Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to zero - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/15/federal-reserve-slashes-interest-rates-zero-part-wide-ranging-emergency-intervention/ <comment><USER2> The Fed can, and will do much, much more. The signal here should be read as "whatever it takes to avoid a depression."

Among other steps, this is likely to mean:

\- Negative-yielding long-term treasuries

\- Direct purchase of stocks or ETFs, which would require congressional approval. Expect the discussions to start soon.

The steps already taken and the ones to be taken will create financial manipulation on a scale never before seen.

If the Fed loses this fight, game over.

<comment><USER3> _If the Fed loses this fight, game over._

This isn't the Fed's fight. Monetary policy won't fix this.

<comment><USER4> I'm sort of surprised they didn't try to push the issue from the bottom. give every tax filer some amount of money say, $200. A bonus for each dependent, say, $100.

pulled numbers absolutely out of thin air.

I thought the issue was money sloshing around at the bottom, a couple hundred bucks can be a big deal when you're out of work.

Ah well, I'm sure the experts have it well in hand.

<comment><USER5> It's called helicopter money. Australia and Hong Kong already announced going down this route.

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

It is very last measure as in that point you are basically admitting that capitalism has failed.

<comment><USER6> Alberta did this with a surplus once. It was great. It doesn't need to be a last resort at all

<comment><USER7> Do it every month. Call it UBI. And fund it from land tax not taxing labour, to encourage people to do actual useful things. Like manufacturing ventilators instead of playing the stock market or the land market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At this point, I'm actually starting to wonder. If we literally do nothing about the virus, or do the bare minimum, the worst case scenario based on the numbers I hear is 7.7b * 0.6 (total infections) * 0.02-0.03 (presumed mortality rate after the healthcare system collapses MINUS the rate if it doesn't), ~115m people are going to die worldwide. This appears to me to be the absolute worst case scenario given current knowledge; gradually slowing infection rates, the fact that the developing world skews younger and is less connected, etc., may make it better. That 115m will skew heavily towards the elderly, i.e. loss in days-of-life would be significantly less than you would expect.

Now, if you put value on days of human life (which you totally can do; first, as a matter of policy, you won't pay a million dollars to give a 90 year old another year of life, nor would you pay a billion to cure cancer in one teenager; second, you do it every day when you take quantifiable risks to make money or for convenience, everything from being a logger or a deep sea fisherman, to merely driving)... if you put value on human life, how much would this waste of life be worth? And how much waste of life is a worldwide recession or depression going to produce - in direct deaths, days lost by billions of people in s terrible economy, esp. if it gets to GD levels or worse, or in the developing world where it definitely will if the economy grinds to a halt; and on top of that in purely monetary terms, as people are not able to do things from buying houses to merely making ends meet, depending on the circumstances?

At this point everybody seems to admit it's beyond containment and the only thing we are trying to do is flatten the curve and prevent the deaths. Is entering a recession, or worse a depression and risking a total collapse really worth it? I am starting to doubt it.

PS. Frankly this reminds me of plane crash reporting. Everybody is, comparatively speaking, overreacting because the event is visible and distinct, even though many more people die in cars every day.

<comment><USER9> Sidestepping the issue of how much a human life is worth you are also missing that the death rate would skyrocket if everyone gets sick and needed treatment at the same time.

<comment><USER10> It's also ignoring the fact that no one can be sick from any other cause during the next nine months because hospitals will be at capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not only that but they've removed the reserve requirements entirely for "thousands" of banks. There are only ~4500 commercial banks in the USA total. So that's at least a good fraction of them. These banks can now create money out of nothing as much as they want.

<comment><USER12> Reserve requirements never really limited the ability of banks to create money. Canada hasn't had reserve requirements for >20 years. Neither does the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden and Hong Kong. But all banks are indeed subject to capital requirements, and that does limit money creation

Anyway, reserve requirements are generally not effective, including in the USA. Much has been written about this. Banks are usually not reserve constrained (especially post QE), there are many ways to game reserve requirements, there are many ways to get reserves when you need them, and central banks increase reserves systematically when they are in demand via interest rate mechanisms.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement#Countries_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement#Countries_and_districts_without_reserve_requirements) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III) [3] [http://www.kreditordnung.info/docs/S_and_P__Repeat_After_Me_...](http://www.kreditordnung.info/docs/S_and_P__Repeat_After_Me_8_14_13.pdf) [4] [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=9075](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=9075) [5] [http://macromusings.libsyn.com/marc-lavoie-on-canadian- centr...](http://macromusings.libsyn.com/marc-lavoie-on-canadian-central-bank- policy-real-time-payments-and-the-post-keynesian-tradition)

<comment><USER13> Reserve requirement were at 10%.

What happens now if someone deposits $100,000, the bank lends out $100k because it can, and the someone tries to withdraw their money?

<comment><USER12> > Reserve requirement were at 10%.

This is very simplistic. 10% of what? Checking account deposits? Savings account deposits? If savings and checking accounts have different reserve requirements (and afaik they do), then depositors just moving money back and forth between different kinds of accounts can change the bank's required reserves. Banks also have flexibility on how they report their accounts.

Furthermore, the reserve requirement is enforced across a 2 week period. Banks don't need to have all the required reserves all the time, just some of the time.

And what if they don't meet the requirement? Is it that they are forced to close by regulators, or do they just pay a penalty? If it's the latter, then how often in practice do banks actually meet their requirements? Because it might be cheaper to pay the penalty than to meet the requirement.

> What happens now if someone deposits $100,000, the bank lends out $100k > because it can, and the someone tries to withdraw their money?

No one's doubting that banks need cash on hand to meet the demands of their depositors, and that they need assets to use for net settlement with other banks. But cash demand on any given day is probably much lower than 10% of deposits (and afaik, the reserve requirements don't expect banks to hold anywhere near 10% of deposits in cash). As for inter-bank settlement, there are a lot of ways to get sufficient liquidity, including borrowing on the repo market and the overnight market.

Holding reserves costs banks opportunity-cost (because they only earn interest-on-reserves, which for most of US history was 0). And there is no shortage of safe, liquid assets out there (US government debt). Even mortgage debt is liquid. And there are tons of reserves sloshing around there, due to QE.

So banks are definitely not reserve constrained... not even close. But banks might be capital constrained. There's a big difference between reserve requirements and capital requirements.

But in many cases, banks might be constrained by neither. They are probably constrained by a lack of demand from lenders. There are not enough people to lend to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My "high interest" savings accounts already took a recent haircut and this will accelerate that. I understand that's the idea: make investing attractive and savings unattractive. But for a regular joe like me, this is exactly the time I want to be saving more so it stings.

<comment><USER15> What do you think is the difference between saving and investing??

<comment><USER16> Saving is preservation of capital whereas investing is growing capital. At least that is my take.

<comment><USER15> Ok, but parent is lamenting that "saving" pays less than "investing". You're saying that's implied by the (or your) definition so it seems like it would go without saying.

<comment><USER17> It's not that saving pays less than investing; it's that it's paying almost nothing right now. Savings account interest rates are terrible, which is very frustrating if you want to have some cash reserves.

I'm not going to put my 6 month emergency fund or the downpayment for my future house into stocks and ETFs; they're too risky. It hurts to keep it in a savings account paying less than 1% though, which is the alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> SARS-CoV-2 doesn't care about monetary policy. Why not give money directly to the people who need it? They'll spend the money right away.

I'm willing to sacrifice my 401(k) and retire on just SS if need be if my government is willing to help everyone worse off than me.

<comment><USER19> Curious why you need to government involved? Why not just take your money out of your 401(k) yourself? You'll suffer a penalty, but people are in need.

<comment><USER20> Because uncoordinated individual action is ineffective against large scale problems, which should be obvious right now.

<comment><USER19> If he gave his money to a few people in need, it would be effective for _them_ , wouldn't it? And probably better spent then after going through the tangled mess of government bureaucracy. What more could you hope for?

<comment><USER18> The GoFundMe model of health insurance and welfare doesn't work. It's my government's job. It's why we have social security and medicare and Medicaid and TANF, etc, in the first place. I can't do it alone.

Promoting the general welfare is right in the preamble of our constitution:

> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, > establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common > defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to > ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for > the United States of America.

And in the letter of transmittal, Washington wrote:

> Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to > preserve the rest. The magnitude of the sacrifice must depend as well on > situation and circumstance, as on the object to be obtained. It is at all > times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which > must be surrendered, and those which may be reserved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMHO this is a really bad idea. Let's hope they raise them slowly this time, unlike 2007-8 when they went back up quickly and triggered mayhem.

<comment><USER22> Don't know why this is downvoted. Cutting interest only benefits the wall street in the next couple months. Basically this admin only knows two things: 1, Cut interest rate 2, Cut tax And it doesn't care if the world explodes after they step down.

<comment><USER23> Most republican administrations have displayed that "get mine and get out" behavior--causing recessions--since Teddy Roosevelt.

<comment><USER24> Obama's admin let one of the world's foremost financial institutions fail and caused a mass market panic / giant economic setback. Their reasoning was entirely political and caused millions of people to lose their jobs. I'm independent, but claiming that Republicans cause recessions is pretty ironic considering the economic damage the last Democratic admin did.

<comment><USER25> Yes, Obama was President from 2000 to 2008 when the Fed let the subprime lending happen with stupid monetary policies. The crash happened in 2008 when Bush was still President.

A few days later, Lehman Brothers began to falter. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who in July had publicly expressed concern that continuous bailouts would lead to moral hazard, decided to let Lehman fail. The fallout from Lehman's failure snowballed into market-wide panic. AIG, an insurance company, had sold credit default swaps insuring against Lehman's failure under the assumption that such a failure was extremely unlikely.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Financial_crisis_and_Great_Recession)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Stopping production for a significant period of time was the first gut punch covid is throwing. The second one seems to be landing on Europe and third will be North America.

This means China will have a head start on getting supply up and running.

If the ROW is at a standstill in production, China will fill that gap which could further displace a lot of production in the west.

China getting containment in order didn't bounce back but also bounce ahead in many places.

<comment><USER27> I think that may be plausible. But I also think that a lot of companies relying on Chinese manufacturing all suddenly saw they had all their manufacturing eggs in one basket.

I'm not suggesting that we should move manufacturing back to US, but we should diversify. I'm seeing that some of my suppliers have already moved to other Asian countries. I expect that diversification to continue.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. The fallout from this, beyond loss of life and impact to day-to-day, will be really interesting and will seem obvious in hindsight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dumb question: does this mean normal citizens can take out loans at near-0% interest, or something close to that? I know credit card interest rates are typically tied to "the fed rate" but a but higher?

<comment><USER29> The Fed rate is the interest rates that the Fed pays banks for their deposits in the Fed. By lowering it, they're incentivizing the banks to loan the money and provide liquidity into the market. Since banks need to make a profit on everything, they'll loan the money out at a higher rate for things like mortgage, car loans, and credit cards. Depending on the credit worthiness and the collateral, the rates will differ (mortgage lower than an unsecured credit card). Ultimately, the Fed lowering the rates will lower all interest rates, but you'll never get to 0% as a consumer.

<comment><USER30> >but you'll never get to 0% as a consumer.

Unless we see negative fed rates. Not that I think going so negative we see consumer level 0% mortgages is likely.

<comment><USER31> Ironically, much of the tax advantage of owning vs renting is embodied in the mortgage interest tax deduction. If there were no interest, obviously it would be a good deal, but would not have the additional benefit of tax avoidance that it does at present.

<comment><USER32> Much of the tax avoidance from primary residence property has been removed from the tax code already due to the TCJA. Not all of it, but most of it. It also makes no sense to have a mortgage for the tax break. Rentals have depreciation and the interest remains deductible as an expense on them there, so that isn't really an issue.

<comment><USER33> Regarding tax avoidance from primary residence, what specifically? I can still deduct mortgage interest. Are you talking about not itemizing some home ownership expenses (like what?) because standard deduction increase? Just wondering what I'm missing..

<comment><USER34> You can't deduct it with the new larger standard personal deduction, only if you itemize. The Trump tax bill was a reform made the mortgage deduction moot for about 20 million taxpayers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the issue is cash-flow. So the govt should do things to mitigate cash- flow. Such as pause rent/mortgage payments for 2 months for anyone that is out of work due to this.

<comment><USER35> It maybe works for mortgage as government deals with banks regularly.

But what if you rented from an individual owner who needs your rent? Liberalized (without proving that you are looking for a job for let us say next 3 months) unemployment insurance may be a better solution that keeps the economy churning.

<comment><USER27> I agree it's not as simple as only mortgage freeze. But if the land lord needs the rent, probably that's for their mortgage. But yes, I agree better unemployment insurance is a good idea.

<comment><USER36> A mortgage freeze would save the landlord and they wouldn't need the rent. If they need the rent when their mortgage payment is frozen, then they're not a good landlord. Chances are, they won't be a landlord for long when the lender calls the loan due as well.

Let's not offload the onus on landlords personally responsibility to manage their finances. If they don't have a mortgage to pay, they'll get by just fine if they can't collect rent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This feels like the end of an era - an era that ran from the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the appearance of Covid-19. A global era, a largely peaceful era, a profligate era, and an era of growing inequality. Who knows what comes next...

</comment><comment><USER38> Does this interest rate transfer to lower mortgage rates? Is now a good time to refinance loans?

<comment><USER39> It will, but not just yet. There's too many people trying to refi right now and supply can't keep up with demand, so rates are higher than they should be. Give it another 3-6 months and I wouldn't be surprised if mortgage rates fell by another 1%.

<comment><USER40> There must be some floor based on default rates right? If 2% of people default you can't go below 2%. And of course default rates go up in recessions.

<comment><USER39> I personally don't think there's a floor, all that matters is spread over treasuries. If we go with your 2% number, that's the spread between the mortgage risk and the risk-free rate. If risk-free goes to -1%, then it'd make sense for mortgages to go to 1%. This is something that already happens in European countries. I don't think there's an inherent reason for the risk-free rate to be a positive number.

On a different note, 2% default != 2% loss. Mortgages are secured by the property, losing investors only a small fraction in foreclosure, so a 2% default * 25% severity = 0.5% loss.

<comment><USER40> All very good points! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In the context of Covid, wouldn't lowering economic activity help keep people home?

It seems more than "just" saving lives. Purely economically, wouldn't a crashed health care system hurt the economy for a longer term?

<comment><USER42> A depression can kill a _lot_ more people than COVID-19. This is why the state of California just told young, healthy people to continue to visit restaurants for now as long as tables are six feet apart.

This is not just an idea from thin air: they're doing lots of projections on models of what is actually going to do more harm.

Think of it this way: if the economy shrinks by 30%, that means we have to spend 30% less on everything. That's 30% less funding for wellness, hospitals & emergency services. 30% less that people spend on self-care like gym memberships. 30% less on gasoline to get to outdoor activities. If your food budget drops by 30%, there's a good chance you're going to eat less healthy foods. If people are going out 30% less often, you will see increases in both physical and mental illness ,as we know that social contact improves health.

This is why the Twitter meme of "everybody panic and go home and stay there for three weeks" may actually do a lot more harm than good even if it helps slow the spread of COVID-19.

 _Unless you think your state and county leadership is incompetent, follow their advice, as they are best informed about the local conditions._

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is not going to help

\- It takes two years for monetary supply changes to fully propagate through the economy

\- Cutting rates to 0% has not been effective in Japan or Europe

The fed does have a role to play here

\- They can provide liquidity to the market

\- They can serve as a backstop in a time of crisis

DC needs to get their shit together

\- Eliminating Trump's tariffs would do more to increase long-term investment than cutting rates to 0%

\- They should have created targeted lending program to help businesses that need short-term cash flow assistance yesterday; the next best time to do it is right f __*ing now

<comment><USER43> As someone said before, I think this is more about sending a message, as in "we're going to do whatever it takes". To be honest I don't know what the future will hold from a financial/economics point of view, but imho this is an once-in-a-century crisis.

<comment><USER24> You're right, and they made a lot of changes that are necessary to keep the global economy functioning over the next few months. I did not mean to imply that they shouldn't be taking action.

I am very skeptical about cutting rates again. There are much more effective actions that could be taken at the policy level. The fed is doing what it can, but it doesn't have the right tools to lead the charge on this.

<comment><USER43> Yeah, this should definitely be teamed up with corresponding fiscal and trade policies, the Fed cannot sort all of this mess by itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Original source: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20200315a.htm)

</comment><comment><USER45> Imagine if Trump had tried as hard to contain coronavirus as he's trying to pump markets rn

<comment><USER46> I have to agree. A full lockdown of the country with a return to normal at the speed China achieved would do more than fooling around with interest rates. In the current situation, there's not much productive a business can do with more loans anyway.

<comment><USER47> They won't come out and say it, but the plan is to let the virus slow roll through the population of young/healthy to build up herd immunity. Some will die, but it will be better in the long run. You can tell that's the plan as they're talking about "flattening the curve." The area under the curve is the same, but they want to allow it to slow roll through the population so we don't over load the healthcare system.

Compare this "flattening the curve" plan to what China has done. They have gone full on "shut down everything" and isolated the whole country. Their idea is to eradicate the virus in the country. This is a worse plan because it means they will not have herd immunity, though they may transition to that plan as time moves forward.

This is why a full shutdown of the country is a bad idea. What happens then is when you start opening the country up there's a whiplash effect and it starts spreading rapidly again. For what it's worth, the UK publicly announced this is their plan. I forget the stat but they said they plan to let 40 or 60% of their population get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why is this warranted yet? This is a terrible that will only signal that the fed is panicking and nothing else. There are no indications that the supply chain is disrupted or that the economy is sputtering. It will happen at some point in the next few weeks with or without the infusion and rate cuts now. These things are much better done when warranted rather than now. As of now it's only a humanitarian crisis and only thing that will help is effective communication to contain the pandemic. These infusions now will soon be forgotten by the next bad news and the effect will not persist.

<comment><USER22> Earlier this weekend Trump said he could have fired Powell but choose not too. Imagine you were Powell, what would you do?

<comment><USER49> Somehow I doubt Powell is living paycheck to paycheck. Professionals shouldn't cave under pressure that's why they make the big bucks. This is only a rebuttal to the "what would you do?" I have no idea whether or not he was pressured or if this is a good or bad move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> We need fiscal stimulus, and we need it yesterday. Time to put money in people's pockets.

</comment><comment><USER51> Bank runs are coming. We are witnessing financial collapse and possibly the early failure of the American empire. Futures trading was halted today. Market will tank tomorrow. That's after a $1.5T stimulus. This is it.

<comment><USER52> This comment won't age well.

No bank run is coming, and we are not witnessing financial collapse, nor the failure of the American empire.

<comment><USER51> The fed had now pushed one $1.5T stimulus package and lowered rates to zero in an absolutely desperate attempt to prop up a market when the entire country is about to shut down - what are they propping up when no one is going to spend any money?

Don't believe me? China. Iran. Italy. Spain. Austria. Multiple Nordic countries. Nationwide shutdown. Coming to a state near you.

300MM people just panicked at the same time, and the stores have been empty for two days. Imagine what's going to happen when they all discover fractional reserve banking.

<comment><USER51> Just documenting for the future: today the NYSE halted at least once and Dow dropped 13%. PA announced shutdown of all non essential businesses.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk Unveils Boring Co's First Tunnel - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-elon-musk-tunnel-20181218-story.html <comment><USER2> Version of article that can be viewed from EU: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/elon-musk-unveils-boring- com...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/elon-musk-unveils-boring-company- tunnel.html)

LA Times version says: "Not available in your region"

<comment><USER3> Thats a different article. The LA times one discussed is archived here: [http://archive.is/VcFEe](http://archive.is/VcFEe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "Still, the $10 million is orders of magnitude lower than a typical subway > project, Musk said."

Umm, and the capacity of these tunnels is also orders of magnitude lower than a subway. It would also be a lot harder to use and available to far fewer people. This entire idea should be laughed out of existence, but despite everything, Musk still gets fawning coverage for any crazy idea he spouts.

Maintenance will be impossible. Breakdowns of any sort would go from being annoyances to a few to being catastrophic failures for the system. Even if the tunnels never degraded, even if no car ever had a flat tire in the middle of the tunnel, and even if you could actually achieve 150mph (which would be extremely unpleasant for the passengers anyway), you couldn't physically fit enough cars through the tunnel to compare to real transit system. Given that this thing requires rigging something up to your vehicle, the onload and offload points would immediately become major bottlenecks to any serious throughput even if you could cram them in bumper to bumper.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > Umm, and the capacity of these tunnels is also orders of magnitude lower > than a subway.

Even assuming that capacity/dollar is actually worse than subways, they can still be economically superior, for the same reason solar+battery is beating nuclear. The ability to incrementally build capacity relatively quickly and with relatively low, incremental costs beats any system that requires billions of initial investment and only comes online in the timescale of decades.

And I really don't think that capacity/dollar will be worse than subways, assuming that he intends to build off-ramps for leaving the system, as alluded to in the stream. Simply removing the need to stop at every exit greatly improves capacity, and while the capacity of an individual tunnel is still much worse than a single subway tunnel, they can just build more.

> Maintenance will be impossible. Breakdowns of any sort would go from being > annoyances to a few to being catastrophic failures for the system. Even if > the tunnels never degraded, even if no car ever had a flat tire in the > middle of the tunnel, and even if you could actually achieve 150mph (which > would be extremely unpleasant for the passengers anyway), you couldn't > physically fit enough cars through the tunnel to compare to real transit > system.

You seem to be assuming a single tunnel per direction. Assume 20 instead. Suddenly a car failing in the tunnel turns from a catastrophic failure into one that causes some traffic to have to take a little extra time as they back their way to the closest cross-tunnel, and a relatively minor loss of capacity until a recovery vehicle can come pull the broken one out.

And as Musk said like a dozen times in the stream, he intends to match a real transit system not by increasing capacity per tunnel, but by starting building tunnels and then not stopping until there are no more traffic issues. Since he gets to expand in three dimensions, he can just stack them on top of each other.

> Given that this thing requires rigging something up to your vehicle, the > onload and offload points would immediately become major bottlenecks to any > serious throughput even if you could cram them in bumper to bumper.

Their demo had the "subway wheels" deploy automatically, while in the elevator. For high-throughput exits, they probably need to bite the bullet and just build off-ramps.

<comment><USER5> > You seem to be assuming a single tunnel per direction. Assume 20 instead.

I think this is the really important part. Think of it like a computer bus - do you want a single channel able to move a lot of data at once but with potential bottlenecks as various systems fight to talk to each other, or lots of channels able to move medium amounts of data without bottlenecking one component while favouring another?

When one channel is at capacity you move to the next, with further redundancy to spare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If they manage to reduce the cost of tunnel boring then that's super exciting and I congratulate them.

But all this discussion of what to put in the tunnel seems very silly to me. Are they just re-discovering subways? Do they know that there are subways in the world (e.g. Paris) that run out rubber tires?

<comment><USER7> Tunneling is currently so expensive that there are few companies doing any innovation on how to properly utilize them. A big part of the problem is actually digging them in a way that is cheap and scaleable. Another part of the problem is the organizations doing the digging and doing the exploitation are typically have misaligned incentives and goals.

For example, expanding subway systems is currently in the hands of very badly run semi government institutions who are arguably quite bad at even utilizing the tunnels they have. E.g. the new york subway system is famously less efficient than ever due to the fact that they keep reducing the speed at which trains travel through it. Digging new tunnels is relatively rare for them; and when they do dig new tunnels, they tend to just use them exactly the same way as their existing tunnels, which is not very efficiently. Also, like most government infrastructure projects, progress is slow and things tend to go way over budget.

Musk's approach is twofold: 1) turn tunnel digging into a scaleable business. 2) provide concrete things to do with these tunnels that are not backwards and stupid that he can sell. For example, if you have autonomous vehicles, you don't need a lot of expensive infrastructure inside the tunnels to get from A to B. Infrastructure like rails, signaling equipment, power lines for the trains, etc. It so happens he has a business for autonomous vehicles already. He sells the whole package. That's why he's emphasizing the use cases.

This is classic Musk, he thinks end to end an he might actually pull it off.

<comment><USER8> You're comparing a difficult but real situation with a perfect but hypothetical one.

Things always are wonderful when they're research projects that don't need to conform to real-world limitations.

<comment><USER9> > difficult but real situation

His first argument is that it's currently too expensive to have any innovation. This tunnel cost 10 millions $. Sure it's usage is still hypothetical, but you can't say this won't be much more accessible to innovate.

I'm in Montreal, our subway barely changed in the past 30 years. I was lucky, I was affected by one of the only change they did in theses 30 years, 3 more stations on an already completely full line. That came with a 745m$ price for 3 stations that sure allowed people further to take it, but it didn't increase at all the actual capacity. It's hard for any of our administration to even consider any major expansion because of that.

If making smaller projects now make sense, maybe we will see more innovation in the technology, in how they are handled, etc...

<comment><USER10> Maybe I can provide a bit more context re: Montreal.

Montreal's metro throughput is not gated by the tunnel capacity. It is gated by the amount of trains in operation. Adding additional cars on the 'already full line' would increase the line's capacity. Neither the orange nor the green line are close to full.

The issue with the orange line extension isn't that the lines are full. It's that 1) subway costs are heavily subsidized at the municipal and provicial level, 2) they were extended to Laval which funds the STL, not the STM, and 3) there was no revenue or cost sharing agreement between Laval and Montreal to subsidize the STM in proportion to the burden placed on the STM by Laval riders.

This issue with cross-subsidization also lies at the core of the municipal agglomeration which occurred in Quebec metropolitan regions.

Montreal won't consider additional subway expansion not because of financial and infrastructure cost reasons, but because of political ones, much in the same way that internal negotiations regarding the dual super-hospital projects were intentionally sabotaged for political reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this safe? I didn't see any escape paths. What happens if there is a fire and you are in the sixth tube down?

Electric trains are considered quite safe yet tunnels have a lot of escape paths and service tunnels built parallel to the main one.

<comment><USER12> It is not, per general EU regulations no 'single bore' tunnel can be longer than 1km (0.62miles0. Tunnels that are longer than that, either have to be double tunnels, with escape doors between them, or one large tunnel and an emergency smaller one.

This looks the size of a emergency tunnel. Still, the cost of building it seems pretty low. Boring Co could build two side by side, (one for each direction) and have emergency hatches between them.

<comment><USER13> Yeah practically I think there's almost always going to need to be two tunnels side by side, given density of stations and the need for long distances to slow vehicles down as they exit from the main tunnel (up to 150mph) to the stations. It may be that stations wind up quite a bit denser than one every mile- certain parts of LA could use them every 1/4 mile really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Twitter thread on the physics to go 150mph in this tunnel:

[https://twitter.com/Model_4_/status/1075270290978963458?s=19](https://twitter.com/Model_4_/status/1075270290978963458?s=19)

Note that air resistance is a much bigger problem in a cheap, narrow tunnel.

<comment><USER13> I imagine it'll also probably be hell on tires. You'd need W- or Z-rated tires to do that and those are $$. Perhaps smooth concrete will mean lower rolling friction along with lack of sudden maneouvers. Still, going that fast is expensive in all sorts of ways.

<comment><USER6> People go 250 kmh on German highways regularly (unfortunately). It doesn't seem to be unpractical.

<comment><USER15> And whats the speed limit in German tunnels? In case you don't care to find out: 80-100 km/h (50-60 mph)depending on the state.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but my point was whether the price if the tires is a show stopper or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It will come down to cost to build and time to build...

I took 2 tunnels to and from the airport today. Each way, over $10. But I'm damn glad I took them because they go all the way from north of the city, to south of the city, including under the river, where our bridges are massive bottleneck.

I saved at least 30' and a lot of sanity, and this was before work. I'd be dead tired if I had to deal with traffic jams for 45'.

Heck I'd even chose a bumpy tunnel over the surface.

<comment><USER17> Sydney?

<comment><USER18> Sounds a lot like it. I used to commute from Alexandria to the North Shore, and though I couldn't afford the Eastern Distributor every day, I did like that it was always there if I was in a hurry to make an appointment or if I just wanted to treat myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the sort of moronic "solution" one arrives at when they're unwilling to abandon the constraint of car ownership.

</comment><comment><USER20> Are they really boring tunnels cheaper and faster than traditional construction companies though? Seems like that's the real goal with the company.

<comment><USER13> Yes, mentioned in live stream was that other co's only spend 1/5 the time actually boring and the rest on logistics of putting up retaining walls and the like. Part of Boring Co innovation is to automate that and keep the borer working all the time. Also they 3x'd the energy output of the boring machine vs competitors. Should add up.

<comment><USER21> That's all still speculation, isn't it? IIRC this tunnel was built with a boring machine from a competitor.

<comment><USER13> It's mostly speculation for sure. I forgot what parts were real from the live stream (the 3x power output was real) but it seemed like this is mostly the rapid learning and planning stage.

Buying a competitors device is a really smart move as a first step, since much of the low hanging fruit gains are in the activities around the machine to save that 4/5s of time when it's idle. As a startup it's almost always best to bootstrap with the competition's product if you can, makes rate of learning so much faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The tone of the article is surprisingly hostile. Maybe I'm just used to Canadian media.

<comment><USER23> American culture has shifted in the last decade to be extremely critical and scathing towards anyone or anything that attempts to change the status quo - even if it's an attempt to make things better.

See all the negative comments in this thread, for example.

Instead saying "Jeez, this looks interesting. I'm happy some billionaire is trying to fix the horrible traffic problem instead of just buying more McMansions and yatchs. It seems complicated and I'm not sure it will work because of reason x, y and z, but it will be cool to watch!"

The collective American voice is now: "Stupid! Will never work! Waste of time!". (And angrily at that)

It's a real shame, because people who genuinely try to make life better for others are rare, and America needs all of them they can get!

<comment><USER24> Elon Musk is hardly starved of hero-worshippers

<comment><USER23> Sure, but what percentage of the US population do you think hero-worship him vs. what percentage hate his guts?

5/95?

1/99?

<comment><USER24> I've not seen anything that would suggest either ratio.

<comment><USER23> So what's your guess?

<comment><USER25> Opinion about Elon Musk seems to be polarized in places like HN. Haven't heard of normal people caring substantively about him, certainly not in a way describable as "hating his guts".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worth considering that a single family luxury car is not the only vehicle type that could be in these tunnels.

Automation allows for all sorts of new options in vehicles. This is a platform and many services can sit atop it. No reason why people can't develop a carpooling service for 6-12 person vans and run those on this. Or services that travel to clients rather than visa versa.

Also, and very important to the cost argument, is that system cost is offset by individuals and external services purchasing fleets. This makes it a lot more practical a transit option to build than typical public transit or freeway fixes which require multi-year, multi-billion dollar outlays and consequent decision making apparatus. Consider what properties an ideal transit option has:

a) easy to add very incremental capacity (vs big long projects)

b) doesn't have to deal with right of way

c) shares costs with private market & individuals

d) can reach any location point-to-point

e) offers broad access to citizens

Seems this + autonomous fleets serving different market segments and needs has these properties. If it works.

<comment><USER26> Why would I take a van if I could take my own luxury car? If I was going to take a van I might as well take the subway. It would probably be more comfortable and roomy.

<comment><USER13> If there's no subway nearby, how would you do that?

Also not everyone can afford a luxury car.

Just imagine lyft, lyft line, and a bigger lyft line. They can all coexist.

<comment><USER27> > If there's no subway nearby, how would you do that?

So here's an idea - how about they run subway trains in these tunnels instead like they do in the rest of the world?

<comment><USER9> > So here's an idea - how about they run subway trains in these tunnels > instead like they do in the rest of the world?

So here's an idea, why is there no subway trains there? Easy answers, not enough money/value into them.

He suggest a way to add value to the system, by allowing luxury cars to go through them and save traffic time. It's also a way to keep your car before and after the path, which can't happen in a subway. Theses add values.

Smaller tunnels can also be much more cost effective and can be done in an iterative way, based on the actual needs of the system. In Montreal (my city) that's a big issue where we just can't get the funds to improve our subway system because it's just so much money which is hard to justify. Our government pension program is currently funding a pretty big improvement in our transit system because THEY have the funds to do it and it's going to be profitable to them. They made it profitable to invest into our infrastructure and yet the freaking government can't do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _" But Musk told reporters that Boring officials have abandoned the concept > of the skate, saying it was "far more complex" than his new plan: guide > wheels that can be attached to the front tires of autonomous, electric cars, > steadying the vehicles as they move forward through tunnels."_

So basically this only works with Tesla vehicles at the moment. I'm wondering how that's going to expand in the future--if at all.

Do they have a standard which other vehicle manufacturers are expected to include in their car designs to be compatible with these tunnels?

This is making me question the viability of it, because without buy-in from manufacturers, it seems seriously unlikely that any government is going to approve a sprawling Tesla Guide Wheel Tunnel™ network.

<comment><USER29> Doesn't the removal of the skate also put the vehicle's speed back in the hands of the driver? So now one slow guy will slow down everyone in that tunnel?

Also, the skate was supposed to provide the automation. How does <random EV> autonomously navigate the tunnel network?

<comment><USER30> It's a Musk thing; not sure why you necessarily expect it to make any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The elevators in and elevators out are the bottleneck.

Then inside it looks like a safety and escape hazard nightmare. What happens when someone gets a flat tire?

<comment><USER13> Seems like it needs to be centrally controlled automation so they'd be able to adjust fleet speed in relevant area for any issues that arose.

Flat tire seems easy, probably a limp home mode to nearest exit + slow down nearby fleet. There should be many exits and relatively close to each other since they're so low cost.

I'm more concerned about fire & earthquake.

<comment><USER32> Generally speaking tunnels are much safer than outside due to the lack of falling debris. And the fire issue is solved my any half decent sprinkler / ventilation system.

<comment><USER33> Isn't water a no-go if it's a lithium battery fire?

<comment><USER34> No, for a battery fire it's quite the opposite. It's going to release all of that stored energy and burn up the electrolyte one way or another. Flooding it with water is the best way to deal with all of that energy.

<comment><USER35> Releasing highly flammable hydrogen gas is definitely not "dealing with the energy". Both electrolysis and the reaction of water with lithium release plenty of it.

<comment><USER34> You're mistaken on that. Electrolysis is going to be far too slow to actually amount to any substantial amount of hydrogen and even if that wasn't the case burning all of that hydrogen would release only as much energy as it already took away from the reaction. Burning 100% of the hydrogen produced would still put you at a net 0 change in energy. For every joule worth of hydrogen that escaped without burning that's a joule of energy that you no longer have to deal with. Also it's a shorted out battery pack we're talking about. The voltage potential isn't going to be anywhere near as high as it would normally and if it was they you wouldn't have a flaming battery pack in the first place.

As to the notion that there's lithium metal in the batteries that could react with the water, you're thinking of non-rechargeable lithium batteries. Lithium ion cells use a lithium compound, not just pure elemental lithium. The formulation might be something like LiFePO4 but the point here is that it's not just lithium metal sitting around inside of it.

Also Tesla has an emergency response guide that includes instructions on fighting a battery fire. It's on page 22 (23 of the PDF) and it makes it clear that you want to douse the thing in as much water as possible and keep dousing it until it's totally gone. Tons of water is exactly what's called for when fighting these kind of fires.

[https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2016_Mod...](https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2016_Model_S_Emergency_Response_Guide_en.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is digging down really cheaper than going up?

Chicago has got an elevated train [0] and even double decker streets [1] and those don't have lots of the problems that tunnels do like ventilation, escape tunnels, and moving all the dirt.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%22L%22](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%22L%22)

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

<comment><USER37> But man is that train loud...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> One of the things I don't get about this concept is how they plan to avoid the surface bottleneck - if everyone's trying to get into the same number of limited holes in the road, then there's more and more congestion and traffic wanting that access. To make a 3d network of roads work, you'd also need a 3d network of buildings, other wise it's not really solving any problem.

</comment><comment><USER39> The big win from this experiment would be better tunneling technology. The tunnels and the sled system itself can fail, but if we walk away from this with tunneling tech that can meet Elon's claims by even 50%, it's a massive win

</comment><comment><USER40> The video of the launch event: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GrUJo9ofJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GrUJo9ofJg)

</comment><comment><USER41> First thing I noticed, why is there a loose hanging cable on the side of the tunnel, plus how will a slightly taller car fit? Seems there is plenty of work still to be done.

<comment><USER42> The goal was to bore the hole, and that's what is being announced. You sure as hell can't drive in it today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> [http://archive.is/VcFEe](http://archive.is/VcFEe)

<comment><USER44> Or you know, Musk planned this ahead. You want to sell more cars of your brand? Build their own roads exclusively for them!

<comment><USER13> It's explicitly not Tesla exclusive. Doubt regs would allow that anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What happens if a car breaks down in the tunnel?

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know the track width? It's more likely to become a global standard if they picked a nice number in meters.

<comment><USER47> Why would that be? The nearest thing to a global standard rail gauge is standard gauge and it isn't a simple number in either SI, 1.435 m, or US Customary units: 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard- gauge_railway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway)).

There might already be a standard of some kind that could be used either directly or as a sub-multiple the same way that European kitchen fitments are generally 600 mm wide modules.

There is nothing magical about units of measurement, neither SI nor what Americans persist in calling Imperial (when they mean US Customary or even worse US Survey Foot).

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> My first thought looking at the pic of the car coming out was geez, the exhaust fumes must be thick in that room...

<comment> Tuna-Fish The tunnels will be EV-only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a gong show and waste of everyone's time.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1075230308545454080](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1075230308545454080)

How can this man honestly think this sort of system could be higher capacity than a subway?

<comment><USER49> I'm not sure what you're purporting to show other than two people disagreeing with each other, without providing evidence... Sure, an individual subway car has "more capacity," but does a subway system have more capacity? For example, I rarely see BART trains come within five minutes of each other. A tunnel that allows cars within 10 seconds of each other could provide more capacity than a tunnel with higher-density trains spaced further apart. Average density across the tunnel system could be higher (aka more throughout) with autonomous vehicles even if individual transport units have lower density (SUVs instead of train cars).

Off the top of my head, here are issues train cars face with managing density that autonomous vehicles wouldn't face:

1\. Needing to stop at stations where few people are getting on or off, meaning that trains behind you must be at least (MAX_SPEED * STOP_TIME) behind you. With cheap tunnel boring + AVs, you can quickly and cheaply build tunnel branches that skip exits, so individual cars need less space between them (you branch off to exit; no need for extra rails or switching technology, since it's built into the cars).

2\. Entrance/exit from the train car: with trains, any jerk can run in as the doors are closing, preventing the train from leaving, backing up the trains behind you and leaving a huge gap with trains in front of you. With AVs, you're already in the car.

3\. Trains have fairly long stopping distances, increasing the distance needed between trains for safe operation. Some quick Googling indicated that an 8-car passenger train traveling at 80mph can take over a mile to come to a complete stop — it's hard to imagine a car with such long braking distances. That puts a pretty hard lower bound on how densely you can pack an ordinary subway tunnel.

Maybe I'm totally wrong, but it would be more useful to give actual data and evidence than knee-jerk shutdowns. It's not obvious to me, a non-train- engineer (like many on this site!), that the dismissive tweet is particularly meaningful.

<comment><USER19> This is already a solved problem. BART may have huge headways, but Vancouver's fully automated Skytrain can run at 75 second headways (!!!).

There is no universe where an SUV holding 4 people is more space efficient than a Skytrain car.

<comment><USER49> 75 seconds is really, really long. Cars on a highway don't leave 75 seconds in between each other; if a cutting-edge train does, that starts to imply that density issues do exist for subway systems.

And how expensive was it to build the train? If you can build 3x the tunnels for AVs as you can train tunnels and trains for the same price, actual throughput dollar-for-dollar in infra spend would be much better with Boring Co tunnels.

Update with data: it cost $2 billion to build 50 miles of Skytrain. Apparently this prototype Boring Co tunnel cost $10 million per mile. That's a 4x cost advantage for Boring Co mile-for-mile, and I imagine they'll try to strengthen that advantage even further; after all, that's their whole company's purpose: cheap, efficient boring.

<comment><USER50> >75 seconds is really, really long. Cars on a highway don't leave 75 seconds in between each other

..and? A car also doesn't carry 500 people.

<comment><USER51> But 75 cars spaced 1 second apart...

<comment><USER52> Somehow you assume they will be able to get into that tunnel at these intervals

<comment><USER19> haha yep.

This plan is like when a city widens a highway but doesn't touch other parts of the road network? What happens? It just moves the choke point somewhere else in the network.

<comment><USER49> Agreed 1s gaps are too tiny — seems unsafe and that'd be a lot of elevator traffic. 5s seems doable though: assuming 5s gaps, you need an elevator system capable of moving one car every 5s, and then the tunnel is optimally saturated. That doesn't seem insurmountably hard: two elevators that take 10s each to go from surface to tunnel would be enough, along with a bit of on-ramp tunnel to allow cars to accelerate to speed before merging. Throw in a third elevator or a fourth for redundancy while you're at it because elevators are way cheaper than a mile of tunnel, and seems doable.

<comment><USER52> You're assuming you can get cars into the elevators at 5s intervals.

Almost all assumtions in the discussion start directly in the tunnel, and sometimes at the elevator. Almost no one thinks about: how will cars get into that thing from the road, how the cars will get out of that thing onto the road.

<comment><USER49> Presumably they'd drive into the elevator on one side, and drive out of the elevator on the other side.

<comment><USER52> Even if you have a separate elevator for entry and a separate eleveotr for exit: how do you get to a 5s interval?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries."

<comment><USER54> Google's AMP seems to circumvent this:

[https://www.google.nl/amp/s/www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m...](https://www.google.nl/amp/s/www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la- me-ln-elon-musk-tunnel-20181218-story.html%3foutputType=amp)

<comment><USER55> So is Google AMP or LA Times then in non-compliance?

<comment><USER56> LA Times didn't want to play the GDPR game so they blocked most of the EU, as is their prerogative. If Google circumvents that and provides access, that's on Google imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I can't see how autonomous cars and Musky holes will be good for common people and not just turn into another form of exclusive transport for the rich.

<comment><USER58> By taking those 'rich' off the surface streets for a good chunk of their commute and relieving congestion.</comment></comment>


We're all communication hoarders - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronkharris.com/were-all-communication-hoarders-so-what <comment><USER2> 2 years ago, I embarked on a project to clean my 10 year old Gmail mailbox to reach Inbox Zero, much like I have been doing at work.

The first few weeks were spent using filters to delete all the junk like Newsletters, Flash Sales, Social Media Notifications, etc.

The remainder was all the personal correspondence. For nearly a year afterwards, I would look through all the correspondence for a given month, and delete or archive based on how meaningful things were.

I came across gems like the following:

\- Planning my wedding

\- Coming up with baby names

\- Celebrating my wife's completion of grad school

\- Younger siblings getting their first jobs

\- Threads with multiple people for planning a friend's bachelor party, surprise birthday parties, etc.

\- Conversations with friends who have since passed away.

This stuff was archived and labeled "Precious".

I highly recommend that everyone go through this process. I plan to do it again once a year from here on out.

<comment><USER3> The thing the article is missing is that algorithms will hopefully improve along with storage capacity. That is, Google may be able to infer what is "Precious" nearly as well as you can. The question is whether Google will offer us that capability, or keep it for itself.

<comment><USER2> I think the technology and capabilities likely exist for Google or any other entity to do this classification for us.

But it's a slippery slope. Do we want machine learning algorithms to show us what to care about? Won't that somehow cheapen the uniquely human experience of sifting through your own data and correlating it with your memories and emotions at the time?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's where we start slipping into the philosophical aspect of the conversation. I don't know that a computer will ever be as good at discerning meaning from our communication as we are - partly because a lot of the meaning is because we say so, not necessarily because of something inherent.

But could they get to 50%? 90%? I hope so, because the load is so huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep all my email around because searching is so easy and useful.

So many times, I will find some reason to search for an old email that might not have seemed important enough to save at the time; I might need to find the date I did something on, or get the spelling of a friend's name that I never thought I would need.

There is very little cost to keeping everything, and I certainly see benefits.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I note a lot of the people who say they hate having lots of old email at their fingertips never bring up the benefits of being able to pull out useful emails from years ago. I don't think they're lying, but their use case is certainly different to mine (and yours, I'm guessing) because I always seem to be _that guy_ who kept an email someone else finds very useful. I have a paper trail for almost everything (and so does Google, but that's another story..)

<comment><USER6> Maybe I'm just bad at email searching, but I've found having a large corpus just means my search results get severely diluted. If I have to recall exact phrases from emails to get meaningful results, then search has largely failed me.

<comment><USER4> What email client do you use? I am sure that has a big effect on your results.

<comment><USER6> I used to use Gmail and never could get search to work well in it. IIRC, it wouldn't even stem words properly. I hope that's changed since. Nowadays I use FastMail and its search is pretty good. But unlike Web search engines which tailor results based upon your history, email search is pretty naive even though I usually have a precise context in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The late Dr. Randy Pausch, of Last Lecture fame, said that his rule was to archive _all_ emails, no exceptions. [1] IIRC it was because he figured that if everyone saved all their emails, it would would provide future historians with a treasure trove of contemporaneous research material.

From a legal perspective, purging emails can lead to accusations of "spoliation of evidence," [2] which in some circumstances can lead to the judge instructing the jury that the jurors can presume that what you destroyed was harmful to your case. You can argue that you didn't purge any _relevant_ emails, but that becomes a he-said/she-said issue.

[1] I believe it was in his Last Lecture at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo), but it might have been his time-management lecture at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blaK_tB_KQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blaK_tB_KQA)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence)

<comment><USER8> " _From a legal perspective, purging emails can lead to accusations of "spoliation of evidence," [2] which in some circumstances can lead to the judge instructing the jury that the jurors can presume that what you destroyed was harmful to your case._"

What if there was a policy to delete _all_ email older than some cut-off age, e.g. 2 years? Would that assumption still be made?

<comment><USER7> > _What if there was a policy to delete all email older than some cut-off age, > e.g. 2 years? Would that assumption still be made?_

You'd have to talk to a lawyer about the specific facts and circumstances, but in general:

1\. If you didn't have reason to anticipate litigation when you implemented the policy, it normally shouldn't be a problem;

2\. Once you do have reason to anticipate litigation, you're supposed to suspend any such policy and preserve evidence; [1]

3\. If a dispute looks as though it's likely to turn into a lawsuit, your adversary's lawyer likely will send you a "litigation hold" letter reminding you of the duty to preserve evidence.

In situations 2 and 3, continuing with an automatic purging routine can get you in trouble.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_hold](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_hold)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I still don't understand, what could be the point of deleting an email?

Privacy reasons? If you are hosted by some company, telling them you want to delete something does not necessarily interact with their retention policy. If you self-host, this is not a problem.

Storage space? Of course not, it is cheap. This is related to minimalism. I try to minimize my material possessions, but for data, I don't find this relevant.

Making it easier to find later, for you or your heirs? In that case, sure, make a folder of "important" emails, have a way to exclude "useless" emails from search by default. But this does not imply that you should delete them for real.

Sure, it's an important and interesting problem to be able to find back the emails that matter. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to keep the others just in case.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interestingly, I think that keeping everything can actually give us a much more fuller account of our lives. If were are able to create an AI that will help with the augmentation of all the data. I can really see something like: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/?ref_=ttep_ep1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/?ref_=ttep_ep1)

Which is what Gordon Bell ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits)) and Microsoft Research have been looking into.

<comment><USER11> When they finally phase-in Deep Learning in Google search, the next step would be to apply that to email databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have been grateful for my 10+-year mail archive many times.

On the other hand, there's mail archive rot too:

I lost most of my mail archive around 15 years ago when a migration from my Lotus Notes university account to several IMAP accounts went terribly wrong. And many mails lost their metadata and/or attachments during later migrations. All in all, however, my mail archive has remained very useful.

There is only one major issue:

I use Apple Mail due to its integration with my private CRM software and with Apple Mail, you have to keep your mail archive in sync even if you use IMAP. That means a few 10 GBs on each Mac I use - expensive storage in the age of SSDs! Even worse, if you are on the road, you pay an addition toll for expensive mobile data or (usually) slow data in public wifi networks etc. Backup becomes more expensive due etc.

<comment><USER13> Instead of risking all that data why not pay for a Google Apps account under a domain you control and make a backup using MigrationWiz.com to Google? Then delete all the old mail from Apple Mail and start clean. You can use MigrationWiz once a year to keep backing up your data.

<comment><USER12> I actually already use Google Apps for Business with my own domain name. For my mail backup, I use CloudPull.

My main issue is really mail storage with Apple Mail plus various backups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aaron hits on an interesting point pretty much in passing: Gmail's UI is pretty encouraging to the archiver vs. the deleter. The Gmail Android app, for example, has a "swipe to archive" feature that lets me push the message back to my archive with a single motion. If there were "swipe to delete," I'd probably end up deleting a lot more.

The real reason I save so many messages, though, is honestly because it feels safer to do so: It costs me essentially $0 to archive a message instead of delete it, and if 10 years from now, there's a little transactional email that helps me win a lawsuit or something, I'd be glad to have it. If I paid for Gmail storage like I paid for storage elsewhere, I'd probably think a little harder about the value.

<comment><USER15> There is a setting for switching to "delete" as the default swipe action. From inside gmail: Settings -> General Settings -> Gmail default action.

<comment><USER14> Please excuse my late reply, I've spent the last week deleting EVERYTHINGGGG

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't really understand why this is worth thinking about. It's not like I can't have people over to my house 'cos my floor and couches are covered in emails. It's not like I'm signing up for everything I possibly can just to increase my collection of emails that I dream will one day be valuable. They don't get deleted because, well for no reason at all. It's just not worth thinking about. Worried about your kids not having precious correspondence to hold on to? Print it out. Worried about google having all your emails after you die? Pay a will executor to delete them for you. I just really don't understand how this is anything worth even thinking about.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some of this could be solved if we could create "expiry filters" to delete after __ days.

There's so much "junk" in my inbox that was actually important in the moment, but by the time it's assuredly useless, a new wave of mail would have pushed it out of sight and mind.

Service notifications (outage report, terms of service updates, watched Github repos, 2-factor email auth codes, someone "followed" you), delete after a week.

Newsletters - delete after a month.

Also merging might be useful - Receipts - merge by month after 6 months (email templates for each retailer are pretty similar, group the items?), maybe export to google drive / dropbox and clean itself up from my mailbox.

</comment><comment><USER18> The biggest culprit in an overwhelmingly large inbox is often newsletters which we signed up for but are no longer interested in reading. Unsubscribing from these can make e-mail a much more manageable and pleasant experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> In the ten years I've had gmail I've deleted probably... 10 emails total. Archiving was one of the core innovations back in 2004 that made gmail be gmail. I don't understand the people who obsess over the criteria by which they delete vs. archive emails. I also don't understand the people who never do either, and have 20k emails in their inbox. The product was clearly designed to be used in a certain way. What compels people to go against the grain so doggedly?

</comment><comment><USER20> You know, personal emails to and from friends and family is probably the smallest part of your gmail used space.

Feel free to never decide whether to delete those emails and keep them forever.

Also, worth noting, is that gmail shares its storage with google drive and google+ photos. So if you use a bunch of google drive/ g+ photos, you have less space for email.

see [https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6558?hl=en](https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6558?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER21> The relevant variable is not strictly the volume of communication, rather the density of important information contained therein. I frequently get annoyed by the heaps of redundant and useless verbiage that somehow makes its way to me. The medium of text messages (especially since smartphones have become ubiquitous) is probably the worst culprit. We need more incentives to make our communications concise.

</comment><comment><USER22> This guy printed printed all facebook's conversation history with her girlfriend and gave it for her birthday. I don't think such a thing would be possible with other ways of communication.

His talks about it on TED talk during public proposal (starts about 11:00)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg6tgh7qprw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg6tgh7qprw)

</comment><comment><USER23> I keep all my email, back to 1997. I only delete (automatically) old mailing list messages. Why not? From time to time I may dig up some useful information I forgot.

I even at times run some scripts to get statistics from my email archive; for instance how many times did I send failed disks to Seagate? Which customer sends more support requests? etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm still miffed that Excite and Netscape deleted mail I had saved from the earliest days of my internet use. Mail from 2-3 years ago is dull, but after 7-10 it grows historic and nostalgia worthy.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a folder called 'important' that contains sentimental items such as my college admissions or my first research paper. I dont see why the author simply doesnt orgonize important stuff!

</comment><comment><USER26> You'll probably tell me it is futile, but I download and archive all my mail from Gmail using Thunderbird, and make sure my Gmail account only contains the recent months' worth of email.

</comment><comment><USER27> People still email me pictures when they should email links.

</comment><comment><USER28> 12 gig of email is a seriously mismanaged inbox unless you're hoarding attachments too. I personally have a massive aversion to deleting mail because I always believe there is that one message that might get me out of the sh1tter in some edge case NSA/KGB/taxman/exGirlfriend scenario but.... 12 Gig!? That's like 12 copies of the encyclopaedia Britannica. Nobody is that interesting.

I get 30 mails a day and with minimal every-3-months basic management (10 minutes max each time) I keep it under a gig. This is not that hard. Chucking stuff out ruthlessly is actually liberating, and the converse is that keeping all this crud indiscriminately is tantamount to a historic drag on your life.

That said, maybe those new 6-gig spindles have a life after all...</comment>


Ask HN: How to plan for breakage of critical upstream APIs? - <AUTHOR> Many PaaS/SaaS startups rely on upstream services that are accessed via APIs. Unfortunately, the provider may break the API, resulting in a temporary or permanent loss of some or all of the startup's revenue. Example: your business provides photo filters for social media and Instagram changes/breaks/revokes your API access. That's significant and may kill your business [1].
If an API-dependent startup asked me for investment I'd ask "What happens if these critical APIs break?"
I'd expect to hear something like this:
1. We've discussed API use with the providers and we have good contacts at each. We have high confidence that API access will not be revoked, and we can expect a prompt response if breakage occurs. (Ideally there would also be a contract featuring API availability guarantees.)
2. We operate within each provider's Terms of Service and our business model does not conflict with the providers' business models.
3. Customers could continue to use our PaaS by manually uploading their data and fetching the output from our service.
4. We've reverse-engineered official consumer client software and could impersonate consumers, thereby continuing to access official APIs. (Obviously plenty of questions here about good-faith, legality, ToS, etc.) For example see [2].
Additionally I'd like to hear:
5. We've analysed the likelihood of each provider obsoleting our product by offering our service direct to their customers.
Each of these has pros & cons and I don't suggest any is ideal or desirable. However I'd expect to hear a detailed response on how to handle revocation/breakage of business-critical upstream APIs.
How would you answer this question?
What other responses would you want to hear?
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/02/instagram-third-party-apps-websites-dead/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605342 <comment><USER2> I would build/buy some kind of service broker that takes queries and passes them to the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understand correctly, you're suggesting a startup in this position would buy access via a broker who might offer a single API which can be used to access all upstream business-critical APIs..?

True... although it feels a little like "kicking the can down the road". Now you have two dependencies: the broker themselves _and_ the upstream API providers.

As an investor I'd still ask "What would you do if the broker revokes your API?" \-- and now I'd also want to do due-diligence on the broker by asking them all the above questions too.

Additionally the broker may be prohibitively expensive.

See this recent discussion about teller.io which in part prompted this question:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605342)

<comment><USER2> personally I would build a service broker. it mitigates the technical risk some. Consolidates the code dependencies to the service broker. You will need to build a translation if you switch services.</comment></comment></comment>


2010: What's in Store? {video} - <AUTHOR> http://www.astramatch.com/blog/2009/11/astrology/2010-whats-in-store/

<comment><USER2> My predictions, in haiku:

      Life on Europa,
      And then Jupiter fuses.
      Who saw *this* coming?</comment>


Ikea Launches Standing Desks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@GregVanHorn/ikeas-new-500-sit-stand-desk-is-a-game-changer-11102fcf79b2

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have any questions about the desks ask away.

<comment><USER2> Is there a motor? or gas spring?

<comment><AUTHOR> Motor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> or you could buy a second hand height adjustable jerker desk and save yourself another $500, just sayin'

<comment><AUTHOR> But then you don't get to go up and down

<comment><USER3> its not a toy, why would you want to go down?</comment></comment></comment>


'God preserve us all': Samuel Pepys and the Great Plague (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/'god-preserve-us-all'-samuel-pepys-and-great-plague <comment><USER2> If you want to read more of Pepys (and I highly recommend it) then [https://www.pepysdiary.com/](https://www.pepysdiary.com/) is great, and I also did over the course of 14 months a thoroughly produced PD ebook for Standard Ebooks with all of the footnotes added back in that Gutenberg missed: [https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the- diary](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary)

<comment><USER3> This is also fun; the diary in realtime (currently on 1667, so a bit late for the plague): [https://twitter.com/samuelpepys](https://twitter.com/samuelpepys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> BTW the name is pronounced "Peeps", peeps. I had it wrong for decades.

<comment><USER5> There's a book, which I can't find at the moment, which describes how some in the family pronounced their name 'Peppis', but Sam preferred 'Peeps'.

I had a 'Pépin' in my family (French given name), which apparently is what Pepys is based on.

<comment><USER3> "It's pronounced BOUQUET!"

<comment><USER6> For non-Brits: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances)

Dunno if this is known outside the UK

<comment><USER7> It's very well known in some areas of Europe, from Wikipedia:

"Keeping Up Appearances was a great success in the UK, and also captured large audiences in the US, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. By February 2016, it had been sold nearly 1,000 times to overseas broadcasters, making it BBC Worldwide's most exported television programme."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You may also be interested in _A Journal of the Plague Year_ by Daniel Defoe.

[https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Plague-Year-Observations- Rema...](https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Plague-Year-Observations- Remarkable/dp/B00EQFF6U4)

</comment><comment><USER9> 1665: Plague

1666: Great Fire of London

It must have seemed like the world was ending.

<comment><USER10> Same with WW1 and the Spanish Flu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's good to keep things in perspective. Our grandparents lived through worse than the upper limit of what is projected for this virus. The virus is a terrible thing, and we need to fight, but at least it's not Spanish Flu/The Great Depression/World War II/The Cultural Revolution/...

<comment><USER12> Actually it is worse than Spanish flu. Mortality rate for the Spanish flu is estimated at 2-3% according to the WHO. COVID-19 currently stands at 3.4-3.6%.

We do have the advantage maybe that the world today is better prepared at handling this kind of events, but we're only just 50 days in, the Spanish flu ended up lasting 2 years.

Source Spanish flu: [https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/44123/97892...](https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/44123/9789241547680_eng.pdf) Source COVID-19: [https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director- general-...](https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s- opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---3-march-2020)

<comment><USER13> > _COVID-19 currently stands at 3.4-3.6%._

Not according to other studies that covered people with no obvious symptoms.

[https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health- environment/article/30...](https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health- environment/article/3065187/coronavirus-south-koreas-aggressive-testing-gives)

0.6%

<comment><USER14> There's been consistent - IMO unprofessional - confusion between Case Fatality Ratio and Population Mortality.

The >1% numbers are all CFRs, calculated from _diagnosed cases_. They don't account for people with no symptoms, or those who aren't tested.

It's very hard to estimate unmodified population mortality, because the real numbers are lowered by quarantine measures and health care.

But real population mortality seems set to be well under 1%, with the bulk of deaths among the over the 60s, heavily skewed to the over 80s.

That's hardly trivial, but it's a long way off the 240 million who would die if the population mortality really were around 3%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why are people freaking out about this? The upper end of the mortality rate is 3% imho that's simply not nearly high enough to garner this kind of reaction. Polio had a 30% mortality rate for adults, let's keep some perspective here.

<comment><USER4> Yes, perspective matters, so here's another: 3% x number of infections. What fraction of the population were exposed to polio vs what fraction are going to be exposed to coronavirus?

It is the _product of these factors_ which is causing the "freaking out" as you call it.

<comment><USER16> When the German chancellor is declaring 60% of the population will become infected, you start to get a sense of the scale.

If you look at just first world nations[0], you're talking a total population of 1.04 billion people. 60% of that is 630 million people. 3% of that 60% is 18 million people that could die just in the first world nations.

And that's rounding everything _down_.

0: [https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/first-world- coun...](https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/first-world-countries/)

<comment><USER17> technically it is not wrong, after all it is backed by actual, true science. That being said, this estimation assumes that nothing will change, so no working counter measures of any kind.

In reality, you have China. They are nowhere near these numbers. In Germany trade show get cancelled, events get cancelled, soccer games take place without spectators, schools close. Quarantine measures will certainly be put in place as well when needed. All this helps to keep infections down and slow the spreading. It worked in China after all.

I am no expert on diseaes, but I did my fair amount of number crunching. And that tell me that just taking the current average of deaths and infections, currently somewhere around 3.4%, extrapolate the number of infections worldwide and multiply the two doesn't fly. At the very least you have to brake down the world population by age groups based on the same groups we have specific mortality rates for. doing so already gives you a better picture and a more realistic number. Nobody who comes up with expected fatalities seems to bother to do so.

Obviously, that leaves the whole impact of counter-measures out of the equation. it doesn't account for time nor for any regionl clusters of people. Neither does it account for any local shortages due to an overwhelmed medical system for certain periods in certain regions. Or for any steps taken to counter these effects. To properly do so requires a full scale modelling of this thing. unfortunately the numbers are changing quite fast, so building these models is quite ifficult i suspect.

You would also have to account for margins of error and the fact that testing is a major influence in any parameter of this model. And testing varies highly between countries.

TLDR: The numbers a re a mess, calculation and modelling is difficult and everything is changing daily. Good luck with coming up with any reliable predictions.

I would love to see numbers for testing so. Especially how many tests have been conducted by region, how many where positive and how many negative. Ideally over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do I flag something on HN?

<comment><USER2> There's a flag button below the title, but you need a certain amount of karma to see it. Is this flag-worthy though?

<comment><USER19> No, historical material is welcome on HN.</comment></comment></comment>


2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/2016-google-tracker-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/ <comment><USER2> _Ten_ separate ad-laden pages, each hitting at least 4 external analytics sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where's VR?</comment>


Wikimedia 'deeply concerned' about India's proposed intermediary liability rules - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/26/wikimedia-foundation-expresses-deep-concerns-about-indias-proposed-intermediary-liability-rules/ <comment><USER2> Is there any reasonable alternative to just blocking India. It might be the 5th largest market but how much does it contribute to Wikipedias financial well-being or to content read by those that do?</comment>


Dr Dobbs - F#: Putting the 'Fun' into 'Functional' - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/visualstudio/224400710 <comment><USER2> This link does 2 redirects just to add a session id to the URL. What bad HTTP form...

</comment><comment><USER3> I see the MicroSoft marketing machine is churning at max power...</comment>


Show HN: We built an entire SaaS product in a weekend - <AUTHOR> https://feedback.fish <comment><AUTHOR> We are four good friends from Vienna who have forever been meaning to build a product together. However, we never quite found the time next to our day jobs. One day we were chatting and set ourselves a challenge to try to build an entire product from scratch in one weekend. The we thought—if we're hacking for three days straight, why not livestream the whole thing?!

That's how [https://productweekend.live](https://productweekend.live) was born. We spent the past weekend building Feedback Fish from scratch live on air in front of thousands of people!

So, why Feedback Fish?

We all individually have built products before, but realised it was kind of hard to get feedback from users. All existing solutions are heavyweight and do a lot more than we want them to (e.g. Intercom, Canny, etc).

That's how Feedback Fish was born. It's an unobtrusive yet polished widget that fits into any website for users to drop ideas and issues into. You get an email for every suggestion, a dashboard to see all suggestions throughout history and pay us $10/month. That's it!

Reducing the scope of what we are building enabled us to finish the whole thing in a weekend, and we launched to the #1 product of the day on ProductHunt yesterday and got ~600 customers, the first of which have already started converting to paid!</comment>


Show HN: Minim – Fast, Flat and File-Based BMS - minim-bms https://minim.one/ <comment> minim-bms New version released with some bug fixes in the RSS feed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> you posted this yesterday[1] under the user name minim-one. why did you make another new account to post it today?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14802243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14802243)

<comment> minim-bms Wanted to post it under Show HN and forgot the password :P

<comment><AUTHOR> oh, good. i like the project, but that had come across as a bit sketchy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> nice idea, very simple. the admin interface should be enhanced.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of sketchy... an account created immediately after this submit and immediately before this comment.

<comment> minim-bms Conspiracy theory :D bloompy is a friend I sent the link.

Critic about the system would be nice.</comment></comment></comment>


PuTTY 0.71 released, fixing security vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ <comment><USER2> The linked page doesn't list details on the security vulnerabilities but the mailing list announcement does: [https://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/putty- announce/2019/000...](https://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/putty- announce/2019/000027.html)

Most major seems to be this: A malicious server could trigger a buffer overrun by abusing the RSA key exchange protocol. This would happen before host key verification, so even if you trust the server you _intended_ to connect to, you would still be at risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be curious to know if they ironed out this "small wrinkle" in the 0.71 WoA (Windows 10 on ARM) binaries they just released.

[https://community.arm.com/developer/tools- software/tools/b/t...](https://community.arm.com/developer/tools- software/tools/b/tools-software-ides-blog/posts/porting-putty-to-windows-on- arm)

Disabling the stack protector is a pretty big "wrinkle" in my opinion.

        PuTTY 0.71: WoA

        $ strings putty.exe | grep Compiler:

        %sCompiler: clang %s

</comment><comment><USER4> Which one would you recommend nowadays, PuTTY or (the fork) KiTTY?

<comment><USER5> If you have a recent version of Windows, the copy of OpenSSH you get with Bash for Windows would be ideal, as you then use the same tools everyone else does eliminating the Putty specific setup and terminal emulation bugs Windows devs generally need to go through. If you really need to use it, stick with Putty, as even then you benefit from other people having the same setup steps and experience, and as such common issues are more likely to be resolved.

Side thought: why doesn't Putty follow a more normal setup and configuration process, i.e. why does it have its own private key format and tooling around that instead of using standards?

<comment><USER6> I've always assumed that PuTTY used its own private key format because the OpenSSH one was terrible until about 2013.

See eg [https://latacora.singles/2018/08/03/the-default- openssh.html](https://latacora.singles/2018/08/03/the-default-openssh.html) (which is from 2018, but I think the weakness has been well known for a long time).

<comment><USER7> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18915747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18915747) .</comment></comment></comment></comment>


D-Wave 2000Q hands-on: Steep learning curve for quantum computing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/d-wave-2000q-hands-on-steep-learning-curve-for-quantum-computing/ <comment><USER2> I've met the founder or D-Wave and have known them casually over the last few years. Few people epitomize scam artist and scientific buffoonery quite as much as this person.

They are now on to their 2nd or 3rd post-D-Wave company and each time they have taken on massive funding rounds at large valuations and then have moved on to form a new company. Call me old fashioned, but something doesn't smell right.

I hope D-Wave, Rigetti and others can move our field forward, but this company more than any other feels like a big shell game.

<comment><USER3> If that person specializes in very early company stages, getting some knowledgeable team and funding, then moving on when all pieces are in place, it might be a valid strategy. How many investors have any clue about quantum computing or are even capable of understanding anything beyond simple examples/hype in order to finance it? The business world's level of technical expertise is really low even with informed investors and buffoonery about anything is rampant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love that we have what is essentially part of an intro-level physics course as part of a software review. This sounds like a totally different paradigm of programming, which I guess it would need to be in order to take advantage of quantum entanglement. Neat, though I guess what it does say is that quantum computing is going to basically be its "own separate thing" for quite a while (if not forever).

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't get what the author is trying to say. It should be obvious to any physicist that his "classical" algorithm for the Bragg grating is complete nonsense (as he now admits in the editor's note). Furthermore, he does not show that the problem the annealer is tasked to solve has anything to do with the physics of a Bragg grating. Essentially he is comparing a wrong physics simulation with the result of "quantum annealing" some random Hamiltonian that looks vaguely similar. I don't see how anything can be learned from that.

<comment><USER6> I think the author deserves credit for an honest attempt to roll up their sleeves and using this opportunity to encode their own attempt from scratch and reporting the results...

Requiring an actually meaningful scientific finding from a journalist who is merely reporting on a new programming API seems a bit picky.

<comment><USER5> In this case the author should make it very clear that what he is doing with the API doesn't make much sense. Judging from the comments, most readers seem to believe that he is describing a legitimate use-case for the machine. In fact, the question whether quantum annealers can be at all useful at solving any real problem is still very much open.

<comment><USER7> The Dunning-Kruger effect is rampant in the comments of "tech news" websites, particularly when it comes to complex subjects that people want to pretend to understand.

Objectively false information is often upvoted to the top, while the people trying to point out why that information is verifiably incorrect are buried in downvotes.

The fact that quantum computing is something that self-proclaimed "futurists" have latched themselves to guarantees that it will be even worse when that particular topic is being discussed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Q for quantum experts: is quantum computing the Manhattan project of computing, where the effort to harness new physics simply requires unfettered capital or tolerance for few incremental results with real applications? Or is it actually even _more_ theoretical and complex, so that we don't have a good historical example for the effort involved?

</comment><comment><USER9> The standardized way of defining what a universal quantum computer is through the DiVicenzo criteria [1].

Quantum annealing is a bridge until we have universal QC, it's a fairly decent one for optimization problems where the solution set is discrete. I personally think D-wave is a good place to start to wrap ones' mind around QC and superposition states. IBM Q is great, too.

In many ways, I prefer IBM Q if you are getting into QC for the long haul because many QC concepts such as CNOT, Z, X, Hadamard gates, interaction between quantum registers and classic registers are explicit. D-wave's API hides quite a bit of what QC is all about, and you have to fit your problem (it has to be adiabatic in nature) into their system. I find this to be rather confusing in the long run.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiVincenzo%27s_criteria](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiVincenzo%27s_criteria)

</comment><comment><USER10> Towards the end, the article suddenly states:

> That is where the real power of annealing lies

From context, it seems he means 'quantum annealing'. Nowhere in the article is it explained what this is. I vaguely recall hearing something about D-wave not building the kind of quantum computer we've heard about (i.e. the kind that can factor numbers). Is this 'quantum annealing', and what makes it different?

Is it better, worse, or plain different from the usual quantum computer?

<comment><USER11> From what I understood, yeah, it's a different kind of quantum computer, and it's a cause of lots of confusion. I.e. when d-wave says "we already have a xxx bit quantum computer", it sounds impressive, but it really is meaningless compared to qbits in a "real" (and until now hypothetical) quantum computer.

Also until now D-Wave has been unable to show that their QC can do anything at all faster than a classical computer. Which really puts this into perspective: This is all early research. Something interesting may come out of it some day. Or not.

<comment><USER12> > I.e. when d-wave says "we already have a xxx bit quantum computer", it > sounds impressive, but it really is meaningless compared to qbits in a > "real" (and until now hypothetical) quantum computer.

Only, gate model quantum computers require error correction. Which doesn't sound bad except that thousands of qubits are required to implement a single error corrected qubit. I.e. when IBM says "we already have a 5 qubit quantum computer", it sounds impressive, but it really is meaningless compared to qubits in the theoretical framework that promises a speedup.

If we're willing to accept unimplemented theory in favor of scalable architecture, then adiabatic and gate model are known to be polynomially equivalent. So far, no quantum computing effort has shown superiority over classical computers, but you don't see this kind of skepticism over IBM and Rigetti's breathless headlines...

<comment><USER13> Do you mean error correcting a single qubit requires thousands of separate qubits? As a paradox?

<comment><USER12> Not at all. We have a similar situation with classical computing, where a "bit" of error-corrected memory is comprised of 3 or more bits of physical memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone is looking to try out a quantum circuit, I found the IBM "Q Experience" to be pretty good: [https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/editor](https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/editor). It simulates simple 5-qubit quantum circuits, and even lets you run them on a "real" quantum computer (within limit).

</comment><comment><USER15> From past articles on Ars as well as some online quantum physics courses from a few years back, there was a lot of healthy skepticism about what the D-Wave was actually doing. I know from the articles here that Chris at least thinks there is some merit to the computer. And in the past few years there seems to be a larger opinion that there is some sort of entanglement working within the machine.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not to nitpick but a steep learning curve actually implies that progress accrues quickly after starting (learning/time). A flat learning curve implies difficulty.

<comment><USER17> To nitpick: almost everyone I've heard use this in casual conversation (who isn't nitpicking) uses "steep learning curve" as in physical analogy, e.g. bicycling to a goal, rather than describing a function plot. A "steep" path is harder going than a "flat" or "shallow" one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quantum computing: eventually we'll factor numbers bigger than 15 :p

Can we do SAT solving on those?

<comment><USER12> Looks like DWave can factor 10-bit semiprimes pretty reliably. But you're not wrong about gate model :p

[https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/14-1002A_B_tr_B...](https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/14-1002A_B_tr_Boosting_integer_factorization_via_quantum_annealing_offsets.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Even though I didn't understand it, I still found the article very interesting. I think I could understand it if I studied for a while. Sadly, I lack the time.</comment>