My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford - <AUTHOR> https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/07/23/my-300-mile-lyft-ride-from-chicago-to-bradford <comment><USER3> This is a fun story—but he should've just booked a round-trip rental car, and dropped it off in Dayton anyway. I've done this a bunch of times, and all they'll do is charge you the one-way rate and grumble a bit...

Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

<comment><USER4> Once I rented a car in Seattle one way to Vancouver. Apparently there is some shitburg nobody has ever heard of called Vancouver, WA but I was going to the more famous Canadian city. The flunkie at the counter booked the domestic trip and I drove to the proper Vancouver. When I got there they tried to charge me over $8000 in fees. I think there is no practical upper bound to what they'll try to charge you for such things.

<comment><USER5> ..."nobody has ever heard of".

You shouldn't project your obliviousness on everyone else.

Vancouver, WA is a suburb of and part of the greater Portland area. Also referred to as the Portland / Vancouver metropolitan area.

It's completely understandable that the "flunkie" at the counter assumed someone leaving from the largest city in Washington would be be referring to the 4th largest city in Washington (Vancouver).

Sounds like the big fee was well deserved.

<comment><USER6> So this is why so many shows supposedly set in Portland are filmed in Vancouver!

// Except it's not, they're filmed in the Canadian Vancouver anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way.

Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.

<comment><USER8> I can't imagine a train leaving every 10 minutes could ever be cost effective. There just aren't that many people who want to do that trip (8 hours?) when you could do it in 2 hours by plane.

<comment><USER9> It is not two hours. The flight time from my home town to Moscow is 50 minutes. Whole trip is about 6 hours.

Get to the airport, takes about 1 hour (drive 60k or 40 miles). If you don't have a car - even longer.

You arrive in advance, security, luggage check in then boarding, then runway.

It's been around 3 hours so far.

Now you fly for 50 to 70 minutes and it doesn't include the plane driving through airport after landing.

Get off, grab you luggage - another 40 minutes easily. 15 if you're lucky.

Now you need to get to the city, so it is 2 hours by car through Moscow traffic or 1 hour using "aero express" train.

The thing is, once you get off this "aero express" train, chances are it is still about one hour trip on subway to the office/apartment.

I used to fly like that, I was leaving my parents apartment at about 4-30am to arrive by 10/11am.

Compare it to train - it takes 13 hours but it leaves from the city centre, no security check in's no nothing, you take 30 minutes to arrive there. It leaves at 6-30pm, you have supper and sleep. 7-30am BOOM you're in the center of Moscow right next to subway station. Brush you're teeth during approach, have your breakfast and off you pop.

It feels muuuuch better on the train. Air travel overhead is just too big - <USER2> hours or something for hour of the flight time. With train you have about two hours of overhead.

The only thing it is almost twice as expensive compared to air travel

<comment><USER10> >Get to the airport, takes about 1 hour (drive 60k or 40 miles). If you don't have a car - even longer.

Well you also have to commute to train stations.

<comment><USER11> In general trains stop in more central locations than airports, which usually get sited far away from people who might complain about the noise. And if you set up the system to do so, trains can stop multiple times within a metropolitan area for easier access. Tokaido Shinkansen trains call at Tokyo, Shingawa, and Shin-Yokohama; the ICE stops at Berlin Ostkreuz, Hbf and Spandau going west, or Gesundbrunnen, Hbf and Sudkreuz going south.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The utter inability to get a one-way rental is quite obnoxious. Also the bit about how he was able to reserve a car, but he wasn't a charter flight. Hertz's utter incompetence on the phone was striking as well from some sort of bizarro catch-22 world.

<comment><USER13> The entire rental car experience is ridiculously complicated and inefficient. Look at the difference in renting a Zipcar (owned by Avis) and a regular rental car company. With Zipcar I can reserve a car in minutes, pick up the car I actually reserved without waiting in line or even going into an office, get charged the amount I was quoted and not find out it's twice the cost from some hidden fees and taxes.

<comment><USER14> Zipcars are great, but their coverage has shrunk over time. There's maybe a 10th of the number of vehicles, and back then Enterprise (formerly car2go) had an almost equal number of vehicles (Enterprise shut it down a while back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I followed this as it unfolded on his Twitter account ([https://twitter.com/scalzi](https://twitter.com/scalzi)). He has a way of taking some small experience or observation and turning it into a great little story or one-liner. He's written some good sci-fi, too.

Worth following.

<comment><USER16> Also worth checking out: the comment from "toyko uber story" on an insane Black Car Uber ride in Japan (scroll down, it's currently 6th from the bottom).

<comment><USER17> Agreed! That story was an unexpectedly hilarious find in the comments. Direct link to that comment: [https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/07/23/my-300-mile- lyft-ride...](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/07/23/my-300-mile-lyft-ride- from-chicago-to-bradford/#comment-865720)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The other hack is to "pony express" in stages: use Lyft/Uber to get part way or to a mid point, where you are confident you CAN get a rental, a train/bus, or another Lyft/Uber to keep going.

This is especially useful if you can't find a driver that will take you all the way.

<comment><USER19> I got in short but _very_ loud argument with an airport taxi driver when I did this to get dropped off just outside the airport taxi zone. The "real" ride was 5x the price at the airport taxi rate vs taking an Uber. The louder the driver got, the more I realized how good of decision it was to get the hell out of his car.

<comment> em-bee in my experience airport taxi drivers all hate short trips. we used to live near an airport, and taking a taxi home was always a nerve-racking moment in how the driver would take it. usually they were grumpy which made for a frustrating experience.

<comment><USER20> Often the taxi driver has waited for a long time (sometimes hours) in the airport queue for it to be their turn to get a fare. If you take a $5 ride they're upset because they invested all that time for no payoff. I don't think it's wrong for the passenger to do this, but I understand why it's frustrating for the driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An interesting solution, but I probably would have tried a Penske box truck first. I wouldn't _entirely_ trust a U-Haul to make it the full 300 miles without some kind of a mechanical problem, even when the box is empty except for my suitcase and carry-on.

Moving truck rentals are better set-up to do one-way trips than the airport car rentals. Also, you won't get the airport surcharge. Might be a little more expensive than a car rental or the Lyft, but I guess you could always fill up the truck with Chicagoland-specific goods, if you wanted.

<comment><USER22> I see someone else has watched "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles".

<comment><USER21> Or "Home Alone".

Kenosha Kickers? _Pol_ -ka, _pol_ -ka...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My experience is that jet centers like Signature Flight Services (from the article) employ concierge people with superpowers.

Once as a private pilot of a 4-seater derping above Colorado I needed to divert to Colorado Springs due to a developing thunderstorm and decided to hanger the airplane to not risk hail damage.

Basically you ring an FBO like Signature (in this case Cutter Aviation), book some hangar space, and show up. Same problem though, flights were being cancelled out of Colorado Springs and every hotel and rental car was booked. It took an hour, but concierge arranged for TWO hertz employees to deliver a car from out of town. My rate was $25 with unlimited miles plus a bit extra for the hail damage waiver. I think the hangar was $50 for the night.

</comment><comment><USER24> What a great story? I always ask Lyft/Uber drivers about interesting stories. One told me how he picked up 3 girls outside of a fancy condo in LA and drove them to Vegas which is about 300 miles and a 5 hr ride. Turns out the girls were drunk and the condo guy had called for a ride to take them home, And they decided they rather go to Vegas to continue the party ;-)

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't the person who called the Lyft be the one entering the destination?

<comment><USER26> I would imagine he handed his phone over and said "put in your address".

<comment><USER27> Yeah, this is exactly how I imagined it. They punch in "Caesar's Palace" then hit "yes", "Accept", and "Charge my stored card" before handing the phone back to the guy.

Then the guy is wondering how in the hell he got a $500 charge from Lyft on his credit card statement at the end of the month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Since the driver would have had to dead head back to Chicago, if his expenses were a not unreasonable 0.50 cents per mile, the only profit the driver made was the tip.

<comment><USER29> Variable expenses on a car you already own are nowhere near $0.50/mile. (The GSA/IRS figure includes apportioned fixed costs, which do not fully apply here, IMO.)

<comment><USER30> $.50 is already lower than the IRS rate ($.58 this year).

It may be a little conservative, but it's not crazy. You absolutely should be computing TCO of the vehicle and amortizing that if you are driving for a service like Lyft. What fixed costs do you think don't fully apply?

<comment><USER29> Time based depreciation and registration, insurance, and property/excise tax are all fixed costs that apply whether or not the Lyft driver takes that 300 mile round trip or parks the car that day.

<comment><USER30> That argument applies to any similar business though, so while I think I get where you are coming from I don't know why you would treat Lyft specially, here.

<comment><USER29> When considering "I'm being offered $300 for a 600 mile drive; is that more profitable (and by how much) than parking the car and watching TV instead?", you should consider only those costs that vary with usage rather than those that you'd incur anyway.

When considering "Should I buy a car to drive Lyft?", you should consider all costs, of course.

<comment><USER30> Ok, I see where you are coming from, but as far as I can tell for the majority of cases it seems that uber/lyft drivers are effectively running small businesses (notwithstanding the PR efforts to convince people it is "on the side"). So the realistic comparison is what other earning can I do in that time, not "sit on the couch", so the TCO comes in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >(which hadn't, in fact, told him the destination, just that it was more than 30 minutes away)

That's disappointing. There are arguments for both sides of whether it should give the exact location but it ought to at least give the rough number of miles and rough travel time.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would have not paid Lyft directly, but instead I would have negotiated with the driver (edit: yes, after having paid the initial few dollars to summon one).

<comment><USER33> And with that you most likely lose any sort of protection/insurance Lyft gives you.

<comment><USER34> What protection/insurance?

<comment><USER35> > What protection/insurance?

The protection/insurance that kicks in when you get in an accident or the driver decides after fifty miles that fuck it, they don't want to drive any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I:

\- Wish I drove for Lyft

\- Lived in Chicago

\- Had gotten him as a passenger

After 10-15 miles I would have said "So Mr. Scalzi, I'm going to need you to tell me what the Perry family is up to. Go ahead, I'll give you a few minutes to contemplate, but then you'd better get to telling me" then I'd have also inquired about the next in the Collapsing Empire series.

Joking aside, I'm curious to see more from the driver. What did you think when you accepted the fare curbside aside from "I like long trips"? Did you stay at the destination for a night or immediately drive back? If you have a partner were they a bit upset? What's it like driving a stranger for 5 hours?

<comment><USER27> Does Lyft compensate you for the drive back to your home? I'm guessing not? Or do they seriously jack up the price if you go beyond a certain distance to compensate the drive for his almost certainly empty drive back?

<comment><USER36> You can tell the app where you want to end up after doing a bunch of trips, so the driver could just set his overall endpoint back to O'Hare and Lyft would try to give him rides going that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I did the same thing recently when a flight home from a weekend trip was diverted due to weather to an airport 150 miles away. All the rental cars were taken, of course. The next flight out was 8-10 hours away, I was dead tired and had important work obligations coming up. I made sure the Lyft driver knew what I was asking. He phoned his wife to tell her he'd be late getting off his usual shift and off we went. It's certainly not something I'd do often, but I'm glad it was an option then.

As a related aside, I have a friend who frequently takes Uber/Lyft for trips from the CT suburbs to Boston since it often beats flying and the Acela train on both cost and time, especially if he's traveling with family members.

</comment><comment><USER38> _" But since I flew into O'Hare on a commercial flight, like a common schmuck, Hertz wouldn't give me the car, even though they clearly had it to give. Basically, I wasn't rich enough to rent the car Hertz had allowed me to reserve, so they weren't going to let me have it. Which, I don't know. Seems like a real dick move on Hertz's part, and doesn't incline me to use them ever again for anything."_

The author's experience with Hertz mirrors my own experiences with them. Much like using UPS, they are an absolute last choice for us. We have a saying in our house: _" It's called Hertz because it hurts."_

<comment><USER39> Every time I think of Hertz I think of how Accenture royally fucked them in their website redesign: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_law...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/)

<comment><USER40> The salty language of these last few comments reminds me of the old FuckedCompany.com website. A guy named "Pud" ran it, and it was great. But I guess he got bored with it.

He'd write about Accenture back in the days. And when he did he'd always say: Accenture (pronounced ass-enter).

Sigh. Apologies in advance if this is drifting too much into Reddit territory.

As for that website redesign, I bet that USA Accenture shipped the actual work off to some third world country, probably India. It seems like standard modus operandi to get stuff back from India that only attempts to meet the bare minimum. E.g. as the article notes, just hardwire Hertz specific stuff, so can't easily deal with sister companies like Dollar and Thrifty.

It's a difficult problem to solve with outsourcing. You'll rarely get any sense of ownership from them. And why would you expect any?

<comment><USER41> Pud used to post here. They started selling ads on fucked company and realized there was money in adtech. Now he's over at distrokid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> God, yes.

The last _three times_ I've had international flights, the puddle jumper connecting flights have been so delayed that I missed the connection. It seems like the big flights rarely get delayed, but God help you if you need to fly from, say DC to Philly (145 miles) or Baltimore to New York (250 miles).

On my next-to-last trip, it took American 13 HOURS to get me from DC to Montreal (450 miles). And they lost my luggage. Literally, I could have taken the bus faster.

It's gotten so bad that I no longer take the puddle jumper flights. I now book to fly directly out of Dulles or Philly or New York and just drive there, or take Amtrak. It's both faster and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER43> Here's a guy doing 2000+ miles on Uber, NC -> CA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6Wh2Zy9jE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6Wh2Zy9jE)

</comment><comment><USER44> the driver probably made around $200 from this ride which is more than how much he would have made working the whole day, except this time he mostly drove on a highway at steady speeds instead of dealing with 30 short distance rides and 30 different people. everybody wins

</comment><comment><USER45> I have had far too many of these stories with Hertz. I simply will _not_ use them anymore.

Avis still seems to do right by me, and Avis seems to give their minions enough autonomy to actually fix the customer's problem.

My biggest problem with car rental lately is simply that the cars absolutely suck. No backup cameras, no radars, no adaptive cruise, etc. unless you buy the ultra, turbo premium ones. They are rotating their fleets so slowly now that the cars are becoming way behind the curve.

I have a secondary problem in that they are always trying to fob off the SUV onto me despite the fact that I didn't want anything bigger than mid-size.

</comment><comment><USER46> Reminds me of something that happened to a friend of mine once. He was booked on the last train from Cologne to Brussels for the day, but missed his connection due to a delay on an earlier train.

Due to EU passenger rights regulations, train company was on the hook to get him there _somehow_ , so they ended up paying a taxi to drive him across the Netherlands into Belgium.

</comment><comment><USER47> Pro tip: when you request long rides in a ride-share app, give the driver a heads-up about where you're actually going before s/he arrives, so they have the option to cancel the request. They'll appreciate it, and generally won't cancel anyway.

</comment><comment><USER48> Transportation in north America is more difficult than transportation within Europe for sure. I recently moved to Germany from Canada and have found it is much easier to get between locations with many options and price points available.

</comment><comment><USER49> He probably should have tried flying to Cincinnati or Columbus... Or taken the bus to Dayton (the blue line would have gotten him straight to the Greyhound station from the airport).

</comment><comment><USER50> I was hoping I'd get to know the total in case this ever happens to me!

<comment><USER51> > Turns out it would cost about $330. Which, as it happens, was only a little > bit more than what it would have cost for that one-way rental that Hertz > wasn't going to give me even though they had the car.

> When I got home I tipped him hugely

So, figure maybe $375-400?

<comment><USER52> Couple of years ago there was a professional football player that took an Uber from O'Hare to Buffalo, NY for just under $1000 to make it practice on time.

Anyway, this guy could have taken a Megabus to from Chicago to Cincinnati for $25 and then done a rideshare the rest of the way. It would have been far less expensive.

<comment><USER53> If making it on time to practice is really important, do you want to depend on a bus?

Bus Being late to pick up or leave isn't uncommon. I assume if something goes wrong along the way you should be able to get off with your stuff without too much trouble and order a ride.

But if there's a big traffic jam. And you might be able to save some time taking inside roads or what have you. A bus isn't going to do that. You also won't be able to order a ride share if you're on the highway with traffic packed up.

I think the situation depends on how important making practice is. Sometimes you're already on thin ice.

<comment><USER54> > I think the situation depends on how important making practice is.

Just ask Jonas Gray of the Patriots [1].

"On November 16, 2014, Gray rushed for 201 yards, and a franchise-record four touchdowns on 38 carries "

This was such a historic event that he promptly featured the cover of Sports Illustrated [2].

A little bit later he was late for practice. He was essentially benched for the rest of the season. It was also pretty much the end of his career in the NFL.

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

[2][https://amp.si.com/nfl/2014/11/18/new-england-patriots- jonas...](https://amp.si.com/nfl/2014/11/18/new-england-patriots-jonas-gray- sports-illustrated-cover)

<comment><USER53> Haha Jonas Gray is actually the example on the top of my mind! I was worried my post was getting long enough so didn't add him! It's really unfortunate. That one game was wild as hell. And ban it's over because Belichick is such a hard ass.

Did not know he graced the cover of SI though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> A Greyhound bus would have done a Chicago-Dayton in about 8 hours for about $50.

I might prefer that bus to driving a rental car. 8 hours of nodding off rather than 5 hours of driving.</comment>


CSS3 regions: Rich page layout with HTML and CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css3-regions.html

<comment><USER2> These are very real problems with current web technologies but Adobe's solutions seem a little strange. Content flow and region styling are both something that should be made easy to do in html and would make it easier to design great looking websites. But, the syntax they propose is weird. They put all the text in one div that is presumably hidden by default before being inserted into other divs that you leave empty in your source.

I feel like some sort of pure CSS solution would be better than requiring empty divs in the HTML, this further mixes content and presentation. (not that HTML/CSS does a perfect job of maintaining that separation at the moment, but I believe this proposal would be quite a departure.)

<comment><USER3> I think it's an interesting solution. I think that CSS-only styling would be more difficult thanks to a lack of regions. This is more an "automated" way to get the browser to lay out the text within your content DIVs.

The good thing is, you can craft a layout and put in some placeholders that get filled with your content. The bad thing is, you probably could have done this yourself by hand rather than by using a CSS extension. The ugly thing is waiting for full browser support (border-radius STILL requires -webkit and -moz!) for these solutions.

<comment><USER2> How would you do this yourself? By using javascript?

<comment><USER3> By knowing the content you could style the regions of each page individually. This would, however, require something like a <style> element on the page to customize the regions or a stylesheet per page.

Or by javascript. But I see this as a more challenging approach than CSS. (Breaking a paragraph across 2 DIV elements would be a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one that doesn't want two column layout to come back, especially on tablets? Two column layout is a relic of a single page layout -- something that seems a bit pointless when you no longer need to be constrained by the page.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you mean by saying that "Two column layout is a relic of a single page layout". Columns have a long history (newspapers come to mind) that does not seem to be tied to single page layout.

The most important thing that columns preserve is readable line lengths. If you want to maintain good, readable line lengths on the web, you are going to end up with a relatively thin column and a lot of scrolling. Multiple columns allow us to more efficiently use the visible on screen space while maintaining readability. That seems pretty valuable to me.

<comment><USER5> > The most important thing that columns preserve is readable line lengths.

A single column can give you that.

Multiple columns seem to me to be fundamentally incompatible with (vertical) scrolling. Yes, they make perfect sense when your pages are fixed-size, and the entire page is visible at once, but when you have a single page of potentially unlimited height, where do you break one column and go on to the next?

<comment><USER2> I believe scrolling is not ideal. You van break your text on viewport-height and then put as many columns on the screen as possible. This drastically reduces the amount of scrolling required.

<comment><USER6> Once you do that, why not scroll horizontally? That gives better context and allows for non-page height scrolling better.

<comment><USER2> I've tried that but it comes out feeling kind of weird. Also, most people don't have a pointing device that allows for horizontal scrolling. But it is totally workable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is definitely more ambitious, but basic multi-column text flow is already defined in the multi-column layout module: <http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/>

CSS columns as defined by that module have been supported by Firefox and WebKit for some time.

Here's a good example/explanation: <http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> _yawn_ It's been done.

<http://textaligncentaur.com/>

<comment><USER9> So you think there's no place for a solution that doesn't require JavaScript?

<comment><USER10> What if he does? Would it be such a bad thing? V8 Javascript isn't slow.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but think printing or other media where Javascript isn't allowed to run at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yuval Noah Harari: 'The idea of free information is extremely dangerous' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/05/yuval-noah-harari-free-information-extremely-dangerous-interview-21-lessons <comment><USER2> > Liberalism is based on the assumption that you have privileged access to > your own inner world of feelings and thoughts and choices, and nobody > outside you can really understand you. This is why your feelings are the > highest authority in your life...

I'm not an expert on the humanities, but that's sure not what _I_ think liberalism is.

BTW, the headline is extremely misleading. The quote from the article is, "The idea of free information is extremely dangerous _when it comes to the news industry._ " Well, yes, it is.

<comment><USER3> > that's sure not what I think _liberalism_ is

I haven't read the article, but he is probably referring to Classical Liberalism[1].

        Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known
        simply as liberalism.  The qualifying "classical" is
        now usually necessary, in English-speaking countries at
        least (but not, for instance, in France), because
        liberalism has come to be associated with wide-ranging
        interferences with private property and the market on
        behalf of egalitarian goals[2].

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

[2]:[https://mises.org/library/what-classical- liberalism](https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism)

<comment><USER2> Actually, "classical liberalism" is what I thought, too. But from the Wikipedia article:

> Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism > which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on > economic freedom.

From the Mises article:

> "Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating > private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, > constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and > international peace based on free trade.

To me, neither of those looks very much like "Liberalism is based on the assumption that you have privileged access to your own inner world of feelings and thoughts and choices, and nobody outside you can really understand you. This is why your feelings are the highest authority in your life..."</comment></comment></comment>


Stellar - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/stellar <comment><USER2> I was able to successfully sign up and get 5,000 STR, so that worked for me at least. But then I started looking a little deeper into the blog post.

> Development is led by Jed McCaleb and Dr. David Mazieres in collaboration > with a small team of others. (The technology is based on the open-source > Ripple project, originally created by Jed a few years ago.)

So, is Stellar fundamentally the same thing as and/or a fork of Ripple? They've hired the same guy who started Ripple (Jed McCaleb), and as I recall there were a lot of concerns around that, as noted in a WSJ article [0] and other places. Jed is also on the Stellar board, too, one of only three members -- and so wields a considerable amount of influence.

If so, then doesn't it have all the same problems and concerns as Ripple? Centralized authority holding a large chunk of initial funds, questionable governance decisions, etc., just to name a few of the political problems, not just the technical ones.

I'd love to see the "IP layer for currency" described by Stripe succeed, but I'm not sure that this implementation of it represents a good idea. And I'm also concerned about whether Jed, the cofounder of both MtGox and Ripple, has the best interests of Stellar at heart.

[0] [http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/05/22/ripple- alternative...](http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/05/22/ripple-alternative- digital-currency-plunges-as-mccaleb-liquidates/)

<comment><USER3> _" If so, then doesn't it have all the same problems and concerns as Ripple?"_

Correct. Like Ripple, Stellar requires special (and dangerous) trust in certain nodes. For example, gateways ([https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing- stellar/#gateways](https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing- stellar/#gateways)) have to be trusted by the Stellar network as they send messages like "a user deposited 100 USD via a bank wire transfer, so please accept this digital representation of 100 USD, trust me". This trust is dangerous as people running an (initially) honest gateway may start acting maliciously and lie about how much USD or EUR or other currency exist on the network. By the time the malice is detected, maybe the network could trace all USD or EUR that was issued by the gateway, and revoke it, suddenly pissing off a lot of users who owns this currency as it would disappear from their wallet. Users would then loose trust in Stellar, and the network would collapse...

Stripe would presumably be the first gateway trusted by the Stellar network. Okay, so what if Stripe decided they could not trust other gateways and wanted to remain the only gateway? Well Stripe would be the _only_ way to inject USD or EUR or other currencies in the network, effectively making Stellar a fully centralized digital currency, with the entire Stellar network being dependent on Stripe not being hacked, not being abused by a malicious employee, not shutting down, etc.

This is the complete opposite design principle of Bitcoin which requires absolutely no trust in any specific authority.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gateways actually don't have to be trusted by the network. Think of them as similar to stores issuing credit: the gateway just says "the user has a credit for 100 USD, redeemable at my store". That credit is tradable, but only to other users who trust credit from that gateway.

This means there needs to emerge a good system for users to decide which gateways to trust, but a malicious gateway can only directly harm the users who have decided to trust it.

The beauty of this model is anyone can become a gateway at any time. See for example the gist linked at the end of the Stellar blog post: [https://gist.github.com/thejollyrogers/b114b5a98fa11a5a4ad0](https://gist.github.com/thejollyrogers/b114b5a98fa11a5a4ad0) — becoming a gateway is just two API calls.

<comment><USER3> "The _network_ does not need to trust gateways, but _users_ need to trust them" -> a subtle difference, but it does not change my point: trusting a gateway's honesty is required.

So let's say I choose to not trust any gateway and their currencies, and instead decide to transact in the native stellar currency directly. This is a strange choice: why have support for alternate currencies if the Stellar protocol in itself can do nothing to help gateways gain trust? You might as well have, say, Amazon not even bother becoming a gateway issuing their own USD_Amazon, but instead Amazon would just accept the stellar currency directly. In this case I am still required to trust the native stellar currency. I am required to trust that Stellar --the nonprofit organization-- will correctly follow their mandate ([https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/)): distributing x% to X, y% to Y, etc, properly thwarting fraud attempts from people with many fake Facebook accounts, properly thwarting fraud attempts during voting ([https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation)), properly thwarting fraud attempts from people building fake nonprofits to attempts to gain a share of the 25% of stellars reserved for nonprofits, etc. And Stellar trusts Facebook, so I am even required to trust that there is no malicious employee at Facebook that will exploit APIs to attempt to gain stellars. You plan to distribute stellars through SMS? Heck I now need to trust telecom carrier employees, etc. Even if you are honest and make no operational mistake, fighting all these fraud attempts will be a large uphill battle, and there is way too much trust required, way too many possibilities for mistakes to happen.

Contrast this with Bitcoin: all Bitcoin requires is trust in three cryptographic algorithms which fit in a few thousand lines of code (ECDSA w/secp256k1, SHA-256, and RIPEMD-160).

I appreciate the attempt of building a different payment technology, but Stellar should not mislead people into believing they are similar to Bitcoin ("Stellar is decentralized [...] owes a lot to Bitcoin"). Stellar threw away the most fundamental element of Bitcoin: complete decentralization (including decentralization of the issuance of units of currency.)

<comment><USER4> In practice, however, using BitCoin requires trusting something that is the equivalent of a gateway (an exchange) with your BitCoins if you want to be able to freely trade them.

The fact that this weakness does not appear in the BitCoin protocol, but is rather implied by the human desire for convenience and marketplaces, doesn't make it less of a flaw. One can sneer at everyone who lost money with MtGox for "choosing poorly", so to speak, but on the other hand exchanges are the driving force behind BitCoin's success.

<comment><USER5> Your choice in trading Bitcoin freely is not only via an exchange. There are other means such as p2p markets like #bitcoin-otc or localbitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems to me Stellar (the organization) will be "the Central Bank" a la Bank for International Settlements at the global level or Federal Reserve for Stellar (the cryptocurrency).

This is what makes me uncomfortable. The biggest point about cryptocurrencies is that they are not centralized. In that sense Stellar seems a lot worse than regular currency. With a regular currency, at least the respective Central Bank or other monetary regulatory authority has credibility and accountability in the sense that they are indirectly elected by citizens as they are selected by the elected government. As such they have to have a history of integrity and monetary experience, and can be removed if they act unethically.

Stellar's board, on the other hand, is self-elected, and with all due respect, don't need to have the level of accountability or have the credibility of running such an organization, which even if it owns "just 5%" (+2% of Stripe's) of the currency can potentially have substantial control over it. And being a non-profit doesn't add a stamp of either, means little.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Stellar Foundation will actually control relatively little. The creation of new stellars, for example, will be done in a fully distributed fashion: [https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation).

To clarify, of the total 5% reserved for operations, ownership is currently:

\- 2% to Stripe (the majority of which we're going to auction off to other companies, with net profits being returned to the foundation) \- 2.5% to employees ([https://www.stellar.org/about/governance/#Employee_Compensat...](https://www.stellar.org/about/governance/#Employee_Compensation)), vesting over four years

As needed, the organization will also hold open auctions to raise funds from its remaining pool of stellars ([https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Continued_funding_of_...](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Continued_funding_of_the_foundation_and_auction)), which will conveniently distribute the stellars further.

Note also there's a five-year lockup for the founders: [https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution).

Are there actions you're worried that the organization might be able to take given this?

<comment><USER7> >The Stellar Foundation will actually control relatively little. The creation of new stellars, for example, will be done in a fully distributed fashion

It's not fully distributed. All the decision-making nodes are controlled by Stellar. Just because there is stake-based voting involved does not mean the underlying system is distributed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'm misunderstanding your objection, but you can actually run your own stellard, which is a first-class member of the network: [https://github.com/stellar/stellard](https://github.com/stellar/stellard). The Foundation runs a public stellard for convenience, but you're under no obligation to use it. The client and wallet powering launch.stellar.org are similarly open-source, and can be hooked up to your local stellard.

<comment><USER7> Stellar is a fork of Ripple. It is not a decentralized system, in the sense that, if you want to use any given currency (such as stellars), you must trust a number of centralized, trusted nodes. This is Ripple's/Stellar's "solution" to the double-spend problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a related (though not completely equivalent) thread on Reddit that I think does a good job of framing this topic: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2c910w/stripe_gets_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2c910w/stripe_gets_more_involved_in_cryptocurrencies/cjdcv9e).

<comment><USER7> Specifically, "Apart from that, block signers synchronize through the Consensus algorithm which is a semi-trusted model."

Emphasis on "semi-trusted", i.e. "not worth shit from a decentralization standpoint".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of looks like a re-branding of Ripple. Ripple had a lot of image issues after one of the founders quit accusing the company of unethical behavior. Kind of unfortunate that Stripe would through their weight behind Ripple in any way.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the image issues were unfortunate -- but the tech is good, and Jed and David have a lot of promising ideas about how to make it even better. Jed and Joyce have been scrupulous about being fair and transparent in how the Stellar Foundation is structured. There's more about this (including governance documents) at [https://www.stellar.org/about/](https://www.stellar.org/about/).

<comment><USER10> I'm actually more excited about David joining this effort (and entering the cryptocurrency space) than anything else. Stellar, also, looks promising (-:

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The password recovery scheme is so poorly designed, that's borderline scary: You can't use the recovery code sent by email after registration without validating your email first (but since you have the code, your email is obviously valid)... which requires you to login (but if you don't have your password, well, you can't log in)... Great!... one lost account for me.

<comment><USER10> +1, the recovery code shouldn't go out in plain text email. Also, I picked a weak password just to quickly make an account and I can't seem to change it, hmmm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone else concerned that there seems to be a permanent confirmation code for resetting pw sent in plain text over email?

"Keep this code SAFE. Anyone with this code and your username can gain access to your account"

Where I'm from, that is a password.

<comment><USER13> While I am not too familiar with how Stellar/Ripple work, I assume they are sending an un-encrypted version of your Stellar private key, or perhaps the equivalent of a bitcoin master private key [1].

I say un-encrypted based on their claim that the code + username can be used to gain access; typically sites will encrypt the recovery code with your password. Based on this, I conjecture that they decided in favor of usability in the usability-security tradeoff.

[1] [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty strange how Stellar is paying people to sign up with Facebook. Facebook is very centralized. These modern currencies are very decentralized. I don't mind myself, but it seems like paying someone to sign up with the enemy...

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you. It's a temporary measure: [https://www.stellar.org/faq/#_Why_do_I_need_to_authenticate_...](https://www.stellar.org/faq/#_Why_do_I_need_to_authenticate_with_Facebook_to_receive_my_stellars_). Basically, it was an easy (but imperfect) way to start. We'd certainly love suggestions for other channels to distribute stellars.

<comment><USER15> The signup with FB to get 5000 stellars pushed me off. Why should I give a totally new non-profit organisation access to my FB profile? I guess most of the devs here know, what that mean in terms of privacy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, for sure. The goal is to get stellars into the hands of as many people as possible, and so moving beyond just FB is definitely a priority. (If you want, I'd be happy to send you a few stellar to play with in the meanwhile.)

<comment><USER16> I absolutely hate Facebook but I have a Facebook account which I never use (mostly used to look up people). I tried to use this account during the Stellar registration process and I am getting "Facebook account is too new to qualify". Can you please help?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oof, that's annoying. We probably can't tell the age on your account. If you send me your stellar username, I'll send some stellars over.

<comment><USER17> Aren't fb user IDs assigned as increasing numbers? You could probably just decide on a cut-off user ID and treat all lower numbers as "older".

<comment><USER18> They are increasing within any one user database, but there are many of these databases. So useridA < useridB only implies B is newer than A if dbid(useridA) == dbid(useridB).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> David Mazières wrote one of my favorite papers ever, "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" [http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/) July 2005

<comment><USER20> [http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf)

Figure 1 is particularly helpful.

<comment><USER21> Every time I see figure 1 I completely lose it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Site seems to have broken. It never finished connecting to Facebook, and now when I go to the dashboard the steps are missing entirely. When I go to Settings and try and enable password recovery I get "Server error". In the Console it says it got a 502 from api.stellar.org.

That's in Chrome. In Safari, I don't even get a response to clicking on a settings toggle. Merely loading the dashboard gives me a CORS error.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, our web client is currently down under the load. We're on it.

<comment><USER22> Looks like it's working now. Thanks!

Edit: Spoke too soon. My wife can't sign up. Button just says "Sending" indefinitely.

Edit 2: She just got an email confirmation code, despite the signup eventually failing outright. But she can't log in, says the username is invalid. So what is the confirmation code associated with?

Edit 3: It finally worked. Yay!

<comment><USER23> Ha! Thanks for sticking with it and we will keep working on smoothing things out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Agh, the Stellar client requires a Facebook login to get a share of the initial batch. :/

<comment><USER25> Of course it does, otherwise I'd be able to register an unlimited number of accounts to get as much free Stellars as I wanted.

<comment><USER26> The barrier to creating an unlimited number of facebook accounts is a half step above creating an unlimited number of gmail or hotmail accounts.

No, the whole point of connecting with facebook is to focus on the UX of making electronic payments. Who's going to remember their coffee date's wallet is 1BeX1pVAjD94hNs6C5d2dB3TRnLx53dXg3? QR codes are cute, but haven't quite hit the mainstream. It's a lot easier to say "Ben Bitdiddle" and have Ben's facebook picture pop up.

The network effects of scanning your entire social graph (and the data contained within) doesn't hurt either. Works fantastically for Venmo.

<comment><USER27> Other discussions here are saying that Stellar scans the Facebook account to check whether it looks like a spam account set up to exploit the giveaway. It rejects accounts that are newly registered, for instance.

<comment><USER28> I'd be surprised if that's true. I signed up with my fake FB account and it worked just fine. The account is a complete spammy mess so if they are attempting that, they are not doing a very good job. I would say more likely no new accounts allowed and that's it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tried signing up but after a minute of waiting I was told my username was already taken. Then, I received an email saying I successfully signed up (with that same username), with a broken link to "forums.stellar.org". Managed to visit "forum.stellar.org" without an issue. I think you may have launched a little soon...

EDIT: now unable to log in with my username and password combination.

<comment><USER30> Same problem here. My account seems to be in an inconsistent state. I can't log in, but my username and email are "already in use".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > We are currently using Facebook as a verification method to avoid spam but > hope to add other methods soon. We will not post on your Facebook.

Mandatory connect to Facebook? No, thanks.

<comment><USER23> I am one of the folks working at Stellar. Yes, FB isn't a login method that will work for everyone. Today is just day 1; we plan on adding more methods soon.

Also, anyone can create an account/wallet without even registering your email. FB auth is only for the giveaway.

<comment><USER31> Looking forward to it, thanks for your message.

Anyways, I just did the "Set up password recovery", and instead of getting 1.000 stellars it forces me again into FB.

<comment><USER32> That makes sense - to get any stellars from the giveaway (either from the initial sign up or from setting up password recovery), you need to confirm your identity. Otherwise, you'd be able to create a bunch of accounts and just get the 1k from password recovery on each.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 100% pre-mined? No thanks.

People complain about the distribution of Bitcoin being imbalanced. This is 100x worse.

<comment><USER33> It's a fork of Ripple, lol.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272)

<comment><USER34> They forgot to run sed in a few places

[https://github.com/stellar/stellard/tree/master/src](https://github.com/stellar/stellard/tree/master/src)

<comment><USER35> Stellar shills are downvoting you, lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a Bitcoin-like, distributed, secure payment system WITH a federated protocol for gateways/exchanges. A federated exchange network allows anyone to participate, similar to email servers. But since trust is so much more important in this case, I think that network effects will result in a relatively small set of gateways that anyone will actually interact with.

<comment><USER33> No this is _not_ Bitcoin-like. It's premined and requires trust. Besides, it's just a fork of Ripple, which has already failed after being dumped by its creator.

[http://i.imgur.com/DvyNzY3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/DvyNzY3.jpg)

Oh but it has integration with Facebook, so I guess that changes everything! /s

<comment><USER37> Bitcoin also requires trust, specifically the trust that miners will not collude to double spend.

There is also nothing fundamental about the idea of issuing coins as a reward for mining. It's just one possibility among many, there's nothing intrinsically "fair" about it.

<comment><USER38> In Bitcoin, you trust the way the network as defined by the code has been set up, not the miners specifically.

In this situation you have the code to audit but you also have to trust the Stellar Foundation... I have to trust they are telling me the truth about how they are distributing the currency, that they won't sell their shares early, that these 3 people heading the foundation are going to act in my interests, etc.

What if the Stellar Foundation dissolves in a month? What happens to the currency?

<comment><USER37> >In Bitcoin, you trust the way the network as defined by the code has been set up, not the miners specifically.

Wrong, you trust the miners not to collude and attack the network.

I know you've heard the claim over and over that Bitoin is trustless, but that doesn't make it true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting, this looks like a fork of Ripple (and is by an original creator of Ripple).

<comment><USER40> Yup, obviously a fork of Ripple. While at Ripple, Jed acqui-hired his gf Joyce (SimpleHoney). Then MtGox blew up (Jed still had his profit-sharing agreement with MtGox from his sale to Mark Karpeles). Then Jed announced he was going to dump his 9 billion XRPs ("fyi, XRP dump incoming") because he didn't like the direction his co-founder Chris was taking Ripple.

Then he launches Stellar, the XRP clone. Didn't even bother to change the total token amount (both XRP and Stellar have a cap of 100 billion tokens).

<comment><USER41> This sounds like a stable currency that is well worth my time and interest

<comment><USER33> Except it's premined and centralized. It's "stable" until its creator decides to dump, like they did with Ripple.

<comment><USER42> Dumping Stellar coins should be prevented for at least five years provided the creators adhere to the agreement described in their Mandate page:

"In order to provide additional stability to the system, the nonprofit founders and Stripe have voluntarily agreed not sell any of the stellars initially received (either via employee grants in the case of the founders or via repayment of the loan) for at least five years; however, Stripe may auction any of their stellars, provided the recipients also agree not to sell their stellars for five years, and net profits are returned to the Foundation."[1]

[1] [https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is anyone else having trouble with the client? My whole team is trying to sign up and are having a myriad of issues, but I can't submit to the forum because my username and password keep not working even when I make new ones.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is an awesome idea, and we want to help support it.

To that end: how do we disclose a security vulnerability? Is there a PGP key posted, or some other system for us to do that?

<comment><USER45> Thanks! Please contact hello@stellar or one of the admins directly on freenode channel #stellar-dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Was wondering what was going to come following the post on Bitcoin as an IP layer. This is great stuff - looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

<comment><USER33> I'm sorry but this is not "great stuff", it's just a fork of Ripple:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272)

<comment><USER47> Yes, by the creator of Ripple who was forced out. This is the continuation of Ripple towards what it was supposed to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The Stellar.org post is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8114871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8114871)

<comment><USER49> No stripe.com URL boost = you'll have to work the hard way.

<comment><USER50> Whoa. There is absolutely no stripe.com URL boost, or any other kind of URL boost.

The stellar.org post set off HN's voting ring detector.

Edit: I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed the parent meant that HN itself was boosting certain URLs, as opposed to, say, name-recognition by users. The latter kind of thing is no doubt a factor.

<comment><USER51> _> There is absolutely no stripe.com URL boost_

Parent may have just meant an organic boost--I certainly notice submissions from certain domains above others, and from the looks of things it appears that others do, too. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, but it does seem to be an observable effect.

 _> The stellar.org post set off HN's voting ring detector._

My understanding of the detector is that (among other things, presumably) it applies a penalty when visitors follow a link directly to the submission from a page other than "new", "news", etc. Is it possible that there is a bug (at least, I think it would be a bug) by which it also penalizes submissions where the visitor has followed a link from elsewhere _on HN_ (eg. parent's link)? I followed the link and upvoted the story, and I assume several others used that path as well.

<comment><USER50> > Parent may have just meant an organic boost

Good point. I may have gotten over-sensitive! Will edit accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I posted this on the support forum as well, but myself and at least one other user have had this problem: I created an account, but it timed out and never took me to the next page, however I received the two confirmation emails (including the pw recovery code). When I try to log in though, I get invalid username or password, and the password recovery code is useless. So it looks like it's possible to create an account which is completely inaccessible.

EDIT: Looks like more folks are reporting the same issue.

</comment><comment><USER53> I have to assume that becoming a gateway requires navigating the Byzantine Hellscape of multinational financial and banking regulations. Have they discovered some non-obvious way to avoid this or are the gateways expected to be run primarily by existing financial institutions?

<comment><USER54> The gateways are expected to be run primarily by Stripe? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I registered for this and got 5,000.999999 Stellars. Kinda curious about the 0.999999 part...

<comment><USER56> The values are probably stored in float, which is ridiculous.

<comment><USER57> A better way to phrase what you just did:

        Maybe the values are stored as a float? But that would be silly, so there must be a better reason.

<comment><USER58> From FAQs: To prevent spam, each transaction burns 10 microstellars (that is, 0.00001 stellars).

<comment><USER59> Where do the 10 microstellars go? Are they actually destroyed?

<comment><USER60> If it's the same as Ripple which this is based on, then the 10 microstellars are destroyed, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Not a great sign up experience - I signed up and linked my Facebook account. Then, I went to click on the link to confirm my e-mail address (from the confirmation e-mail) and got logged out. Now, my login isn't working, nor is password recovery. Impossible to figure out whether I mistyped my username or there is some other issue, and no "Forgot My Username"-type feature to be able to make sure.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm anxious to try it out, but don't have a Facebook account needed to get the seed currency.

</comment><comment><USER63> So after giving them access to my facebook account I was told "Your Facebook account is too new to qualify. Stay tuned for new ways to grab stellars."

How unfortunate. And strange seeing as the account is many years old.

<comment><USER64> Do you have enough friends? A common spam prevention measure checks for 100+ friends. It may just assume that if you have less, the account is 'new'

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is very exciting if it pans out. An interchange layer for money that isn't controlled by the incumbent organizations could enable all sorts of interesting innovations. <3

</comment><comment><USER66> No mining, instant confirmations, inflation rather than deflation? Interesting.

<comment><USER54> It's not really inflation. Oh, never mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> _" The network has been initialized with a supply of 100 billion stellars. 5% will be used to fund operations of the nonprofit (its spending, including employee compensation, will be public), and the remaining 95% of the stellars will be distributed for free as quickly as we can manage."_

IIRC Ripple's founders (including Jed) kept about 20% of XRP, and Ripple Labs kept about 25%, so only 5% is a lot better, but it's still a very centralized solution to distribution.

I do like that they're distributing 20% of the Stellars to BTC (and XRP) holders, though: [https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program)

<comment><AUTHOR> We hope that it'll end up being considerably more even than Bitcoin distribution. One note is that of the 5%, 2% is currently held by Stripe. We're going to auction off most of our Stellars, and return the proceeds to the Foundation.

The Foundation is also being transparent about where the remaining stellars are going, namely: 2.5% to existing employees ([https://www.stellar.org/about/governance/#Employee_Compensat...](https://www.stellar.org/about/governance/#Employee_Compensation)), and over time it'll distribute more stellars in order to raise funds ([https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Continued_funding_of_...](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Continued_funding_of_the_foundation_and_auction)).

But, yes, solving the distribution question is a hard problem :-).

<comment><USER68> I think it would be wise to let people invest now in order to acquire stellars later on - assuming more funding would be welcome by the foundation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I got this message when signing up with my Facebook account (which I only use for signing in to services, not to connect with people, which may be why I got it):

Oops! Our spam detection checks say your Facebook account isn't eligible. If you are a legitimate user, we apologize and are improving our detection algorithms. And we will release new ways to grab stellars soon, so please check back.

Is there any way to prove that my account is legitimate? Maybe my Github account, where I manage a somewhat popular open-source project, Min ([http://minfwk.com](http://minfwk.com)) My username both on Github, HN and Stellar is owenversteeg. This seems like an interesting idea, and I'd like to play around with it.

<comment><USER23> Hi Owen - I'll go help you out. Let me know if you have any questions. joyce@stellar

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I have 'Connecting...' on the main screen, so I cannot send out anything. Possibly a bug? And every time I log out, I have to sign in again.

<comment><USER71> Experiencing same issue! I haven't tried at home yet

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> It says my Facebook account is "too new" to get Stellars.... I've had it for over 3 months. What's the reasoning?

<comment><USER73> Same message and my account is two and a half years old. I have no friends on the account, so maybe "too new" really means "not enough friends".

Edit: Because this is generating some discussion, I'll clarify that it is not actually my main account which is why I have no friends or photos, but I don't like giving third parties access to my private main account information. The spam detection seems to have worked well on me, I was just pointing out that account age is not the only filter.

<comment><USER45> Hello, we check various properties of your Facebook account to determine that this was not a spam account created simply to exploit the giveaway. This is our first day out, and we apologize that legitimate users like yourself aren't able to receive the giveaway. Please check back in the coming days as we continue to improve our spam detection algorithms.

<comment><USER74> And what is with people, that don't have a Facebook account (yet)?

I guess, anybody that creates a new Facebook account now, because he wants to also get the Stellars will fall into the spam category.

tl;dr: Isn't it a legitimate interest, to get something that others get? Or is it just a giveaway for Facebook users? When so, would you please say so in the first place (, that your system is only for them). It does not foster my trust in this new system, when I am locked out, just because I am not inside some "special club" (I don't remember, that Facebook membership is now essential to interact in the internet -- .... I am at the verge to feel discriminated.).

I find it good, to have an alternate payment method to get out of the trap of traditional payment systems, that are dominated by a few big corporations .... and then, what happens, I have to bow to one even bigger monopolist. --> Does not foster my trust into a system that claims to be free and open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Ref: [https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program)

Will the date for snapshotting the Bitcoin blockchain be publicized in advance ?

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm really excited about this (I talked to Jed a few months ago, before joining CloudFlare).

I think there will need to be a strong client wallet, rather than just the web client, but that's obvious, and the web client was an easy place to start.

I'd really like to see how one would integrate chaumian blinded tokens into this. I may be an outlier in thinking unlinkability and anonymity are critical for "real currencies" over time, but I think recent events have shown this to be correct.

I liked Ripple 1.0; Ripple-of-today not as much, so since this seems to be basically Ripple 1.0 plus some lessons learned, it should be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER77> Something weird seems to be going on: at first I didn't get any compensation for making my first transaction, then I got 1000 STR from StellarFoundation 34 times. Now my account has 39000 STR in it...

<comment><USER78> Weird. I'm one of the Stellar devs -- could you email your stellar username to firstname.lastname@example.com? Thanks!

<comment><USER77> done

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Bug report: I was unable to get the 5000 initial coins. (The facebook auth failed twice, so I reloaded the page -- and was then unable to find the "free coins" page.)

<comment><USER80> I'm experiencing the same issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like the emails coming from stellar are delivered from an SMTP origin "mailgun.info" which uses an invalid client certificate; I'm getting errors:

SSL_accept error from mail-182-5.mailgun.info[18.104.22.168]: 0 warning: TLS library problem: XXX:error:XXX:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert bad certificate:s3_pkt.c:1258:SSL alert number 42:

At least they retry without SSL aftwards, and manage to deliver the emails.

<comment><USER81> Hi 0x0, Russell from Mailgun here. Do you have a self signed certificate by any chance? We typically downgrade a connection if we are presented with a self signed certificate. That might be what you are seeing.

If you drop us an email at support [at] mailgun.com with your domain I can take a look at the specific issue we are having delivering over TLS to your domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> What are the key differences between Stellar and Ripple?

<comment><USER35> The name.

[http://i.imgur.com/DvyNzY3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/DvyNzY3.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> As someone who is paying 5% to deposit a foreign check, and also lost a non- trivial amount when a ripple gateway folded, I can say I am still excited to see another iteration on the idea.

5% as a consumer spread on international transfers is ridiculous, and seemingly only avoided using some sort of forex exchange with high minimums and excessive red tape.

Bitcoin exchanges do not offer reliable or timely deposit/withdrawal in most local currencies to consider it an alternative.

The trust points are no worse than existing banks / currency exchange / forex models that allow this type of transfer to take place. If we are lucky, we can improve and decentralize those choke points further.

Yes, those who control the choke points have the potential to make stupid amounts of money based solely on traffic, much like existing banking models and many startups.

Worth reading is the recent blogpost that I'm sure most regulars have seen [https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe- perspective](https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective).

</comment><comment><USER84> Can anyone give an insight to why they decided to have the stellars pre mined? Wouldn't that make stellars not valuable...

<comment><USER33> Yep, just another premined coin to the list, and as it turns out it's a fork of Ripple. Everyone here should read this comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272)

<comment><USER85> There is absolutely nothing wrong with premining, if it is done honestly and transparently and especially if your coin is using a consensus algorithm that has no need for regular mining in the first place. Let's evaluate the fairness of the distribution model on its merits. This one is quasi-centralized (relying on Facebook accounts), but I predict it will be among the most egalitarian.

<comment><USER35> Says the creator of a premined coin (Ethereum).

<comment><USER86> Why isn't pre-mining viewed like VC-less VC?

<comment><USER54> People who complain about pre-mining probably also think VC is evil because their Radeon card isn't sufficient to participate in seed rounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Honestly, I'm impressed that Stripe is that well capitalized. It's an awesome service, way to go guys.

</comment><comment><USER88> What happens when the limit is reached? 100,000,000,000/7,000 is "just" 15 millions accounts

</comment><comment><USER89> The fact that this solves some of the problems of cryptocurrency, and the fact that Stripe is behind it, give me a very good feeling about this. To have the clout offered by Stripe while still being open source is very powerful, and I think it is what the cryptocurrency world has needed.

</comment><comment><USER90> The gateways will be targeted for regulation until they are no different than modern banks.

</comment><comment><USER91> The "Connect with Facebook" button on Stellar's dashboard appears to be broken, or at least for me, anyway. Clicking it results in a "Loading..." message that never seems to go away.

<comment><USER92> See if you're not blocking FB with AdBlock or Disconnect.

<comment><USER91> Ah, Disconnect was the issue. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Curious how much do people think one Stellar is worth? Or will be in future?

<comment><USER33> Nothing, it's just a fork of Ripple.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272)

<comment><USER94> You're repeating yourself, please stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> who is their economist/fiscal policy/monetary policy adviser? I looked on the website and there doesn't seem to be anyone with this background amongst the advisers, board, or employees.

</comment><comment><USER96> 0.625% will be granted to employees for 4 years. Does this mean they won't be paid after 4 years? Also can you elaborate on how the 0.625% will be divided between developers & founders?

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone interested in setting up instant funding for Stellar with ACH, let me know. We've started doing it with some Ripple Gateways and would love to work with Stellar.

tommy at knoxpayments dot com

</comment><comment><USER97> > Each week, the network will identify the winners. The winners are the 50 top > voted for accounts that also received at last 1.5% of the vote. If no > account has over 1.5% of the vote, then the top 50 accounts voted for are > considered the winners. That week's new stellars are then distributed pro- > rata to the winners.

So does this mean that if one account has 5% of the vote and all remaining accounts have under 1.5%, that account will receive all of the inflation- creates Stellars?

<comment><USER98> As I read it, yes. But other account holders would have an incentive to band together in order to surpass 1.5% (or even 5%).

I wonder if it'll be possible to vote for an account that promises to immediately distribute new Stellar back to its voters. If so, newly-created Stellar may always end up being distributed in proportion to the Stellar wealth distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> This just reminds me of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala) and nothing else.

<comment><USER100> Yes, but also more generally, highly-liquid IOUs ("bills of exchange") as were widely used before the rise of modern banking:

[http://jpkoning.blogspot.de/2013/02/ripple-or-bills-of- excha...](http://jpkoning.blogspot.de/2013/02/ripple-or-bills-of- exchange-20.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Damn, my open source project was named Stellar way before! [http://stellar.evelend.com/](http://stellar.evelend.com/)

<comment><USER102> And then Jason Kottke's stellar.io

[1] [http://kottke.org](http://kottke.org) [2] [http://stellar.io](http://stellar.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I get what bitcoin is.

Can someone help me with what stellar is, and why it is better than, or a complement to, bitcoin or the traditional system?

<comment><USER33> Stellar is just a fork of Ripple:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115272)

<comment><USER103> I always had the same questions about Ripple, though.

<comment><USER33> Well it's premined and centralized, so I would say it's just like any pre- Bitcoin coin/exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> just FYI - none of the sliders on the settings page work for me. The first one gives me a "Server Error" tooltip and the other 2 just do nothing.

Also, I linked my Facebook and didn't get any indication of whether it worked or not. Now when I log in I have 0 stellars and the welcome panel doesn't show up. did this happen to anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER105> Registered, verified with FB, it says I'm in the queue and I should receive my Stellar tomorrow. On the other hand verifying the email with the code received raises an error saying that I need to login before via FB (and I did it). Maybe it expects to see before the Stellar gained via FB login before releasing the other 1000

</comment><comment><USER106> Is trustless validation a thing in this system? How do they do it, I can't find any technical details.

</comment><comment><USER107> Very interesting. I always thought of Ripple as semi-scam, but I can see Stellar become a thing (be huge, actually), backed by Stripe and hopefully others soon enough.

Question.. how is the password used to decrypt the secret key? Which encryption algorithm is used? Can anyone technically explain?

<comment><USER108> Stellar dev here. Thanks for the encouragement.

We use scrypt to derive a key from your username and password. The key is used to encrypt your secret data with 256bit AES in GCM mode.

You can check out the implementation here: [https://github.com/stellar/stellar- client/blob/master/app/sc...](https://github.com/stellar/stellar- client/blob/master/app/scripts/utilities/wallet.js#L260)

<comment><USER107> Thanks! Gonna have a look at it now - seems like an interesting authentication scheme :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Stellar is the "IP layer for credit" while Bitcoin is the "IP layer for money".

Stellar doesn't actually transfer funds (like Bitcoin), it only transfers IOUs, the settlement (actual value transfer) occurs outside the Stellar network.

Stellar and Bitcoin achieve two different goals.

</comment><comment><USER110> OMG, this would be perfect for the 501(c)3 non-profit where I'm at.

[http://newfuturefoundation.org](http://newfuturefoundation.org)

They are currently paying a lot of fees to the bank fund nonprofit projects in Africa.

This would really be perfect for them.

</comment><comment><USER111> Ok, so now they're promising me my free stellars "tomorrow".

Which is fine in one way - feel free to take your time handing me my free stuff. On the other hand, it doesn't give me much faith they can scale to the mass market...

<comment><USER112> I'm sure many successful companies had scaling issues well past their first day.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> [https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program)

How does that work for someone who has bitcoins in an e-wallet, like Coinbase ?

<comment><USER54> Either use a real wallet or pester Coinbase to support signing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> If anyone wants to get a send-to-receive chain going for the learn to send free 1000 STR deal, reply to this with your username. I'll send 1000 STR to anyone who sends me 1000 STR. My username is tklovett on stellar.

<comment><USER114> user: merket

<comment><USER113> Sent yours back, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> "Invalid Recovery Code" when I attempt to use the code sent via email.

</comment><comment><USER116> There seems to be a session bug. I have to log in again every time I refresh the page. Of course, the page is updated automatically so the refresh is probably unnecessary, but the session bug is still there. :)

<comment><USER9> It's actually not a bug -- it's because the client never sends the password to the server. (It decrypts your wallet locally.)

<comment><USER116> It makes sense. It looks like they've just added this message: "If you refresh you will be automatically logged out since it isn't safe to keep your password on disk."

<comment><USER15> The funny thing to this is, that keeping the password on disk isn't proclaimed safe but sending each user the recovery code over plain text mail withouth encryption is...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> Too early to tell if Stella will work but their intentions appear good and the underlying concept solid. Was very surprised though that there isn't a single advisor to the board who's career has been in finance or banking.

Seems to me that stella will only work and achieve broad adoption if the network has solid gateways operated by entities people already know and trust. Who do most people trust with their money? Existing banks and other well known exchange/trading platforms (xe.com / etrade / western union). If you want these institutions to start operating stella gateways, surely it would be a good idea to have an advisor to the board that's from that world, well connected and understands it intimately?

<comment><USER117> Not sure why I'm being down voted. My understanding is the system works better (at least for currency X to currency Y transactions) the more trusted local currency gateways exist in the network. So if using stellar on the backend makes it theoretically easier/cheaper/faster for traditional money transfer platforms to transmit/receive funds for their clients and having trusted brands as gateways is good for stellar's adoption; then surely that's a win/win and they should have an insider from the banking/finance/forex world advising their board and helping them get one or two well known finance shops involved in a pilot.

Concrete example:

I use XE.com trade for making international wires to people (most of the time it's GBP to EUR wires). Using XE is easier and cheaper than using my bank for this but the process is still painful. After locking in an exchange rate for the trade, I then have to wire my funds in GBP to XE.com's GBP bank account (with a reference number for the trade) and they then wire the equivalent EUR amount to the recipient's EUR bank account. I have to provide loads of bank details for the recipient (branch address, IBAN, SWIFT, intermediary bank etc.) and it usually takes 48 hours before the money arrives in their account (sometimes longer if they have a weird bank). It's also often difficult to work out what fees intermediary banks will extract en-route.

I'd love it if XE.com had stellar GBP and EUR gateways. I could then dump some funds in their GBP gateway, give them the stellar username I want to send the equivalent EUR amount to and hit send. Instant and easy.

Or maybe I've completely misunderstood the purpose of gateways and how they work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> So how much is a STR worth right now?

Based on the Stripe investment of 3 million for 3,002,289,306.81 Stellars (3% of 100,076,310,227) I am calculating 1 STR = $0.000999237 right now ... is that correct?

</comment><comment><USER37> Who is running the consensus nodes? Will people choose their consensus node, and if so can you guarantee an overlap? Are the nodes maintaining a state or a full, auditable, ledger?

</comment><comment><USER119> I signed up with friends all ok but now dashboard just keeps saying connecting and clicking seems says I have to be online to do this but I am.. Any ideas?

</comment><comment><USER120> connected with FB and not sure if I verified my email, I get some "server errors" and logouts and can't change my settings

<comment><USER121> Nothing loads for me anymore, looks like their API could not handle the interest :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> I received 4000+1000=5,000 Stellar. I sent 1,000 to another user. I have 3,999 Stellar remaining. What happened to my extra Stellar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at [https://www.stellar.org/faq/#_What_are_the_fees_for_a_transa...](https://www.stellar.org/faq/#_What_are_the_fees_for_a_transaction_). The short answer is that each transaction burns 10 microstellar, and they haven't smoothed out all of the display issues in the hosted client yet, hence the surprise.

<comment><USER68> The cost of transaction might be an issue if one day 1 stellar > 20 USD or so (it becomes too expensive). Wondering if there is a way to fix it (other than simply merging multiple transactions), without having anything to do with the USD itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> Pretty excited for what comes of this. For devs reading, auth doesn't seem to be persistent - if I refresh I get logged out.

<comment><USER9> This is actually for security -- your password is never sent to the server, and so the client needs to decrypt your wallet again.

<comment><USER123> Cool makes sense. Maybe some messaging on the login form would be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> As it seems, the future of Bitcoin is Ripple.

</comment><comment><USER125> So why no two factor auth right off the bat?

</comment><comment><USER126> Seems off that they give you 5000 "stellars" to access your Facebook friends list and photos...

<comment><USER23> I work at Stellar. We wanted a method by which we could fund people once (to prevent someone from spinning up a lot of fake accounts to claim) hence the decision to move forward with Facebook. I know it isn't perfect, but we are doing our best to make the giveaway broadly accessible and not game-able. And we are working on other claim methods so yes, totally hear your concerns.

<comment><USER74> Good to hear, I hope you have some ideas, since else, this "facebookers only" feels like discrimination -- as I explained here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115706)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> I'm also having issues with FB but would love to have some stellars. Acct name is jsouza, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER128> Came here to say, "that looks an awful lot like Ripple." Looks like I am in good company :)

</comment><comment><USER129> The irony is that the emails from Stellar have been marked as spam. PS: I use live.com

</comment><comment><USER130> I need to connect with Facebook to receive stellars. How is this decentralized again?

<comment><USER131> ill send you some if you don't want to use facebook.

<comment><USER130> Sure, my user name is reedlaw.

<comment><USER131> for some reason I cant send to you :/. says you arent on the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> I got an email invite, curious where they harvested my address from.

</comment><comment><USER133> Still waiting on the email confirmation :(

Never got the plaintext recovery code.

</comment><comment><USER134> Yeah... I'm not giving my phone number to Facebook...

</comment><comment><USER135> how and why would stripe value 2% of the stellar at 3M$ ?

</comment><comment><USER136> I'm curious about why my balance becomes 6000.

<comment><USER20> You get 1000 for verifying email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER137> Feel free to send me 1000 stellar in step 4 of the signup process. Username zeljko. Comment so I can give you some good karma. Thank you! (btw credit to corey for coming up with this)

<comment><USER138> Yeah, send it to username funkyygames as well - anyone wants 1,000 let me know! I cant find anyone to send this to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER139> Who will sell me their 7,000 stellars for $10 ?

<comment><USER139> OK, I will offer more. $20? Nobody interested in selling 7000 stellars for $20?

<comment><USER14> one dead person replied. go to your profile and turn on seeing dead people. assuming i'm not dead too, lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER140> I just created a subreddit for further discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/thestellar](http://www.reddit.com/r/thestellar)

</comment><comment><USER141> Does anyone want to sell their Stellar?

</comment><comment><USER142> Great idea. This is going to be huge.

</comment><comment><USER143> Hi send me 1000str and i will send 1050 back.. here is my username "cheska27"

and tell your username to verify! :)

</comment><comment><USER144> i am in waiting list. anybody have steller? send me if you have on meanup33

</comment><comment><USER145> Support us engineers and send 1000 stellars to 'git' :).

</comment><comment><USER146> dotts_o can you guys send me some Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER147> my name : minister sent me plz , thanks!

</comment><comment><USER148> Quick, everyone send me their stellar: troypayne

</comment><comment><USER149> lol refresh logs you out!

</comment><comment><USER150> > Stellar is a decentralized protocol

Stellar has a central authority that can mint new stellars. _That is not decentralized._ Bold-faced lie.

</comment><comment><USER151> Feel free to send me 1000 stellar in step 4 of the signup process. Username: _corey_. Had to be the first to ask :) Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER152> I just sent you 1000 stellars :-) We could set up a chain where we each give to the previous user so all of us get +1000 :-) My username is "lck"

<comment><USER151> +1 for the chain idea.

<comment><USER152> I got +1000 from "myleshenderson". I guess he's next in the chain :-)

<comment><USER137> sent to jedd, mine is zeljko

<comment><USER21> sent to zeljko, mine is jonnie

damn this is like getting a gmail account.

<comment><USER153> thedangler is on board.

<comment><USER154> sent you 1000. I'm arturhoo on Stellar

<comment><USER155> Sent you 1000. My user name: benly

<comment><USER38> sent you 1000, my username is leshow

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER156> Your site isn't ready to be launched when you try to hurd people through Facebook auth, after registering my email, and then it doesn't even work....

<comment><USER157> By that logic, any site with any bug in it should never been launched. If it broke, report the bug. It's Open Source: [https://github.com/stellar](https://github.com/stellar).

<comment><USER156> No. They dropped the ball in my opinion from what should be a really savvy group of people who "get it" when it comes to identity/etc.

<comment><USER157> No what? You won't report a bug? That's idiotic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Generative Approach to Simulating Watercolor Paints from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.paytonturnage.com/water_color <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the (absolutely beautiful) watercolor maps by Stamen Design:

[https://hi.stamen.com/watercolor- process-3dd5135861fe](https://hi.stamen.com/watercolor-process-3dd5135861fe)

</comment><comment><USER3> > In my seven years of programming I have had the most fun in the past few > months after discovering generative art.

Careful! It's totally addictive. Next thing you know, you'll be spending thousands on high res prints, or even worse, making it your day job _and_ your hobby. ;)

Nice work! It looks great, and I'm looking forward to more.

<comment><USER4> I feel myself getting this addiction. Can you say more about what kind of day jobs use these techniques?

I realise that to achieve good results requires time, and the easiest way to find time is to spend working hours on it, so I'm considering pushing my consultancy in a direction that includes this kind of work---though I'm not actually sure what this is!

<comment><USER5> Design teams at large companies that have a strong design culture, ad agencies, and design studios working on contract work (particularly installations for music events etc) are the kind of day jobs where you can work on these kind of things.

It definitely takes some time (and a lot of personal work) to break in in this field though. Like most artistic practices sold to the Market, deadlines are usually tight, pay isn't the highest, and there are more people who would like to make a full time living from it than there is available paid work.

Get in a routine (make things with regularity, many artists make something daily), make your work public (post it on Instagram/Twitter/art subreddits/etc.), make it clear that you're available for paid work, and after some time you might make it happen. Good luck!

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in a college graphics class I had a lot of fun, and some lucky success, with roughly simulating watercolors with GL shaders. I kept several textures that represented the paper, it's wetness, and the paint. The shader would calculate new states for each based on the previous state, time and user input.

The cool thing was that you could watch the paint disperse in real time and could add things like gravity to cause it to drip down the page.

It wasn't physically that accurate, but it looked pretty good and was super fun to hack on. If only I could find the source :(

</comment><comment> gene-h This reminds me of this one Siggraph paper where they did full bristle and fluid level simulation of paint and a paint brush[0][1].

[0][http://web.cse.ohio- state.edu/~wang.3602/Chen-2015-WB/Chen-2...](http://web.cse.ohio- state.edu/~wang.3602/Chen-2015-WB/Chen-2015-WB.pdf) [1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-foZ64bIxEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-foZ64bIxEw)

<comment><USER7> I haven't used corel painter in a long time but I hope at they took this as some sort of inspiration about how paint mixes.

<comment><USER8> Verve painter is a great app for this kind of sim.

[http://www.taron.de/forum/](http://www.taron.de/forum/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's too bad that e-ink never really went anywhere. I'd love to have low- power/no-power, random, dynamic, full-color paintings hung up around my house.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of this research paper by Adobe and their approach to bringing Water Color painting to Illustrator on the iPAD.

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1598012&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CF...](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1598012&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=848256239&CFTOKEN=82651607)

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice idea, here's a little WebGL version inspired by your post. I just used a noise function rather than the polygons though. [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lt2BRm](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lt2BRm)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah, I made something similar back when that original article came out. Should have maybe fleshed it out and posted on HN? [https://github.com/akx/watercolour](https://github.com/akx/watercolour)

<comment><USER12> (Edit, in case anyone's still reading: here's the dist version. Refresh for another blob. [https://akx.github.io/watercolour/](https://akx.github.io/watercolour/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a major generative art nexus right here : [http://reddit.com/r/generative](http://reddit.com/r/generative)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a website like codepen or jsfiddle to build and show off generative art in javascript? Would be a fun little community.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are you able to generate dry brush type of strokes?

</comment><comment><USER16> Very nice !</comment>


Emojilisp - <AUTHOR> http://emojilisp.com/ <comment><USER2> A little too baroque. [http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/](http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/) has better regularity

</comment><comment><USER3> During ILC 2014 in Montréal, someone presented the emotional lisp joke. It was a lisp where ( was replaced with (-: and ) was replaced with :-). At a second iteration of the joke, these were replaced with emoji.

I wonder if emojilisp was inspired by this joke.

<comment><USER4> This was Didier Verna with "Smilisp": [http://www.didierverna.net/blog/index.php?post/2009/04/01/%3...](http://www.didierverna.net/blog/index.php?post/2009/04/01/%3Ao\(-Smilisp-%3Ao\)-A-new- and-revolutionary-dialect-of-Lisp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But the cop emoji should be 'and' not 'or'! It's a guard, after all.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.emojilisp.com/prog/m55YcVcbfUBFXf4S](http://www.emojilisp.com/prog/m55YcVcbfUBFXf4S)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why does it say the cdr of (list 1 2 3 4 5) is 5, instead of (2 3 4 5)?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure why most languages don't allow arbitrary unicode as identifiers. It would be quite useful for math-oriented programming.

</comment><comment><USER9> car and cdr emojis are very nice</comment>


Nintendo Labo Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/23/17266352/nintendo-labo-review-variety-robot-kit <comment><USER2> Think this is a dupe from a few hours ago.</comment>