PSX-Scene.org Mod Explains Real Reason Why PSN is Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gx6o4/im_a_moderator_over_at_psxscenecom_the_real/

<comment><USER2> I really hope the rumors aren't true, even though I know they probably are.

The Sony PR people are going to shift the blame to the hackers for having a protocol and server so susceptible to privilege escalation. I don't agree with what the hackers have done, but in the end it will serve to only reenforce the belief that its OK, nay necessary, that end users are unable to mod a device they own. And before someone screams EULA, I'm talking about the opinion in the collective consciousness in general, not specific to the PS3.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter if consumers mod their console or not. What the rumors suggest is that Sony had a vulnerability due to the fact that they allowed their developer consoles loosely restricted access to live data. Just because hackers found it doesn't mean that an unscrupulous developer with a dev console couldn't do the same thing. An escalation of priveleges attack like that is a ticking time bomb waiting to be found.

Long story short, Sony doesn't understand security. This is the second time in less than a year that their security through obscurity techniques have landed them with a mess.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I don't disagree at all. My take is that Sony will continue to ignore their terrible lack of security and lay all the blame at the feet of the people who happened to exploit their terrible security. As you say, Sony makes a mess of security. I don't think they'll own up to the fault (or at least night all of it). As you say it doesn't matter if consumers mod their console, my fear is that regardless of this fact the breach will still be used to further argue against modding.</comment></comment></comment>


Review HN: Heykiki - Find an instructor or practice buddy for an activity - <AUTHOR> http://heykiki.com/ <comment><USER3> i thought it was sub-optimal when someone used the word 'boomerang' in a tweet mentioning me, and next thing i know heykiki (which i had not heard of before) @'ed me with a non-relevant link to a search results page for boomerang- throwing classes. i would not do this.

</comment><comment><USER4> The value proposition should be more visible.

"What are you interested? Where?" is a question and doesn't answer what I get from the website. It doesn't necessarily give me a reason for being there.

"HeyKiki lets you connect with instructors and/or practice buddies for any of your interests," is not visible enough. I really had to look for it. If that's going to be the value proposition, then it needs to be brighter and larger.

Good luck with this site. I started a skill exchange that was similar to Heykiki a while ago. It was called Foobity. It was very difficult to get traction. Sites like these need a lot of users to start being useful. We tried to expand our userbase and accessibility by making a facebook app right when FB opened their platform, but even that didn't turn into lots of usage.

We also had a competitor whose name I can't remember. They had a more polished version of what we were trying to do, but even they faded into obscurity.

Something about this mode of getting people to connect is very difficult. Part of finding teachers and learning partners is that a system of actual payment of pupil-to-teacher insures commitment. And casual non-money interaction takes a bunch of other factors to connect.

Still, I think this is a good idea because anything that increases the chances of people coming together to enjoy learning and practice activities that fuel their passion is a good thing. I hope it is successful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sportsvite tried to tackle this for physical activities but didn't really get any traction. Not sure about its numbers but I don't know anybody using it.

sidenote: Not a good name though if you try to get into the Philippine market. The last four letters of the name refers to a part of the female anatomy in Filipino.

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be great if you paired with some local community colleges.

In addition to "learn" "practice" "teach" and "explore" I would personally add "Play" it could be used as a portal for people looking to find pickup games of soccer of someone to play boardgames with. the LPTE all imply that there is some net knowledge transfer, I do many activities just for fun, and would like to meet other people outside of my normal group.

Site looks great, purple...a very non-traditional yet memorable shade.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A friend asked if I had any feedback, and I thought I'd ask the rest of HN what you guys thought. All ideas/suggestions/comments/critique welcome!

<comment><USER7> The concept might be appealing at first blush but I can't see this doing anything that meetup.com and craigslist don't do.

I spend a fair amount of time looking around for prospective partners and teachers in a variety of activities (including martial arts). The problem isn't that people can't find each other. The problem is most people don't have much commitment to pursuing an activity on their own. If two people are in a city looking for activity partners, they'll find them. But in the Bay Area, a _large_ metropolitan area, you'd be lucky to find a committed activity partner for anything but the absolutely most common activities.

Just think, it's easier to be posting for a prospective partner than actually practicing the activity. So the number of ads one finds on meetup.com and craigslist is probably _greater_ than the number of people you can actually get to practice with you consistently (I have two meetup groups - <USER2> is consistently 20x attendance. Sure, if I put in a lot of effort, I might boost that but it's not a money making gig for me, so why should I? I don't mind having five people show up but this relatively low turn-outs is still a measure of the difficulty in getting people committed to an activity).

Even more, just about everyone is in alternative activity class (yoga, painting, whatever) has been recruited by the teacher. Very few people actively keep a look-out for a special teacher for any extended length of time (I think I know this because I'm one of those very few people). So the model of "connecting people" doesn't work.

<comment><USER8> There are many ways they could be improving on Craigslist:

\- More keywords in the posting template \- a semi usable search system (this alone outclasses craigslist by 10 years) \- Less spam \- An API for integrating with affinity sites \- Better integration with maps

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the idea is great. I don't know how close you are to launch but I'd at least make the featured activities all have some seed data (cello was the one I clicked with no results).

Also, I'm pretty lazy but the registration form at first glance seemed a little much. Middle name? Captcha?

Looks cool though. I think there is a lot of future for sites like this that encourage and enable real-world experiences.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems kinda US centric, it let me put in a country of England but now my posting has no location attached to it.

<http://heykiki.com/listings/98>

I also did not spot the ToS button when I was logging in and so had to re-do the capatcha

</comment><comment><USER11> I clicked on "boxing" for fun and a bunch of results came up.

The left side filters work well, but I have a question. Why can someone click on beginner, intermediate and advanced at the same time? Doesn't seem to make sense to me. I think it should be a radio button, not check boxes.

Edit: Two more things.

1) A personal pet peeve, please have the "Remember Me" default unchecked.

2) For some activities, the gender is important. E.g. for some kinds of dance, you need to parter with someone of the opposite sex. For other activities, some people might want to partner with someone of the same sex (e.g. self defense). I know having a gender indicator can be abused... but any kind of meetup site will run this risk.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the concept. There just need to be more people using it :).

The one thing that nagged me was the popup when you click on any of the actions that kiki is doing. I was expecting it to take me to that activity's page right away so I could navigate to teach/learn/practice from there. The "Excited?" popup felt a little jarring.

</comment><comment><USER13> A small bug: if I want to search for "basket", I'll type "basket" + TAB + [ZIP] + Enter. It looks like your overloading the tab key though, so it selects the first suggestion when I hit tab. You might consider handling suggestions the way Google does on their homepage, that seems to work well.

Edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER14> One minor design related thing: the diagonal stripes behind the search box on the front page create an optical illusion where the boxes get warped. I do not find it pleasant to look at.

</comment><comment><USER15> sounds good to me...i've had a bad experience finding a respectable boxing trainer in my neigborhood as well as a dance instructor to help me and my wife w/ our first dance for our wedding so this site seems very useful for me...would be good if their instructors had more ratings/reviews from existing clients so users feel more comfortable setting up a class or training session.</comment>


Vertebrates became predators by tweaking the neural crest - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-11-vertebrates-predators-tweaking-neural-crest.html <comment><USER2> Trypophobia alert with the cover image, but interesting article.</comment>


The end of the cloud is coming - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/04/the-end-of-the-cloud-is-coming/ <comment><USER2> As a sysadmin, any time I read some variation of; "At some point even data centers may become a thing of the past.", I know they don't know what they are talking about. As a matter of fact it has provided much joy through laughter (followed by required sysadmin scotch) at the show "Silicon Valley" for obviously parodying the issue. Datacenters aren't going anywhere, and this strange fascination in hipster-hackers with instant uber-decentralization- pushes concerns me because it ignores some of the more real (and fixable) issues at hand like dns centralization in favor of magical "p2p(+blockchain) will save us all" thinking not backed by much real world practical implementation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a darknet, meshnet supporter. I love decentralization. That said, I support the establishment of the infrastructure required to support it independent of end-user devices, and I think for security and other purposes it's at least possible they should remain separate, and devs shouldn't assume so much right to cpu-cycles.

So in essence the topology I think that is preferable would be properly called decentralized-distributed.

Of course thats part of the reason I support things that go against that common grain, such as ipv6nat.

<comment><USER3> > I support things that go against that common grain, such as ipv6nat.

> ipv6nat

Die in a fire while stung to death by scorpions and your eyes are eaten by spiders.

No. that is too much. You are my fellow human, i don't wish that on anyone.

> ipv6nat

Still. I hope you have to poop while stuck in a meeting.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this a security thing? I'm not anything close to a security expert, but I always understood that it was best not to have your personal computer exposed directly to the Internet. Not to mention just having control over my own network.

Also, my ISP only gave me one ipv6 address. I'm OK with that.

<comment><USER5> You can have a firewall without NAT

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish one of these "next-generation technology" blog articles would mention Named Data Networking[1]. I think the real problem with the web is the IP protocol itself, not any higher-level protocol or particular way of using IP.

From a very high level: The Web should be built on top of a broadcast protocol, not a point-to-point protocol. If it were, many complex issues would be solved.

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

<comment><USER7> I'm glad to see this mentioned but I'm not sure named data networking is based on 'broadcast' model. I think it is closer to anycasting behavior with packet delivery gated by security mechanisms to ensure delivery only occurs to an authenticated 'requester'.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I didn't intend on saying that it was based on broadcast. I should've been more precise in saying that it enables the flow of broadcast data (e.g., streaming from one source to many destinations) much, much better than point- to-point protocols like IP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So there are a number of issues that are not really answered here.

1) the cloud is a costed model. you pay a company to look after your stuff, so you dont have to manage it yourself

2) the cloud _is_ more expensive, but not compared to hiring your own infrastructure people (depends on scale of course)

3) distrubuted networks of things are much much slower than centralised. save for a few exceptions.

4) Trust. even though you stuff should be encrypted, spaffing it out in the open is a large risk, because should your old keys leak, it'll be trivial to retrieve old data.

5) money. who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure? whats in it for them? Who organises development of tools, patching etc? who do I call when there is an outage.

in short for this to work, it would required a 180 degree culture shift of capitailsm.

also physics, to make globally distrubuted systems both fast, relaiable and consistent

<comment><USER9> > 180 degree culture shift of capitalism

You can monetize from distributed systems; and I think this will happen more often with Blockchain, render farms and things like that.

> who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure?

This. As much as I love the idea of decentralization, I can't see it getting much traction because of this.

<comment><USER10> > > who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure?

> This. As much as I love the idea of decentralization, I can't see it getting > much traction because of this.

At least 90% of all smartphone users are clueless as to when apps work in the background on their devices, so if you install an app that turns your smartphone into a lightweight node in a p2p network, almost everybody will be none the wiser IMO.

<comment><USER8> and how many of your programs can run in a guaranteed nothing environment?

Can your process your sensitive data on an unknown device without leaking any secrets?

Sure, pushing bits from one place to the other is easy. But _processing_ that data in any meaningful way is impossibly hard

<comment><USER10> Do you expect a plan that covers 100% of all problematic points from the get go? As if the current technologies aren't patched to oblivion right now. We can at least avoid the problems we already know exist. That's a progress in itself, wouldn't you agree?

Like with physical exercise, you start off somewhere and you discover solutions to problems you didn't know how to solve, along the way.

Also, I am not sure what you mean. What part of distributing encrypted data and decrypting it with your key on arrival is hard?

Admittedly, it would require a big shift in how we code apps. I am not opposed to that though.

<comment><USER8> I have mildly secret data that I want to process, for example a credit card transaction, how do I securely decrypt, process, re-encrypt and upload to the destination?

Processing that data requires a remote CPU that can't be spied upon. In a de- centralised environment how can I get a reasonable guarantee that the person hosting the CPU isn't just listening to the secrets?

<comment><USER10> And how do you guarantee that in a centralized system? You don't. It's a wishful thinking based on unfounded trust.

I can't answer your question directly. We simply can't rely on anyone hence we have encryption and key chains.

<comment><USER8> What threat model are you looking at? I'm talking about providing enough guarentees to sign a contract with another buisness, not hide from government actors.

as a normal buisness I want to process sensitive information. That is not possible in the world you describe, with current CPUs

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMHO "cloud" as a whole was way overhyped for the value it provided. While it delivered on simple requirements any thing complex meant things got out of hand quickly. Quite a lot of applications were sold as "to be used by business user" but then setup ensured the complexity was so high that it required whole dedicated technical teams to manage it.

That said, is it the end? It is doubtful - A lot of conventional, old school companies which were against moving to cloud because of various reasons are now seriously considering cloud. Quite a lot of these companies are heavily dependent on Oracle, SAP etc which is just now rolling out/pushing their cloud products. Maybe it is the shoe shine boy and Joe Kennedy moment, but it is difficult to tell.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's difficult to tell at all. Real businesses have built massive systems on cloud infrastructure and the pace of them doing so is accelerating. Real money is being made all round, so there's no bubble. It's not all predicated on possible future profits that won't ever materialize. Are there too many startups that won't go anywhere? maybe, but that's not going to lead to the collapse of AWS or Azure.

Meanwhile the solutions this article is promoting don't even really exist yet except in very limited, primitive forms. Nobody is going to build a Facebook on bit torrent and the blockchain any time soon.

<comment><USER10> > _Nobody is going to build a Facebook on bit torrent and the blockchain any > time soon._

This might be a nitpick but I don't think you realize that most p2p advocates despise Facebook and all centralized mastodonts.

The idea the author expresses revolves around a worldwide volunteer-based peer-to-peer CDN than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >This is a problem mostly because of the way we've organized the web. There are many clients that want to get content and use programs and only a relatively few servers that have those programs and content. When someone posts a funny picture of a cat on Slack, even though I'm sitting next to 20 other people who want to look at that same picture, we all have to download it from the server where it's hosted, and the server needs to send it 20 times.

The article reminds me of the Pied Piper platform from _Silicon Valley_ , but especially the above quote.

<comment><USER14> Isn't the point of an HTTP caching proxy, in-part, to mitigate that exact problem?

<comment><USER15> Doesn't really work if the upstream is https, unless you MITM all your proxy users.

<comment><USER16> You can architect for this though. Let's say you're a data-heavy SaaS selling primarily to enterprise, which operates their own datacenters. Instead of naively forcing all requests to go first to api.saas.example, you allow the enterprise to configure its account to first hit a cache service (that you write and distribute) located at saas-cache.enterprise.internal, allowing both the SaaS and the enterprise to save on bandwidth by not fetching the same data 20 times over.

<comment><USER15> Seems like a more common approach would be for the customer to use the on- premise version of the software in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does the author implicitly assume that the amount of spare local storage is enough for the swarm+redundancy? Furthermore how many backups are required for data to ensure the same level of protection as a modern cloud provider? Does the math even work?

<comment><USER18> > Why does the author implicitly assume that the amount of spare local storage > is enough for the swarm+redundancy? Furthermore how many backups are > required for data to ensure the same level of protection as a modern cloud > provider? Does the math even work?

It isn't really a problem. N+M erasure coding is very efficient. Even if the average node only has 40% uptime, that means on average you can recover the data with only 2.5 distributed copy-equivalents. You would want slightly more than that in case the specific nodes end up having below average reliability, but the numbers are completely reasonable.

Moreover, for anything which is shared with a non-trivial number of people, each person would have a full copy which means the level of built-in redundancy is already massive overkill and there is no need to spend third party storage on any additional redundancy at all.

<comment><USER19> > Even if the average node only has 40% uptime, that means on average you can > recover the data with only 2.5 distributed copy-equivalents.

Wouldn't this mean that if X is the total amount of consumed storage currently used, you still need 2.5 times X _additional_ unused storage across the swarm in which to hold the 2.5 distributed copies?

If so do average people keep such amounts of free storage around?

<comment><USER18> > Wouldn't this mean that if X is the total amount of consumed storage > currently used, you still need 2.5 times X _additional_ unused storage > across the swarm in which to hold the 2.5 distributed copies?

No. The first copy-equivalent is the original data.

And again, even that's only for bespoke personal data. As soon as you have a few people with a copy -- which is even the case for most "personal" files, because friends and family will have copies of your photos etc -- then you don't need any redundancy past the copies each person already has on their own device.

Moreover, cloud providers are already wasting more space than that. People have a copy of their data on their own devices, but also on the servers, and then the servers have at least one backup. That's three copy-equivalents already.

> If so do average people keep such amounts of free storage around?

Millions of people buy computers with 1+TB hard drives and then use less than 10% of the space.

And it's possible to use the free space without really depriving the owner of it, because you can set a minimum free space threshold and transfer data off the machine if it ever falls below that, so the space is _only_ used if it would otherwise have been free space.

<comment><USER19> > No. The first copy-equivalent is the original data.

Ah, got it.

> Millions of people buy computers with 1+TB hard drives and then use less > than 10% of the space.

See that's the bit that's weird to me. My OS drives are small SSD's and the spinning platters are all comfortably full.

I will say though, I'm replicating once onsite and once offsite so my own redundancy is pretty high. If I could get over the 'someone else having physical access' thing (I don't use cloud for most personal data) I suppose IPFS or equivalent would be cool.

<comment><USER18> > See that's the bit that's weird to me. My OS drives are small SSD's and the > spinning platters are all comfortably full.

You have to remember that you know what you're doing. You know how much space you need and you know how to add more later, so you don't buy more than you need.

The typical person buys a 2TB hard drive because they have "thousands of photos" and the 2TB drive is only $15 more than the 0.5TB drive, even though "thousands of photos" consume like 0.005TB.

And they're rational to do it because they know they aren't good at predicting whether they will fill the smaller drive and it's worth $15 to hedge against the ordeal of adding more storage later.

Which means many people will buy a 2TB drive and use it to store 75GB of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While it is _technically_ possible to build heavily decentralized, managed hardware deployments, no one has figured out yet how to charge for them except in the case of very large customers. Until this happens, there will be no swing back to anything decentralized.

Although I do understand the allure: just about anyone today could very economically purchase 5-10 servers with 10-18 cores each (and those will be _real_ cores, not hyperthreads). There's nothing impossible about automating software management on such a thing, even to the extent that you'd get in cloud (VMs, containers, distributed storage, automated updates, VM migration, network partitioning, etc). I believe Microsoft will lease you a fully set up shipping container with Azure in it, all that needs to be done is scale this down.

But again, how does one extract billions of dollars in profits from something like that?

<comment><USER21> I think the point would be that the central server `could` gather aggregated data / important business metrics that it could use to provide further value. I think the author also mentions something like this. Ex: provide analytics back to the end user that could be a paid service, or use that information to provide a second set of b2b offerings to other partners. etc.

<comment><USER20> Now compare that to the current model of nickel and diming for every single thing and charging a 90% margin on traffic, and you'll see why this is not attractive to the current players.

<comment><USER21> Well, I think intrinsic ineffeciency of storing all that data inside your central and then running huge spark jobs to crunch through them creates huge costs in the first place that probably needs to be offset by higher margins being charged from the end consumer. If you can just monitor the users engagement with your offering and charge on that without having to actually go through countless logs to do that, might be what the author is leaning to. But yeah, easier said than done. Knowing which metrics to capture back centrally itself could be a challenging thing to do, if the data is decentralized ....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I never understood the difference between Mainframe Computers / Computing and Cloud Computers / Computing.

In both cases, a centralized server connected to the internet does all your application, storage and processing. If that server goes down / connection is lost, in both cases you and your "SaaS" applications are SOL ( Sh*t Out of Luck). Also in both cases, you offer hackers a centralized location to target and hack.

What's the difference, except in the name and in the marketing ?

<comment><USER23> The difference is the move from specialized to interchangeable, commodity hardware. This allows cloud providers establish an abstraction layer over servers, because it doesn't matter which machine serves your demand at any given moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At the core of the cloud paradigm and the centralized/decentralized issue lies no technical problems but a political one about control and privacy invasion.

The only reason why we have youtube instead of VLC + eDonkey packages are because of lawsuits. It is a technological solution from 15 years ago that is technologically superior and much harder to censor.

Datacenters and "cloud-based" services do not answer to a technical problem but to a political one: how do we control information flow in a decentralized net? The answer: provide bottleneck of information for free.

<comment><USER10> The one thing the article didn't address is exactly the pushback from regulators and corporations. They will NOT stand by and watch idly as their control is getting pulled out from their hands.

Even if such a network gets invented, I am pretty certain governments will make aggressive laws along he lines of "if your computer caches a trailer of this new Marvel movie, we can confiscate your tech for copyright infringement".

As much as I want the problems to be only technical, IMO the much bigger battle will be in courts and public hearings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> None of these arguments lead me to think the cloud is coming to an end.

<comment><USER26> None of these arguments lead me to think the author understands the benefits of, or has ever built, a cloud architecture.

Half of his points conflate the cloud with the centralized internet, while the rest are weak or irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Even if all the arguments are true and take into account all tradeoffs -- which I don't think is the case -- there is a big difference between "will eventually happen" and "is coming" or "we're facing the end".

</comment><comment><USER28> Yeahhh no. Try building Netflix on this as a platform. Then write a new article.

<comment><USER29> you mean popcorntime? or webtorrent + thepiratebay.org?

these get shut down due to legal issues, but, from a technical perspective, building netflix using bittorrent (or ipfs) is 100% doable and quite reliable

<comment><USER30> Until you want to watch that one kinda obscure thing that isn't adequately seeded... then your out of luck. (I'm aware of server "pre-seed"/enhancement options this just assumes you want to watch something that isn't seeded or pre-seeded)

<comment><USER31> That's because it isn't done legally, and therefore augmenting the network with a few "supernodes" (I believe that's what napster called them) is a big no-no. You could say the same about Netflix/HBO/..., by the way. Watching obscure things (that aren't worth Netflix or the copyright owner's time to negotiate rights for ... good luck). And if the present trend continues, and Disney, and Paramount, and ... start their own streaming platforms with exclusivity, well, popcorntime is going to be the vastly superior option in a year or two at most.

In the other case for a distributed example, you have the Steam platform. Obscure things download quickly and without much delay. And steam avoids the "rights negotiating" problem by being a marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How would a newb get around to developing with P2P services?

Curious and want to try something new.

<comment><USER33> WebRTC

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > The compute speed and storage capacity of computers are growing faster than > the bandwidth of the networks.

So your proposed solution is to spread out compute and storage to hosts that are even more network constrained???

</comment><comment><USER35> The article also assume that the client bandwidth is unlimited, but in reality more and more ISPs have data caps.

If a p2p network would become this large, the need for more client bandwidth would increase exponentially.

<comment><USER10> Where do you see these "more and more ISPs having data caps" exactly, please?

I live in Eastern Europe and I have a legit gigabit connection with no limits. A load of people around here pay $10 for 75Mbps and connections most USA can only dream of.

Assuming you talk about USA... just saying, world > USA.

<comment><USER35> All mobile broadband isps in eu and Asia (where they usually cannot get anything else) have caps at just a few gigs of data. Even in Sweden, they are adding hidden limits when reaching a TB of data on cabled broadband. This means streaming 4K video will reach these limits.

<comment><USER10> I definitely agree for the rural / less accessible areas. Carriers definitely have a monopoly there and certain countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland are too vast to have good cabled coverage.

In most of the EU cities you got plenty of choice however.

<comment><USER35> That's absolutely true, the closer to the root nodes of EU you get the cheaper the bandwidth is. Heck, in Romania you can even get 10Gbit on a small datacenter for a few thousand €.

So sure, if the larger nodes can weigh up the smaller ones in a distributed network, then it might be plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> ZeroNet seem to be a step in that direction. Completely P2P, allows static HTML and dynamic sites, unique identity and a lot more.

</comment><comment><USER37> Hello, this is the year 2003 calling. We want our arguments for, and vision of, a peer-to-peer Utopia back.

</comment><comment><USER38> Richard Hendricks, is that you?

</comment><comment><USER39> As I've written before, privacy and risk mitigation are the two reasons this article is wrong. The cloud is already the pinnacle of decentralization, and distributed web is just a fad.

[https://nrrd.io/privacy-and-risk-mitigation-are-the- biggest-...](https://nrrd.io/privacy-and-risk-mitigation-are-the-biggest- threats-to-the-decentralized-web-b685ce7cf125)</comment>


SpaCy 2.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v2.0.0 <comment><USER2> Demos: [https://demos.explosion.ai/displacy- ent/](https://demos.explosion.ai/displacy-ent/)

The English neural network named entity model is a huge improvement over the v1 model. However, the training data is still all from 2010, so it makes some notable errors. We're working on improved training data, using our annotation tool Prodigy ([https://prodi.gy](https://prodi.gy)).

The NER for the other languages is trained on "silver standard" data from Wikipedia, so the quality is much less consistent, especially if you're working with social media text or "chat bot"-type inputs.

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit confused as to what SpaCys revenue model is. Didn't it use to be free community edition / paid enterprise support model?

<comment><USER2> The very first release was under a dual AGPL/commercial license. This was bad. It prevents open-source developers from building on top of it, and it discourages people from getting in touch.

We bootstrapped the company by doing consulting, and now we're releasing products adjacent to spaCy. We've had a great response to our annotation tool Prodigy, which is currently in free beta: [https://prodi.gy](https://prodi.gy) .

The license model for Prodigy is pretty simple: permanent per-seat licenses, with pricing that compares pretty favourably to other developer tools.

We're looking forward to releasing some other offerings alongside spaCy. We don't like to say too much because timelines are tough --- we don't want to release something half-finished to stick to a schedule. The Explosion AI mailing list is the best way to stay in the loop.

<comment><USER4> > The license model for Prodigy is pretty simple: permanent per-seat licenses, > with pricing that compares pretty favourably to other developer tools.

Can you be more precise ? Because I don't want to invest time in a tool to discover that I can't afford it months later ( having a research student budget and all, i.e my "budget" is my own money ).

:(

<comment><USER2> The license for an individual developer will be a few hundred dollars --- sorry for the vagueness. We'll be ready to release official pricing soon.

For research students, we think your institution should be covering you! We'll be offering an academic subscription, so research institutions can pay a yearly flat fee to have all staff and students covered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me, the most important thing about this version is the reduced memory usage. Previously the smallest english model took 1GB of RAM, making it troublesome to run it on any cloud instances. If v2 is to take ~200mb instead, that's a huge improvement.

<comment><USER6> Does that mean that it can run on a Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER5> Unless RAM usage hasn't significantly increased beyond 200mb since alpha, it should run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great. I really really hope they have a stable and big enough source of revenue to keep the development going.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thank you for providing such a great tool, I'm excited to try version 2.0. I've also played around with Prodigy. SpaCy was my start in NLP, I really hope it is going to stay around.

We've developed a great product for our customer with SpaCy, it wouldn't be possible without SpaCy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to @syllogism for spacy. It's one of those tools which make Python the go to language for NLP.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats! Have been following SpaCy since it was first discussed/argued here on HN. I haven't had much reason/imagination to use NLP in work but I frequently recommend it to students as most of their curriculum is centered around old versions of NLTK.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome! I've been meaning to get into NLP / Computer Linguistics for a while now.

Can anybody share what kind of projects you're doing that benefit from SpaCy? Do you use it as-is or do you build on top of it?

</comment><comment><USER11> Kudos to Matthew, Ines and others making this possible.

I haven't checked it out myself yet, so I wanted to ask that are the performance issues fixed that were haunting the 2.0 alpha version?

<comment><USER11> Found the answer myself from the release docs: > The Language.pipe method allows spaCy to batch documents, which brings a significant performance advantage in v2.0. The new neural networks introduce some overhead per batch, so if you're processing a number of documents in a row, you should use nlp.pipe and process the texts as a stream.

So if you have an event based system where you can process only a single document at once, it does not make sense to upgrade yet, because for a single document case the runtime performance was 10x-100x slower, at least with 2.0 alpha version.

<comment><USER2> But with a nice caveat: In an event-based system, you can run spaCy 2 with AWS Lambda :). This will be _much_ cheaper than keeping a server warm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really nice work. Is there a bitcoin or PayPal donation page for the spaCy project?

<comment><USER2> We actually don't believe in soliciting donations. Ines explains our thinking here: [https://ines.io/blog/spacy-commercial-open-source- nlp#moneti...](https://ines.io/blog/spacy-commercial-open-source- nlp#monetising)

Basically: donations can only be made from personal funds, but most of the benefits from the software will go to commercial users. That's a pretty lopsided dynamic.

<comment><USER13> Aside: Ines appears to be working on something called Prodigy [1] which seems close to what I imagined would be a "Killer App" after playing around with SpaCy. I look forward to hearing more about it as it matures.

[1] [https://prodi.gy/](https://prodi.gy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great work - big fan! :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Do you have any plans for Korean support?

<comment><USER2> We're definitely interested in Korean support. I hope we can get some contributions for this in the next few months.

My understanding is that there are actually some very good Python libraries for Korean NLP? It's now much easier to provide annotations via another library. This is how the Chinese and Japanese support is working at the moment. We'll add "native" models for all of these languages, but for now you might want to wrap some of these resources: [https://github.com/datanada/Awesome-Korean- NLP](https://github.com/datanada/Awesome-Korean-NLP)

<comment><USER16> See also:

[https://github.com/crownpku/Awesome-Chinese- NLP](https://github.com/crownpku/Awesome-Chinese-NLP)

Very much looking forward Chinese support in SpaCy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent update, great work.</comment>


Introducing Microsoft R Server 9.1 release - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-r-server-9-1-release/ <comment><USER2> Hate me. Down vote me. But I need to know. This is a serious question and I don't mean to troll.

MS version of R, MS version of JS engine (ChakraCore), MS version of Atom. Is the MSJVM history repeating?</comment>


Vuvuzela – Private messaging system that hides metadata - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/davidlazar/vuvuzela <comment><USER2> The added noise reminds me of WASTE, which was infamously created by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft to protest the post-acquisition atmosphere at AOL...

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

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100317095429/http://www.rollin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100317095429/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5938320/the_worlds_most_dangerous_geek)

<comment><USER3> IIRC release of WASTE was closely tied to the vesting of his AOL options and his departure from AOL that followed. So it was more of a farewell finger really than a "protest".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In practice, the message latency would be around 20s to 40s, depending on > security parameters and the number of users connected to the system.

Haven't had time to read the paper yet - is this an inherent property of the system, or a number that could be reduced by future work?

<comment><USER5> seems inherent - servers operate in rounds and each round carries legit traffic plus enough noise to allow traffic metadata to drown in nothingness and forward it to a whole server chain to avoid an adversary to control all the servers, so as you scale servers need more time to forward and mixin traffic

<comment><USER6> Could someone much smarter than me do some napkin math and figure out roughly what kind of tradeoff in security you make by limiting the noise?

20-40 seconds is fine if you are releasing NSA secret files and want the chance of metadata discovery to be <0.1% (number made up)

But it's too much to use as a regular form of conversation between average parties who just want to set a precedent that all conversations by default should be un-monitorable.

However what if that number was down to ~5 seconds? Now it's tolerable. But the tradeoff is, what does the chance of detectability go up to? 1%? 5%? 50%?

<comment><USER7> > 20-40 seconds is […] too much to use as a regular form of conversation > between average parties

With the current irc-ish UI the latency would clash with user expectations, but e-mail, message boards and quite a few other forms of communication regularly deal with much higher latencies. I suppose it depends on how you market it.

<comment><USER8> I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic that prints

        Tracking IP address ... [30 seconds] ... Failed! Message delivered!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm very happy to see work going into this topic. Hiding metadata is the major part of private communication that's not accounted for by any major chat system. I've recently started studying the matrix.org specification, which seems like the best bet for a next generation chat system, but it doesn't account for metadata privacy. It'd be very difficult to hide metadata while also offering many of the other features of a modern chat system that make it useful and convenient for people (e.g. message history that a new client can sync with later).

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's a summary and commentary of the paper from Adrian Colyer's 'important/interesting CS papers' review blog: [http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/10/23/vuvuzela-scalable- private...](http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/10/23/vuvuzela-scalable-private- messaging-resistant-to-traffic-analysis/)

"The cost of running a Vuvuzela server on AWS at current prices is about $10K/month, dominated by bandwidth usage."

<comment><USER11> Or probably about $50 for a VPS...

The amount of bandwidth used per month isn't mentioned but when the Snapchat database was leaked I hosted it on a server of mine and _snapchatdb.info_ was pointed at it. Bandwidth over the first three days was just over 27 TB and didn't cost a dime extra (I work for an ISP and my servers are housed in our cages in datacenters but I pay _very_ little for them).

What's 27 TB cost on AWS?

<comment><USER12>
      First 1 GB / month	$0.00 per GB
      Up to 10 TB / month	$0.09 per GB
      Next 40 TB / month	$0.085 per GB

So around USD 2,345.-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another approach at a more general messaging system that can be used to similar ends is Whisper, by the same community that makes Ethereum: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrWlAtfqF6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrWlAtfqF6s)

</comment><comment><USER14> you win just for the project name.

<comment><USER15> I thought the example conversation was quite cute also :p

<comment><USER16> It's an actual conversation from Citizenfour.

<comment><USER15> Citizenfour is still on my "to-watch" list at the minute, but yeah, I had figured it was an excerpt of an actual conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One if the problems with Tor is that adding noise has too much of a latency and bandwidth cost, thus it doesn't. But an IM client has much less restrictive latency and bandwidth costs, so it makes sense that it adds it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, why did you call it Vuvuzela? I'm from Southern Africa btw

<comment> nevi-me Perhaps because it generates a lot of noise (latency, active users) in the process, like the vuvuzela does :)

I was hoping to find the rationale in the name on the link, but didn't see anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> for the record: bitmessage also has this kind of metadata & data privacy

<comment><USER20> BitMessage has greater latency (~2 Mins?) but is fully P2P, given the cost estimates for a server upthread, I wonder if bandwidth concerns are the reasons for a client server architecture over P2P...

My understanding is that BitMessage achieves its non-content privacy guarantees by sending each message to all clients, and then the latency is the result of the Proof of Work and some other concepts borrowed from BitCoin.

I'd love to hear more about it if you have time.

In particular, I'm interested in the P2P vs Client-Server trade off, is Vuvuzela workable in a fully P2P network, say over WebRTC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is cool! Need to read the paper, and I'm not that knowledgeable anyway, but it seems to be offering something genuinely new.

Edit: Should have more explicitly asked -- can anyone who knows more about this chime in? Is it as novel as it seems? Does it look secure?

<comment><USER22> It was published at one of the top systems conferences (SOSP), so I would presume it's at least somewhat novel. Link to full paper here: [http://sigops.org/sosp/sosp15/current/2015-Monterey/printabl...](http://sigops.org/sosp/sosp15/current/2015-Monterey/printable/136-hooff.pdf)</comment></comment>


A simple test for Lenovo users, to check if they are affected by Superfish - <AUTHOR> https://filippo.io/Badfish/

<comment><USER2> I might be being dumb here, but how does this work? I cannot see any JavaScript that accomplishes the test, so I am guessing server side?

edit: Nevermind. I see how it works now.

They installed the Superfish certificate at badfish.filippo.io then request yes.png ([https://badfish.filippo.io/yes.png](https://badfish.filippo.io/yes.png)), if your browser has Superfish in the trusted root store then the yes.png is returned from that URL, however if you have a clean machine then badfish.filippo.io throws a certificate error and yes.png is not returned, and instead "no.png" is displayed via the alt tag from the base domain (which doesn't use a Superfish certificate [https://filippo.io/Badfish/no.png](https://filippo.io/Badfish/no.png)).

Simple but clever.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who have it, here are removal instructions: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/28607630](http://stackoverflow.com/a/28607630)

</comment><comment><USER4> Sigh... I'm on a Lenovo laptop. I opened the link and saw this in large type:

 _Do the test with Internet Explorer or Chrome first._

And I'm in... Firefox. I get the "probably not" image in both FF and Chrome now, but does that (unexplained) warning indicate that I've nullified the test?

I don't seem to have the Superfish program installed; but this is unnecessarily confusing.

</comment><comment><USER5> fyi, the test on that page will also be positive in the case you have any other mitm certificate - eg company proxy software.

<comment><AUTHOR> It shouldn't since the proxy should disallow a connection with an untrusted certificate.

If it does, please speak to your sysadmin ASAP. Anyone can intercept any HTTPS connection your company does. Probably a compliance breach.

Software brand?

<comment><USER5> [http://www.websense.com](http://www.websense.com)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the HN karmic privileges/penalties? - <AUTHOR> Quoth "jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ":
"You can only downvote comments once you have sufficient karma. The required level rises over time to account for the karma inflation caused by an increasing userbase."
"high average score on your comments will give your comments preference in the search order (this is part of the 'secret sauce')."
"If there are no real big benefits to having a good or even excellent karma you might want to conclude that it doesn't matter at all, but that is definitely not the case, since having 'bad' karma (< 0) will negatively impact your ability to interact with the site."
The italics in the last one are mine since I'm not entirely sure what that means.
I have also heard that at some karma level HNers get to change the colour of their topbar. How jolly!
Do we have a comprehensive list? If the levels are subject to inflation then perhaps a correspondingly definitive "price guide" can't accompany it, but any information would be interesting, out of date or not. <comment><USER2> At 400 you get to downvote.

At 401 you get to apologize for accidentally downvoting someone.

At 419 you get lucrative business opportunities.

At 420 you get baked.

At 451 you get [deleted].

At 777 you get lucky.

At 1337 "they" teach you the Secret Handshake Deal Protocol.

At 1999 you have to update a million lines of COBOL in order to advance.

At 2010 you get to complain that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.

At 2600 you get to make free long distance calls.

At 3003 you get your TI-83 taken away and returned to you at the end of class.

At 4352 you get to get to post a jokey self-referential comment without anybody complaining that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.

<comment><USER3> This is inaccurate, and just the sort of post you would expect nowadays on HN. It's turning into reddit.

<comment><USER4> While I strongly object to jokes and mindless comments on serious topics, there's really not a lot to say or any interesting discussion to be had on this particular subject.

Lightly mocking that doesn't really detract from anything, not on this post.

<comment><USER3> That was my thinking as well, this post is light enough that we can all unwind and joke around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agreed. Tenuously on topic, if Hacker News had - _shudder_ \- badges, then today I would have earned something like "Lightweight: posted something of sufficient triviality to attract a joker".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As for "negatively impacting your ability to interact with the site", that refers to the practice of slowbanning and hellbanning. Slowbanning is what it sounds like - the site will be slower for you, sometimes just a little and sometimes a lot. The idea there is to subconsciously encourage you to visit the site less and to contribute less when you do. Hellbanning is more extreme. When you're hellbanned, nothing you contribute will be visible to anyone else, but it won't look like anything's wrong to you. (However, people with enough karma can elect to see your contributions regardless. This is why you'll sometimes see people kindly pointing out someone's hellbanned state.)

<comment><USER6> That's really interesting to know. I'm very curious about the technical aspects of slowbanning - how is this accomplished without "wasting" valuable server resources?

I've asked a somehow related question[1] on stackoverflow but got no replies... maybe this can help solve the mystery?

[1][http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131671/throttling- http-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131671/throttling-http-api- calls-with-delay)

<comment><USER7> My inference (from hellbanning and rumors of a unique YC alumni topbar) is that there is a closure over each username. If that is the case, then http requests can be assigned various priorities within the queue...or the closure could include something equivalent to:

      (let ((sleep 1000)...

Closures would certainly be a lispy way of doing things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure what level you have to be at to get the ability to Flag stories. I do know that using it too much will get it turned off for you (as that happened to me). I had been assuming that Flagging stories was the right thing to do (as they don't have downvotes, and we're told not to comment negatively on them), but apparently you can have too much of a good thing!

</comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone(PG?) comment what's the point of non-disclosing e.g. how that search ordering is calculated?

Or any other aspect of this site (if there are any other)...

So far, it looks to me like the secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

<comment><USER10> Maybe it is hidden deep in the source code (<https://github.com/wting/hackernews>), the problem is that Arc is basically unreadable if you're used to stuff like C/C++/Java/PHP/Assembler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that the latest source? I didn't realise it was available but when searching HN before posting the topic I did find <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853964> ("Tell HN: How to find karma thresholds in the HN source code") so perhaps if things haven't changed much in the intervening 1298 days it'll still work.

<comment><USER5> It might be the meat of it, but IIRC pg has said that he tweaks key algorithms like comment ranking on his own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another factor in ranking of comments (apart from "average karma" of the poster, and of course the points it's received) is simply its length! The longer, the more it counts. I think it's there to promote deep and lengthy discourse, not one-line, "Stupid article. I stopped reading at [x]" kind of comment.

Source: experience.

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't realize changing the color of the top bar was a karma-sensitive bonus -- when I first heard about it, I checked and it was already in my profile. So: it's not for super-high karma users only!

I got comment downvoting at 500 karma, I think; and my karma is still < 1K, but note that the downvote limit may _now_ be 1K (I'm assuming they don't revoke the ability from users in the gap every time they bump the level).

AFAIK there's nothing special waiting for me at 1K (or any other level), though I admit I'd be slightly encouraged to participate more if there were.

<comment><USER13> If your karma is high enough, you can downvote stories.

<comment><USER14> Must be a pretty high up privilege then.

<comment><USER3> Not that high up; I'm able to downvote stories.

The ability to spread misinformation requires > 10K, though, I think.

<comment><USER13> Haha, nice one!

@elliott: [http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvoteart...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvotearticle)

<comment><USER14> That's what I figured, thanks ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand this obsession with how this site works. You shouldn't be worrying about karma or why things are made [dead]. Just contribute the most interesting stuff and things will take care of themselves naturally.

<comment><USER16> > I don't understand this obsession with how this site works

Isn't this _hacker_ news? If we don't obsess about how things work, who will?

<comment><USER15> Hahaha. OK, point taken!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Downvotes currently require > 500 karma. Topbar color change is maybe 250.. I don't remember exactly.

<comment><USER18> How can the top bar color change be of any use?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just set mine to 212121 and, rather topically, now I can't make out from the top right corner how much karma I have. I suppose that could be used to remind a person that they've got work to do instead of checking if anyone has upvoted their stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nobody could make a list since as you yourself said it changes day by day.

A few months ago downvoting seems to have appeared at around 1000~ for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Nobody could make a list since as you yourself said it changes day by day."

Not quite. I'm asking what the privileges/penalties _are_ , which I believe _can_ be listed. An additional second column for the accompanying thresholds, sure, they change so maybe not.

<comment><USER19> No way the admins will release that. It would be a goldmine for spammers. Just get their account up to X karma and it is worth twice as much for resale.

<comment><USER12> You're overstating this, I think.

How much would a downvoting HN account be worth, really?

Sure, a spammer could sneak in a few messages at a more visible level, or presumably down-vote their competitors, but the suddenly-abusive account would get shut down pretty swiftly.

On other hand, the work required to get an account up to a significant level (say, 500+) is non-trivial, cannot be outsourced to a minimally-trained mouse- clicker, and wouldn't run cheap.

It's not clear to me how it would help a spammer to know what the limit it, given that it's high enough that the work is not worthwhile.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Lately lots of employees are asking for sabbatical year off - <AUTHOR> We've one 20 person company and 10 of them asked for a year off. Now, if we actually give them a year off, it will take 10 years for the last person to get any year off at all. How are you guys managing it? <comment><USER2> [random remarks from the internet]

It's only 20 people. The company culture is such that sabbaticals are available. Ten simultaneous sabbaticals is everyone's problem because: those that aren't taking a sabbatical will get short changed in terms of time away _and_ more work. Those that take a sabbatical may not have a company to come back to a year later.

My first thought is to get everyone together and describe the situation: ten people want sabbaticals next year; it is a potential problem for the company; and everyone together can seek something equitable and acceptable and reasonable that will work over the short and medium terms.

My gut is that among the ten people seeking sabbatical, some are not certain they will return. That is the second part...meeting with each person individually to discuss the reasons they are asking for a sabbatical _now_. Was there a deathmarch to release? Are they unfulfilled? Is it something that can wait a year? Are just toying with the idea of a sabbatical?

Good luck

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on what they intend to do with that year off.

If they want to travel, they need to be completely off and you can grant it to some people.

If they want to work on some side project, then say no to some of them but propose a part-time job (work 2 or 3 days a week). Make sure to explain _why_ you are saying no (can not afford to give half the staff a year off).</comment>


When Should a Startup Start Charging? - <AUTHOR> http://startup-marketing.com/when-should-a-startup-start-charging/ <comment><USER2> Suppose there are three stages of the product lifecycle:

1\. Before minimal product

2\. After minimal product but before product/market fit

3\. After product/market fit

It seems that the common consensus among gururs of lean startup is to charge on stage 3. Based on nothing but my personal opinion I prefer to charge at stage two. The price at this point is the filter you apply to your feedback channel - they higher the price the less feedback you will get, but the more meaningful each individual piece is. If you're just starting out and your feedback pipeline is empty the right price might very well be zero, but once you have feedback the price should go up. My reasoning is that talk is cheap and only people who pay are really serious. Also setting the price helps you discover your audience - they may not even be looking at free stuff.</comment>


Check how many clicks have occurred on a bit.ly link - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone please help me with this issue:<p>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27998973/check-how-many-clicks-have-occurred-on-a-bit-ly-link-present-in-a-particular-twe <comment><USER2> Just add a "+" character at the end of the bit.ly link:

[https://bitly.com/1yowZ54+](https://bitly.com/1yowZ54+)

Atm this link has been clicked 15 times.</comment>


Ask HN: For you who are rich (net worth $1 million+), where to start? - <AUTHOR> If you have to start from the beginning, what will be your bet today for a startup.<p>Which service/product ? <comment> hippee-lee Start with your employers 401k plan. If they match your contributions all the better. If they don't offer one do it yourself with a ROTH IRA and max that out each year if you can. Start now.

When I first started I looked for high yield / high risk mutual funds that the company offered and participated heavily in the ESPP plan of the company. I picked similar things for my ROTH contributions. This means that I was impacted by the stock market collapse in 2008. It also means that I recovered my losses and was back where I was pre collapse in ~ nine months because we didn't panic and are in it for the long term. I'm 36 and will likely start transitioning some of the investments into 'safer' things when I am around 45 or so. The accounts are checked 2x per year and adjustments are sometimes made but usually we just run the calculator that estimates how much we will have when we are ~55.

The company I started this with offered seminars for retirement investing and there is a chart, sort of a guideline, that details how much risk your investment portfolio should have in it based on how long you have to retirement. If anyones interested I'll see if I can dig it up.

Not that I plan on retiring, even when I am retired but if I was 70 and my portfolio took the hit it did in 2008 I might not have the time to wait for the markets to correct. Note: I know very little about finance, investing or otherwise. My wife is the financial guru in the family and I have learned much from watching her lead. Please take this as what worked for me and realize that ymmv. Also, it helps to read up on the basics of investing for retirement but i'll be honest when I say that it has been several years since I read anything.

[edit] - I might have misread the question. Sorry. This is what I did when I was starting at 24 and would do again if I was just starting out. I doubt that I would pay someone else to do it for me since the fees that are charged when one sells/buys end up taking a significant chunk and any service is going to ad their fees on top of those.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you view is very good, in any case my question was more about businesses not investments. I respect your point of view and understand that way of thinking.

I was curious to see what kind of advices a *llionaire could give.

<comment> hippee-lee While not there yet, if projections hold up, I could tell you the same thing again in ~5 years.

I misunderstood the question - but if your goal is to become a millionaire (and you are in your mid-twenties) and you keep chipping away at things like 401k, ROTH etc you will have a great back up plan, with the magic of compounded interest, should the business attempts not work out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Dear OP, you are asking the wrong question -- a person with 1 mil or even 100k has access to different investment vehicles than a person with 10k or 100 bucks to invest.

TL;DR: save at least 10% of your gross earnings and earn compound interest with savings. Split your money between 4 ETFs like RSP, DIA, QQQQ, and VEU.

1\. Get on a budget. Save 10% of what you earn or pay off your credit cards first by saving 15%. Read "The Richest Man in Babylon"

2\. Mutual funds suck. One out of 10 years will be terrible and they only spend a few years on top. How can you get consistent returns? They have high fees. Instead invest in equity traded funds or ETFs. Read "The Big Secret for the Small Investor" by J. Greenblatt and "One up on Wall Street" by Peter Lynch. _Be a value investor not a trader!_ Plan to let your investments sit and grow for years. If you want to buy individual stocks, pick for the list of "dividend aristocrats". These are safe bluechips and you can re-invest the dividends for a compounding effect!

3\. The fees and limited investment choices make 401ks a bad deal, even with matching. A self directed Roth IRA will tax shelter your growth, but you have to invest with money you paid income tax on (unlike a 401k).

4\. Bank account interest rates are a joke! For savings you get 00.05% CD 00.35% Over 500k in money market 00.3% Inflation is around 3%!

5\. For small investment amounts, a US Treasury savings bond is not bad. There is no charge to buy or sell them and you do not have to pay taxes until you cash them in. I Bonds pay the rate of inflation and possibly a bit more. There are some penalties if you cash these bonds in before 12 months pass.

Be aware of things like how much it will cost to buy and sell an investment and when you will have to pay taxes on your earnings.

For me it was very hard to save until I created separate accounts to keep my funds in. I have been value investing in stocks and my portfolio has earned 8 - 10 % growth plus 3% in dividends. The dividends get reinvested so my holdings grow like a savings account.

Read "How to Invest $50-$5,000" by Nancy Dunnan

</comment><comment><USER3> Mark Cuban's answer:

<http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/04/how-to-get-rich/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Go out and do some research with everyday business people and find what problem they need solved that you could do.

</comment><comment><USER5> I heard somewhere you have to build something people want and are willing to use/pay for it ;)...

PS: I'm not a millionaire.</comment>


Meet the startups racing to reinvent the meal - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/30/lab-grown-meat-how-a-bunch-of-geeks-scared-the-meat-industry <comment><USER2> The idea of finding ways to make animal food products without the moral issues and environmental impact is pretty interesting.

But there's a much simpler way to avoid the moral issues and environmental impact of eating animals and animal products... eat vegetarian foods. Or simply, make a larger proportion of your diet vegetarian.

And don't waste time trying to simulate animal products (veggie burgers, faux- turkey, etc.) It'll never measure up in the end and distract from the really good and tasty vegetarian (or mostly vegetarian) stuff.

<comment><USER3> Abstinence has never worked whether it is sex or environmental sustainability. We have to find solutions that factor in human nature. Humans, as a species, will not stop having sex nor will they stop eating meat.

<comment><USER4> That's like saying humans will never stop raping and murdering because of human nature so we have to be realistic and find solutions that don't involve just not raping and murdering people.

<comment><USER5> I'm confused, there have never been a large group of people who would rape and murder. I'm not convinced it's even an order of magnitude lower now than it was 1k years ago (or 10k). The largest majority have also been omnivores (I'd include insects, eggs, and fish) for almost the entirety of that time.

It doesn't look like we're going to either solve omnivorism or perfect non- violent world peace any time soon. On the other hand, I suppose a Matrix-like utopian hellscape could bring us both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that Soylent did not get mentioned since they once seemed to be the poster child for this movement. Are they still a player?

<comment><USER7> I think the bout of people getting sick in late 2016 / early 2017 dampened enthusiasm significantly.

<comment><USER8> They're just not the "latest and greatest" any more. They've been around for awhile and it's just business as usual. They still have a number of consumers and they just started selling in brick-and-mortar stores (I believe it was WalMart).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a classic case of what a good coder would call "premature optimization."

Nutritional science, is far, _far_ from settled. It's not even clear that _is_ such a thing as a baseline, universally-applicable nutritional paradigm. For instance, there could be potentially large deviations based based on genetic and epigenetic factors.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's amazing there isn't more disruption here:

\- Everyone has to eat, but it takes a good amount of time to prep, cook, set a table, eat, clear the take and wash dishes

\- There seems to be broad awareness of what makes a healthy diet, yet lots of difficulty adhering to one

\- People have different tastes and given the choice will rarely choose the same food as those eating with them

Eating out satisfies the variety problem, but not always the time or health one.

A meal in a box somewhat helps the time problem (little prep) and maybe the health one, but not the variety.

There is no 10x solution yet, but it's not hard to think of one like meals in Star Trek that are custom and ready at the press of a button.

<comment><USER11> I had the same realization in 2015 and doubled down.

We have just spent 2.5 years developing automated robotic systems for personalized food preparation, cooking, packaging and retail. Custom hot meals from your smartphone, ready in minutes, actually cooked from fresh ingredients, to personalized orders. Full nutrition breakdown. Model is a wholly owned and operated network, which lets us extract additional efficiencies from a modern logistics network. We simultaneously solve for convenience and choice (plus consistency and availability, with the option to compete effectively on cost if we choose). Series A opens in less than two weeks.

<comment><USER10> Nice, congrats! Care to share a link to your company?

<comment><USER11> [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lab grown meat would be a real game changer I think. I would gladly be as early of an adopter of it as possible - and I very rarely adopt anything early on.

<comment><USER13> Same here, I would instantly become a "vegan" if this were an option. I really enjoy food (it's a massive part of my culture, family, and childhood) and have been indoctrinated with all the flavors of meat. Although intellectually I feel avoiding unnecessary suffering of animals is a good thing it is very difficult to divorce myself from consuming meat for all the previous reasons.

Lab grown meat would leave me no real excuse to support the animal farming industry because I would be able to keep everything I love about it and get rid of the stuff I don't. I could have my meat and eat it too.

Edit: This sounded more phallic than intended, going to leave it in though haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some crystal balling: A lot of these alt-proteins are going to encounter distribution issues.

Why? People aren't going to just go out and say "hey, give me some tofurkey, I watched a PETA documentary last night" and becoming hooked regular alt-protein consumers.

Also, given that in many other parts of the world (South America, Africa, India, China, Middle East) people just eat vegetables and don't need to pretend it's meat to enjoy them - lentils, chickpeas, soybeans/tofu, nuts, seeds, etc. - in terms of health, production cost, familiarity, appearance and overall consumer acceptance, alt-protein faces an uphill battle outside of the new, growing, and high margin western meat replacement market ... but that market is capped, and the real profits for this industry lie in mass consumer acceptance, which will basically be defined by solid inroads in to megacities (most of which are in Asia). These markets could be exceptionally hard to win.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hopefully they will be careful not to accidentally make the obesity or cancer epidemics worse in a push to rid us of the problems of global warming sometime farther down the road.

<comment><USER15> Spoiler alert: They won't be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope this doesn't go anywhere, to be honest. People need more human connection, not less, and the rituals of preparing food, eating together, cleaning etc are one of THE fundamental things that makes us human.

Replacing fast food with healthy food is good, but we should all be trying to cook more, and be with our loved ones (or hell, even roommates) _more_, not less.

<comment><USER17> I hate to be that guy, but did you read the article? It had nothing to do with the rituals of meals and was about lab-grown animal products

<comment><USER18> An alternative point of view would be that lab-grown 'animal' products and factory-farmed animal products alike are dehumanising, and that people should kill & butcher their own meat.

I'm a huntsman, and I can report that I feel most like I'm being true to my natural self when I'm stalking birds across a prairie. It's a communal effort: my friends are arrayed in a line to either side of me, and often we have a dog or two running back and forth before us. Each of us helps & supports the others, driving through the field, helping cross fencelines, contributing thoughts on how best to approach a particular stretch of land. And yet it's also intensely individualistic: you walk forward, gun in hand, eye halfway to the horizon & ears tuned to a few yards ahead, ready for the rustle which indicates there's a bird in the brush.

You think — or at least _I_ think — that this must be how our primitive ancestors felt: together, and yet apart, each doing his own best and each supporting the others in the common cause of getting something to eat.

Compared to that, buying a piece of meat or a piece of pseudo-meat in the supermarket is nothing.</comment></comment></comment>