Why American Construction Costs Are So High - <AUTHOR> https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ <comment><USER2> _News that the Transbay Terminal is something like $300 million over budget should not come as a shock to anyone. We always knew the initial estimate was way under the real cost. Just like we never had a real cost for the Central Subway or the Bay Bridge or any other massive construction project. So get off it. In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there's no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in._ \- Willie Brown (former SF mayor)

I think the inability of politicians to have a real conversation about costs is a big part of high construction costs. Without this sort of difficult conversation it's hard to plan and try to mitigate things that might cause ballooning costs because you need to pretend that don't exist in the first case.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that the attitude shown in the quote is undesirable, I think it's more a symptom of the problem, not the underlying problem itself. He's essentially right. Infrastructure projects are constantly shot down because of cost concerns, yet we have crumbling infrastructure that needs to be replaced. If estimates became higher, approvals would decrease.

One other piece I haven't seen mentioned yet: large construction projects that take years to complete are incredibly hard to estimate accurately, because unpredictable economic swings can cause the cost of items to vary quite a bit between when the estimate was produced, and when the work was actually being performed and purchased.

This was one of the reasons why the Big Dig's estimates were so far off. Although there are a dozen other factors with that particular case as well.

<comment><USER4> Why can't the cost of materials be hedged against rising?

Costs above initial estimates should only happen when there's an unknown (e.g, digging discovered a really hard rock layer that nobody knew about). Or weather issues beyond prediction (like tornadoes or hurricanes).

<comment><USER5> > Why can't the cost of materials be hedged against rising?

How, other than by buying everything you need up-front, finding a place to store it until you need it, and hoping that it is still usable when you do?

<comment><USER6> You can buy futures on basically any commodity to hedge against price fluctuations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In Paris, as well as Athens, Madrid, Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, > Copenhagen, Budapest, and I imagine other cities for which I can't find this > information, metro stations are built cut-and-cover... There is extensive > street disruption, for about 18 months in the case of Paris, but the > merchants and residents get a subway station at the end of the works.

The cost of using a more expensive method ($750M per station vs $110) of building in order to prevent disruption to car traffic is almost always attributed to the cost of public transportation. But it seems to me like it at least partially should be considered a cost of maintaining car infrastructure.

<comment><USER8> I'm actually curious: how do those businesses, particularly smaller ones, survive 18 months of highly impeded traffic?

<comment><USER9> As an example, the Los Angeles Metro actually has a "Business Interruption Fund" that they use to help small businesses in areas impacted by street-level construction (like subway station construction sites).

[https://www.metro.net/projects/business-interruption- fund/](https://www.metro.net/projects/business-interruption-fund/)

<comment><USER10> This seems like the best of both worlds. The millions in savings for using more invasive construction methods should offset the $60,000 per business they are paying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Regarding point 9 about the inability to look outside North America. I always wondered why it seems transit agencies haven't looked to bring in teams of people who have managed/built successful projects in Europe, Asia, or even closer like Mexico City.

California HSR for example went to solicit bids from foreign operators and selected Deutsche Bahn/German Railways. But AFAIK the initial design work/RFP/proposals were done by California and domestic engineers, who obviously wouldn't have much, if any, experience in designing or managing HSR construction.

Would an experienced team be able to overcome a very different regulatory and political environment to make a difference in cost and time?

<comment><USER12> NYC MTA brought in the former leader of London's underground and Toronto's public transit

<comment> frosted-flakes Andy Byford was the CEO of the Toronto Transit Commission and the COO for RailCorp in NSW, Australia, but he was not the former leader of the Underground; he only held managerial positions there (a station manager and general manager of customer service on some lines).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ok, this is worth reading for the section on "Incuriosity" alone. It's worth quoting in its entirety but too long to paste here, so I'll just say if you do nothing else, click through to the article and read that section.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, though I was surprised it didn't point to a cause, which I might identify as American Exceptionalism. No need to be curious about how other countries do things when you're operating under a mythology that your country is the best.

<comment><USER15> +1 to this.

As an outsider it appears to me that this "we're the best in the world!"/"our unique freedoms" propaganda is drummed into people from a young age without anyone ever questioning it. Its no wonder there is this pervasive "what could we ever learn from them? We're the best." mentality.

The other common excuse is size. "Oh no, we can't have trains like that! We just such a big state that won't work here!" Japan is roughly the size of California. EU is roughly 10x the size of California. Both are criss-crossed by high-speed rail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of my first jobs in IT was for a big general contractor.

We built schools, hotels, restaurants, you name it.

Whenever we had a government project, like a building for the county, a jail, new secretary of state/dmv office...we went way over budget and way over schedule. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

We'd have a 'groundbreaking ceremony' and then not be able to actually dig at the site for 12 more days because permits got tripped up. How can the government not approve their own permits on time?

<comment><USER17> "the government" is more a loose confederation of public agencies. They're not a monolith that has the ability to know everything about everything, especially at the local and county levels. I don't know the specifics of that case, but last minute citizen protests or protests that weren't able to be resolved quickly enough are another issue.

It's also not like this doesn't happen in the private sector. A company bough some land on the main road where I am, razed the building, graded, and then stopped for almost 2 years now because the board won't change the zoning for them. (Which is the right decision imho.)

<comment><USER18> What are they putting in, a slaughterhouse? Maybe a brothel? What horrible business can't be accepted on "the main road"?

<comment><USER19> It doesn't matter. There is always some group of citizens who will protest any new building project.

<comment><USER18> Sure. 'jimktrains2 indicated above that he is among that group. I had hoped he would take the opportunity to attempt to justify that political preference.

<comment><USER17> It's not any horrible business; the developer wants to build lower density housing than the lots are zoned for; condos vs an apartment building. Part of my position is definitely rooted in "well, you should have taken care of this before starting instead of trying to strong-arm the township later on" and not necessarily the zoning issue itself; although I'm always a fan of higher density housing.

<comment><USER18> If this is lower-density housing replacing previously-existing-at-that-site higher-density housing, I see your point. It's my understanding that zoning typically enforces the opposite preference, so I'm still suspicious of zoning in general. However, if the previous use was substantially anything other than housing (which would be my guess with it being on "the main road"), this is crazy. There is no rational set of preferences that would prefer both non- housing and dense housing to less-dense housing. At some point the meddlers have to stop second-guessing the market.

Of course, building permits are one thing and demolition permits are another. What municipality happily countenances the destruction of high-density housing without seeing the plans for what's coming next? That is even more crazy.

<comment><USER17> The lots were previously two smaller apartment buildings. I have a feeling the issue is a little more complex than _just_ the zoning, but the zoning appears to be a major issue from the news and comments in council.

> here is no rational set of preferences that would prefer both non-housing > and dense housing to less-dense housing. At some point the meddlers have to > stop second-guessing the market.

While I agree that anything productive is better than vacant lots, I do think we need some more dense housing, especially since there are already a couple of other apartment buildings, transit, and high demand for housing in that area.

I also think that it's a bad precedence that a developer can just get the zoning changed by holding their breath and stamping their feet. That said, I often think that zoning laws are a bit to restrictive and could use a broad rethinking _in general_.

I would personally like to see a mixed-use building, with retail on the first floor, but that's another issue entirely.

> Of course, building permits are one thing and demolition permits are > another. What municipality happily countenances the destruction of high- > density housing without seeing the plans for what's coming next? That is > even more crazy.

We moved in after the buildings were demolished, but my understanding was that the buildings weren't in the best condition and may have been demolished by the previous owners. However, there has been a good deal of grading and site prep work going on when we moved in, and all work has ground to a halt since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> NYC MTA is a great example of why. We need to put blame on all parties involved politicians, corporations and labor unions. Anyone who unconditionally defends labor is naive at best. NYT reports:

"Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show."

Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york- subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway- construction-costs.html)

<comment><USER21> I am certainly of the left, but Labor Unions have been a huge contributor to so many problems in the United States. I'm not against people getting a living wage, ect but Labor Unions have always been about getting "theirs".

A huge reason the US doesn't have universal healthcare is Labor Unions who preferred that they got good healthcare benefits from their work.

A huge reason we have major infrastructure problems in the US is because of the absurd cost of labor. Nothing gets built in most big cities unless Labor Unions are involved and they rip everyone off. This makes public transit unworkable, cities unlivable and unaffordable, ect.

<comment><USER20> I also stand at the far left of political spectrum and in my experience labor unions completely abuse their positions. I think it is way past time to find another way to provide decent wages to workers.

<comment><USER22> Why are unions even permitted on public infrastructure projects? All municipal projects that I have heard about in recent years had extensive work rules, safety, "living wage" requirements, etc. as conditions of the bid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Those who blame it squarely on unions, explain how Europe has strong unions and yet construction there is orders of magnitude cheaper than in the US?

It's because there isn't a proper bidding process. Politicians just give sweetheart bloated contracts to the same contractors every time, and those contractors then "donate to their campaign". If they instead used things like sealed bids and had contractors compete against eachother, it wouldn't cost $1B per mile for NYC's 2nd avenue subway, absurd.

NY Governor Cuomo surprisingly called this out recently, describing it as a "transit industrial complex": [https://nypost.com/2019/01/04/mta-officials- are-fuming-over-...](https://nypost.com/2019/01/04/mta-officials-are-fuming- over-cuomos-brazen-blindsides/)

<comment><USER24> There are unions, and then there are unions.

In Germany, labour unions are strong, but things like union security agreements are unheard of (and I was amazed something like that would exist when I first heard of it). The stories you read about corruption in US labour unions (admittedly subject to selection bias) are unheard of over here.

There are strong laws and customs around arbitration processes, and a culture of unions considering survival and success of the business above pushing through maximal demands. E.g. in a prolonged strike, if employers and union are unable to resolve the conflict, after some time arbitration by a generally respected elder statesman kicks in. They hear both sides, and then make a binding decision, which usually is generally accepted. It all seems a bit more balanced.

I'm not sure how much that transfers to other European countries. France famously has a different culture around strikes and unions, but doesn't seem to be representative ([https://www.etui.org/Services/Strikes-Map-of- Europe](https://www.etui.org/Services/Strikes-Map-of-Europe)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The point about the size of the stations is very obvious in Chicago. Most of the stations were built 100 years ago, and are roughly the same size. A handful of stations have been rebuilt--at great cost. At some of the older stations, you can't barely walk 2 people side by side on the platform without feeling like you're about to fall on to the tracks. The new stations by comparison are 4 times as wide and have gigantic entrances.

<comment><USER26> The interesting question is, do we need the huge stations? If that's a the difference between a $80mil project and a $400mil project, could we build the smaller ones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Funny that the article doesn't once mention unions as a factor that drives up cost. It's almost as if attacks on unions for making public works slow and expensive are disingenuous.

<comment><USER28> Indeed, the author even wrote another article explicitly refuting the anti- union argument.

[https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme- weeding-u...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme-weeding- unions-and-construction-costs/)

<comment><USER5> That post has a few problems:

\- His line about the DART Orange Line is mixing three different projects (the actual Orange Line, the Trinity River Expressway, and the Dulles (VA) Metro extension)

\- He is mixing actual project costs with projected costs, as if the comparison is equivalent

\- The biggest problem, though, is that he is using "Right to Work" to mean "no unions", which is ridiculous. He even doubled down on that in the comments with the asinine statement "But in places with zero union density, like Texas".

Those are just the problems I saw from ~10 minutes of research on the subject. Considering that, I don't put a lot of faith in his arguments.

<comment><USER29> I noted similar issues as well. Particularly for the Silver Line (which he later calls the Orange Line) the guy neglects the fact that this is a government job, despite being in a Right to Work state, and is a federally/publicly funded project and so falls under Davis Bacon Act provisions which are strongly driven by union rates within the region. Especially for Silver Line, union rates in MD/DC have a large impact on the greater DMV area, including the Silver Line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Politicians in the United States do not have an incentives to control costs.

Do any other politicians have systemic incentive to control costs? If so, how?

<comment><USER31> Let's take the UK for example. Grayling, the transport minister, is currently getting pressure from all sides and definitely from the public to quit his post because of his poor decision making that led to a 33m pound out of court settlement.

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, is facing questions and tremendous public pressure on a daily basis for her austerity led decisions to cut the police budget (something that would be unheard of in the US).

They have tremendous incentives to cut costs. In fact, the UK, which was also booming (growth which has slowed since the Brexit vote, however) over the past 5-6 years, continues to be engaged in austerity measures.

Clearly something there is incentivizing UK politicians to pay attention to costs. I think part of the reason is that in the UK you have (a) a populace that believes that government should be providing services where it is effective, and as a result, considers reductions in services a major negative against the government, and (b) you have actual ministers who ar directly responsible for specific areas, such as transport, who can be held accountable by the public. Not being able to control costs means not being able to provide services effectively, which in turn leads to the government failing in elections.

In the US, there isn't a transport minister to point to when the California HSR fails, which means responsibility and blame is diffused. Maybe that's where the difference lies.

Also, contrary to what some believe, most people who believe in government providing certain services don't believe in the government being inefficient in doing so, and will hold that inefficiency against the government since it means they get less, or substandard services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It'll be useful if the title could clarify that this is about metro/subway construction costs in large cities, rather than all construction costs in America.

<comment><USER30> Indeed, residential/commercial construction costs are actually relatively low historically speaking.

(The land that you build it on is another matter.)

<comment><USER33> [https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/whats-up-with-construction- co...](https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/whats-up-with-construction-costs)

Real construction costs are 50% higher than they were in the 1950s, according to our analysis.

<comment><USER34> Off topic, what led you to snag "the_economist" for BuildZoom?

<comment><USER33> This is not a company account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is refreshingly low level and candid. I would welcome this kind of analysis in more places. Please emulate this document!

</comment><comment><USER36> The part about mezzanines struck me. BART has huge barren mezzanines. There is not one shop in the entire station. The other subways I've visited in the US (Boston, DC, NYC) also don't have any shops except in some of the largest like Grand Central or Penn station.

Compare this with subways and train stations in Japan which often have shops in the mezzanines and sometimes at the platform. There are always at least vending machines at the platform. I don't think this is unique to Japan, I recall there being shops in the station in Korea, Taiwan, and London too.

Why do the stations in our supposed capitalistic society not have any shops?

<comment><USER37> I think part of it has to do with how the lines are financed and built. In Japan and Korea for example, individual companies own the lines and stations and basically use them to funnel customers to shopping areas where they actually make their money.

In the U.S. they are built as public works projects and owned in the end by some local municipal authority. Since they are public property, there's no incentive/ability to conduct commerce there. It would be like having a McDonalds inside of a library.

<comment><USER38> As far as I know, stations in Western EU are also mostly public works, and they do have shops. As an example, Brussels-Central has multiple coffeeshops (including a Starbucks), a waffle kiosk, a fast-food joint, a newsstand, and even a small supermarket.

And funny you should mention libraries; my local public library has a private café inside (not in the reading area, of course).

<comment><USER37> Ha! I stand corrected!

In the U.S. at least it's pretty rare to see shops of any kind inside of subway stations or libraries. There's a few news stands in some NYC subway stations, but not many. I've been throughout much of Europe and don't recall seeing many stores in most of the subway systems -- but maybe I wasn't paying attention.

But there will be some kind of place to get a bite in many train and even bus stations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I actually have a reasonably large amount of knowledge on this topic. I took a break after the dot com bubble burst through structural / construction engineering[0] before returning and my brother has been and continues to be in charge of some mega projects for EllisDon.

It is certainly worse in America, but it's not great in Canada either. The issue is this: There is no incentive alignment at multiple levels of these projects.

For example, I've worked with a couple great unions[1] but overall unions slow things down. There have been times where I've been reprimanded for lending a utility knife to open a pallet to a unionized worker.

It's too adversarial here and it really does slow things down. I've seen countless work-arounds to the rules just so employers can pay people that work harder more. For example, only valued employees are offered snow plowing work in the winter when construction is slow, but these tactics don't scale.

Then, on the other side, we do not pay our public servants enough and nor do we have high enough standards for their work. There are good public servants, to be true, but that's essentially random chance. It isn't because we've intentionally created a culture of achievement or excellence in our public works departments.

In both cases firing someone is too difficult. I'm not saying it should be easy, but I've known people that show up for work at 10:30am and leave, no joke, at 2:00pm. It's completely ridiculous.

Then there is the issue of building for the first time versus expanding or maintaining. First time construction is much easier. Standards are lower, there is less stuff in the way, everyone in the city is excited for the new thing so people make sacrifices. A new subway or sports stadium brings in business to the surrounding area, so part of the cost can be pushed on to local property owners in the area. Thirty years later when the soffit is cracked because subsurface water wasn't as expected there is none of that stuff. Just some angry commuters and shop owners wondering why it is taking so long.

I'm starting to think that capital projects, especially subterranean ones, are inherently worse than smaller alternatives. They're so expensive to maintain and once they're in there is no going back. I'd rather have lots of bike lanes or streetcars than subways. We could build a lot of bike lanes for the same cost of a subway, and even have them covered so snow and rain wouldn't be annoyances.

[0] I worked on lots of stuff for the TTC, including subway stations, and some stuff for the City of Toronto.

[1] Electrical worker union IBEW Local 353 was especially great because they pushed their employees to work hard. In exchange, they were able to negotiate default conditions like nine-hour, four-day work weeks. It fostered a sense of pride in their trade and work.

</comment><comment><USER40> Americans not wanting to learn from other countries is just so puzzling to me. If I ever get an answer to why it's often "the US is much bigger than Sweden, it wouldn't work here" to which I reply "then why don't your _states_ look at the European countries? Germany and France have way more people than any US state" to which I get some defeatist drivel about that too.

Meanwhile in Brazil, China and India curiosity reigns.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting about the stations. My Ontario city is close to starting an LRT system and the station costs for just those seem kind of high.

We recently added a new station for the GO regional railway transit system that currently has two trains a day and I think it was something like $50 million Canadian. I can understand needing an elevator for disability, but it could have started as something simple besides that.

</comment><comment><USER42> I found this article really fascinating.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york- subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway- construction-costs.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> "That said, having spent the last nine years looking at topline costs and a few itemized breakdowns does let me reach some initial conclusions, ones that I believe are robust to new data."

So... a hypothesis?

</comment><comment><USER44> The Big Dig in Boston was originally estimated to cost $8 billion. People were upset about this.

There were multiple problems along the way. It ultimately ended up costing $22 billion. People were also upset about this.

At the end of the day? It was an awesome project. They completely buried a highway that cut through the city, and added a ton of green space downtown (The Greenway).

The city is better for it. Taxpayers would never have allowed it if they had their way.

We need a similar program to revitalize the MBTA. It should be done regardless of the cost. I will happily pay more real estate taxes and highway tolls for the rest of my life to support it.

<comment><USER45>
      The Big Dig in Boston was originally estimated to cost $8 billion.

No, $6 billion in 2006 dollars ($2.8 billion in 1982) per Wikipedia.

      It ultimately ended up costing $22 billion

$24 billion, according to the Boston Globe (10 July 2012), yielding a nice, round 300% in overruns.

      At the end of the day? It was an awesome project.

Seriously! It's so nice when your "$6 billion" project gets _$8.55 million in Federal_ funds that the locals don't even have to pay for.

The Big Dig cost almost triple what the entire Panama Canal project did (adjusted for inflation). There's nothing to be proud of there.

<comment><USER44> If you want to put the Panama Canal through Boston it's going to cost astronomically more than $24bn — the logistics (not to mention the requirements and processes of the time period) are entirely different.

<comment><USER46> How is that at all relevant?

<comment><USER47> The grandparent poster compared the cost of the big dig to the cost of the panama canal to in an attempt to show that the big dig was overly expensive.

This parent poster is pointing out the fallacy by hypothesizing that the Panama canal in Boston would be way more expensive than the Panama canal in Panama, thereby showing the error in the grandparent post's reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Regulation.

<comment><USER49> Yeah, wanting building not to fall down really slows down construction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Government. I didn't read it, but that's the reason.

<comment><USER51> And you are wrong, so go read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I haven't had time to read through the entire article in detail but my skimming indicates that the article fails to identify what I believe is the true reason for tunneling increases in the USA: third parties and their ability to sue projects.

This increases costs due to risk of lawsuits/challenges and excessive amounts of money put towards mitigating this risk. This continues from procurement through design and through construction. Environmental concerns have ironically been coopted into this category by NIMBY folks.

<comment><USER52> This is addressed in section 8, "Institutions part 2: political incentives":

> the political system favors NIMBYs and really anyone who complains. > Infrastructure construction takes a long time and the politician who gets > credit for it is rarely the one who started it, whereas complaints happen > early. This can lead to many of the above-named problems, especially > overbuilding, such as tunneling where elevated segments would be fine or > letting agency turf battles and irrelevant demands dictate project scope.

<comment><USER29> My point is related but not exactly the same as his section 8. Litigation in America is what has driven defensive design and construction because we are ALWAYS positioning for claims, especially from third parties. The author is zeroing in on politicians and their lack of a need to take a project from "cradle to grave" and/or answer for cost overruns. This is a symptom of the problem, in my opinion.</comment></comment></comment>


Indie Game The Movie - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Indie-Game-The-Movie/dp/B008DGRG28/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351549463&sr=8-1&keywords=Indie+Game%3A+The+Movie <comment><USER2> Or, you could watch it on NetFlix...</comment>


Registered domain names for attorneys who bullied Swartz - <AUTHOR>

Carmen M Ortiz together with Stephen P Heymann and Scott L Garland are the three prosecuting attorneys who, by abusing their power, losing all sense of proportion and justice, relentlessly hounded and bullied Aaron Swartz. They should not be allowed to get away with what they have done.
Today I registered the following domain names:
carmenortiz.org, carmenmortiz.com, carmenmortiz.org, carmenmortiz.net stephenheymann.org, stephenheymann.net, stephenpheymann.com, stephenpheymann.org, stephenpheymann.net scottlgarland.com, scottlgarland.org, scottlgarland.net, scottgarland.org
They destroyed someone beautiful. They should not be allowed to forget it. We should not forget it and we should remind them of it.
I know we are all angry right now. We should take some time to grieve and to calm down. But we should absolutely make sure that these three attorneys are held accountable for the decisions they made and actions they took. We should pin their actions to them, we should make it impossible for them to flee from their responsibility in this case. Everywhere they go people should know who they are and what they have done.
There is a right way to do this. This isn't about getting revenge. This isn't about using the Internet to bully them they way that they bullied Aaron. Instead, in the spirit of non-violence and democracy that Aaron practiced, I propose that we build a website that calls them to their own conscious for what they have done and never let them escape public responsibility.
I envision a website that will let us highlight other concrete cases of prosecutorial overreach and abuse of power as well as highlighting the many well documented crimes that the DOJ decides not to pursue (bankers who sunk the economy, high ranking officials who sanctioned torture or murder by drone, etc).
If there are any web-designers/developers who would like to help, let me know. <comment><USER2> I think we ought to make a website named hackermartyrs.com that people can contribute stuff about hackers who were martyred by the legal system and have a category for hackers who were martyred by being forced into suicide. Then have an area for the organizations and lawyers involved to document how they contributed to their deaths. Then leave it open for comments for people to state their opinions on it for all to read.

If you register domain names in the name of the lawyers, you will end up being sued because you have domain names with their legal names in them. But hackermartyrs.com does not have their legal names in the domain name, so they cannot sue.

I am disabled and haven't programmed in a long time, and have writer's block, but this would be a good cause to come out of early retirement and code some PHP or learn enough Ruby on Rails to get something going. my email is firstname.lastname@example.com for anyone who wants to contact me on this issue.</comment>


Ask HN: What data source could I use for my stock market program? - <AUTHOR>

I want to make a JavaScript or Flex widget to display stock market info. I have looked around but can't find a good free data source for this. I don't care if the data is delayed by a few minutes. <comment><USER2> <http://code.google.com/apis/finance/>

<http://developer.yahoo.com/finance/>

<comment><USER3> Second both these. Beyond that, I think you'd have to do screen scraping, but that doesn't seem legal/viable.</comment></comment>


Google Now Letting Creators Download Their Original (Source) YouTube Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/takeout/?pli=1#custom:youtube

<comment><AUTHOR> Google's blog post about it: [http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2012/09/your- youtube-orig...](http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2012/09/your-youtube- original-videos-now.html)

I'm trying it out myself. 130GB to download all my videos though. This might take a while.</comment>


Ask HN: How to two-way communicate with her? - <AUTHOR>

She's a paraplegic who can't see or speak but can hear and raise one finger. It's 1996. <comment><USER2> Morse code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that would work. Also, the method they used to allow the writer, Jean- Dominique Bauby, to write the Diving Bell and the Butterfly in which a single response would select a letter of the alphabet read out loud.</comment></comment>


MIT Turns Wi-Fi into Indoor GPS - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/mit-turns-wifi-into-indoor-gps <comment><USER3> > Although Chronos can run on existing Wi-Fi devices using just an app (or a > firmware upgrade for an access point), each device has to undergo a one-time > distance calibration.

I worked at at an indoor location-systems startup once. The real fun part of the system was integrating wifi-based location with streaming video from fixed-mount cameras to pinpoint location even better. But let me tell your right off: wifi calibration of the sort they're talking about can be incredibly obnoxious (think "carefully rolling a laptop in a cart at a constant speed around a space, in a grid", which could easily be completed in an hour or two if you are really good at it, but might take a day or two to get right if you aren't.) Sure, this is all fine if you want to calibrate one or two indoor spaces for your automated drones, especially if you've already got APs deployed in a location-friendly mode (i.e. more around the perimeter and less around the center, with antenna orientation to match), but don't expect to see it in a corner store near you anytime soon.

Now, if you can talk about automating the calibration you'll do quite well.

<comment><USER4> Are Wifi signals even stable enough over time for this to make sense? I thought their signal strength changes and adapts, sometimes even hopping channels automatically.

<comment><USER5> They seem to be taking over control of the transmitter, not using ambient WiFi data. So they're really a beacon system. There are lots of those; here's MoteTrack, from Harvard.[1] There's a commercial one, Estimote.[2]

The WiFi industry is working on a standard, called the Fine Timing Measurement protocol, which is now part of IEEE 802.11.[3][4] That provides 100ps resolution timestamps in WiFi packets. That takes care of the RF layer, and provides resolution to about 3cm. (Real world accuracy won't be that good.)

As with GPS, you need at least four fixed stations to get a fix, and preferably line of sight to five, so you can compute the error. You might get that in a big room such as a convention center or gym. If you need it in a house, you'd probably need some additional nodes that are mostly for location, not passing data traffic.

There's no technical problem doing this; it just hasn't been valuable enough to be deployed widely yet. It will probably be a free feature in fixed WiFi nodes soon.

[1] [http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~konrad/projects/motetrack/moteT...](http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~konrad/projects/motetrack/moteTrack.pdf) [2] [http://estimote.com/indoor/](http://estimote.com/indoor/) [3] [http://www.wi-fi.org/beacon/rolf-de-vegt/never-lost- indoors-...](http://www.wi-fi.org/beacon/rolf-de-vegt/never-lost-indoors-the- promise-of-wi-fi-location) [4] [http://www.ieee802.org/1/files/public/docs2014/asbt- kbstanto...](http://www.ieee802.org/1/files/public/docs2014/asbt-kbstanton- use-of-timing-measurement-0714-v01.pdf)

<comment><USER6> 100ps resolution timestamps? That's crazy impressive. I wonder how they accomplished that. It seems unlikely that there is a 10GHz clock that they're using to timestamp asynchronous events, but who knows.

My reference is the fact that 1588 systems usually get into the <25ns RMS offset realm.

This might not even make sense, but maybe they're talking about using the recovered clock from the incoming signal? Something like synchronous Ethernet?

The link posted doesn't go in to much detail, but I'd like to learn more.

<comment><USER7> They transmit on multiple frequencies. The signals on every frequency will have its own phase offset between the sender and receiver. Think of it as constructive / destructive interference patterns which varies across space, except they have a method where they measure across time multiple times.

At certain multiples of a distance, with synchronized clocks, you'll have offset X between channel Y and Z (on channel Y you may be perfectly phase synchronized, but Z is half the phase off).

Measuring the offsets for multiple sets of frequencies allows you to calculate multiple sets of possible distances, to then figure out which exact distance it is that repeats among all of the calculated distance multiples (like 1, 2, 3; 0.5, 2, 4; 1.5, 2, 3 - the number 2 occurs everywhere).

If for example you're perfectly in phase on 10 frequencies, the distance between you must be a must be a specific shared multiple of the wavelengths of all the frequencies. Least common denominator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. They are using Time Difference of Arrival analysis[1], the fact that most devices have two or more antennas, and clever software to get 10-80 cm accuracy at a good enough frequency to be used as a positional reference in a quadcopter, see the paper[2] for more info

Existing indoor positioning systems such as Bluetooth LE beacons and WiFi triangulation[3] only use the RSSI value and trigonometry to figure out the position. This method is slow (5Hz or so) and the resolution of the RSSI is bad unless you sample it directly, eg with SDR (which incidentally, is what my dissertation is about!)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration#Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration#Principle)

[2] [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi16/nsdi16...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi16/nsdi16-paper- vasisht.pdf)

[3] [https://www.qualcomm.com/products/izat](https://www.qualcomm.com/products/izat) (unfortunately there are no public 'specs' I can find...)

<comment><USER3> Point of note: Multilateration (link [1] above) is the real name for the process that ordinary people casually call "triangulation" when they're talking about wifi location. It's not actually triangulation (which determines location based on the angle) but it's based on circles (or spheres, I guess - based on the distance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those interested, I'm working on an open-source project for doing this at home: [https://github.com/schollz/find](https://github.com/schollz/find)

My solution basically uses the RSSI values for generating classifiers for each room. It works well enough to replace motion sensors.

<comment><USER10> Is this looking at the rssi of all networks seen, or playing with the device you're on? Does this work for iPhones?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it looks at the RSSI of all networks seen, generates distributions of the RSSI signals, and then leverages those distributions using some naive machine learning to classify the location.

It does not work for iPhones. Unfortunately, Apple keeps the WiFi scanning in a "private" api which would require jailbreaking because, as far as I know, use of those apis won't get past the app-store review.

So, for now it only works on Android and on laptops/single-board computers using a Python script (links to app and script in Github).

<comment><USER11> Any chance of getting it to work natively on android as a standalone library without cordova? Being able to integrate a library over Gradle into an existing app would be really really nice.

<comment><USER9> That's a good idea! I'll look into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its amazing how everything MIT touches, they make sure its in the HN title. Good branding I guess.

Anyone with inside knowledge know if this is something that will actually make it to market. They are talking about commercializing supposedly, according to the article, but I would be surprised if this isn't something that just gets incorporated into ios and android if it actually is as good as they claim. Its not like (i)beacons managed to truly become an apple owned thing.

<comment><USER13> Not taking anything away from this very novel work, but MIT definitely has a well oiled PR apparatus to publicize their research. This is a good thing from the perspective of science advocacy and outreach. But it is less good from the perspective of other researchers working in similar areas whose work can get eclipsed this way.

<comment><USER14> This is definitely a deceptive practice. Claiming this was developed by MIT is kind of like claiming that the theory of relativity was developed by the Swiss patent office. MIT is just the place where the researchers were working. To add insult to injury, the names of the researchers are withheld until the 6th (!) paragraph of the article.

<comment><USER15> Thats not an accurate analogy at all. These researchers presumably utilized MIT resources extensively while being paid by MIT specifically to conduct research in addition to other duties. Without MIT or a similar host institution their ability to conduct research such as this would have been severely constrained.

In fairness a better title would be "MIT researchers turn Wi-Fi...", and it would definitely have been good to mention the researchers' names earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If they can prove it works at scale this tech instantly eliminates the usefulness of beacons.

Wifi has always been the obvious solution to indoor location (lower power than GPS / works indoors / piggybacks on installed hardware / somewhat "open") but fidelity was too low.

Hence the rise of beacons.

Beacons IMO are the least elegant solution to the problem of indoor location because they require (a) a whole separate location framework (b) requires vendors / stores to install & maintain hardware to drive coverage (c) are owned by the OS.

I've been watching this game unfold for years - Apple bought WifiSLAM in 2013 to improve indoor location / wifi (1), and then bought "super accurate GPS" firm coherent NAV last year. (2)

There are also several startups attempting to use sensor data + geomagnetic or inertial navigation to solve this problem. (3)

If these guys actually got Wifi working, and figure out a way around the callibration problem, they in one fell swoop solved one of the major barriers to the hyper-localized advertising / consumer tracking that we've been promised (threatened with?) for years.

(1) [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/apple- buys...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/apple-buys-indoor- mapping-wifislam)

(2) [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/17/apple-buys-gps- firm-c...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/17/apple-buys-gps-firm- coherent-navigation/)

(3) [http://www.navisens.com/](http://www.navisens.com/), GiPStech.com, [http://www.PathSense.com](http://www.PathSense.com), [https://www.indooratlas.com/](https://www.indooratlas.com/)

<comment><USER17> > _Hence the rise of beacons._

Good riddance. So far beacons are widely used for just one thing - <USER2> peoples' phones with ads in stores. We've been promised indoor location accurate to 5cm; I haven't seen anyone deliver it yet.

<comment><USER7> Beacons with full AR will be marvelous (for as long as the end user is in control of the experience).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We had this problem at a previous job - how to locate a piece of medical equipment so that a nurse can quickly get it when needed (they get moved around and their locations typically aren't communicated at shift change). Ordinary WiFi wasn't good enough - it had roughly 1.2 meter accuracy, which given that radio waves can pass thru a wall, couldn't tell you if the device was in room 201 or the adjacent 203. Which is a problem when seconds counted.

The fact that they can do this with just a firmware update is excellent news. Hopefully they'll license it to some of the big commercial access point vendors (Cisco, etc).

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems that the advance here is not that WiFi can be used as an alternative to GPS, but that sweeping multiple frequencies allows for high precision timing measurements (hence the name "Chronos"). I suspect the same could be done with cellular frequencies on a much larger scale with similar improvements in accuracy. I am curious how the precision scales with more channels and lower frequencies.

Edit: Apparently exploiting the phase change of a signal has been used to improve the accuracy of GPS in a similar ways [0]. The dual radio angle calculation seems to be a more novel advancement.

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Accurate Wi-Fi based indoor location positioning already exists, though with different pros and cons. For example, the following system still works reliably when walking around, but may be a bit less accurate. And it requires no calibration [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foVqKLE4Mpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foVqKLE4Mpk)

That demo is based on the new 802.11mc standard. Surprisingly, this new standard isn't mentioned in the paper. So no comparison between this and their system...

</comment><comment><USER21> This is the same tech Prof. Katabi demoed to President Obama. She demonstrated using the tech to detect pulse rate if I recall correctly.

Here's a link: [http://news.mit.edu/2015/president-obama-meets-mit- entrepren...](http://news.mit.edu/2015/president-obama-meets-mit- entrepreneurs-white-house-demo-day-0806)

</comment><comment><USER22> Very cool. But does this work if the device is actually trying to use its wifi connection for data? I'd assume that rapidly hopping between all the channels would interfere with the normal duties of the wifi card.

<comment><USER23> I think that if a device hops in the 2.4 GHz band it loses the connection to the AP and it goes offline. So this location system will be useful to locate carts in a shop but not customer's phones connected to that shop free WiFi. And even if the customer is not connected to the AP and the phone still has the WiFi on (extremely common), I think you need an app to do that. Furthermore I expect this to impact on battery quite a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was in a giant mall yesterday where I knew what I wanted, from which outlets but with little idea where those outlets were. Indoor turn by turn navigation would have saved me 30+ mins.

<comment><USER25> Which the mall would not like, so they won't be helping you out here.

<comment><USER26> depends on the mall. i just found out one mall in my city have an automated direction on the directory machine itself. not true turn-by-turn, but helps a lot rather then guessing the places of escalator on the maps and whatnot.</comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley season 4 has it become "Big Bang Theory", not knifing SV culture? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mydFes629og <comment><USER2> I think it looks rad.</comment>


The Android performance gap is getting wider - <AUTHOR> https://mobiforge.com/news-comment/why-the-performance-gap-is-getting-wider <comment><USER2> For me, the best part of the article was the link at the bottom to a post titled "12 expert tips on how to boost web performance"; [https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/12-expert-tips-on- ho...](https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/12-expert-tips-on-how-to-boost- web-performance)</comment>


Engineer grows ice pyramids to provide water in arid Himalayan desert - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2017/06/14/artificial-glaciers-fresh-water-desert-himalayas/?utm_content=buffer27202&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer#gkHk9ZGYrPqP <comment><USER2> Is an interesting concept, but not without some issues to solve. How they maintain an inmaculate ice pyramid in a windy place full of dust and sand for example. Dark sand will trap heat.

On the other hand ponds and water tanks seem a more efficient way to achieve the same result without risking algae growth and debris. Ponds can be used to grow food so they serve more purposes. Recycling waste, culturing fishes and use the water later for vegetables. Chinese are doing the same since thousands of years.

<comment><USER3> For irrigation the debris should be no problem. I'd guess it would also be easy to filter it out.</comment></comment>


Japan Considered Evacuating Tokyo During Nuclear Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/japan-considered-tokyo-evacuation-during-the-nuclear-crisis-report-says.html <comment><USER2> Where and how do you evacuate 36M people exactly?

<comment><USER3> You just tell them to evacuate, and watch until enough get trampled so that you can evacuate.

No, seriously, there is _no_ way to get 36M people out of a city in an orderly fashion, people, even Japanese people, cannot do such a thing without causing much more damage than anything you want to evacuate from.

And this is before the whole 'where-to' issue.

<comment><USER4> I would have told them to get stuffed if they I knew they were trying to evacuate myself and millions of other people, it is recipe for disaster.</comment></comment></comment>


Speeding Up the Rust Compiler - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2019/12/11/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-one-last-time-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> Note that `cargo check` is faster than doing a full compile. Also I use the `rust-analyzer` language server for IDE integration to catch errors as I write them. Between the two, my workflow usually avoids the need for actually compiling a binary until I'm ready to run tests.

<comment><USER3> While developing I completely agree with you. However when I'm debugging it tends to get messier in my experience, I often want to make small changes and see how they influence the symptoms. In this situation you have to do full builds every time, and if your application is performance-critical enough you may not have the option of using the faster non-optimized builds.

Admittedly part of the blame falls on me, I'm a big fan of printf-debugging and I tend to only use debuggers as a last resort.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I'm quite old fashioned when it comes to debugging, so I'll attach a debugger and maybe even read through the generated assembly if need be. I've also been trying to make more use of static asserts where possible. If I can ensure both me and the compiler have the same understanding of the code then there's hopefully less space for errors at runtime. But of course this is never going to eliminate the need for debugging, even __if __(and this is a big IF) the compiler knows my exact intent (i.e. my reasoning might be wrong somewhere, perhaps very subtly so). And static asserts are still quite hacky.

All that said, I totally agree that there are times when faster compiles are really useful.

<comment><USER4> You've just given the reason I often use to explain why printf debugging is something I'm _not_ a fan of. For native development, printf debugging takes a backseat to proper instrumentation and debuggers just for sheer productivity reasons IMO. The main thing it gives is a serializable log for debugging multithreaded bugs. However, for just viewing state during a run, I think people should just learn to use their debugger (which can inject prints and watches on the fly, no need to recompile).

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, the main reason I stick to printf debugging is because I can't be bothered to change my habits, it's not a very sensible choice.

That being said, if I had to defend myself, I'd point out that printf debugging has a few advantages:

\- It's often more lightweight and less intrusive than debuggers, which makes it less likely to encounter an "heisengbug" that disappears when you attempt to debug it. This is especially true for timing-sensitive bugs (which occur in multithreaded code as you point out, but not only).

\- Debuggers are often environment-specific, if you change language, environment or even simply editor you might have to re-learn how to use your debugger. Printf will always be here for you.

\- I do a lot of work in embedded environments, including low level and bare metal stuff (bootloaders, drivers etc...). While these days there's generally some debugger support available for these targets it's often more limited or much more intrusive. If I put a breakpoint in an interrupt handler I basically freeze the entire kernel when it triggers which can sometimes do more harm than good if I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And again, in these environments the debugging solutions are often proprietary and sometimes quite expensive.

<comment><USER4> Yea, I do graphics programming mainly and I suppose console development resembles embedded to a certain degree. I guess part of my preference is that I really don't have a choice. The codebase I'm currently in can take minutes to dozens of minutes to compile. This is compounded by the fact that just loading the engine takes a long time, and loading levels/assets to get to the point where I can reproduce the bug again takes more time. I have to deal with heisenbugs a lot, so necessity has more or less forced me to learn the toolchain (or never get anything done).

It is true though that if there are bugs in the toolchain, it affects me a lot more. For my personal projects, I actually avoid windows and "fancy" GUI based tools. I also painstakingly write all my code so they either compile fast or can hot-reload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> rustc might never be as fast as the Go compiler because the language has so many additional features, but it always makes me so excited to see the continued progress in making the compiler ever faster.

Thank you for the hard work here!

Btw, mentioned in the article are these tools: " All of the above improvements (and most of the ones in my previous posts) I found by profiling with Cachegrind, Callgrind, DHAT, and counts, but there are plenty of other profilers out there." Does anyone have any good resources on using these with Rust, or just in general with C or C++?

<comment><USER6> I think rustc will never be faster than go or even java.

Go has made quite a few language concessions to be fast to compile and is designed with that in mind. And it really shows, using auto reloading in Go feels like using Ruby or Python which is just great.

From my usage standpoint Go has basically no compile time at all.

And awful compile times can be a huge hindrance to productivity. I used to do web dev in Scala, but waiting for the sleepy compiler is one of the reasons is switched to Go.

Scala is a nice language but the long compile times in combination with the vm/jetty cycle feels quite a bit slower than Rust.

<comment><USER7> Delphi, F#, ML, Ada, D prove otherwise.

What they have going for them is not depending on LLVM.

<comment><USER8> > F# proves otherwise

Not really...F# has a "slow" compiler too.

Any advanced type system, whether F#, C++, Haskell, Scala, Rust, TypeScript...is inevitably going to have a _significantly_ slower compiler than a more basic system (Go, Java, C).

That's just part of the tradeoff; though obviously you can optimize within those bounds.

It's about as universal as the runtime "rule": compiled perf > interpreted perf. Not technically inviolable, but practically so.

\---

P.S. And while the F# compiler is indeed faster than rustc, it's not apples- to-apples. F# compiles to CLR; Rust compiles through LLVM all the way to native. If Rust deferred work to runtime with an LLVM _interpreter_ ([http://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/lli.html](http://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/lli.html) ?), it would improve compile-time performance, at the cost of runtime overhead.

<comment><USER9> I don't think this is true. C compilers often have a whole bunch of optimizations built in, which could easily make them quite a lot slower than a less-optimized compiler for a language with a more advanced/complex type system. There are other factors as well, such as the efficiency of the compiler--the same C compiler implemented in C and compiled with an advanced C compiler will handily beat a C compiler written in Python and executed on CPython. But to your point, all-else-equal, a program in a language with an advanced type system takes longer to compile than a simpler type system.

<comment><USER8> I mention this at the end of my comment, but yes the second very significant factor is the nature of transformation.

A SASS (CSS preprocessor language) compiler can be very fast because it does very little.

Native compilers must do significantly more transformation than other compilers, e.g. F# CLR compiler. This is doubly so if you request optimized output (but that's probably not the case in this discussion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the things with Rust is that while the compiler could be considered slow, once your Rust code compiles, if you stay away from `unsafe` code and `unwrap()`, the code is usually bug free (apart from logic bugs that no compiler could catch). At least that's been my experience with Rust.

<comment><USER11> Huh? How exactly do you stay away from error handling? Even the most basic code on Earth has unwrap or expect in it. Show me one single library that doesn't unwrap somewhere along the line.

<comment><USER12> `unwrap()` is "handling" errors by crashing the program, so it shouldn't really be used. It's common in examples, because it's usually the shortest/laziest code possible. However, all practical uses of `.unwrap()` have better alternatives, e.g. instead of

        if foo.is_some() {
           let unwrapped = foo.unwrap();
        }

you write:

        if let Some(unwrapped) = foo {
        }

There are plenty of combinators like .map_or(), .ok_or()?, .filter_map() that deal with optional values gracefully.

<comment><USER13> > `unwrap()` is "handling" errors by crashing the program,

IIUC, panicking via unwrap() or expect() IS graceful error handling. It unwinds the stack and releases resources. We should be clearer because it's confusing to people less familiar with Rust who will confuse this with actually crashing and immediately terminating.

Personally, I think if there's nothing you can actually do to handle this error then unwrap() or expect() are the correct choices. There's no point writing more code just to bubble an error that you can't handle.

<comment><USER14> > IIUC, panicking via unwrap() or expect() IS graceful error handling. It > unwinds the stack and releases resources.

AFAIK, only with the default panic=unwind mode. With the panic=abort mode, it aborts the whole process instead of unwinding.

<comment><USER13> panic=abort is only intended for embedded stuff, I think.

<comment><USER15> Nope, it's intended whenever you want this semantic, and do not want to pay for landing pads. Embedded is a common case where this is true, but it's not exclusively for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The PR gave some very small (< 1%) speed-ups on the standard benchmarks but > sped up a microbenchmark that exhibited the problem by over 1000x, and made > it practical for procedural benchmarks to use tokens.

Does this imply that existing benchmarks weren't catching the problem here because they were _avoiding making use of a feature because it was too slow_? That seems like a strange way to write a benchmark, especially if tokens were actually in common use in the compiler itself.

<comment><USER17> Given that we're talking about token concatenation in macros, I doubt that's going to show up in that much day-to-day code, so the small gains come from benchmarks using stdlib functionality that uses this feature.

The bit about benchmarks using tokens sounds to me like he's talking about harness code, rather than the test subject code. You can speed up _running_ the benchmarks without necessarily affecting the benchmark results themselves.

<comment><USER18> If your benchmark harness has performance properties not reflected in your benchmark suite, your benchmark suite is incomplete.

Benchmark harnesses are real programs too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We have a fairly small but complex library written in Rust.

a debug compile takes about 5 minutes from clean. Release takes 18 minutes. (1.38.0)

<comment><USER20> Do you happen to be using a lot of trait bounds? I had a small library that was slow due to this, and was able to refactor from ~3 minute builds to ~6 seconds by grouping the trait bounds into marker traits.

There is a compiler flag you can use to list where time is being spent and it showed all my time was spent dealing with those trait bounds.

There is an open issue to make that not necessary.

If your time is spent linking, you can swap the lld linker in

<comment><USER21> Though note that LLD isn't supported on Mac, so no luck there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like if you're using an 'old' release (<=1.36 , like me) it is time to upgrade.

Performance improvements in this post are from november'19 to december'19 - IMHO the november version _already_ had impressive optimizations.

</comment><comment><USER23> One thing that was not addressed is why the effort is not put into making the parallel compiler default. It would give a 8x speedup on a developer machine compared to 10% speedups from these optimizations, especially when AMD releases the Zen 2 architecture for laptops.

<comment><USER24> Any gains in the single threaded model (usually) carry over to the parallel model. And maybe there is a separate effort on making the parallel compiler working better.

Maybe they are working on it in parallel.

<comment><USER23> I understand that there's a separate effort, but I don't see many blog posts about it, and I see that as something that should be prioritised.

Rust was partly created because most of the transistors on the computers are heavily underutilized, and multiprocessing with C++ correctly is extremely hard.

Rust compiler is written in Rust, so it would be a perfect showcase of taking advantage of the multi-processing safety of the language.

I know that there are global variables in the compiler that the compiler team is getting rid of, but at this point that should be the main focus, as I see that most of the easy huge gains of single-threaded improvements are over.</comment></comment></comment>


Why don't podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don't accurately seek them - <AUTHOR> https://marco.org/2016/08/15/vbr-mp3-plea <comment><USER2> That's not the only reason. We have been podcasting for over 10 years, and early on we tried to use VBR MP3s because we are teach people who know about that sort of thing.

As it turns out, not everyone is listening using a modern device. When we tried VBR a significant number of people could not listen because their MP3 playing hardware/software of choice did not support VBR files properly. They didn't realize this was the problem. They just complained that the file was corrupted while it was working fine for everyone else.

Also, lots of encoders, including Adobe Audition/Adobe Media Encoder, don't write the headers on VBR files properly. This also causes a lot of players to fail at playing them properly.

[https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1072786](https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1072786)

When you make a podcast, maximum compatibility is the priority over audio quality and file size. So standard old MP3 it is.

<comment><USER3> My favorite bug about this was on an _ancient_ MP3 player I had (an EigerMan F20), which supported VBR MP3s...incompletely. It didn't support decoding regions with certain bitrates, so it would just silently skip them, leading to extreme confusion on my part.

<comment><USER4> I had a similar problem and never considered that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want more context to this, there's a lot more in the most recent ATP podcast (with timestamp link included in the article).

Which kind of highlights a problem that I think is only going to grow over time - the general greatness of podcasts has one big black spot in that they're tough to share. I've seen so many discussions recently where there was awesome additional context or info in a recent podcast, but it was tough to share it with people in a format where they'd actually consume it. Whereas, if it had been in a blog, sharing would've been easy. Marco has the right idea with these timestamp links, but even that isn't perfect. A lot of people, especially technical people, won't even click on a non-text source, for better or worse.

It's a shame that a lot of good information is becoming harder to share due to this. It's not even that podcasts are "locked down" or behind a paywall or anything, it's just that people often don't have the time or motivation to listen to them. I don't have a great solution to this; some kind of automatic transcription maybe?

<comment><USER6> I just don't understand why Marco has bitten so hard into this problem. It doesn't matter _at all_. Everybody skips the ATP theme song anyway, and VBR will only negligibly improve quality of the rest of the show ( _as Marco himself has pointed out_ ). And it's not like the theme song sounds bad in its current state! I have never noticed any artifacts or flaws in the recording at all. This is almost literally only something the ATP crew would notice.

Assuming Apple fixes this VBR problem — unlikely — it would still be a far better idea to switch to something like AAC instead of using VBR and massively inconveniencing a) your entire audience on older iOS versions, and b) a large swath of your audience that uses players with equally poor VBR support. This whole brouhaha makes absolutely no sense.

<comment><USER7> The ATP theme song by Johnathan Mann is unexpectedly awesome, and I never ever skip it. And as Marco pointed out in the ATP episode, this also affects any musical interludes or short musical samples within any podcast.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm sure lots of people listen to it all the way through. I did for a while myself. But it's not worth inconveniencing so many of your listeners just to make your theme song (or very occasional clips) sound a tiny bit better — _especially_ considering the fact that most people listen to podcasts in their car or even through the iPhone speaker, as Marco himself discovered from his analytics. Others have already noted that the easy solution to this problem exists in the form of AAC, which is supported ubiquitously at this point. Another solution is to just use 128kbps CBR; a 1.3x size increase is really not that big of a big deal, and 128 is transparent for many use cases.

Marco's solution is way, way out of proportion to the actual "problem". You'd think the guy who so often kvetches about Apple prioritizing design over function would know better than to make the same mistake!

Also: I know you don't air your dirty laundry in front of your audience, but I'm a bit disappointed that a careful and analytical engineer like Siracusa didn't call Marco out on this nonsense. (Especially after the .marcosweirdformat discussion, which was downright comical given the inconsequential nature of the problem in the first place.)

<comment><USER8> What nonsense? He explicitly said in the episode that he studied some options and they were all bad ideas. He made a few million from the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo, has FU money in the bank and he is just scratching an itch and exploring his hobby. I don't see anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER6> The nonsense is that this is a solution looking for a problem. It's scratching an itch by trying to move a mountain. I am certain that nobody in the history of the podcast has ever complained about the sound quality of the theme song or audio clips, especially after they switched over to 96kbps. Whereas there is no doubt that any technical solution — especially any of the ones proposed, including switching to VBR — would inconvenience a whole lot of people.

(By all means, Marco should continue working in this direction if it interests him. If Apple ends up adding those ID3 tags to their MP3 decoder, it will have a net positive impact on the world. I just think it's a rather foolish endeavor.)

<comment><USER9> >I am certain that nobody in the history of the podcast has ever complained about the sound quality of the theme song or audio clips, especially after they switched over to 96kbps.

Source?

>Whereas there is no doubt that any technical solution — especially any of the ones proposed, including switching to VBR — would inconvenience a whole lot of people.

It sounded to me like the entire point of his approach is to find a technical solution _without_ inconveniencing people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's MP3s. AAC/MP4 has better efficiency, and I can't imagine any devices in 2016 don't support it...?

<comment><USER11> If only OGG support was more common :(

<comment><USER12> Opus if the free software lossy codec of choice now, I think. It can be put in an ogg container though.

<comment> TD-Linux Yup, .opus files are the Ogg container. While Opus is newer, both Opus and Vorbis are much better than MP3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are many degrees of VBR MP3 seeking support, and it's often surprisingly bad. In the case of Firefox's <audio> element, it was very poor (nearly unusable in my testing) until a few months ago:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994561](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994561)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163667](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163667)

I had a fun time testing different js audio players, and going though their many confused bug reports, issues and threads all stemming from this. Even if Apple fixes their stuff, I still wouldn't use VBR MP3 for anything that's going to get streamed. There's always going to be some platforms that screw it up, and even a future browser introducing poor seeking seems very possible.

<comment><USER14> You're correct about that there are different degrees of seeking support.

Seeking VBR MP3 with perfect accuracy is trivial by forward-reading. However, this is obviously highly inefficient on long duration seeks.

For instant seeking support, you need to (partly) depend on the optional VBR headers. This comes with its own set of issues, e.g., the most commonly used Xing header contains only 100 seek table entries, which may not provide enough resolution for large files.

I'm still surprised about the complete lack of support for those headers in AVFoundation, since I would consider it a low-hanging fruit in terms of improving usability for the majority of use cases (excluding pod casts).

Disclaimer: I've worked on MP3TrackDemuxer for Gecko/Firefox.

<comment><USER5> > However, this is obviously highly inefficient on long duration seeks.

Is it that bad? On the podcast, Marco claimed that seeking forward through an MP3 to find the correct time is pretty efficient, and that the reason for all this trouble is that streaming (specifically, requesting the correct byte offset from the server, if you want to jump to a specific time on the stream) is the problem he's trying to tackle here. He said that if it weren't for the streaming use case, he'd be fine with forward-reading.

<comment><USER15> He did say it wasn't an issue for downloaded files.

For streaming I believe he said you only get eight bits, which over a two hour podcast is about 30 seconds of precision. Then of course the podcast sometimes goes longer, not to mention how long Gruber's podcast goes.

Sounds like Matco is right it would work well for a 3 minute song but not s multi-hour podcast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So is this why I have weird problems fast-forwarding through some NPR podcasts? I'll find myself at the end of the podcast (as indicated by the time bar), but the podcast itself is still playing.

Man, Apple really is neglecting podcasts. Reminds of an article I read recently - "Podcasts Surge, but Producers Fear Apple Isn't Listening"

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/business/media/podcasts- su...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/business/media/podcasts-surge- apple.html)

<comment><USER11> It's not Apple's fault; It's MP3 in general. Seeking in VBR MP3s is hard unless you decode the whole file and make note of the offsets for timing.

<comment><USER17> And decoding the whole file, in turn, would be easy in any other use-case (iTunes does this for "gapless playback" calculation) but podcasts are quite often streamed, and only once.

Probably the simplest "clever hack", if Apple wanted to fix this on their own, would be for all the podcast feeds registered through iTMS to get their files retrieved by the iTMS servers once, chewed through to calculate this information, and then all the calculated "keyframe" offsets injected as an opaque extra data field for each feed item of the iTMS-served podcast feed, where the Podcasts app can pick it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not a fans of VBR MP3. VBR is great. But as some has shared maximum compatibility is much more important. Let's do some maths ( Correct me if I am wrong )

At 128Kbps that is 1MB per minutes, an hour would means 60MB. Since most podcast uses 64Kbps we are talking about 30Mb, a saving of 20% means 6MB per client, 10,000 listeners saves you 60GB per episode, assuming a Weekly episode, that is 240GB....... on an 2015 Est of ATP listeners around 80,000, that is ~ 2TB of Transfer. That is the transfer a $10 Linode would give you.

So is it really worth the risk of VBR concern on a little saving worth $10 to $20?

Since i didn't exactly listen to the podcast, I wonder what problem does he has with AAC. Because the argument about most having a newer devices with proper support for VBR MP3 also works for AAC. And AAC sounds A LOT better.

<comment> et-al You raise a good point, but if you're ever in a place with a shoddy internet connection, you appreciate optimized filesizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not a fan of VBR MP3 files in general. They're more complicated to deal with when writing a codec, due in no small part to the seeking problem. And VBR is one of those optimizations that only works on things that didn't need optimizing in the first place (i.e., low-entropy frames.) There's just not much point to it.

If you need VBR MP3 for some reason, chances are you really need a better format.

</comment><comment><USER20> Oh, that explains why when I pause music on my iPhone and resume, it doesn't continue playing from the same place.

Damnit, Apple.

</comment><comment><USER21> How does one actually see the bug report? What is `rdar://27848317` supposed to open?

<comment><USER22> This in reference to Apple internal bug tracking system named "Radar", the number listed here is the bug ID and only Apple folks and probably the person that created that bug in the Radar system can see it

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I assume this is the same problem I see in my car (VW) when streaming Spotify via Bluetooth? The progress bar in the car seems to go at double speed and runs out about halfway through each track.

<comment><USER24> I thought so too but it's actually a bug in the radio itself (if you're driving a MK6).

You can go to the dealer and reference Technical Service Bulletin (TSB) 91-13-03 and they'll do a software update to fix it.

\--- There's another bug in that radio but I won't tell you until after you see if you want to get it fixed because its really annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I actually didn't know that MP3s had a VBR option...I guess this shows how uncommon it is.

I use VBR Ogg whenever I can, and I always thought it was weird that MP3 didn't have support for that feature. I guess I was (as always) a bit ignorant :D.

</comment><comment><USER26> > VBR encoding is far more space-efficient and better-sounding than constant- > bitrate (CBR) encoding

While this may be true for podcasts, it's def false for music files.

<comment><USER27> How so? Any VBR encoder could choose to produce CBR at the targeted average bitrate. The fact that it doesn't means that there is some better setting in terms of either space or quality.</comment></comment>


Everything that is wrong with American capitalism, in one headline - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/04/everything-that-is-wrong-with-american.html <comment><USER3> Service businesses spin off and absorb blocks of customers all the time. If I sell someone else my paper delivery route, is that an indictment of American capitalism?

Really, the title should be "everything that's wrong with state and local politics in one headline."

If you want to blame someone for the situation in "such cities as Long Beach, Malibu" (that often, there's only one guy delivering papers), start here: [http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Information+for+providing+s...](http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Information+for+providing+service/videofranchising.htm). The state of California grants cable franchises,[1] and not with just an eye towards creating competition. Read the four bullet points on that page. Only the first has to do with competition. The other three are priorities that necessitate policies that discourage investment and competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If I sell someone else my paper delivery route, is that an indictment of > American capitalism?

It is if your customers don't have the option to switch to another paper.

<comment><USER4> and the reason you don't have the option to switch to another service provider is your state and local governments granting comcast, et al local monopolies.

Please direct criticism to the proper source: government interference.

<comment><USER5> > and the reason you don't have the option to switch to another service > provider is your state and local governments granting comcast, et al local > monopolies.

The real reason is the FCC doesn't require the infrastructure businesses to sell wholesale access to competitors. Once upon a time, Comcast et al would've leased you the line, but you would've had choice in your ISP service. A stroke of the pen eliminated all serious competition in the ISP game, and made it so Comcast owns the entertainment pipeline all the way from movie studio lot to your internet connection.

Odd that the studios aren't allowed to own movie theaters [1], but they're heading straight for the same end result by controlling your internet access.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > in a free market, the customer is supposed to select the supplier, not the > other way around

Which free market philosopher expressed this sentiment exactly? None that I'm aware of. Free markets involve free choice of both customers and suppliers. Customers may chose to leave the supplier based on this move, and are absolutely within their right to do so. Customers might even be able to argue their way out of locked contracts.

The idea that free markets should be sort of one-sided, consumer owns supplier, is just silly in my view.

<comment><USER7> Free market is where consumer has right to buy the goods they want and suppliers have right to produce goods they want. I agree to your point, both sides should have options to select what they want. But here consumers have no choice. It cannot be considered free market even remotely.

<comment><USER8> Telecom market is obviously not a free market - there are piles of regulations, both federal and local. It looks, however, as the OP sees free market as "suppliers do what I want" \- which may be a consequence of free market, sometimes, due to consumer's power to withhold purchase from suppliers that don't do what they want - but is not a condition. There could be free market where consumers have no choice - i.e., if for some reason there's only one supplier of said good. Simplest example would be unique non-commodity items - if somebody has the Picasso painting that you want, you can't just go to a competitor and buy it from them, you have no choice. Another example can be markets with very high barriers of entry and very low profit margins, where fixed costs of entering the market may outweigh potential benefits, and as such once one player has established itself there may be extended periods - with completely free markets - that there is no competition for them on that market.

So, the absence of buyer's choice is not per se an evidence of the market not being free, and there's nothing in free market that ensures buyer would _always_ have a choice - only a promise that in most cases, the choice would exist, supported by ample evidence.

<comment><USER7> Remember ATT bid for T-Mobile? FCC stopped the deal to keep the competition and also so consumers have a choice. Same applies here but seems they are turning their eyes away. Your example of Picasso painting does not apply, by definition that is one of a kind item and only selected people want them, it is not a commodity, so market competition does not apply.

<comment><USER8> Market is any set of voluntary exchanges, I just point out that some markets can have no competition despite being free. This can happen even in commodity markets, e.g. if somebody owns a huge chunk of the market. E.g. diamonds & De Beers. For telecom markets, there seem to be no substantial reasons why healthy competition can not exist on a free market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain to me how this doesn't violate the Sherman Act (I'm being serious)?

Comcast is actively engaging in trust behavior with another company in order to obtain a desirable merger ruling with the FCC. How is that not anti- competitive?

<comment><USER10> Cable monopolies are state sanctioned and state controlled, and thus fall under the Parker immunity doctrine[1]. Its the same doctrine that permits tight state regulation of electric, gas, and other utilities.

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

<comment><USER10> I would like to correct myself. Cable _franchises_ are state sanctioned and state controlled. Monopolies ("exclusive franchises") _were_ also permitted under the Parker immunity doctrine, but as rayiner pointed out elsewhere in the discussion Congress explicitly prohibited them with various acts in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So Comcast is trying to build a monopoly and people see it as a failure of Capitalism ? In non-capitalist societies monopoly is a default state. (India for example for a long had only one government telecom provider. It exists today with wages to turnover ratio of 103% where as for private companies it is 5%.)

If Comcast actually manages to create an monopoly it will be able to dictate higher prices for poorer service. What prevents Google or someone else who has interest in cheap internet from entering the market as a new service provider ? One answer as usual: Government.

All corporations are greedy and will do everything in their power to create monopolies and squeeze every last penny out of our pockets. This is true is all societies and the best way to stop them is not by letting government fix the problem but letting government out of it.

<comment><USER12> The answer to poor regulation isn't no regulation.

I'm much more interested in government counterbalancing corporations instead of one of them grossly overpowering the other.

<comment><USER11> Asking government to come up with "counterbalancing regulations" is exactly same as asking corporations not to be ruthless in making profits. In one word: "Impossible".

There is a good reason why corporations are ruthless in profit making. It is because the people who are responsible for making its decisions have a strong incentive to make more and more profits at all cost.

Government out of all people have 0 incentive to come up with anything that acts as a counterbalance. Government employees including Mr. President have only one incentive. Keep that damn job. I worked in a department that was focused on improving certain aspect of engineering education. Very quickly I realized that our jobs and funding depended on painting a very sad picture of reality and getting lots of money from government. Improving education was the last thing we were concerned about.

I do not see what is wrong with "no-regulation" at all. In fact all the empirical evidence suggests that no-regulation leads to far better outcomes in most areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > the customer is supposed to select the supplier, not the other way around

Which isn't entirely right. Companies routinely chase after specific demographic groups. Porsche isn't exactly selling huge numbers of low-cost commuter boxes. Where you live is just as much a demographic category as anything else.

It doesn't mean it's not a crappy deal, but the article doesn't get how things work from the company side.

<comment><USER14> What you're describing is companies choosing who they market to, not choosing who their customers are.

<comment><USER12> Extending the metaphor is off-topic, but Lamborghini (or Ferrari -- can't remember which) picks it's customers. In order to get on the waiting list for their small run cars, you have to have purchased one of their cars before and not done anything to piss them off.

When the supply is that low and the demand that high, the costs move beyond monetary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cable (and other utilities) are not good examples of free-market capitalism since they operate under franchise agreements with the affected municipalities.

<comment><USER16> This is mis-reading the thesis. Those franchise-agreements and associated rgulatory structures are the premise. The bit about "everything that is wrong with American Capitalism" more or less logically follows.

<comment><USER15> I read his thesis ... I'm stating it's wrong. Utilities are not free-market and don't represent American capitalism. This is one step away from government-owned utilities, closer to socialism and worse than both (capitalism and socialism).

EDIT:

Reading the sub-comments below, I think perhaps my mistake is assuming that American capitalism tends to be more like Tesla, Amazon, etc (maybe I'm deluded or just a hopeless optimist). But if "Bad American Capitalism" is the topic being discussed, utilities are a perfect example and perhaps we can agree that there are examples of "Good American Capitalism".

<comment><USER17> _> Utilities are not free-market_

True.

 _> and don't represent American capitalism_

Depends on how you define "American capitalism". I think they represent American capitalism just fine, because to me "American capitalism" very often means "companies that can't compete in the free market use their capital to get the government to pass laws and regulations that protect them from competition".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How are these customers not free to select their supplier? If you dont like the new owner then you can switch to another service provider.

Suppliers switch ALL THE TIME in the free market and consumers are none-the- wiser. Consumers care about the end product...is it up to par for what I pay? Think of the hundreds of suppliers that go into the computer you use. Did you select them? Do you care who provided the plastic for your keyboard?

<comment><USER19> With regards to cable/internet service providers, in a lot of locations there simply is only one option. If that's the case in the area where the customer trading is going on, then the only option is to cancel that service and go without the internet/cable. That's why it is bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Not only is this the situation we are in, but we have somehow gotten here with only the feeblest of protests. "

Feeblest of protests? I ditched Comcast years ago, and it apparently bothers them enough that they send a person to my door every month or two. What does he want me to do, storm the local Comcast office?

</comment><comment><USER21> If its that easy to "switch" customer bases why can't I just choose an upstream provider and force providers to compete on service?

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been "owned" by three different cable companies in the last 3 years. In the same house. The worst part is, the big fish who "owns" me now hasn't bothered to upgrade fish #2's infrastructure to match their own. So I now have the worst of both worlds - famously crappy support, with poor selection. Thank Buddha for Satellite.

<comment><USER23> It's a sad state of affairs when anybody is happy with satellite internet. So much expense for such an awful service in all respects.

<comment><USER24> As a (very) rural satellite consumer, it's only awful in most respects, not all. With the latest incarnation of satellite, the speed isn't terrible. Really, it's not.

If the weather isn't bad, and it's not spring/fall sunspot season, and you only use 15 gigs. But at least it's overpriced.

<comment><USER25> And if you don't have hills or trees between you and the southern sky, and you don't have any interest in anything latency-dependent, like gaming or VPN/remote desktop.

Oh, and uploading anything ever. Does satellite still use dial-up lines for all upstream communication?

<comment><USER24> Uploading isn't terrible anymore. No dial-up lines. Not super fast, by any stretch, but it's not an the abomination it used to be.

What kills me, personally, is that I have a fiber line running between two of the major metros in my state underground at the front of my property, and no feasible way to tie into it. Am currently taking suggestions on how to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's because we don't live in a capitalistic society. We live in a plutocracy where the rich change the rules depending on whatever is most advantageous to them. We privatize our gains and socialize our losses. There was a time during the financial crisis where I thought real change was going to occur, but things like the Tea Party went upside down and started attracting kooks and racists instead of real fiscal conservatives.

<comment><USER27> Wait what ?

hypocrisy: the practice of claiming to have moral standards or _beliefs_ to which one's own _behavior_ does not conform;

Social Networking Platforms are know to treat and swap users as commodities. Why are people even complaining ?

"I am not a Number; I am a Man!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sure this is as much of a problem as he makes it out to be - <USER2> anything, we should be disturbed that the merger is being allowed to go through in the first place. Separating out some customers to prevent a monopoly is a good thing, if anything, and has been done before - when Verizon acquired Alltel, they were required to let AT&T buy the North Dakota portion of Alltel so there wouldn't be a Verizon monopoly here.

<comment><USER29> I agree that the merger approval is the original and bigger problem at large, however, unlike AT&T/Alltel this does not seem like 'monopoly prevention' but in fact just the opposite. Calling it 'saving-face' doesn't even do the situation justice.

Sure, Comcast sells off 1.4 million viewers. The gap from No.1 to No.2 post- merge then grows from ~11m subscribers to nearly ~25m. Not only that, but as the LA Times article points out, this is "a fast-evolving industry that requires huge capital investments to maintain..."

Competitors will be reluctant to enter an industry with such significant capital barriers, and why would they? Comcast owns their customers before they've even started.

<comment><USER7> Based on what I've seen and heard, Comcast has history of doing things like this. They have entered in contract with apartment complex across the nation and have mandated each apartment to have their service. The consumers have been at their mercy whether they like their content or not or even want it. Comcast has gotten too large, it is very dangerous when one company controls so much of media in the country. Where are the regulators?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Afaik, the cable companies got virtual monopolies to certain regions/cities/neighborhoods with the claim that they were like utilities. Laying cables and maintaining them was similar to what power companies do.

And now, we are finding out the rates of the cable companies are going up and up because we are basically financing their expansion into other businesses.

It's like my local power company raising rates so that they can go into business of running data centers.

</comment><comment><USER31> When discussing the cable industry, one must acknowledge that it is unique in its government mandated monopoly. Trying to analyze it as normal capitalism is pointless.

</comment><comment><USER32> This was an unintentional bait and switch.

Monopolies on tv? Who cares? I don't even watch it.

...and then overnight they steal internet from the phone companies and dedicated isp.

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/maintain-true- net-...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/maintain-true-net- neutrality-protect-freedom-information-united-states/9sxxdBgy)

</comment><comment><USER34> Looks like an industry ripe for disruption.

</comment><comment><USER35> I did choose. I don't have cable.

</comment><comment><USER36> A lot more than that is wrong with capitalism like the fact that no value is given to anything you can't sell.

</comment><comment><USER37> Everything that is wrong with this HN post, in one headline.</comment>


Why crypto currencies can't replace card networks like Visa/Mastercard? - <AUTHOR> What could be the possible reasons? <comment><USER2> * only a few transactions per second, worldwide

* no consumer safety, cryptocurrency fans don't even understand the most basic requirements for a consumer product

<comment><USER3> Transactions isn't the issue; you can push a lot per second.

The problem is throughput, and wait time.

Throughput, is the whole block size problem; and that whole can of worms.

Most people don't want to wait an hour plus or minus, for a transaction to be classified as safe. Zero confirmation transactions, the seller takes all the risk.

<comment><USER2> "Paying isn't a problem, only receiving payments"

Right. Cryptocurrency make-believe.</comment></comment></comment>


Is the SP500 the Highest It's Ever Been? - <AUTHOR> https://is-sp500-the-highest-ever.glitch.me/?delta=5 <comment><USER2> Maybe an an improved question would be "Is the SP500 the Highest its Ever Been in terms of Uninflated Dollars?" Or maybe "... in terms of ounces of gold?"

The numbers keep increasing, but is the increase higher or lower than the inverse of the currency decline? (If the currency declines by 5%, prices of goods must increase by an equivalent amount to maintain the value of the goods. You need more of something smaller to have the same final amount.)</comment>


Show HN: Serveo–Port forwarding a la ngrok using SSH, with HTTP inspect/replay - <AUTHOR> https://serveo.net <comment><AUTHOR> When you make an SSH connection to serveo.net and request remote forwarding, a subdomain is assigned, and traffic to that address is forwarded to your local server (like ngrok).

Use it like this: ssh -R 80:localhost:8080 serveo.net

The main difference is the use of the SSH client, so there's nothing to install.

Like ngrok, it can also do HTTP inspection and replay using a terminal GUI launchable after SSH is connected.</comment>


60 Words And A War Without End - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is buzzfeed, but it's not the buzzfeed you're used to.

This article is written by their Michael Hastings Fellow, and is a seriously in-depth and interesting look at a piece of legalese that has defined much of the United States' more controversial foreign policy since 9/11.

Michael Hastings Fellowship: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/hastingsfellowship](http://www.buzzfeed.com/hastingsfellowship)</comment>


Man indicted for disabling red light cameras faces 7 years in prison - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/man-indicted-for-disabling-red-light-cameras-faces-7-years-in-prison/ <comment><USER2> jury nullification</comment>