GNU Emacs Video Editing - <AUTHOR> http://1010.co.uk/gneve.html

<comment><USER2> Simply amazing. Do similar plugins for any of the more modern, popular IDEs currently exist that can do this? Just curious but I highly doubt it.

Not to make generalizations, but it does demonstrate the difference between the user base of Emacs versus the users for most other popular IDEs in that they have both the determination and the skills to make this possible.

<comment><USER3> well, the eclipse and netbeans platforms have been used to create all kinds of applications that have nothing to do with software development.

<comment><USER2> examples?

<comment><USER4> Does Azureus count? It uses SWT...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And this is why I use emacs. The fact that it is even _possible_ to write a video editor that runs in it means that I will be able to edit files as I please, as efficiently as I please.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it painful to be smart enough to come up with ideas like this independently but not enough smart/knowledgeable to implement it without being preempted by a few or several years by another project.

Will I ever reach a level of proficiency where I'm content with my skillset, and would that even be desirable?

<comment><USER7> did you look at the source? it's like 200 lines. basically key shortcuts to mplayer operations. you could have done it in a couple of days (less if you know elisp). but my point is that everything starts small. so just start ;)

incidentally for truly impressive emacs packages check out: gnus, erc, slime, org-mode, tramp, magit, ido, paredit, nxhtml, yasnippet.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. I'd probably reverse Hexstream's comment in that I find it much harder to think up good ideas than actually implementing them.

It just never would have occurred to me to use Emacs as a video editor (my brain has been conditioned to think of it strictly as a _text_ editor). If that idea had popped in my head then implementing it, relatively speaking, would probably have been _less_ of a challenge than coming up with the actual idea in the first place which requires overcoming my preconceived notions.

In this instance, the idea is far more impressive than the actual code. This demonstrates innovation beyond technical prowess because it added a new way of doing something to a familiar software tool that most people would never have thought of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I daresay this may be one of the big e _/vi_ war points.

"Great application for emacs! Emacs rules!"

Vim user: Why the hell would you want to use an /editor/ to edit video? Use iMovie or something. If you want to edit TEXT then lets talk emacs v. vi.

<comment><USER9> Oh I agree with you. Use the best tool for the job I say. But man I'm blown away by the OP's example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real question is, _is it any good as a video editor_? (I don't do video editing, so I'm not qualified to compare it to professional video tools. My fiance does, but doesn't use Emacs.)

All of this "an x, written in (drumroll) [Emacs|Haskell||etc]" should probably be judged on its own merits as a useful program, you know?

(Don't get me wrong - I think putting stuff like rcirc in Emacs makes a lot of sense.)

</comment><comment><USER11> A bit excessive IMO, but very, very cool.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is so awesome. I want one for VIM.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you using Google Cloud in production? - <AUTHOR> I have been asking various people I know about their experience with GCP vs. AWS.<p>I'm curious about who has been using GCP at scale and it being reliable? <comment><USER2> I guess it depends on what scale you are talking about. I used GCP at a previous employer, a small saas startup, that was dealing with thousands of api requests per second, and lots of big(ish) data processes on the back-end. We made use of GKE, Bigquery, Pubsub, Stackdriver, GCS, Compute, Dataproc, Cloud functions, Data studio and Cloud SQL mostly.

I had a really positive experience with GCP - I think for every one of those services, the workflow and developer experience was far more pleasant and easy going than my experiences have been on AWS. GCP just clicks with me more, for some reason. To me, it feels like they put more thought into their suite of offerings and how they all work together.

Lots of the services on AWS have a great deal of overlap. That alone can waste a surprising amount of time, just figuring out which you ought to use for your use case - which is not always easy to discover. I'm constantly underwhelmed and disappointed by most AWS services, and keep finding that I'm better off just using AWS as a glorified ec2 VM hosting service.

</comment><comment><USER3> We switched from Athena to Pub/Sub & BigQuery and ECS to GCP Kubernetes recently and our architecture became much more powerful & easy to maintain.</comment>


Show HN: Up-to-the-minute status for 100+ services - <AUTHOR> https://statuspages.me <comment><AUTHOR> The Service name column links to the services twitter (preferably ops) and the Current status links to their status page.

Data is collected from their status page HTML elements, or sometimes from a different JSON/XML request. Some CSS/JsonPath selectors and regexes are applied to surmise state. The grey 'see...' lines are where this process is incomplete.

If you depend on a service not listed here, please let me know and I can try to add it. Helps if you have their ops twitter, page/data URLs (and if you feel like, a selector). I intended to make a submission page for this, but better to show early and get feedback.

The page turned out to be accidentally responsive. It's made with Vue.js with the interesting part being that each line is a component that makes its own http request. The thought there being that if it was permitted to filter the set there are no combinations and there cache friendly. Plus just being fun to try something differently.

The back-end is spring boot 2/java with PostgreSQL and dead simple. The only interesting part being use of the Nashorn engine for evaluating scripts for special case data.

<comment><USER2> So, what about LastPass? Since you've already got 1Password, and LastPass is totally dependent on their web infrastructure, it would be nice to have LastPass covered, too.

And before you ask, this is for work -- I didn't choose it.

They've only got a couple of twitter accounts. Their official status account is [https://twitter.com/LastPassStatus](https://twitter.com/LastPassStatus) whereas their "help" account is [https://twitter.com/LastPassHelp](https://twitter.com/LastPassHelp) but you will find that a lot of people send them complaints to the "help" account and the official status account doesn't typically get updated until they've already fixed the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, good one. I'll definitely add this. They just got a status page, looks like a statuspage.io type so it should be super easy.</comment></comment></comment>


Instagram's CEO Wants to Clean Up the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/08/instagram-kevin-systrom-wants-to-clean-up-the-internet <comment><USER2> > To Systrom, it's pretty simple: Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom > to shitpost. His network isn't a public square; it's a platform people can > choose to use or not. When pressed on the matter, he asks, _"Is it free > speech to just be mean to someone?"_ Jackson Colaco makes the same point > more sharply. "If toxicity on a platform gets so bad that people don't even > want to post a comment, they don't even want to share an idea, you've > actually threatened expression."

Yes, it is free speech to just be mean to someone. The fact that this man is a leader of anything at all troubles me.

Neural Nets and computers aren't impartial. We should never be putting any power into them to affect real human discourse that NLP cannot possibly hope to accurately parse at this time.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand how we got to a place where it's censorship unless private entities will distribute shitposting garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Is it free speech to just be mean to someone?

Yes. But thankfully for internet platforms, they are not bound by free speech.

> If toxicity on a platform gets so bad that people don't even want to post a > comment, they don't even want to share an idea, you've actually threatened > expression.

No, you've only threatened the appeal of the platform. Expression and free speech lives on outside of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Personally I agree that certain platforms have become so toxic that a portion of the users are leaving or failing to participate as they had before because of the right to free speech that many exercise simply for the purpose of being rude, hateful, or crude.

I will always advocate for an individuals right to free speech but at the same time I feel that a mom should be able to post pictures of her kids without trolls coming along and saying they are fat or ugly or worse, making inappropriate sexual comments about them. I do not think our founding fathers had this type of speech in mind when they protected speech as that was an enactment of a different time.

The internet allows the worst in people to rear its ugly head and we find ourselves here, at a moment in time where we have to question if a business owner is overstepping boundaries by putting in place systems to protect people from scummy comments.

I recognize the difficulty in balancing the rights of opposing sides. Surely there is a solution. At least Systrom and Ev William's have lofty goals in trying to clean up the internet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why can't CEOs just build products and help customers and abstain from moral crusades?

<comment><USER7> Because they need to provide some value to lure in the eye for the advertising

<comment><USER6> Great answer.</comment></comment></comment>


Will Cuil's New Streaming Feature Put It Back on the Map? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/09/23/will-cuils-new-streaming-feature-put-it-back-on-the-map/ <comment><USER2>
      Will Cuil's New Streaming Feature Put It Back on the Map?

probably not.

FTA: The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company received $33 million in funding from Madrone Capital Partners, Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners last year and has a valuation of $200 million.

How? Who is going to pay 200M for a fifth-rate search engine that showed it was better at self-promotion than technology.

In fact, the only thing i remember about cuil from last year was this register article (nsfw): <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/cuil_launch/> Where the revolutionary algorithm that put unrelated photos next to text search results managed to match up a CS Ph.D with gay porn.

I would also suggest they change their name to something less cuil-sounding.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Cuil would do much better for itself if it focused on its search algorithm.</comment>


A Bitcoin miner in every hand - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-bitcoin-miner-in-every-device-and-in-every-hand-e315b40f2821 <comment><USER2> Instead of spending $1 on something, you can burn $5 of electricity! Suppliers figure you're more likely to waste some energy than you are to type in a credit card number, so they say go for it.

And as the big ASIC miners get more efficient, your device will generate even less revenue. In two years, you'll be running at a small fraction of the chip's original mining rate, but still wasting just as much energy!

[http://media.coindesk.com/2013/09/bitcoin-difficulty- graph.p...](http://media.coindesk.com/2013/09/bitcoin-difficulty-graph.png)

I'll pass, thanks.

<comment><USER3> More like spend 5 _millionths_ of a cent's worth of electricity to receive a transaction token that trades for 1 millionth of a cent. But that token (1 satoshi) has much more utility than as just a store of value and has been loaded onto your personal device without you having to do anything. And can be used by software on your personal device to give you extra functionality without again you having to do anything. Or even really understanding how it works or what is going on at the technical level.

People walk around with extra apps on their phones consuming battery life all the time. If a user was presented with an option to turn on some hardware in their phone that gave them all sorts of interesting additional functionality and at the same time were warned that it would decrease the battery life of their phone by 1 or 2 percent then I think you have a viable proposition.

<comment><USER4> Why not have a background app that periodically purchases a satoshi now and then?

<comment><USER5> I guess an important (not to say THE) feature is that you get paid services without setting up any payment method like a credit card/paypal etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am extremely glad that most comments here see the inherent craziness of this idea. I am a hardware designer who participated heavily in mining since Jan 2011, and gave up completely on Bitcoin in summer of 2014.

The big problem that Balaji is completely ignoring is that SHA256 cores implemented in silicon have extraordinarily high power consumption relative to their size (mm2). This is due to the incredibly high signal switch rate inherent to implementing avalanche-style ciphers [1] in hardware. Perversely, most modern semiconductor processes optimize for static (leakage) power, since modern silicon designs are more vulnerable to this than to dynamic power. No rational semiconductor maker will want to include this IP on chip, because it will drastically complicate the power distribution metal layers. Additionally, it will require more expensive packaging, since you will need many more power and ground pins to source/sink the required current. I know this first hand after building a mining ASIC myself. I would venture a guess that most SoC chips would cost significantly more due to the extra engineering time and packaging cost needed to include this IP.

This entire concept is a non-starter for me.

[1] [http://research.neustar.biz/2012/02/02/choosing-a-good- hash-...](http://research.neustar.biz/2012/02/02/choosing-a-good-hash- function-part-3/)

<comment><USER7> Out of curiosity: what made you give up on Bitcoin? (I'm still bullish on crypto-economies in general, but am concerned that the electricity costs of PoW creates a downward price pressure that's unsustainable.)

<comment><USER8> Why would that be? The maximum PoW can depress the price is the inflation rate. Nobody will pay $1 for electricity to generate <$1 of bitcoin. And the inflation rate of bitcoin is set to drop below that of any large currency like dollars, euros, yen.

In other words, the money supply that causes inflation (downward price pressure of currencies) is by design lower than fiat currencies. It's one of the key things supposedly we're not ought to be concerned about with bitcoin, so far I see no reason to think otherwise.

<comment><USER9> > Nobody will pay $1 for electricity to generate <$1 of bitcoin.

Hobbyist miners are convincing themselves that <$1 of Bitcoin will be worth >$1 the future. Major miners seem to have question business models as well, where they are either losing money or have something shady going on with their cost of electricity. BTC still seems to be very prone to pump-and-dump schemes, so major miners may be able to pump the price enough to sell their coins profitably before the next crash.

<comment><USER8> No not really. If you believe $1 of X will be more than $1 in the future, you buy it for $1, you don't pay more than $1 for the manufacturing or mining of $1 of X, it makes no sense from a financial perspective, especially considered the time, effort and substantial risks in purchasing and running mining hardware.

The argument that you mine to hold to invest, while mining and selling right away is unprofitable, doesn't really hold when you can just buy and hold instead for cheaper and less hassle & risk.

The exception is of course when buying coin isn't an option, but buying electricity & hardware is. Which is why you may see shady operators mine above cost in China, because purchasing bitcoin in bulk in China can't be done easily anymore, a substantial premium cost.

But generally speaking, mining expenses approach mining revenues and top out there, as with virtually every other market. There are some caveats sure but they're not the rule.

Beyond that though, electricity isn't very relevant. At the end of the day if you have 1 million bitcoins, and the annual mining rewards are 50k bitcoins, the most coins that can be sold is 5%. Regardless of electricity prices, the new supply is 5%. Whether it ends up in the hands of miners or others, that's the inflation and the amount of downward pressure. It's true if electricity is expensive and margins are tight, miners sell more quickly. But in the long- run, the supply on the market is still averaging 5%, there's no magic way to go above that number. You could see miners sell 0% the first half of the year and then the entire 5% the second half of the year when margins are tight and miners sell to get cashflow, but it's still 5% a year, regardless of electricity prices.

So 5% is just a hypothetical number, but the reality is that by design it's set to go to 0%, again regardless of whether electricity is cheap or expensive. Which is why I contest the earlier statement by the guy I replied to that electricity prices is something to worry about.

<comment><USER10> >No not really. If you believe $1 of X will be more than $1 in the future, you buy it for $1, you don't pay more than $1 for the manufacturing or mining of $1 of X

I know you read /r/bitcoin so I know you know that there are a lot of people who stupidly don't think about it that way even just in that subreddit. There are also a lot who think their tiny collection of miners is contributing to the hash rate and helping the network even if they are losing out.

Also with all the delays in shipping miners there are a lot of people mining with obsolete hardware just because they don't have to feel completely scammed so if they mine something they can convince themselves it was worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This makes no sense. This is what a current Bitcoin mining operation looks like.[1] It looks like a low end data center. Few cables, because the miners only need to communicate when they find a block or are getting new starting points. Power and cooling costs are a huge issue in Bitcoin mining. Most profitable Bitcoin mines are in cold places. This one is in Sweden. There are bigger ones in China. There's no way a small, low-powered Bitcoin miner can make money today. That era ended years ago.

The way Bitcoin mining works, you don't get anything unless you win an entire block. That happens about once every 10 minutes over the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. If they're talking about "a constant stream of satoshis", they mean you're a slave of their mining farm, working for them and maybe getting paid some pittance by them.

Is this thing a hoax? They're on Reddit, Twitter, and Medium. They have a web site with no useful information. ([https://21.co/](https://21.co/)) They claim to have a development kit, but have no pictures or specifications. There are no numbers about this, just PR blithering. It looks like another Bitcoin- related scam. It's been only few months since the last big one, Paycoin.[2]

[1] [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/10/massi...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/10/massive- bitcoin-mines-spring-up-in-warehouses/) [2] [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/20050/death-paycoin-employee- vid...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/20050/death-paycoin-employee-video- reveals-internal-chaos/)

<comment><USER8> It's not a Hoax, they're the real deal with very solid co founders, top ranking VC backing and a top of the line board. All mainstream stuff. For example their CEO, or one of their backers in Andreessen Horowitz.

The whole mining idea is complete rubbish. I have no clue how these two facts are compatible but they are.

It's very very strange. I can see how a hardware wallet on a dedicated chip is important, and how blockchain authenticated devices with unique private keys has use cases. But you don't need mining for that. It's still a mystery to me what the idea is.

<comment><USER12> The founders should be here explaining their company? I'm not sure what they are trying to accomplish; even after looking at the Job posting qualifications. I have a vague idea, but still confused.

I know it's difficult to explain new technology, but just give it a shot? Maybe they don't know they don't know they are on HN, or I just got conned out of an email address?

<comment><USER8> Yeah it's a bit of a mystery to me.

The blog post goes a long way in hinting here and there, but leaves lots of unanswered questions. I'll give it a shot for you if you'd like.

The underlying idea is interesting. At its core mining bitcoin represents an opportunity to earn money for proof of work, and work is done by electricity going into hardware. If everyone has hardware, then that means you can run a payment system on electricity. And that's hugely powerful and exciting. Want to your fridge to stock some Chicken? Well it's plugged into the socket, just turn electricity into money, and let your IoT fridge order chicken, an Amazon drone will deliver it, all paid for with bitcoin, automatically, without humans involved.

It's a slightly crude example but it hints at interesting opportunities. Have a lightweight computer at home and want to render a 3d model? Simply turn electricity into digital money, and pay a cloud computer to do it.

Electricity as a payment channel. Anyone you have power, you have access to internet and financial networks.

But that's kind of where it all breaks down. The economics make very little sense. You can't have local consumer grade mining hardware mine bitcoin to pay for cloud computing, without at the same time living in a market in which these cloud computers can mine the bitcoin themselves, much cheaper, with industry grade hardware and access to cheap electricity rates and cheap cooling in places like Iceland.

Mining is a zero sum game. Every 10 minutes 1 person wins the lottery, and the amount of lottery tickets depends on how big your hardware is, and how efficient it is in turning electricity dollars into tickets. Because industry grade hardware is more efficient and electricity is cheaper for industrial purposes, the professional miners mine at below average costs, the consumers at above average costs.

It follows then that it's cheaper for a consumer to simply source or license mining power in the cloud, or indeed, simply purchase bitcoins from professional miners, for less than it'd cost them to mine them themselves.

And it's no surprise this has been exactly the way of bitcoin for the past few years since professional mining took over in full.

And if bitcoin is ever to become truly mainstream - if not, this entire venture of putting chips in millions of devices is irrelevant to discuss - then purchasing and using bitcoin should be as easier or easier than sending an email. Making it trivial to finance your IoT devices with bitcoin without having to mine it, too. Indeed already using Circle you can instantly buy bitcoins at 0% commission, not much harder than signing up with Gmail.

And this is just one of the various fundamental issues. The other one is that mining very rapidly increases in scale. If you'd have had a smartphone that had a mining chip in 2011 that used bitcoins to get service, it'd now be defunct as its mining output dropped by a factor of a million or some crazy amount like that. Mining output and difficulty is unpredictable, yet constantly growing. It's as if you had a smartphone charger that charged 80% less a year later. It's not practical.

Beyond that, the whole idea of discounting consumer devices to recoup revenues in mining requires serious technical challenges to be solved. i.e. forcing devices to mine continuously after purchase, and worse, forcing humans to charge and turn on their devices long enough to spend their electricity on paying back the proverbial debt on their discounted purchase. It's a business model which is not quite a no-brainer.

Lots of unanswered questions. There's genuine IoT potential and it's very interesting to think about, but so far only in the realm of sci-fi ideas whose economics make little sense.

Ignoring the mining bit for a moment, you're left with bitcoin wallets on IoT hardware that happen to not mine, but that can receive and spend money.

And that's hugely exciting. Send your router or PC $10 and it'll automatically add small pieces of bitcoin to http requests and you could create a different payment model besides ads and subs. Send your driverless car $100, and it'll drive to the nearest charging station at night and charge itself, then while driving on the highway while late for a meeting, pay $1 to any driverless cars configured for 'not-in-a-hurry- in front of it to move out the way, creating a real-time market based VIP lane for you that more efficiently dedicates scarce lane space to priority users. (it has flaws, but it's an enticing example).

I'm hoping they're looking to spearhead this and that the mining bit isn't as big as it's made out to be.

Examples like that can't be done through traditional banking systems like ACH or SWIFT. You want digital payments, even creditcards are slow to clear. Paypal could work, but it's proprietary, similarly we don't like to run the internet on proprietary protocols and platforms, either. Bitcoin is an open protocol and can be built on top of with fast or slow transactions, cheap or expensive etc. It's a unique platform to make global, plug & play, open-2-all IoT platforms possible.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I found out a little bit about the founder(I think)--forget his name, but he seems legit. He's a founder of vagabond.something, and was a player in Skype. I listened to his podcast, and he was pretty grounded in reality. I heard he was given 5 million a few years ago to get this thing started; which doesn't seems like enough to manufacture your own chip? After every job posting, the company is offering a Mac book pro retina as an incentive to join the company. For some reason I started to laugh, but you need a laptop to work, and why not a Mac book pro retina? What I got out of the podcast is the TV show Silicon Valley just might be a documentary. I guess I didn't realize just how important Silicon Valley has become, and seems akin to an amusement park in some ways. No wonder rents in the Bay Area are beyond staggering. The podcast I watched was about vagabond.someting--not this company.

<comment><USER8> Never heard of Vagabond before. If you want to know his background a little bit, this is a good start:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/video/521121/innovators- unde...](http://www.technologyreview.com/video/521121/innovators- under-35-balaji-srinivasan-cofounder-counsyl/)

As for Skype... the company is backed by VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel who all invested in Skype. Don't know any other connection to this company.

As for your comments about Silicon Valley, yeah it's pretty crazy. The basic idea is that companies like Google, Apple or Facebook have millions or even billions of customers/users and are some of the biggest companies in the world. Meanwhile they have very few employees because their product is mostly software, and 1 guy can code a program that a billion people use, unlike say a barbershop where 1 person can only cut a few thousand people's hair. Which means that the potential reward for the very best programmers (a small team of whom can build products used by millions) can go through the roof in a free market.

Which is why you get wages of $100-200k for solid programmers. And something like a free Macbook Pro then is not a big deal. It costs $1500, it's used for 3 years, so the cost is $40 a month, peanuts for someone whose wage is already $10k a month. It makes sense to spend an extra 0.4% for one of the best laptops available allowing your employees to be productive anywhere anytime they want.

And if a $50 gym membership & free lunch makes people happier, more productive and absent due to illness, to the extent they're only 5% more productive, you get an additional 5% of $10k of 'work', or $500, so it makes sense to give employees free gym memberships that cost you $50.

If you run a private bus service with wifi for employees and pay $500 for a private bus driver for a day moving around 100 employees who don't have to take a crappy bus, and those 100 employees are 5% more productive because they can get to work sooner (or leave home later and more rested), and work on the bus because it has wifi and is spacious etc, or because they can have breakfast on the bus, that 5% productivity gain nets $50k in total for the 100 employees, and costs a fraction of that.

etc etc. That's the kind of reasoning going into making it an amusement park. It makes a lot of economic sense to spend a lot of money to make employees a bit happier, more productive, less absent and reduce employee turnover, when these employees already cost $200k and in small teams build large software products. It also makes sure talent is attracted to work at your company specifically, and is less inclined to leave once they get there.

All of which can make for some amazing working environments, and also very silly outcomes (as well as friction in communities where people live that don't have any of those benefits but work just as hard, and have to see things like awesome private buses for some citizens, while they have to take shittier public transport, for example. There's been quite a bit of controversy in Silicon Valley about stuff like this the past few years)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From what I gather, the Bitcoin mining is really just a way to incentivize device and chip makers to include 21's tech, in the short term.

I can think of two longer term benefits that only kick in once they actually get their tech widely distributed:

1) A low-power hardware wallet in your smartphone, smartwatch, etc, allowing people to make Bitcoin transactions from anywhere to anyone without needing to go through a middleman. Finally, true digital cash.

2) A Bitcoin private key on every Internet of Things device, which means that you'll be able to use some sort of fancy multisig side-chain algorithm (I'm no expert here) to verify ownership of all of your "stuff." This will disincentivize theft in a big way.

It's worth noting that, to make mining a viable way to bootstrap this whole thing, they need to be at the cutting edge of Bitcoin ASIC tech for multiple iterations of Moore's Law. Which is probably why they raised so much money.

<comment><USER14> I hope you're right, there _must_ be other components to their business model to warrant $116m in investment capital. At face value this all appears beyond foolish, though I'm rooting for them to make me eat my words down the road.

"21 Inc., formerly 21e6, announced it had raised US$116m in venture capital, the largest investment yet accumulated by a startup in the digital currency industry. 21 Inc.'s lead backers include American Andreessen Horowitz and RRE Venture, Chinese Yuan Capital, as well as strategic investor and chipmaker Qualcomm Inc."

[http://cointelegraph.com/news/113668/bitcoin- startup-21-inc-...](http://cointelegraph.com/news/113668/bitcoin- startup-21-inc-reveals-industry-record-funding-of-116-million-dollars)

<comment><USER15> I'd wager a decent fraction of their $116m is being held in Bitcoin. If Bitcoin could magically go to mass adoption that would stimulate a price in the range of $10-50k/BTC. Holding a few million $ of Bitcoin now and "doing stuff" that makes the Bitcoin more valuable has a higher expectation than trying to build sustainable business model around the Bitcoin ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I by no means would call myself an expert on Bitcoin, but I did coauthor a book about Bitcoin.

All I do when reading stories about 21 Inc is parse every sentence very slowly saying to myself "What is it I'm missing that turns this from a terrible idea into a good one?"

I have yet to discover such a sentence... I hope I'm wrong and will still read it at some point.

<comment><USER17> That's what I was thinking. I've been pretty into cryptocurrency for a good while now, out on some pretty distant frontiers at times. And the mining aspect of this makes no sense at all to me. I don't get it.

<comment><USER18> I think that's the bit where they're selling snake oil to the lower quartile of VCs. You and I know it's completely ridiculous, but they don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My comment for a similar thread about Intel manufacturing Bitcoin mining chips ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537691)):

 _I think you just landed on the "Free" version of future electronic devices. Imagine a terrible reality, not unlike today's videogame market, where every device, charger, lamp, TV, and box fan comes in "Free" and "Pay" versions - most manufacturers will have a mail back program, so you can return a broken "Free" item for a brand-new "Free" item. The "Free" items will mine Bitcoins and return all profit to the manufacturer._

 _Meanwhile "Pay" items will still be widely available from numerous online vendors. These devices will require you to enter your personal Bitcoin address, so they can credit you with their mining._

 _And thus the world will continue to be dominated by Whales, so named for the size of their bank accounts. The rich will be able to keep the entirety of their revenue, while the poor must subsist not only on the charity of the State, but also the charity of the Corporation._

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't want to be overly dismissive -- I'm sure this is a huge engineering achievement -- but I just don't get it. A mobile phone, where battery life is precious and a big differentiating factor between devices, seems like the absolute last place you'd want to mine bitcoin. Manufacturers have spent years optimizing for battery life - why would they want to shoot themselves in the foot? What consumer in their right mind would buy a phone advertised as, "your battery will die much sooner, but hey, you don't have to use your credit card as much"?

Perhaps I'm wrong, and I'd love to be corrected. But I don't see the point.

<comment><USER21> This is absolutely insane. You're basically getting $0.00000001 USD for cutting your phone battery life significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't see how this make sense. Even if you assume that it's useful for a device to have some bitcoins available, it seems much more efficient to either supply them when the device is created or download them on demand. The cost of building a mining chip into the device plus the expensive power consumption plus the difficulty of maintaining a network connection to access the mining pool seems way more than the cost of just providing the device with bitcoins.

A key point from the article is: "Crucial to this is the idea that bitcoin generated by embedded mining is more convenient — and hence more valuable — than bitcoin bought at market price and manually moved over to the site of utility." I just don't see that, especially if you assume bitcoins mined on the device are going to be much more expensive (because of less efficient mining and because of 21's overhead.)

</comment><comment><USER23> I would love to see an analysis of how much BTC a user could generate in a day on his/her cell phone with only a 10% impact to battery life. I'm imagining that it's pitifully small today, and it will only be 10% of that number a year from now. Any more than that, and I don't see users accepting the trade-off.

<comment><USER24> An iPhone 5 battery is about 5 watt hours, ten percent of this is 0.5 watt hour. [0]

The most efficient mining chip I could find information about is the BM1384, which consumes 2.058W at the lowest power bracket. [1]

We would exhaust our 10% allotment in 15 minutes.

In those fifteen minutes our speed would be 8.25 gigahash per second, which would produce 0.000003542 BTC per day [2].

Our total income for 15 minutes of mining would be 0.00000003689583 BTC. [3][4]

At $237.7/BTC our 10% iPhone 5 battery life has been exchanged for $0.000008770 USD.

Assuming 0.17 USD power cost in the United States, the power cost would be 0.000085 USD. [5]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5)

[1]: [https://www.bitmaintech.com/files/download/BM1384_Datasheet_...](https://www.bitmaintech.com/files/download/BM1384_Datasheet_v2.0.pdf)

[2]: [https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty](https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

[3]: This number isn't even representable in Bitcoin, which maxes out at 8 decimal places of precision.

[4]: The reward halves in 62 weeks though.

[5]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_comp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_comparison)

<comment><USER25> Following your example of using the most efficient miner available and ignoring heat, size, etc. restrictions:

Average cost of electricity for U.S. households is $0.12/kWh [0]

0.05 Wh = $0.000006 average cost

Net Profit = $0.0000008801 - $0.000006 = -$0.000005120

Net profit margin = -581.7%

[0] [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/10/27/141766341/the-p...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/10/27/141766341/the- price-of-electricity-in-your-state)

<comment><USER26> The author states in the article he's more interested in expanding the use of the blockchain as a ledger (as opposed to a store of value).

<comment><USER25> Which is strange given their cost-savings examples using bitcoin mining.

This might work for authentication, but they shouldn't sell it as "bitcoin- subsidizing devices for the developing world".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> After the gold rushes were long gone, people still offered to let people rent a shovel, a pan, and buy a map to go try to find their treasure by panning in a river where most everybody knew there was absolutely no balance to the time+effort:value ratio. But, come they did.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Bitcoin-subsidized devices for the developing world.

Let's take advantage of vulnerable people by ripping them off with hidden energy charges! Viva Bitcoin!

<comment><USER23> ... and energy in the developing world is much more expensive and dirty than it is in developed nations, making it doubly dicey.

<comment><USER28> The Internet of Things-That-Are-Secretly-Robbing-You

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This sounds like a really evil item. Are the devices going to be labled as "subsidized by Bitcoin" or is Qualcom going to secretly include it with every SoC? Are we going to be able to turn that thing off?

I really don't like the direction technology is going. It all looks scary and downright depressing.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Towards that end, our team of PhDs in EE from MIT, Stanford, and CMU has > built not just a chip, but a full technology stack around the chip — > including reference devices, datasheets, a cloud backend, and software > protocols.

This is pure marketing fluff. They should be embarassed by this.

Plus, there are tons and tons of capable PhDs and non-PhDs from lots of other schools.

Moreover, as others are saying, it doesn't make sense to waste electricity to mine bitcoins in small quantities.

edit: Given that it doesn't make sense, does anybody know what they are _really_ doing?

<comment><USER31> Looking at their admittedly bad website, I am thinking the following:

Let's assume that the next big thing is not centralized services, but distributed ones. We've already gone through periodic waves of P2P mania. Even Bittorrent got a fair amount of VC. I think it is not unreasonable to gamble that in the next 10 years distributed systems and protocols will dominate and client/server will fall into disuse.

Of course it might not happen, but if it did, where would you need to position yourself in order to be able to profit massively from it? There are several major problems with P2P applications. For example, you need coordination, authentication and resistance to bad players.

Bitcoin has a reputation for having solved many of these problems for its domain. Although it might not be the _best_ way to solve all of these problems (specifically proof of work may not be optimal for many problems), imagine that you are trying to sell your idea to a VC company. Can you come up with a convincing story about how this technology can be used to solve most of these problems? Even on HN there are a large number of people who think that the Bitcoin implementation of a block chain is the solution to practically every distributed authentication/coordination problem.

Now imagine building a chip that would enable the use of this technology in every day equipment. You could look at it as the modern day equivalent to the FPU or GPU. It is distributed authentication/coordination hardware acceleration. As such, if the world _does_ go to a distributed model of communication/computation, it will practically be _required_. As the defacto standard, every single device on the planet will need to include your chip.

Are they really thinking to mine bitcoins? There are some potential applications, perhaps. For example back in the day Microsoft proposed that there be a "postage fee" for email. This would make it expensive for people to spam freely. Imagine a "postage fee" for distributed services, like authentication, whatever. The fee needn't be large and the idea is that the device could mine enough BTC to pay for average usage. Anybody who wanted more would have to pay for it. But Bitcoin _does_ provide a convenient method for doing these kinds of really micro payments.

Note: I think it's an absolutely stupid idea that can't work due to the nature of service fees once new BTC runs out, but I can well imagine a VC company completely overlooking this detail.

In any case, I can totally see the potential for $100 million or so investment. I think the web page may intentionally have a lot of fluff -- things that are really improbably or impossible but are there because some key stakeholders expect to see it there. I think the challenge for them is that they are walking into an arena _very_ early where there is a total vacuum of applications that are currently being used. What they will need to do is not only build the hardware infrastructure but also convince a lot of people to write applications of the infrastructure so that everybody wants it. Probably this is one of those instances where you are better off being second or third to the market (like, for example, the Apple Newton).

<comment><USER30> Thanks for your thoughts.

If there is some advantage to devices having a few satoshis, it would be easy to just send them a few satoshis. (Or install a private key that lets them draw a few satoshis from an account you set up for that purpose.)

In other words, you don't need the device itself to do the mining.

And it's always going to be cheaper to produce satoshis in massive mining farms than to do it in tiny chips in embedded devices---so you would always economically prefer to give satoshis to devices, not make them mine the satoshis themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How do you get people to invest in such an idea and write such excited statements? Almost nothing they say makes sense. Mining on battery powered devices. Abusing the block chain as a database. Making other people pay for you.

</comment><comment><USER33> These comments remind me of the crapping-on uBeam took on HN after a few people decided, upon a cursory glance, that it was theoretically impossible and ridiculous.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542091)

We still can't be 100% sure if it's ridiculous or not, but all signs are pointing to not. So assuming Balaji et al are acting in good faith and aren't scamming their investors (one of whom Balaji is a partner in so that would be weird) this is cool and I can't wait to see what it does and where it goes.

<comment><USER34> These comments reminded me of the crapping-on Colour took on HN, not even on the grounds of theoretical impossibility of the product but simply the buzzword-laden me-too nature of their pitch. Turns out the naysayers were right: whilst the team weren't intentionally scamming the VCs that backed their remarkably large pre-product fundraising efforts, the world's first stealth social network might as well have been a scam for all the traction it achieved.

I'm having to hedge my scepticism on the basis that I know I know barely any more about bitcoin mining technology than the average layman, and VCs can bring in highly skilled specialists for their due diligence, especially for investments of this magnitude. But when a press release fails to acknowledge the level of technical breakthrough they'd need to have achieved for their product to be viable, and instead launches straight into a series of theoretical monetisation strategies of varying degrees of plausibility, I think the cynicism is entirely warranted.

If they _actually_ have a team of engineers that could develop chips with far more computational power in relation to their size and energy requirements than anything else on the market, you'd have to wonder why they'd think persuading consumers to put Bitcoin miners in their pocket was the most promising avenue to monetise.

<comment><USER35> > If they actually have a team of engineers that could develop chips with far > more computational power in relation to their size and energy requirements > than anything else on the market, you'd have to wonder why they'd think > persuading consumers to put Bitcoin miners in their pocket was the most > promising avenue to monetise.

Basically, if they've got the tech to do this, they could get rich just by selling that tech, and not screwing around with Bitcoin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> None of their bullet points seem to make sense. I guess their "secret" is "Crucial to this is the idea that bitcoin generated by embedded mining is more convenient — and hence more valuable — than bitcoin bought at market price and manually moved over to the site of utility." I don't know whether that will turn out to be true.

<comment><USER37> A somewhat more thorough asking of the same good question: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/36e8by/21dotco_a_bi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/36e8by/21dotco_a_bitcoin_miner_in_every_device_and_in/crd7b3h)

I'd like to see this answered in some forum. It's very hard to get a more concrete sense of the vision without it being answered.

<comment><USER36> I don't know if it's even possible to answer such questions concretely. Everything hinges on transaction fees, and future fees depend on both the rate of transactions (which they propose to increase greatly) and the block size (which is being hotly debated right now). The case where their chip doesn't even mine enough satoshis to pay its own transaction fees isn't out of the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related discussion from last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537691)

Maybe we can have "smart" electrical outlets that steals back any Bitcoins you mine off of someone else's electricity.

</comment><comment><USER38> I can't believe they actually believe in the 'device that pays for itself' type of scenarios. Are they that stupid or outright lying?

</comment><comment><USER39> >This means any vendor can take a chip performing a normal function (say video decoding or networking), add 21's BitShare technology, and thereby enable the chip to continuously generate revenue simply by being connected to power and internet.

I'd be interested in any estimates they have for how much this would generate if, say, included in a wireless router, or nest thermostat.

Also, the deal is either: you pay extra for a router that also mines you bitcoin, or you pay less for a router that mines bitcoin for someone else. In the first case, you have to then sell the bitcoin -- causing a lot of friction for a not-so-technical person to get a few bucks. In the second case, your device isn't your own -- you have a section you're not allowed to access.

<comment><USER40> make it like a mail in rebate, I bet something like half of those never get sent in so people who got the 'paid' version but don't claim the coins after X days have them sent off to the company anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What if they actually planned this and fine tuned their ASICs so that they would never be able to actually generate enough satoshis to go above the dust limit? They could tell their users: you've generated 1 satoshi this month, just 5459 more to go ... that's only 454 years :). "Honestly, we want to pay you your share, but the Bitcoin network won't allow it because it's below the dust limit ... trust us, you'll get paid in 454 years".

So they can make them mine fast enough to make a difference in terms of hash rate but slow enough to never actually reach the payout limit - so they could constantly owe their users very small (unpayable) amounts.

If the idea is to mine slowly, it can be done on a CPU. Most smartphones also have a GPU on board, so they could mine faster than a CPU. And the chips are already in there, you wouldn't have to buy a new phone/chip for this.

Finally, people seem to misunderstand how mining works ... you can't mine a single satoshi, you either find a block or you don't, so you either get the 25 BTC (currently) reward + transaction fees or you don't. The pool distributes the load and the reward, so there would still be a "funding" transaction from the pool to the user - it's not like their ASIC can generate 1 satoshi on board, it can lend its hashing power to the pool and receive 1 satoshi (actually 5460+ satoshis, see above) for their effort from the pool.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's rather annoying that the mining conversation always gear towards profits.

mining centralization/decentralization is the importance here.

What I rather worry about is will you be able to control which pools these chips will be allowed to be pointed to, do the users have control over these matters?

personally I rather have 1b+ small chips all over the place in devices than a few $10m mining farms spread around the world.

</comment><comment><USER43> Basically what I'm reading is it probably would have been more prudent just to light the 116 million dollar investment on fire and not waste everyone's time.

These are terrible ideas.

<comment> super-serial No don't burn it, we should piss it away...

You see my idea is to install hydro turbines inside men's urinals at major corporations. Then everyone will piss on them generating free electricity... that electricity powers work computers during non-office hours to mine bitcoin.

It's sort of like the enterprise version of this idea. Maybe I should start talking to VCs to raise $200 million? B2B startups are hotter than consumer- facing ones right now - so I should ask for more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This would require a significant overlap between 'smartphone' owners and 'people not so good at math'. They may be on to something.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's be interesting if, instead of Bitcoin, 21 planned for these chips to be used to create a new cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER46> Perhaps to provide an authentication a security layer for IoT...this sounds like a story you could raise 100M with. See also Vernor Vinge and the SHE

<comment><USER47> That is the only part that makes sense. The mining makes zero sense but having a secure wallet in everything sounds like a good idea.

<comment><USER46> Here is some rumor I found that rings true but is really disappointing (if real)

[http://bitsndollars.blogspot.com/2015/05/inside-21s-plans- to...](http://bitsndollars.blogspot.com/2015/05/inside-21s-plans-to-bring- bitcoin-to.html?m=1)

The tldr is that Balaji and 21e6 have done nothing more interesting than use millions of dollars of opm to build a huge mining pool out of custom silicon that performs so well the 70M it took to build it just makes financial sense on its own, netting in the low eight figures currently.

Now the followup strategy is to give away free mining chips for embedded systems to 1) mine more coins using other people's power (21 keeps 75%) and 2) stabilize the long the term value of their massive BT holdings by promoting consumer adoption of bitcoin (by bribing people with free coins mined by their own gadgets)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Reading this I really didn't get the impression the chips would be generating actual bitcoins. Just currency-like tokens for doing resource management and proving that something occurred.

<comment><USER36> If you're going to create custom hardware but not going to mine actual BTC it seems like it would be much easier and more energy-efficient to use something like trusted-computing-based proof of existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> And the end-users's motivation for ever purchasing anything with is... off- setting short term costs with long term costs that make payday loans look like a fair deal?

</comment><comment><USER50> I would like to remind everyone of hn's policy against negativity and by extension of negative posts. Or does that only apply to YC related posts?

<comment><USER51> HN's policy is against _" gratuitous negativity"_.

It's OK to be critical of an inefficient idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I really find the phrase "embarrassingly parallel" obnoxious; nice to find out (on the Wiki link) that I'm not alone.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is bitcoin relevant any more? The hype level seems to have crashed from former heights.</comment>


In:Verse – a poetic programming language - <AUTHOR> https://inverse.website/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me vaguely of Piet[1], but only because these seem to be the only two languages that have focused on the visual elements of geometry, colour and mathematics.

[1] [https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html](https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't appear to work on Firefox, reports "no webgl".

<comment><USER4> This works for me on Firefox 75.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meta: title horribly truncated, please fix.

<comment><USER6> Fixed. Submitted title was "In: Verse is a programming language and environment for exploring the conflux of".</comment></comment>


Rome2Rio profile: exchange with founder Michael Cameron  - <AUTHOR> http://tims-boot.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/rome2rio-profile-exchange-with-rome2rio.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Rome2rio is a platform for organizing and searching the world's travel information. ..."_

That is an interesting idea.</comment>


Readability for Android is Here - <AUTHOR> http://blog.readability.com/2012/03/readability-android/ <comment><USER2> I stopped using Readability because it lacked an Android app. As far as I'm concerned it still doesn't have one. I'm not installing the Amazon App Store just so I can get the Readability app. Read It Later works well enough and I don't have to jump through hoops to get it.</comment>


Code in an expert programming language - <AUTHOR> http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2010/08/code-in-expert-programming-language.html

<comment><USER2> No idea what language it is, but it most likely does base64 encoding (the string in the first line is a dead giveaway).

</comment><comment><USER3> "Hideous abomination"... why is that?</comment>


Berkeley Lab: It Takes 70B Kilowatt Hours a Year to Run the Internet (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/06/28/how-much-electricity-does-it-take-to-run-the-internet/#262fab161fff <comment><AUTHOR> Wow, and that's 3 years ago, I imagine streaming and cloud services have seen considerable growth in that time.

>To generate 70 billion kwh you'd need power plants with a baseload capacity of 8,000 megawatts — equivalent to about 8 big nuclear reactors, or twice the output of all the nation's solar panels.

>Sliced up per capita, the average American uses about 200 kwh a year for his or her internet use, costing about $20. For those of you obsessed with carbon footprints, your internet use is responsible for the emission of about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide per year.

Obviously that solar panel figure is probably inaccurate now, 3 years is a long time with the way PV has been deploying but compared to the growth in data usage/servers in that period it may still be relatively accurate.</comment>


Ask HN: Paid alternatives to WhatsApp - <AUTHOR> Do y'all know of a paid cross platform messaging service that respects user privacy in everyday, and not do creepy stuff? "paid" because I'd like them to stay in business. <comment><USER2> I am wondering why everybody wants a service provider and nobody seems to care about an open solution. If you choose an provider you are always bound to its fate. We have 20+ global messaging networks which do not cooperate/communicate with each other.

I am using XMPP and it works as good as any other messaging app (fast end-2-end encryption included). And since it is an _federated_ protocol I am not bound to any provider.

There is just one major problem:

There seems to be a lack of client developers, because most clients are simply not up-to-date. I am using 'conversations' as an android client, which is quite good, but the desktop clients seem to lack any development momentum.

</comment><comment><USER3> well not paid but signal seems pretty well funded and not likely to sell.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gasit/id659093855?ls=1&mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gasit/id659093855?ls=1&mt=8)

<comment><USER4> Let me know what you think, if you get to try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about Telegram? It's free though...

<comment><USER6> Telegram doesn't use encryption by default.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I realized that after I gave it a try. Felt really really dumb considering they have the facility already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://threema.ch/](https://threema.ch/)

<comment><USER8> I got threema at launch for iOS. Still haven't managed to find anyone else using it unfortunately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here. Threema sounds best on paper. I'm definitely going to try to use atleast within my family. But, I don't hope to have a thriving network around it any time soon.

Too bad the masses don't get the privacy angle in free products. I feel like FB<->WhatsApp is counting on just that by using a unintuitive "opt-out" policy. The moms,dads, and not so tech aware citizens won't even know what goes on underneath. They would be feeling falsely proud to use a 'secure','E-E encrypted' service not knowing 'privacy' is different from them.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Digital Assistants Are a Privacy Nightmare - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/the-privacy-problem-with-digital-assistants/483950/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Even if it's run on the client, it'll still be vulnerable to scalable privacy abuse by a large number of actors via malware, just like end-2-end encryption.</comment>


Launch HN: Quirk (YC S19) – Open-Source Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm Evan. We make Quirk, an open-source Cognitive Behavioral Therapy app. (https://github.com/flaque/quirk)
If you've never seen a cognitive-behavioral therapist before, it's easiest to understand by analogy with physical therapy. Like a physical therapist, a cognitive-therapist gives you goals and exercises to do, only they're mental rather than physical. Similarly, Quirk gives you exercises where you record and challenge negative thoughts.
I work on Quirk with my brother, Koby, a former founder and marketer in both consumer products and the mortgage industry. He's really good at simplifying, branding, and explaining complicated topics to the average consumer. Personally, I'm just an engineer who used to work on Segment's developer platform.
Quirk started as a command line tool (https://github.com/flaque/freak) that I used to track my panic attacks. I've had severe attacks for as long as I can remember, some lasting several hours. I always used to down-play them, saying "they're a once-in-a-blue-moon thing." But that wasn't really true and they started happening more and more. At a certain point they got so bad that I felt hopeless; I always assumed at some point in my life they'd just stop. But they didn't. So I picked up a book on depression, which turned out to be the CBT bible, "Feeling Good" by David Burns. I started working through the exercises and saw a dramatic drop in panic attacks. (https://i.imgur.com/P29BSRC.jpg)
I started turning the CLI into a little app so I could use it wherever. But since I was having so few panic attacks and was constantly recording thoughts all the time, the project became a CBT app. And the more thoughts I recorded, the better I felt; I went from having multiple attacks a week to having two in a six month period.
I gave Quirk to folks with a "this-software-will-probably-break-if-you-look-at-it-funny" guarantee and open sourced it. But after a bit, it became pretty hard to ignore how many folks were relying on it. That was surprising; it's small and it doesn't really do much from a technical perspective. Its main claim-to-fame is that it works pretty well. Everyday we wake up to folks writing in saying that "for the first time in 30 years I feel peaceful," or that they're "happier, healthier and feel so much better about everything," or that they feel like Quirk is "their secret weapon." We're recommended by quite a few therapists but we're also used by folks who aren't currently seeing one and had never planned to before trying Quirk.
That's fantastic, but that's not really surprising: CBT has 40 years of evidence saying that it works really well, even in "bibliotherapy" where someone isn't necessarily seeing a therapist. Quirk doesn't do every part of CBT, but it does the most general, applicable-to-everyone part. So what Quirk is really doing is fixing CBT's branding and consistency problems. Most people don't know what CBT is, or if they do, they don't realize just how effective it is and how much evidence is behind it. And when they "try" it, they often don't really do it consistently enough to see the value. Quirk's current feature set is just the thought-recording exercise with some cute illustrations, evidence building to prove to you that it works, and some silly skinner-box tricks to remind you to use it.
A lot of companies solve these massive technical or structural problems. We make a little toy app that helps you feel better.
But given just how approachable we could make CBT, we think we can help around 100 million people world-wide in the future. We're translated into 14 languages (kinda, it's a bit broken right now) and have quite an amazing and supportive community.
We charge a small subscription for Quirk, currently $4, though the price might change as we figure stuff out. Unlike a lot of other apps, we're quite privacy conscious; we store your thoughts only on the device and don't have any email or phone collection.
We want your feedback, questions, and ideas. If you're comfortable sharing, we really want to hear about your experiences. But mainly, we want you to know that CBT exists and that this is really something that could help you if you haven't been doing so hot lately. <comment><USER2> Nice work! This is a great idea and something I've thought should exist since getting interested in CBT a few months back. Before even trying the app, here are some thoughts.

\- On pricing: $4/mo seems like a difficult price point to build a business around, and it doesn't reflect the value you're offering. People pay hundreds/thousands per month to therapists to improve their mental health. If outcomes from using your app compare favorably to a therapist, shouldn't your pricing reflect that? $4/mo makes me think 'toy', not serious therapeutic tool. For people to be willing to pay _anything_ for an app like this, they have to be convinced it can really work. But if they _are_ convinced, they'll pay a whole lot more than $4/mo. I would consider freemium (so people can try it out and see the value) and then a much higher price point (maybe $50-100/mo?). You might get undercut by competing apps, but if you're clearly the best one, I think many people will want the best option and won't be very price-sensitive if they believe it can really help.

\- On branding: while it's important to mention that the app is based on CBT so you can piggyback on the awareness people already have about CBT, I think referring to it as a "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy app" severely restricts your market to people who already know what that means, which I'd guess is a very small slice of the people who could benefit. I would try to lead with the benefits--feel better quickly; easier, cheaper, more effective than a therapist; evidence-based; etc.--and save the more technical/jargony stuff about CBT for supporting info.

\- On stigma: I would also try to avoid positioning this as something mainly for people experiencing a 'mental illness' like clinical depression/anxiety, but rather something that _everyone_ can benefit from and use to feel better and improve their lives, regardless of how they currently feel. I think many people who don't consider themselves to have a serious problem still engage in cognitive distortions and could see major benefits from using CBT techniques, so I would try to include these people in your messaging as well. While going from bad mood to good mood is obviously valuable and desirable, so is going from good mood to great mood. But if you make it seem like using the app is effectively self-identifying as 'mentally ill' or even just 'feeling bad', many folks in the latter camp will be turned off, so that's something to be careful about.

<comment><USER3> Offhand, I feel your advice is contrary.

You suggest increasing the price because "If outcomes from using your app compare favorably to a therapist, shouldn't your pricing reflect that?", but then the next two points on brand and stigma suggest opening it up to all people who want to feel great.

I think you need to choose one. You are either a niche therapy compliment/competitor (price insensitive) or a mental wellbeing tool for a broad audience (super price sensitive).

I personally hope you keep to the lower price point. I think overall you will do more Good and reach more people. Even if you don't make a unicorn, $4/month from 5% of your market, is still $20M/month.

Also, final note, many people suffering from mental illness can not afford therapy. Even $4 would be hard, $50 is impossible.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't call therapy a niche market. Therapy _apps_ might be currently, but if they can disrupt the current therapy model to a meaningful extent, they won't be niche for long.

While I don't have time to look for better data on this, a quick google turns up this 2004 survey via [https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/survey](https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/survey):

'A similar poll released in May, "Therapy in America 2004," and co-sponsored by Psychology Today magazine and PacifiCare Behavioral Health, found that an estimated 59 million people have received mental health treatment in the past two years...'

59 million people (in just the US... in 2004) is not a niche market! And these people are paying a _lot_.

The problem with trying to be a "mental wellbeing tool for a broad audience" isn't just the market being super price sensitive, it's the market being unwilling pay anything whatsoever, which leads to ads and selling personal data (yuck).

"Even if you don't make a unicorn, $4/month from 5% of your market, is still $20M/month."

Right, but how will you reach 5% of your market? I don't see much virality here, and $4/mo gives you no room for customer acquisition costs.

"Also, final note, many people suffering from mental illness can not afford therapy. Even $4 would be hard, $50 is impossible."

I agree, but an unsustainable business can't help anyone at all in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I agree, but an unsustainable business can't help anyone at all.

10000%. This has basically been my learning experience (Koby's much more knowledgeable than I am). It's amazing how many people you can help if don't die.

Also 100% agree with all of your points! Though, you'd be surprised about how viral it currently is and also how cheap the customer acquisition costs are. (That said, I don't expect those trends to continue as we grow, they tend to get harder.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommended Quirk to my girlfriend a few months ago. Still haven't tried it myself.

You seem to know what you're doing so my only advice is to not take VC money or you'll probably be pushed into making this app a general health app that is a bit useful for everyone instead of very useful to a lot of people, for the sake of money.

<comment><USER5> Does the app store any data in their servers? I'm hardly obsessed with data privacy but I would never, ever, ever want my mental health data out there for some data scientist to play around with and manipulate.

Facebook knowing all the dumb crap I do on their platform really pales in comparison to the data privacy issues of an app. If I get a whiff of anything negative, I'm not using it. I'm suspicious already.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it doesn't store you mental health thoughts on any servers. They're all stored only on your device.

The caveats are below:

We collect anonymous, aggregate (as in "user-213sdfewfefwa") events. This is stuff like: > "user-awefawewa21312aef" opened the app > "user- efaoiwejf21321few" started a free trial

These are used for aggregate stats like "how many people use Quirk" or "do people read the articles?" This is recorded by the phone stores anyway, but we do this both so we can get some more Quirk-specific stuff and so we can combine Android and iOS data.

We also collect some base information on your phone. For example, what type of phone you have or what language you're using. This is basically a requirement to debug stuff; since there's a lot of bugs that crop up only on certain OS/Phone/languages.

If your phone crashes or there's an error thrown, we use Sentry to report it. This lib will collect some basic info like phone types, IPs, and then the stack trace of course.

In the future, we may provide a way for you to share a thought with a trusted friend or therapist. This has been a highly requested feature, especially by folks who would otherwise huddle around their phone during an appointment. To do this, our plan to use an expiring, private link. That means your thoughts will be stored in raw form in a DB and then get deleted within X days. This would only happen with your explicit consent and it's only for a thought you share rather than your whole list of thoughts. It's a button you have to press EVERY time, not an "automatic share my thoughts" sort of thing.

We'll also be adding a cloud-sync feature at some point so you never have to lose your thoughts when you switch phones. When we do this, all the thoughts will be end-to-end encrypted; so no Quirk employee will ever be able to see your raw thoughts.

Because we're a paid product, we have little incentive to read your thoughts or strip-mine your data. We're in the business of making you feel better; we're not reading your deepest darkest secrets to figure out how to sell you shoes or something. We don't want to know your thoughts. Unless someone explicitly tells us otherwise, we treat them like passwords.

<comment><USER6> > Because we're a paid product, we have little incentive to read your thoughts > or strip-mine your data. We're in the business of making you feel better; > we're not reading your deepest darkest secrets to figure out how to sell you > shoes or something. We don't want to know your thoughts. Unless someone > explicitly tells us otherwise, we treat them like passwords.

I trust you when you say this, and I trust that you are being sincere. I do not trust the incentive structures of Silicon Valley to permit you to adhere to this principle.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I do not trust the incentive structures of Silicon Valley to permit you to > adhere to this principle.

Neither do I! My point is more so that we try to take steps not just to say "hey we don't read your thoughts" but also to align the incentive systems so that 10 years down the line we're at least pointed in the right direction.

<comment><USER7> Why not switch to a Patreon model and give people simple "export all data as markdown/json" inside every version of the app? In that way there's less incentive for the business to become potentially untrustworthy, but _if_ it does, people's emotional investments are still protected by being firmly in their own hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Got discouraged by the fact that I have to introduce my credit card details to try the app. This is a no no for me and I'm sure that it will be a no no for a lot others.

<comment><USER9> Literally their first sentence is bolded and calls out the subscription fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wasn't able to make it to WaffleJS yesterday but I hope your talk went well! As someone who's dealing with anxiety about the job hunt/interviewing for my first tech job right now, I can definitely see myself using Quirk.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Good luck in the job hunt/interviewing. It took me a LONG time and a lot of tries before I stopped freezing up in interviews.

CBT (with or without Quirk) is definitely something that can help you here and definitely recommend giving it a shot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I never post here but I'm a huge fan of this and what you're doing. I am going to share this around with folks I know will benefit from this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome product and idea, I can definitely see this solution (or similar ones) be a crucial "culture-boost" for companies. And, of course, +1 for open sourcing it.

With that said, any reason you guys decided to GPL it? I actively try to avoid both contributing as well as using GPL-licensed software (e.g. non-permissive libraries). All my stuff, for example, is MIT'd.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, I just kind of picked it and went with it. I think at the time I had been talking a lot with my dad (an old copy-left enthusiast). I never really thought it would really be a thing.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, I don't think it's a huge deal, it just makes it very inconvenient to use any cool parts of your code commercially or in other projects. Sometimes I'll work on a project without knowing if I'll ever commercialize it, and I try to err on the side of using MIT (or Apache) libraries/code as opposed to (L)GPL.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, it makes sense for software packages, but less so for real products. If we build out any packages for public use in the future, they'll likely be MIT not GPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The potential for this kind of application is great; it allows people who would otherwise decline, postpone, or forget to get this kind of therapy. All while delivering it through a much more cost effective medium.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just wanna say that "Feeling Good" by David Burns changed my life.

Best of luck to you :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Mine too! Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1) How will migration to new iOS devices work if the thoughts are only stored locally?

2) I popped the app open when I found it, but haven't used it yet. One thought I had then, I'll share here: if it doesn't have a mode similar to the Lotus Bud app, it might be nice to have something like that. Basically, you can set up the Lotus Bud app to check in randomly during the day (window of time, and frequency are both configurable) and invite you to "clear" for a moment. Quirk could ask if there's a thought stream you'l like to address.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 - At the moment, we don't. :( One of the next things we'll be working on is an end-to-end encrypted cloud sync. So we won't storing the "raw" thoughts, but you'll still be able to get access to them.

2 - Ah, our reminder notifications kind of work like that, but we'll probably try to make that more configurable as the days go on.

<comment><USER7> 1 - DayOne (and to a lesser extent 1Password) had problems from this. Both supported Dropbox initially which was great for privacy-conscious users as it was user-controlled sync, and easier on the company as they didn't have a server infrastructure (or much of the accountability). They're both now pushing for sync to their own cloud (helps drive the subscription model) and it's starting to show if you look at the behaviour of those same privacy- conscious folks. I think it may be a mistake to move to "trust our black box" cloud sync in your case as you're asking trust of the very people who in some cases have feared trust backfiring for their whole lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If anyone is facing mental health problems my advice would be to minimize screen time and avoid using the internet unless absolutely necessary. More often than not screen time contributes to the problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> I downloaded it yesterday and plan to try it out this weekend. I think this is great because this seems to be an empowering way for someone to do some CBT with a low barrier to entry and very accessible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Please let us know how it goes for you. It definitely takes a bit of practice; it took me a bit to get it at least.

Our biggest challenge at the moment is helping folks through that "initial" barrier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hi Evan! It's Brian - I helped out on the internationalization issue. Just here to say I'm glad to see this showhn and good luck on everything!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Brian! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've actually been building something similar myself. Although mine is mostly just for tracking stuff in your life and forming statistical analysis from the data. And I do nearly everything server-side.

I think you guys should set up a website to explain and promote this a bit better. Basically how you introduced it here but just on a website.

<comment><USER20> Check it out! :) www.quirk.fyi

<comment><USER21> Any reason there seem to be two domains? One is quirkapp or something. Then there's the one you listed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _I started working through the exercises and saw a dramatic drop in panic attacks._ ([https://i.imgur.com/P29BSRC.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/P29BSRC.jpg))

That's an impressive, likely clinically significant effect, congratulations! May I ask what is the _x_ axis in the graph?

<comment><AUTHOR> The x axis is a labeling bug. I THINK it was weeks? But the code that generated this was a small python script that was on a laptop that I wiped.

I wouldn't assign any clinical significance though to it (or to Quirk quite yet), especially since it's an N=1. But even if it's buggy, that graph shows one of the most important things that's every happened to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If curious about the history of this type of treatment, check out a very interesting character named Albert Ellis: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis)

</comment><comment><USER24> Great app and execution!

I have been considering an open source + subscription model for an app I'm working on. Do you have any concerns about "piracy" (someone forking it and removing the subscription stuff)? Any lessons learned along the way?

<comment><AUTHOR> So far no one has done it. Quirk's got a closed source api that it interacts with, which makes it a bit trickier to straight rip off. Plus, we own the brand, which is a pretty big reason why people try Quirk in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How are you handling operating in states which require a license for conducting therapy?

<comment><USER26> Not a lawyer, but my guess is that since people are self-reporting into a text capture tool, quirk is no more liable than Microsoft would be if users were to do this into Word.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly this yeah. We're not talk therapy, we don't claim to connect you with a therapist, and we don't take health insurance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do you guarantee privacy?

I know it's open source, but I can't see how I can check that the app store version is an exact copy of the OSS version.

Obviously, I really would not like to see my most intimate thoughts end up for sale at some information broker.

<comment><USER28> This is a great question. Is there a technical way to prove that an iOS or Android app is built from a specific git commit revision? And what about a web app? I know that these apps are signed but can a signed app be tagged with a transparent revision number which cannot be tampered with. Kind of like a sha2 hash that can be reproduced by building the same source code.

<comment><USER29> This is something I've wished for for a while. There are many developers out there whom I'm sure would love people to trust them and that are trustworthy. But I feel we now live in an age of "trust, but verify" and there's no great way to verify privacy claims even if we really want to believe something is benign.

In some cases it may even be unintentional leaks if someone isn't aware of an issue.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately, there is little incentive for Apple, Google to fix this situation because the majority of people simply don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The little circle guys are hilarious. I really like how instructional the landing page is, with a sort of old-world informational ad copy style instead of just a bunch of flashy screenshots.

Taking it for a spin, and wishing you the best!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It probably needs a refresher at some point, but I'd like to keep the explanation focused style.

Plus, we'd really like to make the site have lots of free explanations about CBT and it's concepts. That's why we picked the "fyi" domain originally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Your app charges for subscription but it is also available as open source. Does that mean somebody else can potentially publish it on App store and offer it for free?

<comment><AUTHOR> They could but a lot of features would break. The app communicates with a closed source API. Plus, we still own the name and the brand and would likely send a take down if someone didn't remove them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I LOVE that the app is so approachable and easy to use. Great job!!

</comment><comment><USER32> Cool idea, but what advantage does open sourcing the app give you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know folks are supposed to have reasons for open sourcing things and I might a bit naive here, but the best answer I can give you is: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I like open source. I couldn't find any strong reasons why it couldn't be open source.

But what I think happens to a lot of open source consumer products is that they're primary feature is being open source. Outside of Hacker News, we don't tell advertise that we're open source. It's not important.

For most people, we're a really good CBT app, not an open source CBT app. Our competitive advantage to the average person is that we're good, not that we're open source.

That said, I think there's advantages for customers. You can be reasonably certain we're protecting your data well. If you don't like something, you can suggest a change. If you want to use Quirk in your research, we're, in general, the most open about things.

To be clear, we're not 100% open source, there's a small closed-source API that quirk uses to do some of it's features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is so cool! I love how simple the UI is.

</comment><comment><USER34> What's to stop someone making a free clone from the open source version if the paid version really takes off?

<comment><USER35> Purely my opinion:

Like many hip big startups today, one of their strongest competitive advantage is having users. Most users come because product A offers a better UX than product B.

At least I feel that most big FAANG companies are mostly UX plays. In some cases you have to get very technical and innovative to give a good UX (Google), but in other cases not (Facebook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This looks amazing, thank you

</comment><comment><USER37> I was dissapointed to open the app again - I had been using it frequently when I switched to paper thought-records. When I reopened it I was greeted with a paywall.

Alternatives on iOS exist such as Thought Record that are free. Until there is an obvious value proposition that differs from free alternatives, I see no need to pay merely for a 'quirkier' interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is due to a bug where some folks didn't get caught up as "free forever."

Send me an email and I'll fix this for you and give you the app for free: firstname.lastname@example.com

Hopefully you'll like the new version as well!

<comment><USER21> Thanks so much for this offer! I ran into the problem too on my iPad.

And Quirk is great for such a new product!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've used a couple of principles regarding CBT to become more social and to get a better dating life. The first book I read was Michael Hall's Mindlines, which was an NLP book (a nonsense pseudoscience acronym). A couple of years later I learned about CBT and saw it has a lot in common with NLP. The biggest difference: CBT has scientific research into it and NLP doesn't, a couple of people simply made it up. When I tackled these problems I was 16, around 18 I was a lot more scientific about this.

The key insights regarding CBT for me were the following:

1\. Start with small goals and celebrate them.

2\. Log the following questions:

A. To what extent do I think event foo or thought bar will happen? E.g. to what extent do I think I'll get ridiculed while introducing myself to this new group of people?

B. (after it happened) what actually happened and to what extent was this in line with my expectations? After doing it for 10 times, 5 groups were cold and generally non-responsive, 1 ridiculed me and 4 were very friendly and happy to have met me (from experience this would be a particularly worst case realistic example for me).

3\. I've used this so many times: if you feel terrible, ask yourself whether you're having the right perspective. If you feel like you do, then ask yourself it's the only right perspective. If you feel you do, see if you can find other perspectives anyway and ask yourself whether those perspectives gave you new information. This did wonders on how I viewed my physical attractiveness. My opinion used to be: I'm ugly. My opinion now is quite nuanced and grouped into segments by age and personality type. Conclusion: the people I like either don't care (too much) or they find me attractive. It took me a long time to this conclusion. For a long time I had another one which was: I'm not that good looking but looks don't matter too much in dating, or at least not when people meet me.

Those 3 insights really helped.

It's funny, I also studied psychology but that never really helped as much in this area as CBT before it.

\---

If you guys feel up for it, then send me an email (see my profile) to reach out to brainstorm on things regarding CBT/psychology, dev or UX. I thought this was completely solved but apparently it isn't.

I wish there were more positive psychology[1]/tech companies on the whoishiring thread, if I weren't applying for McKinsey right now, I'd have publicly asked to see whether I could help you guys out.

[1] While CBT isn't part of positive psychology, I feel they're quite close to the spirit of it which is why I include it.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1000% this: > if you feel terrible, ask yourself whether you're having the right perspective.

One of the most common bits of "debugging" we do with folks is that they know they feel like crap, but they're not sure if there's a thought associated with it. Almost every time, the thought that they should be challenging IS "I feel like crap."

<comment><USER35> I find it one of the most intriguing parts about CBT, because I don't know of any research on one of the fundamental assumptions it has (from my interpretation), which is: your feeling/emotion is caused in a big part by a thought you have.

For me this seems to be at least mostly true, which is why I can use the assumption. It was then that I realized that I'm a believer of the appraisal theory [1]. But I still didn't find any convincing paper on it to what extent this is true.

The danger this can have is that it may be that some feelings/emotions are not caused by your thoughts, but because of something else, but yet you try to CBT it away. One example is: you simply have a chemical imbalance. The first question I asked in this case is: do I exercise? If not, then let's hit up that dopamine button first in a healthy way. If I do exercise, the next question is: am I eating healthy? I also put social contact in as a 3rd possible factor. Whenever I went to meditation retreats (they double as a silent retreat), I noticed that my thoughts went in loops and other people break you out of your thought loops. It was then how I viscerally experienced how one might become crazy when they are left alone. I also found ways to battle it (e.g. try to do math in your head and come to newfound knowledge).

My full (mental) checklist is:

1\. Am I exercising? If not then there might be a dopamine issue.

2\. Am I eating/drinking in a healthy way? If not then your body might not be working properly.

3\. Did I sleep in a healthy way? If not then the same as point 2.

4\. Am I experiencing constant stress for more than 2 weeks? If so, then cortisol might be screwing up my HPA axis [2]. I should check for burnout/depression symptoms to verify.

5\. Have I been a hermit for more than 2 weeks? If so, have I been focused or mind wandering? If I have been mind wandering mostly, then it's time to visit some friends.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary%E2%80%93adrenal_axis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Are you hiring? :joy:

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not for a bit; but shoot me an email with your info! email@example.com

<comment><USER38> Awesome! Sorry, I was only semi-serious, because my last name is Quirk and it seemed like a good fit :D</comment></comment></comment>


Postgres pager - <AUTHOR> http://okbob.blogspot.com/2017/07/i-hope-so-every-who-uses-psql-uses-less.html <comment><AUTHOR> Step 1: clone the project repo: [https://github.com/okbob/pspg](https://github.com/okbob/pspg)

Step 2: ./configure, make, and make install

Step 3: update your shell config (.bashrc, .zshrc, ...), exporting as follows: "export PAGER="pspg" \-- you can update this command to specify one of the color themes

Step 4: update .psqlrc:

1\. make sure your .psqlrc file does not deactivate PAGER

2\. define "\pset border 2"

Step 5: connect to your database using psql and run a query with lots of results</comment>


More women pick computer science if media nix outdated 'nerd' stereotype - <AUTHOR> http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/06/25/more-women-pick-computer-science-if-media-nix-outdated-nerd-stereotype/

<comment><USER2> _In a second study, researchers asked male and female participants to read fabricated newspaper articles. One article claimed that computer science majors no longer fit those stereotypes, while the other article claimed they actually do reflect those stereotypes. The articles were identical except when claiming the field did – or did not – reflect the stereotypes. Students then rated their interest in computer science._

 _Men were unaffected by how computer science majors were represented, but women who read the article with non-stereotypical images were significantly more interested in majoring in computer science than women who read the article with gendered stereotypes._

I'm now curious why the men seemed indifferent to the stereotypes.</comment>


'The Amazon Is Completely Lawless': The Rainforest After Bolsonaro's First Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html <comment><USER2> It's angry making. But I wouldn't blame those farmers. They're trying to make a living, and farming is probably the only realistic choice. We would all do the same if faced with that situation. What's more important to you, climate change or feeding your children?

The blame goes all the way back to the consumers, which are probably people like us living in First World countries. We are reaping the benefits of deforestation (lots of cheap beef) but now we are seeing the downsides.

Living our First World lifestyles and simultaneously criticizing deforestation are contradictory.

I believe we ain't seen nothin yet. Just imagine if the other 6.5 billion people live like us. Who can blame them for wanting to? I'm talking frequent worldwide travel, plenty of meat, having our own cars (doesn't matter if electric or not), living in nice single family homes like we all want to (even if not all of us can), having 2-3 kids and giving them the same lifestyle. There would not be a single tree left.

I think this destruction is difficult to stop because while we all admit to the damage, nobody is yet willing to make the sacrifice.

<comment><USER3> You can forgo the beef.

I did 18 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is Brazil getting all the negativity? Bolivia has as big fires as Brazil despite being tiny. If you want to protect the Amazon you need to lobby your politicians to start some sort of tax for that in order to compensate Brazil its development plans. The western world has logged off theirs long time ago.

<comment><USER5> That is blatantly wrong - they have more forrest than they did centuries ago.

Second they are right to expect better of the 9th largest nominal GDP nation.

<comment><USER4> What part of my statement was blatantly wrong?

<comment><USER5> That the west logged off all of their forests long ago - also implying that it was a precondition to their status.

Except that instead of forests instead of being cumulatively wiped away has grown as marginal agricultural land has been left utterly unused. That becomes blatantly wrong like saying Europe's population is lower now than it was in the past because of two world wars and the Spanish Flu. While the terrible things did happen the end status did not.

In all of the forestry cases they realized the major problems that would ensue if they ran out and shifted to sustainable models with replanting instead of virgin land. In Germany's case they started shockingly early in the 1500s after encountering wood shortages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship." \- Wikipedia.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please, reread the Off-Topic carefully but before that, read the On-Topic paragraph:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.</comment></comment>


Am I Being Tracked? - <AUTHOR> http://amibeingtracked.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Supposedly checks for "supercookies" that track your every move on your phone. Anyone know anything else about this?</comment>