World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later - <AUTHOR> https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/world-of-goo-update-10-years-later <comment><USER2> World of Goo was a great example from the early Android days of what people thought the future of mobile gaming would be. High quality games that could be controlled with tapping and swiping.

Unfortunately it turned out to be mostly games preying on the impatience of the player to make microtransactions.

<comment><USER3> Flight Control, Doodle Jump, (early) Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Tap Tap Revenge, Cut the Rope, Fieldrunners. I really miss the good old days of iPhone gaming.

<comment><USER4> Flight Control :(

I wish they update the game to make it compatible with latest iOS.

<comment><USER5> Tiny Wings was a masterpiece.

<comment><USER6> Switched to Android years ago and am still sad that Tiny Wings is the pretty much the only game that is Apple exclusive.

<comment><USER7> Maybe try Dragon, Fly! It is quite similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Holy cow, I bought the game 10 years ago, found my old email with the "Secret World of Goo Download Location" and it worked :) No Linux update yet, but I'm going to play the original anyway. Such a fun game.

Edit: .deb package didn't work on Xubuntu 19.04 but extracting the .tar.gz and running ./WorldOfGoo.bin64 worked like a charm

<comment><USER9> I just remembered I too bought the game 10 years ago, as part of the Humble Indie Bundle. I also found the old email but it didn't "just" work.

Interestingly, the part of the chain that failed was their then email marketing provider, that hijacked all the links in the email to provide click tracking, doesn't exists anymore. So all the links are dead even though they would have redirected to pages that are still functioning.

<comment> em-bee look at the text version of the email, it contains the actual URL.

based on your post i checked if i got the bundle that included world of goo, and it turns out i did. it contained the key url as [http://www.humblebundle.com/?key=..](http://www.humblebundle.com/?key=..). and that url is still working. as someone stated elsewhere in this discussion, the humble bundle version is not updated. it's downloading version 1.30 right now...

<comment> em-bee in the meantime i am playing osmos in the browser which the humble download page helpfully includes. i am pretty sure that can't have been there when the bundle was released initially

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I _loved_ playing World of Goo when it came out.

And nothing has made me feel older than finding out it's 10 years old. I would have been like... 4 years? 5 at the most? _Wow._

Congrats to them!

<comment><USER11> Games like World of Goo, Braid and Super Meat Boy really paved the way for indie games. They showed that small teams can product quality entertainment, and that there's a real demand for it.

<comment><USER12> back then the indie scene was super interesting. [https://experimentalgameplay.com/](https://experimentalgameplay.com/) was full of gems and igf had plenty interesting concepts too with lot less focus on trying to make them marketable.

<comment><USER13> Do you know why the sector did not boom?

<comment><USER12> it did boom!

 _edit: rewrote the whole paragraph to be more clear and remove unnecessary negative connotation against mainstream indie which I do not share_

thanks to early experiment success and profitability indie games managed to get a lot of visibility and the genre exploded. whole business revolve now around making indies meet buyers (kickstarter, indiegogo, steam greenlight); as a compromise they lost some of the original experimental nature and gained in term of polishing and content quality.

I'd say the sector transformed; it lost some innovation, gained some marketability. there's less explorative projects now and they are harder to find, but you can still find them; currently itch.io seems to be a trove of these kind of content, but the lack of curation makes hard to find anything among the pile of crap (no offence intended, it's just Sturgeon's law)

<comment><USER14> It also got absolutely flooded - Steam is chock-full of indie stuff, but as everything always is, 99% of it is crap, and by making it easier for a developer to get visibility, it's now virtually impossible to sift through to find the promising stuff.

<comment><USER11> It's worth pointing that there still is amazing gems in there, just last year we had games such as Into The Breach, Celeste, Obra Dinn, Gris, and many many more. But yeah, since the bar has been lowered, there's also far more crap too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Likely in preparation of the Fre Giveaway for the Epic Gamestore? [https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/](https://www.epicgames.com/store/en- US/)

<comment><USER16> This seems like a strategy everyone can appreciate: Epic pays indie developers to update their old games

<comment><USER17> > Epic buys Rocket League publisher, announces Epic Launcher exclusive, and > goes silent after backlash

Seems like a better way to put it. They are buying IP left and right and pushing their unfinished, buggy client in a very unhealthy way.

[0] - [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-05-01-epic- acquires-...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-05-01-epic-acquires- psyonix-will-remove-rocket-league-from-sale-on-steam-later-this-year)

<comment><USER18> I've bought a few games on Epic, and had no problems. The lack of junkware like on Steam is great – I can honestly browse the store knowing that every game is high quality (even if not necessarily in the genre I enjoy).

Achieveemnts not popping up helps focus on the actual game.

Cloud save, family sharing etc. are of marginal use for me and I imagine 99% of consumers outside the vocal minority.

<comment><USER19> Well, I was about to comment that the lack of cloud save is the absolute dealbraker for me as I play games at home and at work, so if I can't sync saves automatically then I won't buy a game from there(#1 reason why I haven't bought Metro Exodus for instance, game which I am otherwise super interested in).

But I guess that makes me a vocal minority :P

<comment><USER20> I used to "cloud save" my Borderlands 2 save files by symlinking the save game folder to a Dropbox folder

<comment><USER19> Yes, that would be an option if my work allowed any services like that(and yes, it's slightly odd that dropbox/google drive are not allowed, but Steam cloud sync is).

<comment><USER21> Not sure if it helps any, but box.net allows webdav access and can be mounted natively by Windows.

<comment><USER19> Oh but it's not a technical issue - both dropbox and google drive would install and work fine, we have full administrative access on our machines with no restrictions. But it is against policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Because of this post, I just found out about Human Resource Machine...

I'm hooked. Currently I'm trying to optimize my Level 17 solution.

I hope these people continue producing new games.

<comment><USER23> If you want a slightly quicker REPL for HRM, I've got a clunky-but-functional CLI version that I use when I'm at work for testing ideas - [https://bitbucket.org/rjp/hrm/src/master/](https://bitbucket.org/rjp/hrm/src/master/)

Pull requests gratefully accepted, etc.

<comment><USER24> When following the link to the repository, I'm forced to login, then receive an access denied error from Bitbucket. Is the repository private?

<comment><USER23> Ah, bugger, sorry, I thought I'd made it public a while back but obviously didn't. Apologies again, it's definitely public now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I bought the Humble Indie Bundle in May 2010 that included World of Goo. I think I have the game on Steam as well through the Steam key that was included but can't check right now. Anyway, since some are saying it may take a while before the Steam version is updated, I was wondering if the download that is accessible through my account on Humble Bundle has been / will be updated?

<comment><USER26> I got it in the Humble Bundle. No Steam key provided and I just downloaded it from the HB site and it's not updated. Pity, I really like this game and think my kids, who weren't born when it came out(!), would really love it too.

<comment> em-bee from this comment it looks like there is a different way to access the bundle that get's an updated link. in any case they are aware of the humble bundle and seem to promise to update that too: [https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/world-of-goo- update-10...](https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/world-of-goo- update-10-years-later#comment-9291)

<comment> em-bee the humble bundle download link has been updated. it features version 1.51 now

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned the Wii version. I do own the PC release (from when it was in that first Humble Bundle) but this game was a brilliant fit for the WiiMote controller. I still play it today.

<comment><USER28> There's a switch version that uses the accelerometer/gyro in the joy cons to emulate a wiimote, it works surprisingly well - definitely worth a shot if you want to replay it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The other games from this developer, Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans, are fun little pseudo programming puzzle games. They're pretty good!

<comment><USER30> And if you like those, any of the Zachtronics series of games are perfect. Spacechem is a personal favorite (machine layout programming), but there's also TIS-100 (modular system programming), SHENZEN IO (modular digital logic programming), and Opus Magnum (machine layout programming). The last two are actually upgrades of older games they made, KOHCTPYKTOP and The Codex of Alchemical Engineering. I'm hoping that Ruckingenur II gets an upgrade eventually (debugging! in a video game!).

<comment><USER31> SHENZEN IO was my favourite by a mile. Although looking through a datasheet half-written in Mandarin to understand what was going on, at 2am, to then go into work at 6am and look through more datasheets half-written in Mandarin - well, I swiftly began to question my life decisions.

<comment><USER32> You should check out EXAPUNKS if you haven't. It similar to SHENZEN I/O, but I like better.

<comment><USER31> I've played all his games and they're all fantastic. EXAPUNKS is probably my second favourite, but I'm an EE engineer so SHENZEN I/O is especially satisfying to me. Zachtronics games are my vice. As a recovering self- confessed video-game addict I only allow myself to play educational/puzzle games now, and they toe the line just enough - while being fun as hell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> wow.. just a few bits from the update:

To be super clear, there are no new levels, no new characters, no new battle royale deathmatch mode. This is just a gentle remastering we did for fun.

The framework has been replaced. This is the thing that draws all the graphics onto your screen, and sends all the audio to your speakers, etc. This means the Win / Mac / Linux version should work on modern computers again without freaking out, and you can run the game on modern displays at whatever resolution you want.

Game now runs at a hi-def widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio by default. The original ran at a squarer 4:3 ratio.

Resolution of graphics is doubled. The original game ran at 800×600, and the tiny graphic files didn't scale to huge monitors very gracefully. We used a few different high quality upscaling tools to start, and then went over each image by hand, tweaking each image further as needed. In a few lucky cases, we still had the original source files and were able to use those. But if you still really want the original flavor, there's a setting to use the original graphics, also included with the game.

Fabulous joke about looking good in hi-def has remained unchanged.

Brought over graphical and UI improvements from releases on other platforms, like Nintendo Switch.

No more encrypted assets or save files. We hope this makes the game more open and friendly to mod.

The config.user.txt file is now located wherever your save file is stored. So no more editing that file in your Program Files folder. It has a bunch of new config vars exposed as well.

We'll be updating the game everywhere Win / Mac / Linux versions are available in the next few days.

These updates 10 years after the initial release. These guys love their fans.

<comment><USER34> It's worth noting that they're launching on Epic Games, free for two weeks, tomorrow, I believe. So this is an update they were just recently effectively paid to do. Though of course, it also benefits the folks on Steam as well.

<comment><USER35> Will it benefit the folks on Steam? I was under the impression the update was not coming to Steam for a year, although the end of the blog post does seem to suggest it'll be coming out. Maybe unclear reporting when the patch was announced a few weeks ago?

<comment><USER36> My reading of the blog post would be yes - "We're slowly updating the game everywhere it's currently available over the course of this and next week." \- but I wouldn't take it as a definitive statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Devs who update a game to make unrestricted modding _easier_. In 2019.

Really cool!

<comment><USER38> Given what happened to them it's even more impressive:

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame- world-o...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo- piracy-rate-near-90/)

<comment><USER39> 90% piracy is about par for the course. Doom and Quake's was even higher IIRC. It basically tells you that your game runs on cheap PCs and poor people won't spend more than 5-10$ on a game. Steam sales and region-based pricing are one way of trying to capture that market.

<comment><USER40> I was reading a book which was essentially the memories of some BBS nerd from the 80s (i do not remember the name, sadly) and he basically quoted a magazine post from around back then - the 9 out of 10 piracy was a thing even in the 80s, more than a decade before Doom. It doesn't surprise me that it would be the same 10 and 20 years after it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> After AoE II, Worms, and World of Goo I wish similar update for Red Alert 2.

<comment><USER36> CnC (original and Red Alert) is getting a remaster[1] - if that does well, I can't see RA2 being far behind. It's also quite playable in CnCNet.

[1] [https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/command-and-conquer-red-alert- rem...](https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/command-and-conquer-red-alert-remastered- release-date/) (URL is somewhat misleading - release date is unknown)

<comment><USER42> Oooh - I wonder if they will there will be a revamped Mac release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > To be super clear, there are no new levels, no new characters, no new battle > royale deathmatch mode. This is just a gentle remastering we did for fun.

This update is great and all, but I was actually... really hoping for new levels. I've wanted them for the past ten years. Pretty please? Maybe some day? :'(

<comment><USER44> They did unencrypt the assets and save files, so maybe some modders will add new levels?

<comment><USER45> There was (is?) a WoG modding site that contained a lot of new levels.

<comment><USER43> If anyone has custom level recommendations, I'm all ears! I tried a few in the past and found them of middling quality.

(I say this with all possible respect to the modders, of course, their efforts are appreciated.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Very nice. But I wonder why they did encrypt assets or save files in the first place for a single player game? Is this ever useful?

<comment><USER47> It may help stave off blatant rip-offs for a while.

Of course, if you strike it big, someone will eventually find enough time with a debugger to get around it, but as a small indie dev you'll probably be most interested in making sure you can break even first.

<comment><USER48> Assets are protected by copyright. If you are not concerned about copyright you can just redistribute the whole game.

<comment><USER49> Thus preventing the users from being able to use the fair use rights from US copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Damn, it's been 10 years, I used to follow their dev blog and their little 2d starter code project is what lead me to game development. Now, I left game dev, the guys still. Reading the update bring me back to these days, ohhh

</comment><comment><USER51> One of the best games I ever played. This along with "FAR: Lone Sails" are two of my favorite chill games.

<comment><USER52> A few more: Blueberry Garden, Starseed Pilgrim, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Braid

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This game really opened me (and possibly other people) up to indie gaming. They're definitely not the first small team to tackle a fun game concept like this (The first game companies were 2-4 people.) but maybe the most influential of 10 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER54> Awesome! Based on the title I though the game didn't receive any updates for about 10 years or so. Apparently that thought is incorrect: [https://steamdb.info/sub/1045/history/](https://steamdb.info/sub/1045/history/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Heh, this is amazing. I've thought of remastering and re-releasing some of the old Mystery Studio titles ([http://mysterystudio.com](http://mysterystudio.com)). Unfortunately it would need more art work than programming work, and art is not my thing :(

<comment><USER56> If it's vectorising pixel graphics you're after then I've seen some incredible stuff done automating that.

<comment><USER55> That might definitely help! Any pointers?

<comment><USER56> Looking now I think it was much longer ago than I recalled so things could have moved on considerably, but I think what I was recalling was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601347](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601347) .

Also I hope that "pointers" pun was intentional!

<comment><USER55> Thanks for the link! As for the pun, no, it was a happy accident. I'm not that clever :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm still waiting on my Profanity Pack, damn it! [http://goofans.com/faq/world-of-goo/getting-world-of- goo/whe...](http://goofans.com/faq/world-of-goo/getting-world-of- goo/wherewhat-profanity-pack)

</comment><comment><USER58> It's super cool that the game is being updated 10 years later to effectively remaster it AND make modding easier! I wish more developers were like this, but I can see why that might be difficult (which makes this all the more impressive)

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow it's been 10 years already?

(Check my purchase email, it is from 2010)

Time flies. And WoG was such a nice game!

</comment><comment><USER60> I remember installing World of Goo on my iPad back in... 2010? It was super fun, immersive, well ported to the tablet, it was actually one of my selling points for the then new device.

I should get it again.

</comment><comment><USER61> Terrible news. I've just bought the desktop version to get some flashbacks :-) BTW, the old version was terrible in my modern Windows machine.

</comment><comment><USER62> Where can you buy this now?

I like people who update things!

<comment><USER63> It's available on Steam for $10 or DRM free cross platform from [https://2dboy.com/](https://2dboy.com/).

I believe there is also a mobile version? Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER42> The iOS version has been sitting on my iPhone for 10 years and still runs very nicely. Just checked the app store - still there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I wonder what's the new engine. They were using PopCap Games Framework.

</comment><comment><USER45> I really wish they (PopCap) did the same with Plants vs. Zombies 1.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've always loved the Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack

</comment><comment><USER66> Mainly because they are trying to port it to Switch. It's great anyway.

<comment><USER67> Trying? It's out already isn't it?

<comment><USER68> It's been out for 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've tried to like this game, since it is an Indie Wonder. But it just isn't much fun for me. There are better things to spend your time on.

</comment><comment><USER70> >we've just updated the Win / Mac / Linux versions of World of Goo for the first time since 2008 or 2009

>release date October 2008

I get that it's a three-man studio but man that's a really bad support track record.</comment>


And now, Twitter philanthropy - <AUTHOR> http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/03/01/and-now-twitter-philanthropy/

<comment><USER2> Philanthropy has historically followed Pareto's Principle, that about 90% of your donations will come from 10% of your donors. Barack Obama changed this perception. The majority of his donations came small donors, less than $100, who donated over and over. Does this mean we'll start seeing a fundamental shift in philanthropy too? Will development officers stop taking Rockefellers out to lunch so they can spend more time on Facebook?</comment>


Uber Will Rent Scooters Through Its App in Partnership with Lime - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-09/uber-will-rent-scooters-through-its-app-in-partnership-with-lime <comment><USER2> I was thinking about the debate on scooters and it made me realize something:

Bike lanes are a disaster, probably one of the biggest mistakes in road design and planning.

The basic idea was sound, but it was done the wrong way. Everywhere you see a bike lane, that should've been the concrete sidewalk extended into that area with a painted stripe separating pedestrians and bicycles. Go to a beach and you can see the correct implementation. Our sidewalks are simply not wide enough.

What we have now is a cheap and bad solution. Nobody on bikes, scooter, etc. wants to be just a thin painted stripe away from cars that can kill them. But they are forbidden from sidewalks because they are too narrow.

The right way to add bike lanes would've been to extend the sidewalks into the road (where the current bike lanes are) by pouring concrete there. Full protection from cars, wide enough for pedestrians and bicycles, scooters, etc.

It's not too late to fix this, the bike lanes are there. Cities just need to spend the money to expand the sidewalks there. If they do this, there's potential for a true revolution in non-car mobility in the US.

<comment><USER3> There is some merit to that idea but I think you may be missing a few things. Often, parking is placed between a bike lane and the side walk. Bikes need to be able to cross lanes, often in cities, to make left turns. How can they do that when they're up on a curb to start, but additionally, with potential street parking in the way?

I think technically in many jurisdictions, bikes are to be treated as vehicles. Whether or not they're always treated that way is up for debate (and vice versa), but it may explain also partially why things were done that way.

<comment><USER4> Put the parking between the road and the bike lane/sidewalk instead. That's how most city streets are laid out in Copenhagen, af it provides a good safety buffer of parked cars.

<comment><USER5> Also how Oakland does it on Telegraph. San Francisco has switched to this solution on some streets (Folsom and Howard).

This doesn't include putting the bikes on the same grade as the sidewalk, but that's a relatively minor difference once you already have parked cars separating you from car traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This partnership could also allow Uber driver partners to basically have another source of income - rebalancing the scooter/bike network and helping with charging (ex. someone drives for Uber Eats, drops off a scooter at pickup restaurant to charge). Current Lime freelance chargers are making ~$1400 earnings per month[1] so this could start being substantial and help the growth for both companies

[1] [https://www.axios.com/how-lime-is-pitching-its- bike-a-152949...](https://www.axios.com/how-lime-is-pitching-its- bike-a-1529492063-f32aac78-caf6-4455-a7f1-215cc4bf4552.html)

<comment><USER7> That $1400/month number strikes me as dubious. They mention the charger earns $30-50/day. Assuming a standard 22-day work month, $1400 would have to be $63/day. A more realistic number seems to be $40 * 22 days, or $880/month. Which is not a lot of money in the expensive cities Lime is active in.

<comment><USER8> Man... $880 a month to drive around Seattle sounds miserable.

<comment><USER9> What else can you do in Seattle with absolutely zero skill or qualifications and no willingness to commit that pays that well?

Not a joke question. I'd have loved any fraction of $880 a month when I was in college and was otherwise worth nothing and couldn't get a traditional shitty part time job because I had unpredictable hours due to school.

<comment><USER10> valet parking or catering

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's time for someone to invent Uber Walk: someone physically picks you up and carries you to your destination

<comment><USER12> Yes, but eventually Uber Walk would be rebranded Uber Walk Premium and a new service under the old Uber Walk name would be started where you get a 50% discount for walking yourself.

<comment><USER13> You can save even more money with Uber Walk Express, but you have to walk three blocks away from your destination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why not keep the scooters in the cars. Grab one on the way out, leave it behind when you get home. Request an uber with a scooter in it. There will have to be some leveling between cars but that's surely easier than blanketing the city.

<comment><USER15> I think docked bike shares had the following problems:

\- they were spaced too far apart

\- they weren't in residential areas

The dockless bikes, and scooters, were a response to that. We could go back to using docks if we solved those two problems.

Or what if there was a hybrid approach, incentivising users who brought their bike / scooter to a dock by making the ride cheaper or free?

<comment><USER16> In my city, the docked bikes are $8 for a day pass. That's way too high an entry point for me to ride to lunch a little farther than I can walk. Not to mention that I might get on a bike and find my destination rack full, therefore having to go to the next nearest dock to try to end my ride (and walk that distance on foot). A more economical choice is the $80/yr pass, but that's also a very steep entry point.

<comment><USER17> Your probably not the market in London its mostly commuters where $80 is trivial compared to the several k that your season ticket

<comment><USER18> You could just buy a bike for 80 bucks (albeit a poor quality one).

<comment><USER19> And then you have to keep it somewhere whenever you ride it some place.

<comment><USER17> As its only £80 just park it on the street with a couple of decent locks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Taxify already has a rider feature in Nairobi, Kenya, called Boda within their app. It's insanely cheap and the ability to circumvent traffic is a huge plus. I'm happy this is coming to Uber as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> These scooters are a menace in Oakland -- people are riding them down crowded sidewalks at 20 MPH

<comment><USER22> I don't know about Oakland, but in Boston these wouldn't be legal to ride on the sidewalk. Hell, they're barely legal to ride in the bike lane (only motorized vehicles that can't exceed 35 mph and that make a motor smaller than a certain size). Combine that with the fact that most riders won't be wearing helmets and it's a potentially deadly accident waiting to happen.

<comment><USER23> For the curious, the maximum motor size to ride in the bike lanes in Boston is 50cc.

<comment><USER24> cc is a measurement of displacement, only useful for combustion engines.

Equivalent for electric motors would be Wattage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It sort of looks like litter when I see all the bikes and scooters just left on sidewalks all over town.

<comment><USER26> Just the bikes and scooters? Not, say, the idle cars left on streets all over town?

<comment><USER27> Cars are at least parked in designated spots/areas. Dockless bikes and scooters don't have a designated space to park in; they have to be left on the sidewalk, and they can be dropped anywhere.

<comment><USER28> This is such a boondoggle. I _rarely_ see any birds, lime bikes, orange bikes, ofos, etc. parked in places other than off to the side of the sidewalk, or in a bike rack. When I do, I move them.

Most people, generally speaking, are good people. They put bikes where they're supposed to be, they put scooters where they're supposed to be etc. It isn't just enlightened tech commenters who know that a bike should go in a bike rack.

<comment><USER29> I'm surprised they don't have a technical solution -- like, say, have it take a photo from the scooter when you log out to validate you put it in a good spot. (Or gps if they have drop-off points, etc.)

<comment><USER30> Lime starting doing _exactly_ this in Denver before pulling out at the behest of the police department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, that's going to kill Bird.

<comment><USER32> We will see. Been "workating" with my family in LA for a few weeks and we ended up using Bird much more especially because it looks like Lime require you to pay in bundles (10usd) and there are just way more Birds available than Limes. It might change now that Uber is involved but they would have to increase their scooters fleet quite a lot I think.

Been interesting because in New York Bird isn't something people talk about where as here it was everywhere (didn't hurt we lived at Venice beach either).

One thing I realized is how much the ability to just leave your bird/lime anywhere and just pick it up where it is, affects your desire to use it.

We will see the same uptick in bicycles in NY I think once you are not required to park them at specific places.

It's a little bit of a mess though especially down on the beach promenae but I think there are plenty of ways to encourage good behavior.

<comment><USER33> Where I live (San Diego), Lime and Bird have swapped places a couple of times for who has the most scooters on the street. They are both being really aggressive in increasing the number of units. It's not uncommon to see 10 of each lined up on a sidewalk.

It's also been fun to watch both companies experiment and revise their hardware. The original Lime scooters were slow and the Bird scooters were much stronger. With the v2 of each, it is reversed.

But from what I've heard second hand, increasing the number of units on the street isn't that expensive. I've heard that the units cost them in bulk ~$250 each and they quickly (< 3 months) earn that back. So the investment to blanket a city with scooters is way less than you'd expect and not the main barrier to entry. Of course that's second hand, so I could be totally wrong.

<comment><USER34> I love riding them at mission beach! I was sort of sad about the version 2. It had a speedometer but only would go 10mph, and the brake was so weird. The version 1s are much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Once again a successful prediction from Ben Thompson.

<comment><USER36> Link please.

<comment><USER35> [https://stratechery.com/2018/the-scooter- economy/](https://stratechery.com/2018/the-scooter-economy/)

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17284094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17284094)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> From the article: >Lime said its service, which lets customers rent scooters scattered around cities and leave them on the sidewalk for the next person to pick up

I now look for a "Tragedy of the Common" errors in business models. That's it right there: they freely exploit a public resource without care or consequence. The fallacy is evident when we ask "What if everybody does this?"

<comment><USER16> I guess I'm not sure I understand how this relates. Everybody already _does_ do this. You are allowed to drop your bike off at a bike rack or on the sidewalk out of the way of traffic if you're brave (or have more faith in your neighbors than I do).

<comment><USER37> > I guess I'm not sure I understand how this relates. Everybody already does > do this. You are allowed to drop your bike off at a bike rack...

Scenario: go to park your personal bike at the public bike rack only you discover it's full of bikes from some company who wants to make a buck out of it.

A lot of these business models take advantage of resources that are "free" but have really cost a lot of money to set up and maintain, usually by the public.

I'm in Sydney and am now starting to see share bikes littering the landscape. One had been dumped in a public ocean bath (at Balmoral).

<comment><USER38> You'll probably saturate the market before you run out of parking. One car space converted to bike racks would hold 20 bikes and if bike share is truly that popular, it's an entirely viable option.

<comment><USER37> > One car space converted to bike racks would hold 20 bikes...

In a city CBD, what would one car space be worth? In Sydney some car parks charge $23 an hour. Should this space just be given to some bike share company that decides to set up shop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I read that in early June, scooter hire was halted in San Francisco and companies had to apply for licenses, which were expected to be issued by the end of the month. Any update on what is happening there?

</comment><comment><USER40> Why doesn't Uber just provide their own scooters?

<comment><USER41> The same reason they currently don't provide their own cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Who here is charging for them?

</comment><comment><USER43> Scooters: a (small) feature within a large global mobility company.

NOT a business unto itself.

<comment><USER44> same with taxi companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Well, I guess it's time to delete the Lime app from my phone. Good thing there are multiple competitors.

</comment><comment><USER46> Scooters are ruining Austin.

Fuck The Scooters!

<comment><USER47> No they aren't, they're probably saving downtown Austin's transportation woes. Decades of failed resolutions by the city council to provide expanded public transportations for an extremely high growth city have brought us to this point, one where the market had to come up with a solution. I'd imagine more regulations are probably due in the near future.

<comment><USER48> The scooters definitely aren't "ruining Austin" but they're not "saving" it from transportation woes either. The percentage of drivers who live close enough to downtown to hop on a scooter instead of taking car is pretty small.

For example, only 4% of Austin commuters live within 2 miles of their workplace [0]. Commuters in Westlake and P-Ville, etc. are definitely NOT trading in their cars to get on a scooter (if you could even find one) and then riding it down the highway for 30 minutes. Especially in 100 degree heat.

[0] [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8eBZN5u...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8eBZN5uyROoJ:www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/bhat/REPORTS/Austin_commuter_survey_report.doc+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER49> You don't understand marginal improvements and how they ramp up?

<comment><USER48> (marginally) improving traffic (a bit) ≠ saving us from our transportation woes

Austin still has a long, long way to go.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Super Bowl to handle 30,000 Wi-Fi users, sniff out "rogue devices" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/super-bowl-plans-to-handle-30000-wi-fi-users-at-once-and-sniff-out-rogue-devices/ <comment><USER2> I feel like 30,000 concurrent users is _woefully_ underestimated. The article says "During the Super Bowl, the network will be able to handle up to 30,000 simultaneous connections, which should be enough." but I wonder where that estimate came from.

I would double that, in my estimates, given the kinds of people even capable of securing Super Bowl tickets. W're not talking about a fair sample of the US population here, we're talking about 80k at-least middle class fans, which I'd imagine raises the likelihood of a wireless-capable device being in their pockets significantly.

Again from the article: "As long as 100 percent of the people in there don't take out their cellular device and switch it to the Wi-Fi network, it should be fine."

Given the fact that it's an open network, why do these people even need to take out their device at all? Many phone will jump onto an open network if at all possible, won't they?

I'd be interested in a post-mortem after the event to determine the effectiveness of the Wi-Fi plan.

<comment><USER3> Just because 100% of the audience is capable of using wifi doesn't mean that 100% of them will be using it _simultaneously_.

Tickets cost a minimum of $2,000 on stubhub.com for nosebleed seats.

This event only happens once a year.

People _really_ want to see this thing live.

With a drink in one hand, popcorn in the other, and a smile on their face, I would be surprised if more than 10% of the audience was glued to their phone at any one given time.

<comment><USER4> The article points out that during the 3 hours of the Superbowl, only an average of 11 minutes is actual playing time. That's a lot of downtime where fans in those $2,000 seats will be watching replay videos, uploading their own, and checking stats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Better not use that microwave in your luxury box, the Mercedes-benz-superdome- FCC will be on your ass in a hot second.....

</comment><comment><USER6> For the curious, this is a small scale map of what they'll be viewing: [http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/ps5755/p...](http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/ps5755/ps6301/ps6386/images/0900aecd806364db_null_null_null_05_03_05-3.jpg)

I would be really curious to what the wireless spectrum looks like at an event like that. Most football fans won't bring more than a phone, but with 80,000 people there will be some outliers. Maybe someone decides to bring a walkie talkie set that works over the 2.4 Ghz band, lots of people with bluetooth headsets, or other odd bluetooth devices. Wireless cameras can ruin Wifi on the same bands.

Monitoring 'rogue' devices is actually a requirement of all parts of a business that handle credit card transactions (PCI). It's to prevent card card data from leaking out of a planted wireless device (small device plugged into bag of a register/pc, etc). That's one of the main drivers for this technology existing beyond anything else.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Well, maybe not. The NFL manages to spread 60 minutes of clock time across > three hours in a typical game. What with time running off the clock between > plays and the typical play lasting about four seconds, an average game ends > up with only 11 minutes of action.

Setting aside the fact that this entire paragraph was irrelevant to the point of the article, it always irritates me as a (college) football fan when people cite this statistic. There are far more than 60 minutes of "action" from kickoff to the final play. Most of American football is actually about strategy - if you're completely ignoring what happens between when the play is whistled dead and when the ball is snapped next, you're going to be very confused, and I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't enjoy it.

But we can all agree that TV timeouts suck when you're in the stadium.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how many people are going to be sniffing the open network.

<comment><USER9> As a percentage, I'm calling 2%

<comment><USER10> I think that is wildly optimistic. I'd be surprised if 2% were not drinking, though there may be some overlap.

<comment><USER11> The only thing more dangerous than bored hackers is _drunk_ bored hackers.

Bur seriously, with only 11 minutes of action in a 3-hour event, 2% may be realistic.

<comment><USER12> The 11 minutes number assumes that you don't consider the formation (and constantly changing formations) before the actual play is run to be interesting.

Although the Super Bowl isn't known for attracting "true" fans, I would hope that "true" football fans would appreciate the intricacies that take place before and after the plays are run.

Edit: And honestly you think 1,400 people are going to be trying to sniff the WiFi from within the Super Dome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the issue interference or they want to stop people taking pictures and sending them or offering free hot spots?

<comment><USER14> They don't want some rogue devices screwing it up for everyone else. The stadium is offering free WiFi, so there's no attempt to block communications and there is no need for kind souls to offer free WiFi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this even legal? Aren't the frequencies used by wi-fi explicitly set up to be unregulated by the FCC? Can a private company force you to turn off a device legally operating on those frequencies?

<comment><USER14> They don't make you turn off anything. You simply can't bring it in. Just like you can't bring in your own food or drink. The FCC and radio spectrum legalities don't enter into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One person with WifiKill[0] is going to spoil it for everyone.

[0] <http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1282900>

<comment><USER17> They claim to have spectral analysis solutions. Does that mean they are going to zero in on the offenders? It is probably technically possible.

<comment><USER18> It's a Cisco setup so they will be using their CleanAir feature to identify and triangulate sources of interference.

<http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns1070/index.html></comment></comment></comment>


New technology makes for more accurate guns - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10415476-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

<comment><USER2> A good sight is not just about absolute accuracy & precision, but about speed of acquisition of a "reasonable" sight picture given the existing context and time-task window for making the decision to fire.

In other words, a good optical 'combat' sight geometry tends to be very different from a good 'target' sight.

Both ghost-ring, for shoulder-mounted, and 3-Dot for hand-mounted (e.g. pistol) sights have _already_ been tested extensively (in the lab) and field- proven for close-quarters and near-field target acquisition under actual battlefield conditions.

Some numbers please? A control please? FFS even a 1-sample comparison versus existing 22LR Olympic target pistol competition sight? None are to be found in this "article".

Not to take anything away from Mr. Kraft's work, but optical ballistic sighting is a field where one size definitely does _not_ fit all.

Until then, this is nothing more than cheap 'pop sci' link-bait jurinalism from CNET. It must've been a slow news week for Mr. Matyszczyk--the "author" of the post.

<comment><USER3> _A good sight is not just about absolute accuracy & precision, but about speed of acquisition of a "reasonable" sight picture given the existing context and time-task window for making the decision to fire._

They talked precisely about that; according to the inventor, part of the reason he thinks it might be better is that filling in a shape is a natural and fast.

Other than that, your point appears to be that if there are no tables and numbers, nobody should write an article about the invention, lest it becomes "cheap 'pop sci' link-bait jurinalism", and then you go on to insult the "author" of the "article" (do we really need the condescending quotes?).

Not a big deal, this being the internet, trolls trolling trolls, etc., but I've been seeing this kind of ultra-negative comments get upvoted a lot recently. It used to be an honour reserved for Techcrunch and Coding Horror posts ;)

<comment><USER2> Did you read the same article and view the same video?

There were absolutely no mentions of "acquisition speed", nor precision of said sight picture relative to that speed, nor any trade-offs associated between these two critical variables in sight performance. A good sight tries to achieve the right balance between these values for the given application.

As a competitive shooter, I'm sure that Mr. Kraft has made these conscious trade-offs in his design, but _none_ of these fundamentals are mentioned in the article nor in the accompanying video.

"No one has re-thought the basic principles of a pistol sight for a hundred years"

Really? 3-Dot? L.E.D illuminated? Fiber Optic blade? Is even a basic Wikipedia search beyond this author's reach?

<http://tinyurl.com/y8p2sc6>

IF the literal headline for an article is "New technology makes for more accurate guns", you had best back-up that claim with _some_ credible evidence.

No evidence was offered or were ANY comparisons made against alternative sight designs--either on a qualitative nor quantitative basis.

This article was not authored. It is mere video stenography.

Before you judge the merits of the insult, I urge to to examine other works by Mr. Matyszczyk.

Is this the sort of journalistic standard to which a technology-centric site such as CNET wishes to give its imprimatur? Sadly, it appears so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is definitely a pretty cool hack. It will be interesting to see how much (if any) impact it has on the less well trained shooters.

For people who don't shoot a lot, accuracy is impacted much more by grip, posture and trigger control. Where this sort of thing would come in handy would be with people who are well trained, but need to be able to acquire targets quickly.

<comment><USER5> Spot on. At handgun distances (say under 20 meters) the issues of trigger control and grip are going to dominate the quality of the sights, as long as they are half decent.

Since good shooting practice is to focus on the front sight, thus rendering the rear sight fuzzy, that rear sight has to be useful while out of focus. Consider the classic Novak sight. The front sight is a rectangular post that fills the gap that is the rectangular notch of the rear sight. Also, the front sight post and two rear sight posts have colored (white or glow-in-the-dark) dots that form a 3-dot line that is parallel to the ground when aligned. This type of sight leverages our ability to spot horizontal lines, something that our vision/brain is very good at doing: lining up the top of front sight such that it is flush with the top of the rear sight and forming a proper 3-dot line that is in line with the ground. This type of sight is pretty accurate and permits fast acquisition.

It looks like the pointing-in of the rear sight to form the triangle is somewhat subtle. I am unconvinced that the headless triangle is sufficiently discernable whilst fuzzy. And it doesn't offer multiple cues like the Novak. And it seems like it would take longer to acquire a good sight picture.

Still, I could see how this would be very useful at relative fixed distances in the hands of a trained shooter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not too much detail. I wonder how this compares to a peep hole sight. A circle seems just as simple as a triangle, perhaps simpler.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a similar concept, except this is much more conducive to mounting on a pistol since a peep sight would be kind of cumbersome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> pop culture hints that well practiced shooters sort of just feel their target, they aren't really deliberately aiming with the sights per se. seems intuitive to me that aiming becomes rote with practice. i wonder if this sight would make a difference to a rote shooter.</comment>


Ask HN: API limitations for Web services - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I have ideas of Web services that require the Twitter Search API. But then, after seeing the number of requests you can do by day (150 searches for example), I keep thinking: "well, this app could always be better written by them, on their servers. They could even copy my idea and do a much better implementation because for them there are no API limits."
With 150 (or 1000...) requests per day when your app got minimally successful it would also die.
Is this thinking correct or I'm missing something? (Not a web developer here...) <comment><USER2> The thing with Twitter is, that they don't really want to kill their app ecosystem, but really just want to keep growing because of their app ecosystem, they only want to be the transport layer so it is highly unlikely that they would come out and kill your project by duplicating it.

A perfect example is the completely under-powered lists feature, the API is super powerful but twitter's implementation is as barebones as it can be, possibly because they want to encourage other people to build on top of their stack.

Have you looked at the Streaming API for your ideas? You can also get full firehose access if it really does become successful. Obviously, sharecropping on someone else's farm is never a brilliant idea but if you're going to do it, Twitter may not be such a bad place to do it...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take a look at the streaming API.

"You can also get full firehose access if it really does become successful (...)"

Sorry, I don't understand what "firehose access" means in this context. Care to explain? :)

<comment><USER3> Firehose gives you all the tweets in almost realtime. Its the big brother of the gardenhose. Its not publicly available. I would like to know what the conditions are to get it.

Is just asking nicely enough?

<comment><USER4> Twitter announced at LeWeb in December that they would open the Firehose to all developers in "early 2010": <http://mashable.com/2009/12/09/twitter- firehose/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twitter has kinda relaxed limits for search. I have done 1 req every few seconds, and that was fine. Their normal API has more constraints, but it's supposedly not that hard to get your limit lifted to 20K queries/hour..

</comment><comment><USER6> Depending how often your searches update, you might be able to get away with using the RSS feeds from search.twitter.com.</comment>


XOmB Exokernel OS written in D - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.xomb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page <comment><USER2> I guess D really is becoming more popular. I'm hoping it'll eventually overtake C, much the same way C has overtaken COBOL. Guess I should dust off my "D Programming Language" book.

Regardless of the language used however, this is a great resource for learning about OS development.

<comment><USER3> Don't dust off your old one, read Andrei Alexandrescu's new one: [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321635361/modecdesi-...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321635361/modecdesi-20) (I believe that is Alexandrescu's affiliate link). It covers D2. As a C++ programmer who has exploited many corners of C++, I am pleased and impressed with the design of D2. (I can't say what was present in the first version.)

<comment><USER2> That was in fact the book I was referring to. I got it long enough ago that it's the version without an author on the front cover.

I think I'm coming from the same place as you. I've explored enough C++ to know its many pitfalls, and I'm impressed with some of the things they've done with D2.

<comment><USER3> Then that copy is 1 out of 1830 (<http://erdani.com/>). Hold on to it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My whimsical hope: that an OS distro based on the XOmB exokernel will be called "Exosystem, eXperimental Operating system-XOmB" or "Exs XO-XOmB" for short.

<comment><USER5> Not sure if that's worse or the "GNU Hurd" pair of pairs of mutually recursive acronyms. [1]

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/what_is_the_gnu_hurd/o...](http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/what_is_the_gnu_hurd/origin_of_the_name.html)

<comment><USER4> Actually, the point is to make a meta-reference to the Scott Pilgrim reference.</comment></comment></comment>


BEE3: Putting the Buzz Back into Computer Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1923

<comment><USER2> L-t-U discussion here: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3065></comment>


Why are so many researchers moving to Qatar? - <AUTHOR> https://www.elsevier.com/connect/why-are-so-many-researchers-moving-to-qatar <comment><USER2> [http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/13/middleeast/qatar-dutch- woman-r...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/13/middleeast/qatar-dutch-woman-rape- report-jail/)</comment>


Ask HN: best low budget hardware setup for rookie developer? - <AUTHOR>

Considering raspberry pi, thoughts? <comment><USER2> If this is for your primary development machine use the best lenovo thinkpad you can afford plus arch linux.

</comment><comment><USER3> Raspberry pi is too slow for any real development. What's your budget?

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Get something like a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop and stick 8GB of RAM in it - RAM is dirt cheap these days.

Laptops like that are 3/4 years old and pretty cheap now.</comment></comment>


Vietnam managed to keep its Covid-19 death toll "at zero" - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/asia/coronavirus-vietnam-intl-hnk/index.html <comment><USER2> Americans even lack the capacity to be humiliated about the facts: free market unpreparedness, and slow to react; government unpreparedness, slow to react and frequently in denial; the death toll itself. Are Americans just overwhelmed with the obvious extent of the incompetency? Or is it cognitive dissonance?

While Italy was at it's peak, Americans seemed to be "won't happen here, we're just better at this." At every turn there's goal post shifting. Oh well, they're just old people. Oh well, they just have pre-existing conditions. Oh well, whataboutism traffic accidents. Oh well, the economy matters more.

Of all the things America seems to have lost, it's honesty. It can't even self-assess, let alone self-correct. For anything.</comment>


SQL as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.yegor256.com/2019/10/29/sql-as-a-service.html <comment><USER2> Not sure if I love the idea of moving more and more responsibilities to Cloud services. As a wanna-be BI developer/SE I really hope to do as more as possible by myself for the learning stuffs. The modern gist is that there are a lot of things you can't learn until you are on job, but automation and Cloud are taking more and more needed practice from you.

Why are SEs so passionate about automating their own jobs? I can understand automation of boring processes, but it seems they/you want o kill huge ranges of interesting jobs.

Just some vent, yeah it's good for business after all.</comment>


Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocurrency-mining-pump-dump-fraud-ico-value <comment><USER2> > This is a contributed post by Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding > CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital.

I was not in the least bit surprised that what followed this disclaimer was by and large the same tired anti-Bitcoin arguments we've all been reading since 2010. Not to mention the title is a gross exaggeration and undoubtedly fishing for angry clicks.

The worst part is there's a nugget of truth hidden amongst this FUD: the danger of ICOs and other varieties of altcoin scams. There's really no value being created when yet another coin is created that's just an existing coin with a new PoW algorithm stapled on, yet the creator stands to make tens of thousands off of his or her 2% premine, because of people speculating that this might be the Next Big Coin.

For this reason, I think the cryptocurrency market is definitely in a speculative bubble. But so what? So is Silicon Valley. Is a Wi-Fi enabled plant waterer really worth $30 million in VC funding? Probably not, but that doesn't mean the Dropboxes and the AirBnBs of the market aren't adding value. The abundance of worthless altcoins doesn't mean the cryptocurrency market as a whole is worthless, but it does mean you should be careful what you invest in.

<comment><USER3> I'd think the founder of PayPal knows a thing or two about moneys...

<comment><USER4> They said that about banks in 2008

<comment><USER3> random guy on internet or PayPal founder, which one can I trust more? hmm...

<comment><USER5> Trust yourself and think for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "This is a contributed post by Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital.".

"Cryptocurrency is best-suited for one use: Criminal activity"

"... rest of article..."

When something is 100% in one (from the authors view negative) direction and no technical, economic, social future potential gets mentioned something seems not right. I should not even post this, don't feed the troll.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if "Criminal Activity" is the most descriptive name. But "gray market" activity such as pornography seems to be a big market for cryptocoins.

IIRC, PornHub is experimenting with a cryptocoin (not BTC, but something else) because they don't like being subject to Paypal's whims. They believe they're in the legal clear, but banks don't want to be associated with that kind of business. And thus, there's a growing need of some kind of financial instrument for this politically unsavory, but legal, product.

But yes, the primary benefit of Cryptocoin seems to be about avoiding the standard regulations and standard financial institutions. And yes, a big chunk of that (ie: SilkRoad) is about illegal-activities. In short: "Criminal Activity" is pushing the hyperbole too far, but the core concept seems to be a hack around the US's conventional financial system and protections.

<comment><USER6> I think you're right that this is one (early/first) use case, as it was during the beginnings of the internet. Also, one could argue "gray markets" is complementary to "free speech" or "censorship resistance" \- which is indeed one of the core ideas of cryptocurrencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sometimes I feel like both Bitcoin naysayers and Bitcoin aficionados are missing the big story with Bitcoin:

Bitcoin represents the breakdown in trust. Trust in institutions, trust in government, trust in the financial system, trust in currency, and trust in fellow humans.

One of the great goals of the Internet was to shed a light on all the forms of corruption and abuse that people in power were perpetuating. Back in our naivete of the late 90s and early 00s, we thought that meant that people would then _fix_ those problems. Instead, many of the problems have been largely unfixable. People in power tend to hold on to power pretty tightly, and once thwarted a half dozen times or so, people tend to declare the whole system rotten to the core and unredeemable. (All except the winners, who are often the most blind to the threat to the system itself.)

Couple that with many of the Internet giants adopting business models involving psychological manipulation and a wholesale attack on the idea of a shared reality itself, and instead of people taking targeted action to fix the problems of corruption and abuse of power, they choose to opt out of the system itself. Bitcoin & other cryptocurrencies are the ultimate in "exit" strategies - if you feel like you will never get a fair cut of wealth in the current fiat economy, well, start a whole new economy where you hold all the tokens. Bitcoin proponents correctly point out that if Bitcoin is a scam, so is _money_ itself, but then miss the part where money is a _useful_ scam, one which has allowed people to trade peacefully for millenia.

It's unlikely that the result will be a new crypto-utopia. Already we see the same problems with corruption and abuse of power showing up in most coin ecosystems, but _worse_ than with mainstream institutions, which at least have developed checks & balances to catch the worst abuses. Instead, we're likely to see extreme fragmentation and conflict, more like a dystopian sci-fi novel than a utopia.

<comment><USER9> > Trust in institutions, trust in government, trust in the financial system, > trust in currency, and trust in fellow humans.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the number of people who really believe that is pretty close to the number of conspiracy theorists.

<comment><USER8> So...tens of millions in the U.S. alone, now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is correct on a lot of points, but is overall an uncharitable rehash of every tired argument against Bitcoin.

For example, while I acknowledge that Bitcoin could easily end up failing and producing nothing of lasting value, and that regular investors should be extremely cautious, that does not make it either a "scam" or a "pump-and-dump scheme".

<comment><USER11> 'that does not make it either a "scam" or a "pump-and-dump scheme".'

I mean, at the very least, at this point one must be gracious and grant to BitCoin its success in being pump-and-dump _schemes_ , plural.

Now, excuse me, I'm off to found an autonomous corporation to compete in the burgeoning field of PnDSaaS, a truly 21st century sort of organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey guys let's just all agree to use govt controlled money through govt approved mediums.

Just accept inflation and quantitative easing as the way things are, any alternative is just a scam.

The Federal Reserve can self regulate, the people there all have good intentions and are very concerned that all your hard work isn't diluted by inflation.

<comment><USER13> Fractional reserve banking with the US government, aka US tax payers, as lender of last resort is awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> These are the same tired arguments that have been brought many times before in the previous few years. What's the point of an article like this that contributes nothing to the discourse?

> It's the job of the SEC and other regulators to protect ordinary investors > from misleading and fraudulent schemes. It's time we gave them the > legislative authority to do their job.

Ah, I see, it looks like he's trying to drum up support for regulations that would help the banking-industrial complex that he's a part of.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is so opinionated.

What's so hard to understand about Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat currencies?

Yes, its real, its a store of value, and you can use it for payment if the seller is willing to accept Bitcoin.

And yes giving your private keys to some offshore exchange or invest all your money into some dubious altcoin is probably a bad idea.

Doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin's promise is very simple and clear and no part of this is a scam.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well there's always Nassem Taleb's view of bitcoin which some might find worthwhile, particularly because he's a known skeptic of things generally. [1]

[1] [https://medium.com/opacity/bitcoin-1537e616a074](https://medium.com/opacity/bitcoin-1537e616a074)

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://cointelegraph.com/news/in-attempt-to-regain- relevanc...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/in-attempt-to-regain-relevance- ousted-paypal-ceo-says-crypto-traders-are-drinking-the-kool-aid)

This is a good read. Basically this guy spent around 20 working days as "PayPal founding CEO" before he got figured out :D :D :D :D

</comment><comment><USER18> Pet peeve:

"A bitcoin has no intrinsic value."

Okay, sure. Along with everything else. Things can be useful, and they can have moral value, but the whole concept of value relies on someone doing a valuation. Nothing has value in and of itself without someone valuing it. Bitcoin obviously has value (whether that value is founded on usefulness or not), because we see people valuing it... and contrary to the author's statements, it's not all Greater-Fool speculation, etc., even if you don't agree with the reasons they're valuing it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah and the 2008 bailout of finance firms was not a scam... Then the Fed creating money out of thin air and using it to buy up toxic assets from these very same finance firms (aka 'quantitative easing') is not a scam either...

Also I find it highly suspicious that they don't teach this in schools. Money is one of the most important things to mankind and yet schools don't teach is anything about where it comes from... When people finish school, they know a lot about sport, art, philosophy and even religion but they know almost nothing about money (except how to count it).

</comment><comment><USER20> "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

\- Abstract from [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

The first line of the paper says: Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.

Aside from the technical solution proposed in the paper, the points related to "trusted third parties" and "financial institutions" are key. This is a product designed to circumvent institutions. It would most probably not be received well by the institutions. There is too much philosophy, religion, politics, and drama around Bitcoin - and is a great vehicle for all human folly to be on display - greed, fear, prestige, cultism and so on and so forth. Of course, No one really knows how this experimental product will play out but it is intellectually engaging and _largely_ serves the function it was designed for.

It is fascinating to read critiques of this product (esp unsubstantive ones). There is no CEO, Customer Service, Executives, Managers etc that are really listening - unlike say, criticizing a company like Uber or Comcast. Therefore, most of the feedback just goes...nowhere and is just echoed amongst "people" (Echo chamber?). The inventor's mystique and politics further add to the cult- like qualities of this product - probably cognitive dissonance - because we have never seen a product launched like this ever before. As an author of these type of posts, one must really focus and ask what do they want to achieve. If they are warning the public about avoiding speculation (which is good motivation) then they need to make much better arguments.

This article is lazy. I would even generalize and say that this constant "thought leadership" around Bitcoin is one of the most tiring things about Bitcoin - with people doing it for themselves and not really making good deep arguments for furthering everyone's understanding.

It is tiring because all the points have been made - there is no new original thought (which would be great to discuss, actually). Bitcoin is an experiment. It is a pretty decent product, with some downsides (like inefficiency) for being "like money". Like a mycelium network [1] or Facebook, it spreads largely on its own. In some respects, Bitcoin is an amazing product.

Maybe we let the experiment play out. We will see what happens. What is playing out is truly fascinating :)

It would be great to see some new points being made so one can have an interesting discussion.

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest- organism...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in- the-world)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is an embarrassing article for Bill Harris.

<comment><USER19> Agreed, there is no real intrinsic value behind fiat money; old people who have a lot of fiat money essentially get paid to sit around all day doing nothing; they're not actually offering any real service to society so why should we value their currency?

At least cryptocurrency people are contributing though open source work. You'd be surprised how many general purpose open source projects are sponsored by crypto companies.

<comment><USER22> Wait, what? The second old people are no longer working their savings should immediately be devalued?

There is some rich irony in calling out the lazy old people sitting on fiat when easily 99.9% of "cryptocurrency people" are sitting around HODLing while they wait for their COINZ to MOON. If contribution is your value argument, at least make a modicum of effort to list some of the great open source work contributed by the cryptocurrency people. It seems that most of the "work" is either minimum effort ICO garbage meant to enrich the principals or is blockchain-for-the-sake-of-blockchain to get a marketing boost off the hype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> isn't much of what he says, true for cash as well? i'd wager there's orders of magnitude more criminal activity involving cash vs "bitcoin".

</comment><comment><USER24> Bill Harris is on the wrong side of history.

</comment><comment><USER23> well said.

dumb question: why would anyone "invest" in an ICO?

<comment><USER25> spreading bets and hoping one takes off

<comment><USER9> Diversification in the cryptocurrency space is a myth. As soon as Bitcoin goes down, everything else follows shortly after. E.g. 2 months ago: [https://i.imgur.com/f1Vaybt.png](https://i.imgur.com/f1Vaybt.png)

<comment><USER25> i assure you it is extremely possible to make a bunch of money betting on altcoins

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This post could just have easily been describing the U.S. Dollar.</comment>


Ask HN: Think about the physics of economic growth - <AUTHOR> 1. Our economic model is built on the expectation of future growth.
2. A constant relative growth rate corresponds to an exponential progression in absolute terms.
3. Such a progression requires a proportional increase in energy consumption (you can't improve efficiency past 100%).
4. Yet, energetic resources (solar, both direct and indirect, fossil and nuclear) on Earth are finite. Even if we end up mastering fusion, it would raise, not remove, the ceiling).
5. The only way to keep on growing would be to expand our industry in space.
(5' Is it even possible, from a logistical stand point to keep a steady growth when you have to move resources across millions of kilometers?)
6. Assuming yes for 5', A human in a space ship make as mush sense as a fish in a motorized bowl on the highway. Intelligent, autonomous machines will conquer and exploit the solar system, not humans. They are likely to set up trade routes between themselves, and ultimately compete with us for resources.
7. I can't see how we can keep on growing the economy without building (for efficiency reasons) a fleet that could (and would, see Murphy's law) cause a robopocalypse.
Please poke holes in my reasoning. <comment><USER3> You might like this. [http://www.monbiot.com/2014/05/27/the-impossibility-of- growt...](http://www.monbiot.com/2014/05/27/the-impossibility-of-growth/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Our economical model could be wrong. We could end up in equilibrium in terms economic size and technology, and be stuck there for centuries - like China was until 1800 and like North Korea today. (And like fish in the ocean - <USER2> are not moving to land any time soon)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a well known idea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY&list=WL&index=61](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY&list=WL&index=61)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, but I was curious about the community's take on the topic since startups are so focused on hypergrowth.

Instead, I got crickets (beside your answer, thanks for taking the time to respond).</comment></comment>


The Language of Programming: Learning to Code as a Non-English Speaker - <AUTHOR> https://temochka.com/blog/posts/2017/06/28/the-language-of-programming.html <comment><USER2> Interesting piece. I've often acknowledged to myself how much being a native English speakers has given me a leg up in my programming career. I can scarcely imagine how difficult it would have been for me to learn the compute stack on my own if I was also trying to learn e.g., Russian simultaneously.

The author focusses on programming languages, but the whole compute ecosystem is undoubtedly a challenge. Consider UNIX idioms like `stdin` "/etc" "/bin" `tail` `mv` etc. Consider the entire CLI surface area of `git`.

One of the refrains around my shop is "NO WHIMSY". I strongly object to the introduction of kooky ontologies (e.g., Chef's 'cookbook', 'recipe', 'knife', brew "tap", "cellar" etc). Cute names are a waste of time to think up, pollute the concept space, are usually just stand-ins for more names with a longer and wider usage history, and ultimately are the groundwork for the kind of insular, almost ideological thinking that can make for sprawling, ad-hoc, complex, and redundant system surface area.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to hear about how programming is taught in other non-English speaking countries, and whether anybody shares my concern about the difficulty of modifying names in many programming environments being a threat to productivity and creativity.</comment>


Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? - <AUTHOR> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 <comment><USER2> I think people here need to lighten up. I know we are all programmers, and we are sometimes portrayed as snobby and entitled, but we don't have to live up to those stereotypes.

I understand it's frustrating when a tool you use is expected to work a certain way and it doesn't. I understand it's even more frustrating when the output could change depending on the time of day. That doesn't mean it is our place to gang up on an open source tool that is designed to make our lives easier.

I think we should be allowed to have some fun every once in a while, and this "gimme gimme gimme" easter egg is awesome.

It seems the maintainers didn't realize that this easter egg was affecting a command that was designed to have a predictable output so that is the real issue here. Just a simple bug. If this was output on some help screen or something like that then no one would be complaining.

<comment><USER3> BUT IT IS 12:30 AT NIGHT, THE CLIENT WAS PROMISED DELIVERY OF THIS FEATURE TWO WEEKS AGO, AND I CAN"T FIGURE WHY TF STDERR KEEPS OUTPUTTING GIMME GIMME GIMME!

<comment><USER4> This is a great example of a time when you should go home, get some sleep, and everything will work in the morning :)

<comment><USER5> Sometimes your servers are set to UTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Year's ago i was coding a warehouse management system and in this edge case, that required a moon full and blood sacrifice to even have it occur i stuck some debug code/message that was only ever meant for me to try and figure out how it was happening.

5 years later i get a call. "We have a weird error message it says ... How did i even get here! This error is bad and you should feel bad."

<comment><USER7> As a used-to-be engineering manager for a group of engineers who didn't appreciate how often these "blood sacrifice" errors actually do occur in production, I fully appreciate the kind of "oops" feeling that comes when realizing that your obscure errors messages made it into production. Even something simple like "This has all gone terribly wrong. Call engineering." can make its way to the console of some "customer service" technician talking on the phone with an irate muggle working three companies away, and the error message triggered escalations at all three companies... you start to appreciate that maybe you should take your job seriously, and not make so many assumptions about who is using your software.

<comment><USER8> Ah, but there's something to be said for the effectiveness of these weird error messages. Typically the conversation would go: "We got an error come fix it", with no further details. It can be really hard to track down from there.

I experienced something similar when troubleshooting some Chrome issues across a Citrix XenApp farm. It was so incredibly useful to be able to ask the users "Did you get a dinosaur or a _He 's Dead Jim_?" One was a connection issue I could disregard, the other was the memory management problem I was trying to track down.

Sometimes I wonder if we should make all our cryptic, developer-only errors absurd and memorable. I've never had a user tell me anything like "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error". "The lemur jumped the shark again" gets their attention.

<comment><USER9> A unique error code would accomplish the same thing, but I get your point.

This happens to me all the time with the software project I work on, which is enormous and has been around for a long, long time: the error messages usually aren't very useful. Neither is the log. In fact, the log is often little more than all the debug messages created during development.

<comment><USER8> A unique error _code_ will accomplish little. It will serve mostly to bewilder and frustrate you after discovering many users can't (or won't) remember so much as two numbers.

What I'm saying is take the unique error code and add an absurd/funny phrase to the number. It's easier for people to remember an odd mental image than it is _ERROR CODE -42_.

<comment><USER10> I could see a use for an error code generator that would come up with memorable nonsense sentences sort of like imgur's urls. "Error : Green Exemplary Huemul" rather than "Error : -42"

<comment><USER11> I think you just gave me an idea for a weekend project :)

<comment><USER10> You just made my day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As an old fart who grew up with 1970s and 1980s music, I didn't even have to read the Stackexchange article to know the answer.

<comment><USER13> Completely off on a tangent: A good friend of mine, getting on in years, just this weekend told me a story about the time he met one half of the composer- team behind that song, Benny Andersson of ABBA, at the absolute height of his fame somewhere in the mid to late seventies. Pleasant and low-key, almost self-effacing, superstardom or not. Someone tried to pull a fast one on him, and my friend, in a professional capacity, had to intercede. "Nah, let it be", said Benny in a very quiet Swedish way, "I can probably afford it".

<comment><USER14> Benny owns the Rival Hotel in Stockholm. They mainly play ABBA music in the lounge. I spoke at the Stockholm webperf meetup a few years ago and the organisers put me up at this hotel (side story about how flying from Munich to Boston via a night in Stockholm saved me $400 in airfare). It was a really nice, modern hotel, very comfortable, and stylish, and of course, for a 70s/80s kid, the music was great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Demonstration from [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does- man...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print- gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030#comment725879_405784)

        $ faketime '00:29:00' man
        What manual page do you want?

        $ faketime '00:30:00' man
        gimme gimme gimme
        What manual page do you want?

</comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps it makes me a killjoy, but generally if I see things like this in our codebase I think "Great! I get to remove code today!"

<comment><USER16> Programmer humor is really cringey. I fully expect to be downvoted for this comment (outside of our cringey humor, we tend to be rather humorless and thin skinned), but so be it.

<comment><USER17> My downvote is not because of our collective sense of humor, but because I deny the notion of millions of people sharing a certain collective sense of humor.

<comment><USER18> > I deny the notion of millions of people sharing a certain collective sense > of humor

You don't think there's any such thing as nerd culture?

<comment><USER19> > You don't think there's any such thing as nerd culture?

Nothing is ever black or white. I'm most certainly a nerd, but that doesn't mean I have the same sense of humor as every other nerd. Think of it like inheritance vs composition. Just because I'm a nerd, doesn't mean I inherit everything other nerds have. I only have some components. And while I appreciate Sci-Fi movies, I don't participate in wars between Star Wars and Star Trek (I think Stargate SG1 was better anyway).

<comment><USER18> > that doesn't mean I have the same sense of humor as every other nerd

Of course not. Think _statistically significant_ rather than about absolutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had a coworker who would often just throw out a random word as a hapax legomenon if he thought an edge case was unreachable, to make it easy to search the source code. One day we got a call from an analyst: "The program says 'atrocity' and I don't know what I did wrong!"

He also thought it would be funny in another edge case to have the program print out "SB no es bueno." I thought it was funny too...

<comment><USER21> Really not much different from using a unique "error" number, and certainly easier to communicate without transposition or other unintentional errors:

Compare:

"The program says 'atrocity' and I don't know what I did wrong!"

vs.

"The program says 'error 567231' and I don't know what I did wrong!"

<comment><USER20> True, but atrocity conveys something extra that 567231 does not. Or at least that's what the humans tell me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Note in particular the comment from the man-db maintainer: "Oops! It was never meant to affect non-error cases" \-- and this upstream commit [https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man- db.git/commit/?id=84bd...](https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man- db.git/commit/?id=84bde8d8a9a357bd372793d25746ac6b49480525) makes sure the easter egg doesn't affect real use cases.

<comment><USER23> 1\. I really really like how they kept the easter egg in by figuring out how to permanently sweep it out of the way. I can imagine some environments that would stumble on something like this and tensely rm -rf the whole thing with forced smiles.

2\. "print_where" is set by the option parsing code when it sees "-w". [https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man- db.git/tree/src/man.c?...](https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man- db.git/tree/src/man.c?id=f498f1bad6cb5bd154f1a10cbdafad0aa159bfd3#n413)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the impressive thing here is how quickly both upstream and the distros have fixed this once the problem was reported (even though the report was via an unofficial channel).

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm beyond irritated by the presence of an output breaking easteregg in a GNU utility under standard usage. I should be able to depend on my outputs being repeatable.

Honestly, the fact that this got into the codebase makes me question the code review process of GNU and what else is potentially hiding in there.

<comment><USER26> I understand what you are saying, but keep in mind, you are also bitching about software you didn't pay for, probably didn't spend time coding, yet get to use for free that probably made your career and livelihood, AND you get the source code for.

Maybe if you took a step back, you wouldn't feel so irritated. You could be stuck working on an AS400.

<comment><USER27> Not that I think it has much relevance as an argument, but my employer pays for Ubuntu. Which in turn seems to be this developers employer. Presumably this is part of his job there, since the commit was made during the day.

As I said, not that I think it matters. But "no one pays for open source" frequently just isn't correct these days.

<comment><USER26> >But "no one pays for open source" frequently just isn't correct these days.

I understand it's paid for one way or the other, but to use it, it is free. I'm comparing it to before, if you wanted to try a Microsoft product or something, you had to buy it and once you broke the seal, you owned it* (or the little plastic disk and box).

Also, if the OP was a maintainer, I can see where he would get frustrated. I assume he was just some overzealous user.

Anyway, the fact that open source even exists is probably the best thing to happen to computing since it's invention (and I'm not even much of an open source user).

*No refunds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's having fun, and then there's violating the Principle of Least Astonishment. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment)

</comment><comment><USER29> Here's a list of some other Linux easter eggs: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/top-10-linu...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/top-10-linux- easter-eggs)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is what Rickrolls looked like before Rick Ashley recorded his first big hit.

</comment><comment><USER31> I bet it is a reference to the ABBA song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (a man after midnight)"

Edit: I see that is the explanation given on StackOverflow. This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm.

<comment><USER32> > This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed > earworm.

someBODY

<comment><USER33> I recently wrote a tool that worked on bodies of text in Rust. Had multiple instances of

        if let Some(body) = ...

<comment><USER32> I'm working on a game engine in Rust in my spare time, I'll probably end up with that same code in the physics side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I worked on an (now obscure) OS named CTOS back in the 80's. In an error message file, the error message that would be delivered in the unlikely event that the correct error message could not be found was "Pressed Rat and Warthog closed down their shop". This was an even more obscure reference to a Cream song that Ginger Baker sang lead on

</comment><comment><USER35> Aren't all times after midnight?

<comment><USER36> Yes. But, they chose 00:30 because she says "Half past twelve" at the beginning of the song

<comment><USER35> That makes sense. I wasn't familiar with the song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a bug and should be fixed.

<comment><USER38> Easter eggs remind us we're human and bring us joy when we least suspect and might need it the most.

Obviously don't want easter eggs in things like security code.

<comment><USER39> How much joy do you think the SO questioner had when their CI was breaking at (seemingly) random times of the day due to this idiotic flourish?

<comment><USER40> About as much fun as they had using free software they did not pay for of which they were free to browse the source code to their hearts content.

<comment><USER41> So you're saying that free software is not reliable and you can't have any sort of expectations from it, so it shouldn't be used for "serious business" (enterprise, government, ...)

<comment><USER42> Yes, I believe that's exactly what they're saying.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airlines Embrace Pollution Plan That Could Cost Them $24B - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-25/airlines-embrace-pollution-plan-that-could-cost-them-24-billion <comment><USER2> I was wondering how airlines were going to cut emissions. Turns out they're not.

 _To be clear, the 15-year agreement would not force airlines to cut their pollution. Instead, companies would compensate for any emissions growth after the accord begins in 2020 by buying credits that back renewable energy development, forest preservation or other environmental endeavors._

<comment><USER3> What a great barrier to competition. If a smaller airline grows, they'll have to buy "credits".

Cap and Trade is political bullshit. If you want to tax carbon emissions, tax the fuel coming out of the ground and let the drillers and diggers pass that on to whomever uses the fuel. It's the only way to be fair about it. Otherwise just accept that this is nothing more than a political game.

<comment><USER4> Why wouldn't the tax on fuel be a barrier to competition too, under your reasoning? To grow, the smaller airline would need more fuel, and so would be paying more.

Emissions are approximately proportional to fuel use, so I don't see how a tax on fuel (which would be proportional to fuel use) would have any lesser or greater effect than a credit system on emissions (assuming credits needed are proportional to emissions).

<comment><USER5> If I understand the accord correctly, the difference is existing emissions are grandfathered in/exempt. The offsets are only required on emissions growth (new emissions above current levels). So a new entrant would have to pay the "tax" on all new flights while the legacy carriers only pay on the difference from present flights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cost _them_ $24B? Hahaha. No. Come on now, you _know_ airlines aren't going to embrace anything that costs them money.

If every airline has to pay the fees, carriers will be free to raise prices to cover the additional cost. Fewer people will fly, so ticket prices will go up more, eventually reaching an equilibrium where the carriers make about what they make today moving fewer people from place to place.

</comment><comment><USER7> Air travel is already pretty efficient and clean? Certainly when calculating emissions per passenger-mile. Compare them to shipping, which is at the other end of the emissions spectrum. Lets hear something about cleaning up the oil- burners sometime.

<comment><USER8> Well of course per passenger-mile shipping is less efficient than air travel, because shipping is primarily transportation for goods, not for people. A big container ship has what, 20 people? Nonetheless, you're right that shipping should receive more attention. I think that it's less visible, less profitable, and more economically critical than air travel, which is often seen as a luxury. This would make taxing it more of a tax on economic activity.

Air travel produces a factor of ~100 more C02 per unit mass transported than maritime transport [1].

It seems that shipping is a little understudied, but apparently a leaked UN IPCC report (from 2008, so pre-crash, peak globalization) states that shipping produced 1.1 billion tonnes† [2] of CO2 annually. This number is ~4x higher than other studies so maybe it's more accurate, maybe it's not.

Air travel on the other hand produces 780 million tonnes of CO2 per year [3]. The major issue is that, as stated in TFA, it's supposed to triple in coming decades. I am not sure that global shipping is.

†I am quoting 'tonnes' in both which I think refers to metric tons, not imperial measurements, so I believe the units are comparable.

Shipping may be much easier to improve technologically than air travel, though. I'm sure many of the ships burn low-quality diesel. However, they're of the scale where very small nuclear reactors are available, and I have heard talk of ships being powered by natural gas. Ships can also deal with heavy batteries, so maybe in some instances offshore wind or solar farms could provide electricity? I have also heard of ships actually being powered _directly_ by wind, but maybe this is a rumor, some far off Silicon Valley pipe dream.

[1]: [http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate- change/science/cli...](http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate- change/science/climate-change-basics/air-travel-and-climate-change/)

[2]: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatec...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatechange.pollution)

[3]: [http://www.atag.org/facts-and-figures.html](http://www.atag.org/facts- and-figures.html)

<comment><USER7> Shipping burns tar and sludge. The worst smokey emissions possible. Its appalling.</comment></comment></comment>


How Western aid enables graft addiction in Ukraine - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/05/how-western-aid-enables-graft-addiction-in-ukraine/ <comment><USER2> A data point - Russia does the same total corruption without international aid. May be it isn't about aid?

<comment><USER3> There are many faces of corruption.

<comment><USER2> this is why i said "total corruption" \- not the best choice of words, yet i meant that in Russia and Ukraine all depths and kinds ("faces" one can say) of corruption are present everywhere through the society.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PlaylistStar, see which major Spotify playlists your tracks are on - <AUTHOR> https://www.playliststar.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I had fun building this. Wanted to make it feel very quick despite the large data set. Also wanted it to be very low maintenance with little to no running costs ($0 currently). It's a static Jamstack site, using vanilla JS, hosted on Netlify with Cloudflare. A scheduled GitLab CI job regularly polls Spotify's API and updates the site, using JSON files on Google Drive as a database.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you reading? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Well, I have 25 books in my GoodReads "currently reading" queue, but the one I'm most focused on right now is _The Language Instinct_ by Stephen Pinker. Second to that would probably be _Bayes ' Rule: A Tutorial Introduction to Bayesian Analysis_ by James V. Stone. The rest are basically "backlog".</comment>


U.S. to Iran: Coronavirus won't save you from sanctions - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-iran-usa-idUSKBN21712L <comment><USER2> >[Brian Hook, the U.S. Special Representative for Iranian Affairs] also blamed Iran's leadership for its coronavirus woes, saying that Iran "spends billions on terrorism and foreign wars" and that if it spent one tenth of this "on a better health care system, the Iranian people would have been much better off."

Well, that's a bit ironic and hypocritical.</comment>


My first product  - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I've just launched my first product. It's a jQuery image tagger plugin. I just wanted to know what do you think of it or any suggestions other in terms of SEO .<p>Cheers <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, it's kinda late and i'm sleepy lol. Yes , the website is <http://www.jpictag.com/>

<comment><USER2> hey Henrique,

Looks very professional, I love the logo and the demos are really neat.

You'll likely see competition from some open source variation on what you've made (if that doesn't exist already).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) I expect that, I've found one OO source project but it only does maybe 40% of what mine does. This is like a commercial version of facebook image tagger :P

<comment><USER2> One way you might forestall that is to make a 'light' version that you make available for free.

That way the light competes with the same featureset as the open source programs, and you offer an 'upsell' to your commercial version if people want more features or commercial support.

<comment><AUTHOR> Freemium ;) it's currently an option on the table. Thanks for saying it tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Site looks good. I love the demo's. Its great to be able to use/experiment with a tool before buying it.

The purchase process is a bit sluggish. It's been a long time since I've been bumped to paypal to make a purchase. I think it would be worth your money to pay the $30 a month for paypal pro and use the API to keep them on your site. Or use one of the many existing tools/apps/apis out there to make a cleaner checkout process.

It is far easier to deal with a refund than it is to deal with a charge back. Cheaper too. Since you have a demo, most that buy it are going to keep it. But those that for what ever reason end up wanting to return it, will be able to get their money back by going threw PayPal or their credit card. Plus its been proven that having a 30 day money back guarantee will improve your conversion rates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Great things to keep me busy for while. Cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One bug, one suggestion.

On the Edition demo when I click to tag someone I can't immediately select their name from the list but if I start typing the name it selects fine. I click but it doesn't tick the box.

" _(You may need IE8, FF, Safari or Opera to visualize this example)_ "

Visualize is the wrong word, you mean "use" or "see" I think. Visualise is a mental action.

Edit: oh yeah, it looks really good, like both FB and Flickr; hope they don't have patents on it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the bug report and suggestion. Also, I've this bug report golden rule, which is, if you found a bug I will offer you the next release. So if you are interested let me know ;)

<comment><USER4> Would be much obliged, my email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good, but I think you'll have some competition ;) I'm already on my way building my scripts, which has a panel for tagging and is built also with jQuery.

Anyway, wish you good luck :)

<comment><USER6> I have also already built one...and check out stippleit.com -- they have already launched and have a good product that had some recent NYTimes coverage.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the link. I think the difference between my product and this one is "execution". My script is flexible, so you can make the same effects and boxes. But I think I'm missing on execution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe it's this, which was posted directly to HN a few minutes ago:

<http://www.jpictag.com/>

<comment><USER2> Yep. So why not add this question there as a comment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It would maybe help if you posted a link to it!

</comment><comment><USER8> We need a link :)</comment>


Resources to Learn Programming in Java, Python, Ruby or JavaScript (Updated) - <AUTHOR> http://www.learneroo.com/modules/12/nodes/96

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally created this for my blog, and it was my first post to reach front page of HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4822907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4822907)

The Java column was pretty empty then, so I created Learneroo.com to fill it in. I just updated the chart with recent resources for all the languages.</comment>