An Employee Dies, and the Company Collects the Insurance - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/an-employee-dies-and-the-company-collects-the-insurance/ <comment><USER2> Life insurance is just a tax-advantaged investment vehicle. The companies aren't "profiting from your death." They pay the premiums, those premiums get invested, and the company gets the proceeds when you die. It doesn't preclude you from having your own life insurance. Your only involvement is as the hook that enables the tax advantage.

<comment><USER3> Like you, I don't understand the ethical dilemma here. It's not like the company is taking money that would otherwise go to the family, or is misrepresenting the purpose of their taking out the policy. What's the big deal? Perhaps there is an angle I'm missing.

<comment><USER4> The main problem is that the company stands to gain if the death rate among their employees is higher than average, so they pay fewer premiums to get to the payoff. That might incentivize them to reduce health benefits for employees.

<comment><USER5> But the actuaries at the insurance company price that added risk into the premiums.

I can see there being a big difference in death rates between, say, an Alaskan crab fishing operation and a suburban CPA firm, but 'job' is one of the questions that's asked by life insurers so that's already accounted for.

How would a white collar office employer legally engineer a higher death rate for their people than an equivalent company down the street? Providing only fries and burgers in the canteen? Relocating to an office block near a chemical waste plant? Nothing really seems feasible or effective enough to make a measurable difference to the performance of the investment scheme. The added investment return bought by shortening the lives of some percentage of staff by a few years would be just noise compared to the tax savings this vehicle provides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ordinarily, one wouldn't buy life insurance in aggregate as an investment. The insurance company has done the calculations, and it would be a net loss to the buyer. (The buyer is willing to take that loss for security, which is just fine.)

The only reason it's happening here is that the government gives tax breaks, and those tax breaks are higher than the insurance companies' profit margins, so it actually turns out to be a net gain for _both the seller and buyer of life insurance_.

Surely, this is the result of lobbying by life insurance companies. It doesn't make any sense on its own.

Similarly, it makes no sense for companies to buy their employees health insurance. The reason it started is because of the tax breaks which make it cheaper for the company to buy you health insurance than for you to buy it on your own. (Aside: I don't believe for a minute that it somehow results in some magical savings from group bargaining.) Now that's a big part of the mess we call our healthcare system.

Direct your criticism to these special carve-out laws that make a mess of everything. Don't direct it towards the companies that rationally take a tax break that is already on the table.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not that concerned about the practice until companies start killing employees in order to collect sooner. Unless the policies actually affect the individuals thus covered, al they really amount to is a tax avoidance scheme.

</comment><comment> martin-adams Naturally the film industry would be very keen to insure against their cast[1], but I would feel a little uncomfortable if my employer were better off if I had an 'unforeseen accident'.

[1] [http://www.insureme.com/health-insurance/hollywood- insurance](http://www.insureme.com/health-insurance/hollywood-insurance)

<comment><USER8> If it makes you feel any better, the insurance company is much better off if you live a long life, and has a strong incentive to investigate suspicious accidents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Had no idea this was going on. I'm aware of life insurance offered through the company for myself at very low premiums (and I guess google and the like are no premiums for whatever-x your salary). First time I've heard of a completely separate policy with the company as beneficiary. If the terms last even until you leave the company, it's a no brainer for the employer. Everyone dies.

<comment><USER8> Keep in mind the insurance companies have carefully calculated the premiums so that, on average, the company pays more in premiums than it gets in payouts. I think it's more about financial planning and tax avoidance.

<comment><USER9> That makes sense. Everyone's a winner then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I get that the companies here are not trying to off employees and collect.

It does, however, sort of remind me of the Herbalife "investigations", where a hedge fund bet $1 billion that Herbalife would fail and then began lobbying politicians to bring it down. You look at the lengths these guys went to and consider the potential impact of their efforts, and it's unsettling to say the least - [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/business/staking-1-billion...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/business/staking-1-billion- that-herbalife-will-fail-then-ackman-lobbying-to-bring-it-down.html)

For me, it calls into question what behaviors are incentivized by allowing people to seek any sort of financial benefit from people/companies in which they have no real property interest (for lack of a better term). I don't think this is purely a financial/tax inquiry; it does seem to have some societal ramifications that ought to be considered as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's my attempt at running the numbers:

Scenario one: Company takes out an insurance policy for $1,000,000 on an employee. The expected remaining life of the employee is 20 years. The expected return on investment is 5%. The insurance company prices the contract so they make 10% of the returns. The company pays $32,000 per year for 20 years, then gets the $1,000,000 payout.

In the insurance policy scenario, the company gets $1,000,000, with no taxes owed, a gain of $360,000.

Scenario two: The company invests this $640,000 ($32,000/year * 20 years) on its own on the same schedule and with the same expected return on investment. They earn approx. $1,111,000 and owe capital gains tax on the $471,000 gain, which at a rate of 15% is $71,000, for a net gain of $400,000.

Scenario two: investing the money themselves and paying cap gains, makes more sense than scenario one: buying insurance. Unless the insurance company is taking less than a 7% vig.

<comment><USER11> I'm not saying your math is wrong, but I'm confused as to how the breakeven can be a 7% cut when the capital gains rate is 15%. Can you explain why my intuition is wrong here?

<comment><USER10> Because it's only 15% of the gain, whereas both investment gains and customer payments are revenue to the insurance company and I've assumed the insurance company needs to keep some percentage of their revenue to pay overhead expenses, marketing, commissions, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dead Peasants Insurance. The name says it all really. Banned in most countries, for good reason.

Edit: The downvotes are interesting. People don't being reminded it is banned for good reason, or object to the well-known industry-wide perjorative name for the said insurance? Wikipedia covers the reason for the name well enough - look it up!

<comment><USER13> It's even mentioned by that name in the article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Insurance is only an investment if it's used to hedge risk to some other asset of value. Employees aren't your assets, unless you're participating in indentured servitude. This is just gambling at best, hiding money at worst.

I get insuring your movie against the star dying. If someone wants to start a business insuring the internal projects of companies against people crucial to them either quitting or dying, that's fine with me. But with no asset at risk, there's no difference between your company buying life insurance on you and me buying life insurance on you.

Of course, CDSs are still legal to buy against companies who don't owe you anything, so I should really just give up the idea that financial regulation has an obligation to society in general rather than just in setting up a fair playing field between speculators.

<comment><USER13> > Employees aren't your assets, unless you're participating in indentured > servitude.

Employees are most assuredly assets in that they provide value to the company.

<comment><USER14> Your employee's life does not provide value to the company, their work does, and they can end that work at any time that they (or you, in most states) choose. You do not own your employees, or their future labor.

Being allowed to take out insurance on your employee's life makes about as much sense as being able to take out insurance on a hotel that you're renting a room in.

edit: clarity

<comment><USER11> How is a company to insure against a disaster wiping out an entire branch's worth of employees? That's certainly a low probability event, but many companies with single-digit locations would be in big trouble if they lost such a huge proportion of their workforce at once, which is pretty unlikely to happen naturally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've also seen this done with founders where the policy is used to buy out a founder's estate, as well as being used to cover the business risk presented by that founder's (or senior staff member's) death.

</comment><comment><USER16> If the firm also took out a policy for the same amount and under the same conditions, paid for it themselves, but named a beneficiary of my choice, I'd be OK with this practice. Sure it doubles their premium costs (absent a quantity discount), but in my mind it would resolve any ethical issues since my heirs would also receive a benefit from my demise.

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one who thought the obvious thing to do if the company wanted to make this problem go away is to give the employee's family a reasonably cut?

</comment><comment><USER18> "But critics say it is immoral for companies to profit from the death of employees, while employees themselves do not directly benefit."

</comment><comment><USER19> >But absent meaningful regulation around the practice, it grew unchecked, and soon companies were taking out policies on many poorly paid employees like janitors, then reaping millions in profit when they died.

Most of the article is about Universal Life products, which is a product that is generally considered an enormous scam (it is a really poor investment vehicle), however this part really stood out.

Anyone planning on making money through insurance needs to understand that the house odds are against you, at least unless you have insider knowledge or are hiring hit men. Insurance companies are very very smart, and you won't profit by trying to play the odds against them, _especially_ and most certainly in the aggregate.

So you come to the reality that this is wholly a tax avoidance scheme (sometimes legal, sometimes not). Not really about profiting from death, or usurping someone's great insurance payout, but simply hiding money away for some period of time.

This is a tax code discussion that has perilously little to do with life or mortality. Just taxes and ways around them.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, morality has nothing to do with anything. Say, if all of your neighbours bought insurance on your property, and the one day it collapsed, then there would be nothing immoral about that, but I bet you would not feel to great when they waved their piles of sweaty cash in your face over the rubble of your home.

Now swap home for dead relative.

See?

Life is not black and white, but, it seems, is certainly good for payoff or two.

<comment><USER20> >Say, if all of your neighbours bought insurance on your property, and the one day it collapsed, then there would be nothing immoral about that

I agree, if the neighbours had nothing to do with the collapse.

<comment><USER21> I can even think of situations where it would make sense to take out insurance on your neighbors home. For example, if you observe that your neighbors are hoarders, you might try to get insurance on their home in anticipation of the home's eventual condemning (which would wreck your homes value through geographical association).

The only problem there is that I suspect that the insurance company would not be particularly keen on that.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, that's why you generally need an Insurable Interest in someone to buy life insurance on them: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurable_interest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurable_interest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm on other side of this. While I understand the need to keep pension plans afloat, when my mother passed away in 2011 the value of her pension left to my brother and I was ~$60,000. This was split between the two of us.

While no small sum, the mortgage was not paid off and I have been paying it since. I have no idea if HP took out an insurance policy on her, but if they did it was most certainly WAY MORE than $60,000.

This shouldn't be a vehicle for profit in my opinion. Unfortunately, she only had an accidental death policy. So if her corporation had a general life insurance policy in the $400-500k range - as her heirs, we should be entitled to some of that money.

Yes, we as consumers/employees have to take responsibility for our choices. So some might argue it was her fault she wasn't covered well. I would disagree. There are a lot of companies that aren't honest about this practice. So, if the company has you well covered, if they are a good company, shouldn't they extend you the same courtesy and offer to let you buy in to the plan?

The point being, why are they only looking after their best interests? It's bullshit to say they are just keeping their pension plans afloat because of the payoff amounts.

There is an ethical dilemma because a lot of companies hide what they are doing. That and the certain return when the employee dies.

It should not be an investment vehicle, period. It is profiting from death. Of course you can have your own life insurance. Just because someone is my employer, shouldn't give them any right to take out insurance on me.

<comment><USER24> Not to be harsh, but why would HP owe you any of that money? This is a legal way for them to avoid taxes, yes it sucks that your mother died, but HP payed the premiums, they did not take them from your mom, and they didn't lead her to believe the insurance would payout to her heirs, and they didn't prevent her from taking out an insurance policy for herself. You have no claim or right to that insurance money.</comment></comment>


One look at venture capital, or "Why I hate VCs." - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/03/why-i-hate-vcs.html

<comment><USER2> The author makes four points, which are interesting to consider vis-à-vis YC:

1\. VCs and founders have a conflict of interest with respect to risk, because VCs are portfolio investors who need a few home runs while founders have all their eggs in one basket.

2\. VCs tend not to respect or care about founders.

3\. VCs generally don't add that much value beyond cash, though they claim otherwise.

4\. VCs tend to think of techies as totally fungible, weird, and not capable of leading.

When it comes to #2 and #4, YC is obviously in a different league.

On #3, it's true that some people dispute whether YC adds value beyond cash. But it appears that the founders themselves overwhelmingly say that it does. So I give #3 to YC.

I'm not sure about #1. It would be interesting to hear more about this one.</comment>


The same melodic sequence appears in a surprising number of recent pop songs - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/767812/millennial-whoop/ <comment><USER2> Linked from the article, Axis of Awesome's 4 Chords: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgFrVqUXS8I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgFrVqUXS8I)

Wow, that's hilarious. One of the ut comments has the list of songs.

<comment><USER3> Also known as the Pachelbel rant:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are two things that needs to come in western pop music to kind of renew it : oriental tuning ( quarters tones, like you can hear in indian or chineese music), but this one may take a while because ot actually sound like a bad note if you mix it with our scales. And the second is non conventional time signatures, meaning different than 3/4 or 4/4.

The only popular song i know which has a different beat is "money" fromp pink floyd, which is a 7/4 and sounds good. So it is possible to use at least this new time signature.

<comment><USER5> Fair number songs use other time signatures.

[http://www.songfacts.com/category- songs_with_unusual_time_si...](http://www.songfacts.com/category- songs_with_unusual_time_signatures.php)

Many more play with the 8-bar structure.

But don't hold your breath for oriental tuning. I don't see any reason why that would ever catch on. ick.

<comment><USER6> > "But don't hold your breath for oriental tuning. I don't see any reason why > that would ever catch on. ick."

I can understand your personal preference. That said, I think the ear is more adaptable than you might think, I've found myself enjoying music that employs microtones. To give one example, here's some Turkish music played on microtonal guitar:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsSjh5TTqI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsSjh5TTqI)

<comment><USER7> Listening to that, the microtones remind me of bends on guitar solos in popular Western music. So maybe we don't officially use them, but I think they do appear more than we might realize.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, quarter note bends are common in blues guitar, and by extension blues- rock and rock. This video gives a simple introduction to what these sound like:

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

As another example, honky-tonk piano can be out of tune compared to standard piano tuning:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUP6k5xkdBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUP6k5xkdBU)

There's also been some Eastern influence on the vocals of Western singers. For example, Jeff Buckley talked of being inspired by the Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Here's Jeff Buckley covering a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58E-9ZEw- yQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58E-9ZEw-yQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not nearly as maddening as DJ Mustards "Hey hey hey hey" sample.

[https://youtu.be/kGVrCIzzoro](https://youtu.be/kGVrCIzzoro)

<comment><USER9> You do not _have_ to listen to what's on the radio or in the mass media. Plenty of other music exists. It is just a matter of accepting being spoon-fed with soup or going on a hunt for the thrill of discovering a unknwon trio from wherever in the world that has made some truly innovative or different music. It is just a matter of consumer choice, just with like everything else (food, drinks, books, movies, etc.)

<comment><USER10> Great place to start and it doesn't require a subscription:

[https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/)

<comment><USER11> The netlabels section [1] has plenty of random and interesting songs to listen to.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/netlabels](https://archive.org/details/netlabels)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pachebel canon in D is also found everywhere: [https://youtu.be/JdxkVQy7QLM](https://youtu.be/JdxkVQy7QLM)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a minor third, which is probably the catchiest interval.

You hear it a lot in school playgrounds. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> you can easilly kill the The Millenial Hook earworm with a single dose of New Millenium Cyanide Christ :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ)

However it is still plain old 4/4 stuff in meshuggah, despite the impression...

<comment><USER14> Thanks, man, that was good for a laugh. Definitely wiped out any memory of "canonical" chord progressions from my recent auditory memory. It's like "bulk erase" for auditory memory :-)

(I guess I'm more of a "prog/symphonic metal" guy than a screamo/"cookie monster metal" guy, though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Blame it on the Swedes...<br>

[http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/why...](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/why- is-sweden-so-good-at-pop-music/280945/)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is an interesting observation, but it's poorly contextualized, and becomes rather trite in the context of modern trends in melodic construction.

His attempts to contextualize this are not lacking: there's a hint at the minor third's use in schoolyard songs, a quintessential reference to the overtone series (the God of the gaps of armchair music theorists!) an appeal to Bernstein's The Unanswered Question (which is, sadly, for all its visionarity, bordering on irrelevance in the light of the intervening four decades of research on music perception), the quintessential appeal to the overtone series). There is no attempt to understand why the 'whoop' sounds good in songs, or how it relates to other trends in music. The mere identification of a pattern provides little insight into its usage and meaning. But who doesn't enjoy a few digs at the formulaic nature of pop?

Let's look at an example, from the article "Good Time". There's actually far more information density in pop music than is assumed.

Specifically, let's focus on the use of the 'whoop' as a way of delineating chorus activity. The article identifies the 'whoop' at 0:04, but this card- collecting example-finding behavior hides its main usage in the song.

A major 6-5 scale degree pattern predominates in the verses of "Good Time," often to start a phrase ("Woke up"; "What's up") or nested inside of other melodic patterns. Many phrases are ended with a descending 3-1-6, outlining a minor triad (or 1-6-5). All of these patterns avoid closure on the tonic, allowing for smooth elision into the next sentence.

To end the first half of the verse, Owl City uses a 3-5 pattern (the inverse of the 'whoop') at 'inside my head', followed by Jepsen humming 5-3-1, a foreshadowing of the 'whoop' in the chorus.

The 5-3 pattern takes over in the chorus. This fundamentally transforms how the 6-5 patterns at the ends of phrases are perceived. In the chorus, they are no longer a way of avoiding closure during the rapid declamation of the verses. They are fully subsumed as little moments of relaxation in between 'whoops' of freedom, joy, summer...in short, the joys of being a Millennial.

Among the myriad trends and styles that have enjoyed their moments of fame in the history of pop, the most notable is likely the tension between melodies and chord progressions based on the minor pentatonic scale (roughly, blues, rock, etc.) and those based on diatonic scales (arguably, the major pentatonic is stylistically aligned with this side). Different stylistic elements have predominated at various points in time.

There has been a resurgence in the popularity of certain diatonic patterns (especially those based on the diatonic major scale) in the past ten years. The 5-3 minor third is particularly useful as a bridge between the pentatonic and diatonic worlds. The 'Millennial Whoop' is no doubt an outgrowth of that trend. There has also been a trend for choruses to focus on the fifth scale degree, often in a higher pitch range than the surrounding verses (this is not remotely new, but in the past, was more identifiable by the use of V chords rather than melodic construction around the fifth scale degree).

As an example of the 5-3's usage elsewhere, Adele's Someone Like You, with its soulful roots and pentatonic construction, exemplifies many of the trends that are picked up in the 'whoop'. She starts many phrases in the verses with a descending 5-3 minor third, then moves to a higher pitch range for the chorus...with a few anguished (decidedly not feel-good and 'whoopy') minor thirds (e.g. "I beg"). ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CGuafoq3T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CGuafoq3T4))

<comment><USER17> No - the songs a very close.

Similar beats, genre, production values, upbeat, bubblegum themes, and then you have the 3-5 whooping by a 'chorus of teens' or whatever.

It's very, very similar. It's a thing. And it's sad.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's a thing. But similarity is no reason for sadness. One could make a similar argument about design patterns.

The important question to ask is, "what ways are there of making music sound appealing to as many people as possible on the first listening?"

Convergent solutions will arise, just as in the case of design patterns.

<comment><USER17> It's not the similarity that bothers me, it's the general craziness of it all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hooray! Someone else has noticed it and given it a (pretty good) name! I can stop banging on about it. I would actually expand it to include a particular style of gratuitous vocalization that doesn't use this specific interval/pattern.

Pop music today is full of what I've started calling "tropes", of which this is the most glaring. The action of all of them is to make it unlistenable.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is not a millennial thing. V-III-V arrangements have been in pop music forever.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but not as a meme.

And not generally howling like that.

It's definitely a thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This happens almost every summer for a few months. Pop musicians are thieves. This year we had even 2 themes being used all over, the second a special reverse guitar riff.

</comment><comment><USER21> How does Milky Chance fit into this conversation?

</comment><comment><USER22> Most of these songs are not written by the millenials that perform them

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh, so _that 's_ why all these songs fucking suck.</comment>


Startup Heroku (YC W08) Now Hosting 40,000+ Apps - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/11/23/the-state-of-cloud-startup-heroku-now-hosting-40000-apps/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps this isn't the best place to say this, but since Heroku is a YC company, maybe someone is listening:

I _want_ to use Heroku for some upcoming projects, however they require the uploading of high-res images. Every time I've tested things on their free plan:

\- Uploads over 5mb cause errors 50% of the time

\- Some ImageMagick functions don't seem to be available

Are these limitations that paying plans don't experience? Or are my needs simply out of the scope of Heroku's target market?

I want to give you my money :) ... (BTW, congrats on all the growth)

<comment><USER3> I use direct uploads to S3 to get around this. It works much better as a long term solution and you can easily do image processing somewhere else in the background.

<comment><USER2> Right, but doesn't this effectively double or triple your bandwidth usage on S3? (since you're uploading, downloading, then re-uploading)

<comment><USER4> Transfer between S3 and your Heroku app (which lives inside EC2) is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know who did the artwork for the site? It's beautiful stuff.

Example: <http://heroku.com/pricing#ronin-1>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm writing an article for DevX as we speak for Heroku deployments.

I think that Heroku is a good alternative for some applications where saving money by managing your own EC2s is offset by decreased development and admin costs. I'm also writing about Heroku deployments that use remote CouchDB or MongoDB services.

<comment><USER4> We've seen a ton of Couch and Mongo apps lately - works very well with Heroku. Check out <http://www.mongohq.com>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Heroku. We've been building our app on Heroku for a few months now, and it's been a great experience. Seems like we bug firstname.lastname@example.com almost every day, and his responses are always quick and helpful. Keep up the good work and the great customer service!

</comment><comment><USER8> Are they still supporting the herokugarden editor? That thing was awesome since designers could get started w/o installing anything at all.

Feels like they are no longer supporting that. Is that right?

<comment><USER4> Correct, the editor is no longer supported. We hope to bring it back sometime in the future.

<comment><USER9> Now that will be specially interesting for people that want to develop using Chrome OS computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any idea how many paying clients they have? I know they offer a fremium (which is good).

</comment><comment><USER11> congrats!</comment>


Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53303364 <comment><USER2> I am quite bearish about the impact of WFH, especially for software engineers, but if there is one country where I think the coronavirus can have a huge positive effect for the economy, it is Japan.

Japanese companies are generally extremely inefficient. Outside of a few powerhouses, partially thanks to a protected and large domestic market, Japanese labor practices are antiquated. There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example.

To give a concrete example, you will have companies where people will make sure to start meetings at 7 pm to make sure they can maximize "残業" (overtime). The labor ministry is trying to curb on companies that expect more than 80 hours of overtime _per month_. On top of it, if you live in one of the big city (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka), 3 hours of commute per day is not atypical. And then you have the practice of 飲み会 ("business dinners" where people drink, abuse toward women common, etc.), which also takes time.

Finally, Japanese companies rely a lot on paper and 判子 (hanko) and other seals systems. My wife sometimes has to go the desk of a colleague dozens of times a day to get some paperwork. IT systems are antiquated. And yet, Japan has one of the most educated workforce in the world. Especially women are often relegated to menial work. Internet is fast everywhere. It is the true steam punk country !

Coronavirus and WFH change this. Seeing large companies like fujitsu publicly taking a stance is highly significant in a country like Japan where executives are often extremely risk adverse.

<comment><USER3> How does this square with for example the Japanese car market, which I thought led the world in labour practices and efficiency? They've invented many labour practices that are considered the best we have today. And their cars are so cheap - how are they doing this if they aren't being efficient?

For example are Toyota's engineering and factories running on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely. If they are it seems to produce great results!

<comment><USER4> An assembly-line is a machine designed to avoid the need for synchronous human decision-making. Instead, there are only _synchronous_ machine decisions, and _asynchronous_ human decisions based on e.g. sampling, or spotting.

There are synchronous human _tasks_ in some assembly-lines, but as long as they're _rote_ tasks, inefficiency usually isn't introduced. Humans working _as if they were_ machines, are rarely inefficient; and if they are, this inefficiency is "legible" for blue-collar work in a way that it isn't for white-collar work, so an inefficient human "part" can be, er, swapped out.

The whole "thing" that Toyota did to revolutionize car manufacturing, was essentially to make quality-assurance part of the same ground-level machine (i.e. make it a computed outcome of a series of "dumb" machine and worker steps), rather than making it a separate auditing process. As such, they essentially squeezed the _ability_ to be inefficiency/incompetent out of the QA process.

<comment><USER5> > The whole "thing" that Toyota did to revolutionize car manufacturing, was > essentially to make quality-assurance part of the same ground-level machine

Where can I read more about it? I find it hard to imagine, how QA could possibly be a function of manufacturing process, since pretty much the sole purpose of it is to spot when "dumb" manufacturing process failed you a couple of steps ago. I mean, a lot of QA is pretty dumb too (like testing a party of 1000 details by breaking 10 of them), but there is nothing new about that specifically.

<comment><USER6> > since pretty much the sole purpose of it is to spot when "dumb" > manufacturing process failed you a couple of steps ago

This is really not correct, a quality based approach to design and engineering will likely change your entire process (for good or for ill ... probably both).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any Japanese care to chime in on how WFH is accepted culturally? When I worked for a Japanese tech company I was surprised by how old school they were. Landlines, business cards, reams of paper, week long meetings about policies, and this was a software company. WFH was forbidden unless it was an emergency.

<comment><USER8> Add fax machines and it will be perfect picture of current situation in Germany.

<comment><USER9> How are two of the most advanced manufacturing countries so backwards?

<comment><USER10> It is a pendulum swing: these countries advanced a lot after WW2, then they believed they found the ideal way and got stuck there. In the meanwhile time flows linear, other countries were left behind but caught up and moved on. This way Japan and Germany still work well due to their excellent history, not recent trends.

<comment><USER11> I would say more like they found a local maxima and stayed there, never going even slightly less efficient in order to find a higher maxima than the one they had.

Kind of reminds me of which countries have the fastest/cheapest Internet access now. The countries that had Internet first tend to have shitty copper infrastructure and expensive plans, while the newer countries are all up with the latest fibre infrastructure and fast/cheap plans.

<comment><USER10> I don't think there is a need to go slightly less efficient in order to improve the current processes; they just got frozen in time and there are many such examples with companies and countries. Remember Japan is not the first time doing it, at the end of the shoguns era they were behind the rest of the world they were more advanced than.

<comment><USER11> There is always a dip in productivity when switching systems as you need to untrain people from the old and train them in the new system. Then you need to work out all the bugs and edge cases in the new system.

So even if it will make you far more efficient there will be a temporary productivity slump as people get adjusted to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can Japanese residents comment on how this works WRT office space in the home? Do people typically have space in their homes to have a proper home office setup?

My wife and I are both WFH right now, and we had to buy a second desk and chair and repurpose what was previously our 2nd bedroom. The 3rd bedroom has always been a home office. If we lived in a downtown apartment, I'm not sure what we'd do, as we're both in management and spend the majority of the day teleconferencing.

<comment><USER13> I mean FWIW I'm American and your explanation sounds very foreign to me. I'm a millennial though, so owning a house at all is quite obstacle. Scrounging up a down payment when even a 2 bedroom apartment is $1-$1.5 million is not the easiest task. Renting an extra 2 bedrooms to have lying around in case we suddenly need 2 offices would also cost an extra couple thousand dollars a month. My wife and I are both working from home from a 1 bedroom apartment currently.

<comment><USER14> The US has very localized housing problems. Many tech giants are realizing that they have to either diversify their locations or enter into a housing spiral, as there just aren't enough houses for how many people they'd like to hire.

Once you step out of a small number of markets, the price problem goes away. I live in a well sized metro in the midwest, and I've worked, from here, for companies you've heard about. 4 bedrooms in my street, sitting on half an acre and a decent school district, are $250k. A 1 bedroom apartment would be under a thousand a month to rent, and that's a modern building with good appliances, a gym, a pool and gigabit internet. A single person in tech, right out of school, can easily save enough to get a mortgage in their first year working.

So yes, your situation is very real, but if there was less pressure to be in Seattle, NY or SF, the housing problems would melt.

<comment><USER15> It's more that the price problem follows the workers.

A decade ago, Seattle was cheap. You could get 4/5 BR homes in Kirkland for $400K. I just checked, and those homes are going for $1.2M now. Similarly, one of my former Google coworkers moved out to the Boulder office. When I'd checked on Boulder in the late 00s, you could get nice homes for $250-300K. He paid about $850K.

Wherever you have highly paid tech workers, you will have highly paid tech workers bidding up houses. You just have to get ahead of them, and buy where the FAANG offices are just being constructed rather than wait until you work there. True remote work (where you could dial in from anywhere, not just a city near an office) would fix this, but that's not really what's being offered these days, and when it is the salaries are more inline with what people make in the Midwest than what they make in Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The one big downside I have noticed from WFH is that any efficiency I introduce in my own work becomes reclaimed time. If I can crank through a days work in 4 hours in the morning I can reasonably take it easy in the afternoon. This is great but it has created some stress around things like code reviews and impromptu mentoring etc.

If I am sitting in the office I may as well spend 20 minutes on a code review trying to figure out a cleaner solution, but at home its harder to do it. There is just a general feeling of racing towards that 'done' status which represents a good amount of completed work for the day. Before it was just 9-5 and a thorough code review was a welcome use of that time.

<comment><USER17> I think it's even more difficult when you factor in kids at home. We've had to deal with that at our home which means our ability to get work done has been cut in half. It also puts a lot of burden on co-workers. The biggest issue with this has been people without kids wondering why coworkers WITH kids aren't getting as much done.

<comment><USER18> But once the situation with the coronavirus is over, the kids will be in school/daycare, so this won't be an issue.

<comment><USER17> Unless you have year round school, this will always be an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not commenting on this specific case here, but I believe we currently see the pendulum swinging from one extreme (WFH only at a very exclusive subset of companies) to the other extreme ("WFH first" policies)

I'm convinced the true winners will be those companies that find a smart mix of both worlds. This includes recognizing that both concepts have their strengths (e.g., people are a lot more disciplined about meetings in a remote context) and weaknesses (e.g., a further breakdown of the separation between work and live). WFH needs more than just giving people the green light to work from home on selected days. It also, for example, needs a radical rethink of office infrastructure (most offices are not designed for 10 people sitting side-by-side and being on the phone most of the day), management culture, and shared best practices how to approach non-transactional work (e.g., how to tackle complex topics with people who do not know each other remotely?)

<comment><USER20> There is no middle ground -- WFH is self-reinforcing trend, because offices are much less useful when they are half-empty and all processes have go online. As soon as some coworkers move, others follow. If people start working 2-3 days at home ... they start to think about moving somewhere better. I wonder what is the endgame of this rearrangement? Perhaps nomadism will become common? But in that case, cities will lose even more cohesion than they ve lost so far. If we take away the work factor, the question "where do i/my family live" becomes much more open-ended. Obvious choice #1 is near extended family. What else motivates people to move?

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's anywhere near as bimodal as you say.

As far as human pyschology goes, I think it's hard to be productive over the very long term with almost no real in-person time to connect with your team. We're social animals and we bond best when together. And we are more productive and efficient when we have bonded in that way.

Even famously all-remote companies shell out cash to fly everyone together at least a few times a year because of this. At some point, though, there are diminishing returns to getting everyone in the same room. The optimum point surely varies from person to person and depends on the nature of their work, but I don't think the peak is "every day" or "never".

Yes, offices are less useful when they're empty half the time. But homes are too! Most American homes sit empty from 8am-6pm every single day. Miles and miles of dead suburban streets, empty driveways, houses silent except for the ticking of thermostats.

I'm interested to see a company try a middle ground like this: Everyone works from home most days. At some periodic interval, maybe once a week, everyone comes to some shared space for meeting and coordination work.

This sounds like the worst of both worlds because you need both home office space and office space. But the office space can likely be shared with several teams. An office big enough for 100 people could service a 1,000 if teams only came in once every two weeks. If in-person days are mostly around meetings and communication, you don't need a lot of dedicated desk space. It doesn't need to feel like a permanent "territory" for each worker. Instead, just a pile of shared meeting rooms and open spaces.

If you still have to come in a few times, then it sounds like you're still stuck living close to an urban center. But, actually, the livable radius increases dramatically. A one-hour each way commute is a nightmare if you do it every day. That's ten hours a week stuck in a car. But if you only come in once every two weeks, then you could cut your total commute time in half while living five _times_ as far away. And, since in-person days are mostly for meeting anyway, it's viable to have an understanding that commuting is part of your "work day" and have a shorter in-person work day.

In return, you get to spend less time commuting and more time in your own community, with your pets, with your loved ones, and in your own home.

<comment><USER22> >almost no real in-person time to connect with your team

I work on a very distributed team and, in normal times, we just physically get together in one of our offices or in conjunction with some event a lot of people are attending anyway a few times a year. Most of us (normally) travel a good part of the time anyway so it's really not especially disruptive.

I actually agree that remote teams should have some real F2F time but that needn't mean living within commuting distance of a common office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, that huge for Japan I believe. I live at Kichijoji and it takes me 1 hour to get to work in Akasaka. I love my place and somehow get used to this routine, but honestly I wish I could rent a place in Japanese countryside.

<comment><USER24> You can actually get a house for free in some areas, mostly central Japan. Many cities are becoming deserted and houses are left alone, governments offer incentives to take them over. Might come with a catch such as committing to maintenance of farming.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b My wife did a little light reading on this subject and found it's more complicated than that. It turns out that finding the owner of these properties is an enormous challenge because due to the high level of taxes and fees associated with these buildings, the owners are reluctant to claim them (to avoid paying the taxes/fees). I would like to see someone living in Japan confirm this, though.

<comment><USER25> I haven't seen any houses being offered for free in my area, but have seen number that were listed at less than $15K USD and wouldn't consider any of them livable without at least some major renovation - and in most cases you'd probably want to just demolish the house completely and build something new. Of course different people might have differing definitions of what is "livable", so your mileage may vary.

Focusing on the abandoned houses is a bit of a red herring, though. There is definitely affordable non-free housing to be found in Japan... less than $100K USD for a move-in ready house in a small city seems very doable to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd love to see companies convert 'Unlimited vacation time at your discretion' over to 'Unlimited remote at your discretion'.

<comment><USER27> "Unlimited vacation" is a deception. Real perks are to have 15 or 20 days of vacations, increasing with seniority at the company, and _forced_ vacations (i.e., the company forces you to take the vacations every year). It is also good for the company health (ensure that no 1 person missing has a large impact).

<comment><USER28> _" Unlimited vacation" is a deception._

I see this being repeated over and over but I can't help but think that it's become a way to discourage giving employees time off from a company's perspective. I've successfully taken 30+ days off in an unlimited vacation environment (not consecutively) and not been reprimanded in any way because I was able to operate responsibly. Before I left for any length of vacation, I made sure that projects were delivered and successfully launched weeks before hand and I created documentation and trained others on continuing work processes (the lack of my presences should not have ANY impact).

"Unlimited vacation" should be a work perk that is attractive. Often times I find that it's the managers who don't believe employees should be given time off or the company decides to just implement unlimited vacation without any process in place to revoke the privilege or guidelines as to what a responsible policy looks like. It's easy to say something doesn't work when there was never any intention or effort to make it work.

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER22> I had a fairly long conversation last year with someone who is a manager at a well-known "unlimited vacation" company. His take was that it works well but that's because there's clear leading by example from the top.

(It's also not necessarily a great system in general if you're someone who moves between jobs a lot as there's no unused vacation payout under such a system.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Considering how Japanese companies are famously conservative, I can't help but wonder if Fujitsu executives were faced with undeniable evidence that productivity increased during the pandemic WFH

</comment><comment><USER30> Finally someone had the brains to do it! Beautiful.. if they pay for the use of space and resources at home

</comment><comment><USER31> Another side often missing in these dicussions is that Japan's tax laws are relatively sane and are the same through all states. You will not be taxed differently just because you're living in a different state or are living between states.

There are some issues regarding where your residence tax should be paid to but those are minor compared to what I've read on here about crossing state lines in the US.

</comment><comment><USER32> > The company also said the programme would allow staff to choose where they > worked, whether that was from home, a major corporate hub or a satellite > office.

Culture cannot change quickly. I expect only a few Fujitsu employees will work from home. Most will continue to waste countless hours sitting at a desk to "demonstrate commitment to the company." It won't matter that the desk is in a satellite office. Male managers will require their female subordinates to work from the same satellite office with them. Only determined top leadership can change a Japanese company's time-wasting sexist culture. I doubt Fujitsu will succeed before the pandemic ends.

</comment><comment><USER33> But if software engineers can work from home, they surely can work from Mumbai?

<comment><USER34> If they speak japanese and are happy to adjust their working day to the japanese timezone I can't see why not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is productivity going up, or are workers more happy, or both?

<comment><USER36> I think it depends on the company and on the team.

In my company, my productivity skyrocketed, while that of my work colleagues crashed. It largely correlated with things like tech literacy and being open to change. Where I work, there are a few people with who invested in nice WFH setups, work-life integration, and all the things needed to make this work, who found productivity going up. And then there is the majority of people who stubbornly still refuse to even use a headset or learn to use tech, and are just waiting for the office to reopen.

Outside my company, it's not quite the same split, but most people are dipping their toes in rather than diving headfirst.

<comment><USER37> I'm curious, what all do you include when you think about a "nice WFH setup"? For me it's largely a defined space, a nice desk, a nice chair, and a nice monitor. Anything else on your list?

<comment><USER38> High quality microphone and headphones so you dont echo. I already bought a Blue Yeti microphone ages ago but it works wonders when I have to hop on a call.

As for nice chair depending on your employer I would ask for the one from your job if its sufficient. I was able to take mine home. Its just gonna collect dust otherwise.

<comment><USER39> My UK employer has closed the office and tried to sell us our own redundant desk chairs...

<comment><USER38> That is awful, my employer actually gave out some of our "old" desk chairs, so I took one with an arm missing, I don't use the arm rest, so I took out the spare arm, otherwise if I had asked for my actual desk chair I'm sure they would of given it to me to use. We're technically allowed in the office due to the type of work we do (defense contracts) but mostly work remote, I have only heard of a few people going to the office for anything they need. It's sad when companies don't treat you like adults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Even software service companies have started to go full remote. WFH is the future.

<comment><USER41> "Even"? softare dev is one of the easiests things to do remotely

<comment><USER42> "Even" because the comment is about software service companies (as opposed to software product ones).

In service companies keeping or accounting time (so that clients can be billed) is a thing.

When working from home, keeping account of time spent may be a challenge. As long as one is in office, even though they may not be clacking away on a keyboard (but goofing away) they can be billed without any guilt and if the service company is really questioned or audited, they can show employee swipe in and out time.

For WFH employees one cannot, also just tracking login maynot cover full story (Ex. tele calls would not be accounted for).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Thats really good. I wonder how UK companies will respond.

<comment><USER44> They largely won't unless forced to.

Management in the UK by and large sucks.

<comment><USER45> I always wonder how people come up with these statements, is it just anecdotal?

To add my own, my company was shifting to working remotely for the development team gradually, but now our CEO has been impressed with how well we adapted to working from home and has told us that our office will not be open until September at the earliest.

<comment><USER46> From CEO perspective they shift all accommodation [overhead] costs to employees with no increase in wages. Even with slightly lower productivity then financially surely wfh for dev roles and the like is going to get them a bigger bonus and/or more profit.

Sure it might just be cleaning/utility costs/stationary for now, but longer term expansion won't have stepped accommodation costs. And if locations can be done away with ...

I can't see why workers would be happy without higher wages? I want at least to afford a house big enough to have an office space (I'm working out of my bedroom, my line-manager is in their kids bedroom, their line-manager is in a utility room (storage and laundry room)). 5-10% increase in wages should do it.

<comment><USER45> I completely understand this, but I've seen more people complain that their company (in the UK mostly) is not letting them work from home, or did and are now demanding that people go back into the office.

I personally agree with you, we should be paid more now that we're not commuting but I doubt that will happen. Our company are organising a one-off payment to help people set up their home office though, which is a nice gesture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> All companies remote work policies: remote.lifeshack.io

</comment><comment><USER48> Covid might actually result in permanent changes. Sucks for a lot of commercial real estate companies. WeWork is probably 100% done

<comment><USER37> I also wonder the impact it'll have on retail and lunch places. A lot of small restaurants popped up around places with a lot of office workers. If those office workers are all WFH now, the previously desirable restaurant locations will become semi-worthless.

On top of that, my guess is that WFH people will go out for lunch less often, so those restaurants won't just relocate to more residential areas, they (and their jobs), will just disappear.

<comment><USER49> OTOH, isn't it pretty customary for any large office (let's say 1k+) to have a cafeteria, with presumably most employees eating there?

Some of these will not want to cook lunch in the middle of work, and at least order takeout instead.

<comment><USER50> > with presumably most employees eating there

I think this is a pretty big/new tech specific thing, and there are still exemptions. Of the large non-tech companies in NYC, I know a few banks have cafeterias, but the food is both not free and not good

<comment><USER51> In Japan, it's far more common, even for much smaller companies. There's a great Japanese TV show that does mini documentaries on these places (and others where workers eat) called, "Sara Meshi" (サラメシ)

[https://www.nhk.jp/p/salameshi/ts/PVPP6PZNLG/](https://www.nhk.jp/p/salameshi/ts/PVPP6PZNLG/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hey, you should add your company here: remote.lifeshack.io !</comment>


Dear Google: Podcast app requires location history to subscribe to a podcast - <AUTHOR> If one downloads the Google's Podcast app, you are unable to subscribe or unsubscribe to any podcasts unless you have location and web history enabled for your Google account.
Similarly, in Google Maps, it will not keep a phone local list of places you've searched unless it's synced to your Google account and you have web and location history enabled.
Is there a chance both of these issues could be fixed? I really don't want GPDR-style regulations in the USA, but I feel that this sort of forceful behavior is going to send us down that road. Please consider being kinder to your user base. We love your products, but privacy should be our choice. <comment><USER2> Stop using Google's products. That's the only real choice you have. Besides, there are plenty of great podcast apps.</comment>


Secret millions for 0x00A651D43B6e209F5Ada45A35F92EFC0De3A5184 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/secret-millions-for-0x00a651d43b6e209f5ada45a35f92efc0de3a5184 <comment><USER2> >"In this context, anonymity will become more a hindrance than an asset for virtual currencies" and their potential future popularity.

The EU parliament report is wrong. Without privacy, money's utility is extremely limited. Accounts that leak private financial information are also a major security liability, that empower criminals who engage in violent crimes like kidnapping for ransom, not to mention run of the mill scams like phishing.

Former Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen notes how resistance to past government efforts to stifle privacy has had huge economic benefits. [1]:

>In the '90s, there was a group of people called the cypherpunks who were pushing to get encryption technology declassified. It used to be you couldn't create encryption products and ship them overseas because they were classified as a munition and the U.S. government didn't want you shipping munitions overseas. The notion of software being a munition seemed ridiculous to these people, so they began to change the way that technology was seen and used. It's thanks to them that we have good encryption that lets things like e-commerce work on the Web. There was also a lot of talk back then about digital cash and whether there was a way to pay for things that doesn't require you to trust a government or central authority.

There is now an effort by some government bodies to eliminate cash [2], and prevent the emergence of electronic cash, because of the financial privacy it gives people. I believe it's extremely important for the future that these efforts be resisted.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/qa-gavin-andresen-bitcoin- foun...](http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/qa-gavin-andresen-bitcoin-foundation/)

[2] [https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that- is...](https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will- be-lost)

<comment><USER3> > The EU parliament report is wrong. Without privacy, money's utility is > extremely limited.

Without privacy the authorities are able to tax you and track your purchases. That is why they hate cash, because it's anonymous. You can now cross the border with millions worth of USD stored on a microSD card without declaring anything. One of the purposes of cryptocurrencies was to escape the regulating grip of governments. What the bureaucrats in power do not understand is that anything could be used as money as long as there is confidence in that thing. In ancient China and Japan bags of rice and tea bricks were used as money during _interesting times_ , some of which lasted up to 700 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This individual or group is going to face the same issues everyone who makes huge gains in crypto faces: Limited liquidity.

You may have $200 million in your "wallet" but it's not a lot of use to you unless you can find enough people to give you "real money" in exchange for your cryptocurrency.

I tan into this issue early on with Bitcoin. I was an early miner and at one point had some serious coin on hand. Unfortunately selling it all took a really long time and of course because it took so long my gains fluctuated wildly from transaction to transaction. I still walked away from the experience with more money than I had going into it - but nothing like I would have had if I had simply been able to dump it all at the peak of the market like I could do with a blue chip stock.

</comment><comment><USER5> > 0x00A651D43B6e209F5Ada45A35F92EFC0De3A5184 couldn't be reached for further > comment.

Was this just a cute line or is it actually possible to reach them and get comments?

<comment><USER6> It was a joke but you can send data in a transaction to an account. In fact, somebody did that today.

[https://etherchain.org/tx/0x16b867d064cab80f0f5d938adda6d03c...](https://etherchain.org/tx/0x16b867d064cab80f0f5d938adda6d03c62985b93c7778244928d9d74e39ab10c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >[...] concerned regulators say it might be time to link wallet IDs with actual humans

Good luck with that! :D

<comment><USER8> Imagine when some AI gets smart enough to start trading in digital currency...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to bootstrap? - <AUTHOR> I  and my friend have been working on this project. It is a website where developers will be able to show off their projects and write technical articles .It is written using rails. We are still working on it. Improving it and adding new features. We have decided to host it on Heroku as we don't any DevOps experience and want things to go smoothly when launched.The real problem is about money. If the number of users soars so will go up the hosting costs. We don't want to launch poorly .We do have a paid job posting facility on the site but we can't depend on it since day one. We even don't have any idea how much it will cost to sustain this project for at least 2-3 months if no one posts any jobs and users keep growing.Any idea where we can make some quick money to bootstrap this site. <comment><USER2> Unrelated to this Ask HN: two weeks ago you presented raw data about a HN survey with over 3000 responses [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431228). Did you ever write a blog post about your findings?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really sorry , I did not.I was on vacation when I created that form. Then I posted the data and returned to college . Then I got caught up with this project and submissions and completely forgot about the form. Again I admit this is not a good excuse and I am really sorry about it. Thank you for the remainder will write it this weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The answer might be too obvious: if you can't make money with this website yet, then you need to make money outside the project. Selling possessions, waiting tables, taking a loan. Basically non-technical approaches.</comment>


Doing the Math on Tesla's Solar Roof - <AUTHOR> http://www.consumerreports.org/solar-panels/doing-the-math-on-teslas-solar-roof/ <comment><AUTHOR> My home actually needs a new roof and I thought I'd check into a solar roof. This doesn't make any sense for me. I need $100K in up-front costs and am relying upon $24K of tax savings (which are volatile and can change at any time) to realize $800 of net savings over 30 years. Looks like I'm going to stick with asphalt. :(

I'd be really interested in learning how others fare. I imagine this is going to be highly dependent on your locale and the kind of home you have. I have a ranch home in Columbus, Ohio with a roof surface area of 3,400 sq ft.</comment>


Rent vs. Buy: If You Have to Ask, You Should Probably Rent - <AUTHOR> http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/07/27/rent-vs-buy/

<comment><USER2> This article and the "What your work truck says about you" article linked from it both miss an important point: taxes. Granted the author uses the example of Toronto, where I understand there isn't a mortgage interest tax deduction. In the United States though, that is the largest tax deduction available to John/Jane Doe and a significant incentive to buy a house in some tax brackets. With regard to the truck part - I guarantee more than one accountant has recommended their client buy a big truck as a tax offset.

I appreciate the frugal advice offered in these posts, but they feel incomplete without the inclusion of tax implications into the discussion.

(Disclaimer: I am not an accountant, seek professional advice.)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- calc...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- calculator.html)

This calculator the NYT made is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER4> Article grossly overlooks an obvious advantage of _buy_ option: Over almost any long enough duration, houses appreciate well in line with inflation over that period, where "long enough" is usually defined as 18+ years[1]. So you can effectively live in 2500 sq foot house absolutely _free_ as long as the duration is long. It doesn't matter if you bought at the peak and sold at bottom as long as duration is long. There are sure some edge cases like Detroit or natural disasters like Katrina but overall this rule applies pretty well statistically[2]. If you were lucky enough to buy at bottom and sell at peak after 18+ years you can break a bank. But even without much luck, you will mostly break even, i.e., ~zero cost towards housing as opposed to 100s of thousands of dollars in rent checks during the same period.

Another strong point for "buy": If your horizon is indeed 30 years then house is _truely yours_ at the end of the loan. Most people would be planning to retire after 30 years and not having to have rent expense during this period is a huge deal. You can even move out to much less expensive area and use the difference to maintain your life style. Also note that rents almost always go up over long duration. If inflation happened to kick in high gear when you retire, you will be toast because your rent would skyrocket while you are living on a fixed income.

The decision for rent vs buy is therefore very simple: If you think you are going to be living in given area for 18-30 years of time range, _buy_ is no brainer provided that (1) your retirement savings remains same (2) you still have "rainy day" funds (3) there is reasonable income security and (4) you have recovery plan if natural disaster stricks. So those people doing long commute are not all fools and "drive until you can buy" is in fact the best strategy for them. There are some people arguing that you should buy even if you had time range as short as 5 years but then you will need to time the market and that's where most failures occur causing people to lose their life savings. Unfortunately lots of people are in this state and frankly it sucks to be in that state. You pay huge premium to be mobile and you don't know if you will ever use that mobility.

[1] [http://www.dce.harvard.edu/professional/blog/how-use-real- es...](http://www.dce.harvard.edu/professional/blog/how-use-real-estate- trends-predict-next-housing-bubble)

[2] [http://www.estateofmindsites.com/subscriber_new/map.php?user...](http://www.estateofmindsites.com/subscriber_new/map.php?user_id=1&share=y)

<comment><USER5> (1) is not a given, though. If buying has a higher monthly cost than renting, that money comes from somewhere in your budget. If you are viewing your home as a retirement investment (will pay off in 20 years, when you don't have to pay rent), that's most likely where it comes out of. In that case, when you take into account the appreciation on the house, you have to also consider the opportunity cost of not investing the extra money in an alternative investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Try this experiment in SF.

</comment><comment><USER7> myopic article.. the guy is taking a single set of specific requirements and extrapolating that to the general argument of rent vs buy...

<comment><USER8> His conclusion is this:

"The lesson? If you live in an area where houses cost more than $300,000, take a close look at the rent prices around the areas you currently drive. Budget your driving costs at at least a dollar per mile (80 cents/km in Canada to account for higher costs) because you absolutely must put a high value on your spare time to get ahead in life. Doing the math on life decisions like this was by far the biggest factor in my own early financial independence.

Buying a house is a great thing to do when you're settling down in a beautiful, affordable spot right near everything you need to do for the next ten years. And if your schedule and temperament allow some time for a good several hours a week of maintenance work. But for the rest of us, it's worth having another look at Rent vs. Buy."

Which seems to be good advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love reading MMM but how is this hacker news?</comment>


Toyota opens up 24,000 hybrid car patents to other automakers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/3/18293649/toyota-hybrid-car-patents-automakers-royalty-free <comment><USER2> Hybrids are dead, nothing will save them - the more who assemble and build hybrids, the more money will be lost. Annual battery advances over the past 10 years, coupled with flat lined IC engine advances assure this. That said, there are a few special cases where the ability to switch fuels is an asset - very few...</comment>


Denmark Tightens Border Control Temporarily Due to Rise of Gang Violence - <AUTHOR> https://swedesinthestates.com/denmark-tightens-border-control-temporarily-due-to-rise-of-gang-violence/ <comment><USER2> What the heck is going on in Sweden?

<comment><USER3> A sharp increase in violent crime across the board: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#Gun_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#Gun_violence)

      Hand grenade attacks and bombings
      [...]
      Criminologists in Sweden don't know why there was a strong increase and why Sweden has a much higher rate than countries close by.

<comment><USER2> Are these all turf wars? Is it mostly young native swedes? We have huge amounts of gang violence in the US but generally bombs arent a tool of choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is this not a controversial topic?</comment>


Why 'The Blond Girl' in CompSci matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenrosenbaum/2012/03/28/why-the-blond-girl-in-compsci-matters/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps it should be gender blind, but I'd still like to see more women in the field..</comment>


Show HN: Modern Python Development with PyCharm - <AUTHOR> http://pedrokroger.net/pycharm-book/

<comment><AUTHOR> I finally finished my book about PyCharm!

I'd like to offer 20% off for the next 36 hours for Hacker News readers. Use the discount code "HNEWS1" (without quotes).

I'll be around for the next few hours if you guys have questions.</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Hunt – A hacker news reader with summary and clean UI - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/hacker-news-hunt-a-new-way-to-read-hacker-news-d2123ef942e7 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I have always loved hackernews for its content but could not find any good mobile app so I decided to build my own. It provide a nice UI with summaries and one news at a time with daily notification so that you never miss an update from hacker news. Any feedback is highly appreciated. HN is not letting me submit playstore link as part of the story so here is the Playstore link: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hnhunt.hnh...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hnhunt.hnhunt) Thanks :)</comment>


RDL: a lightweight system for adding contracts to Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/plum-umd/rdl <comment><USER2> It's always baffled me why more people don't seem interested in adopting design by contract, it is a ridiculously powerful tool for writing quality software.

Here's a Babel plugin which adds design by contract to JavaScript, squeezing it into existing JS syntax (the result is really similar to Eiffel) - [https://github.com/codemix/babel-plugin- contracts](https://github.com/codemix/babel-plugin-contracts)

and here's what it looks like in a reasonably complicated program - [https://github.com/codemix/malloc/blob/master/src/index.js](https://github.com/codemix/malloc/blob/master/src/index.js)

(disclosure: I wrote this)

<comment><USER3> > It's always baffled me why more people don't seem interested in adopting > design by contract

Because it's yet another layer on top of other layers, because it has performance implications ... A few languages such as Vala support some form of contracts, this kind of feature is more useful when part of the language itself, not some third party babel plugin that leads to codebase fragmentation as one just had yet another layer to the compilation pipeline. No offense, that's a nice thing you wrote, I'm just not going to use this kind of thing and add more complexity for very little gain. To me tests ARE the contracts.

I would only be willing to pay the cost of transpilation with something like Typescript which adds a signification value. Babel and co ? not worthwhile.

<comment><USER2> Your argument seems more like one against transpilers in general.

Contracts are useful during development, they're typically stripped out in production builds, so there's no performance overhead there. If you find a bug in production, turn on your contracts and you'll quickly discover the source of the error. Contracts can validate the state of the world at runtime in a way that can never be covered by unit tests, unless your tests cover all possible inputs to your program. It doesn't mean you don't need unit tests too, they are yet another layer of safety.

I use this in combination with Flow, which means I have to transpile regardless, so the overhead is very low for me. Of course I'd like them to be part of the language proper, but for that to happen there needs to be developer demand first.

<comment><USER4> If it's stripped out during production, that sounds more like an assert than a contract. What's the line over which you'd call an assert a contract...?

<comment><USER2> Contracts are just structured assertions, they're very similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typing is such an important and powerful construct. It'd be amazing if scripting languages like Ruby and Python built optional typing into future versions, especially if they could be used in speeding up the execution time. If nothing else, type safety for function signatures would be a huge win for productivity, testing, and would cut down on a large class of programmer- introduced bugs.

<comment><USER6> I used languages with static types for half of my professional life, the last one was Java, and languages with dynamic types in the other half. I never felt like I have more bugs in dynamic typed languages. What I felt is that I don't have to waste time writing stuff like ArrayList<Whatever> when just something = {} works perfectly well in practice.

I understand that many people say that with static typing if it compiles it works, but I remember using debuggers quite a lot.

I'd say that if one wants types there are plenty of languages to choose from. There is Crystal if one likes Ruby.

Contracts are interesting. I remember Eiffel and other languages. Those could be useful regardless of the kind of typing the language use.

BTW, invariants are another useful tool when designing some algorithms and were neglected recently.

<comment><USER7> > I never felt like I have more bugs in dynamic typed languages. What I felt > is that I don't have to waste time writing stuff like ArrayList<Whatever> > when just something = {} works perfectly well in practice.

Java is a pretty terrible language when it comes to static types. If you have a language that allows you to work with types in a succinct and expressive way, you end up with a powerful modelling tool that can help you reason about and design programs. The side-effect of this is to have far less runtime crashes (you know what cases to check for, like nullable data), great documentation for your future self and your fellow devs, and a greater liberty to do large scale refactors without worrying about breaking things.

<comment><USER8> The self-documenting nature of statically typed programs is something that critics often miss. Making a contribution to an existing codebase is far easier when it is statically typed. You can very easily understand what you ought to do, because the constraints of the type system help you figure out exactly what things are, what arguments you can pass to a method, how the other programmers used the types, etc.

In contrast, contributing to an existing codebase in PHP or Rails is much harder. Nothing will stop you from sending the wrong arguments to a method, or adding members to classes that should not be modified, or even simply refactoring and forgetting to change all of the usages of the types and methods you modified.

<comment><USER9> Well, the converse argument is that most dynamically typed languages allow you to explore the codebase in a REPL by playing with it. And there's a reasonable amount of noise that is added by static types, since often the types don't tell you how to use them, so you have to read the docs anyhow.

Which really means there's a big difference between static types that everyone knows and uses, and those that someone invented for particular use. That difference seems more significant than the static/dynamic divide.

<comment><USER8> There are statically-typed languages with REPLs, e.g. Scala, C#, F#, and the upcoming Java 9, so REPLs are not an advantage of dynamic languages. There are even REPLs for C++.

Many people's impressions of static languages are based on Java from 10 years ago. It's really quite different now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> RDL supports most of the serious research anyone is doing into types in Ruby. See the papers with Foster as an author under Types here [http://rubybib.org](http://rubybib.org). I hope the Ruby core team is watching their progress since some kind of typing is being debated by Matz.

<comment><USER11> That is "the" problem, "how" do we know if the Core Team are watching / discussing / debating. Comparing a similar situation to the Python circle ( You can laugh about Python 3 all you want, but that is another issue ), which is clearly layout and in some way beautifully presented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> After changing focus from Ruby to functional languages recently I've found that optional types can be really helpful in a lot of situations.

Ruby also has another popular and mature library that I am surprised nobody has mentioned yet named 'Contracts.ruby'

[https://github.com/egonSchiele/contracts.ruby](https://github.com/egonSchiele/contracts.ruby)

This syntax is also more appealing to my eyes than what rdl provides.

      Contract Num => Num
      def double(x)
         x * 2
      end

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool. I experimented with something similar in JavaScript.

[https://github.com/smizell/snug](https://github.com/smizell/snug)

For me, it is useful for runtime checking data that may come across the web.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good to see PLUM (Programming Languages at the University of Maryland) releasing their work on GitHub. They're among the most talented in the department at UMD.

<comment><USER15> Totally. PLUM is a great team, and this work on ruby contracts from Brianna and Jeff is particularly awesome. By the way, their newest paper about the work in this github is going to be at PLDI: [https://www.cs.umd.edu/~jfoster/papers/pldi16.pdf](https://www.cs.umd.edu/~jfoster/papers/pldi16.pdf)

(disclaimer: I just graduated from PLUM)

<comment><USER14> Awesome, thanks for sharing! And congratulations on graduating.

I'm an undergraduate, so my experience with PLUM is just that of an admirer looking in ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh wow, even with support for static type-checking. It really makes me want to give ruby another shot.

Piggybacking on this: apart from F*, does someone know of a language or support for existing ones for contracts, loop-invariants and possibly verification?

Dafny and Spec# aren't very general-purpose and apart from those nothing much comes to my mind.

<comment> david-given Ada has robust preconditions and postconditions.

Untested code follows:

        procedure swap(a: in out integer, b: in out integer)
        with
          pre => a <> b -- just for example purposes
          post => (a == b'old) and (b == a'old)
        is declare
          t: integer;
        begin
          t := a;
          a := b;
          b := t;
        end

(Sorry, couldn't think of a sensible small example which uses both pre and post, hence the terrible precondition.)

Note that the postcondition can refer to the old values of the variables with the 'old suffix --- the values will be automatically saved on entry to the function and used for comparison later.

Unfortunately the pre- and postconditions have to be specified in the public part of the module, so can't see any private module variables, which forces you to jump through hoops if you don't want to expose your module's internal state (e.g. checking to make sure that functions on a state machine are called in the right order).

You also get type invariants, where you can specify an expression which must always be true for a number:

        subtype Even is integer
        with dynamic_predicate => (Even mod 2) == 0;

Or, if you really want your mind blown:

        subtype Even is integer
        with dynamic_predicate => (for some N in integer => (Even == N*2));

There's also a static_predicate form which only supports a restricted predicate expression but which can be checked at compile time.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for the example.

Also: SPARK is another one I forgot. I guess I'll have to think of a nice example and just implement it in a Ada, F* and with RDL to get a hang of the differences and features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is fantastic. They even have type checking. Looking forward to the day this turns into something like tsc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't get too excited. It's not rails enough for the ruby community to ever seriously use it. I know this from firsthand experience going down the same rabbit hole a few years ago.

<comment><USER11> >rails enough

Cant upvote you enough. I am getting the sense that DHH dictates more of Ruby rather then Matz. ( Which isn't necessarily a good or bad thing )

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know what the performance implications for using this would be?

</comment><comment><USER19> Some differences from Eiffel contracts: no class invariants, and postconditions don't have access to previous object state.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if contracts can be used to speed up the execution instead of slowing it down.</comment>


One month later, Honeycomb has just 50 native apps - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/03/one-month-later-honeycomb-has-just-50-native-apps.ars

<comment><USER2> Well, there's only one device, and no real person can afford it or would buy it with all the bugs. Motorola is hit or miss. The Xoom is a miss. The only people I've seen with a Xoom either work for Motorola or work for a tech review site. Otherwise, they simply don't exist. There's no market yet.

In June, when the real hardware manufacturers start cranking these things out, I think we'll see an increase in apps. I'm looking forward to what Asus and Samsung bring to the table.

But to be honest, I'm sick of "apps" -- just make your little toy a website, please. Then I can use it on any device without any effort on your part. (Yeah, then there's no "app store", but who cares? All the app store is is someone that takes 30% of your money and lets idiotic users post comments like "Not enough space on my device for this! Negative eighty stars!" all over your app's page. Why would you want that?)

<comment><USER3> App Store provides easy monetization and discoverability. If you want to make money off of a side project, I'd argue a native app is a far easier route to take than a web app.

<comment><USER2> How much money are side projects actually making people? (Taxes are a big issue. Is your app really worth enough to have to deal with a 1040 + 1099s instead of the 1040EZ?)

<comment><USER3> I've made ~110K in my first 9 months on the app store. Apple takes care of scalability, monetization, discovery, etc. Native mobile apps are just so much easier to make money off of, which is why they are taking off.

<comment><USER2> Before or after income taxes?

<comment><USER3> before

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The iOS developer they quote extensively seems somewhat confused:

 _"And even if developers wanted to create such a "true tablet experience," they're hard-pressed to do it without the source code for Honeycomb, which Google is currently keeping a tight reign over. The big device manufacturers working on Honeycomb-powered hardware—like HTC, Motorola and Samsung—all have early access to the code, but only after licensing agreements were made with Google. Smaller developers don't have this luxury."_

Why would he think the source to Honeycomb is required to make an app scale to different screen sizes and resolutions?

I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is in the headline.

<comment><USER5> >I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is the headline.

Because Honeycomb tablets will happily run older Android 2.x apps in a scaled up compatibility mode. The "Native" refers to apps specifically written just for Honeycomb or those existing apps which also specifically support Honeycomb.

The comparison in iOS was the way that iPad pixel-doubled existing iPhone apps, the iPad specific apps developed just for iPad, and Universal apps which were developed for both iPhone and iPad.

<comment><USER4> From his blog:

 _"My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet experience. I didn't count games or existing Android apps that are just upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. While it is a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad, I'm not counting it given that Apple doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of iPhone exclusive apps in its 65,000 iPad app count."_

So "native" seems to refer to having a redesigned UI, and if your UI naturally scales (displaying or taking pictures, showing video, 3D or vector based games, webpages, maps etc.) then that's not "native" by this definition.

Seems like a "no pain no gain" approach, if your app just works on multiple resolutions than that counts as a demerit for the OS, rather than as a good thing.

There also seems to be widespread ignorance about the pre-Xoom and pre- Honeycomb tablets that are out there. They're only for hobbyists since they don't ship with the Google Market, but people have been using them, and debugging their apps on them for many months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a few background issues here to acknowledge:

* The honeycomb emulator is pretty much unusable for development. It's beyond slow, meaning that any sort of practical development is going to need a physical device. Compare this to the iPad emulator, which is snappy and very usable for development without needing an actual iPad.

* The xoom has been out for a month, but it wasn't until last Sunday that you could buy a wifi-only version and avoid paying the Verizon tax. Several people (myself included) eagerly bought xooms on Sunday in order to start developing.

* The app situation is grim, but it isn't as grim as the article leads you to believe. Android apps are already built with resizable layouts due to the device fragmentation everybody talks about. As such, most phone apps scale reasonably well even if they haven't been updated for tablets. This is a far better situation than the 2x scaling of iPhone apps on the iPad.

So, while there are reasons that honeycomb development has been stalled up until this point, those reasons are quickly disappearing, making it a great time to start developing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps the intersection of people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people who develop for android is quite high.

Still - given Honeycomb is being touted as the "ipad killer", and ignoring the silliness of that concept, it is surprising that developers aren't seeing the xoom as a good way of getting ready for the flood of honeycomb devices that is apparently coming. It's hard to work out from the various trolling headlines about how iOs or Android has "won" something or other - but doesn't Android have quite a healthy developer base? are they making money?

<comment><USER8> _Perhaps the intersection of people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people who develop for android is quite high._

I don't know if that's true, but it's still a really intriguing question, thank you! The follow-up also seems relevant: What is the intersection between people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people who _buy_ android?

If the market for android tablets is also the market for netbooks, that could be a problem. Apple is going out of their way to distance the iPad from netbooks and sell to people who don't want a laptop--or already have one and are buying this as a third device after their phone and laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think a big part of the difference between launch/early apps is the state of the emulators. Apple's emulator runs quite fast due to using a lot of native desktop code, and is in many ways suitable for testing at least a 1.0 version [1]. Android's emulator is a full virtualized stack and runs significantly slower than the target platform, making it hard to get a real idea of how well your program is running.

Hence, while you could be pretty confident releasing a day one iPad app, many android devs would balk at the same situation with Honeycomb. A lot of devs may be waiting for a different tablet than the Xoom as well, while Apple devs obviously could all buy theirs on day one.

The Xoom and 3.0.0 honeycomb both feel a bit rushed, there is probably a good argument for calling it a preview out here in reality. I don't think that's an indictment of the platform over all, though.

[1] Not an active iOS dev, but that's how I remember it.

</comment><comment><USER10> i was lucky enough to get my honeycomb app featured (DrawFree) and have been considered on the the few honeycomb specific apps -- i don't believe this is true. the market just doesn't offer a way to find honeycomb optimized apps.

also, android's method of scaling apps is far more usable than the way the ipad does it. visual quality doesn't suffer (mostly), just some minor usability issues with things being far too small.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the comments claims that iPhone apps with art assets designed specifically for the iPhone 4 don't use them, but instead pixel double the smaller art assets for use on the iPad. Is that true?

He seems to think this is a good thing, but it means the comparison of Android scaling and iPad scaling is even less true, as on the iPad it is intentionally made to look worse than it could.

<comment><USER11> The comment states that the iPad is upscaling the iPhone 3GS graphics on the iPad, rather than just using the higher resolution iPhone 4 retina graphics at near full resolution.

I'm 90% sure that this is the case. I think that the main reason why Apple did this is because the iPhone 4 has 512 MB RAM, and the iPad 1 only has 256 MB(iPad 2 has 512). That could make performance with the higher resolution graphics an issue for the iPad.

<comment><USER12> I can verify this is the case. I have Final Fantasy III on iPad, which is a native Retina display app for iPhone 4, and it only displays with iPhone 3GS graphics in pixel doubled mode.

This is unfortunate, and I think you're right. The iPhone 4 does have better graphics hardware than the iPad 1. It would be interesting to see if iPad 2 could overcome this limitation. Judging by the video I saw of an iPad 2 outputing 1080P to HDMI at 60 frames per second running Real Racing 2 HD, I would say that the iPad 2 has the graphics hardware to handle actually scaling a native iPhone 4 retina display app to it's own resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it's funny that the article mentions that there needs to be more hardware with Honeycomb to have more apps. Sorry but if hw like the iPad is built well enough and with enough hw options, then that's enough of a reason to build apps for it, in advance of any sales.

Google is always playing the catchup game, being slow and patient and then storming the market with new devices whenever they feel ready.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think a good web based design can make a lot of "native" application irrelevant. That, probably is what google wants anyway.</comment>


Why Louisiana Stays Poor - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38 <comment><AUTHOR> In short - Despite huge natural resources, Louisiana is "poor" because of huge corporate subsidies from a board that gets to grant tax exemptions.</comment>


Mask vs. Respirator: N95, FFP2, FFP3: What's the Difference? - <AUTHOR> https://fastlifehacks.com/n95-vs-ffp/ <comment><USER2> A good informative article, though take it with a grain of salt. It often weighs specifications and official recommendations over common sense or even evidence.

The article accepts the conjecture that mask 300nm (0.3µm) particle filtering is a minimum with smaller particle filtering being better (that's how standards were formed), while providing evidence that 50-90nm is fair, but notably lower[1].

It largely dismisses self-protection of surgical masks, saying they "may provide more than zero protection", while providing evidence they should be notably better than no protection. Just keep in mind they are likely only a marginal help.

It doesn't seem apparent from the text - the linked aerosol study takes measures to keep the virus aerosolized so it only tests degradation in air. Thus the graphs exclude settling and adhering to surfaces, photo-degradation and other likely faster agents.

[1] [https://fastlifehacks.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/02/n95-par...](https://fastlifehacks.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/02/n95-particle-penetration.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> I highly recommend folks check this out.</comment>


Show HN: Visualization of all bus routes stacking up in the air, in 3D - <AUTHOR> https://busrouter.sg/visualization/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I've posted a bunch of photos/videos on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/cheeaun/status/1010542298810085376](https://twitter.com/cheeaun/status/1010542298810085376)

Basically my goal is to render _all_ bus routes on a map. But unlike train routes, they overlap wayyy too much. Instead of limiting the space to X & Y, I thought why not go Z index (up).

Data from Land Transport Authority of Singapore. Map is powered by Mapbox GL JS.</comment>