Hackethereum. The first truly honest Ethereum ICO – 100% guaranteed to be hacked - <AUTHOR> http://hackethereum.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN...

This started as a joke that occurred to me last week when I was thinking about the current fad of the Ethereum ICOs that seemed to have little substance or be blatant scams. Well my brain took that to its logical extreme and this is what I arrived at.

I obviously couldn't pass up the excuse to try writing it.

You can check out the source code here - [https://github.com/hackethereum/hackethereum](https://github.com/hackethereum/hackethereum)

Learning Solidity has been an interesting experience. While it is visually like JavaScript, that is where the similarity ends. It's statically typed for a start, and having to reason about an entirely new form of execution model is quite a challenge. I'd encourage any devs with a passing interest in blockchain tech to give it a try.

<comment><USER2> I commend your perfectly cromulent white paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure it counts as satire when you're openly being the thing you're satirizing, and that's the entirety of the joke.

It normally wouldn't be a question of import, but this is a scam satirizing a scam, and according to the "Stretch Goals" if it raises enough to not be a joke it will stop being a joke.

So this rubs me the wrong way: it feels like just another unnecessary ICO that uses the satire tag as a shield from criticism. I don't think the already cynical ICO scene needs more of that.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually a game or sorts. I think I've misjudged the content of the website.

You kind of have to read the code to understand what is happening, but it's actually the users that can take part in the hack, there are several steps to a back door that will allow players who participate in the ICO to 'hack' it and withdraw the funds.

The first clue to the hack is on the website, the plan was to reveal the rest over time.

In my own head I thought I had put the right level of clues to have people make the jump and see what was happening, without being too obvious on how to do it. I think I've made it too confusing though from the comments I'm getting it, and most people are just taking it at face value and seeing it as a scam. Which I guess is kind of the point. Most participants would lose their contribution, but some could also take out more.

I might rework the website to explain it better and try again.

<comment><USER4> I don't know I think the original was a valuable mirror for what happens in reality. A thousand followers that don't know whats going on along for the ride and few people who look at the code trying to find an edge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like this process will take too long. I have a busy week how can I get hacked today? Is there a more insecure coin out there?

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey Simon, looks like an interesting game...</comment>


What if we taught young children abstract algebra first? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I think there are two separate points.

Could this work?

Seems like it might. I'm not sure kids are primed to learn strict definitions of things but maybe we could find a way... it would be difficult though because their parents generally won't know abstract algebra. Counting is easier to teach because it comes up at home and at school, but the kids would be learning different things at different places. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, lots of kids learn English at school and a different language at home.

Edit: The kids difficulty with strict definitions could be a good thing. Having a feel for whats going on without being restricted to the definitions could lead to new discoveries.

Should we do this?

I'm not sure this is a good thing though. I love abstract algebra and think its great fun and is, as far as I know, very useful in parts of science (I believe material science uses group theory). However, delaying the time when kids learn to add and count and do concrete math means they learn things they need for life later.

Edit: I'm reminded of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618972>

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a lot of approaches to abstract algebra for adults.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=pd_rhf_s_1?ie=UTF8&search- al...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=pd_rhf_s_1?ie=UTF8&search- alias=aps&keywords=abstract%20algebra)

Which approach, if any, best fits young children?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a good question. I think children are best primed for understanding abstract concepts when they're young. Look at the success of Harry Potter, for example: magic and wizardry. Santa Claus, even. Teaching them to think about counting concrete objects before counting those elusive abstract and imaginary number-objects might not be the most efficient approach.

</comment><comment><USER5> Possibly this: A new teacher walks into a class and asks, "What is 3 + 5?". A child responds, "5 + 3 as addition is commutative".

I'm not so worried about the order children get taught mathematical subjects but whether they have a good teacher that encourages them to enjoy mathematics and learn how to problem solve.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's almost always better to teach the concrete and practical before the abstract.

That's like teaching the rules of grammar before teaching them to read and write.</comment>


A fungus with over 20k sexes - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/11/06/fungus-genders/ <comment><USER2> Serious question; I hope it makes sense: What makes these "sexes" and not just "individuals"?

To elaborate a bit: when I read the description, it sounds like a person could make the same claim about humanity: "there are billions of sexes: John, Jane, Tim, Judy, Juan, Maria, etc etc"

How is this different? Or equivalently, what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% (?) of other individuals.

To me, that sounds like 4 sexes.

<comment><USER3> > what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex > chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% of other > individuals?

I haven't read the article yet (looks like it's been DOSed by traffic from Hacker News?), but your criterion would be met in a population of 201 entities (numbered from 0 to 200) where each entity X can procreate with entities in the range [X-25 ... x+25] (mod 201, of course). That would arguably yield 201 distinct sexes, where each individual is sexually compatible with 25% of the population.

<comment><USER4> If a mapping between compatible sexes existed such as in your example, it would be more useful to think of sex as continuous spectrum rather than a discrete collection.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps. But only because the mapping I've defined has so much symmetry.

Instead of the range [X-25 ... X+25], assign to each sex a random one of the 200-choose-50 (4.6 * 10^47) possible groups of partners sexes with size 50.

It would be impossible to completely describe the set of sexual compatibilities without simply enumerating them, and therefore necessary to treat the sexes as a set of discrete entities.

<comment><USER4> That's why I wrote "such as in your example."

I think that if each individual was randomly compatible with some subset of the population, we don't have 200 sexes, we have one sex and a 25% fertility rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is about the model species _Schizophyllum commune_. I found the OP article left me wanting to know more. The wikipedia page for _S. commune_ links to a fascinating, in-depth page by an enthusiast:

[http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/feb2000.html](http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/feb2000.html)

Also, there's this database with more pretty pictures and some distilled information:

[http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Schizophyllum_commune.htm...](http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Schizophyllum_commune.html)

I hadn't realize how unique some of the fungal genetic systems were!

</comment><comment><USER6> My understanding is that the main reason for different sexes in Fungi is to figure out whose mitochondria go on to populate the child after the nuclear DNA is combined. Having mixed populations of mitochondria inside a cell would provide an incentive for competition among them, which would be a Bad Thing. Otherwise they fungi could just do away with sexes entirely for a further, much smaller, increase in the number of potential partners.

See _Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life_ by Nick Lane.

</comment><comment><USER7> It strikes me as oddly cool for a fungus to find a cryptographic solution for their mating. And they still preserve some definition of a "collision".

<comment><USER8> You mean roughly: fused_hyphae = (A+B) ^ (C+D)?

</comment></comment><comment> reading-at-work I laughed for an unreasonably long time at "it must make for a wild singles night"

</comment><comment><USER9> OT: The Joe Rogan podcast recently had Paul Stamets on who talks at great length about fungi and it's benefits -- truly fascinating stuff.

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

<comment><USER10> That segment about how the fungi slime reorganized the Tokyo Subway System into a more efficient system was fascinating. Curious whether you could use this in someway to design everything from Circuit Boards to Software. One of my favorites so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The writing style is horrible.

</comment><comment><USER12> Q: There are lots of techniques to preserve genetic diversity in EA/GA, like e.g. niching. Does anyone know if this specific thing has ever been tried?

<comment><USER13> Could you elaborate what EA and GA stand for the uninformed but curious, like me?

<comment><USER14> Evolutionary algorithms/genetic algorithms ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm))

<comment><USER12> Thanks for hopping in while I was offline! (upvote)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The site has malware, to be precise it pops up an ad which says your Android is infected

<comment><USER16> Alternative link: [https://www.popsci.com/fungi- sex](https://www.popsci.com/fungi-sex)

<comment><USER12> Well the Discovermagazine article at least gets right that this is about genetic diversity. The writer for Popsci butchers that into sexual diversity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Being gay would be especially challenging for that species.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure there's plenty of bicelium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fungus Tumblr must support _a lot_ of tags.

<comment><USER20> Imagine how complicated the "about me" pages for OK Fungus are.</comment></comment>


GCC 7.2 Released - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-08/msg00129.html <comment><USER2> Release notes: [https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-7/changes.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-7/changes.html)

Which is generally more helpful than the above link. (IMHO)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Compared to the LLVM compiler, where the option already exists, the > implementation in the GCC compiler has some improvements and advantages:

> Complex uses of gotos and case labels are properly handled and should not > report any false positive or false negatives.

I would hope that ASan use-after-scope false positives are considered bugs in clang+llvm.

> C++ temporaries are sanitized.

This is a nice improvement -- I've seen escapes happen here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting:

      "NVPTX

        OpenMP target regions can now be offloaded to NVidia PTX GPGPUs. See the Offloading Wiki on how to configure it."

</comment><comment><USER5> RISC-V is officially added as supported, which is exciting.

Now if I could only get hold of a nice RISC-V board...

<comment> dis-sys it is called QEMU + x86_64</comment></comment>


Tesla Owners Can Edit Maps to Improve Summon Routes - <AUTHOR> https://teslamotorsclub.com/blog/2019/11/04/tesla-owners-can-edit-maps-to-improve-summon-routes/ <comment><USER2> This is great news. OSM might not have gotten as much public awareness like Wikipedia, but it deserves it. Having a global map data source, which isn't only freely available, but to which everyone can contribute, is a great piece of information infrastructure. The level of map details, especially off the roads open for car traffic, is excellent around the place where I live.

With Tesla pulling map information used for routing in the summon feature from OSM, this gives not only an overall incentive for Tesla owners to enhance the OSM database, but also gives them the ability to add the data they personally need, making the feature more useful in places which didn't have good data yet.

I wonder though, if Tesla could use the data collected by the vehicles in general to improve OSM. As Tesla seems to track special driving situations for building and enhancing the Autopilot features, they could also automatically detect wrong or missing map information, whenever a Tesla drives "off" the map. Based on that information, they could contribute to OSM a lot.

<comment><USER3> Anonymized gps traces are a common way to contribute, and routing errors as well. They could build a "Report an issue" feature which can be shared with the community after being validated by their data team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's that hard to walk to a car we need to reinvent the wheel? It's getting ridiculous

<comment><USER5> One way in which this could (I am being very speculative) be useful is that when we pass a tipping point and most cars are autonomous enough for summoning, this could change the architecture of public buildings like malls, condos, and offices:

Parking could be deliberately placed far away: Cars could drop you at the front doors, then drive off and park themselves, returning to pick you up when you are done.

This could revitalize downtown shopping districts, for example.

It may not be a hardship for able people to walk to their car in today's malls, but perhaps in the future your car could be parked a few kilometers away.

That could be a big win for liveability: Imagine malls that didn't need to be surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt. Shuttles could carry people driving "legacy" vehicles between the parking and the mall, but those with autonomous vehicles wouldn't need to wait for and share a shuttle.

<comment><USER6> > That could be a big win for liveability

Somehow having a lot of traffic created by _empty cars_ is not a win in my liveability book. Unless you're sharing the car and it's picked up by someone 5 minutes away as soon as you get out you earn very little besides some driver convenience. Instead of acting like taxis that you drive yourself, they act like limos and everyone gets to feel like they have a chauffeur to get dropped off exactly at the spot.

<comment><USER5> The whole premise of autonomous cars is that they behave like limos. I don't see how that is any worse than people driving their own cars, I see it as better in many ways, including this.

Not as good as people sharing cars, or sharing a Big Urban Service vehicle, we could build it to hold dozens of people... I guess it would be known by the acronym "BUS..."

<comment><USER6> > The whole premise of autonomous cars is that they behave like limos

Those would be the fully self driving cars. Cars that can somehow navigate short distances to a parking spot where the next person takes over would be the middle step. They sort of act like a valet service or a "self driven taxi" (comes to you where you need it).

> I don't see how that is any worse

A FSD is not worse. Just not better for anyone but the owner unless it's a shared vehicle. The only way we all benefit is if the number of cars goes down because they are shared or people move to more public forms of transport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uhm, anyone else worried about the security here? What if someone were to draw a "parking lot" polygon that resulted in a path to water?

<comment><USER2> I guess the key here is, that Tesla knows that that OSM isn't "trustworthy"[1] and consequently treats the map information as it should be: just as the source for the routing algorithm. So it uses the maps as the basis on how to get from A to B, but the actual driving is based on the sensors, not trusting the maps. So the worst case of false mapping information would be of trapping the car in a place where it doesn't know how to get to its destination.

[1] Due to its open collaborative nature, there is an obvious risk for bad or even malicious edits submitted to OSM. On the other side, "professional" and closed mapping services can have errors too, especially they run the risk of being outdated, so shouldn't completely be trusted either. Due to the community efforts, overally the OSM data should be better maintained and errors can be fixed resulting in better map quality. But the big thing is, that you cannot trust any map data 100% - and if only it has been invalidated by a tree falling onto the road.

<comment><USER3> Tesla can collaborate with the community and other business users to take the feedback from their fleet and fix the issues upstream in the data. Facebook, Apple, Amazon and others are already doing so. [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Organised_Editi...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Organised_Editing_Teams)

<comment><USER8> Describing what those companies do as "collaborating with the [OSM] community" might be a bit of a stetch. At best some companies have been dragged kicking and screaming to actually talking to the OSM community.

<comment><USER3> Hi Rory, better than nothing it seems, they were all in Heidelberg for starters :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World - <AUTHOR> http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-constrained-world/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full report here:

[http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The- Future-...](http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-of- Nuclear-Energy-in-a-Carbon-Constrained-World.pdf)

Bottom line is, as Forbes rather clickbaitily puts it [1], the main reason nuclear reactors can cost twice as much in the United States and Europe than in Asia is _not_ regulation (or rather, _not only_ regulation), but rather dumb stupid preventable factors like project/construction management failures, inexperienced subcontractors, starting construction before the design is complete, and so on --or so the study claims.

If so, then making nuclear cost-effective may be a stone's throw away, after all...

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/10/01/3-reason...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/10/01/3-reasons- nuclear-reactors-are-more-expensive-in-the-west-hint-its-not- regulation/#1878fb625d1a)</comment>


Which Bay Area Drivers Aren't Using Hands-Free Devices? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cockeyed.com/science/car_phones/car_phones.shtml

<comment><USER2> The statistical analysis is not very thorough.

For example, while the population might be evenly split between men and women, that doesn't mean that there's an even split of driver-hours between men and women. In my observations, men drive more than women. Like, when a heterosexual couple is driving somewhere together, it seems to me that in a pretty large majority of couples, the man drives most of the times. It's also probably that white people drive more on average because they have more money than blacks and latinos on average. (Though I'm not sure how the averages compare for asians.)

Anyway, I'm not sure that the demographic stats mean as much as he claims.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was he taking pictures while driving to conduct this survey?

<comment><USER4> hehe, and probably with his camera phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's what I sent her (quoting): "Only a year on the books and the California hands-free cell phone law is virtually ignored. I see people everywhere and every day driving and talking on their cell phones. There seems to be three types of people; those who do not use a cell phone in the car at all, those who use a hands-free device, and those who don't. I was wondering why so many people seem not to care if there is a law?"

Respect for traffic laws is regularly degraded by feel-good measures like unreasonably low speed limits, obvious speed traps that have nothing to do with traffic safety, 20-mile-long highway "work zones" with no workers but plenty of cops, "traffic calming" devices such as unnecessary stop signs and obstacles, and countless other signs of governmental indifference to drivers' everyday concerns. Traffic laws are treated as optional because they are often completely unrelated to safety.

"Is it because they think the ticket is so cheap? Is it that their chances of getting caught are so low?"

There have been numerous studies suggesting that hands-free devices are no safer when driving. This is undoubtedly because when it comes to traffic safety, your presence of mind is far more important than where your hands are. Perhaps more drivers realize the truth of that idea than you might think.

I violate the hands-free law frequently, but never in a context where I'm likely to need the missing brainpower. I wouldn't behave any differently with a hands-free device because I know it would still be hazardous for me to do so, based on my own driving abilities and general absentmindedness. Michael Schumacher can use his phone anywhere he wants, but I'm too easily distracted to get away with that!

I think it was Jaron Lanier who defined virtual reality as "the place where you're at when you're on the telephone." Virtual reality, whatever it is, doesn't sound like a good place to be when you're driving. My suspicion is that hands-free laws don't work for anyone except legislators who are pandering for votes and/or desperate for revenue, and cops who are always looking for excuses to stop people who aren't doing anything wrong besides driving in the wrong car, in the wrong place, and/or with the wrong skin color.</comment>


The Feynman Lectures on Physics (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu <comment><USER2> Microsoft Research made a number of Feynman lectures available in 2009 with their Project Tuva [1]. Originally it required Silverlight, but the Silverlight app has been decommissioned. The videos are now directly available online.

For those interested in Feynman, the man, I highly recommend "Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman.". It's a mostly fun, sometimes sad, look at his life.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva- richar...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richard- feynman/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

I had tried to find this before and it was like Microsoft were making it for Windows users only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a path for learning physics, [https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want- to-l...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want-to-learn- physics) for those interested, and here is relevant HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691963)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this a good introduction to physics for a layman who is comfortable with linear algebra and calculus?

<comment><USER6> No, definitely not. Try to find some book in the topic that you are interested in. If it is electromagnetism, go for the black book with four equations printed. If it is quantum mechanics, I like the Sakurai book.

<comment><USER7> Griffiths on Electromagnetism?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I like the Griffiths book. Last time I heard he is on the gre physics panel. Wonder what is he doing now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I notice that the way these volumes are split up is the same as both the way US AP classes and most colleges I've seen split up physics classes. Is it safe to assume that it has become the canonical order to teach the subject because of these lectures?

<comment><USER9> No, that was the canonical order of lectures long before Feynman started teaching.

Actually, I think Feynman's influence on introductory physics teaching is much smaller than it is often stated. More "standard" courses that put a higher emphasis on how to actually carry out computations are more successful first physics courses. Feynman's lecture notes are an illuminating read to gain a broader perspective when one has already learnt how to "do" physics. IIRC in the preface Feynman himself actually expresses his disappointment with how well his students actually managed to learn from his teaching.

Feynman as a researcher was a master at presenting his (innovative and important) results in insightful ways, such that they appear almost obviously plausible from these alternative angles. But he did that after powering through insanely hard, long calculations to really obtain these results. Those are the most important part of the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a huge fan of Feynman, but the lectures gave me the impression they are not the ultimate learning resource for physics. Any other books on physics that people would recommend?

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny to see the guy in the top photo in the process of lighting a smoke. Ah, the good old days.

Anyway, great series. I happened upon the 50th anniversary hardbound edition in a Los Alamos museum bookstore.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know how this publication relates to Six Easy Pieces? Same thing now free? Different lectures? Same lectures but one is abridged?

[http://www.basicbooks.com/full- details?isbn=9780465025275](http://www.basicbooks.com/full- details?isbn=9780465025275)

<comment><USER13> _Six Easy Pieces_ corresponds to these chapters in _The Feynman Lectures on Physics_ :

      Chapter 1, Atoms in Motion
      Chapter 2, Basic Physics
      Chapter 3, Relation of Physics to Other Sciences
      Chapter 4, Conservation of Energy
      Chapter 7, Theory of Gravitation
      Chapter 37, Quantum Behavior

The editing differences are probably slight. _Six Easy Pieces_ first came out in 1994 and the question would be whether a particular edition contains the 2006 definitive edition corrections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My favorite part of those books is Book II, Chapter 19 on "The Principle of Least Action" \- a great explanation of the core of what he would win his Nobel prize for two years later.

The sizable section that analyzes ways to try "beat" the two-slit electron experiment is also amazing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are these good for getting an intuition for the underlying _math_ , without particularly caring about physics?

I don't care so much about particle interactions, but if I can get a better intuition for thinking about common mathematics, that would be more useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish I knew about the Feynman lectures during my undergrad :(

</comment><comment><USER17> Bill Gates supposedly put all the free video lectures online. I see a comment there that links to 7 of them but I wonder where the rest are.

<comment><USER18> There are no videos of the lectures of the material the book is based on. The videos Gates put up are the Messenger Lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If only the greatest of us didn't rot away and die. I think Feynman would be great to still have around.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was a physics major. These 3 volumes used to be so dry that I can't even turn a page. But those are real good memory considering I am now just a web developer digging code just for the money. Hey, at least I can show off to my former classmates on how much I am making. Don't you pity me.</comment>


Health-care reform will resemble the evolution of browsers + HTML: both are path-dependent - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this piece by Atul Gawande on how health-care reform in the U.S. will proceed was illuminating. He uses the social science term "path- dependent" to describe systems that grow up around early design decisions, and they win out over alternatives that purport to be better (for some definition of "better") because those very decisions turn out to be far more consequential than could have been foreseen at the time. He argues our new health system will build on the existing one, and not be a from-scratch replacement, because of path-dependence, and give examples of how other industrialized national health plans follow this dictum.

I thought of the co-evolution of Web browsers and HTML, and the current efforts to create a successor to HTML 4, while reading the article, and noted the similarity. HTML 5 is expressly designed to "pave the cow-paths" of the way HTML 4 is actually used and implemented by browsers.</comment>


Package license condition of use – plant a tree - <AUTHOR> https://treeware.earth <comment><AUTHOR> Hadn't seen this take on supporting open source before.

Text of the license: "This package is Treeware. If you use it in production, then we ask that you [ __buy the world a tree __]([https://plant.treeware.earth/{user}/{package}](https://plant.treeware.earth/{user}/{package})) to thank us for our work. By contributing to the Treeware forest you'll be creating employment for local families and restoring wildlife habitats."</comment>


Nail the Customer Development Manifesto to the Wall - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2012/03/29/nail-the-customer-development-manifesto/ <comment><USER2> Seeing mottos, manifestos or anything else in list form on wall in your company is a sign that it's time to try to find a new job.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm in Steve's class at Haas (U.C. Berkeley), and our team has undergone 4 pivots in 8 weeks, which is 1 pivot every two weeks. Every time we spoke to customers, there were revelations, both with respect to what will not work, but also what we can change that might work.

Lather Rinse Repeat...

</comment><comment><USER4> "8.No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers" - I have personally experienced this and was speechless then my bplan fell flat. Listening more and talking less will help understand the problem.</comment>


Samsung Starts Mass Producing Industry's First 3D Vertical NAND Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/news-events/press-releases/detail?newsId=12990

<comment><USER3> Heat dissipation and manufacturing concerns aside, a 3D stacked architecture seems to be the most obvious thing to increase clock speeds. Light can only travel about 30cm every nanosecond: components clocked at 4GHz can't be more than 7.5cm apart from each other (I think -- and probably have to be quite a bit less for practical concerns). Packing everything vertically makes it easier to keep these propagation delays low and drive up clock speeds.

We seem to be in a race to the smallest transistor physically possible, to increase density on 2D chips. Tiny transistors generally leak more heat due to quantum tunnelling, right? So what if the industry moved toward much, much more efficient, larger transistors, layered hundreds or thousands of layers thick in a large 3D architecture? I think the only reason this isn't happening is because it's not really possible to manufacture that sort of chip without it taking a thousand times as long and being a thousand times as likely to fail QA -- but maybe this is a step in that direction.

<comment><USER4> Well there is quantum tunneling but there is also dennard scaling, so it goes both ways. Transistors need to be small but also non-leaky, so that's why everyone's toying around with exotic materials and structures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> not being a chip engineer, i wonder while 3D chip layer stacking isn't in the wide use. For high powered chips it is understandable because of heat dissipation requirements. Whereis for lower powered it may seem that additional layers of heat transfer material between working layers would do the trick. For CPUs the 3D stacking would decrease distances between various parts for example and would allow something like cluster (of low powered chips) in a cube.

<comment><USER6> For low power chips, what advantages would there be for stacking? My thought is that low power chips probably aren't going for performance (since they are low power), so stacking for performance wouldn't really be buying them anything necessary. Maybe you could just get smaller form-factor low power chips.

<comment><USER5> half of motivation for 3D i see is the model of the brain, not the actual geometry of the brain, which is about 2D+ (don't remember the fractal dimension value of the brain), more a logical model of it where computational power comes from having number of connection an order of magnitude larger than number of connected neurons. Our current electronics has it backwards - <USER2> of connection is orders of magnitude less than number of connected elements. 3D seems like a way to build computational devices with increased number of connections (that though requires some work on software side as well to benefit from it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty amazing hack to get around the size limitations of NAND flash feature size.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions 10nm process size, whereas I thought the current state- of-the-art was 20nm. Is flash memory an exception? And if so, does that also apply to DRAM? Or am I just confused?

<comment><USER9> Flash and DRAM have highly regular structures, which means they tend to be ahead of everything else in terms of feature size (and also, feature size isn't an exact measurement anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >128 gigabit (Gb) [per chip]

This is the first I think I've seen size measured in gigabits, rather than gigabytes, of which there'd be 16, which is still impressive, but on amazon I can buy a 32GB sdcard for $20.

<comment><USER11> Flash chips are typically spec'd in terms of bits in the industry.

Things like SD cards are really small consumer electronics devices and are spec'd in terms of bytes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is incredible and may have far reaching implications for computing.

Hopefully, the cost ratios haven't disproportionately increased as well.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how long it'll take for Apple to violate Samsung's patents, when product bans will be proposed, and when those bans get overturned.

<comment><USER14> That's not funny. This isn't the market where Apple and Samsung compete, it's the market where Apple is a huge Samsung customer, where a few years ago Apple was responsible for an outright _majority_ of Samsung's sales.

<comment><USER15> Samsung is a gigantic company, a South Korean Siemens. They are active in any number of markets, and Apple certainly didn't provide for a majority of their sales.

<comment><USER14> Read my comment again. I wasn't making any statements about the Samsung conglomerate as a whole. I was only discussing the flash memory market, and in that market, Apple was indeed responsible at one time for purchasing more than 50% of Samsung's production of flash memory (this was during the heyday of the iPod Nano and prior to mainstream SATA SSDs).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Latest Vision for Las Vegas - A Downtown Vibe - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/arts/design/latest-vision-for-las-vegas-a-downtown-ambience.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I am in Vegas right now, and I can tell you: most nerds I know would die in this heat. Turn your oven on and stick your head into it: that's what it feels like.

I remember when I first visited San Francisco: I felt like it was home. Right then I decided that I'd move there some day. But Vegas doesn't feel that way. The entire city seems like a mirage: from the fake Eiffel Tower to the fake Statue of Liberty, it all seems so superficial. For the locals' sake I hope Hsieh can pull it off, but I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER3> All that fakery is the strip - the strip is for tourists, not locals.

<comment><USER4> True dat

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like discardorama, I am in Vegas right now. Possibly unlike discardorama, I was born and raised in this town.

Note: I don't live here now. I left in 1986 to go to work at Convex in Dallas, and now live in Austin. (after a 7 year break from the VC-funded madness when I lived in Hawaii 2004-2011.)

But while here, I'm working outside all day, every day. (Effecting a repossession of some heavy equipment for my father, and fixing said equipment so it can be transported. Said equipment is the remaining artifacts of what was a 50 year-old water well drilling business located in Las Vegas.)

Yes, in the 115F heat, and I'm 51, and have survived both an ascending aortic dissection and an associated MI.

It hasn't killed me yet.

The problem with Las Vegas isn't the heat. The problems are: lack of tech structure (why I left), and water. There simply will not be enough water to support a city of any size here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fun picture taken tonight downtown on Freemont East during First Friday: [http://cl.ly/image/2U3m2I0p2O0v](http://cl.ly/image/2U3m2I0p2O0v)

I've come to realize Vegas is facing a problem with talent in tech. Plenty of companies are looking to hire, but there is not much selection. I guess that makes it a great place to move. Low cost of living and a sellers market.

<comment><USER6> Just be prepared for low rates. You can't demand what you can on the coasts. Low cost of living means low salaries. Companies are often willing to expense living and travel, though.

<comment> k-mcgrady If it's a choice between low cost of living/low salary and high cost of living/high salary do you happen to have any figures which show which one actually works out as more profitable?

<comment><USER3> My thinking is that a good job with pay appropriate to the area is better in a high-cost area than in a low-cost area. The reason being is that part of your pay goes towards housing which eventually means a mortgage.

Once you decide to retire you can cash out that mortgage. A modest house in the bay area is still a million dollar house. A modest house in vegas is a $200K house. $1M in hand gives you a lot more flexibility than $200K.

<comment><USER7> Also, an iPod or other globally-priced goods are cheap in high-cost high-wage areas, expensive in low-cost low-wage areas. Student loans, etc. are like iPods.

I think the ideal is to work in a high-wage high-cost area early on your career, to build up a high salary history and cover some of your fixed costs (student loans, etc.), while not incurring large recurring high costs (buying a house). Then, relocate to a low-cost low-wage area while working remotely for a high percentage of your original salary.

A $150k/yr Silicon Valley salary that became $110k/yr to telecommute from a low-cost, low-tax, low-wage area would be awesome buying power.

A lot of people do this with fixed retirement income (pensions, or even social security) -- retire to a low cost area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like they've tried this before with City Center--though it might not be a gigantic construction job--but it seems to want to ignore the fundamental culture of Las Vegas. Vegas is a unique city and even the people who live there aren't there because they want a regular city (think about the type of person to become a doctor or teacher in a town like that). Freemont is already Vegas' "downtown"; that it doesn't look like other cities' downtowns is not a problem.

<comment><USER9> CityCenter heavily contrasted with Hsieh's plan in the text of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are some great Photoshopped photos showing how much more fun the Las Vegas strip would be with narrower, pedestrian-friendly streets:

[http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas- strip-...](http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas-strip-i.html) [http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas- strip-...](http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas-strip- ii.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems really cool, but what about Vegas' sustainability issues? Isn't everything still imported( especially water ), or does this project also address that?

<comment><USER3> FWIW, SoCal imports vastly more water than Vegas does. Practically all the agriculture in SoCal would disappear without the imported water.

<comment><USER12> The city of Los Angeles has 6 times more people than Vegas, without counting the metro area, the OC and San Diego, and of course the agriculture. It would be shocking if LV took as much water as SoCal.

<comment><USER3> While true, and quite obvious, I don't understand your point. Are you saying that makes SoCal water importation more sustainable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was invited by the Downtown Project to visit the city next month for one of their retreats. Will be sure to write a blog post afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER14> Previously, some criticism about the Downtown Project: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5895699](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5895699)

</comment><comment><USER15> What a schlep!

EDIT: Context [http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> So great to see entrepreneurs like Hsieh help to build communities on a massive scale.

</comment><comment><USER17> Imagine if YC moved there.

<comment><USER7> If I got to pick between YC in MV and YC in LV, I'd pick LV hands-down (firearms, other regulations, being able to have decent housing; taxes are better but that's a very minor concern). But, I don't think this would be true for more than maybe 5% of the people in YC.

The main weakness of YC in LV would be the lack of investors. Within 10 miles of YC in MV are almost all the good investors, within 30 miles, basically everyone except USV and Mark Suster and maybe a couple more.

Tony Hsieh is awesome, but he's basically the only investor of note in Las Vegas. Even Seattle has slightly more choices.

<comment><USER4> The Greenspun family could be an interesting source. Danny Greenspun, in particular, seems to get it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dropbox down / DNS resolution issue? - <AUTHOR> Can't access dropbox due to a DNS error, is it just me?

    $ dig +short www.dropbox.com @220.127.116.11
    www.g1.dropbox.com.
    $ dig +short www.g1.dropbox.com @126.96.36.199
    %
 Reproduced from servers in a few regions. <comment><USER2> $ dig +short www.dropbox.com @22.214.171.124

www.g1.dropbox.com.

18.104.22.168</comment>


Reddit Transparency Report 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report-2018 <comment><USER2> I get the feeling if you really wanted a true transparency report, you would discuss government requests, but also prevalence & detection & restriction of bots, prevalence & detection & restriction of vote farming, true likelihood of random submissions doing anything, acts of reddit censorship and the underlying and reportable reasons for doing so, user tracking and sales & mining of user information.

I don't see 95% of that there.

<comment><USER3> Traffic quality analysis is often far worse at a lot of these sorts of companies than you'd expect. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have an accurate analysis on the full scope of bots on their network.

<comment><USER4> They're probably afraid of what they'd find.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but they should still do that. Bots and astroturfing does not generate big revenue and they are pushing real users to other sites.

<comment><USER4> Consider that if they study the problem they may discover the problem is severe and they can't fix it. Now they have an even more serious problem: If they lie about the existence of the report, they're defrauding advertisers. If they admit the contents of the report, advertisers and users will flee.

So it's rational for them to not look in the first place. If they don't know, then they're not technically lying. This is good for them, but nobody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related Reddit thread about the report where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is answering questions: [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddits_2018_transparency_report_and_maybe_other/)

Most questions are about the Tencent investment. Huffman's response:

> Our governance didn't change during this round, which means we didn't add > anyone to the board, and our policies won't be changing either.

<comment><USER7> China doesn't have anyone in the board of Hollywood production houses either and yet I learnt right here from HN that there are no Chinese villains or bad portrayal of China anymore. Irrespective of the money they received if they plan to bring Reddit to China, Reddit will be washed clean to Chinese specifications.

<comment><USER8> >I learnt right here from HN that there are no Chinese villains or bad portrayal of China anymore.

That has more to do with the Chinese box office being a 9 billion a year market than it does Chinese investors.

<comment><USER9> Does it? The US market is greater than $10 billion and there are plenty of movies that portray Americans as bad guys. Seems more like the government of China might not allow that movie to be released in the first place.

<comment><USER10> The difference is that it's an American movie with an American bad guy. Take a look at the Chinese movie poster for "The Force Awakens", they minimized the presence of the black character because they knew he wouldn't be popular with Chinese audiences.

[https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/star-wars- chi...](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/star-wars-china-poster- controversy.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Just curious -- Is Finn actually popular with any audiences? Aren't minor villains from the original trilogy more popular than Finn?

<comment> basil-rash Nobody knew that they didn't like Finn before the movie even came out though. This is TFA, not TLJ.

<comment><USER11> The TFA release date for China was almost one month after the rest of the world. Plenty of time to realize nobody really likes Finn,and adjust marketing accordingly.

<comment><USER12> > Plenty of time to realize nobody really likes Finn

[Citation needed]

[Substantiation needed to show that marketing materials for films can be changed that quickly]

<comment><USER11> Finn is consistently less popular than Grand Moff Tarkin and Boba Fett. I've even seen him ranked below Darth Maul, who doesn't even really have a personality at all.

It's a poster. You take it to a printing press and ask for a few thousand new ones, it's NBD. If they didn't already have several alternate designs from before they selected this one, it's like an hour of mucking around in adobe CS to make Finn smaller and droids bigger, less if you have the original images on hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, emergency disclosure request compliance went from 10 in 2017 to 162 in 2018, with a near-tripling in the ratio of produced:total requests.

I wonder if their compliance policy changed, or if the requesting parties just got better at making actionable requests, or something else?

<comment><USER14> My guess is that it's a combination of a larger user base attracting more attention from law enforcement agencies. That relationship doesn't necessarily need to be linear. Once you've gotten to a certain size, I imagine the number of requests for content production/removal increases quite quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it odd that they don't mention the data breach that happened in 2018. [0] You would think this would be the place to disclose this and their response in perpetuity as opposed to a reddit thread.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/93qnm5/we_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/93qnm5/we_had_a_security_incident_heres_what_you_need_to/)

<comment><USER16> "Every year, Reddit produces a Transparency Report to provide users with information about the _types of requests that we receive from third parties that want Reddit to disclose user data or remove content from the platform._ "

<comment><USER17> well, it was a third party, they probably sent some sort of request to reddit, and they certainly wanted some user data :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I liked Reddit but I think it's too big now, the format just doesn't work for such a big website, I can't imagine the data they have though, I'm sure you can make some crazy psychological profiles with some of the data in there.

<comment><USER19> It's literally the worst parts of Twitter combined with the worst parts of Facebook with comments from YouTube. I guess most aggregators are cesspools after your cross a certain DAU threshold.

<comment><USER20> I think the subreddits are a nice solution for that though. There are a lot of very nice and useful niche subreddits.

I agree the frontpage and r/all is a cesspool.

<comment><USER21> It's the niche subreddits that keep me using it for now.

The trend is towards worse though with pretty much everything they do lately.

<comment><USER22> Recommendaome subreddits, I won't ruin them :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish they would list the requests by user and by sub. Would be good to see which tend to draw the Government's ire.

<comment><USER24> I don't think disclosing user names of requests would be in the interest of those users.

<comment><USER23> I'm against it if it's an active investigation. Otherwise obfuscate the account name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are they actually going to detail what content they banned or quarantined? When Reddit previously went on a quarantine spree, I recall a lot of reasonable content got the hammer as well, probably because it doesn't align with the political groupthink of Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh man, you really hit some buttons with me via "Reddit" and "Transparency"! Here is the rant that has been building in me:

The transparency I would like are three rules:

1) New policy statement: All subreddits must state moderation rules in their side bar.

2) New technical consistency: Open moderation logs for all subreddits.

3) New feature: An open log of moderation complaints for each subreddit. Each complaint costs the submitter $1 (or some reputation?) to avoid spam and most thoughtless complaints.

This requires very little from Reddit:

Changes (2) and (3) only require technical changes, no personnel intervention.

Change (1) Is a policy change, but only requires manual work from Reddit after high technical thresholds:

1a) When moderation complaint logs see a lot of submissions relative to subreddit activity, a warning is automatically sent to the moderators whose moderation is subject to complaints.

1b) Only when a moderator has received several warnings, will someone need to review the complaints, the moderation log and decide if a moderator should be removed, get a personal warning, given a clean slate with regard to past complaints, or no action.

1c) If three or more moderators for the same subreddit have to be removed due to consistent violation of the stated policy, then the subreddit can be closed.

The point of all this is:

* Users no longer have to deal with deceptive moderation.

* Users do most of the oversight, Reddit takes on very little extra work.

* Subreddits that spend a lot of time trying to police moderators of related sites can stop. Either there was no problem, it will clear up, or it will be dealt with.

* Reddit becomes more useful to everyone except deceptive moderators.

<comment><USER27> I disagree.

Subreddits are absolutely owned by the top mod, originally whoever created them. It gets very political but I think your suggestions will just open up an avenue for aggressive takeovers of subreddits.

If someone built a subreddit I think they should be free to do what they want with it. It is authoritarian and causes drama, but not nearly as much drama as if it was democratized and transparent. Bad faith actors can manufacture crises constantly to take over a subreddit. It's happened already.

<comment><USER28> > It's happened already.

Where?

<comment><USER29> r/punchablefaces was one if i remember. some people got really riled in that case

<comment><USER30> The top mod of /r/punchablefaces decided that he was going to give it away and offered it to the first person to accept it of two other mods, one from a left-leaning sub, one from a right-leaning sub. The left-leaning one accepted first, and got ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I believe an even better metric, and one that's completely overlooked, is what data does Reddit collect about it's users from third parties that it holds and could _potentially_ give to government entities.

I don't care about how many times the government requests data from Reddit, I care about what Reddit keeps about me in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER32> Something that is not at all addressed in any seriousness, even though it is probably the most pertinent issue that faces Reddit in particular, especially in something called a transparency report; is the clear abuse and misuse of both removal of content and banning of user accounts to censor things, usually for political reasons, but often also simply out of convenience or maybe due to conflict of interest, or any other number or reasons. The whole premise of Reddit was public discussion, and today the very notion of the self-moderation and good ideas percolating up and bad ideas being deprioritized through voting is utterly broken as moderators and administrators operate like little feudal lords and wield their control in the most arbitrary manner with rather loose, if any, serious adherence to even their own sub's rules.

There are some rather notable examples of that in the past even though they somewhat escape my mind right now, but I believe there was a case of a moderator using the power to mod in order to suppress mention of some rival product, just as one example. I think there have also been quite notable instances of whole threads just being "nuked" where pages and pages of comments are simply deleted, sometimes due to corporate or even founder ego reasons ... spez

I get that some things, especially illegal things and even things like doxing or real spam need to be removed, but that does not mean that just because something is removed by dictate of mods or admins, it should never ben seen again or invisible to anyone. Make the unapproved thoughts that are not illegal visible to users, maybe even classify them based on the reason for mod/admin flagging, i.e., spam, wrongthink, etc. It would serve to keep mods and admins ethical and accountable and... transparent.

I think it is a rather significant and overlooked issue. Sure you don't want, e.g., one political group being able to spam another, but that doesn't mean that retaining such an event and the comments, just alone for their scientific and historical reasons, is not rather valuable.

There is also another even more significant reason, the pareto effect, which would indicate that it is far more likely that the one outlier solution is snuffed out because the conventional thinking deemed it as an unacceptable outlier and snuffed the account or user out. Think of those who opposed the Iraq war or even the Afghan war, or warned about the tech or housing bubbles, or any number of people who warned about the things that were obvious in hindsight, but the conventional thought persecuted before it became painfully obvious.

When you start digging into the details of this phenomenon, it is quite unsettling actually just how likely it is that the spark of genius we are all hoping for regarding any particular matter under consideration, may have been snuffed because it or the person that could have provided the solution was declared an personal non grata and were essentially put in a digital concentration camp or buried in a digital mass grave of accounts, executed by some fanatic moderator or administrator that did not tolerate wrongthink or free speech as ever broader rubrics of language are falling under ever harsher persecution.

Just think of all the outliers that have produced essentially most major discoveries, now imagine if they had been making their controversial points today in a forum. They would have been shunned and immediately shadow banned, fully banned, or summarily had their voice snuffed out in any number of ways, maybe even just by one moderator or administrator with a dictatorial chip on their shoulder with far more control and power than any one person should have over another person's voice and speech ... no matter how much you are self- convinced that they are wrong and you are right and therefor no one else should be able to hear what you don't approve of.

That applies to this forum too by the way. I know, this is the dominion of the technocratic elite demigods and wrongthink will not be tolerated from mere inferiors, but just think about it all for a second ... if you even get to see this point being made and some mod hasn't deemed it unacceptable for others to see. But you wouldn't have ever known that it was even made, because there would be no trace of it, on orders of the mod executioner.

<comment><USER33> On this site you can enable 'showdead' in your profile.

</comment></comment><comment> master-litty Spez is answering questions in the related announcements thread and, remarkably, responded to a question about reddit's historic free speech stance. [0]

Completely dodged the question and pulled the "Think Of The Children" card, framing the asker as a CP supporter.

Game over for free speech on reddit. It's so blatant it's insulting.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddits_2018_transparency_report_and_maybe_other/egedlhh/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know what kind of growth Reddit has seen over the past few years? I'm curious if the trend in number of disclosure requests over time looks any different when normalized for some sort of growth metric.

</comment><comment><USER35> > In 2018, Reddit received 28 requests for the production of user account > information from foreign governmental authorities (excluding emergency > requests). Reddit did not comply with any of these requests.

</comment><comment><USER36> Apparently nobody in this thread understands what a transparency report is. Also, the level of entitlement in these comments is off the charts.

It's a report on government/law enforcement requests. This concept wasn't started by reddit, but by Google and Microsoft.

Reddit is a private company and owes you nothing. Deal with it or visit another site. It's one thing to suggest changes, but don't start thinking they or any other company owes it to you to produce whatever documentation and reporting you happen to be curious about.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder how many of those request are related to the 2016 election.

</comment><comment><USER38> I feel like reddit nowadays needs a transparency report for their own actions. I don't know what happened to reddit, but it isn't so transparent anymore.

</comment><comment><USER39> I saw this earlier today scrolling through in card view mode, except what I saw was an image macro with text about how I'm using an ad blocker. I was amused, the irony of a transparency report being blocked because of an ad blocker. I was using Brave. I didn't click through, yep I'm just gonna scroll by without updoot because the Great Thing About Reddit is it (mostly) works great with no account. At least so far.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wow, we Canadians sure do love our takedown requests (section 3). Wonder what the reason is for our disproportionately high number of requests.

</comment><comment><USER41> They didn't include how many posts were removed as "spam". It seems like an important thing to include.

<comment><USER42> That has nothing to do with the purpose of the transparency report, which is specifically about third-party requests:

> Every year, Reddit produces a Transparency Report to provide users with > information about the types of requests that we receive from third parties > that want Reddit to disclose user data or remove content from the platform.

<comment><USER43> They make a point of showing that Reddit admins delete less content than the various subreddit moderators do. I would guess that 90% of the stuff being removed by mods (or AutoMod) is spam, making it a bit of an apples to oranges comparison

<comment><USER44> As I read it they didn't include what they remove automatically as spam, just what they as humans remove.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I must be looking at this incorrectly. I don't see 'Requests from Reddit Investors' listed anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ironic that they're actively censoring critical comments in the transparency report post.

</comment><comment><USER47> reddit is much a manipulated site. It's terrible than Facebook but slightly better than Twitter.</comment>


What is a good cheap 2 ethernet port SBC - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a cheap SBC with two switched Ethernet ports for a network device project. It is incredible how rare SBCs that have just two Ethernet ports (without a kitchen sink of other stuff) are. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure about "good", but for "cheap" take a look at the Orange Pi R1:

[https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange- Pi-R1-H2-256...](https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange- Pi-R1-H2-256MB-Quad-Core-Cortex-A7-Open-source-development-board-beyond- Raspberry-Pi/1553371_32827494728.html)

[http://www.orangepi.org/OrangePiR1/](http://www.orangepi.org/OrangePiR1/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I know, OpenBSD is supported[1] on Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[2].

Depending on what you need, a readily available appliance at a reasonable price (~$100) might even be better than just a SBC.

[1] [https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html](https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html)

[2] [https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter- lite/](https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-lite/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The fli4l community looked into different options and I have heard they often use ALIX boards[2] with up to three ethernet ports.

[1] [http://www.fli4l.de/en/home/whats-that- fli4l/](http://www.fli4l.de/en/home/whats-that-fli4l/)

[2] [http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm](http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm)

<comment><USER5> Yep, I can vouch for the pcengines boards.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have experience with PC engines boards in the past. They are good quality but the price is about 5 times what I am looking for, e.g. something about $20-30 to build a competitive network appliance with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am looking for something about $20 to $30 per unit.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is an SBC?

<comment><USER6> Oh nevermind single board computer.</comment></comment>


Telstra: Android phones not robust - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Trujillo-Android-phones-not-robust/0,130061791,339294624,00.htm

<comment><USER2> The only part of Android that is "not robust" (thus far and in my opinion) is the hardware. The Android OS itself feels about as solid and responsive as the iPhone OS (does that have a name, btw?) or pre-cellphone-era-Palm-OS. I have had very little experience with WinCE, Symbian or whatever the Blackberry uses, so I cannot compare there.

Android has real multi-tasking. I can't even begin to tell you how nice it is to be able to SSH into a server from my G1, switch to email or the web to check something, and then come back and my SSH session is still active. I couldn't do that on the Treo (no multitasking) and it annoyed me to no end.

</comment><comment><USER3> "But the platform isn't at the stage where it's really robust" is the actual quote.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find stories you care about on the web? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! How do you find stories you care about on the web? Everyday, I have a few go-to sites that I use but usually only find a couple stories I'm really interested in...Extending this circle of sites is difficult as well with 1000's of news/media options (e.g. Vice, NPR, Gizmodo, HBR, CNN, Medium...the list goes on forever) which site to try out and then I have to take the time to find stuff I care about on those sites. Furthermore, this is complicated by each site organizing content such that it's easier to see what they want you to see vs what might interest you (agendas). I've come to realize that it's really difficult to find great stories on a daily basis so thought what if people could share any story they found on the web (from anywhere!) and have this content in one place, then instead of organizations deciding what we see, the community gets to decide that. I put together a simple site to see if people are interested in sharing stories they find on the web and also in discovering interesting content and wanted to see what you all thought? Please all criticism is welcome.
http://www.lumn.io
This is a work in progress. I'd love to see some of the interesting stuff you all read. If you have any feedback/comments, feel free to email me at email@example.com <comment><USER2> Cool site!!!

I like the concept and you've done a nice job implementing it.</comment>


Show HN: A "How to Talk About Politics" Simulation Game, Made with Google Docs - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X8HxIVpsEh2ulFUO_9ngyDBE6i1FocYle54Mw1WaJaE/edit?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> Would love feedback on this. I made it as an exercise in combatting how divided the US is right now, in hopes that people can rebuild trust and eventually share facts again one day.</comment>


Jim Carrey Walks into a Bar [DeepFake] - sahin-boydas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fz9ZxZcMVY <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't look for artifacts for the first part, got totally into the moment.

Yeah, my untrained eye can see things, if I'm looking. But this was a context where the maker was saying out loud "look what we can do with fake faces."

Most people won't be looking, their first perspective will be that created by the perpetrator. People will be manipulated by these, especially those that want to be manipulated.

These things will work. Even ones that are shown to be fake will have done their lasting damage.</comment>


James Dyson on why not every device needs to be connected - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/06/james-dyson-on-why-not-every-device-needs-to-be-connected/ <comment><USER2> James Dyson gives a great NPR interview on how he developed the Dyson Vacuum and his approach to engineering. It is really interesting to hear how he got started. If you are into podcasts check it out; _How I built this with Guy Raz_ and scroll to James Dyson[0]

[0][https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built- this](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dyson is very good at getting his face in the media all the time, I'm not sure his reputation is deserved.

</comment><comment><USER4> maybe we can have technology without it being connected to the internet?</comment>


Euler - <AUTHOR> http://www.billthelizard.com/2009/01/euler.html <comment><USER2> I don't have the source handy, but I remember reading that during his lifetime, Euler was responsible for one third of the entire world's output of new work in the Mathematical Sciences (Maths, Physics and Optics I guess).

ONE THIRD!

(I think it was from this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius- Theorems-Mathem...](http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems- Mathematics/dp/014014739X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b))</comment>


The Evolution of Roller Coaster Tycoon (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nicscorner.com/evo_of_rct.htm

<comment><USER2> Fans of Roller Coaster Tycoon would do well to consider entertaining themselves by playing OpenTTD, a community reverse-engineering / rewriting / extension effort based off Transport Tycoon (Deluxe), which was in turn the predecessor of Roller Coaster Tycoon. (RCT was originally going to be Transport Tycoon 2, but when Chris Sawyer tried out the new track-layout features the idea of roller coasters became obvious, and the game was history.)

Of course, this unusual legacy has some interesting side-effects and it can be a little weird to get into the game (e.g. there's two completely different models of doing signaling, and there's a complete rewrite of the passenger- traffic distribution algorithm that makes things a lot more challenging and fun but is buried in some sub-sub-submenu in the settings' Advanced Mode...)

Think of something a little like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but you get to do more network-design work and make tradeoffs between the expense of building a system right the first time or doing something more scalable for the future, and then seeing it blow up in your face when you try to run too much traffic down a congested line :D

<comment><USER3> I play a bit of OpenTTD from time to time. There's quite a learning curve, but it's enjoyable. For all the tweaks though, there's a couple that I always want, are always the source of me stopping play:

I don't like negotiating with towns to let me lay down roads and other infrastructure. After a while dealing with this nonsense by planting thousands of trees gets old and doesn't work all the time. I wish I could just turn that off.

I wish resources didn't run out. By the time I have a pretty cool multi-mode transport network worked out, somebody will run out of resources and I have to undo the whole thing. The maps are big enough that infinite resources would still be fun.

The game gets into these weird modes were my boats or trains or whatever are shuttling around tons of mail, or the lines to use service at one stop are unbelievably long and there's no activity anywhere else. I think it's a bug (but I'm open to it being a problem in my transport network as well).

The GUI gets a little obtuse and fussy for my taste. It's okay when you're building up a mode of transport, but once your network starts to get really medium sized you quickly run into trouble trying to keep track of what's going where or doing what.

<comment><USER4> There are a couple of 'NewGRFs' that can solve some of those problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think most people know this already but the original RCT was written almost entirely in assembly by Chris Sawyer[1].

It was almost 15 years ago but still not the norm for the time and quite an impressive feat.

[1] [http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm](http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm)

<comment><USER6> I remember reading that and being totally amazed, especially since I personally think RCT 1 and 2 are far superior games to RCT 3. It's a wonder how much discipline and drive went I to those two games - if only we had the code/documentation to review, that'd be a dream come true.

<comment><USER7> We have the code, just run the binary through a disassembler.

What I think is more interesting is the open source clone: [http://freerct.blogspot.ca/](http://freerct.blogspot.ca/) and the indie clone: [http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39904.0](http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39904.0)

There was also an effort to migrate the ASM to C as a fan project, despite the glaring copyright issue.

<comment><USER6> Oh yes, of course, but what I meant was the code as it was written. I'm sure, like anything else, comments, and perhaps in this case any whitespace would be removed during assembly!

I'll check those out though, alongside Caesar III, this was one of my favourite games of my childhood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A really interesting thing about this is the length of the development cycle. It was released in March 1999, so that's 2.5 years from start to release...I think I would go stir crazy if I worked on a dev project that long without a release. But glad they did, because RCT brought me hundreds hours of enjoyment back in the day.

<comment><USER9> What will make you appreciate the development cycle even more is that it was one guy, Chris Sawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I loved that version RCT2, when RCT3 went out I got disappointed, the control feeling was lost...

Looking through those alternatives makes me believe that maybe I'll can enjoy one more time that game...

Parkitect is the real evolution of RCT2, like Gangsters 2 the latest version Omerta has great textures and graphics and the original game style, I hope that Parkitect can reach their goal on time as a Kickstarter project</comment>


Process videos in browser using FFmpeg compiled to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://bgrins.github.io/videoconverter.js/ <comment><USER2> This is fantastic. Mad props to Brian for this.

While I think some of the posters here have valid points regarding performance, merely being able to do this in a browser makes this capability available to a _ton_ of people who would otherwise be intimidated with the process of installing or compiling FFMPEG.

This is a long way from an alert() box, which in the mid-90s the only thing I saw Javascript good for.... aside from making pointless in-page clocks. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is pretty neat demonstration of the maturity of Emscripten. This reveals a lot of interesting avenues one could take with legacy software in the browser to me that I hadn't thought about before. Many kudos to the creators of this project who took the time and energy to show the rest of us what's possible with a little creativity. Keep on hackin'!

<comment><USER4> Thanks! It will be interesting to see how much it will speed up as JS runtimes get faster, and as we are able to apply additional optimizations with Emscripten.

In particular, asm.js is explicitly disabled right now because of the need for memory growth. In the meantime, I'm planning on having a build with it enabled just to benchmark times on smaller files (where the growth is not needed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's been a while since I did any contributions to libavcodec, but I'm always surprised when someone uses the encoder parts for anything.

They've had no algorithm development for years and nobody has bothered to tune them; it's more like a disassembled Lego box than an encoder.

Of course, if you include FAAC, LAME, or x264 it should be fine. But native libavcodec/x264 with their asm disabled is already considered too slow for use, so running them under a VM must limit it even more.

(In here goes the usual statement that OpenCL is not useful for this kind of work, and SIMD or direct asm is what's needed.)

</comment><comment><USER6> So we took a performance-sensitive embarrasingly-parallel problem and made it run on a slow single-threaded language?

Sounds like fun ;)

<comment><USER7> Or you could think of it as taking a compute-intensive problem and distributing it widely.

Or taking a bandwidth-bound problem and completely eliminating that bottleneck.

If you've got 1000 people converting videos at once, the embarrassingly parallel isn't going to help you much on the server.

This does look like fun, and really a nice validation for emscripten, and there's a ton of practical application.

<comment><USER8> True; this seems a bit silly at first glance, but imagine how much money a YouTube-like site could save if videos were converted in the user's browser before upload, rather than by the server.

<comment><USER6> It's also an excellent new benchmark for JavaScript VMs. If we can get near- native performance on this it'll enable a whole new class of application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really great. I wish I was reading this headline back in 2009 when I was working with video encoding.

If file size to download is an issue, why not build a "stripped down" version which works with just a couple of file format inputs and one output that uses a GPL codec?

<comment><USER10> I don't actually think file size to download is much of an issue - the current build is a little over 6mb gzipped, which isn't much bigger than most Youtube videos.

For building a "stripped down" version, there is a config flag "\--disable- everything" that can be used, and I will investigate it a little more. We probably won't end up hosting the compiled file, just out of the interest of repo-size, but I can certainly build a "build-minimal" script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Neat!

If this could encode an MPEG in realtime (it should be fast enough on Desktop PCs and browsers with asm.js support, right?), you could send WebCam video via WebSockets to a server, distribute it and decode again with jsmpeg[1]. Sort of like the ghetto version of WebRTC, but without all the codec hassles :)

[1] [https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg](https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg)

<comment><USER12> It's single-threaded and asm.js still has overhead, so I doubt you're going to approach the performance you get from ffmpeg compiled natively for your machine. I expect native ffmpeg uses SIMD, too.

Regardless, there are some neat possibilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Heh this is awesome. Anything that avoids a round-trip to server usually is much easier to implement quickly in admin forms that use PaaS app servers...

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been trying to get away from an old ActiveX solution for client side video playback, and this seems like it could be an excellent option. Likely going to build something based on this.

I wonder if you could also drop the size of the library significantly by dropping everything from FFmpeg except for what is needed for playback.

<comment><USER15> Playback is done through regular browser capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. very cool. love the demos!

</comment><comment><USER17> Hi guys. I have been also working on emscripten ffmpeg port, but for audio. Check out my converter at [http://quick-apps.com/audio](http://quick- apps.com/audio) . The performance in FF is really good! I must say that native apps in browser are really cool technology playgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER18> Neat! Did you play with using ffmpeg on audio at all? I saw you had mp4 and mpeg codecs - did you experiment with anything that would allow mp3 like libmp3lame? I have an audio processing tool that I'd love to move into the browser.

<comment><USER4> Audio processing works, but certain codecs do not come bundled with it. It should be possible to configure it with --enable-libmp3lame if you had the source alongside and had everything set up correctly. We didn't have time to try this, but the closest thing I found similar to this when researching was: [https://github.com/manuels/unix-toolbox.js- imagemagick](https://github.com/manuels/unix-toolbox.js-imagemagick). You can see that libpng, libjpeg, etc are all being included in the output.

If you'd like to give this a shot, definitely open up an issue on Github and we can talk more about the details!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm, does this solve the browser audio support issue? ;)

Use Opus, but if browser lacks support, render to Vorbis, RIFF Wave or MPEG Audio Layer 3. Obviously this isn't a serious suggestion, but I really wonder if it could work.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was thinking libav has replaces FFmpeg? Anyway, this project is very cool. I could see web workers working a mini video grid kind of system perhaps.

<comment><USER10> We did get libav working, but it was much less stable than FFmpeg, and we couldn't get swscaler working (which meant a lot of videos would not work)

<comment><USER5> There shouldn't be that much difference between the two forks. Which parts were failing?

For swscale, was it compile problems or something later?

Also, if you have a way to run libav's "make fate" (regression tests), do you know which ones fail?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if we can private message on here, but if you would email me at email@example.com, or contact us on the github project, I can let you know our progress and where we got caught up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's the most impressive thing I've read on HN in a long time.

It shows how far the technologies have come. Truly a remarkable achievement.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I guess this a testament to the power of source code translation, but it's a very impractical hack overall.

<comment><USER16> I disagree completely. It is amazing that you can now encode videos, create screenshots etc without any additional software required.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Some things are just better left to the desktop and not the web, I'm afraid. FFmpeg is a part of most standard desktop Linux distributions, and can easily be downloaded for other systems. Apparently installing software locally is a horrifying predicament now.

Encoding videos on the desktop with the native FFmpeg code will not only yield better performance, but I can't think of a scenario why you'd want to use as a web-based service.

Create screenshots? Really? What a complete triviality. I guess using standard software and hitting the PrtSc key is too difficult in comparison to using the browser for everything. Making screen _casts_ is a different issue, but also one you'd do locally.

Sorry if I'm not so passionate.

<comment><USER21> [http://www.easyprintscreen.com](http://www.easyprintscreen.com) saves me time firing up photoshop.

(shameless plug) more editing tools coming soon :)

Funnily enough I'm using a color pallete plugin written by @bgrins who is working on the OP project.

<comment><USER16> This looks great, but what I really meant in the original comment is creating screenshots from a video.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linus got a Nexus One - <AUTHOR> http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy-camper.html

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised Google didn't send him one as a freebie

<comment><USER3> Believe me, he didn't need to buy one.

<comment><USER4> But it's a lot nicer that he did.

I much prefer hearing that people were not given things to make a good review, but chose to purchase one and loved it. The latter makes me want to buy one, the former puts me off a little bit as I can't be sure that the good review is untainted by the freebie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone said on the comments to the blog, it seems surprising that he didn't buy a N900 instead. It's far closer to being a full Linux machine than the Nexus One.

<comment><USER6> Sometimes you want a phone and not a really bad small PC.

<comment><USER7> I got one N900 and I don't see why it's a bad small PC, let alone a really bad one. Granted, most interesting tasks involve accessing a remote machine via ssh, but you can still toy with (for example) ipython, the shell and, in general, a good number of Debian packages. What is bad about it? (Pricing shouldn't qualify as part of the diagnosis.)

If anything, I'd say it's a so-so _phone_ =).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _I wasn't enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge._

Is pinch-to-zoom really that important?

<comment><USER9> isn't pinch-to-zoom already available on the iphone for, like, 3 years...?

<comment><USER10> Except the iPhone doesn't run Linux, which is what Linus actually wanted.

<comment><USER11> While the N900 is a nice phone it still requires too much screwing around for someone that wants an easy device to use. The Nexus One is that sweet spot of usability between the iPhone and the N900 _and_ still runs the Linux kernel.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


4 common mistakes in picking a co-founder - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/11/4-common-mistakes-in-picking-a-co-founder/ <comment><USER2> A good list: jumping in too fast, issuing too much equity, not imposing vesting restrictions, and not requiring the execution of employment documents.</comment>


Google Admits Algorithms Are Subjective - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-admits-algorithms-are-subjective-2010-12 <comment><USER2> Pretty stupid article. Of course they're subjective where is the surprise there</comment>


"Blade Runner" Was Set This Month. Where Are Our Flying Cars? - sahin-boydas https://futurism.com/blade-runner-set-november-2019 <comment><AUTHOR> It's ok to have flying cars as long as they are flying over unpopulated areas. Emergency vehicles can fly over populated areas but sometimes I think the cops put on the lights and sirens just for kicks.</comment>


Clojure: Interactive Programming for Artificial Intelligence [slides] - <AUTHOR> https://dragan.rocks/talks/ClojureConj2019/ipai.html <comment><USER2> Am I missing something here?

It doesn't seem like there's much to the site other than that those two books exist and some sparse text. The books seem interesting and I'd like to see more than just cover mock ups... maybe like a table of contents and some example code.

<comment><USER3> ... which is exactly what you can see if you follow the book link ([https://aiprobook.com](https://aiprobook.com)). These are not mock-ups.

BTW. Did you use right and down arrows for navigation? There are 70 slides.

<comment><USER2> That is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

I didn't see any links to the books and what I expected to be a link to it wasn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> added [slides] to title</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Etsy Ships Apps - <AUTHOR> https://codeascraft.com/2017/05/15/how-etsy-ships-apps/ <comment><USER2> Super interesting article. With a system like this you can also get great metrics for product health / tech debt. If you were also looking at key growth metrics for the apps, you'd be able to see which releases improved them, and give credit (in the cases where it makes sense).

Metrics related, here's a book review of Moneyball I just wrote: [https://dtrejo.com/moneyball-book-review-and-measuring- reven...](https://dtrejo.com/moneyball-book-review-and-measuring-revenue-per- engineer.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting article. Native Apps deployment constraints seem so different than a typical web continuous deployment process.

As an aside, here's a look at Etsy's Continuous deployment process: [https://www.slideshare.net/mrtazz/development-deployment- and...](https://www.slideshare.net/mrtazz/development-deployment-and- collaboration-at-etsy)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you like this, Buzzfeed had something similar recently: [https://tech.buzzfeed.com/deploy-with-haste-the-story-of- rig...](https://tech.buzzfeed.com/deploy-with-haste-the-story-of-rig- ca9a58b5719a)

</comment><comment><USER5> what is missing in all of this, i think, is the ability to do a/b testing. It'd be nice if app stores provided the ability to repush existing version and new version to a small fraction of users - this way you could compare in a more sane way.

<comment><USER6> Google Play Store has a rollout feature that makes this possible, but it's not possible on the App Store AFAIK.

<comment><USER5> i am not sure if that feature is going to have uniform traffic for old and new releases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR - drop shipped from China.</comment>


Palantir Moves Headquarters to Denver from Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/palantir-moves-headquarters-to-denver-from-silicon-valley/ar-BB18ahzV <comment><USER2> This feels on-brand after they used their S-1 to complain about Silicon Valley "elites."

> The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about > building software. But they do not know more about how society should be > organized or what justice requires.

Presumably Denver elites know what justice requires.

<comment><USER3> Or that Silicon Valley has no intrinsic advantage, and that they no longer have to factor it in where they are physically situated. Denver probably came out on top because they think it affords a better quality of life for their employees and possibly more favorable tax regime.

<comment><USER2> Those are excellent reasons to move to another area. I think that relocating to other areas makes fantastic sense for lots of companies, Palantir included. My point, though, was that Palantir went out of their way to rail against the values and culture of Silicon Valley in their S-1. Repeatedly. These are all quotes from their S-1:

> Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and > fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments.

> Our roots in the intelligence community and defense sector introduced us to > unique demands that many companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere did not > address: security, stability, and transparency

> Palantir was founded on the premise that the most critical challenges cannot > be solved from the comforts of Silicon Valley.

This all makes more sense now that we know they were planning to move shortly, but it still struck me as weird and political. It read to me like "Remember, US government, we don't get wishy washy about using technology for military purposes like some of those other, differently-valued companies."

<comment><USER4> Colorado is home to Lockheed Martin, one of the largest US defense contractors. Sounds like a solid culture fit for Palantir.

<comment><USER5> Lockheed Martin was based in Bethesda, MD last time I checked.

<comment><USER6> They have a big operation south of Denver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The reception of this move appears to be... mixed[0]. As a Denver resident, I'm interested in seeing if this moves some larger offices out of Boulder and into Denver. Boulder seems to be suffering under the weight of zoning laws[1], but Denver seems to be capable of expanding, or at least adapting[2].

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/iczx59/palantir_hq_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/iczx59/palantir_hq_is_moving_from_palo_alto_to_denver_fun/) [1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti- growth-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth- sentiment-reflected-in-zoning-laws-thwarts-equality.html) [2] [https://www.denverpost.com/2018/08/06/denveright-denver- plan...](https://www.denverpost.com/2018/08/06/denveright-denver-plans-parks- development-transit-trails/)

<comment><USER8> Boulder is our own mini SF here in Colorado. Housing is artificially expensive and has many of the same things going on as SF regarding zoning. Really cool and hip place that has become increasingly unaffordable over the last decade.

<comment><USER9> > The last decade

It think it goes back a bit further than that. Boulder has been seven square miles between the mountains and reality since the early 90's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone think this will start a trend of de-centralizing Silicon Valley? I'm just wondering what the world looks like if these companies continue to have remote employees. Will there be a need for an HQ in such a high cost area?

<comment><USER11> I don't think a week goes by without an article about that but I honestly don't see it. The concentration of talent and capital make Silicon Valley too attractive.

I think people vastly overestimate the long-term impact of covid, underestimate the benefits of agglomeration, underestimate the negatives of remote work, and apart from a few individual companies I don't think there is a trend even. I'm not even sure this move from Palantir is anything other than some sort of strange branding exercise to get more Trump government contracts

<comment><USER12> I agree with you that SV isn't going anywhere. The money people and best talent is entrenched there through their networks and simple things like home ownership.

The other question is where else? Texas? Maybe but not exactly welcoming to the liberal elitist attitudes. Europe? And you thought California is unfriendly to business... Canada? Australia? New Zealand?

Like it or not, the West is still relies on the US for technical dominance. And until there is an alternative, we should hope it stays that way a bit longer.

<comment><USER13> I'll shill for Florida here. I think a lot of tech companies looking for an alternative to SV would do well to put it on the shortlist.

It has an extremely business friendly environment, a pro-immigrant attitude, no state income tax, one of the top educational systems in the country, a fairly blue-state ish culture, and (given the exodus from NJ/NY) a high concentration of skilled professionals.

Similar to Silicon Valley, there's very little prejudice towards old money or pre-conceived notions of what elites "should look like". Unlike Silicon Valley, there's hardly any aversion to growth or gentrification. Job and wealth creators are celebrated.

Living costs are pretty cheap, especially for idyllic locations. The housing stock is newer and more modern. One can easily afford to live in walking distance of world-class beaches on a FAANG salary.

The biggest downside is the humid summers, flat landscape, and mosquitoes. On the other hand, the air pollution is markedly better than California or the Northeast. There's more hours of sunshine per year. Also, unlike San Francisco, human defecation on the street is virtually unheard of.

<comment><USER14> > ...one of the top educational systems in the country, a fairly blue-state > ish culture...

Not knocking on your statement, but i had not been aware of these as descriptive of Florida. I was under the impression that Florida was more of a red state, and while not at the bottom education-wise, didn't think they were near the top either. Again, not knocking your state, i just never heard of that.

<comment><USER13> This[1] has a breakdown of state performance in primary education with detailed statistical adjustments for confounders outside the educational system. The results are that Florida performs fourth best in the country (behind Mass, Texas, and NJ).

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9617514/test-scores- naep-2013](https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9617514/test-scores-naep-2013)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing; TIL!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Denver is very heavy with Federal government agencies. So in that sense it seems to be a logical step.

<comment><USER16> The ISR capital of DoD contracting and procurement.

<comment><USER17> I don't think Denver has quite exceeded the Anne Arundel-Fairfax axis quite yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tom-_- Ignore the grandstanding, the two reasons why companies move out of a state/country:

1\. Tax laws

2\. Cheaper labor

Edit: 3. Be closer to the people that give them money

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's true of "winner take all/most" businesses anymore. Who cares about saving 15% on labor in a business where the difference between the highest quality employees and just "good" employees is literally billions in valuation? There's a reason that so many of these giant incredibly profitable business are in places with punitive tax laws and some of the most expensive labor on the planet.

<comment> tom-_- It's true, locality of talent pool matters..but covid has shown the degree to which it matters is quickly diminishing as evidenced by the handful of companies declaring WFH forever, or re-considering their office leases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It'll be very interesting to see how going remote impacts various urban centers. I can imagine that centers like Silicon Valley will be hit hard as a ton of their labor can work from anywhere. Whereas places like Boston that have a heavy bio-tech investment are harder to relocate because you need people working in physical labs.

<comment><USER20> Silicon Valley is NOT an urban center, it is a suburban area of Santa Clara County. It is Santa Clara Valley renamed, from Palo Alto down to San Jose and a bit north to Milpitas. I don't expect the pandemic and recession to impact Silicon Valley that much. You certainly don't see it in home prices or rents, which have either remained stable or gone up.

San Francisco on the other hand is hurting. Both rents and home prices are down.

<comment><USER21> I was able to negotiate a pretty sizable rent decrease here in Palo Alto. That's a single antidote obviously, but I think that would have been impossible if covid wasn't having a significant impact on the housing market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's unclear if a significant number of the employees are going to move from PA to Denver or if Denver will simply be HQ in name.

</comment><comment><USER23> New Hampshire has no State Income Tax, nor any Sales Tax. Not entirely sure whether they have their own version of a Capital Gains Tax (CA sure does). Karp will reap the benefits of moving to NH. Not sure if he will escape CA Tax Authorities coming after him (but if he has planned his move, he probably has access to the best advice money can buy.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I have fond memories of the security guards at the Palantir building in Palo Alto. I helped run street experiments for a wireless startup back in 2011 and they always thought we were trying to hack their WiFi.

</comment><comment><USER25> _Blucifer_ bursts out into braying laughter.

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought Palantir was headquartered in Langley?

<comment><USER9> Nah, just their servers ;P</comment></comment>


Elon Musk Isn't Joking About Sending a Tesla to Mars - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-04/elon-musk-isn-t-joking-about-sending-a-tesla-to-mars <comment><USER2> Nice PR stunt.

I understand that it's test launch and they don't want to launch anything very expensive, but sending some cheap amateur satellites, retroreflector, or just polished metal sphere that can be used as communications satellite to the orbit around the moon would have been better.

<comment><USER3> There's nothing to say they can't also do some of that.</comment></comment>