London: the city that ate itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/28/london-the-city-that-ate-itself-rowan-moore <comment><USER2> This is just not London, it's happening in almost every major city. There is a massive real estate investment movement in progress where wealthy and giant investing funds are dumping bucket loads of money to buy up properties in popular areas. These then gets put back on market with extra-ordinary rents (typically 5% annual of purchase price). I think the hope is that even if property stays without renters for even half a year, its returns when combined with appreciation would exceed other "safe" investments. It's not unnatural anymore to go in high demand areas of city in night just to find empty apartments all over. I shudder to imagine how next real estate crash would look like...

 _If you walk through Knightsbridge in the evening, at a time when people in well-adjusted cities might be having dinner with their families and friends, or at least watching TV with their kids, you will see a wall of black, punctuated by the odd square of illumination._

<comment><USER3> Couldn't this be solved by passing city ordinances, and state taxes on vacant properties, non-primary houses, and un-rented apartment spaces?

Without any way to counter balance out speculation, land hording, and gentrification/displacement of urban areas, syndicates of real-estate investors would just buy up everything in sight, turn it into luxury condos/lofts and set the price at a rate determined to be some minimum of %75 of the target populations' average income..

<comment><USER4> > Couldn't this be solved by passing city ordinances, and state taxes on > vacant properties, non-primary houses, and un-rented apartment spaces?

Why restrict these taxes only to unused spaces? If you do so, you'll have to get around people only nominally using the spaces.

> Without any way to counter balance out speculation, land hording, and > gentrification/displacement of urban areas, syndicates of real-estate > investors would just buy up everything in sight, turn it into luxury > condos/lofts and set the price at a rate determined to be some minimum of > %75 of the target populations' average income..

If only making money was so easy..

<comment><USER3> >Why restrict these taxes only to unused spaces?

To create an incentive for unused spaces to be used, instead of horded.

>If you do so, you'll have to get around people only nominally using the spaces.

Who could pull that off? Someone who owns 4 houses?.. 10 apartment units?

<comment><USER4> How would the legal system tell apart used from unused spaces? How would you make that distinction hard to game for someone with expensive lawyers and resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author went to Eton and then Cambridge, moving to London for the first time after university. In the process, he himself pushed property prices up, and directly contributed to gentrification.

Obviously, when he moved there, that's when London was at its best. Since then, these upstarts and their money, moving there, pricing out the real Londoners... etc.

It has always been thus.

<comment><USER6> >he himself pushed property prices up, and directly contributed to gentrification.

Not nearly as much as those Russian oligarchs and Arab oil barons did.

<comment><USER5> It's amazing, with the tens of thousands of Russian millionaires coming to London each year, stealing our houses, that the Russians have any left at all!

Much less amazing: the same xenophobia and racism as always towards immigrants.

<comment><USER6> I used to live in one of the most multicultural areas of London before the rents started going through the roof. I loved it.

Now it's slowly turned into a string of soulless Gucci/Prada/Maserati shops, and all the people/immigrants who made it a genuinely nice place to live have been priced out by foreign investors.

But sure, racism or whatever.

<comment><USER7> How can an investor price somebody out? The investor only makes money if people are willing to pay rent for his property. So it is the willingness of people to pay the high rent that drives the prices up.

Edit: HN doesn't let me write more comments. I still don't understand from those videos how they make money with the vacant houses. Also the articles are a bit weird, as if renting out a few houses in an expensive street would really have a significant impact on the housing issues of London.

<comment><USER8> > The investor only makes money if people are willing to pay rent for his > property.

In most cases, yes. But not in all cases. The thing is, it is _not normal_ to be able to make money on an empty property. So then, the expensive parts of London are not normal.

[http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside- london...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside-london- billionaires-row-derelict-mansions-hampstead)

[http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/lights-out-london- stre...](http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/lights-out-london-street- where-7-in-10-houses-are-second-homes-10249301.html)

[http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/25/its-like-a- gh...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/25/its-like-a-ghost-town- lights-go-out-as-foreign-owners-desert-london-homes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Need to tax _unoccupancy_. If an entity is preventing people from living in the city, they should be paying more than those contributing to the well being of the city.

<comment><USER10> We tried to tax underoccupancy in state provided accommodation, ie, if you lived in state housing, with empty rooms, you'd have a reduced benefits payout. It was an absolute nightmare response. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under- occupancy_penalty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupancy_penalty)

<comment><USER11> There was large campaigns to abolish this tax, I believe this was largely funded by lobbying. Edge cases, like the ones below which was largely used to stir criticism from public could easily be accounted for (ie implement allowance of 6 months after the death for under-occupancy tax to kick in and medical requirements). Yes these allowances may be abused/dodged (I can see a lot of "home offices" popping up and people claiming tax on their "office rooms"), however there will be a large amount of revenue generated from implementing an under-occupancy tax.

But as we all know getting bureaucracies to implement something like this will cost hundreds of millions, and will it be beneficial in the short term? Probably not. But we should start looking at long-term solutions.

> Michael Rosen writing in The Guardian has criticised how, under government > proposals, parents living in social housing could become liable for what he > calls the bedroom tax after only three months following the death of a child > – something that inadvertently causes the creation of a "spare" room.[26] In > March 2015 the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid newspaper, reported that a > woman had become liable for the bedroom tax following her son's death from a > brain haemorrhage following an assault.

> The changes in housing benefit have been criticised for having a > disproportionate effect on disabled families. Two-thirds of individuals > affected by the under-occupancy penalty are registered as disabled.

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under- occupancy_penalty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupancy_penalty)

<comment><USER12> > But as we all know getting bureaucracies to implement something like this > will cost hundreds of millions, and will it be beneficial in the short term? > Probably not. But we should start looking at long-term solutions.

Penalizing people for having extra rooms while it is impossible for them to downsize because there is insufficient supply of smaller properties is not a long term solution.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/big-lie- behind...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/big-lie-behind-the- bedroom-tax-families-trapped-with-nowhere-to-move-face-penalty-for-having- spare-room-8745597.html)

<comment><USER11> In which case it would make sense to rent the spare room out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hawaii got bought up by the Japanese when they were flying high and then they crashed to earth. I remember playing golf once in a beautiful country club that was now public. Glorious gold everywhere in the clubhouse and no one would ever use it again. Eventually things will crash and all that golden London will die.

</comment><comment><USER7> London is not creating the prices of property, the people are. They will be prepared to pay as much as they think living in London is worth. If eventually all the cool stuff is driven out by the high prices, prices will fall accordingly. Or rather, presumably there will be an equilibrium of prices vs coolness.

It kind of sucks, but what would actually be a better system? That people get assigned places to live by lottery, so if you happen to live in a cool place on the cheap, you were simply lucky? It sounds good on the surface because you only have the people living there in your mind. You forget about all the other people who never get a chance of living there. Why is it fair if some randomly selected people get to live in nice places and others don't?

I am not convinced that the market approach is not preferable. After all, those people PAY for the privilege to live in a cool place. If they have the money, presumably they should have delivered something good to the world in exchange.

And, hello, welcome to overpopulation. The number of nice places to live is finite. Even if we can cram ever more and more people into the world (by building skyscrapers or whatever), it doesn't seem obvious to me that we can provide nice places for everyone. For example, the length of shorelines is finite (glossing over fractal issues), so if your idea of living in a nice place is to live by the sea, there are only so many people who can have that privilege.

<comment><USER12> _" It kind of sucks, but what would actually be a better system? That people get assigned places to live by lottery, so if you happen to live in a cool place on the cheap, you were simply lucky? It sounds good on the surface because you only have the people living there in your mind. You forget about all the other people who never get a chance of living there. Why is it fair if some randomly selected people get to live in nice places and others don't?"_

We actually have had something not completely dissimilar to this since the 1980s. Anyone who lives in state housing for at least a minimum period of time is able to buy that home at a subsidized price. As local authorities are banned from using this money to build more state housing, this leads to long term shortages in state housing which is one of the causes of the problems we are facing now. (Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Buy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Buy))

Nobody is expecting to get a cheap home in Kensington or the equivalent super- expensive part of whatever city you are from. But it is not just the "cool", "nice" places that are becoming unaffordable. And the problem is that people are not paying to _live_ in these homes. People are paying to use them as big, shiny piggy banks in the sky that happen to offer a better rate of return than other investments. Poor people who actually live in London and use London businesses generally contribute more to London's culture than rich people who don't.

<comment><USER7> Of course it is the cool, nice places that become unaffordable. Pretty sure if you move further out, or to another city, it is cheaper?

How much would you say contributing to the culture should be worth?

And I still don't understand how they make money by letting houses remain vacant?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very similar sentiment to the Vice article from the weekend:

[https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/london-its-over-and- its-n...](https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/london-its-over-and-its-not-me- its-you)

</comment><comment><USER15> Boo bloody hoo. Are we in 'the provinces' meant to feel sorry for Londoners? Are you shitting me?

<comment><USER16> Sure, since it's happening on this side of the pond, too. "The provinces" have their own messes, like Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal (to some extent).

Same in "the colonies," like: San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin, the Bronx and Brooklyn (ways you know the real estate market has gone bonkers: people are buying in Manhattan because it's _cheaper_ than Brooklyn).

Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland are getting the exact same double-whammy as London: very popular places to live along with very popular places for foreign investment.

Schadenfreude doesn't help anybody, really.

<comment><USER17> In a British context, "the provinces" is a rather pejorative expression for the rest of the country outside London. It doesn't refer to Canada.</comment></comment></comment>


VH to YC Founders: Ping us if you want additional help with your term sheets - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/adam-smith

<comment><USER2> I _wish_ the most promising startups got snatched up on demo day. In fact investors are so slow that even the most eager generally take around a week to put together a term sheet.

My hope is that as t approaches infinity, demo day will approach an auction. But t is still pretty far from infinity.

<comment><USER3> I would imagine you have some influence here. You could require investors to get word out to people within a short deadline or face the penalty of non- participation in the first funding round and potentially a disinvite to future demo days. Maybe too harsh, though.

<comment><USER2> I sometimes tell investors that kind of thing. And certainly they know that if they maltreat any YC startup, they won't get any more deals in the future.

But the thing that really motivates investors (and acquirers) is competition. That's why we try to bring so many investors to demo day. (Today there are so many coming that we had to get a tent for the founders to stand in while they're not presenting, because there's not really room for everyone in the building.)</comment></comment></comment>


Defining Roles: CTO and/or VP Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/engineering-leadership/defining-roles-cto-and-or-vp-engineering-f1c7563643a3 <comment><USER2> > And, if the tech cofounder is young, they are the Chief Architect, not the > CTO.

This should probably be rephrased to refer to experience, not age.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any software that can find a formula from inputs and outputs? - <AUTHOR> I'm attempting to reverse engineer some formulas that control the position and size of some elements (in some PDF software that I want to emulate.) There are four output values: x and y coordinates (to center an element inside a box), and then two size values.
Is there any software where I can enter a list of inputs and outputs, and it can try to figure out the relationships and produce a formula? (I would also appreciate any human help with finding the formulas!)
Here are some example values as CSV:
Width, Height, x, y, size1, size2
18, 18, 2.853, 4.081, 14.532, 13.9943
18, 17.4733, 3.0844, 4.0028, 13.9849, 13.4675
26.9535, 27.4801, 3.164, 5.4875, 24.3802, 23.4781
58.0274, 32.2202, 16.6181, 6.1908, 29.3043, 28.2199
31.1669, 46.9672, 2.0307, 12.6383, 32.0399, 30.8543
59.6075, 55.394, 7.2542, 9.6522, 53.3091, 51.3365
(P.S. I'm not sure if there are some inaccuracies in the data since there was some manual copy/pasting, so 90% accuracy would be fine.) <comment><USER2> Prioritized Grammar Enumeration</comment>


Hey, you, good job on that.  Keep it up. - <AUTHOR> http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/

<comment><USER2> ...except I actually am the worst coder in the room. :-(

My zpg car race simulation will never be made.

</comment><comment><USER3> WHAT IS THIS, I DON'T EVEN..

<comment><USER4> Read the paragraph as the "--". His point is really clear: the only time hacking is wrong is when you're not enjoying it. Comparing your projects and tools to others is meaningless.</comment></comment>


S3 trickery, using it as a scheduler - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/s3-trickery-using-it-as-a-scheduler-c618103b1cf2 <comment><USER2> Fascinating approach. Just be aware it's going to cost $17.52 a month to run this in S3 API charges alone. I'd probably go for `at` on an instance instead at a first pass.

Alternately I'd have a cloudwatch event fire, and insert logic in what it invokes to figure out if now's the time to run the command; if not, bomb out.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, it's more expensive</comment></comment>


Important announcement about your My Opera account - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/important-announcement-about-your-my-opera-account

<comment><USER2> Where are you going, Opera? A little more than a year ago, I applied for a job there because it seemed like such a cool company to work for, but now... I don't know.

I'm really curious what their strategy is. For a geek like me it feels incomprehensible.

<comment><USER3> I feel you, but this move is one in the right direction. A small, independent browser vendor, why does that need its own webmail, social network, blogging platform, etc? Much better to focus on core. I have good hopes they'll manage to bring the new Blink-based Opera to v12 feature levels, but better. They won't be able to do that if everybody is busy debugging needlessly fancy forum software.

<comment><USER4> Opera is not really an independent browser vendor any more. They used to be when they made their own browser. That's just not true any more. They're a Google Chrome distribution with slight service and UI modifications -- kind of like RockMelt or the Yandex browser.

<comment><USER5> I understand your analogy but I think comparing Opera to RockMelt is going a little too far.

Do we know if Opera is pushing much upstream into the Chromium Open Source Project?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understand their decision. They are taking the SteveJobs route: Concentrate on just a few major things and axe everything else.

Apple followed this route. Google followed this route and now Opera is going to follow this route. More companies will also follow.

My feelings are mixed. They had nice product offerings that differentiated them from the rest. I wanted to become an Opera user just for that reason. But Alas! It sort of confused me what I really wanted to do online and why I was using a browser to do it.

</comment><comment><USER7> And in the process of closing down My Opera they broke the RSS links to their previous news and release feeds. It really feels like they've lost all people with common sense.

<comment><USER8> Arguably, if they had any common sense, they would have gotten out of the desktop market a decade ago and focused exclusively on mobile.</comment></comment>


A 1980s study on juvenile crime in Japan sheds light on American gun culture - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1225724/a-1980s-study-on-juvenile-crime-in-japan-sheds-light-on-american-gun-culture/ <comment><USER2> Interesting fact:

Firearms were present in Japan beginning in the 13th century, but saw little adoption. In 1543, the Portuguese introduced matchlock firearms, a much more impressive weapon, and Japan embraced them. They began manufacturing them in great numbers, researching firearms technology, and fielding armies equipped with firearms, which they used to great effect. In 1592 a Japanese force invaded Korea and rapidly captured Seoul, in large part due to the presence of an estimated 40k gunners in the force. It's estimated Japan may have led the world during this period in firearm production, and surviving written records suggest they saw firearms very positively.

...then, they stopped. There's an excellent book about it called "Giving Up The Gun" ([https://www.amazon.com/Giving-Up-Gun- Reversion-1543-1879/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Giving-Up-Gun- Reversion-1543-1879/dp/0879237732)) There's no super clear explanation; the answer mostly seems to be a vague hand-wavy nod towards "cultural reasons".

But, obviously, those cultural reasons didn't seem to apply prior to the Edo period, when Japan went all-in on firearms, arguably more so than any European country. Odd.

<comment><USER3> I'm not a historian, but I think "the period of war" is a nice explanation:

> The Sengoku period (戦国時代 Sengoku Jidai, "Age of Warring States"; c. 1467 – > c. 1603) is a period in Japanese history marked by social upheaval, > political intrigue and near-constant military conflict. Japanese historians > named it after the otherwise unrelated Warring States period in China. It > was initiated by the Ōnin War, which collapsed the Japanese feudal system > under the Ashikaga shogunate, and came to an end when the system was re- > established under the Tokugawa shogunate by Tokugawa Ieyasu.

So, after the period of war ended and the Tokugawa Shogunate was established, the "Bakufu" clearly did not want millions of unemployed soldiers hanging around with guns. (I heard even the invasion on Korea was conceived as a means of keeping soldiers and lesser feudal lords busy, though I'm not sure how widely it is believed.)

<comment><USER2> It's a plausible argument I suppose. And Europe never went through a comparable period of peace and unification (at any rate prior to the present day), so it sort of makes sense that Europe stuck with its guns and Japan did not.

And yet it still raises questions. It happened very suddenly as these things go (over a few years or decades, rather than centuries), and seems to have been accompanied by a deep, long-lasting cultural shift. Even after Japanese isolation ended in the mid 19th century, there didn't seem to be any real reversion (hence, indirectly, the originally linked article). If the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate was enough to make Japan give up the gun, why was it's collapse not enough to make Japan re-embrace it? If the answer is "unique Japanese culture", why was it not present at the start of the Sengoku period? It's not like the Sengoku period was just way more violent than the 1850-1950 period.

Anyhow, the book I linked (which I last read over 10 years ago, so I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details) goes into a lot more detail, digging through historical records and evaluating most of the obvious theories. I highly recommend it!

<comment><USER4> Japan didn't embrace gun culture but certainly built up its military after being forced to abandon isolationism by (literal) threats of destruction from western powers.

<comment><USER2> Quite right. The question is _why_? If culture is driven by events, it feels like they should have embraced gun culture given how huge that event was. If it's not, then when triggered the earlier abandonment?

<comment><USER5> The abandonment was triggered by the shogunate having a large amount of control over anyone wealthy enough to own a gun. Afterwards, the military certainly embraced gun culture, but civilian gun culture largely rises from colonialism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The retired cop then noted that even the yakuza don't like to use guns these days — because the penalties are too high...One mid-level yakuza boss told me, "Having a gun now is like having a time bomb. Do you think any sane person wants to keep one around the house?"_

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/01/06/national/media-...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/01/06/national/media- national/even-gangsters-live-in-fear-of-japans-gun-laws/)

<comment><USER7> As much as I want to believe this is true, I can't help but question the accuracy of the japan times reporting on Japan. In my mind, it's like RT reporting on Russia

<comment><USER8> I don't believe the Japan Times is a propaganda arm of the Japanese government in the same way as RT. They aren't as old an organization as Mainichi Shimbun for example, but I wouldn't group them with RT or Sputnik. Television news organizations in the country have to tread lightly, since they have to come hat in hand to the government when they need to renew their broadcasting licenses, but I don't believe other news organizations have that kind of power exercised over them by the national government.

<comment><USER9> You meant ' _wouldn 't_ group them with RT or Sputnik', right?

<comment><USER8> Yes, fixed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I should quote from an older book called 'Confessions of a Yakuza', on the Yakuza from about 80 years ago, it's just so fitting:

>The real reason why the police set him up, of course, was to improve the district's anti-crime record. Sometime after I left jail—around 1938, I suppose it would have been—I had just the same kind of trouble myself at my joint in Uguisudani. Told me, in just the same way, to hand in my guns. This particular detective came straight from the Metropolitan Police Board—the very top. I expect they'd been tipped off that some yakuza somewhere had got hold of a few pistols, so they planned to make a clean sweep. But there weren't any in my place to begin with, and there was nothing I could do.

>So they told me to produce some even if I had to buy them. It was way out of line, but if I'd gone on insisting I didn't have any, I'd have ended up the same as Kan-chan, so I got a brother to buy me a couple at three hundred and fifty yen apiece. That was enough to buy a house with in those days, but I couldn't afford to think about that.

>I turned them in to the police immediately. "Good work," they said—and that was the last I heard about it: no letter of thanks, and no punishment, either....

<comment><USER7> I'm glad there was no punishment, but wow, that's such a crazy and unfair situation to find yourself in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Their reasons for remaining gun-free revolved around some loosely held concept of honor," Beck says. "Being able to move your finger on a trigger is not really a skill that wows anyone."

I find this mindset is reflected in a lot of manga produced in Japan. Heroes are often paired with swords: Rurouni Kenshin, Inu Yasha, and Bleach to name a few.

<comment><USER12> And yet (as I hear) the Samurai they emulate considered their bows to be their primary weapon, and their spears their secondary weapon, and considered it a disgrace to ever need to draw their sword.

They also used guns when they became available. They were soldiers and mercenaries, after all.

<comment><USER13> Of course manga heroes are more about romantic ideals than historical accuracy, but even so, you can't really generalize about all samurai any more than you can generalize about all European knights. The samurai class existed in one form or another for around a millennium. I rather doubt that they all considered it a "disgrace" to draw their sword.

<comment><USER12> >The samurai class existed in one form or another for around a millennium. I rather doubt that they all considered it a "disgrace" to draw their sword.

That's fair. I was just trying to imply that the samurai (and Western cowboy, and European knight, and even modern yakuza and mafia) all present a romantic facade in popular culture that wasn't and isn't necessarily reflected in practical reality.

Apparently even the concept of Bushido is a cultural retcon[0,1] as is, almost everything related to ninja[2,3]. Some young Japanese hoodlums might buy into the hype, but I don't necessarily trust that anecdata as a basis to make some general statement about Japanese culture mistrusting guns because they're less honorable.

[0][https://www.tofugu.com/japan/bushido/](https://www.tofugu.com/japan/bushido/)

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11990721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11990721)

[2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-UePD6Wp5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-UePD6Wp5A)

[3][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR43l77jlpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR43l77jlpY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This conclusion is based on remembered anecdote from 35 years ago...bit shaky to make firm statements based on that.

Edit: Unless I'm missing something basic here? I don't see any reference or link to the "study on juvenile crime" the article title references.

<comment><USER15> It is indeed anecdotal, but gang violence is hugely influenced by the culture of the nation it's taking place in. Brash, unabashed outlaws have been romanticized in American culture since its very beginning, and firearms have always been a part of the American gunslinger mythos. Other nations facing organized crime with access to firearms don't necessarily have the same issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seriously? As a Japanese, I can't agree any of the auther's claim.

First, It's less than 20 years old for a crime to be punished differently than adults in Japan. Not 21 years. An article containing this level of mistake cannot trusted further.

It said, Japanese biker gang can get a gun but not doing so because of honor, "Being able to move your finger on a trigger is not really a skill that wows anyone." What?

It costs a fortune(and you have to deal with bad guys) to illegally acquire the shitty hand gun that was so poorly manufactured and cannot be trusted.

And each live rounds cost a fortune too.

How can a young dropouts and delinquents earn such amount of money while still maintaining the bikes?

<comment><USER17> Huh, Japan is trial as adult from 21 on-wards... Juvenile is up to 20 years old...

<comment><USER18> No, it's >= 20. But it's actually more complicated than < 20/>= 20.

[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E6%B3%95](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E6%B3%95)

Children can be charged at any age, but there is no criminal liability under 14. Children under 14 can still be sent to juvenile detention centers.

From 14 on-wards, they can be sentenced to prison, with reduced sentences compared to adults.

From 18 on-wards, they can be sentenced like adults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article remind me of the series movies "Crows Zero"about high school students fight each other to become the leader, and also fight other school's students. They only use bare hand. Weapon do appears, but very unlikely.

There's also a scene that an the "oyabun" (absolute leader of a yakuza clan) use gun to kill one man who did not complete a mission, but instead of shooting into his head, the oyabun gave the man his coat, and shoot to the back. It turns out that the coat is bullet proof, and the oyabun actually allow that man to live a normal life thereafter.

Watching that movie make me absolutely want to fight someone with my bare hand (I know I shouldn't).

<comment><USER20> I highly recommend trying out BJJ (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu). Not only is it physically and mentally stimulating (I like to refer to it as physical chess), it also makes you appreciate how vulnerable you are, and by extension why to avoid physical altercation at nearly all costs. An added bonus is that you'll be able to defend your self against most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Back in the early 2000s I visited Kitakyushu. From my hotel window around midnight, to 1am I witnessed some local hoodlums rev their car engine loudly, and then "run away" being chased by police in a car. The chase went around the square once and then peeled off to .. a red traffic light.

Both hoodlums and police stopped at the red light, and sat there until the light turned green before resuming their "chase" at approximately 20km/h.

I think they got away. Very slowly.

TL;DR _yes youth culture is quite different around the world_

<comment><USER22> This is one of the most Japanese stories I have ever read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, there is another thing as well: is it legal and easy to get a gun in Japan as a person ?

Because I get that a gang use guns in the US, where it's quite easy to get your hands on one.

But in France, while some criminals do have guns, it's not that common. It's not only hard to get a gun but it would also almost always considered like a sure tell something fishy is going on. Having a gun, unless you can conceal it very well and not be noticed when you use it, is a great way to get busted.

<comment><USER24> You know guns are legal outside of Paris and you can buy silencers over the counter right?

The most serious restriction on guns in France is you can only own two at any time that accept military calibers. So 9x19mm, bad, but 9x21mm A-OK.

<comment><USER23> You need to practice at a shooting range with professional to even get access to a simple gun.

A process that is hardly as casual as this: [http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/19/news/guns-background- checks/...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/19/news/guns-background- checks/index.html)

And come on, if you get an FFL licence, you can even get a silencer or a machine gun as a normal citizen.

The difficulty is not even on the same scale.

<comment><USER25>
      And come on, if you get an FFL licence

It became very difficult to get an FFL without having an actual storefront, or being a gunsmith, starting with the Clinton administration.

      you can even get a silencer or a machine gun as a normal citizen

That's flat false. Being a conventional FFL doesn't bestow any access to any NFA weapons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So in Japan you are the cool kid when you come with a knife to a gun fight ;-)

I like that attitude.

<comment><USER27> In Japan, the person with the gun would be known as bringing a gun to a knife fight.

<comment><USER28> He/she would also probably be known as undefeated.

<comment><USER29> There are no places to practice. From what I gather, even Japanese Yakuza cannot hit the broad side of a barn.

<comment><USER30> Japan produced an IPSC champion some years back. In Japan, he trained exclusively with an airsoft pistol and only ever fired a gun when he came to the US to compete.

<comment><USER28> Wow, that is incredible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't even count the times I've heard of someone getting into a bar fight and not being content to get their ass kicked "like a man" proceed to get a gun out of their car and shoot like six innocent people trying to get back at the person who did the ass kicking.

It's a cultural thing methinks...

<comment><USER32>
      I can't even count the times I've heard of...

Probably because that count would be exactly... _zero_.

I have over 60 years of criminology data and yet cannot find one case that meets your stated criteria (bar fight or any other collection of strangers resulting in more than 2 fatalities or 3 wounded).

<comment><USER31> 1 dead 2 wounded: [https://www.usnews.com/news/best- states/arizona/articles/201...](https://www.usnews.com/news/best- states/arizona/articles/2017-05-29/man-dead-2-others-hurt-in-phoenix-bar- shooting)

1 dead 2 wounded: [http://www.azfamily.com/story/37585825/police- investigating-...](http://www.azfamily.com/story/37585825/police- investigating-shooting-near-south-phoenix-substation)

1 dead 2 wounded: [https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2016/10/2...](https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2016/10/29/man- killed-2-others-injured-phoenix-bar-shooting/92954984/)

and that's just Phoenix.

Hold on...found a 6 people shot one too: [https://www.click2houston.com/news/6-people-shot-after- fight...](https://www.click2houston.com/news/6-people-shot-after-fight-in- boss-nightclub-sports-bar-parking-lot-1)

Don't think your criminology database is all that comprehensive...

\--edit--

Actually, just up the street from the first link I was in the parking lot of Kitty's Bar calling into dispatch (was working for Sunrise Cab at the time) and this "individual" took 3 or 4 steps into the street and unloaded his handgun in the air. Me (being me) looked at this "individual", who's 30-40 feet away from me, and see he's not shooting at me so go back to what I was doing and was like "whatever".

Only thing I can think of is he was either mad at getting kicked out of the bar or perhaps wanted the traffic to stop for his jaywalking, dunno? Of course all my later calls were in the area the police were conducting their manhunt which was a PITA.

<comment><USER33> None of your linked articles fit your original description, so I'd say his database is comprehensive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learning to Read at Age 41 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/14/learning-read-age-41 <comment><USER2> This is a beautiful story! The past two weeks has been ugly, with all the news about violence against women by refugees, violence against refugees by gangs etc. This story is an example of how an immigrant can grow in a foreign land and how a local can help an immigrant grow.

I wish such stories were more common than the stories we are currently hearing from Europe :(

<comment><USER3> Absolutely beautiful. I think these stories are also a way to balance our feelings with the conflict we face/hear of. We'll always be hearing of/facing harsh issues prevalent in the world, and we need to maintain our hope. Stories like this one help us do just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Way to go!</comment>


We're Making Life Too Hard for Millennials - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/were-making-life-too-hard-for-millennials/?ref

<comment><USER2> It bugs me that the blog-author has an ax to grind against "liberalism", they place the blame on legislation which predates "millenials" (and the associated graphs they requote from the NYT op-ed) by many decades.</comment>


Google Adds Real-Time Tube (London) Information To Maps  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/london-underground-real-time-google-maps-71267

<comment><USER2> For a moment I thought this meant <http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/> had been integrated into google maps proper.</comment>


Russian citizens must register WiFi devices (including laptops) and receive special permission to use them - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080416-russian-government-enacts-byzantine-wifi-regulations.html

<comment><USER2> Not exactly. Officials from one of the government agencies issued an opinion that WiFi devices require registration by the end users. Other people including other officials pointed out that this would contradict existing law that frees certified end-user devices from the need of being registrated (though commercial WiFi equipment including e.g. Cisco is not).

So it is an open issue, rather than a definitive "must register". This is not the first case when a cretin from a government agency blurted out something as stupid as this; and certainly not the last. In the end the underlying cause is far less sinister than one might think - they simply want to milk public for the licensing fees.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a distilled version without unnecessary words:

"A Russian government agency has proposed mandatory registration of all WiFi devices.

According to Fontanka.ru, the government agency responsible for regulating mass media, communications, and cultural protection has stated that users will have to register every WiFi-enabled device with the government and receive special permission in order to use the hardware. The agency says that registration could take as long as ten days for standard devices like PDAs and laptops and that it intends to confiscate devices that are used without registration. Users who wish to operate a wireless access point or WiFi- enabled home router are expected to go through an even more onerous process that will involve submitting documentation and obtaining a license. In certain regions, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, users will also have to receive special approval from the Federal Security Service.

The policy, which was explained to Fontanka.ru by the Russian agency's deputy director Vladimir Karpov, could reverse existing policies like a 2004 government panel decision to provide blanket permission for indoor wireless access point operation and a 2007 policy that allowed use of mobile WiFi devices without registration. According to The Other Russia, the Russian government agency that is responsible for issuing the new policy was created when the Russian media and telecommunications regulatory bodies were merged last year."</comment>


Bitcoin Foundation Receives Cease And Desist Order From California - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/06/23/bitcoin-foundation-receives-cease-and-desist-order-from-california/ <comment><USER2> It is worth pointing out that the state can put out Cease And Desist orders, and warnings on its website with no: 1) Evidence of wrongdoing 2) Communication with the accused 3) Method of reconciliation

I have my own personal example:

I received a letter ordering us to cease and desist from doing online notarization through California notaries. We were not doing so, so in effect we sent back a letter stating: "We have not, and never have, conducted the activity you accuse us of." They basically responded saying "ok, we agree that you haven't done anything wrong but if you do anything we will prosecute you to the full extent of the law."

A few weeks later, they posted a "consumer warning" on their website saying that our company was in effect defrauding companies. Then, several other states copied that language without contact. I spoke with the government officials, I told them we were hurt by these baseless accusations, and they admitted that they really had no evidence of any wrongdoing. They basically said "we are too busy to update the website right now but we will do so shortly."

After months of effort, I was able to one by one get most of these ultimately removed or reworded to a reasonable position. California was the last holdout. I basically began the process of suing them for massive damages and that ultimately was the only thing that was able to get them to change the wording.

So overall, my learning is that it genuinely scares me what government agencies can do without any evidence or judicial process. I would guess that the Bitcoin Foundation can respond with "you are wrong, please provide evidence" and get away with it for now.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Additionally there are questions regarding how clear a statute needs to be before you send people to prison for 5 years. Crime by analogy, once the bread and butter of Soviet justice, has unfortunately been becoming more common in the US (see the prosecution of Jeffrey Skilling for "honest services fraud" and the prosecution of Dr Hurwitz for unlawful distribution of narcotics).

<comment><USER4> Are you really offering up the CEO of Enron and a doctor who prescribed up to 1.6k pills per day to a single patient as victims of the big bad US Gov?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This C&D demonstrates a rather alarming ignorance about Bitcoin, and an even more alarming tendency of modern enforcement agencies to halt any activity they don't understand. It is an embarrassment to Paul T. Crayton and the State of California, and this "default deny" stance on innovation has just as much chilling effect as patent trolls.

<comment><USER6> I see it a bit differently. The system is set up so that an independent interest can raise an issue, the state requests clarification, and the resulting court cases clarify the issue.

The State isn't going to take the BitCoin Foundations word that they aren't doing anything wrong, just like they don't take the credit card processors or Treasury departments word that they are doing something wrong. So party A says "They are doing it wrong!" and the state tells party B, "Please stop what you're doing, unless you can show your not doing it wrong." That is how the system evolves its understanding and codification of things.

Sure, its obvious for something things (like murder and mayhem) but when its less obvious or more subtle then its unfair to take one side's view of the matter and declare it correct by fiat. You explore the subtleties and need to decide where to draw the line.

This is a good thing for the Bitcoin folks because it is the start of the process where the government develops a collective understanding of what Bitcoin is. That, if nothing else, validates that Bitcoin is "real" in the sense that the government must "understand" it in order to work with it. People who dislike the notions will argue its evil, and supporters will argue its beneficial and once we've talked through all the legal ramifications then its future will no longer be in doubt.

<comment><USER7> Shouldn't the burden of proof be on party A?

<comment><USER6> Party A, "This Rembrandt is the best he ever painted.", Party B, "No it's not, _this_ Rembrandt is the best he ever painted."

In these sorts of actions you aren't trying to prove a negative both parties are proving a positive, which is to say both parties are working to create a _consensus understanding_ of the interpretation of the law. In one view what these folks do is legal, in one view it is not.

What generally happens though, and looking at the history of the same sex marriage effort is really a great analog here, is that one view or another comes up short in terms of written law, new law is written with what the consensus is thinking _should be_ rather than perhaps what _is_.

Using same sex marriage as an analog, we started from "Homosexual activity is illegal" to a place where the consensus view was that you couldn't really legislate something which was innate, to "but marrying is illegal" to "well we recognize that your partnership is in many ways like a marriage" to what I expect tomorrow will be "You know, the state doesn't have any business defining the sex of the two people in a marriage." [1]

In each stage of this "conversation" (and I realize that term is not perfect but I don't have a better term for millions of people going through a process to reach consensus) we explored particular aspects of the problem. Was it the 'sex' that was wrong? Was it the 'people' who were homosexuals that was wrong? Is the definition of 'family' inextricably tied to offspring of mated individuals? Or is is broader than that? Are citizens harmed by this? Helped? How about their children? Other children? People around them? In every case one party says "It's wrong because 'reason'." and the the other party debates that reason or comes up with a different line of reasoning why its right. Jurists listen, they consider what has come before and will come after, and rule. Then we as a people consider whether or not that consensus was what we intended or want and then we create new law and the process continues.

It's slow, its ponderous, but it does converge and it allows things to move with the consensus as the consensus moves. FWIW this is the single most powerful 'feature' of our form of Government.

[1] I'll know tomorrow if I'm wrong I suspect but reading about the coverage at the Supreme Court I'm betting its going to come down on the side of same sex marriages.

<comment><USER8> You're confusing the process of drafting or modifying laws with the process of defining exactly what those laws mean in practice. Criminal courts only get involved once there's reasonable suspicion that a party has committed a crime (so far as the current legal understanding of the law), not before. You can't just say "so and so violated law A", the courts need some evidence to back up that claim. At best you might get a detective to go out and ask some questions, look around, and try to figure out if there's anything there to follow up on.

Now civil court is another matter, but the state doesn't prosecute that, so it's not really relevant to this discussion.

The court (and particularly the supreme court) is involved in interpreting the law, but they don't get to ask people to prove they haven't broken the law unless they have some kind of evidence that they did in fact already break the law. Simply claiming they "think" someone is in violation of a law based on no evidence at all falls so far short of the legal requirements to bring a case it's laughable. If somehow the government did prosecute based on no evidence at all I'd imagine there's a whole horde of lawyers that would line up to get a chunk of the wrongful prosecution lawsuit that would come of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a long time I've admired Silicon Valley and America as a whole. It had been my dream to work and create a sartup there but after all of this. After seeing how free Americans really are I am now unsure about moving there. Although America has great opportunities for people like me, it doesn't seem worth it especially since I've found out how some people get blacklisted for no reason.

PS. I hope I didn't offend anyone

<comment><USER10> Come to Texas--any of our major cities (Houston, Dallas, Austin, others) are great places to start doing business. We're full of friendly people and fairly permissive state government, our economy is quite strong and full of opportunities for people who want to work (startup or no), and the cost-of- living is actually reasonable compared with the coasts.

I'll personally plug Houston here (my colleague has already done the same for Austin). If you want to do energy, manufacturing, or medicine, you basically can't beat this town. We're a port city, we've got the largest medical center in the world, we've got tons of oil & gas folks, and great schools to pull talent from. Our food is also way better and cheaper than Austin. ;)

<comment><USER11> Isn't Texas the state that doesn't even allow you to buy sex toys?

<comment><USER12> That law was only used a few times, and even fewer times successfully. It was overturned in '08, but it was very rarely used even before then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> State money transmission laws are very strict, requiring, among other things, a bond to be posted to protect the public.

Accoring to FinCEN, anyone selling units of a decentralised virtual currency to another person for real currency is a money transmitter--so, for example, if you operated a business exchanging U.S. dollars for Bitcoins, you must be licensed. I don't know if the Bitcoin Foundation did this in California; perhaps there is some other wrinkle of state law at play here.

<comment><USER14> As you might guess, we have deep expertise on-hand for the Foundation as to MTB/MSB laws, and can confidently state we do not engage in MTB or MSB activity at the Bitcoin Foundation; we're just a member organization.

The state of California is blanket C&D-ing all Bitcoin businesses.

<comment><USER15> Given the online ads included in the letter, it appears they googled for "bitcoin" and used a screen grabber to copy/paste the law text. It's sad how messed up the CA gov't has gotten.

<comment><USER14> Yes, this seems likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the equivalent of suing the American Bankers Association for a lack of a banking license.

<comment><USER16> > This is the equivalent of suing the American Bankers Association for a lack > of a banking license.

Not really; the most obvious difference is that a C&D isn't equivalent to a suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most of the comments here are not particularly well-informed and should be ignored.

Yes, the Bitcoin Foundation (probably--I don't know anything about them other than what I've read) isn't strictly speaking a money transmitter. Yes, the California Department of Financial Institutions--which will cease to exist in 7 days when it gets merged into the California Department of Corporations--is totally ignorant of Bitcoin. But they know the law pretty well. Especially the one that they wrote. (See the name Robert Venchiarutti on the letter? He's really the one behind it. The DFI lawyers just do what they're told. They don't even like the law. Venchiarutti actually wrote it, with the help of TMSRT's lobbyists.)

That being said, the law to worry about here isn't even the one cited. It is, as I've stated quite frequently, 18 U.S.C. § 1960 ([http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426](http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426)). And that law says that you don't have to be a money transmitter to get a letter such as the one received by the Bitcoin Foundation ([http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/149335233?access_key=key-2l...](http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/149335233?access_key=key-2lnhtenm4qb1mydngxac&allow_share=false&show_recommendations=false)).

"(a) Whoever knowingly conducts, controls, manages, supervises, directs, or owns all or part of an unlicensed money transmitting business..."

The question then becomes whether the Bitcoin Foundation has any "control" or "direction" over its members and/or affiliates, who are most clearly in violation of the law under section (b). These words are vague. It could be argued that it does.

There is an extremely high chance that people will go to jail over this whether people here think it's stupid or not. It's too bad no one took me seriously when I pointed out that the MTA was going to cause problems two years ago. I've been doing the industry's dirty work ever since. It would have been a lot faster and easier with some help. Now we all have to hope that my constitutional challenge ([http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716056](http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716056)) is going to save the day. And it might, but that day may be pretty far off in the future at the current rate.

Meanwhile, everyone should really be freaking out over AB 786 ([http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB786)), presently before the California Senate, which makes the MTA worse than it already is by giving Robert Venchiarutti even more power. I've been successful in removing the clause that created a new thought crime, but the rest is still pretty bad--unless you're a payroll company. Amazing what lobbying can do.

If you want to help, click on the "Comments to Author" tab at the link above, register with the State of California, and tell Assemblyman Dickinson that the MTA should be repealed for all of the reasons I outline at [https://s.facecash.com/legal/20130225.packetnumbered.pdf](https://s.facecash.com/legal/20130225.packetnumbered.pdf): its overly broad scope, inability to sensibly regulate mobile technology, and unconstitutional nature. Money transmission takes place over the internet, which is in the domain of the federal government, not the states. See /ALA v. Pataki/, 969 F.Supp. 160 (1997), [http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1017409488915582...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10174094889155823351). Also CC: Eileen Newhall <firstname.lastname@example.com>, Mark Farouk <email@example.com>, Senator Jerry Hill <email@example.com>, Marc Hershman <email@example.com>, and BCC me: Aaron Greenspan <firstname.lastname@example.com>. If you live in California make sure to say where. Be polite.

Reading material:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308013)

<comment><USER14> A few notes about Aaron: while I agree with his perspective that Money Transmission should be a Federal issue, not a state issue,

A) He's not a lawyer;

B) He's (or at least Think Computer) is cheerfully suing a bunch of Bitcoin and Silicon Valley companies (including one I founded) over these laws, costing many startups litigation defense fees.

I do not consider him to be anything like a balanced commentator on these issues, and I also do not believe his approach to be one that is, on balance, helping California technology companies who wish to deal with payments.

<comment><USER18> >I do not consider him to be anything like a balanced commentator on these issues, and I also do not believe his approach to be one that is, on balance, helping California technology companies who wish to deal with payments.

Why not argue against the argument rather than the man? Or at least if we're arguing against men, follow up with "a few notes about Peter" so I can get a decent comparison of the men.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if Mr. Teveia Barnes (correction: Mrs) is aware of her place in history: One of the brightest minds of our generation spent years of his life developing a technology that has essentially no other purpose but to make her C&D (which we knew would come one day) completely ineffective.

(This is assuming Mrs. Teveia believes that the bitcoin foundation runs the servers that make up the bitcoin network, which I think is what this is all about.)

<comment><USER20> Just because it's technically not possible for the state of california to shut down bitcoin does not mean that the state (generic, not just cali) could not effectively kill it by outlawing businesses and individuals from dealing in it.

It would certainly end the 'bitcoin everywhere' dreams the fanatics have.

I would expect to see a lot more of this. There are a buttload of laws around money transmission and exchange, anr BTC probably breaks a lot of them.

<comment><USER19> They could certainly limit bitcoin's appeal, but that is kind of beside the point: I'm sure the automobile broke plenty of horse carriage laws, too.

If enough people find bitcoins useful (big if) they will somehow become normalized with respect to the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Freedom of choice in currencies is probably the most important free speech > issue of our time.

That sentence requires some serious mental gymnastics to agree with, which I find beyond me.

<comment><USER22> When money is just information, it's indistinguishable from speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's hard for me to reconcile how much I like living in California with how much I dislike the state and local governments here.

<comment><USER24> I know, it's like you want all the benefits and none of the costs.

<comment><USER23> I seriously doubt the government is responsible for most of the reasons I enjoy living in California vs. other areas.

<comment><USER24> Nice goalpost-shift there. I never claimed that it was.

<comment><USER23> Then I don't understand what point you were trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is an interview we did at Techendo with Constance Choi of Payward (They are building [http://kraken.com](http://kraken.com)) regarding the current legalities and regulatory landscape of virtual currencies: [http://www.techendo.co/posts/techendo- episode-8-legalities-o...](http://www.techendo.co/posts/techendo- episode-8-legalities-of-bitcoin-virtual-currency)

</comment><comment><USER26> Good luck with that. Nobody is putting that genie back into the bottle any time soon....

</comment><comment><USER27> The Bitcoin Foundation site [1] accepts donations via Bitcoin. Whose server are they using?

[1] [https://bitcoinfoundation.org/donate](https://bitcoinfoundation.org/donate)

<comment><USER28> That's irrelevant -- accepting donations isn't providing money transmission services to the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Even if they were a money transmitter, what authority does California have over a Washington based nonprofit?

<comment><USER30> The Bitcoin Foundation recently organized a large bitcoin conference in California. [http://www.bitcoin2013.com/](http://www.bitcoin2013.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does the letter advance any evidence that the Foundation is acting as a money transmitter?

<comment><USER16> C&D notices are, in theory, _courtesies_ and don't _usually_ include evidence. If you aren't doing what the C&D says that the person issuing thinks you might be doing, then you have nothing to cease or desist.

The goal isn't to convince you of the facts of your action (it may be, in part, to convince you of the impact of the relevant law), so there is no purpose to include evidence.

If they decide to file a lawsuit, _then_ evidence will become an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Sorry, you can't do this until we figure out how to tax it. And it took us 18 years to figure out how to tax Amazon..."

</comment><comment><USER33> Seriously!? Did you really thought you can send and receive untraceable money without lovely U.S. putting an end to it?

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow, a government that fails to understand technology. Shocker, that.

</comment><comment><USER35> The People's Republic of California is at it again.

</comment><comment><USER36> Only the state of California may issue phony currency, apparently.</comment>


Exceptional: Exception-Handling in C99 Using (Black?) Preprocessor Magic - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Qqwy/c_exceptional <comment><USER2> Black magic to indeed</comment>


JSON Labs Release: Native JSON Data Type and Binary Format - <AUTHOR> http://mysqlserverteam.com/json-labs-release-native-json-data-type-and-binary-format/

<comment><USER2> I feel as soon as every database supports JSON the world will move to a different data format. Like I feel a bit sad for Scala having native XML.

<comment><USER3> XML can't piggyback on the success of anything. It's just a human readable data format, and a cumbersome one at that. It make sense in certain use cases and not in others, but it has to fight it out with other data formats on its own weak merits.

JSON is the object literal format for Javascript, likely the single most widely deployed and used programming language in the world. Until paradigm shifts obsolete the web browser, JSON will be ubiquitous.

<comment><USER4> This is.... an interesting perspective. Why couldn't xml "piggyback" off of the success of html, for example?

<comment><USER5> Good point, but xml is "cumbersome" or hard and json is not (in the eyes of many). xml was widely hated before json become widely accepted while json is not as widely hated.

<comment><USER4> I definitely agree that that is the perception. So, apologies to all if my tone earlier implied any condescension.

What intrigues me is why is it so. There is a great article in one of the Programming Pearls books (so, published earlier), that goes over how providing provenance in a data format is highly useful. Yet, by and large, you can not do this in JSON, because comments are disallowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Such a strange world we live in.

NoSQL databases are adopting standard SQL interfaces and becoming more uniform.

SQL databases are adopting their own JSON interfaces and becoming more proprietary.

<comment><USER7> NoSQL databases are implementing features their users are requesting.

SQL databases are implementing features their users are requesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> JSON support is also provided by the CONNECT storage engine, which I think is much simpler.

[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/connect-json-table- type/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/connect-json-table-type/)

e.g:

      SQL > CREATE TABLE junk.j1 (a int default null)
      ENGINE=CONNECT DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8
      table_type=JSON
      File_name='j1.json';

      SQL > insert into junk.j1 (values) (1);

      $ ls $(mysql -NBe "select @@datadir")/junk
      db.opt	j1.frm	j1.json

      $ cat $(mysql -NBe "select @@datadir")/junk/j1.json
      [
    	{
    		"a": 1
    	}
      ]

I use this for generating config files, and getting data into pydata tools; no need for a database driver, which is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> They should lead with this revelation:

       You can... [create] indexes on values within the JSON columns

Ability to index changes everything.

<comment><USER10> How does pg handle this? I believe it has GIN index support on JSON columns but that can not do range queries. Is it possible to use a functional index in postgresql on JSON types too?

<comment><USER9> I just skimmed the documentation[1]. Doesn't look look like it:

       8.14.4. jsonb Indexing

       ...

       However, the [GIN] index could not be used for queries like the following:

       -- Find documents in which the key "tags" contains key or array element "qui"
       SELECT jdoc->'guid', jdoc->'name' FROM api WHERE jdoc -> 'tags' ? 'qui';

[1]: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype- json.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype-json.html)

<comment><USER11> To do a range query you would need to use a BTree index (or a GiST index that is essentially configured to simulate a BTree) over the extracted value, not on the column itself, value (exactly as is possible now in MySQL as of two months ago, as they finally caught up and got a way to do functional indexes, specifically designed for this use case). PostgreSQL has been capable of this essentially forever (if you really needed to do this ten years ago, one line of plpython to parse the JSON and extract the field would have worked perfectly and built a perfectly efficient index; just no one wanted to store this kind of stuff until MongoDB tried to push it as the future, and so no one cared to bother doing writeup on how to do that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anybody explain why the function is "jsn_extract" instead of "json_extract"? I thought it was a typo at first...

<comment><USER13> There may be some chance that json_* functions become a standard, but have different call parameters.

This design allows MySQL to implement both without the backwards compatibility concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We already have a not-particularly-transaction-safe JSON database in MongoDB.

When postgres added JSON operations it brought the sanity and robustness of its database engine to the wild west of document stores.

What's MySQL bringing?

<comment><USER15> The usual thing, the try to catch up with Postgres from five years ago.

<comment><USER6> PostgreSQL only supports indexing for JSONB so actually MySQL is ahead here.

<comment><USER14> What functional difference does this make? Do you really want to keep your JSON formatting? My guess is all MySQL does is create a shadow JSONB-like format either in-table or in the index.

<comment><USER6> According to here: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype- json.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype-json.html)

PostgreSQL doesn't preserve key ordering and strips multiple key/values pairs. I know some systems we have insist on JSON documents having a set order sequence. Also there are often legal reasons why you need the raw, unmodified data preserved.

<comment><USER16> > _Also there are often legal reasons_

If you business has legal implications on your database format, then why would you trust a NoSQL implementation?

For example - financial transactions: [https://twitter.com/seldo/status/413429913715085312](https://twitter.com/seldo/status/413429913715085312)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neat. I don't see any mention of it, but it would be nice if it also supported JSON PATCH for UPDATEs: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have a pointer to the actual internal binary format? There have been a zillion attempts to do this efficiently (JSONB, BJSON, BSON, ubjson, MessagePack) and I'm curious which one they chose.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now, i'm waiting for sqlite to add native support on json & xml data type

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice! Will this also be a feature of MariaDB?

<comment><USER21> I did a bit of digging because I was curious to the answer for this question. My understanding is that the closest thing MariaDB has currently is dynamic columns[0]. Essentially they allow you to have arbitrary key-value pairs associated with each row in a table. According to a talk from a couple years ago[1], it seems like the plan is to use this as a stepping stone toward JSON support. Note that MariaDB also supports virtual columns[2] which could be used to create indexes over dynamic columns.

[0] [https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/dynamic- columns/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/dynamic-columns/)

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/blueskarlsson/using-json-with- mari...](http://www.slideshare.net/blueskarlsson/using-json-with-mariadb-and- mysql)

[2] [https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/virtual-computed- columns/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/virtual-computed-columns/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Codd must be rolling in his grave.

I am speechless.

<comment><USER23> I get what you're saying, but these JSON features are actually indicative of a deficiency in the relational model:

The relational model has no performance model. The existence of ever more complicated query optimizers proves this. This is fundamental engineering issue, and NoSQL and JSON in MySQL are engineering hacks that address this issue for specific problems.

It's also a big usability issue. Even if you can tune your queries, indices, and schemas to remove a given performance bottleneck; it could be beyond the skills of users. NoSQL and JSON are indeed simpler.

So it would be nice to come up with a better model instead of one-off hacks, but it's hard. I think it would be cool if you could exhaustively enumerate the queries an application makes, and then the database would somehow generate the schema and indices for you, and also give the time complexity bounds for the queries. But there is kind of a chicken and egg problem there, because the queries depend on the schema.</comment></comment>


A Sun Position Paper on Software Patents, 2006 - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120520001747488

<comment><USER2> Not sure if I'm more amazed that Oracle thought deleting the evidence from their website would stop non other than Google from finding it. Or if I'm more amazed that it actually worked for so long.

How exactly does this effect the current state of the trial? When will Google have an opportunity to show this, and on what context? I thought we were just waiting for the judge to finish making up his mind and give his verdict. Is that correct?

<comment><USER3> > Not sure if I'm more amazed that Oracle thought deleting the evidence from > their website would stop non other than Google from finding it.

That's not the first time they do this, they deleted Jonathan Schwartz' entire blog in the days that followed the acquisition.

They were certainly right to think that this blog would hurt their case, but they obviously didn't realize that Schwartz' testimony itself would align with Google.

Fun times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like Groklaw has this all backwards. Android does not run Java.

So Sun's position would be that software patents would be acceptable in this case because Android is not interoperable with Java not trying to be.

<comment><USER5> That's a very interesting point!

That said, it's not quite as cut and dry, given that API compatibility goes a long way.

<comment><USER6> The patents under dispute have absolutely no relevance to the API. Regardless of whether or not they are valid/justified/infringed by Google, they are not required to make any software that's interopable with Java. Groklaw, as usual, simply tries to flaunt whatever "incriminating" evidence it can find against Oracle. Groklaw's analysis is anything but reliable as far as this case is concerned.</comment></comment></comment>


What Convergence? TV's Hesitant March to the Net - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/technology/internet/16chip.html <comment><AUTHOR> The Wiimote is the answer for web browsing from the couch. Still need a wireless keyboard if you want to type.</comment>


MSN Messenger is shutting down after 15 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/29/6082199/msn-messenger-shutting-down-15-years-history

<comment><USER2> Really the only thing that was keeping it alive in my opinion was the nostalgia factor. Makes much more sense to make everyone use Skype, I don't think they even had cross platform chat which probably could have helped ease the transition.

<comment><USER3> But they did have a protocol supported by many clients. This is very difficult/impossible with Skype. Though at least it works on the desktop, unlike whatsapp, the most idiotically crippled IM client of all time.

<comment><USER4> Sadly Pidgin ([https://www.pidgin.im](https://www.pidgin.im)) the library used by most alternative chat programs doesn't support Skype.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is a Bitcoin 2 feasible? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious, how feasible would it be to create a second currency almost exactly like Bitcoin (say Bitcoin 2) with the only difference being that its a new market (aka the barrier to entry for mining isn't so high)?<p>I haven't really been following bitcoin that much so forgive me if the answer is obvious. It seems that if Bitcoin can be successful (at least to the degree people are trading large amounts of money with it) then there should be copycat currencies popping up based on the same principles. <comment><USER2> There are more than a few already.

[http://coinmarketcap.com/](http://coinmarketcap.com/)

New ones pop up every few days.

[https://cryptocointalk.com/forum/40-new- cryptocoins/](https://cryptocointalk.com/forum/40-new-cryptocoins/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bytecoin [1] is intended to be exactly this. As others have mentioned, there are many imitators [2], many of which have innovations.

[1] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164569.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164569.0)

[2] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0)

</comment><comment><USER4> There are several other 'coins' other that do things very similarly to bitcoins but aren't necessarily the same. None of them, however, experience the same monetary value as bitcoins do. Here is a list of some of those other cryptocurrencies: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0)

</comment><comment><USER5> There are plenty of copy cat crypto currencies (+4 alliteration) already. But the question is, what value would a new currency provide over BTC? Mining difficulty is a feature of BTC in order to prevent all the coins from being mined before there is sufficient demand. IMO the market only needs one crypto currency and BTC is already the winner.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd say Ripple ([https://ripple.com/](https://ripple.com/)) can be seen as the new Bitcoin. It's a bit different though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Discussed extensively yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6706125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6706125)</comment>


5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus - <AUTHOR> http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/

<comment><USER2> Previous submission of canonical URL with lots of comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7333998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7333998)</comment>


I tried to live without the tech giants. It was impossible - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-tech-giants.html <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/IiArT](http://archive.is/IiArT)</comment>


Can You Draw a Perfect Circle? - <AUTHOR> https://vole.wtf/perfect-circle/ <comment><USER2> 97.8 after a dozen tries. Larger is easier. It's hard to correct midstream, had to just keep drawing circles.

This would be good tech for kids to improve their handwriting by copying letters... other than "O" ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Mouse or trackpad? I wonder which is better for this...</comment></comment>


There's actually reason to throw good money after bad - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/87562/theres-actually-reason-to-throw-good-money-after-bad/ <comment><USER2> It's a weird sort of effect, yes: how can people forget so much that a blind commitment to previous choices was a good idea? I tend to prefer the exploration vs exploitation paradigm for explaining sunk cost thinking: the additional investments purchase you information (see <http://www.gwern.net/Sunk%20cost> ).</comment>


Google X: Waiting for a Moonshot - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-us-jet-packs-they-promised-the-bosses-profit.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below <comment><USER3> Y'all misunderstand why Google X exists. It exists for three reasons:

1\. To obscure the fact that Google is an advertising company, first and foremost, by creating dazzling PR. The more insane the project, the better. Self-flying balloon shooting lasers from the sky? Here's 10 million dollars, go ahead and do it. Over time people lose interest, and those projects disappear into the void.

2\. To draw the "best and brightest" in with the promise that they'll work on self driving cars, only to have them repair some obscure dilapidated ad serving backend, where they'll spend years nurturing futile hope that they'll get to work on the cool stuff at some point, and wiping their tears with hundred dollar bills.

3\. To keep very senior employees from jumping ship to competitors.

If those three goals are met, actually producing a moonshot every 5 years or so would be gravy, GoogleX will exist even without producing anything at all, indefinitely.

<comment><USER4> > 3\. To keep very senior employees from jumping ship to competitors.

If I am not mistaken Bill Gates once mentioned in an interview that in the old days, Microsoft would rather pay someone to sit around than letting them work elsewhere.

<comment><USER5> And the second part of the joke is that these people usually are not real techies who produce, like Wozniak, Ritchie, Thompson, etc. but socially skilled, manipulative talking heads, who inevitable raise to topmost positions if an organization is old enough - the useless ballast of pointy haired managers. There is no better example of that kind than Balmer himself.

<comment><USER6> Excellent. Keep those characters around, then unleash them when a competitor is looking for a CEO or something. Sit back, get popcorn, watch a competitor crumble. Laugh maniacally?

It's just like that time when Marissa... nah, I was just kidding :)

<comment><USER4> If you are referring to the whole Nokia episode, don't forget it was the Nokia board itself that placed a big sum of money on Elop's contract if he managed to get someone to buy the company.

<comment><USER6> I was not thinking Elop, wasn't he more of a Trojan Horse, a smart guy planted to do evil stuff?

And anyways, I was just joking... I even mentioned that :]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What always irritated me about Google X was exactly that rhetoric around "moonshots", as if Google had discovered this completely new technique for getting stuff done.

Not only have quite a few companies and organisations successfully completed huge, ambitious, forward-looking projects; but Google _haven 't_, at least nothing remotely comparable to the actual moonshot they happily co-opt. Google has done lots of amazing stuff, but usually in a remorselessly incremental way.

Gmail and Google Maps (especially Street View) are the closest I can think of to "moonshots" in that they were big and bold improvements over what had come before. But neither one would be called a "moonshot" by Google X standards. In each case a back of the envelope estimate would be enough to show that it would work out (in technical terms, if not business terms).

So why does Google act like they're uniquely qualified to make moonshots work?

<comment><USER8> GMail and Google Maps were also both ruthlessly incremental. They seemed like big improvements over what had come before because they had incubated inside the Googleplex for a couple years before they were released, and because the competition hadn't improved in nearly a decade.

It's more that _Search_ was a non-incremental leap forwards, and that Google was basically the only company of the dot-com era that had attempted an ambitious technological goal and succeeded. Google Search really was fundamentally different from previous technologies; its main rival Alta Vista, for example, ran on a single box and used very standard text-ranking techniques, while Google thought very much out-of-the-box in terms of ranking, scale, and architecture.

Google X is very much a Larry & Sergey project, and Larry (while Eric was CEO) was often very critical of how incremental employee projects were and how they weren't taking enough risks on fundamentally different approaches.

<comment><USER7> Amazon is a much better example of a moonshot than Google search. The key idea is easy to state: an easy-to-use online store for almost anything, with fast and cheap delivery. But how on earth do you make that work in practice? You need a ton of business deals with various manufacturers and brands, you need warehouses everywhere, you need a massive delivery network... the investment required is just staggering. And indeed, for many years they were criticised for not making a profit, but the investment is clearly paying off.

<comment><USER9> At the beginning, Jeff have only thought of an online book company, instead becoming the 'Everything Store'. This legacy still exists as ASIN (Amazon Stock Indentification Number) is extended on ISBN to work on legacy systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This:

> "I'm an optimist: I believe that there is an endless supply of huge problems > affecting humanity."

combined with this:

> "I think we could meet it, but it would be more like 15 to 20 years." That > was too far away, which was why she recommended killing it.

...seem to be fundamentally at odds. Or, at the least, leave an extremely narrow sliver of projects: big problems that can be solved in under 10 years. And how many projects started out in the engineer's mind as a short task but turned into a decade-long struggle?

Also, I can't look at a picture of that guy in rollerblades without thinking of this:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/google-x-astro-teller-hbo- sil...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-x-astro-teller-hbo-silicon- valley-2016-6)

<comment><USER11> I agree. Think about the Manhattan Project: six years from concrete idea to working prototype. For three of those years, they had a significant chunk of Earth's smartest people living and working together with few distractions or outside responsibilities, an almost unlimited budget, supported by satellite sites all over the U.S. (plus Canada and Britain), logistic support supplied by the military with high priority, and, oh yeah, the motivation that if they didn't win the race Germany could rule the world.

For today's most important "moonshots," like fusion and large scale water purification and pulling lots and lots of carbon out of the atmosphere and colonizing the solar system, we might not even have the kind of clear starting point they had, where the fundamental science had been done and the rest was mostly engineering. It doesn't seem like solving these problems is compatible with any kind of near-term profit motive.

It feels like the corporate version of a lottery: if enough people buy lottery tickets, someone will win. It just probably won't be you. If enough organizations with gigantic piles of cash spend them on long-term research, life on this planet could get way better for all of us. But each organization would have to individually decide to do something whose most likely effect is just throwing money away.

So how do you convince a corporation to start buying lottery tickets?

<comment><USER12> You're better off funding research and startups directly. We need more DARPA and similar research investment funds.

<comment><USER13> how could i do that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Mr. Teller appears to be always on Rollerblades.

The article seems to confirm the rollerblades anecdote from the New Yorker Silicon Valley story [0]

>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. "Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open," Kemper said. "It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?" In the end, the joke was deemed "too hacky to use on the show."

[0] [http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon- va...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails- silicon-valley)

</comment><comment><USER15> Research divisions exist for recruitment purposes. Sometimes it's just a bait and switch, being promised "R&D" and then getting interviewed for Google Play Store once someone realizes you're not qualified enough. Other times, you work on research for six months, and then there's this team at the company that needs work from you for two years.

Ask the former MSR executive, who fixed the accounting of their losses by pointing out how people at MSR were working on regular MS commercial products too.

<comment><USER16> Eh, you've got it all backwards. You cannot get a job at X by going into the ordinary Google hiring pipeline, and in any case the Google hiring system does not hire people for specific products like Google Play Store. Furthermore, one does not freely transfer between X and Google, in either direction.

<comment><USER17> How does one get hired at X? Their jobs page just leads you to google.com/about/careers

<comment><USER18> Perhaps if you have to go to the jobs page, you are not qualified?

(It's like, if you have to ask for the price, you can't afford it?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's the thing -- well, two things, really:

1) The article mentions Obi Felton's Foundry team. This was explicitly added to solve one of the deficiencies at X: X is staffed by hardcore engineers & research scientists, not businesspeople. The Foundry team was created to add a commercialization path & process for X research, which never previously existed (except in special cases like self-driving car). That should, in theory, help bring more things to market.

2) Google is averse to investing in anything that isn't a moonshot (where I liberally define moonshot as "at least $1b or 1b users"). So many great ideas and products get shot down because they just aren't "Google scale" even though they'd be perfectly viable, and sometimes wildly profitable, businesses on their own. Because the bar for business viability is so high, lots of things aren't even tried, which is a shame.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm impressed that Google/X has been willing to give the self-driving car group enough time and money to do it right. They have about 60 self-driving cars, being driven by paid employees. They have their own proving ground. All that can't be cheap.

I'm disappointed that Google bought all those robotics companies and ran them into the ground.

<comment><USER21> > bought all those robotics companies and ran them into the ground

Did this actually happen? I know there have been cultural issues with Boston Dynamics, but the other acquisitions seem to have gone fine. Folks from Redwood, Meka, Bot & Dolly, and Holomni are still working at Google and many of the founders are director-level in the robotics groups.

<comment><USER20> Bot and Dolly had customers, yet they seem to have dropped out of the market they were serving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reading this I'm starting to wonder if they are failing too early.

I've often reached a point in fixing some object, or some code, or whatever, when I'm certain I can't do it. I'm ready to just shut it down.

But I have no choice - I have to make it work. So I keep plugging away.

And so far I've managed almost every time - despite being certain I couldn't. Now I'm smarter and no longer so certain :)

But if I got a bonus for failing - well. In each case I could easily, and convincingly, and truthfully! demonstrate it couldn't be done.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think one of the biggest problems with Google X is that they give their employees a false sense of what I consider "full freedom" which is a big component in making moonshots possible. All of the biggest tech companies in the last 20 years were not conceived within a larger corporation - <USER2> evolved out of a garage or a university. What makes Alphabet think that by fueling employees under a new division of their company is going to spin off more cash cows for them?

Also, what happens if an employee manages to produce something that does become a huge success? Will they be able to enjoy the same success as if they had spun up that idea on their own?

</comment><comment><USER24> > Waiting for a Moonshot

It sounds like they're doing interesting work.

But you don't "wait" for a moonshot, hoping something of that magnitude comes out of all but random motivation from individual team members.

You produce a moonshot by deciding to do that exact thing. Which is exactly how the actual moonshot happened.

If you have random inputs, you'll have random outputs of unknown magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Xerox pioneered the graphical interface for computers — the idea that people > could navigate with a mouse rather than typing obscure commands on a screen. > But it was a young company named Apple that turned that idea into a giant > business.

It's weird how the article fails to mentions past successes for other R&D labs. Xerox Parc also invented the laser printer which certainly made a lot of money for the company.

<comment><USER26> As a standalone device, powered by Adobe Postscript and HP PCL/JCL.

Where did the embedded version in the Star end up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The self-driving car project that came from Google X sparked the huge investment in autonomous vehicles, and gave Google a huge head start. In addition, they positioned themselves well with a large investment in Uber. The moonshot has succeeded/will succeed from a technological sense. Now they just need the right go-to-market approach.

<comment><USER28> While I don't disagree with you, I think the real credit goes to Dr. Tony Tether who was the director of DARPA for the duration of the self-driving car competitions. He set aside money for the races and helped design them. After the last race in 2007 Google acquired most of their talent from various teams.

<comment><USER27> Definitely, but to me it seems like Google was responsible for jumping on it and taking it from university research projects to a viable "moonshot." So it's much less waiting for a moonshot - they already have it - more just waiting for the launch

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if they make available the research they've done on dead projects, like the vertical farming, failed because they couldn't get staple crops to grow well enough.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you have a great idea and are actually talented, why would you want to go to Google X, rather than start a company yourself and have far more control and freedom in the open market? You could always get Google to invest later, and if you're right and successful you probably have a lot more options for investment than just limiting yourself to Google in the first place. That is, if you're really serious about your idea. Or are you just there to play with Google's money?

You don't see Elon Musk or Richard Branson clamoring to join Google X, or just about any other startup founder.

The entire premise behind Google X (save other than a hype machine) is flawed on basic principle. Seriously, what actual real thing has come out of Google X in all these years?

<comment><USER31> fallback. I assume they like doing what they do and they prefer having job security. I'd rather try moonshot projects thinking about how to develop it rather than constantly wondering about the business model and if it will be successful (read: stress). They have other people to think about that (the foundry). And they will have much more resources. While I agree that VC funding might be an analogue in a startup situation, it's just not the same. You'll still have the steady paycheck at the end of the month, no matter what

Of course, if someone is confident of their idea and wants to start their own company, they will. Just google 'ex-googler startup'

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Astro Teller. Grandson of Edward Teller.

<comment><USER33> This is only tangentially-esoterically related, but due to your comment I ran across some online book called Unsong about a Kabbalistic sweatshop in Silicon Valley. [0] It sounded like a novel humoristic idea. Apparently by coincidence the lead character is named Aaron Smith-Teller, and worked on AI at some point. And Astro Teller wrote a book about AI and also sold a movie pitch to Paramount called Golem (a Kabbalistic reference).

And Gwern posted an interesting thing on Edward Teller's Atomic Alphabet. [1]

[0] [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28589297-unsong](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28589297-unsong)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/4pzyvq/edward_telle...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/4pzyvq/edward_tellers_atom_alphabet_1946/)

<comment><USER34> It's not a coincidence; it's discussed in chapter 6 that Aaron Smith-Teller's grandfather was Edward Teller.

[http://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built- jerusalem...](http://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/)

<comment><USER33> Sorry I wasn't clear. This is the part I was referring to:

>I recently learned that Astro Teller, the real-life grandson of Edward Teller, is the head of Google X Labs. And has a degree from Stanford in "symbolic computation". And has written a fiction book about a man who creates a self-aware AI. I knew none of this when I wrote the first few chapters of this book. Needless to say, nothing is ever a coincidence.

[http://unsongbook.com/authors-note-2-podcast-llull- meetups/](http://unsongbook.com/authors-note-2-podcast-llull-meetups/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Shouldn't we say Marsshot now? :)

</comment><comment><USER36> Anybody want to take a shot at a less baity, accurate, neutral title? Preferably using representative language from the article.

<comment><USER22> Google X research lab: Waiting for a Moonshot

or

Waiting for a Moonshot at the Google X research lab

("Waiting for a Moonshot" is a prominent sub-heading in the article.)

Incorporating another subheading, perhaps:

Google X research lab: Waiting for a Moonshot after 'Failing to Fail'

or

Waiting for a Moonshot after 'Failing to Fail' at the Google X research lab

<comment><USER36> Ok, we'll use that suggestion; incorporating a subheading is a good idea. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


RockMelt: Another Day, Another New Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/27/rockmelt-new-browser/ <comment><USER2> Another day, another new idea for a browser which may or may not ever actually exist. Not impressed. If you want to make a better browser, stop talking about it and do it.</comment>


Shipping Mantra: Fix What's Broken First - <AUTHOR> http://chengsoon.com/2012/04/15/fix-whats-broken-first.html <comment><USER2> "Fix bugs first" is a principle that saved me once when a project was getting into trouble due to everybody (developer & sale people alike) willing to add features instead of fixing poorly working ones, leading to an increasing lack of quality and customers anger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another one that should be common sense is not adding people to a project that's already late.</comment>


Rackspace Cloud Offering Free New Relic Accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/02/rackspace-cloud-offering-free.php <comment><USER2> It's about time.</comment>


Making end-to-end encryption easier to use - <AUTHOR> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-end-to-end-encryption-easier-to.html

<comment><USER2> "We recognize that this sort of encryption will probably only be used for very sensitive messages or by those who need added protection. But we hope that the End-to-End extension will make it quicker and easier for people to get that extra layer of security should they need it."

We should all use this as much as possible. If not for anything else, then to make the people who really need it seem less suspicious.

<comment><USER3> That is quite a dissapointing attitude. Everyone would use it if a) it was easy. And b) if they weren't being mislead by providers that their email is so secure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could be a big deal; I can see many people using this, including me. People are generally reluctant to try end-to-end because it is rather confusing to install.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it FOSS? Other browsers could use this technology.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Apache 2.0

[https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/](https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/)

And there's more discussion on it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842233)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or maybe they could support native clients better instead of putting crypto in everyone's favourite infection vector.

<comment><USER8> What's a native client do if Google still stores all your emails, receives all your email's, etc. It's not like once you read the email in your client Google forgets it ever saw the email.....

<comment><USER9> A native client has advantages over a browser extension. For mobile devices, there isn't much choice except to use a native client for email. But that would mean open sourcing the client, if that's how you read the cleartext.

Google needs a few more pieces, like Web-of-trust facilitates by social connections and real time communication, but this is a good first step.</comment></comment></comment>