Inside Tesla's gigantic Gigafactory - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36893104 <comment><USER2> The amount of publicity associated with this battery pack plant is a bit much. Tesla's battery factory is about the same size as LG's battery factory in Michigan.[1] That's the source of the Chevy Volt battery packs. (LG is adding a fourth production line for an undisclosed customer.) That's just one of LG's plants. They make the batteries for the Chevy Bolt in South Korea.

There are large EV battery plants in operation or under construction all over the place. US, UK, Germany, Korea, China... VW is planning a plant bigger than Tesla's full sized expansion.

Nissan has the largest lithium-ion battery plant in North America right now.[2] They're building a bigger one in the UK.

[1] [http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101606_ford-wants-to- de...](http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101606_ford-wants-to-develop-its- own-battery-chemistries-for-hybrids-electric-cars-but-why)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBboW2Sw3Co](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBboW2Sw3Co)

<comment><USER3> I found some actual numbers for the LG Chem plant. They currently produce 650MWH worth of battery cells per year, and they expect to expand that to 3GWH within a couple of years.

This is definitely smaller than what is planned for Gigafactory.

[http://www.autonews.com/article/20151214/OEM06/312149992/lg-...](http://www.autonews.com/article/20151214/OEM06/312149992/lg- chem-quietly-surges-in-battery-race)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. If that number is right, their top number is less than 1/5th of the originally planned Gigafactory top number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Serious question: My impression is that when Verizon bought Yahoo (for 5 Billion), this was a pretty standard affair M&A. However, this Gigafactory has the same price tag but is met with the question "Does Elon Musk have more money than sense?" How are M&A purchases different from direct investments in a company?

<comment><USER4> Verizon currently makes a profit, Tesla doesn't[1].

1\. They might be able to run a profit without R&D expenses, but that wouldn't make any sense at this point, so they are bleeding money and need to raise capital constantly.

<comment><USER6> Tesla doesn't make a profit, and they're spending billions on a factory that will make a valuable product with good margins.

Verizon makes a profit, and they're spending billions on a failed company.

I don't really see how the profit status of the _acquirer_ is relevant. What matters is the profit potential of what's being acquired.

<comment><USER4> Tesla /might/ make a valuable product with good margins from the factory. I would rate that chance as greater than 90% personally, but it still isn't certain. Just like it isn't certain that Yahoo is a failed acquisition for Verizon, although you and I might rate the chance of that as quite high.

The profit of the acquirer is relevant in so far as it relates to the ability to finance massive acquisition projects such as these, and the market's willingness to do so. I'd say in both instances the market's willingness has been high, but people have good reasons to be skeptical both ways.

<comment><USER6> Profit and ability to finance aren't quite the same, though. So far, capital markets have been willing to give Tesla big piles of money with excellent terms (buying issued stock at a price that values the company similarly to major automakers and such) so they seem to have no trouble financing the Gigafactory.

Verizon may well have access to more money, but then that just supports the first half of "more money than sense."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I call to your attention a series of three blogs written by someone who had the opportunity to interview Elon Musk himself before the writing.

I, for one, think that big thoughts, big visions, and big ability to implement them can't help but change the direction of humanity.

[http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds- raddest-m...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest- man.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you do the math, best case scenario: Tesla's budget model will have twice the range (~200 miles) of the Nissan Leaf at the same price point ($30k). This assumes that Tesla is capable of a $35k model today. My estimate for a 200 mile battery power pack today is around $20,000 going by what amateur EV enthusiasts have managed, using the same 18650 cells.

<comment><USER9> It's seems a little unlikely that the Leaf would see 0 progress.

There's also a Bolt in the room. It's pretty likely to ship this year, with a 200 mile range and competitive price point.

<comment><USER4> The Bolt is probably the closest competitor to what Tesla is doing right now for EVs. They have the range, but they still haven't figured out styling or performance, nor is the charging infrastructure as robust yet.

<comment><USER10> Doesn't the Bolt use a fairly standard charging cable? I see those connectors in parking garages and grocery store parking lots.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately, most of the public charging stations out there are pretty pointless due to their slow charging speed.

Without faster charging, you can't do long-distance travel (nobody wants to stop for 4-8 hours in the middle of a road trip to recharge), so the only value they offer is for longer charging sessions while the driver is already in the area for work/shopping/etc. However, even then, you can't really rely on their availability, since it's always possible someone will already be there tying up the station for an 8-hour stretch...so they really aren't terribly useful or convenient for the vast majority of EV owners.

I would argue that the only charging network out there that really makes sense is Tesla's Supercharger network: it actually charges fast enough to make road trips practical, is generally quite reliable, and typically includes at least 6-8 stalls per station to avoid congestion during peak travel times. This gives Tesla a _huge_ competitive advantage over other EV manufacturers, and I think it'll be a long time before anyone catches up to them in this regard.

<comment><USER4> A slower charging network could be useful for putting a charging station at every parking space at say workplaces, where your car will be left for an extended time Slower chargers are presumably cheaper to build and run, so they might make more sense there. But otherwise completely agreed that superchargers are basically the only type of charger that makes sense for 99% of the rest of use cases that a gas station would normally take care of.

<comment><USER11> Yeah if there were parking garages or lots where every parking space had a charging port, that would be awesome, and could actually be part of a practical solution in the long term. Unfortunately most garages I've seen have somewhere from zero to two spots in the entire garage :(

<comment><USER12> Facebook HQ has around 150 L2 chargers. It's just a matter of time.

<comment><USER13> I'm not exactly sure what facebook having 150 car chargers has to do with the rest of the world getting car chargers.

<comment><USER12> They aren't the only company with more than 0-2 chargers per parking lot, I could name a bunch of others. The point I'm making is that more chargers are on the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems clickbait to me! Most of the pictures are _outside_ the gigafactory.

<comment><USER15> Tesla is dialed into how modern media works. Every press release makes it to HN and other tech sites, who proudly proclaim "No marketing budget!"

It's genius.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The completed Tesla Gigafactory area will be bigger than the town I live in population 50,000 people.

Comparison overlay [https://i.imgur.com/ixHBkyw.png](https://i.imgur.com/ixHBkyw.png)

Each side of the red square is approx. 3.75km

<comment><USER16> Correction: Total land area, I guess the factory itself is about a quarter of the entire factory complex land area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does it take such a huge factory to make batteries? FWIW, I work with LiPo batteries for my R/C hobby. Granted, these batteries are likely a lot more complex, but the same basic principle remains. I'd imagine most of the assembly could be automated. Anyone know why it takes so many people?

<comment><USER18> Because they plan to produce as many batteries in it as the world production was in 2014 all together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If it works, this will be a win-win for Panasonic and Tesla. Panasonic gets to vastly increase its battery sales, and Tesla gets all the batteries it needs and at a much lower price. So it is not surprising they have gotten together in this venture.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you can't watch the video because you don't want to install Flash then you can just change your user agent.

Guides:

\- Firefox: [https://unop.uk/how-to-watch-bbc-news-videos-on-a-desktop- wi...](https://unop.uk/how-to-watch-bbc-news-videos-on-a-desktop-without- flash-in-firefox/)

\- Safari: [https://unop.uk/how-to-watch-bbc-news-videos-on-a-desktop- wi...](https://unop.uk/how-to-watch-bbc-news-videos-on-a-desktop-without- flash-in-safari/)</comment>


Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting - <AUTHOR> https://smitop.com/post/reddit-whiteops/ <comment><USER2> While many Redditors are changing their "avatar" to dancing rainbow cockroaches, I had the idea to set mine to the Digg logo as an act of protest. I'm hoping it catches on. I suppose Reddit's new userbase may not even know what that means.

Why the hell do we need avatars on Reddit anyway? Most of them are animated, strobing distractions.

Reddit has jumped the shark. If there weren't significant opportunity cost, I'd happily work on a replacement. It's become a low-signal, high-noise ad- laden dumpster fire.

Advertising is eating the Internet alive. I fucking hate it.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to sound maximum hipster/back-in-my-day/gate-keeper here, but Reddit circa 2015 and earlier was far better.

Nobody wants the redesign. Reddit doesn't need avatars. It used to nicely tread the line between enough people to make it active, but not so many that it didn't still feel niche. It feels very mainstream now, and I think it's lost a lot of what made it actually good. It's asymptotically approaching a social network, but to no benefit, and only the downsides that come with that.

<comment><USER4> I joined HN right around the time I thought reddit had become a dump. Apparently that was 10 years ago.

Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of).

Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed.

Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now.

People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.

<comment><USER5> Honestly Digg can not be mentioned enough times here, what Reddit did with the re-design almost feels like opt-in/wilful self-destruction. Is there a point somewhere in there that once a platform becomes a powerhouse, in terms of democratic user behaviour & numbers, that platform is in turn basically forced into auto-destruct since the risks of having a sudden functional democracy the size of a small nation state is basically too disruptive to current world order/system?

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure a community that can be disrupted by dancing avatars and a page redesign is no threat to the stability of the international community.

'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' Especially when founders leave.

<comment><USER7> The problem with founder culture is companies become dependent on their founders. If Aaron was still around I think Reddit would look very different.

<comment><USER8> If Aaron was still around he would have invented something better than Reddit. Probably several times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title is misleading because they are not using DRM to generate a unique identifier like, for example, Netflix would use. Instead, it is using the type of DRM implementation for fingerprinting/bot detection. It's just a few more bits of unique entropy, along the lines of your screen size and user agent.

This might seem like a small difference, but reason activists hate DRM is that it enables service providers to go a step beyond traditional fingerprinting and gain a truly unique identifier.

<comment><USER10> It's not misleading, they check for DRM presence and that's bad enough.

> but reason activists hate DRM is that it enables service providers to go a > step beyond traditional fingerprinting and gain a truly unique identifier.

The reason is that in some places on Earth you can be sentenced for violation of special computer laws prohibiting you to even look at such code and disclose what it does, you just run it and see what happens

<comment><USER11> maybe this a silly question, but isn't that like most closed source code?

<comment><USER12> No. You can basically always decompile proprietary software and work out how it works. And even publish most of your findings. In some places like the US, if that code is DRM its now illegal to study (Under the DMCA specifically I think).

<comment><USER13> Is there a specific definition that makes something DRM?

Sounds like all software companies should add some trivial DRM only for the specific purpose of exposing people to legal risk if they attempt to reverse engineer their code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user- hostile in so many ways nowadays.

For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg triggered a mass exodus to reddit years ago.

<comment><USER15> It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition. Digg rolled out massive changes overnight which caused a sharp, immediate rebuke.

Reddit has been slowly rolling out changes for a couple years, and at least so far are leaving the old interface available at old.reddit.com. The redesign is as bad or worse in every way; but it's so slow there hasn't been the organized revolt.

Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse.

It's funny though, I actually really like the new Digg. It's nothing like what it used to be, but it's a nice curated list of interesting articles, major headlines, and tech news.

<comment><USER16> > Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's > easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers > anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse.

On the contrary, Digg's UI changes were happening when "Web 2.0"-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech- oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported.

I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site's popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.

<comment><USER17> Digg's decline began before Web2.0 and any redesign - it was mainly a result of the "bury brigades" killing anything that was remotely interesting through downvotes and leaving it to be a dull feed of mainstream news links, which got progressively worse over time.

Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.

<comment><USER18> 5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Those bury brigades are real, but instead they just remove what they don't want seen or promote content they do want seen with huge influence in the most popular subreddits. The same issue with Digg power users having too much control (among other reasons it failed) is also apparent on Reddit.

[https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png](https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png)

<comment><USER19> Yep. Check out r/redditminusmods

On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _i.e. the main redesign domain, not old.reddit.com_

If the old one didn't do this, there's yet another reason to use it...

I still believe that part of the reason a lot of sites are moving to JS-only SPAs and the like is that it becomes much harder to block things like this. Regardless of sandboxing, the idea of letting a site execute Turing-complete computations on its visitor's computers, just to display what could be done without, is quite repulsive.

<comment><USER21> _> the idea of letting a site execute Turing-complete computations_

I'll admit that I have never been keen on the "browse with Javascript disabled" idea, but after my digging around yesterday to figure out why Reddit kept asking me to enable DRM _[which I totally should 've blogged about but oh well....]_ it shocked me to see just how much JS code was being loaded on each pageview.

Now I'm seriously considering taking the NoScript plunge.

The problem is that a light sprinkling of Javascript really can go a long way towards making HTML more usable -- how can we find a way to permit the "good" uses of Javascript while prohibiting all of the "bad"?

<comment><USER22> Something that's surprised me is that there hasn't been a push to allow users to restrict a websites access to JS APIs.

If I can restrict certain sites to different browser APIs, it would make it so much easier to get rid of annoying browsing behaviour. For example, there is no good reason to allow websites to sniff my clipboard or to play multimedia without my consent.

<comment><USER23> I think there is a move toward that, certainly for newer features as of several years ago (though they present their own issues to work out, see the deluge of permissions prompts for notifications).

Clipboard stuff is permission gated on some browsers at least already, I think. Autoplay disabling is an option for most (all?), though that's a little different.

The issue with introducing a permission system to an older feature is always a balancing act between increasing user control and potentially breaking older content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It real stupidity to push for that 2.0 UI. I don't know why reddit insisted on that. It's honestly really bad, pages feel real heavy and wastes a lot of screen real estate. The only reason people haven't migrated away is because there isn't an alternative.

<comment><USER25> > The only reason people haven't migrated away is because there isn't an > alternative.

I agree the new design is just awful, but you can switch to the old design in the settings menus (equivalent to browsing [https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com) ).

<comment><USER24> This is what I do but recently they changed it so the mobile browser doesn't honor your settings. So I have to type the old.reddit url every time. I do that and don't give in to them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> @OP and others, here's how to enable this flag temporarily.

In the pretty printed version of [https://www.redditstatic.com/desktop2x/Reddit.de2e3f279d82ee...](https://www.redditstatic.com/desktop2x/Reddit.de2e3f279d82eef14ab2.js) add a breakpoint to the first line of this part of the code.

        if (!as(e))
            return;
        const t = e.user.account ? Jt()(e.user.account.id).toString() : void 0
          , s = document.createElement("script");
        s.src = Object(es.a)("https://s.udkcrj.com/ag/386183/clear.js", {
            dt: "3861831591810830724000",
            pd: "acc",
            mo: 0,
            et: 0,
            ti: $t()(),
            ui: t,
            si: "d2x"
        }),

Then when you are paused on the breakpoint evaluate this in the console:

      e.runTimeEnvVars.staging=true

</comment><comment><USER27> Lots of sites use "DRM" (content protection, obfuscation) techniques to fingerprint for anti-abuse. Somewhere, there's a truly excellent writeup from (I think?) Mike Hearn about the work they had to do to build anti-abuse for Youtube; it involved nested VMs implemented in Javascript.

<comment><USER28> I've never heard obfuscation referred to as DRM. The author is referring to the DRM browser checks.

> Specfically, it looks for Widevine, PlayReady, Clearkey, and Adobe Primetime

<comment><USER29> DRM and obfuscation are traditionally related because unobfuscated DRM wouldn't be effective for long. Hardware assisted DRM is newer and a bit different.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps you mean encryption, not obfuscation.

<comment><USER27> For content-controlled code, meaningful encryption tend to imply obfuscation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's why I'm so happy that HN stayed roughly the same : fastest UI in the west, respectable community, and non-profit. Just like Wikipedia and Craigslist.

I wish we had an equivalent for every big website.

<comment><USER31> Still wouldn't mind some basic formatting options in comments like bullet lists and code though.

The equivalent for websites is probably reader mode supported in various browsers or addons, but that too is probably limited. Pretty sure it doesn't work for Reddit, but for Reddit there may be browser addons that clean up the interface by a lot.

<comment><USER32> There is a pretty popular one for Reddit, yes -- it's called Reddit Enhancement Suite, adds a ton of features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just another reason why I am never going to touch the new reddit with a 10-foot pole. If they phase out the "old" design, I'm done with it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Reddit as of late has crossed my enough is enough line, used extension to wipe out 8+years of posts and deleted my account.

Alternative will happen, there is a pile already being promoted we will see who wins.

<comment><USER35> Why did you wipe out all of your posts and comments though?

That just makes it harder for people trying to see insightful comments from years ago.

<comment><USER34> I do not want Reddit to earn a single cent from anything I ever posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is Reddit not doing enough to identify and remove bot accounts and bad actors, or are they doing too much fingerprinting? The former is definitely a problem, and I imagine most users care about it to some degree.

If you as a user care about both, perhaps a nuanced opinion is warranted.

</comment><comment><USER37> A lot of these bugs are used to test for fake user agents. Even sophisticated bots may not know that their fake user agent's V8 version had a jit or rounding bug. If you watch change logs you can spot this stuff. Most of these are obvious and sophisticated fraudsters are well beyond that.

I could say it's defensible but a big reason bots are a problem is the way the entire online ad system is still the Wild West. There is no regulation so I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of the bots were just competitors. It has to be tempting to use that black hat fraud defense knowledge against your competitors, especially if there is so little regulation or transparency.

</comment><comment><USER38> I have recurring thoughts of implementing something like reddit, by writing a server which would present a list of groups/posts actually stored on an NNTP server.

This would allow sharing posts, and decentralized hosting, because all the real content would be stored on the NNTP host.

(A simpler approach would be to use an IMAP server - a different mailbox for each group, and threads naturally being stored as .. threaded emails.)

Perhaps I should have a stab at actually implementing it!

<comment><USER39> I've been thinking about this for quite a while and finally worked out a way to do this in my head the other day and I plan on writing it down to code soon-ish. I'm glad to see others interested in this, and would love to collaborate if you're interested!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> You know how this works those days on a big corp level: the CEO buys a "solution" from 3rd-party "vendor". The solution does _things_ but no one cares what exactly and how. A few insider developers get upset when they run a debugger and notice weird stuff going on, but they don't have any power over it. Anyway rolling this kind of things on your own in a non-creepy way is not viable unless you're Google scale, so you pay the 3rd party like WhiteOps or Distil or Cloudflare or use Google captcha.

</comment><comment><USER41> There's an interesting philosophical question raised here, which looks like this:

User Privacy Vs. Troll/Bot Protection

If you want stronger privacy (weaker browser fingerprinting), then you must equal-and-oppositely accept that that allows Trolls and Bots to flourish on the network...

On the other hand, you can have less Trolls and Bots on the network -- but this means that you must give up some of your privacy via stronger browser fingerprinting...

So, the next logical question is, is there a way to have the best of both worlds, that is, more privacy (less browser fingerprinting), and less Trolls and Bots simultaneously?

The answer I come up with at this time is:

"No -- UNLESS Reddit were to call up every single user that registers, and voice verify them and/or make sure they have a credit card or other valid ID on file... and then they'd have to take extra steps to validate those..."

So yes, it could be done... but then Reddit might lose its automated registration process -- and possibly casual users, who didn't want to provide all of that information as well...

It's interesting, because all online user commmunities represent various types of compromises between the different factors I've outlined above (there are more factors, of course)... in the future, I should create a matrix of all of them, and see where other various famous online communities exist as points on it... I think such an exercise would be enlightening in some way or other...

</comment><comment><USER42> I joined reddit more than 14 years ago, before subreddits, when it was written in lisp and top posts were Paul graham essays and Joel on software. Today HN is the place for this kind of content. When digg died there was a fear what their user base would turn the site into. I have no issues with the design but probably because I'm mainly on my mobile. What did change for me though was the amount of toxic people in almost every subreddit I frequent.

<comment><USER43> [http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html) suggests the world may be getting "more toxic" (fragmented + interconnected), rather than some underlying force ("It's because Digg's user base invaded").

<comment><USER42> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I just followed the privacy URI FOR iOS Reddit on Apple App Store, the link is no longer valid. I am searching and reviewing their privacy statements.

EDIT: their blanket policy I found on the web was what I expected. I donate money to Reddit and I wish that as a perk I had more privacy "We may share information between and among Reddit, and any of our parents, affiliates, subsidiaries, and other companies under common control and ownership."

</comment><comment><USER45> > Contains what appears to be a Javascript engine JIT exploit/bug, "haha jit > go brrrrr" appears in a part of the code that appears to be doing something > weird with math operations.

Ignoring everything else, this made me chuckle quite a bit. I can only imagine how much funnier it'd be if I actually saw that line while picking apart minified code.

</comment><comment><USER46> Reddit died with Aaron Swartz. Check out r/watchredditdie and r/declineintocensorship to see blatant examples of how Reddit censors right wing opinion. I left Reddit when they recently banned 2000 subs to curb "racist" speech while racist subreddits against whites are okay because they are the majority (America is the only country that exists). Reddit has become such an echo chamber it's worse than Facebook now.

</comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone know of a nice open-source desktop client for reddit which runs on Linux?

<comment><USER48> For CLI values of desktop, there's the (no longer maintained) rtv ([https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv](https://github.com/michael- lazar/rtv)), though last I checked it works well, and three others:

[https://gist.github.com/michael- lazar/8c31b9f637c3b9d7fbdcbb...](https://gist.github.com/michael- lazar/8c31b9f637c3b9d7fbdcbb0eebcf2b0a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Not a new phenomenon.

Google's anti-bot team in St. Petersburg had a lot of positions for such "talent" good at using borderline exploit techniques to detect bots as far back as 2012-2013

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649371)

> You know, mobile ads companies resort to borderline exploits to fight > botting, but even they loose out.

> Lockdown is a useless measure, from my experience. Both IOS and Android ad > nets croak under 60-70% bot traffic.

</comment><comment><USER50> Reddit is absolutely one of the worst things to ever happen to humanity. Reddit invented modern bubble building.

It is impossible to understate how much better off this world would be without Reddit.

<comment><USER51> You meant 4chan, right? w.r.t. bubbling, how is Reddit as a platform different than a forum?

<comment><USER52> 4chan is pretty niche these days, and for good reasons. It was never mainstream but it definitely lost a lot of its prestige and relevance.

But at least 4chan was always upfront about its policies: you could always basically post anything as long as it didn't put the site's existence in jeopardy, so effectively as long as the lawyers/cops/fbi didn't come knocking it was free for all.

Reddit is roughly the same thing except they hypocritically attempt to maintain a façade of being "the good guys". I remember in particular how, after having hosted "jail bait" and other very questionable content for years they finally decided to no longer allow it they felt the need to publish a heartfelt message about how "we thought about our daughters" and all that crap instead of saying the truth, which is that it just generated too much bad publicity and made the advertisers go away.

Reddit is 4chan pretending to be Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This isn't newsworthy. There are hundreds of ways to use the browser's built- in API for fingerprinting purposes. It's actually overkill because you only need a handful and a decent statistical model derived from device testing.

Any big company with ad revenue has their own research and proprietary methods to catch fraudulent ads and TOS violators. It's been happening for years, and as long as browsers "improve", it will continue.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is it possible to use DRM to display a captcha? I tried to lookup Chrome's DRM doc but it was removed and can be only accessed by DRM members.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wasn't on Reddit often at the very beginning, I only really started to use it when I found out about rage comics and would log on every morning before university to check the new ones out.

That must have also been around the time the same guy who introduced me to Reddit also asked me to check out a cool game he was playing called Minecraft!

</comment><comment><USER56> This is basically supercookie from Samy.

</comment><comment><USER57> So fraud detection becomes a new excuse for tracking, when ads targeting doesn't sound solid enough.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've been a Reddit user since about the time that the Digg Patriots poisoned the well over at Digg... At least that's what prompted me to make an account.

Reading through the comments here is a bit weird for me because it seems like I have a much different experience that most folks here. I suspect this is because a) I use the RES browser extension to filter out a great many useless or unpleasant subreddits and b) most of my time on Reddit is spent moderating.

The redesign however, is a bit of disaster. Even though I don't care for the look I would have used it but when they rolled it out and made it the default experience it lacked the basic functionality for moderators which is where I spend the majority of my time on Reddit. For two years every time the admins released some improvement to it, I would go back and try to use it and couldn't... so I gave up and branded it "worse.Reddit"

Anyway, I suppose it's about time to find an alternative to Reddit but I've yet to find a site where I can create and curate niche communities, like I do on Reddit or where I could somehow transfer the collected data and experience of the larger subreddits I moderate to some other site (which isn't already home to unpleasant extremists who left Reddit).

So far I know about: [https://tildes.net/](https://tildes.net/) and [https://dev.lemmy.ml/](https://dev.lemmy.ml/). I sorta lean towards lemmy but I don't have a solid reason for that.

Lastly fingerprinting on Reddit seems like a very useful and very needed solution to problems that have little to do with targetted advertising or selling private user data.

<comment><USER59> > Lastly fingerprinting on Reddit seems like a very useful and very needed > solution to problems that have little to do with targetted advertising or > selling private user data.

Ohhhh cliffhanger!

Tell us more?

I suspect you're referring to abuse???

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> DRM is a bit clickbaity here.

The site does a lot of fingerprinting, and the EME module is one of the least useful bits and doesn't really reveal anything the browser user agent string doesn't already.

</comment><comment><USER61> As if another reason was needed to leave that cesspool behind.

</comment><comment><USER62> I sat this every time I see a post about Reddit - selete your accounts. I did this about two years ago and as a result I was multiples happier and more productive.

</comment><comment> jeppesen-io Not to sound like an idiot - but aside from CPU usage, what's the downside to this exactly?

<comment><USER63> Honestly speaking a lot of the list pointed out in the article is weird that way. For example, "Checks if function bodies that are implemented in the browser contain [native code] when stringified" \- that's a very straightforward way to check if a particular feature is browser-supported or was polyfilled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> >"haha jit go brrrr"

</comment><comment><USER65> Ah, that's why Firefox was notifying me that Reddit wants me to enable DRM recently. We new it was only matter of time, since they got this crap into the standard. Pity mofos.

</comment><comment><USER66> honestly disgusting behaviour IMO, everyone should use noscript or ublock origin to turn off all js by default. Even though it's a hassle it gets easier once you've established your allow/deny list for frequent sites over time. First time visits remain a bear though since sometimes you have to do a bunch of guesswork to determine which js bits are required for a given site to work

<comment><USER20> _sometimes you have to do a bunch of guesswork to determine which js bits are required for a given site to work_

I've been browsing with off-by-default JS basically since JS was invented, and my list of trusted sites has remained very small (around a dozen) --- the majority of sites I come across on searches that ask me to enable it will simply cause me to go somewhere else. The rare occasion that I can't find the information elsewhere, I will view source and sometimes it's sitting there, or even RE the API, but actually getting me to enable JS is close to a "never", as it's reserved for the very few sites I have far more trust in, e.g. my bank.

Once --- and only once --- I was enticed by a site that doesn't need it to "enable JS for a _better experience_ ", and immediately disabled it again when I was bombarded with ads and other distracting, irritating shit (selecting text causes a popup, elements animating around while I'm trying to focus, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> vprza.com strikes again

<comment><USER68> what is that domain? cant seem to find any useful info about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Stallman was right. Holy shit.

</comment><comment><USER70> GDPR says hello. Even something as easy as Google's recaptcha is impossible to implement GDPR-compliant according to many German authorities, so I highly doubt that _this_ kind of invasive tracking is in any way legal.

Why can't they just use something like a proof-of-work mechanism to combat spam?

<comment><USER71> I agree that this is gross, but I do want to add some subtlety to the discussion. Reddit is trying to combat a different kind of activity than traditional spray-n-pray "buy our pills" spam. It is a large and influential enough forum that corporate and nation-state actors try to manipulate the tone and content of conversation with both words and votes. None of that is necessarily a volume-based issue, which is what proof-of-work is effective against.

<comment><USER72> Reddit could require users associate a mobile number with their account and use an SMS to validate. Zelle (the payment network) performs fraud validation using your mobile number as a signal, for example (using a Google Voice, Twilio, or similar virtual number will cause onboarding to fail).

<comment><USER73> A prepaid SIM card is $5.

There are also now services that do this for you so you don't even have to buy the SIM card yourself. They add some new phone numbers every day and publish the numbers along with every SMS they receive on a public site with ads on it. The "higher end" ones give you your own personal throwaway phone number but then you have to pay the $5.

This means sites should immediately stop using this verification method because it obviously isn't going to stop adversaries with even trivial resources, and the security implications of encouraging vulnerable populations to use random sites like that is hugely bad.

SMS verification is also ridiculous to begin with because phone numbers get recycled quickly and users should neither lose their account just because their phone number changed nor have some stranger enabled to steal it.

<comment><USER72> This is a poor argument against a mechanism which clearly has both a cost and time component against an attacker. Of course you're not going to subvert attackers with enormous resources, but you will slow down most of them and it is cheap to implement (both upfront and for ongoing SMS costs).

<comment><USER73> What cost and time component? They go to a website like this (this is not an endorsement, the security of doing this is terrible):

[https://receive-smss.com/](https://receive-smss.com/)

It costs zero dollars and takes the same amount of time as the SMS verification would on a regular phone. If the sign-up site is continuously vigilant enough to find and prohibit every number on every one of these sites (not so cheap to implement) then there are sites that give you immediate access to a non-published number for $5. Even this is not "enormous resources" by any means.

But the even bigger implementation cost is that there are many people who don't have a personal cell phone number to receive SMS, and you're either disenfranchising them or pushing them to use sites like that which obviously allow anybody to see the verification codes sent to the phone number which is now associated with their account.

> A significant amount of online properties use SMS for 2FA and authentication

Using SMS for optional 2FA is a mediocre security practice but is mostly harmless (because people can opt out; though it still makes it possible to lose your account if you use it, your number changes and then the site requires you to authenticate with it).

Using it for mandatory 2FA has the problems discussed.

But I also want to point out that actual major sites exist that use SMS as the sole and mandatory authentication factor, and they are very powerfully incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I find the current title ("Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting") to be fascinating. Is there more to Reddit than a website? The headline just sounds like "wrestler's body grapples and pins opponent" to me.

<comment><USER60> They have native first party applications for iOS and Android now.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to make paid (non-game) iPhone/iPad apps more viral - <AUTHOR>

What are some ways to make a paid business / education app more viral and create a network effect?
Some of the things I can think of - Referrals - Twitter and Facebook integration
Would it make any difference if it was free? <comment><USER2> Great question.

One thing to keep in mind regarding Facebook/Twitter integration is you _must_ keep it optional. A lot of users hate giving away that info and will instantly 1 star/delete your app if you force them to login. I've seen this over and over again (most recently with the Gourmet Live iPad app).

</comment><comment><USER3> You could target bloggers with audiences that might want to use the app. For instance, if the app was to help people take the SAT, find bloggers that write about SAT test taking skills and ask them to feature it.</comment>


Peter Thiel Believes the Future Belongs to College Dropouts - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/04/peter-thiel-believes-future-belongs-college-dropouts/36561/

<comment><USER3> My first post on HN =]

Let me weight in on what I think are the pros and cons to higher education. (I go to a Canadian University so this is related to my experience in Canada)

Pros:

Life goals/direction - Growing up, going to university has definitely given me a direction and goal to peruse. How dangerous would it be if the younger generation had no direction, but simply just aspired to be an "entrepreneur"

Networks - University has given me access to a huge network of professors, established industry professionals (through events/networking sessions etc), role models and up-and-coming talents

Exposure - Exposure in terms of being exposed to different types fields, career options, co-op program is a +

Career Opportunity - Whether we like it or not, going to higher education and advertising that you go to a reputable school is a criteria for HR to weed out good candidates from the bad. Just showing that you can get into a better university says something about you.

Fundamental thinking/critical thinking skills - While uni has not taught me what I needed to know for my career it definitely has built the foundation.

Fun + social experiences

Cons:

Cost - ridiculous, in a recent convo with my friend he describe it to be a $40,000 party

Career learning - not there, I learned more from on-job training, reading blogs and interviewing industry professionals

Like-mindedness - esp with the management program, I find that the teaching is based on measuring units, quantifying experiences and not giving people the room to grow as artists. In the marketing field, you can't quantify everything, we are training too many scientist and not enough artists

Overall, I can't generalize that without higher education the younger generation will be lost for directions. There is definitely a lot of young talents who are already well developed into the senior years of their high school or even prior. But remember this is a confusing time and chaotic time for us. teens now days have so much more to worry about. Not everyone is made to be an entrepreneur, you have to give the opportunity to the right people. For the rest, it is just like giving wings to Icarus, he will fly too close to the sun and be burned.

Your thoughts?

Lichi

<comment><USER4> First, welcome to HN! As a quick aside, it's generally taboo to sign comments with things like your Twitter handle or personal URL -- feel free to throw them in your profile :).

Re: your comment, you're absolutely right that entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and that many people will benefit more from college than without. However, Thiel doesn't argue that everyone should dropout of college. Rather, he claims that the best and brightest don't necessarily need it, and would be better served with "freedom" from education.

Should we burn down Harvard? Definitely not. But you don't need it to be successful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Peter Thiel also wishes women couldn't vote.

[http://gawker.com/#!5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women- cou...](http://gawker.com/#!5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-couldnt-vote)

<comment><USER6> Some context is extremely helpful.

Peter Thiel only believes democracy is instrumentally valuable. I.e., it is valuable only insofar as people vote for more freedom, and harmful when they don't [1]. He believes women vote against freedom. Thus, he believes women voting is harmful.

[http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the- educa...](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of- a-libertarian/)

[1] The belief that democracy is valuable only when people vote for your preferred policies is not that uncommon. Witness, e.g., hostility by gay marriage proponents towards voters who oppose gay marriage.

<comment><USER7> *Peter Thiel's definition of freedom.

It's important to note that a lot of libertarians' ideas about freedom and pretty much everything else is comically out of step with how most people think. They think it is because they have stumbled on the magical answer to everything (the response to any problem facing society is a trivial "no government") and that everyone else is a blind idiot, when in fact they are an odd fringe that is unlike most other people.

<comment><USER6> Of course Peter Thiel's opinion of politics will be informed of Peter Thiel's definition of freedom. The fact that it is out of step with how most people think (in particular, women and welfare beneficiaries) is precisely why Peter Thiel is pessimistic about democracy. This is explained in the short essay of his that I linked to.

Apart from attempts to lower Thiel's status, what value do you believe your comment adds?

<comment><USER8> This guy is pushing an idea that, on the surface, I disagree with. Confronted with it, I then wonder if it is worth taking more time to understand the guy's arguments, to see if there is something of worth there.

Evidence that this guy has other ideas that are more clearly bullshit keys me in that, no, I don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _"Why doesn't Thiel make it possible for anyone who wants to go to Harvard > to be able to do it?" Maneker wonders._

What makes Harvard Harvard is that _not_ anyone can go there. If everyone could, it would just be a good state school, and that certainly wouldn't pay the bills.

What universities don't realize, is that the same force which drove more and more people to attend college at the beginning of the information age, is also tearing down the requirement for college. There is really very little that you can't learn or even experience on your own these days to give yourself a brilliant education.

That said, a good college is still far and away the best way to learn classical knowledge quickly. I am very thankful for my CS degree, because there's no way I would have gotten that breadth of exposure to the most interesting parts of CS with 4 years in industry, but with the way tuition is increasing, the cost is squeezing out the benefit for more and more people, masked only by the availability of government loans, and throwing people into a life of indentured servitude.

I don't know if Thiel is doing these kids a favor, but it's certainly no worse than the deal they'll get from the establishment. I'm glad he's throwing a wrench in the works regardless of how misguided he may be.

<comment><USER10> > What makes Harvard Harvard is that not anyone can go there.

That's part of it, but it's not the main thing. What makes Harvard Harvard are the resources, professors, environment, culture, history, reputation, and other students.

That not everyone can get in is largely a consequence of the school's limited resources. It's also a consequence of high admission standards, and those can't be replaced however it's already the case that Harvard cannot accept all qualified applicants.

<comment><USER11> Actually, being a current undergrad at Harvard as well as one of the Thiel 20u20 finalists, I have to pitch in my two cents and say that in immense part, what makes Harvard Harvard _is_ the fact that not everyone can go there.

The individual validation that a student gets upon attending Harvard is predicated on the unparalleled difficulty of getting in. In my class (2014), for example, admissions were at an all time low - ~7% admission rate, with ~30,000 applicants. Possibly a majority of those applicants could have attended Harvard and graduated with respectable success, but had Harvard chosen to open its doors to all of those applicants (just assuming for the moment that its resources would have allowed it to do that), the respect a Harvard admission garners would plummet - because it proves very little.

It no longer demonstrates that you're any better than your peers, and there's the problem. I'll shoot up a counterexample - when I was choosing between schools, Harvard was actually far from my first choice. UChicago was hands down the college I wanted to go to, and I had my heart set on it. In all honesty, the academic rigor at UChicago is lightyears above that at Harvard (saying that after now having taken courses at both institutions), yet the prestige of UChicago is nowhere close to that of Harvard. That's due to a number of factors, but as a correlation (can't quite say causation in either direction) the acceptance rate at UChicago used to be immensely higher - <USER2> plummeted down to the teens in 2010, but it was roughly ~30%+ for all preceding years. Hence, while the education you might receive upon admission might be comparable to or even arguably better in certain ways than an education at Harvard, admission itself demonstrated very little. And that's the problem - for applying to the Thiel Fellowship, for instance, being an undergrad at Harvard undoubtedly helped me far more than would have being an undergrad at UChicago. Like Thiel said, most of the finalists came from Ivy League and prestigious name institutions - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford...not a single one from UChicago.

The exclusivity is, quite honestly, the main thing.

Addendum - though admittedly, the real awesomeness that lies in going to Harvard manifests itself in the peer environment. Contrary to popular belief, pretty much everyone who goes here is social, super chill, extremely nice, and radically tolerant - on top of being insanely intelligent and supremely accomplished. It just inspires you to do things...like drop out and move to California to make it big.

<comment><USER10> _The individual validation that a student gets upon attending Harvard is predicated on the unparalleled difficulty of getting in._

Acceptance rate and difficulty of getting in aren't the same thing, that's my point. "Not everyone can get in" can mean several different things. Most people who don't meet the standards for admission don't even bother applying, so even that 7% admission rate is likely higher than ratio of high school grads who meet the standards vs those who don't.

It stops being difficulty when it's just a matter of dumb luck. If there were 5,000 qualified candidates and only 2000 slots, and those other 3,000 wind up going to Yale or MIT or Stanford, does it really matter? So it doesn't make sense to emphasize Harvard's exclusivity without also admitting where that exclusivity comes from: reputation and high standards for admission. Exclusivity is a consequence of that, it's not the reason for it.

 _It no longer demonstrates that you're any better than your peers, and there's the problem._

I would say that if you are better than your peers then you aren't really peers in that sense.

 _though admittedly, the real awesomeness that lies in going to Harvard manifests itself in the peer environment. Contrary to popular belief, pretty much everyone who goes here is social, super chill, extremely nice, and radically tolerant - on top of being insanely intelligent and supremely accomplished. It just inspires you to do things...like drop out and move to California to make it big._

This is exactly my point. The students, faculty, and overall culture at Harvard make it a superb environment for an ambitious student. Exclusivity alone isn't responsible for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A person under 20 has a far better chance of making $100,000 in professional sports than getting it from the Thiel Foundation. I suspect that for a person under twenty, the odds of getting $100,000 from Thiel are even lower than the odds of winning the same amount in Texas Hold'em.

Not to mention that they also have a far better chance of getting an academic scholarship to an elite institution.

<comment><USER13> That's a strawman. Nobody is saying that the only way to be an entrepreneur is through Thiel's program. And once you remove that implicit assumption from your snark, there's nothing left.

<comment><USER10> That's not a strawman at all. If the argument is that any given high school graduate would be better off starting a company than going to college, using 20 hand-picked or self-selected candidates isn't very good support. Pointing out that fact is important context.

<comment><USER13> The post I replied to has been edited since I made my comment. It previous had a much stronger false dichotomy where the only entrepreneurs were those in Thiel's selected group. I still think the false dichotomy offered is too strong, but it's less pronounced than it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733089>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799700>

</comment><comment><USER15> I was not aware of Peter Thiel's other opinions when I read this piece, but his arguments that we're in an education bubble seem to me to be very solid.

Indeed, there's a lot of evidence he left "on the table". E.g. grade inflation is analogous to the kinds of things we saw surrounding the housing bubble and the internet bubble -- people want the metrics to meet certain criteria and don't care about the underlying fundamentals, so everyone is above average.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a high school dropout, I'm just going to go ahead and extrapolate.

</comment><comment><USER17> I satisfy the following three conditions:

* I dropped out of college.

* I got kicked out of college.

* I graduated college.

Why stop at dropping out when you can have it all?

<comment><USER18> how did you get kicked out?</comment></comment>


Tech's center of gravity shifts north to San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/286835/techs-center-gravity-shifts-north-san-francisco <comment><USER3> Sounds healthy. I'm certainly not alone in being a city person who wouldn't want to live anywhere that doesn't have everything in walking/cycling distance, good public transport and all the other features of a dense urban setting.

I wondered how long SV could continue to bitch about talent shortage whilst ignoring such a major portion of the population. Especially young and ambitious talent tends to gravitate towards the lifestyle of major cities, and has been for generations. Why would tech be an exception?

I'm guessing a lot of young people currently employed in Silicon Valley consider living there a (minor) sacrifice rather than a perk.

<comment><USER4> There's lots of companies already doing this. Every morning in SF you have hundreds of buses filling with young folks commuting to work down at Apple or Google or Facebook. Uniformly, the age range on the bus is 22-35.

The larger tech companies aren't moving to SF any time soon. Too many of their execs and employees want to live in houses, and there just isn't space in SF for campuses that will hold ~10,000 employees, nor many skyscrapers available, either. Plus there are still prohibitive tax issues to being in SF, unless (like Twitter) the city cuts you a break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm still waiting for the tech world to discover the East Bay.

It has Oakland and Berkeley -- not cities on the scale of SF, but offering reasonably dense downtowns and cultural life.

BART vs. CalTrain. Readily commutable, with 4-15 minute headways and highly reliable service from 5am to midnight, rather than the often 1-hour interval schedules and mid-day lapses of CalTrain. Some of the newer CalTrain livery beats BART, but the latter is upgrading soon.

Access to a much broader (and cheaper) housing stock: Alameda and Contra Costa counties, with commutes via BART, 80, 580, 880 and 24. Granted, many of the highways are chronically congested, but less so than 101, and more useful for commutes than 280, which is largely a high-speed SF - Palo Alto/Cupertino link.

Options for much more dense infill development without the Penninsula's NIMBYs. Granted, there are the East Bay NIMBYs, but they're slightly less focused and rabid.

SF does have considerable growth opportunity available, though existing transit is stretched, and there remains resistance to growth. That said, development in the SOMA / China Basin area in the past two decades has been pretty considerable.

Edit: and of course, UC Berkeley. Not Stanford. But more than a match.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's tragic that the SF city government is so set in its ways. There's a lot of people who are priced out of SF because of the city's reluctance to increase housing stock and to maintain rent control.

<comment><USER7> War is peace, freedom is slavery, and rent control prices people out of SF.

SF has limited space. Price is not the only way to allocate space. Local government can, within limits, set other ways such as rent control (essentially a form of seniority). The local government representatives are democratically elected in seemingly uncorrupt elections, so I have to assume this is the will of the majority of the city residents. Get over it and deal with it.

<comment><USER8> SF has limited space mainly because city homeowners lobby against new building permits. 418 housing units constructed in SF in 2011 -- do you seriously think that in a city with $3000 one-bedroom apartments, there aren't hundreds of real estate developers who would build new units here?

The will of the majority is no evidence of fairness or moral rectitude - <USER2> will of the majority is what was responsible for slavery, institutional racism, and now marriage inequality.

<comment><USER7> I think you have that backwards: city homeowners lobby against new building permits because SF has limited space. They feel their neighborhood is plenty crowded, their views are blocked quite enough, and traffic is already congested, etc. Hundreds of developers at 5-100 units each will significantly change the density and life experience in the city.

I was referring to the will of voters as opposed to a cabal of corporations or corrupt influences. Obviously, majorities that impinge on civil rights need to be overruled. It is not a civil right that just because you want to live in the city and you have more money than a current resident, you should be allowed to do so. Nor is it a civil right for a developer to build an oversized and overcrowded building when their property zoning allows a modest residence.

<comment><USER8> Any right that the government grants to a person impinges upon another right held by someone else. If you grant someone the right to live in a rent- controlled apartment you're forcibly removing the right of the property owner to rent out his/her apartment at any terms.

It's not like any of these rights are free, they come at steep costs, and it's hard to say who should actually be the stakeholders of any given decision. Should it be the people owning property in the city? (that's how decisions in condominium buildings are made -- by owner's vote, not by resident's vote). Should it be people living in the city right now? Should it be people who would live in the city if the measure in question was adopted? How much influence should people in one neighborhood have over what happens in another neighborhood (i.e., should there be a neighborhood level of city government, and what powers should it have relative to the city government?)

The same set of stakeholder definition issues come up when thinking about granting work visas to a foreign national -- should that individual's desire to work in the United States be part of the decision to let him in, since once you do, he'll be a voting American citizen, or should he not have a say in that decision since he's not yet a citizen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of my silicon valley peers and I opted to live in the SF area and commute south for work because we found SF & Oakland far more entertaining on nights and weekends.

As more and more tech jobs became available in SF itself, we started taking them.

<comment><USER10> I commute from SF and I hate it. Two hours of my day are spent on a bus five days a week.

I hear Google has an office in the city and, if you do your time in Mountain View and they like you and want to keep you, they'll move you up to the city. I'm sure Apple, FB etc could do the same.

<comment><USER11> That is incorrect.

Tranferring to sf is almost always done as a team move, and they will not let you transfer up to the city if your new team does not already ahave a sizeable contingent up there.

It is not a carrot or a reawrd, it mainly has to do with team chemistry and logistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Because Palantir has taken over all of the available office space in Silicon Valley, the Startup Bubble has shifted and grown. The Bubble now encompasses the majority of San Francisco, in addition to the Valley and its other territories."

(not from the article)

</comment><comment><USER13> I like to think that I am ahead of the game. My startup is so lean and progressive, not only do I have very few employees (none) but once (if) I am (ever) ready to hire, I have the ultimate address for my headquarters: the internet.

<comment><USER10> Hear hear. It's all about remote employees these days. You miss the best talent by only looking at ten square miles of a huge planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wasn't San Francisco already part of Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER15> Technically no, the 'Valley' that is Silicon Valley is actually the Santa Clara Valley. But for all practical purposes everyone in the 9 bay area counties consider themselves to be part of 'Silicon Valley' at one time or another.</comment></comment>


Is Dolphin (browser) the New Chrome? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1033519/Is-Dolphin-browser-the-New-Chrome?display=Normal <comment><USER2> The submission title does not match the content. The majority of this post concerns the author's investigation of processes running on his Nexus 7.

He claims to have empirical evidence of Chrome being slow, but does not supply it. Something like a dump of logcat showing lots of GC is an idea of what to expect.

It does not state if the list of processes was obtained after a reboot. A complete list of installed apps would be useful, too.

Code for the ProcMan app that he used to get the list of processes is not provided under the excuse it was ugly and incomplete. This is on a website dedicated to sharing code.

All in all, article should have spent more time in the oven.</comment>


The problem with profitless startups - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/problem-with-profitless-start-ups.html <comment><USER2> I remember a coworker telling me in a condescending tone 'this is how a startup runs, you break even and try to expand market share, burning investors cash and growing without profit' when I asked about how it is that our company that has not made any profit in the past 4 years serving enterprise customers is able to still be solvent. What if investors suddenly stop injecting cash? Financials would be negative in the first quarter.

I never understood the working models of growing at the sole expense of investors money. Because I don't know but last time I checked capitalism and free market still is king, and they always have a history of major market correction. When something's not efficient or something's offplace, market has a tendency to correct itself, in a big, unexpected, ruthless sort of way and we've seen this again and again, but history seems to teach people nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who recently accepted a job in silicon valley, I've started to become concerned that there is a bubble. I feel there are many parallels between 1999 and today. I would love to be convinced otherwise because I am concerned with job security, but I can't escape the feeling that the "music" will soon stop. At the very least I'd like to hear people's opinions on whether there is a bubble or not

<comment><USER4> So the biggest difference to me is that the 1999 bubble was completely built on the backs of everyday investors. It was a rush to IPO and easy money, and eventually the market got wise and the whole thing fell apart.

The new paradigm is far more interesting, since it's almost all the investment comes from VC and Angel Investors. I think these entities can leverage risk far better, since they may lose a few million here and there, but when they hit a whale they really hit big.

I think there might be 'micro bubbles' within the industry that may implode under their own weight (F2P mobile games companies come to mind), but I think that's largely separating the wheat from the chaff.

I know some will disagree with me on this analysis, but I don't really subscribe to the sky is falling theory. The tech industry is now big business, that's not going to change.

<comment><USER5> Regardless of my opinion on whether or not we're in a bubble, the argument of "it's different this time because..." is used in the build up of every bubble we've ever experienced.

Stock bubble? Economic stability and the wonderful controls the Fed has on monetary policy. No more economic cycles.

First tech bubble? The internet is a wonderful thing we haven't had before - new opportunities, etc.

Everything is different until it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this article is kind of clueless.

First, the VC money isn't going to cost-cutting - it's going to growth. In theory, virtualizing the business processes should lead to higher efficiency and naturally lower costs. This model has been proven out in other fields - it's the Big Box model of retail that created giants like Wal-Mart (although a better comparison would be specialist big box retail like Guitar Center). So the VC money is going to building out the business model infrastructure, not selling a sandwich cheaper than the local shops.

Second, these businesses on the edge don't have enough market share to make a massive dent in the local market - and it's ludicrous to think that they could do so by losing money on transactions at scale. By the time they pose a real threat to local business, they will be profitable. They _must_ be, because the markets are too large to be subsidized by VC forever.

Third, a lot of the businesses that are threatened are not "mom and pop" at all. Taxis? That's a local oligarchy protected by politics. Food delivery? Ever heard of Domino's Pizza or Jimmy John's?

Fourth, these can create new opportunities for local business. I can now get food delivered to my door by one of these startups, but the food comes from excellent _local_ restaurants (the mom and pop ideal) that otherwise could not possibly get a delivery service working profitably. They've outsourced the business model, not the food prep.

And then there's the handwringing about how the long-term professional institutional investors who run pension funds and the like might go broke on venture capital, not realizing what a tiny sliver of that market VC is - it's a diversification strategy, not a core. The biggest concern would be if a VC collapse led to a broader stock market collapse, a la the dotcom era. Not likely.

Yeah, dumb article.

<comment><USER7> You totally missed the point of the article.

The lunch that guy described is impossible to deliver for $8 in the US, and especially in SF. That business makes no sense, ever. Losing money while making a unit profit on that lunch, ok, let's see where that goes. Getting my business by selling to me below cost? I'll do business with you all day but as soon as you raise the price, I'll switch to the next startup offering me a subsidized lunch. There's nothing 'long view' about that. No vision there.

This trend, if it's as big as the article makes it seem, is way more worrying to me in a 'bubble' sense than the color.com thing.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, I did some research on SpoonRocket. First, I caught the article author deliberately misrepresenting the Series A:

"it's just raised $10 million in venture capital expressly so it can keep its prices low". The linked article said nothing of the sort. It said Series A, yes, but not that it was to subsidize pricing. Second, that Series A just happened on April 9 - this week. They haven't had time to even cash the checks yet! (they had a $2.5M seed in 2013, per Crunchbase. If VC thought that money was wasted on cost-cutting, they wouldn't be paying Series A)

Second, SpoonRocket differs in a couple of ways. First, they're a food+delivery service. They don't drive for other restaurants, and they don't have a restaurant space (and associated costs for service and location-driven rent). They only do two meal choices a day, and those are driven by ingredient availability. They're much more like a wholesale bakery than a restaurant.

Their technical edge isn't just communication, either. They have heating systems built into the cars. So I'm assuming they simply fill the cars with meals and send them out, using software to track closest car to the customers, in a high-density urban area. When a car runs out of meals, just come back for a refill.

This is an _extremely_ efficient model, for both food production and delivery, outstripping the benefits of restaurants that have to offer a diverse choice- driven menu, and delivery services that have to do one-off deliveries to support that consumer customization of their food.

So I think it is absolutely reasonable that they could _profitably_ deliver $8 meals.

<comment><USER7> Once they've built the app, almost every one of their costs aside from executive salaries (!) is a recurring per-unit cost -- paying the drivers, buying the food, the gas, etc.

Still sounds more like 100k bank-loan material than 10M VC material to me. The only way that 10M makes sense is if they're running a per-unit loss. Doesn't cost 10M to build that app.

<comment><USER6> They were a Y Combinator company. They're drinking the kool-aid, for sure. But seriously, this sounds much more like a VC play than a bank play to me. There are real cost/performance advantages to their model. This could scale to a billion dollar company. That's the sort of thing that attracts VC, which is _much_ easier and more flexible than a bank loan - IF you're talking about real scale potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article actually missed one angle: increasing cost of living. It's not just that prices are dropping for services like food/trasportation/etc, but that it's happening while rent prices are going up. If anything, local service prices ought to be rising along with rent. It's doubly striking that they are dropping.

</comment><comment><USER9> Their workers aren't independent contractors because they don't offer their services to multiple companies. The IRS will figure this out and get their taxes. Next, eventually when the employee count is big enough they will sue for things like minimum wage, breaks etc.

also, it takes nothing to start one of these businesses and compete therefore profits can't get too big. The business doesn't really scale.

</comment><comment><USER10> tl;dr the author argues that the ultra-cheap venture backed services are a problem because while they're using money from VC firms and being patient, they're driving out local businesses, and they'll ultimately fail, leaving a hole in the local service ecosystem.

<comment><USER11> If that's the problem, it should eventually autocorrect when the investors give up permanently and local businesses return.

<comment><USER12> That word "autocorrect" masks quite a lot of suffering on the part of local business owners who close up and lose their livelihood and investors (including pension funds, retirement accounts, etc.) which lose their money.

Sure, in the long run it all works out, but in the short term there's quite a lot of turmoil.

<comment><USER13> As John Maynard Keynes put it, "in the long run we are all dead."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting argument, but I sort of doubt that local small businesses and bootstrapped startups really need to worry too much about VC-backed startups that truly lose money on the the margin.

In general startups that lose money on the margin do not last very long.

Anyway, if the theory is that this food delivery service is selling under cost in order to get rid of the competition, well, then they are going to be displeased to discover that the barriers to entry for a food-delivery service are not particularly high.

</comment><comment><USER15> How do we know that some of these businesses are losing money? Looking at the menu of SpoonRocket that the author listed, you could make the same meal for less.

I have a feeling that the profit margins are very low, but I do not think they're in the negative.

<comment><USER16> Paying employees, executives, money for the car leases, gas, all while located in SF?

An $8 meal, they make it at $4. With one avg engineer on salary at 125K, (~10K a month), you'd have to sell 2500 lunches with a $4 profit to cover just his salary.

I'd bet they're losing money.

<comment><USER17> Outsource the engineer. At 30-40k salary per annum, they can scrape by on 625 to 833 deliveries a month. 20-28 deliveries a day. You still have to look at paying the delivery guys and managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's possibly some decent arguments in there but they are shrouded by inanity. They aren't "profitless-on-purpose". They understand the simple fact that a dollar is better spent building the business than sitting in a bank account. The author simultaneously degrades startups for not having other business lines to fund them while also degrading the VCs that do. The retirement funds care about returns not portfolio business model nuances. Pretty much every credible "money losing" business I've seen needs to be able to project out profitability at modest scale. Google Shopping Express and Ebay Now are far more perplexing form a cost perspective. If physical businessed can't compete on cost then rents need to come down or they need to figure out how to benefit from their advantages (location, service, etc).

</comment><comment><USER19> Does Uber Black Car really subsidize UberX?

I find it hard to believe that UberX isn't profitable alone - Uber just takes 20% of fare.

<comment><USER8> If they don't pay the drivers enough, there won't be any drivers. 20% is probably not a hard rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Remember that Priceline had a history of loss leaders. Amazon was patient in making money too. A couple million here or there is pennies if you're funding the next big thing. This turns into a way for companies to subsidize early adopters. Yes, the interface may not be perfect, and you never know what will appear in the box, but if you'll give us a go, you'll get an $8 lunch that might just be good... Sounds fair.

<comment><USER13> Not all startups are created equal.

The biggest difference between (say) Amazon and the startups discussed in the article is that the startups in the article are aggressively local. "We deliver lunch in the Bay Area" doesn't scale to other communities as easily as "We ship books to anywhere from a giant warehouse in the middle of nowhere" does, since the former requires building up local infrastructure (meal prep, delivery, legal/regulatory compliance, etc.) for each expansion.

<comment><USER20> Fair enough. If a VC wants to toss money at them, why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> meanwhile, enjoy your consumer surplus.</comment>


How I Structure My Flask Applications - <AUTHOR> http://mattupstate.com/python/2013/06/26/how-i-structure-my-flask-applications.html <comment><USER2> A couple other things I'd add to this good article:

\- I took a couple of good things from Django's manage.py by using Flask- Script. It looks like [1]

\- I'm not sure if there's a better way of doing this, but I really want to be able to swap out configurations based on which environment I'm using. I think I've forced some Django structure onto Flask, but that said, I dynamically load in a `settings` object and use that to configure my `app` object. I use something like [2]. Just looking over it again I think I have some extraneous code in there but I'm tired. It works pretty well, so far.

\- Flask-SQLAlchemy has some good stuff too but I'm not entirely sold on using it. I'm using it on one project, but not the other. I don't miss it when I don't have it.

1\. [https://gist.github.com/mattdeboard/5872584](https://gist.github.com/mattdeboard/5872584)

2\. [https://gist.github.com/mattdeboard/3cbe5395052128e60328](https://gist.github.com/mattdeboard/3cbe5395052128e60328)

<comment><USER3> Good call on the Flask-Script mention. I will add a note about that.

As far as configuration based on environment goes, I really dislike environment based configuration in my project repository. So I use Flask's instance folder functionality:

[http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/config/#instance- folders](http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/config/#instance-folders)

This file can be used to configure the app based on its environment wether it be local development or my production environment. The shared factory method attempts to load this file and fails silently if it does not exist.

Regarding your SQLAlchemy comment, well...thats just not really something to add to the article now, is it? ;)

<comment><USER2> Yeah but how would this solve having identical app installations in dev, prod and staging?

<comment><USER3> The settings.cfg file that I place in the instance folder is generally placed on the server during deployment. Any values in this file will override defaults. I generally do this with Chef or Fabric. Perhaps that answers your question

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the mention! If anyone has further questions I'd be happy to answer them here, or in the comments of the article itself.

<comment><USER4> Enjoyed reading through the approach you take and I'll spend some time reading through the code tomorrow to see how it all fits together. It's surprisingly infrequent that an article pops up describing the thought process behind using a specific structure for your code - thanks for taking the time to write it up.

One thing I've done differently on my last couple of projects is to put the core parts of the app into their own packages at the top level and to make a 'web' package that just contains the web interface and the config. That way I make sure that the core application code isn't bound to the web framework at all. Then within my web blueprints they import the bits of the core library they need to do their work. I can then use the main bit of the library myself without having anything to do with the flask app.

The web app itself is responsible for creating a db connection and then injecting that into the core when needed. I've made a simple gateway class that wraps the db connection and deals with persistence.

The data layer is the bit I'm least happy with. Mostly that's because I went with a nosql solution for the db which ultimately has made the data model more complex than it needs to be. Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with switching to SQLAlchemy again to see how that effects things.

Definitely not saying it's the right way to do things but it's another take on how you can structure things and it's been working really well for me. Feels like you're writing an application first and a website second - which changes how you think about the code.

<comment><USER3> I hear you on the "core" library idea. I have strived for this separation before with varying success. I just did not feel as if I wanted to go that far with this article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. As a recently new Python and Flask user it's good to see how things are done in a nicer way than I have hacked together!

Question: I have a web app built in flask, but I also require a worker process in the background that is actively scraping websites and inserting/ updating data into the DB via the ORM. How would you go about that in the cleanest way?

<comment><USER6> You could use Celery: [http://www.celeryproject.org/](http://www.celeryproject.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like and use Flask, but as to how to structure it, I always end up mirroring a classic Django structure: views, models, forms, utils, static, templates etc. About the only thing missing is urls and admin.

It works, and it's easier for me to organize projects according to a common standard.

<comment><USER3> Flask-Admin ([http://flask-admin.readthedocs.org](http://flask- admin.readthedocs.org)) will cover you on the admin area to a certain degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a newbie to web frameworks, I found Flask was much easier to deploy and I understood what was happening compared to Django. I also found the documentation and support better than that of Tornado and cherryPy.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article, but the best take away for me.. Alembic, awesome! I'd just started to write something myself (poorly)

</comment><comment><USER10> Just use django bro

<comment><AUTHOR> > Just use django bro

I would be fascinated to read your rationale for just using Django. Specifically I'm curious what use-cases you see as Django having an advantage in? (Specific examples make for a much more interesting dialogue.) In relation to this, do you think there are contrasting use-cases where Flask might excel as a more suitable option? Personally, I do not favor Flask or Django or <insert web application suite here> exclusively; instead I evaluate a use-case and then determine which tool best fits my needs. However, it would be amazing if you could somehow show that "just use django" is axiomatic to web development in Python...

<comment><USER10> > I'm curious what use-cases you see as Django having an advantage in?

My primary use case involves having a webapp that actually works

<comment><USER11> Whereas, in your vast experience, you found that Flask webapps don't work?

<comment><USER10> In production

<comment><USER11> Whereas -- not where.

And I was being sarcastic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft issued with formal warning by CNIL - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnil.fr/en/windows-10-cnil-publicly-serves-formal-notice-microsoft-corporation-comply-french-data-protection <comment><USER2> Good.</comment>