER16> Music coming out of an electric arc (no moving membrane).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEeWtBAE5LY>

</comment><comment><USER17> For some reason, I still have a stack of floppies in my closet. Looks like I found a potential weekend project :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I've heard PCM audio through the PC speaker, it'd be interesting to try similar techniques with this setup.

</comment><comment><USER19> So PC shipped with a floppy _and_ a speaker only in order to be able to beep while loading? :)

</comment><comment><USER20> It sounds like someone playing a Kazoo in the background whilst a floppy disk is filmed

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Crazy hack done by someone with a lot of free time and discipline :D

<comment><USER21> pffft...we used to do that on our 1541's back in the day.</comment></comment>


Non-Deterministic Infinite-State Automaton - <AUTHOR> http://minimalj.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/non-deterministic-infinite-state-automaton/

<comment><USER2> I was intrigued by the "INfinite" in the title; but the author of the article just seems confused.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to read the article, but it appears to not parse or cuts off partway. I call shenanigans; flagged.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to tweak this post in an attempt to explain finite state automation in layman terms using comics. Posting at HN is intended for suggestions. regrets for delay in explanation</comment>


Show HN: Benchmark to compare Racket's Web servlets, Caddy, Flask, Sinatra, Plug - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/dbohdan/racket-vs-the-world <comment><USER2> Various results are discussed in the Google Groups postings that are linked from the repo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have some results available, to read them without running the benchmark?</comment>


An incomplete history of language facilities for concurrency - <AUTHOR> https://wingolog.org/archives/2016/10/12/an-incomplete-history-of-language-facilities-for-concurrency <comment><USER2> (2016)</comment>


America's Most Promising Startups: Profiling Startups Around the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepreneurs/1.htm <comment><USER2> This article is from 2008

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it's a constantly updated article- they keep on adding new startups... the most recent one was just added yesterday</comment></comment>


Is Silicon Valley Wasting Its Talent On Foolish Ideas? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3013350/creative-conversations/is-silicon-valley-wasting-its-talent-on-foolish-ideas

<comment><USER2> So long as it's a kind of adolescence period, it's not all that much of a 'waste'. Very good tools are being built to do mundane and transient things - but they are still good tools. Good ways to visualize, sort, design and otherwise interact on a gigantic network are being fine-tuned and honed.

Now imagine how, once made easy, pretty, useful and rapidly developable, those 'non-foolish' ideas will be after a decade or two of sustained practice on the 'foolish' ideas. It could be quite possible these foolish ideas are the etudes to the valley's greater works of art.

I'm graduating from a hard science PhD shortly, and I'd love to be able to sic the ease, prettiness, and developmental talent onto some pretty hardcore problems.</comment>


Malta: an island of secrets and lies - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2018/02/malta-island-secrets-and-lies <comment><USER2> I found this interesting after spending a few weeks there this Summer on a whim. Everything about it is just so improbable. Tiny ancient place, Arabic- descended language, Mediterranean climate, built environment like some cross of Crete and Jerusalem, Catholic culture and social mores, English food-and- drink, and now also ugly sprawl and car-culture, receding nature, people everywhere.

All that and crawling with the families of minor Russian oligarchs and unashamedly advertising all sorts of tax-haven services. Just... weird.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if corruption is to some degree inevitable in any country this small. How do you deal with international companies and billionaires who are richer than your entire nation?

<comment><USER4> The "tax haven" business model only works for small countries: Malta, but also Luxembourg, the Caymans, Panama, and Ireland.

If you can attract a significant slice of the world's wealth and somehow funnel just 1% into the local economy, that can be enough to provide generous services for a 6-digit population. But it obviously doesn't work for anything larger. My example of Ireland, above, is probably just on the threshold. And the model only worked for them because they also have a well-educated and english-speaking population, making it attractive for actual operations to be located in Dublin.

The problem is, obviously, that this is an international zero-sum game. The US, Russia, and most EU countries provide all the infrastructure that allowed their citizen to earn the money, but the money leaves those countries as soon as the tax-man rings.

Which is why the last decade has seen an assault on tax havens: Switzerland's bank secrecy laws have already been neutered, Panama has lost most trust with the recent leaks, and Ireland is forced to play nice by the EU.

It's highly likely that oligarchs will soon run out of such locales, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain both ingredients necessary for a tax haven: you need not only low taxation, but also robust rule-of-law. Those two goals come into conflict once the first is used to brand you an international pariah.

<comment><USER5> >>The problem is, obviously, that this is an international zero-sum game. The US, Russia, and most EU countries provide all the infrastructure that allowed their citizen to earn the money, but the money leaves those countries as soon as the tax-man rings.

This is a pretty baseless assumption. Most of the wealth is obviously produced in large countries with very significant natural and human resources, but we have no way to know if they would be producing more or less wealth if their tax burdens and governments were smaller.

What evidence that exists suggests government significantly smaller than the norm in the developed world is better for economic development.

If it is indeed the case that low taxes contribute to more global economic growth, then these tax havens are bolstering the world's economy rather than exploiting it in a zero sum way.

>>Those two goals come into conflict once the first is used to brand you an international pariah.

By the sounds of it, there is a concerted push by a large and powerful political faction to make it illegal for any country in the world to have low taxes, on the basis that a country exercising its sovereignty in this way is somehow victimizing and exploiting other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part of our travels took us to Malta. My family spent a few months there and got to be embedded in Maltese culture. Hard to do as a tourist because while the Maltese are nice they are not inviting to strangers. Since the Crusades they've been a softball between Eastern and Western empires, coming in and telling them what's what.

I was just a fly on the wall but what I learned is Malta is a mix of old world families and familiarity and new world, EU, business rules. Where even billionaire megayachts get duty-free fuel smuggled in from Libya through a series of handlers. It's also something I really enjoyed about that island. The big box stores were on equal footing or disadvantaged to local, small shops. Everyone had a friend or family member who dealt in one speciality or another. The rock bottom price wasn't reserved for friends or family. Little haggling was even necessary. The price you paid was the best price you were going to find. Whether that be sailboat parts, limes, or rabbit.

I really miss it and look forward to going back.

<comment><USER7> There's also a heavy mafia presence, and organized crime in general. When Italy cracked down on organized crime, some maafia elements moved their operations to Malta. The recent killing of a Maltese journalist was almost certainly related to organized crime [1] [2]. It's amazing how much violence they've had for such a small country [3].

That said, Malta is awesome, and this is not really something you see as a tourist. The scuba diving is some of the best in the Mediterranean.

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/03/italy-accuses- ma...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/03/italy-accuses-malta- failing-counter-organised-crime-murdered/)

[2] [http://europeanpost.co/mafia-seeing-malta-as-a-little- paradi...](http://europeanpost.co/mafia-seeing-malta-as-a-little-paradise- italian-anti-mafia-commission-warns/)

[3] [http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2013-11-20/news/50-un...](http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2013-11-20/news/50-unsolved- murders-since-1972-3238133761)

<comment><USER8> Honestly... the mafia presence / organised crime bit is either totally over my head or very much overblown in international media.

Source: Maltese born and bred, 24 years and counting.

<comment><USER9> Oh you have no idea how rooted the mafia is in Malta then.. I've experienced it first hand, and i'm not even a Maltese citizen. Everything you see in Malta is more or less under the mafia's influence, its really just like in the movies, and thats partly because, as another user pointed out, the mafia moved from Italy to Malta.

<comment><USER10> What did you experience first hand?

I'm curious as to how a non-citizen has a greater knowledge of Mafia presence than a Malta citizen.

<comment><USER9> I lived on the island(Sliema) for a few months a few years ago. Let's just say i know someone who knows someone... The maltese are completely unaware of whats really going down on their island.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personally, Malta is a great country but the political part is complicated and makes it hard to expect good but controversial change, ex: attempts to lower the number of cars on the road. If someone tries that, they might do some good but it's very likely to make a lot people unhappy and everyone knows everyone, voting for political parties goes for generations (15-16 year olds chanting for Labour party because their parents and grandparents did that -- even though they can't even vote yet). Hard and drastic changes are needed but you won't get reelected if you do that...

Apart from that, the occasional xenophobia and selfishness is visible.

From a dev perspective, iGaming (online gambling) is booming and raising the prices of rent making it more difficult for locals. Poor get poorer, eh..?

Source: Living in Malta for almost 2 years now.

P.S. The trick is not to read too many news, not having interest in politics, enjoying the weather and ignoring crappy people.

<comment><USER12> > voting for political parties goes for generations (15-16 year olds chanting > for Labour party because their parents and grandparents did that

That's true also in the US, and generally true for anything that is complex requiring dedicated time to 'understand'. The default route is to mimic parents. Some people never grow out of that behavior.

<comment><USER13> Can't really compare the two. while the US struggles on voter turn out. In Malta during elections there is a rabid and more than 90%+ of eligible voters vote. But its all tribal and pointless..

Some examples -> [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Malta+mass+meeting&tbm=is...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Malta+mass+meeting&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj7nL6i1srZAhVJ7lQKHafzAfMQsAQIKw&biw=1536&bih=759)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Btw, there was another murder of a journalist few days ago, this time in Slovakia: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/28/slovakian- jour...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/28/slovakian-journalist- was-investigating-political-links-to-italian-mafia)

</comment><comment><USER15> I worked for different sports book, casinos and poker companies there. Gaming licenses there are regulated and the environment is toxic. My work experience was very bad. Despite the regulations for that industry, mafia still drives the entire sector and is not something hidden.

</comment><comment><USER16> We worked with ST micro in Malta, they had a bunch of good MEMS engineers there, weird place for that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like an appropriate place to leave a link to this video: [https://fb.com/10157136069225329](https://fb.com/10157136069225329)

</comment><comment><USER18> Its a bizarre place for so many reasons. Us swedes are everywhere because of igaming. No one in Sweden ever thinks or talks about Malta, but we are enough Swedes here to be counted as a small city.

<comment><USER19> What's igaming? I'm kind of guessing online poker.

<comment><USER8> The palatable name for any sort of gambling/betting related sector really.

Gets annoying when I tell people that my hobby is gaming and they think I'm a closet gambler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fitting for a country founded by real Templars.

<comment><USER21> Malta wasn't founded (or ever ruled by) the Knights Templar, though it was for a period ruled by Knights Hospitaller, the other of the two best-known crusading orders (and the one that still exists, known now as "the Sovereign Military Order of Malta".</comment></comment>


The Zombie-Mobile: Car brands no longer reflect differentiation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ade3/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.y9vr35tbl <comment><USER2> > Through this lens it is not surprising that Porsche was an early adopter of > the crossover, if they didn't create it outright with the Cayenne.

I would argue that Honda started the category with the CR-V. Front-wheel drive, unibody construction, emphasis on utility for a typical family, yet has the high driving position of a SUV. They have sold millions of them.

Also, while the author mentions aerodynamics, the one thing that is driving cars to uniformity these days is legislation. Both the European pedestrian safety standard, and the soon-to-be-draconian US CAFE fuel-economy requirements.

<comment><USER3> Excellent point on legislation. It has at least once led to divergence of design (80's pop-up headlights) but safety standards, especially pedestrian safety, have dramatically constrained the style of the front end. Low hoods are a thing of the past in part thanks to that.

<comment><USER4> How does a low hood affect pedestrian safety? I'd much rather be flipped over the car then hit and possibly pushed under. Any studies on this, perhaps?

<comment><USER5> I love comments like this. "I have a random hunch about a subject I have spent 30 seconds thinking about. I bet it is correct and the regulators who have full time jobs researching this are wrong"

<comment><USER6> [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law) \- The best way to get an answer on the internet is to say the wrong thing.

<comment><USER7> This is why I always say dumb things. It's not that I'm looking to make you ignorant, it's that I want you to make me knowledgeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't help but feel like this is simultaneously insightful and insufferable. The author has interesting thoughts, but is obsessed with aesthetics.

You want differentiation? Every Subaru (save one) has AWD, and one of the best AWD systems on the market at that. Subaru never really sold cars on the basis of looking cool (save that same one).

As for the wind tunnel- that's a smart connection. A large amount of the stylistic similarity can be traced to the wind tunnel. But that is because we are slave to wind resistance, and the optimal shapes for fuel efficiency are pretty well known.

Statements like this:

 _The wind tunnel's usefulness has been perverted to legitimize the destruction of progress._

I cannot even figure out how to parse. The wind tunnel is now an excuse to gain fuel efficiency and avoid progress, where "progress" means "striking bodystyles"?

Or:

 _Wiedeking's use of the word "fickle" is telling. To translate, "People with taste are picky. The only way to make money is by satisfying those who can't discern quality."_

Wiedeking's problem with the sports car market is it fluctuates wildly no matter how good a car you make. It is the canary in the coal mine that is the greater car market.

<comment><USER8> Aerodynamic shapes may be well known, but can still be very dissimilar, and counter to what we perceive as "aerodynamic."

Point in case: the Citroen AX has a drag coefficient of 0.31, which apparently is the same as for a Porsche 997 Turbo. The AX looks like a box on wheels.

We aren't the slaves of the wind tunnel, as in that case we'd probably have some pretty mad shapes driving around, but slaves of wanting to look, well, the same as everyone else, to avoid any risk. But this is more a feature of entrenchment in the car industry than anything else. There is really no incentive for the big OEMs to do anything risky.

<comment><USER3> Ok, to be more accurate a number of variables come together with drag. If you are buying a crossover, you're probably interested in a roomy interior, safety, a higher vantage point for visibility, a short hood for easy maneuvering and again visibility.

Put all these things together, and the basic shape is that of an enlarged classic mini cooper. Then put this somewhat large, somewhat tall vehicle in a wind tunnel and sculpt it for efficiency, and you arrive at today's crossover.

You're right that aerodynamics does not leave us with only one possible body. We still have sports cars, vans, sedans, etc, each with a basic shape dictated by basic goals. But drag sculpts the shapes that go into the wind tunnels in generally uniform ways, because the wind treats a Dodge the same as a Ford.

<comment><USER9> > But drag sculpts the shapes that go into the wind tunnels in generally > uniform ways, because the wind treats a Dodge the same as a Ford.

As do safety regulations and testing bodies. Hence the same high belt and hoodline, same lack or rearward visibility, same super-thick A-pillars that trade visibility for roof strength (and in my opinion, this final design point ends more lives than it saves).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In which the author disdains the aesthetic of the crossover. I'm not sure if the author dislikes the idea of crossovers or dislikes the fact that crossovers look similar. What change would best please him?

I think it would be very fair to say that car companies don't spend much time branding their crossovers - look at the flagships and sport cars for that. Crossovers are functional vehicles - be comfortable, transport kids and groceries, be safe at a decent price. Every vehicle is a compromise - some are more extreme than others - the Hellcat for instance drives a hard bargain, but still has to make concessions to be street legal.

Also, as other commenters have pointed out, there are well differentiated crossovers that are not pictured: The Element, the Crosstour, Ford FLEX, etc.

A large part of the brand image of a vehicle is its front end sheet metal and grille, which are not shown in the picture. For example, if you look at the Buick and Chevrolet, you'll see that they are the exact same vehicle in profile. Headlights, Grille, Front end, taillights, and components set them apart.

Disclosure - I work for GM. These opinions are my own only.

<comment><USER10> The thing is that people act like the crossover form factor is new. It isn't. Take a look at the cars of the 1920s. Big tall two-box thing. Small box at the front for engine, big box at the back for passengers and cargo. You step up to get into it.

<comment><USER11> Whether 5-door, hatchback, cross-over, SUV, what-have-you, it's all just filling in space between the sedan and a van/truck. If you brought someone to 2015 from 1955 via a time machine nobody would step up to a cross-over or an SUV and be agog at how utterly different and incomprehensible a vehicle it is. It's just variations on a century old theme.

Big, station-wagon-y cars with extra height, that's what we've got in various different iterations. But the station-wagon is still "uncool" so we invent special names for such things, but really they are the same damned thing.

<comment><USER12> The station wagon and the minivan are uncool. The SUV is guilt-inducing and retrograde. Hence, the "crossover," which is basically a tall station wagon, a short minivan, or a low SUV, depending on your perspective. In all of these cases it also skirts the marketing risks now apparently associated with using words like "station wagon," "SUV," or "minivan." Sooner or later "crossover" will sound lame (kinda always has, but I digress). They'll call it something new.

<comment><USER13> You can pry my minivan steering wheel from my cold, dead hands. I'm firmly of the belief that most people that denigrate the minivan haven't driven even a moderately good modern one for any significant length of time.

<comment><USER12> I'm not casting any personal aspersions on the minivan. I actually respect the minivan. I'm just saying that the term/class "minivan" no longer seems cool, and car makers seem to be distancing themselves from it to varying degrees, replacing it with terms/classes like "crossover."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I drive an honda element. Its a odd car, but I really like it. Its not a beauty, but its certainly different and practical. It didn't see an update, sales slowed and its no longer made.

The design presentation linked is revealing in that its a car that was designed for something and totally missed, but ended up being different anyway.

The Honda CRV which is in the same class, is in the car lineup in the article and impossible to find. The element would have stuck out.

[http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/files/schumaker.pdf](http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/files/schumaker.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Heh. I work for a marketing agency that works with one of the major automotive brands and that brief is the kind of thing we see with every vehicle launch, model refresh, etc. Nobody wants to build a car for old, boring conformists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> maybe I'm just a car nerd but I actually can identify most of the models in that pic.

i don't understand this article, is he arguing that car makers should stop making these massively popular vehicles and focus on design passion projects? if the people demand a bunch of wacky bespoke 50s style vehicles then the companies will make them.

<comment><USER17> Yes. He further argues that competition is bad because it has produced this state. ("Competition doesn't produce variety, it results in commoditization until we are left with 23 identical variations of the same vehicle.")

He fails to note that there are actually many hundreds of other substantially different vehicles available for sale today.

He is also evidently unaware of what happens in the absence of competition: far from some sort of designer's utopia of unique individual self-expression, you get one vehicle to pick from, and you have to wait for 10 years to get one -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One reason car companies are conservative: unit-body construction and safety and efficiency standards mean that getting a new car to market is very expensive nowadays. In the 50s and 60s, restyling every year or so cost a lot in tooling (meaning the independents like Nash and Studebaker had a hard time keeping up), but it was almost pure fashion, with very little regards for aerodynamics or safety. And since the body didn't provide the main structure of the car, you could do some radical changes to styling without affecting much of the underlying function.

It's not to say that there isn't a lot of conformism, like in many industries. This leads, for instance, to the use of less-durable features like those silly plastic wraparound headlights; everybody has them, but because they aren't protected from the sun, they quickly fog and yellow; their complicated shapes also mean they're very expensive to replace for no good reason.

</comment><comment><USER19> You can still see house styles if you know what to look for.

And none of those look like say a Mustang Super Snake or a R8 or a Porsche 911.

</comment><comment><USER20> So if every vehicle is the same,vehicles are reliable, how do car companies persuade people to replace cars so often ?

<comment><USER21> You could more or less argue the same thing about phones.

They all have the same apps that 90% of people use (Facebook etc), they all have the same core features that 90% of people use (texting, internet and calling) and yet.. many people upgrade often.

I expect its just a newer = better mentality that humans share.

<comment><USER22> What about speed? Camera quality?

<comment><USER23> All decent smart phones from the last 3-4 years run Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Email, SMS, and a web browser just fine.

The Lumia 920 was released in __2012 __, and has an 8.7 megapixel camera with an f /2.0 Carl Zeiss lens, and supports 1080p video capture. You are not limited by the camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "By homogenizing the style across all brands, every brand sells more because the decision is easier." _Every_ brand sells more? That would mean that the homogenized style makes people buy a car who would otherwise not have bought one. Makes no sense.

<comment><USER25> Analysis Paralysis maybe?

<comment><USER26> Regression to the mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What does it say that I correctly identified the crossover of both brands of car I own (VW and Volvo) despite not having ever seriously looked at buying their crossovers?

</comment><comment><USER28> Not sure how serious to take an article on cars that misspells Volkswagen.

<comment><USER29> Is it an article on cars? Seems like it's an article on design that merely uses cars as an example.</comment></comment>


Cryptocurrency in the 2020s - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coinbase.com/what-will-happen-to-cryptocurrency-in-the-2020s-d93746744a8f <comment><USER2> The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for.

Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building.

It's this kind of thinking that leads people into the dark thicket that is "tokens": digital instruments bought and sold largely for speculative purposes. It's understandable. The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age.

The last two years have seem a solid refutation of this notion. Almost every token has lost value against Bitcoin. It seems reasonable to conclude that the carnage will continue.

So the money printing press ship has sailed. It's going to come as a shock for many people (some with economics degrees), but bootstrapping censorship- resistant money is a one-time deal. Any attempt to profit from the undertaking harms the credibility of the founders. Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise.

Here's a vision for the future of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will extend its role as a refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. It will become an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance.

That's your application for Bitcoin in the '20s. And it's a doozy. It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. There will be many attempts to "ban" Bitcoin.

Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do.

<comment><USER3> I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for."

Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second.

"Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling." -Satoshi Nakamoto

[https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke- coi...](https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coinbase-ceo- brian-armstrong-s-heart-so-he-s-now-focused-on-ethereum)

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size.

I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high enough that few individuals could afford to run full nodes.

<comment><USER5> Correct me if I'm misunderstanding things, but Lightning Network means off- chain transactions, right? Which can be be reneged on if one party is malicious, meaning they'll only occur between trusted parties? And in practice, that means traditional financial services companies and their KYC- compliant customers, which is the exact 180 degree opposite of the originally envisioned use case.

From where I sit, it seems like BTC was designed to be a currency that would free us from financial regulation, it has failed on both counts, and crypto enthusiasts are trying to turn it into an over-elaborate debit card because the alternative is for it to become a historical curiosity.

<comment><USER6> It's complicated, and I'm not sold on the Lightning Network as the future, but

> Which can be be reneged on if one party is malicious, meaning they'll only > occur between trusted parties?

This is not correct. My understanding is essentially each party is tying up Bitcoin as being between them on the blockchain, then trading cryptographically verifiable assertions of each other off-chain about what the latest status of the ongoing "tab" is between them. Either of them can close the tab at any time and reconcile to the blockchain.

They don't really need to trust each other, although this does introduce a dependency on some entity (whether the user's own server or a third party) to publish the latest version of the "tab" if the other guy maliciously tries to publish an older version of the "tab." And of course, that means you need some redundant storage / handling of those cryptographic assertions from the other guy about what the status of the latest "tab" is. But that doesn't require trust--you'd want to do it even if you trust the other party.

Or at least that's my understanding of it. I like the conceptual idea of LN but some of these details seem like dealbreakers to me.

<comment><USER5> > My understanding is...

That's how two finserv companies would transact off-chain with each other, but when I go to buy a cup of coffee with a bitcoin, I'm not opening up a payment channel with them for one transaction, that would defeat the whole point. The coffee shop will use a payment processor, who isn't going to deal with me off- chain unless I'm the KYC'd customer of them or some other finserv they trust. (please correct me if I'm wrong here)

<comment><USER6> I think you're correct in that this will be the inevitable result. It just won't really be for trust reasons.

You won't want to open up a payment channel to them, but you don't need to. You just need an already open payment channel to someone who is, or (more importantly) there is some route of payment channels between you and them through any number of intermediaries.

There won't be a way to enforce KYC on the network itself, and you don't need trust for this to work.

But because of the inherent cost / time / complexity reduction benefits of just maintaining big channels between large entities, normal people and businesses will inevitably be incentivized to just work through banks to do this. The banks can just hold all their money and handle keeping the channels between themselves open and funded.

And that's where I think you're correct. It leads to a world where KYC can be required easily because the vast majority of legitimate use cases will be through centralized endpoints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consider the source, right? How many people without a large vested interest in the propagation and uptake of cryptocurrency consider further growth likely?

My guess is that governments will more and more realize that the main utility of blockchains is money laundering and speculation. As has been remarked over and over again, they don't solve any above board problem more efficiently or with lower expense than existing technologies. I predict we'll see growing regulation increased amounts of crackdowns on cryptocurrency and its applications going forward.

<comment><USER8> I honestly don't understand where the perception comes from that this technology is only useful for laundering and speculation. Certainly it is currently being used for those purposes. But to say there is no imaginable use outside of that seems unwarranted.

I've commented in the past here that the use of public blockchains to automate the functions of clearinghouses and escrow services will be a huge cost reduction for many industries such as finance. The technology as of today is not ready to handle that use case, but with the developments currently in the pipeline for Ethereum v2, progress is being made in that direction.

If you look at what MakerDAO is doing with the Dai stablecoin, they've proven that it's possible to create a synthetic asset closely pegged to the dollar purely through financial incentives, and they did it all just using Ethereum v1. A holder of Dai can earn 4% APY through a Dai Savings Account, and a vote is currently in place to raise the rate to 6%.

I personally find it incredible that an asset exists on the blockchain that's equivalent in value to USD, with a higher APY than you can get from any US bank. And because everything is on the blockchain, there's a public ledger of exactly how much is being collected in interest from those who are collateralizing their Ether for a Dai loan, how much of that interest is being paid to savings account holders, and how much is being collected by the system as surplus. It's the closest thing we have right now to a decentralized bank.

Whether or not you buy into the technology, it's improving by the day and more and more use cases and applications are being tried out and built. If all you see in blockchain is money laundering and speculation, you haven't been paying attention.

<comment><USER9> > If you look at what MakerDAO is doing with the Dai stablecoin, they've > proven that it's possible to create a synthetic asset closely pegged to the > dollar purely through financial incentives, and they did it all just using > Ethereum v1. A holder of Dai can earn 4% APY through a Dai Savings Account, > and a vote is currently in place to raise the rate to 6%. >I personally find > it incredible that an asset exists on the blockchain that's equivalent in > value to USD, with a higher APY than you can get from any US bank.

I also find this "incredible", but in the old sense of the meaning as "not believable".

<comment><USER10> Seriously.

The risk adjusted return on whatever that crazy contraption is is almost certainly negative, and probably incalculably so.

The idea that any sane financial instrument could increase its return by _two points_ by the holders of it voting to do so is... I haven't the words.

<comment><USER11> > whatever that crazy contraption is

The people who built "that crazy contraption" are pioneers in an industry that is going to help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty via cheap, non- predatory financial services and create trillions in wealth by further unifying the global market.

I am somebody who spends hundreds of hours per year reading about Ethereum and blockchain. I could stop doing this whenever I want, I'm not bound by my employer or anything.

I keep at it because the underlying technology and things being built with it are amazing and valuable.

If you take one thing away from this thread, let it be that Bitcoin is the "Ask Jeeves" of cryptocurrency and the future is actively being built on Ethereum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Just like the dot com craze kicked off the idea of an internet startup (and a decade later, just about every tech startup uses the internet in some way), I believe that by the end of the 2020's almost every tech startup will have some sort of cryptocurrency component."

This literally already happened for a hot second, did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was 20k? Are you saying it will happen again?

<comment><USER13> > ... did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was > 20k? Are you saying it will happen again?

I don't think that's what they're saying. I suspect it'll be more like support for existing major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Either for payments or smart contracts, or other decentralized book-keeping.

I'm not convinced about "almost every tech startup", but I do think it'll become more mainstream.

<comment><USER12> There is like ~5 million people using crypto right. I could see this being possible if that number was closer to 500+ million

<comment><USER14> At 500M it's already mainstream.

<comment><USER12> That's my point, why would a startup implement it if it's not mainstream and can bring a lot of customers. Startups barely pay attention to China and India consumers, much less a cryptocurrency holder.

<comment><USER14> It said it would become mainstream, and in that process there would be commonplace integration. Also, I think there's some confusion if you think the startups would need to pay holders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just wanted to write 'hey, could anyone give a brief overview/current status of the crypto space' but then I realized once again that I might get answers influenced by personal investments (I've got still quite some significant portfolio).

This space is difficult, after the last years there's some stigma and trust- levels towards and within the crypto-community are super low (similar to the porn space) and I decided for myself, this sector is over. Main reason is: distributed DBs are hard, publicly distributed DBs are even harder, there are so little use cases that justify the effort involved (except currency & fund raising).

Maybe I am wrong.

<comment><USER16> "He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation." And this does not necessarily only apply to nations. Isn't that a strong justification for the effort involved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a different view of the 2020s. We don't need more tokens or programmable technology. Money is the dominant use case for crypto. We still haven't figured out how to make crypto money that people can use beyond speculation. Notable projects will be around money use cases. Currently, we see Bitcoin, Tether, and stablecoins. In the 2020s, there will be more coins that people can use as money. We'll spend the next decade searching for them.

Tech-focused projects, like Ethereum 2, Algorand, won't be successful. Decentralized coins, Libra, corporate coins, government coins will be.

For decentralized coins, I think the market needs to find a way to incorporate inflationary economics into the system. Bitcoin needs an inflating parallel blockchain. It's all about money. I put my focus there.

I wrote a post on the topic: Emerging Markets of Cryptocurrencies

[https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of- cry...](https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of- cryptocurrencies.html)

<comment><USER18> Check out open bazaar. It is a decentralized p2p market place similar to ebay. Even has a decentralized escrow system with moderators that get paid to resolve disputes. Best part of it is that there are no fees at all to buy/sell stuff other than the cryptocurrency transfer fees. You also pay a fee if there is an issue with the product you bought/sold etc.

Not much people using it though. Seems like best selling items are gift cards.

<comment><USER19> > Seems like best selling items are gift cards.

So either this is a way for crypto to be "used" for purchases at popular stores, or it's being used for money laundering. (those gift cards are easily sold on eBay and other marketplaces for fiat; this is how you'd take payment in mostly untraceable crypto and cash out without having to subject yourself to exchange KYC/AML)

<comment><USER20> Almost certainly money laundering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Olaf Carlson-Wee and Balaji Srinivasan estimate that at a price of $200,000 per Bitcoin, more than half the world's billionaires will be from cryptocurrency

This misses a key piece of information. They take the price as an an assumption for their argument, but that is insufficient to draw this conclusion. When Bitcoin reaches $200,000 is also a factor.

The worlds existing billionaires will not sit still. If it takes 70 years then it would be pretty easy to make better money elsewhere. I have no idea if or when it will happen. I'm inclined to think on average it will increase at a decreasing rate.

<comment><USER22> there are people who also believe gold will reach $100k an ounce. I don't think that will happen, or if it did, society would've transformed so much that there bears little resemblance to today's world.

<comment><USER23> it will take so long to happen that such time frames are irrelevant to anyone alive today

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cryptocurrency tries to automate away trust, but in the process ends up reestablishing centralization while taking up a ruinous energy and complexity cost.

Perhaps one day, the tech community will understand that some problems require a political solution and simply cannot be solved by technological means alone.

</comment><comment><USER25> The most important challenge cryptocurrencies face is capturing real world value. The ICO craze turned out to create basically 0 value on any crypto platform, and the more recent wave of tokenized securities will be very slow because there are lots and lots of regulations that need to be addressed by token issuers (for good reason).

The value of our public goods however is not being captured by any financial asset, and is a huge market that can be addressed by cryptocurrencies. This is something I'm quite passionate about and have put a lot of time into thinking through how they might work (see link below). As an example, AirCarbon ([https://www.aircarbon.co](https://www.aircarbon.co)) is a Singapore exchange being built on an Ethereum token and will tokenize CORSIA-certified carbon credits for the airline industry. This is a fantastic example of a huge market ($100+ billion) that is right now extremely inefficient, and will benefit greatly from moving onto a globally accessible and permissionless ledger. It'll provide everyone in the world the ability to invest in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and even better, since the tokens also work as stores of value, investors can sell their tokens in the future.

This type of financial asset has enormous potential.

"Tokenized Goods - A New Store of Value": [https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods- a-n...](https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-new-store- of-value-83b91c53d436)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a post written by a crypto company, which has all its interest in keeping it alive. Hopefully 2020 will be a watershed movement in crypto world and people will stop calling a peer to peer distributed exchange mechanism by names similar to money.

Crypto is not money and company like coinbase thrive on that information asymmetry because a normal person do not understand that cryptocurrency is not really a money,but a network of computers trying to fix some arbitrary value to a sequence of string which are worthless in themselves if not widely used for exchange of goods and services.

Hopefully in 2020 peer to peer exchange of good and services evolve and companies like coinbase don't need to exist (this was the true purpose of distributed currency to get rid of companies like coinbase and being hold hostage by them by keeping wallets under their supervision without liability unlike the way bank maintains account with liability and protection).

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm pretty new to crypto in general, but it seems to me that the primary value of it in coming years would be anonymity/privacy.

As I understand it Bitcoin has some problems in this regard, but others have solved it.

I just can't find it hard to believe we get to 2030 without a way to buy things anonymously online.

<comment><USER28> Cash is anonymous and private.

<comment><USER29> Cash is still controlled and regulated by a states. The point of crypto is to have currencies and markets which states cannot control, tax or regulate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How do you fix their No. 1 problem: scalability? The blockchain updating, and certainly mining, are inherently slow.

<comment><USER31> Those are two different problems: scalability and finality.

Obviously every transaction can not be processed and stored by everyone. That much is clear even to casual observers. There has been two or three main ways people have tried to achieve this during the past decade.

The obvious thing to try would be to shard the blockchain like you would a database. This turns out to be hard to do in a trustless way since shards would need to interact. This realization and the contracts required to securely swap assets between otherwise separate chains leads naturally to:

Full on separate blockchains that run in parallel to the main one, checkpointing when needed (rootstock, drivechains). These are not limited by the main chain and can be specialized for custom use cases. The parallel chains are only interoperable by way of the main chain and need not know about each other, which helps scaling out.

Payment channels by the way of time locked contracts. Satoshi sketched out an initial implementation that turned out to be flawed. This has since been improved on and made bidirectional and made into a standard which is now the Lightning network. It has a number of real world limitations but the general idea is that only the parties involved in a transaction needs to know about it. An added benefit of this is that finality among these parties is immediate.

There have also been some work squashing a large number of transactions into a large transaction. This has the added benefit of obfuscating the flow of individual transactions, which otherwise makes everyone's holdings transparent (mimblewimble, grin). This requires new signature schemes and is hard to retrofit to existing blockchains and make security guarantees about.

There used to be ideas about Chaum like schemes on top of blockchains, but most of that interest probably went on into separate blockchain schemes.

Those are some of the ideas that have been tried, most have shown some promise but are more or less still at the research stage. Don't expect radical changes overnight.

<comment><USER32> You forgot the most important thing wrt scaling: everyone don't need to run a full node (store the block chain).

Most mobile wallets are light wallets, that query servers for the information on demand. It works great, but you have the risk of the server lying to you.

So the next level up is SPV wallets, which verify that transactions are included in blocks and that the proof-of-work is valid. So the cheat them you need to reproduce POW, which is _very_ expensive, and also very secure.

This notion that everyone needs to run a full node is simply false. SPV security, and even light wallets security, is enough for almost everyone. Exchanges, payment processors and the paranoid few can still run full nodes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That was very optimistic. And $200k Bitcoin? Might as well suggest $2m Bitcoin and the odds will be about the same.

I've become very pessimistic around cryptocurrency after a year of chasing coins.

Wake me up when Turtlecoin hits $10.

<comment><USER34> I remember people scoffing at the concept of 100 dollars per bitcoin like it couldn't possibly happen.

<comment><USER35> I remember people scoffing at the internet like there no legitimate use-cases for it. "Yeah, we have places for information, it's called Grolier's Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, and it's cheap!". "I already have yellow pages delivered for free by C&P Bell". While cryptocurrency may be quite a bit more narrow, blockchain is most likely a far more interesting technology.

<comment><USER36> > blockchain is most likely a far more interesting technology.

Why? Really, I would like to know why you think this. Append-only data structures have existed almost since the dawn of computing. Making it distributed and trustless doesn't seem to solve any real problems, which is why over a decade since they entered the public consciousness they are used for almost nothing interesting, and nothing that couldn't be done better in a centralised system.

<comment><USER37> > doesn't seem to solve any real problems

If you don't see the current monetary systems as a problem, then I guess you don't really have a way to understand Bitcoin.

I think it's one of the most important innovations of our civilization; a 'next step', if you will.

Personally, it solves my problem of storing value of my work indefinitely.

<comment><USER38> Are you against private banks being able to create money when they make loans? If so, why?

<comment><USER39> Banks don't create money, they create debt.

<comment><USER38> It's only a debt for the business who receives the loan.

When a business receives a loan it shows up as an asset to them in the form of a bank deposit. The business then usually uses that demand deposit to purchase goods and services, so people who don't owe debt to the bank get those deposits in their accounts, and spend the deposits, etc., etc. So effectively, private banks create money.

<comment><USER39> You missed the part where the business gives the money for those goods and services back to the bank plus interest and the fact that the bank already had the money to give, nothing was created

<comment><USER38> The bank doesn't usually "have the money to give" when it makes a loan.

Let's say Bank A loans $1000 to a customer. It creates a $1000 bank deposit in that customer's account. On the balance sheet it looks like this:

Bank A:

(Asset) Loan to customer of $1000

(Liability) Bank deposit in account of customer $1000

Bank A created the $1000 at will out of thin air. This is how it happens most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The scalability constraint is a fundamental one. A single cryptocurrency cannot scale beyond a certain TPS without sharding. But sharding reduces the decentralization of each shard. Also, rebalancing existing shards when adding new ones also introduces its own decentralization problems.

I think the way forward for acalability will be multi-chain. Each blockchain has its own accounts and own token but is connected to other chains via fully automated DEXs. The blockchains will form a hierarchy of chains with the most trusted and busiest one at the top. I think there will be a trend to make a consistent payment API so that any cryptocurrency can be used in the place of any other, online shops will use on-chain DEX trade price and volume data to determine which coins they accept and for what value.

</comment><comment><USER41> Cryptocurrency does not have anything close to widespread consumer adoption. If the Coinbase's of the world don't fix this, cryptocurrency will be massively devalued.

<comment><USER42> Cryptocurrency can't have widespread adoption right now, because it's not scalable enough. Various projects are working hard on fixing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I was thinking with some friends recently (new year's eve) : considering a bitcoin model with a fixed finite amount of currency, won't every coin be lost at some point due to storage failure/lost keys/etc ? Statistically ? And rather sooner than later, if my thinking is right ? Like the birthday problem ?

There is a maximum of 21x10^6 bitcoins, imagining a 0.01 chance of losing 1 bitcoin/day ?

<comment><USER37> Yes, but every bitcoin is divided into 100000000 satoshis, and it's possible to add even smaller units in the future.

<comment><USER43> Who and/or what decides by what mechanisms and when satoshis would be divided into smaller units ?

Doesn't that make it virtually valueless by definition ?

<comment><USER37> No, it doesn't change the value. It's just more decimals. A hard fork would be needed to make the change in the protocol.

Similarly a bank can use whatever amount of decimals they wish to store their dollar amounts, it doesn't create new money. You can also divide gold into infinitesimal amounts.

You can already send millisatoshis on the Lightning network, which is rounded to a nearest satoshi when it's settled on the blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Like many have pointed out, this guy is clearly biased. But my own personal opinion is that people will always want drugs and as long as governments enable a black market of drugs, crypto will be used to trade drugs.

I perhaps cynically believe that is what has kept, keeps and will keep cryptocurrency going.

</comment><comment><USER45> Interesting research on stock-to-flow: [https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now- plan-a...](https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now-plan-a- ed6277b21760)

</comment><comment><USER46> "Privacy" seems to be used as a buzz word here. I can assume but no concrete idea what the author means by _blockchain with built in privacy features_

<comment><USER47> Google ring ct and zksnarks

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Yet another thread for me to bookmark. Crypto is eating finance, and I can't wait for a decade to pass to repost this thread. Good luck banks!

</comment><comment><USER49> Most predictions of the future are wrong

<comment><USER40> True. Also, aside from Cosmos, none of the projects mentioned in the article have actually launched. And Cosmos does not scale any better than any other blockchain. It may perform better than Bitcoin, but there is still a rigid upper bound in terms of TPS beyond which it cannot process anymore transactions (beyond which point fees would skyrocket to force down demand). On the Cosmos website, under the "Scalability" heading, it says "Proof-of-Work protocols are slow, expensive, unscalable, and environmentally harmful" but then it says: "Tendermint BFT fixes this."

As a blockchain developer of 2 years who understands the principles behind Tendermint and who has build many scalable systems in his career, I can say for sure that Tendermint doesn't add any scalability to any given blockchain. It only aids with certain specific interoperability scenarios (nothing to do with scalability). The statement on their website is not accurate. The people who wrote this statement are marketing people who do not understand the first thing about scalability of any system. The leaders of these projects wash their hands of any responsibility by pretending to believe their own dogma.

Most blockchain marketing is a flat out scam IMO. As a result of all this deception, almost everything that everyone knows about blockchain today is wrong. Everyone thinks that all the trendy cryptocurrencies can scale but they can't. None of the ones that I analyzed in the last 2 years could scale. And I looked at many; for those whose whitepaper made the most sense, I even made the time to discuss the tech with their lead developers, node operators and community members. The reality is always far behind the marketing.

Unfortunately, investors are investing based on hype and their personal connections, not based on demonstrable facts. Investors are being mislead en- mass. As a developer who understands the tech and who actually believes in its potential to incentivize productive collaboration, it's disturbing to watch how the industry is unfolding.</comment></comment>


Rapping grandmas and Ninja-Rockstar fatigue - <AUTHOR> http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-grandmas-and-ninja-rockstar-fatigue

<comment><AUTHOR> I maybe didn't use the most descriptive title for this. It's basically about how the terms "rockstar" and "ninja" are overused in job descriptions.

</comment><comment><USER2> I believe the other big offender is "guru". Rails "Guru", or Social Media "guru".</comment>


Google monetizes start page, vocal minority gets vocal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081018-google-monetizes-start-page-vocal-minority-gets-vocal.html <comment><USER2> First off, the topic of this article is pretty misleading and kind of divisive. From the article's own admission, Google only allows monetization of start page gadgets that user's manually ad. The meat of the article was spent talking about the merits of a left UI navigation for Google's start page. (Personally, I think it should be a setting since I am on the laptop a lot, and it really kills screen space, but I'll live)

Further, I have a very hard time hating Google because they provide so much value to my life. They store all my e-mail through GMail, all my RSS feeds, all my documents, and now I have all my company internet assets managed through Google Apps.

I might get flamed for saying this, but I'll gladly click on some Google links on their start page or anywhere else, a few clicks of a mouse is definitely worth more than what they have given me. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd subscribe and pay a monthly fee to keep Google alive, if they asked. People should be grateful for what they receive for free.

<comment><USER3> Well, no - that's not quite right. In regards to "gladly clicking on some google links", I'd say it'd be more appropriate to be _willing_ to click on their links, should they make them relevant. And that's what google has done so brilliantly! They're not asking people to please click on the links, or to be grateful for their free services, they're taking advantage of the natural self-interest people have, and making it to the individual's benefit to click.

I'm certainly right there with you as to the utility of Google, replacing them would be very dear indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article does not give an even account of the user discontent.

[http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArti...](http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211201740)

Gives a more balanced account.

I think Google is trying to roll back. I'm actually stuck in between the releases. Mine has the old container (no left side bar) but the new gadgets so they don't work at all.

This is a massive screw up by Google.

I also think it's funny that this story is also current on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=336736></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite domain registrar and why? - <AUTHOR> There are a lot of different domain registrars to choose from today: Namecheap, Google Domains, Hover, GoDaddy, etc.  Who have you used and had a good experience with?  Are there any registrars that you have sworn off?  What are the most important features to you: cost? privacy tools? automation? or? <comment><USER2> OVH.

They offer 1 free 5GB email account to every domain you register with them which I often find very handy. Especially for smaller initiatives that need just a firstname.lastname@example.com and nothing more. Plus they offer a free funny 10MB shared "hosting" with FTP which also can be used in a creative way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Namecheap has a no-nonsense UI and has been providing free whois domain privacy for a long time.

I've since switched some names to Cloudflare since I use their DNS anyway because of quick update/propagation.

I've also moved some personal domains I'm not really using to NameSilo-- horrible UI but I don't feel bad having a bunch of names I'm not (yet) using.

Fastmail for email for these domains is cheap and easy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Namecheap I found to be pretty good. I only need basic features so I moved to a cheaper (in Canada) registrar - porkbun and they have been totally fine.

</comment><comment><USER5> NameCheap has been pretty good IMHO

</comment><comment><USER6> google domains

free whois privacy

free email forwarding

simple no-nonsense ui</comment>


Sleeping With Your Cofounder - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/sleeping-with-your-cofounder

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887989)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's twice as hard to convince one cofounder to screw the other out of their equity when they're married to each other.</comment>


House of Representatives passes bill written by Citibank to cut bank regulation - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2013/10/30/banks-led-by-citi-lobby-house-successfully-to-limit-dodd-frank-on-derivatives/

<comment><AUTHOR> What is really horrifying is both sides of the aisle voted for this overwhelmingly.

Country is essentially owned by banks, producing nothing, just manipulating money for profit.

And they are voting against regulation that is trying to stop the same kind of disaster from happening again.</comment>


Show HN: Stock market analysis - <AUTHOR> https://www.forestpin.com/cse/
This is still experimental and is a different way of analyzing stocks in the long term. We consider Dividends, Rights Issues, Bonus Issues, and Splits to calculate the value of the share. This gives a more realistic view than simply looking at the share price variations. We reinvest cash from dividends in the same stock and sell existing shares to execute rights. It's a simple calculation but it gives a much better perspective of the stocks in the long term than simply looking at the share price.
You can select a stock symbol or click on following links to see some of the largest companies.

  https://www.forestpin.com/cse/#JKH
  https://www.forestpin.com/cse/#DIAL
  https://www.forestpin.com/cse/#COMB
  https://www.forestpin.com/cse/#NEST
 The first graph shows the value if you bought a share at the IPO. The second graph shows the number of times your investment has grown. This is in log scale to give a better visualization of ROI with time. The third graph is the actual share price. The fourth graph is the number of shares you own. (You buy more shares with dividends, the number of shares increases with Splits, etc) The fifth graph is the current value if you invested in the stock at the given time. i.e. if the graph shows 10 in 2007, it means your investment of $1 in 2007 is now worth $10. The list of events below shows the calculation.
Unfortunately, right now, we only have data from Colombo Stock Exchange now, and even that is until August 2014. We had to do a lot of data cleaning and still there seem to be some errors. We plan on adding up-to-date data as well as including other stock exchanges. <comment><USER2> Nice visualizations, and I thought it was helpful to see the varied information you're showing. Much better than a lot of financial sites. If you could expand your stock symbol offering, it looks like it's on the right track to becoming a helpful tool for researching stocks.

</comment><comment><USER3> clickable: [https://www.forestpin.com/cse/](https://www.forestpin.com/cse/)</comment>


Homeless explosion on West Coast pushing cities to the brink - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/higher-education/homeless-explosion-on-west-coast-pushing-cities-to-the-brink/2017/11/06/ae0e5274-c2b2-11e7-9922-4151f5ca6168_story.html?utm_term=.3c553f4467a8 <comment><USER2> This is not a result of prohibitive housing prices or anything like that. Through my work in the homeless community I've seen and heard first hand that chronic homelessness is almost always a result of mental illness and/or drug use. Those two problems have always existed, but opiate abuse is much worse now than it has ever been.

Of course there are sad cases of people unable to find jobs who are otherwise 'normal', but these cases are in the minority. Many people unable to find jobs or hold down jobs beyond the most menial sort have mental illness that prevents them from doing so.

<comment><USER3> >This is not a result of prohibitive housing prices or anything like that

The counter example is in the article is one of a couple who receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence? You're argument is this is an anomaly?

I don't understand the mental gymnastics some people have to go through in order to convince themselves the problem in articles is not the problem. It happened in the Susan Fowler thread too.

There is also increasingly more evidence that drug use is more attributed to escapism or a learned behavior of happier times and should be treated as a societal issue and mental illness seems to be a catch all for all the societal ills we don't want to deal with. I'd probably be addicted to drugs and have mental illness too if I had to shit in a bucket everyday in my shit filled RV.

<comment><USER4> Why should anyone value your opinion on this? The person you responded to cited personal experience in working with the homeless. I have a reason to give weight to their opinion.

<comment><USER5> They weren't exactly sharing an opinion. They called to the claims of the article that contradict the other's experience. They mentioned—admittedly un- cited—recent evidence that also contradicts the other's claims of anecdotal experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It might have something to do with this chart: [http://i.huffpost.com/gen/926781/thumbs/s-COLLEGE- TEXTBOOKS-...](http://i.huffpost.com/gen/926781/thumbs/s-COLLEGE-TEXTBOOKS- PRICES-480x360.jpg?6) (not just textbooks). Remember of course that median incomes have been almost exactly flat over the same interval.

<comment><USER7> US median income from 1984 to 2016, adjusted for inflation: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

<comment><USER8> Against C-S median housing price (seasonally adjusted):

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N#0](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N#0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The cost of housing cannot go below the cost of servicing the debt required to construct the housing, otherwise that capital will flow elsewhere to find returns and no housing will be built. Realistic solutions will focus on ways to lower the cost to bring units to market and finding new low-cost sources of capital to fund it.

<comment><USER10> Is that a bad thing?

Maybe we should be increasing the efficiency of the existing housing inventory. Second homes, timeshares, empty neighborhoods (...Las Vegas...), AirBNB properties show pretty clearly that there's an excess, or at least strange market incentives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why don't we build public housing in the US anymore?

<comment><USER12> Because as it turns out, the way public housing was being built concentrated all the poverty in the city into a tiny area, which drew the predators out of the woodwork, drove away investment, and made the housing development nigh- unlivable. Additionally, the architecture has often been hostile to the residents, and the city neglected maintenance.

The best way to build public housing would be to make it a part of the gentrification process. Build where the revenue from property taxes is increasing, and in proportion to the development for more affluent housing.

Some municipalities get a lame approximation to this by requiring that developers build housing for poor people in exchange for regulatory variances, but it just isn't the same.

But the short explanation is that the US is overwhelmingly run by rich people, and the rich people in the US hate to see poor people get something at or below cost without them sweating on it first, because they believe that welfare dollars are overwhelmingly coming out of _their_ pockets, and they _earned_ them by their hard work. They may be delusional, but they still get elected to fill the public offices.

<comment><USER13> Rich property owners (or those looking to become rich from high-value property) would counter with concerns about their property value being destroyed, but personally I am satisfied with this as it is an indirect means of progressive taxation.

Wrenching the general populace above bottom-barrel poverty was done on the back of twentieth-century prosperity (ie: progressive taxation) but there is no such progressive taxation scheme for property tax (ie: property taxes are exceedingly complicated and many deductions are available). It is only prudent that other (new and exotic) means of wealth redistribution are attempted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps a little inland from the coast, but I was in Palm Springs 10 years ago, and then again this year and was struck by what seemed like a general deterioration in the town, as well as the number of homeless people - I don't remember seeing a single homeless person on my first trip. Very sad to see. These intertwined economic/social problems seem to be the most difficult to solve, or is it just lack of willingness to do something about it by elites or society as a whole?

An idea that has crossed my mind before is: how expensive would it be to provide the homeless the very bare minimum of survival i.e. food, shelter, most basic healthcare, even free alcohol? Why don't we just accept that some people are going to fall through the cracks and save ourselves the delusion that we are going to be able to get them off drugs/reintroduce them to employment etc., and take care of their needs in the simplest and cheapest way possible?

The current economy is pretty good at casting aside those it deems economically worthless. Is it really so tricky to just accept this and pay to look after them?

<comment><USER15> You're not alone in thinking that. It works[1], and it's cheaper than the current revolving door of policies and support systems. The problem seems to be that people have a strong negative reaction to "undeserving others" getting things "for free".

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced- chroni...](https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic- homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how)

<comment><USER16> It's sickening to me that most US citizens seem to prefer watching people die on the street than give them things they "do not deserve".

<comment><USER6> I have good news for you. US citizens don't actually like watching people die on the street, not even the ones on the right.

<comment><USER17> Right, they close their doors and avert their gaze

<comment><USER18> That's very easy to say on your very comfortable chair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find Google's Ngram viewer a useful tool for getting a sense of the emergence of issues and trends.

Here, "homelessness", "homeless crisis", and "housing crisis". Emerging during the 1980s.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homelessness%2...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homelessness%2C+homeless+crisis%2C+housing+crisis&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chomelessness%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chomeless%20crisis%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chousing%20crisis%3B%2Cc0)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is the result of population growth. Even if housing is built specifically for poorer and lower income individuals, middle class families looking for housing will inevitably trickle in causing demand and prices to rise naturally. Once again poor individuals will be on the street. The same cycle keeps occurring in cities across America. Properties designed for the poor end up getting bought by middle and upper class individuals, seen this in Washington D.C. and New york firsthand. Other than full blown capping prices that can be charged for rent, I don't see a long term solution.

<comment><USER20> Weird how New York City housed millions of poor immigrants at the turn of the century but we can't support natural population growth and urbanization today.

<comment><USER19> > Weird how New York City housed millions of poor immigrants at the turn of > the century

Are you really comparing housing standards for the poor today vs 100 years ago? Unless your solution is to throw all poor people in filthy slums like its 1902 I don't see the point of your comment.

<comment><USER20> Better to let them live on the street then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Duplicate (same AP source)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642394)

</comment><comment><USER21> Something I find amazingly prescient here is Past Tense [1].

Past Tense is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It was filmed going on 25 years ago - in 1993. It told a story of increasing disparity eventually culminating in "Sanctuary Districts" starting in the early 2020s as a means of providing 'sanctuary' for the unemployed, mentally ill, and those otherwise unable to make it in society -- and the dystopia that followed. Everything down to the timeline and location (the story focused on San Francisco) is again just quite prescient.

It's just a story, but one to keep in mind when deciding how to try to deal with problems like this. The ideas of Sanctuary Cities are incredibly appealing, and it's for that reason that I think we're highly likely to play out this story to its natural conclusion. It offers no alternative, and it's entirely possible that there is none. But it's certainly a thought provoking episode tying together all the issues we're facing today, while considering how good intentions can go very wrong.

[1] - [https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/st...](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/star- trek-deep-space-nine-past-tense/542280/?single_page=true) (the episode itself is far more on point than this article - and is only provided for those who cannot access the episode)</comment>


Show HN: A JavaScript password hasher - <AUTHOR> https://hashpasswd.com <comment><AUTHOR> This a quick javascript Vue.js app I wrote as a learning project. It used to be a PHP script that I wrote at $previous_job.

We used it there to request password hashes from new employees which we then distributed via puppet.</comment>


Amazon's tax arrangements are nothing short of a work of art. Bravo - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/19/david-mitchell-amazon-tax-artwork

<comment><USER2> _"Last week it emerged that, despite £4.2bn of UK sales, [Amazon] paid only £2.4m in corporation tax in 2012. In the same year it received £2.5m in government grants ... What elevates Amazon's activity is the fact that it applied for government grants. The elegance of that corporate choice is like the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa's smile, the ruthlessness of Mike Tyson's punch and the adaptability of the malaria virus combined. There is no point in criticising anyone or anything that can do that. They can only be admired or destroyed._

The grants > tax paid thing is pretty amazing, it has to be said.</comment>


When process are cheap, who needs timeouts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.javalimit.com/2010/09/when-process-are-cheap-who-needs-timeouts.html

<comment><USER2> This article comes to an incorrect conclusion on the need for timeouts in Erlang's gen:call implementation. Monitors are necessary but not sufficient for building a robust distributed system with Erlang.

When dealing with remote processes a monitor is very quick to detect a process crash, however it can take a lot longer than 5 seconds to detect a node crash or other form of netsplit. Setting an application specific timeout in this case can be a prudent strategy for setting up a firebreak so that a netsplit does not cause cascading failures through the whole distributed system.

A case can also be made that just using monitors is not sufficient when talking with local processes. Monitors do not detect those situations when a process becomes unresponsive due to overloads like queue overrun. Once again it is a good idea to have a timeout in the call so that one may avoid a single misbehaving process crashing the whole system.

In fact, I find it difficult to imagine a situation where one would not want to have a timeout on a gen:call. That is why timeouts are set by default in the gen call facilities. Building highly concurrent systems is difficult. Erlang makes a lot of the typical pain points in building these systems go away. But the need to tune defaults and stress test a system remains.</comment>


NPM Is Down - <AUTHOR> https://status.npmjs.org/ <comment><USER2> I am having trouble installing new packages, also seeing failures on CI for branches with no cache... ug.

</comment><comment><USER3> Status Updates: [https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/cksjqc1w11v5?u=33mgrqjjqd...](https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/cksjqc1w11v5?u=33mgrqjjqdb1)

</comment><comment><USER4> Down for me. Packages aren't fetching.</comment>


1999: Description of the LCS35 Time Capsule Crypto-Puzzle - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/lcs35-puzzle-description.txt <comment><AUTHOR> > The value of t was chosen to take into consideration the growth in > computational power due to "Moore's Law". Based on the SEMATECH National > Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (1997 edition), we can expect internal > chip speeds to increase by a factor of approximately 13 overall up to 2012, > when the clock rates reach about 10GHz. After that improvements seem more > difficult, but we estimate that another factor of five might be achievable > by 2034. Thus, the overall rate of computation should go through > approximately six doublings by 2034.

Not many people are running 10 GHz computers; GPUs and parallel processing have taken a lot of work off the CPU. But that doesn't help with problems that are 'intrinsically sequential' - is anyone working on that?

I'm aware of some semi-obscure projects for parallelisation (Copocobana, etc etc) but I'm keen to learn more about fast non-parallel computing.

<comment><AUTHOR> This 2010 article mentions some overclocked devices running at 6 GHz (with considerable cooling effort) and an IBM device running at about 5.2 GHz.

But raw GHz feels like a dumb way to measure processor speed.</comment></comment>


[Photo] a 5MB hard drive being shipped by IBM in 1956 - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitter.com/Crazzyintheusa/status/1048679992698294272 <comment><USER2> "The following media includes potentially sensitive content."

Seriously, Twitter?</comment>