Walking a mile is 3x more expensive than driving, from a fuel perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.datadriventhoughts.com/2016/08/08/walking-is-3-times-more-expensive-than-driving-from-an-energy-perspective/ <comment><USER3> This analysis makes the same mistake that innumerable other analysts have made before: that going a mile is something worth doing. If you stipulate that everything is a mile apart, then you're guaranteed to get this outcome.

The point of walking is that if you throw out the cars then everything is much closer together, and then you don't have to walk a mile. If I start from the Ferry Building in San Francisco and walk a mile up Sacramento street, I'll pass thousands of establishments of all kinds. If I start at the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and walk a mile I will pass literally every single thing there is in the old city. In a walkable city you'd never need to walk a mile, so finding out what is the most energy efficient mode of going a mile is relatively pointless. What you actually need to know is the most energy efficient form of building, not the of transport.

<comment><USER4> How many Ethiopian restaurants, improv theaters, and dueling piano bars did you pass? A lot of niche interests can't sustain themselves at all with only a small fraction of a small population.

<comment><USER3> Well you got me on the piano bars but as far as Ethiopian food goes there are dozens in my relatively walkable city and I just spot-checked the first car- choked blasted expanse that came to mind (Phoenix) and there are only five in a much larger metro area.

If I was an Ethiopian restaurant owner would I prefer a restaurant in a dense neighborhood with five families living in apartments right on top of me, or would I prefer to be in a strip mall at the corner of an American suburb with nobody in walking distance and only a few hundred families within a mile? I know which one I'd want.

<comment><USER4> Odd, are you in a destination for Ethiopian immigrants? I would have expected something more like the single restaurant serving the entire Napa valley. Most people don't even know Ethiopia has a cuisine, much less seek it out.

<comment><USER3> Yes we have many Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in Oakland and Berkeley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should not really be very surprising as walking is not very efficient. You should be comparing driving to cycling, as both are wheeled forms of transportation. Cycling is up to 5x more efficient than walking ([https://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/humanpower1.html](https://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/humanpower1.html))

So, if you compare driving to cycling, cycling wins hands down. And, this is with the artificially low cost of fossil fuels. If fossil fuels properly factored in all the environmental damage, cycling's efficiency advantage would be even higher.

<comment><USER6> > Cycling is up to 5x more efficient than walking

"Up to" doesn't mean much. Biking is explicitly considered in the original piece:

> Surprisingly, from a pure energy perspective (using the methodology > mentioned above), biking, walking, and running are the three most expensive > types of transportation listed

<comment><USER7> Does it consider the health benefits and therefore reduced medical costs we would have if more people walked/biked?

<comment><USER8> Those people will probably more than make up for those costs later in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Except your food expenditures are a sunk cost, and you can't replace them with fuel expenditures.

This is literally comparing apples and gasoline.

<comment><USER6> Your food expenditures vary with the amount of work you do, no different than your car's fuel expenditures. They are most certainly not a sunk cost for this purpose.

<comment><USER10> Actually not so much surprisingly - the key exceptions being if you are working in very cold climates where the body has to generate more heat to keep you alive or you're training competitively for very physically sports.

It turns out that about 70-80℅ of what most people consume goes into simply keeping them alive (research basal metabolic rate & daily calorific requirement) and the impact of "work you do" is only a small variation - <USER2> the above exceptions.

Also interestingly (unable to search the paper reference on phone) there is research that shows that dramatically different lifestyles like Namib desert nomadic hunter-gatherer vs. typical urban don't actually differ on metabolic rates (accounting for non-fat weight)

<comment><USER11> You should have posted that at the top level, so this could be the top comment. While the statistics are nice to look at, I have read the article you mentioned, too (was on HN a while ago) and instantly thought that metabolism unfortunately renders the whole calculation useless and wrong.

<comment><USER6> > While the statistics are nice to look at, I have read the article you > mentioned, too (was on HN a while ago) and instantly thought that metabolism > unfortunately renders the whole calculation useless and wrong.

Why did you think this? Can you articulate a change that metabolism would make to the calculation?

<comment><USER11> It adapts, like my parent comment has said. Most of our energy is spend on keeping the system running, not running with our feet. If we start to run, we burn more energy, because our metabolism has not adapted yet, once it adapts (see his example with Africa), there is very little change. Obviously this is simplified.

<comment><USER6> Are you claiming that running requires no more energy than sitting? If not, what are you trying to say?

The energy that you need to spend on overhead doesn't go down because you start running.

<comment><USER11> I am claiming that there is no linear relationship between the amount of running and burned calories.

<comment><USER6> So what? If you propose to have someone do some amount of running that they wouldn't otherwise have done, they must pay for that running in one of two ways:

1: Eat more. This has a linear relationship to the amount of additional running.

2: Do less. By doing less, you can redirect calories that would have been burned anyway to the task of running. You cannot, by definition, redirect calories that are budgeted for the basal metabolic rate.

By paying for the extra running "in kind", by not doing activities you would otherwise have done, it is easy to show a nonlinear relationship between "total running done" and "total calories expended". But that's spurious, it has nothing to do with the energy cost of running. There is a linear relationship between "total running done" and "total calories expended on running", and that is what matters when calculating the cost of running.

<comment><USER11> Unless one does this every day, the metabolism adapts and one now does not need to eat more (or significantly less "more").

The correlation is not that simple as you make it sound.

Edit: To anticipate your next answer: If you run more on top of that, yes, you have to add additional calories somehow and the process starts again. The point is that a car does not have this mechanism at all so it does not make that much sense to compare them like equals.

<comment><USER6> > Unless one does this every day, the metabolism adapts and one now does not > need to eat more

Why would there be more adaptation to something that occurs rarely than to something that occurs often?

You appear to be describing the following sort of situation:

BEFORE: 100 units of energy expended / day, of which 70 are the rest requirement and 30 go to discretionary activity. This means that 100 units of energy are consumed per day.

THE CHANGE: discretionary activity increases 20%, leading to 106 units of energy expended / day and food intake of 106 units of metabolizable energy / day.

AFTER: discretionary activity stays constant, but "metabolic adaptation" kicks in, reducing energy expenditure back to 100 units / day. Or, "metabolic adaptation" kicks in, causing a diet that had provided 100 units of energy per day before to provide 106 units / day after.

This doesn't happen, and metabolism is not capable of "adapting" in either of those ways. It is capable of adapting by burning more or less mass per unit time, but you can't burn what isn't there. A person's physical structure may change, which changes the efficiency of various activities (though see below!), and their basal metabolic rate, but that is not a metabolic phenomenon. An elevated level of energy expenditure means an elevated level of food intake.

I have found the paper I assume you're talking about, [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503) "Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity". First I'll note that it does not investigate, or discuss, caloric intake at all. Fortunately, we know that for a person who is not gaining or losing weight, caloric intake is equal to energy expenditure. It documents that the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, have the same daily total energy expenditure as other populations elsewhere in the world, except farmers (who have higher energy expenditure). It _specifically_ documents that the energy cost of walking is the same for the Hadza as it is for everyone else:

> comparisons of activities common across cultures do not indicate that Hadza > muscle and locomotor physiology [are] inherently more efficient. The energy > cost of walking (kCal kg^{−1} m^{−1}) for Hadza adults was well within the > range of values reported for Western subjects: of 20 U.S and European > populations included in a recent meta-analysis of treadmill walking cost, 14 > had mean [minimum cost of travel] values below the Hadza mean. [Resting > metabolic rate] for Hadza adults measured while sitting averaged 11% above > predicted BMR, within the range of values (7–35%) reported for other > populations.

It documents that the Hadza have much higher physical activity levels than Westerners. Since physical activity is just as energetically costly to them as it is to us, this requires that their basal metabolic rate be much lower than ours, and it is -- because they are much smaller than we are:

> Regressing [total energy expenditure] on estimated [basal metabolic rate] > suggests that group differences in [physical activity level] were related to > differences in body size, as the Hadza are significantly smaller than their > Western counterparts. In a multivariate analysis controlling for age and > sex, the relationship between TEE and estimated BMR did not differ between > Hadza and Western subjects. However, because TEE is correlated with > estimated BMR with a slope <1.0, PAL (the ratio of TEE/BMR) tends to be > greater among smaller individuals; this is particularly evident among men in > our sample.

It documents that traveling, being pregnant, and lactating are all uncorrelated with daily energy expenditures, despite being very energetically expensive. Given this, it speculates:

> We hypothesize that [total energy expenditure] may be a relatively stable, > constrained physiological trait for the human species, more a product of our > common genetic inheritance than our diverse lifestyles.

This means that when Hadza have to do extra work, they overwhelmingly pay for it by doing less elsewhere rather than eating more. That means that the cost of traveling is actually much higher than it would appear just by looking at the energy requirements -- eating extra food is easy, but empirically you are much more likely to pay for traveling by failing to accomplish things that you otherwise would have done. I don't find that reassuring.

IN SUMMARY:

\- Hunter-gatherers meet the high energy requirements of their lifestyle by being physically small, which lowers their basal metabolic rate. This strategy is not open to someone deciding whether to walk or drive; they are already the size they are.

\- Hunter-gatherers are no more efficient at walking than anyone else, regardless of your several previous comments. No amount of habituation will lower the energy cost of walking (or running, etc.).

\- Empirically, energy you spend on running is likely to be made up by failing to do something else that you would otherwise have done. This cost, where it applies, is probably significantly higher than the energy cost. (On the other hand, this result is from a group of hunter-gatherers who aren't necessarily able to eat additional food even if they'd like to.)

<comment><USER11> My wording was unclear, should have been:

Unless one ALREADY does this every day (because then the metabolism already would have adapted) …

<comment><USER6> But that is not true; metabolism does not and cannot adapt in the manner you suggest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The data also ignores the fact that walking leads to a healthier lifestyle which means living longer, which is more costly than not living longer.

<comment><USER13> Yes, and one should also account for the reduced tax burden of dying younger.

<comment><USER14> But then you also have to account for the reduced earning potential due to dying younger :P

<comment><USER8> Not really. If you die at 70 rather than 90 then your total earnings were probably pretty much the same.

<comment><USER13> In Australia those additional 20 years on the current full rate pension for a single person represent an additional AU$454,428.00 of income[1].

1\. The full rate includes the supplements for a total of $873.90 per fortnight for a single person as per [https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelin...](https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink/age- pension)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not all fuel consumption is the same. Gasoline is way under-priced in the US when traffic, pollution and road construction costs are factored in. On the other hand, high quality, sustainably farmed produce is overpriced, most significantly from sustained subsidies for corn and the associated increase in the cost of arable land.

<comment><USER16> There is also the cost of getting the food to you. Often the most efficiently produced food will be produced some distance from you and a surprisingly large fraction of the cost will be shipping.

<comment><USER17> It would definitely be interesting to see the carbon footprint per mile of all of these options...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this an autonomous car, deadheading? If not, you should consider the resting calorie consumption of the passenger. On a highway, that is indeed negligible; but a crosstown trip in Washington, DC, used to take me about six minutes per mile.

The article on travel efficiency shows that a walking person requires about 210 calories per hour at 4 km, about 2.5 miles/hour, call it 85 calories/mile. For an American consuming 2500 calories/day, a given hour requires about 104 calories: divide that by 2.5, reckon 41 calories in the time it takes to walk a mile. Now the cost of walking over resting is about 42 calories, and we have walking down about where he has biking.

Please correct me, for it's likely that I have missed something here.

<comment><USER19> Good catch! Not to mention that the calorie consumption of someone driving a car is likely significantly more than someone idly daydreaming, both from the physical activity of steering, braking, shifting etc and possibly also from the focus required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> people who drive probably aren't going to eat less because they're walking less. also, walking (to me) isn't just about saving money, it's about good habits and contributing less to traffic and pollution

edit: people travel farther distances in cars than on foot, usually. nobody would replace a 20 mile commute by car with 20 miles of walking.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the intent is to convince you to drive. It's just an interesting way to slice the data.

<comment><USER22> Not so interesting because they compare food (with highly variable cost and reason for consumption) to fuel. Going by the cheapest calories available, the way you would to fill your car with the most economical gasoline, walking is cheaper. (source is the article)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The math on walking, at least, seems little off: 210 calories per hour divided by 2.5 miles per hour is 84 calories per mile, which is about 23.5¢ per mile.

Also the cost of driving should really use the average fleet fuel economy of a country together with the fuel price in that country. That works out to a hair under 10¢ per mile for 2014 fuel economy and today's gas prices.

The takeaways remain the same, though: Human-powered transportation isn't especially efficient (unless you're burning calories you would have eaten anyway), and driving is subsidized up the wazoo in the US.

<comment><USER24> I think the math should also include cost of auto infrastructure, vehicle deprecation, and the reduced health care costs if you walk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > it's anywhere from 33-400% more expensive to drive

The article's conclusion including ownership cost fits my intuition pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's also interesting to consider this calculation from a carbon emission perspective. From _Climate impacts of biking vs. driving_ :

[http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-of- bi...](http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-of-biking-vs- driving)

If you eat a lot of meat and bike, you could potentially have a bigger carbon footprint than a very fuel efficient vehicle.

<comment><USER27> ... assuming the biking does not displace other exercise.

<comment><USER28> This is a really important point. For many people, bike commuting is partly a way to avoid having to schedule an extra hour a day dedicated solely for exercise, so the calories are indeed "free"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Of course, this assumes that you're perfectly fit already and that every calorie burned translates into additional consumption.

For the vast majority of Americans, that assumption is incorrect. From personal experience, it's actually the opposite: I eat _less_ on the days where I go for a long walk.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting thought. So going to the gym is literally burning your money. Will quit in the morning. Thanks

<comment><USER31> Why put it off until tomorrow? Quit now.

<comment><USER30> You are absolutely right. No excuses!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another data point: a light electric vehicle (ebike, boosted board, etc.) is about 1-2¢ per mile (~100-200 Watt-hours per mile at 10¢ per kilowatt-hour).

<comment><USER23> Oops, I was off a little ([https://www.electricbike.com/watt- hours/](https://www.electricbike.com/watt-hours/)), but what's an order of magnitude between friends?

That should be ~20 Wh per mile, so 0.2¢ per mile with some of the pricier electricity in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How about the cost of manufacturing a car, which has a cost in fuel? Also, most of the cost of food is labor for its preparation. You're paying for a lot more than just calories. Food is not made to be energy dense like gasoline, it's made to be tasty and nutritious.

<comment><USER33> Exactly... If you would include the manufacturing/r&d/transport, walking probably would be the most efficient way if looking at just one mile

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The article touches on this, but doesn't directly address it: whether they're using gross calories or net calories. Gross is the total calories you burn during that mile. Net is how many additional calories you are burning as a result of walking versus being sedentary.

Glancing at the wikipedia article which the author uses doesn't clarify this, nor does Wikipedia's citation. I didn't check the citation's citation.

Clearly we want net calories. Average humans burn ~100 kcal per hour doing their normal activities during the day, so that could potential change the figure from 210 kcal per hour walking, to 110.

<comment><USER35> This can't be mentioned enough, because otherwise the travelling by car would have to include the 'human' fuel element as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This analysis should take the additional calories it takes to walk vs sit to represent a fair cost of walking. Or add the cost of calories for sitting should be included in the driving option as these are part of the process.

<comment><USER37> Sure, but since driving is faster, and sitting consumes less calories than moving, the additional calories will be little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is a good thought exercise, but kind of comes across like a random equation looking for an explanation rather than interesting observation in search of an explanation.

I can't imagine the person driving doesn't spend as much or more than the person walking on food.

If we are saying that this small amount of money VS drinking oil is where the line is crossed, then are we not all comfortably well past this zone anyways?

So another way of saying this is listening to music is most efficient if you listen to a pre recorded song or you whisper only.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a good point, petrol is clearly way too cheap.

(We have of course long improved on bicycles. An ultra aero lowracer recumbent can get 30mph on 120W, covering the 100k for a mere 1kWh at average 25% efficiency)

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting. I think the article would benefit from a graph of the raw data, i.e., calories per mile, in addition to dollars per mile. I actually wouldn't mind paying more for food, in return for the pleasure of walking or biking. At the same time, walking and biking are not an option for a lot of trips, depending on distance and cargo. Since my daily bike commute is 8 miles round trip, it's a pretty inexpensive pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've seen a number of people wearing versions of this shirt:

[https://www.missionbicycle.com/store/home/gift/53-miles- burr...](https://www.missionbicycle.com/store/home/gift/53-miles-burrito)

Although if Wikipedia's energy figure is right, that's a 2279 kcal burrito (which you could _probably_ find somewhere in San Francisco, but...).

<comment><USER24> Oh, burritos can easily get into the 2000+ kcal range. Burritos from Chipotle get well into the 1000–2000 kcal range without even trying.

<comment><USER41> I tried the calculator at

[https://chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator](https://chipotle.com/nutrition- calculator)

and added the highest-calorie individual meat (steak), rice (white rice), beans (black beans), salsa (chili-corn), sour cream, cheese, and guacamole, and still got only 1365 kcal.

While adding _every single topping_ does reach 2425 kcal, one would have to order 4 kinds of meat, tofu, 2 kinds of rice, 2 kinds of beans, fajitas, 4 kinds of salsa, sour cream, cheese, guacamole, and lettuce. I would think that should count as "trying"! :-)

<comment><USER24> Here's some better data:

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/17/upshot/what- do...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/17/upshot/what-do-people- actually-order-at-chipotle.html)

You can see that 2000 kcal is in the 98th percentile, but the 1000+ kcal range is very common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why has nobody mentioned opportunity cost?

There's a huge opportunity cost of not being able to travel as fast and far as a car lets you. You can't* get an Uber or bum a ride from a friend to your mother's house in the middle of nowhere on Christmas morning. There's few parts of the country where walking/biking year round is feasible.

*at a reasonable price point.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm really surprised at the comparison of motorbikes to cars. I don't own a motorbike, but my impression was that compared to cars the fuel costs are trivial. This data suggests a cost reduction of only ~25%. Was it dumb of me to expect a cost reduction of >75%?

<comment><USER3> Cars are a lot more efficient than they were a few years ago, and motorcycles have gone the other way. You can still get a motorcycle that gets 60 MPG or better, but the mainstream has decided to use their thermodynamic budgets to build engines with very high specific power and hold the line around 40 MPG or even less.

Nobody should buy a motorcycle imagining that they have lower operating costs. Aside from fuel, motorcycles have high budgets for tires, engine maintenance (due to the aforementioned appetite for high specific power, and relative lack of scale in their manufacturing), insurance, likelihood of theft or other total casualty, need to continuously refresh your riding apparel on approximately 5 year basis, expensive consumable items like drive chains and sprockets, and so on and so forth. Also there is generally a lack of miles over which to amortize the time-denominated costs like insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Which is more efficient; a diesel running vegetable oil, or a human?</comment>


Free for Customers ReCAPTCHA - <AUTHOR> https://freeforcustomers.substack.com/p/recaptcha <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! This is my latest post for the Free For Customers newsletter. A newsletter about companies that made money without charging their core customer base a dime. This one is about reCAPTCHA and about how spam helped create a new way to digitize books. If you want to check it out, you can read it at the link! Any feedback is appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Really interesting post, thanks! I would argue, though, that you should distinguish between "users" and "customers". The service wasn't free to their actual customer who needed help digitizing books, it was free to the users who aided in the process.</comment></comment>


I just noticed a Twitter virus - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#search?q=textarea It spreads when someone hovers over the text on their web-based timeline.  It does not appear to spread in search results or individual tweet page.<p>e.g. http://twitter.com/ibackupyourshit/status/25112187461 <comment><USER2> This one links to an external script: hxxp://t.co/@%22style=%22font- size:999999999999px;%22onmouseover=%22$.getScript(%27http:%5Cu002f%5Cu002fis.gd%5Cu002ffl9A7%27)%22

It also makes the text so big that as soon as it appears in your twitter feed its impossible to avoid mossing over it.

<comment><USER3> I don't know, these links don't work for me, even with xx replaced with tt.

Nothing is happening. I created an isolated twitter account to try it, and nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been all over the internet this morning. It's a bug where twitter is allowing onmouseover.

<comment><USER4> People would be wise to avoid Twitter.com today. Clients should be okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twitter says exploit patched. They're still trickling through.</comment>


Show HN: Medium.com with real-time collaboration - <AUTHOR> http://eese.com/story/184217/433:zKzAfa18L

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

I've build a real-time collaborative editor for online articles. The focus is set on collaboration, so a Story is a thing that gets build up by multiple authors of similar interests and skill.

I would like to get some tough feedback :)

(The link leads you to an open story - feel free to write anything that comes to your mind)</comment>


Windows Terminal 0.4 Released - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-v0-4-release/ <comment><USER2> I use Qodem the open source Qmodem from the BBSing days.

[http://qodem.sourceforge.net/](http://qodem.sourceforge.net/)

There are BBSes on the Internet that are still going strong and this terminal has all of the features that QModem had.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Woo Unix style copyOnSelect</comment>


Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2015/08/leisure-suit-larry-in-the-land-of-the-lounge-lizards/ <comment><USER2> "Anxious to avoid accusations of selling filth to minors, Sierra came up with the clever idea of a trivia quiz using questions stemming from the 1970s and earlier to make the player "prove" that she really was as old as she said she was. Some of the questions are decidedly obscure, to such an extent that they create quite a challenge to those of us today who are well over the the age of eighteen, but, what with almost thirty years having gone by, aren't quite up to scratch on our Baby Boomer trivia. Thankfully we have a secret weapon in Wikipedia."

Or, if I remember correctly, you could just use alt+x to skip the quiz :) Played this a lot as an 8 year old kid.

</comment><comment><USER3> Found this on my Dad's Compaq Portable (can't remember if it was an original or a model II but it was around 1986/87)

Comedy story: I didn't know any commands, but know that I wanted to list the drive contents in a specific format...

<comment><USER4> Was that a "ls -l" joke? Would that have even worked on an MS-DOS machine? ;)</comment></comment>


Cassandra Summit 2012 - Slides and Videos - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/events/cassandrasummit2012/presentations

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitter here. For those who are short on time, these are a few of my favorites:

1\. For those unfamiliar with Cassandra, Patrick McFadin's talk (Building a Cassandra Based Application from Scratch) can give you a good feel for how Cassandra tends to be used

2\. Greg Ulrich's talk (Servers Fail, Who Cares?) covers some great ways that Netflix uses Cassandra for high availability

3\. Scaling MongoDB with Cassandra is a fun lightning talk

<comment><USER2> Aaron Morton's Cassandra Query Performance talk was great too.</comment></comment>


FireMe - Who wants to get fired? - <AUTHOR> http://fireme.l3s.uni-hannover.de/fireme.php <comment><USER2> I really don't get the point. Sure, these tweets are ostensibly public to start with. We all know that. So why this passive-aggressive approach to things, with a quote at the bottom saying, "So don't blame me, instead get responsible"?

Perhaps whoever posted these tweets doesn't care? Maybe they've already done the math on the chance of discovery? Maybe they are posting anonymously?

This isn't even the first time we've seen a compilation like this, so it's not like it's novel or anything. Seriously, what's the point?

<comment><USER3> I talked with a girl recently and she was surprised to find out that her tweets are public (and tweets from people she follows). I was surprised to find out she didn't know that.

This makes me think maybe there are many more people than we expect who don't know this.

<comment><USER2> True. I considered this in my original comment. I think the reality is that anyone who is on HN or who is likely to stumble across that site almost certainly knows this though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Similar to, but not nearly as damaging as @NeedADebitCard <https://twitter.com/NeedADebitCard>

<comment><USER5> That is the funniest thing I've seen all week. One girl even posted a picture of her ID next to her debit card!!

<comment><USER6> I saw that one. Facepalm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Getting fired from my last real job, over a year ago, was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me. Haven't starved yet!

<comment><USER8> Did you go freelance? :)

<comment><USER7> Yep, and it pays well enough that I even get to take large amounts of time off. I basically keep a teacher's yearly schedule, having fun all summer, working through the spring, fall, and winter, making as much as when I had a boss breathing down my neck. I lost 20lbs and found the woman I'm going to marry. And I've been completely debt free for the last 3 months. It's been amazing.

<comment><USER8> Sounds good - do your clients breathe down your neck less than managers?

<comment><USER9> Not the guy you're replying to, but my experience is that the ability to either say "no" or "yes, but that will cost more" makes crazy random demands _really_ tolerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If an employer has to spend his time troweling his employees' social networking accounts to find out which ones don't like their job, he's doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> Give people a platform for their voyeuristic, narcissistic ramblings and they will hang themselves through ignorance.

If you write it on the Internet, be polite and respectful or anonymous!

</comment><comment><USER12> Similarly: <http://www.weknowwhatyouredoing.com>

<comment><USER13> Quite a few false positives in there though.

<comment><USER14> Case in point, under "Who wants to get fired?"

"Really stinks not having car. I hate putting others out of the way to help. So my boss is driving out here to Tim buck two to get me work and get me home if car not fixed. But at least get to go. So I am thankful for that."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why do I feel like I'm participating in a web developer's slave morality?

Let's hope that these people quit their jobs to lead more meaningful existences.

</comment><comment><USER16> 1% chance of being fired! File that under winning.

<comment><USER17> 2% here. I feel the hot breath of my boss in my neck already.

<comment><USER18> 0%, which is odd, because I had a tough conversation with my boss yesterday :P (of course this thing doesn't check Hacker News, or my odds would improve a lot :) )

<comment><USER16> If that thing accounted for all the social webs, I'd never have a job ever. =p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is cool, but I'd really like to see something like this for YouTube comments. That would really help get their quality up.

</comment><comment><USER19> for those that don't want to go through disabling disconnect, ghostery etc just to see what it is (and it's not worth it) - it searches for tweets from people saying that they hate their job and displays them.

<comment><USER20> It searches for the exact string "I hate my job", thus giving some lovely false positives in "I hate my job... Not!".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Could a project like this ever come under libel laws?

<comment><USER22> I don't see how, given that the content is knowingly provided for public consumption by the individuals

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> post how much you hate your job, your company will find out and make your wish come true :P

</comment><comment><USER24> there are a lot of bots on there

</comment><comment><USER25> hell ya</comment>


On-demand alcohol delivery startup Saucey raises $5.4M more - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/13/saucey/ <comment><USER2> Texas makes sense (austin) but florida seems like a curious market to expand into.</comment>


Mutator silences your iPhone, no exceptions - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/mutator-silences-iphone/27809/

<comment><USER2> This is such a glaring weakness of the iPhone's current mute function. I can't believe we need a hacky hardware dongle to provide it.

But given that we're at that place, this is about as good a solution as I've seen for those times when you can't turn your phone off but absolutely do not want it to make noise.

<comment><USER3> A hardware solution to a software problem. So sad.

That said, I personally have no issues with the mute mode. I works as intended for me.

Also, this entire product lime can be made obsolete by a simple software update from Apple.

<comment><USER2> > Also, this entire product line can be made obsolete by a simple software > update from Apple.

True, but it sounds like the project team might actually consider that a success, since they designed this to work around a problem they wish they didn't have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you really want this little dude sticking out of your phone 24/7? I get the feeling people will take it in and out rather than do the twist thing. And in that case, wouldn't carrying around the snipped-off end of any random 1/8" audio cable do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER5> "In the Off position it does absolutely nothing, allowing you to use your iOS device as usual, but twist it into the On position and it mutes all sounds coming from the device apart from alarms you have set manually."

Those sound like exceptions to me.

<comment><USER6> With those exceptions it wouldn't have prevented something like this famous example:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing- finally-s...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing-finally- stopped-but-concertgoers-alarm-persists.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait, there's a problem with the mute function? Excepting alarms (from Clock.app), my iPhone is silent when it's switched to mute.

I'm guessing people have a bunch of third party apps installed that don't respect the mute button?

<comment><USER8> Videos, Games, Siri can/do make noise when "ring/silent" switch is engaged. I usually don't have a problem but sometimes Siri launches when I don't expect her to - quit an app... wait... pling-pling-pling!

<comment><USER9> Yes that's how silence works on iOS. Mute mutes thing you have no control over calls,texts etc. why the hell would I fire up a video and not want the sound?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My 3GS has a broken Ring/Silent switch that is permanently on 'ring'. I've been trying for a year to find a reliable way to make it shut up -- I'm a 'silent always' kind of guy, and that switch failure made me hate my phone. This looks like a pretty great solution!

<comment><USER11> Can you set ringtones on the iphone? If so can't you just record nothing and set that as the text acknowledgement tone?

<comment><USER10> You can set most, but not all, of the sounds to 'None'. There still seem to be a bunch of sounds that you can't control. And manually configuring the whole phone to be silent is quite time consuming, especially since you have to may have to do it for individual apps, which may or may not even support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Buyer beware if you have a case on your phone - it states in the FAQ on his Kickstarter page that this will only work with low-profile cases (which is hard to gauge qualitatively).

</comment><comment><USER13> Just want to point out for everyone who wants that switch to be a mute button instead of a "less noise switch": I LOVE the way it works now. There are many of us out there.

</comment><comment><USER14> including the camera sound? thinking here of the privacy issues (ie: why all digital cameras still make the noise)

i was actually wondering that about the HTC one's video + picture functionality too.

</comment><comment><USER15> This one is cheaper and has more features <https://dx.com/p/3-5mm-splitter- plug-2716>

<comment><USER16> It's a bit unwieldy to carry around attached to your phone even though it can achieve the same task (as well as others)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My phone mutes texts, I don't get it.

<comment><USER8> It's about accidental user interactions - like when Siri launches when you don't expect - or if you forgot that you had a game running that makes sounds when you were last using your phone and you unlock it in class and the angry birds music starts playing and your teacher looks at you... and you know.</comment></comment>


Staff Report on Algorithmic Trading in U.S. Capital Markets [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/files/Algo_Trading_Report_2020.pdf <comment><USER2> > They find that when the relative tick size, i.e. the minimum tick size > increment divided by the stock price, is larger, HFTs compete more intensely > to be the first one to the front of the limit order book queue in order to > supply liquidity.

Although I think the SEC has generally done a good job in terms of market microstructure (especially in terms of resisting ill-informed populist rhetoric), I really wish they'd start exploring sub-penny tick sizes, at the very least on the most liquid low-priced stocks.

Since decimalization, it's been two decades since we've had a tick size reduction in US equities. When certain stocks sit at a one penny bid-ask spread all day, that's a sign that penny ticks are too economically wide. It's consumers and ordinary investors that pay the cost in terms of higher spreads.

You can think of the bid-ask spread as the cost of liquidity. It's how much more you pay for immediate execution. The tick size therefore acts like a price floor on the cost of liquidity. Why are we imposing a price floor, one that's much higher than the free market price, on end-consumers? If we reduced tick sizes from $0.01 to $0.001, the cost of trading for most retail investors on most stocks would fall by 50% or more.

It blunts the price discovery process. It incentives HFTs to compete in an arms race of speed to capture queue position, rather than provide better prices. The only group it really benefits are the incumbent exchanges (who can avoid competing with new entrants offering better pricing), and large, active portfolios, like hedge funds, that incur high market impact costs.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, but there is an interesting though experiment. What if we made tick sizes $.000000000000001?

At what point do we get a diminishing return? At what point is it so small that it blows up the algorithms?

<comment><USER4> Well it might blow up some software not expecting these tiny tick sizes but there is an economic motive for larger tick sizes.

Traders can compete on

\- price

\- queue position

Small ticks mean they compete on price and big ticks mean they compete on queue position - to trade they need to have an order on the book, offering to trade at the current tick, that is ahead of other orders.

It's easy to see how the market benefits if people compete on price. However, it also benefits if people show how much they are willing to buy and sell. No sophisticated trader wants to reveal that as they will be taken advantage of when they are wrong. By having bigger tick sizes you incentivise people to try to get into the queue at these artificially better prices - it pulls liquidity into the open.

The tick size pilot that concluded in 2019 shows how this balance isn't easy to strike [https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/key-topics/tick-size- pi...](https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/key-topics/tick-size-pilot- program)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for this simple explanation.

Lowering tick size helps price discovery, but hurts open liquidity.

Is there some ideal constant average number of ticks between the bid and ask which optimizes this tradeoff given a desired state of liquidity and price discovery?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Today's equity market structure is highly fragmented, consisting of fifteen > national securities exchanges, over thirty alternative trading systems, > multiple single-dealer platforms within broker-dealers, and other forms of > order matching

While the fragmentation of trading venues has led to competition on fees, in my experience it has actually widened the effective spread (spread + fees) and created a more difficult environment for customers.

Let's say a market-maker would like to trade 100 contracts. Any less than that is great, and any more than that is bad, as the counter-party is likely well informed about their trade. With one exchange, the market-maker can post their 100 contracts on that exchange, and be confident that the most risk they will take on is 100 contracts.

With multiple exchanges, the market-maker now needs to spread their exposure across exchanges (say, 10 contracts each on 15 exchanges), which can leave them (A) overexposed across exchanges, and (B) underexposed on any given exchange.

(A) causes a problem because the market-makers compensate for this risk by widening spreads. If the most sophisticated counterparties in the market can access liquidity across exchanges, the market-maker needs to at least statistically account for that possibility.

(B) causes a problem for customers with less sophisticated market access. In the example above, a customer with access to 1 of 15 exchanges only has the ability to trade 10 contracts, when they could trade 150 contracts with connectivity to all 15 exchanges.

For a real life example of where single listing works, you can currently trade over 20m of notional value with a spread of about .01 basis points in the ES future listed on the CME.

Source: HFT trader

<comment><USER7> The CME's monopoly definitely causes problems though. For instance it's much more expensive in fees to trade there and your recourse when you observe shenanigans is less.

Source: Used to be an HFT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The money quotes:

Broadly speaking, and as more fully discussed below, algorithmic trading in the equities and to a lesser extent—in the debt market, has improved many measures of market quality and liquidity provision during normal market conditions, though studies have also shown that some types of algorithmic trading may exacerbate periods of unusual market stress or volatility. Advances in technology and communications have enabled many market participants to more efficiently provide liquidity, more efficiently access market liquidity, implement new trading services, and more effectively manage risk across a range of markets.

Today, algorithms address many of the problems and decisions that have long been central to the business of trading. What instrument(s) should be invested in or traded? What price should be bid or offered? What order size is optimal? What should be the response to a request for a quotation? What risk will be taken on by facilitating a trade? How does that risk change with the size of the trade? Is the risk of a trade appropriate to a firm's available capital? What is the relationship between the price of different but related securities or financial products? To what market should an order be sent? Is it more effective to provide liquidity or demand liquidity? Should an order be displayed or non-displayed? To which broker should an order be sent? When should an order be submitted to a trading center?

</comment><comment><USER9> "Although some studies argue otherwise, a number of academic papers study the effects of algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading on volatility in equity markets and find evidence that, under normal market conditions, they reduce short term volatility."

That's interesting, and goes against the conventional wisdom that markets driven by automated, high-frequency trading will be much more volatile. I wonder if HFTs made major changes to avoid another Flash Crash.

<comment><USER10> >That's interesting, and goes against the conventional wisdom that markets driven by automated, high-frequency trading will be much more volatile.

Only if you ignore the word "normal". Otherwise it's what people have been saying for years - HFT reduces volatility when the seas are calm and amplifies it when they're choppy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Never forget that ETFs are only really possible due to HFT. Most ETF users do not even realise this, unless they ask themselves "how do ETFs actually work", and they start reading about Authorized Participants.

<comment><USER12> Can you expand on this? From my understanding ETF's re-balance quite slowly, once every few months, how does HFT even help, much less make ETF's possible?

<comment><USER13> ETF shares are created and destroyed all the, bringing their value inline with the underlying. So for a S&P 500 ETF, HFT firms are creating shares when the price of the ETF is too low and destroying them when they are too high.

It doesn't have to do with how ETFs rebalance, rather how shares are created and destroyed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I read the report, here is a question I would love to know more about:

Many of these quant/algorithmic trading firms are exploiting market inefficiencies at the millisecond (microsecond??) level. To the point that no human person is participating on the same timescale, yet every "real person's" trade gets just a little bit shaved off by some algorithm able to take advantage of it.

What would be so bad about putting in human-sized time intervals as the minimum trading frequency? Like, buyers and sellers can only be cleared on a 1.0 second frequency, or even 0.1 second frequency. So that the millions of times-per-second arms race is nullified.

Are these algorithmic trades serving some public good? Why not have the SEC / exchanges put in this delay for everyone's benefit, and not have these firms make $ off everyone?

Or is that not actually the main market inefficiency happening / being questioned here, and the bigger loss is bulk movements driven by algorithms over hours/days, not milliseconds?

<comment><USER15> If a market did as you suggested, then there would simply be no orders for 0.99999 seconds and then a huge flood of orders at 0.000001 seconds before execution happens.

<comment><USER16> Not if they couldn't be processed in that time.

It is an interesting thought experiment though.. quantize time as well as price. You could exaggerate to one trade per day for the thought experiment. Now this would be on human scale so there is a lot of information that would build up (same when markets are closed). Between that and no time quantization like now, there are probably a few different positions (like electron orbitals) where positives and negatives vary quite a bit. Maybe one of them is better than the current system. Maybe not.

<comment><USER17> But.... Why?

What problem is this solving?

Seems like a lot of faff to get people worse prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Side question, can anybody recommend a good brokerage for running my own trading algorithm? I'm getting tired of inputting very similar trades every day and being limited by the types of limit orders they allow in after hours trading. So far it looks like the winner might be Interactive Brokers or maybe Centerpoint (if I meet their guidelines).

<comment><USER19> interactive brokers is really the best you're going to get. Its a low level API which is generally good. Terrible documentation, in fact the worst documentation I've ever seen on such a large project, but once you figure it out it'll give you all the functionality needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Related to a new kind of algorithm being used in the market 'Dexamethasone Announcement Could Have Made Hedge Funds A Fortune — Alpha Week' [https://www.alpha-week.com/dexamethasone-announcement- could-...](https://www.alpha-week.com/dexamethasone-announcement-could-have- made-hedge-funds-fortune)

</comment><comment><USER21> While we're on this topic, can some expert ELI5 how or/why HFT is good for markets/economy?

<comment><USER22> HFT is specifically a tool that benefits the haves (HFT) over the have nots.

It can benefit stock prices for companies too, since it can cause the market to move more in their direction if machines think they should buy based on whatever they're programmed to look at.

I looked into this for a while, but I simply felt it was immoral and dropped the project.

<comment><USER23> > It can benefit stock prices for companies too, since it can cause the market > to move more in their direction

which can also harm companies if algorithms decide to sell, which might trigger sell chain for everyone

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any highlights or summarizations?

<comment><USER25> Haven't read it, but there's a summary section in the attached PDF on page 69.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The algos being talked about here do not add true liquidity. The fact that over 2/3 of investable wealth is parked in passive funds would suggest there's not a lot of trading being done (2020 craze excepted). Therefore, what's happened in the past decade is artificial liquidity with very sharp unexpected moves. Some of the biggest algos I've seen proliferate and capture exactly this phenomenon. Started in 2015 with year ends being targeted (see 2018, 2019 and 2020). Of course, the pandemic unleashed a different beast altogether.

<comment><USER27> those passive funds still need to continuously rebalance their holdings.</comment></comment>


Django-fancy-cache - Django's cache_page on steroids - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/peterbe/django-fancy-cache <comment><USER2> Does anyone here use two-phase template rendering[1], or know of a good library for it?

There is phased[2], but it seemed to impart too much of a performance hit for me.

1\. <http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-two-phased-rendering/>

2\. <https://github.com/codysoyland/django-phased>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice =) might have to give it a try</comment>


How I came to find Linux - <AUTHOR> http://ianmurdock.com/post/how-i-came-to-find-linux/ <comment><USER2> Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking about it at the time (I had embedded OS design experience, but none with virtual memory so maybe we would not have pulled it off). Also don't forget that the enabling technology was gcc and there was the example of Minix.

We did contribute to the floppy driver. The original driver read a block at a time before incurring a rotational latency. I had had enough of this slowness with SCO Xenix, so added a track buffer to speed it up on Linux. My friend wrote the original generic SCSI driver, to support a film scanner.

I think we may have made one of the earliest products using Linux. We worked for an entrepreneur who started a business selling medical image archiving and teleradiography equipment. In those days, ct-scan machines and MRI machines had no networking. To get images from them you had to capture the image sent to the console screen or use the 3M laser camera parallel interface. (My job was to make cards for this capturing). Image transfer was over phone lines using sz/rz and Telebit Trailblazer modems.

Anyway, at some point one machine did have network (I think it was some proprietary interface, not DICOM). The problem was that Linux did not yet have a networking stack. The solution? Use "KA9Q", the amateur radio TCP/IP stack in userspace for this.

At some point Pat Volkerding (Slackware) also worked with us. I remember he was a big deadhead at the time, wrote Slackware while living in parent's basement. We were half installing / half developing a teleradiography system after hours in Eastern Long Island Hospital.

<comment> vezzy-fnord You should strongly consider writing a blog article about your experiences, there's some really great bits of trivia you're describing. Particularly about crossing paths with Patrick Volkerding (he's still a diehard deadhead from what I know).

<comment><USER3> I'll second this. I love reading stories like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember being introduced to Linux by our programming TA, who used to come at classes with the 'You need Python' t-shirt (it was early '00s for me). "So you don't need to reboot after installing a program?" \- I was shocked. And in awe.

Then I jumped in the library and got myself a manual based on the UNIX 'System V R4' and am still amazed how 15 years later all commands still make sense (BTW, a link to the PDF copy of the SVR1 manual has passed here on HN a few days ago - I _so_ recommend it to anyone starting out[0]).

Dissatisfied with RedHat, Mandrake and SUSE I fell in love with the minimalist Slackware - that was my first true love, the one you will never forget.

Good memories, made of long nights recompiling the kernel, failing and wonder why nothing boots anymore, giggling when modprobing the module for the wireless device, and dreading leaving the home server up at nights with port 22 open (did I harden it enough?).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592)

<comment><USER5> No, you don't need to reboot Linux. You need to consistently make fixes which include go to this config, change this line so that this software-package doesn't crash. Oh, it still doesn't work then please reformat it.

If you want an OSX which doesn't require reboots OSX is the answer.

<comment><USER6> I think this is what happens when you try installing Gentoo or Arch, configure everything your self, and then realize you didn't do it right and now it's a constant headache. New users should really stick with the easiest to use distros like Ubuntu or Fedora, which IMO are on par with OS X in terms of usability and simplicity.

<comment><USER7> I think calling Ubuntu _on par_ with OS X is a stretch. Not that it's that far, but I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with Mavericks or even Yosemite.

I agree, though, that sticking to Ubuntu or Fedora for new users is a great idea. They are both excellent operating systems with regard to simplicity.

<comment><USER6> >I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with Mavericks or even Yosemite.

By any chance are you running OS X on Apple hardware? If we took OS X and installed it on an Ubuntu Certified Dell PC we may find that _it_ has the stability issues, so if you _are_ comparing it to OS X running on Apple hardware it's not a very fair comparison, as it's being run under ideal circumstances and Linux is not.

<comment><USER8> that may be "theoretically" the fair comparison. but in practice, most people run osx on apple hardware and linux on any hardware. So to get an actual comparison of the user experience, it is fair to compare them on different hardware.

<comment><USER9> So OS X is unusably more expensive.

<comment><USER8> is there a reason you decided to repost this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, that's a remarkably similar story to mine. Except I wound up with FreeBSD because of, well, Linus.

I had a very similar journey. For me, I got hooked on computers when my mom (a programmer at a defense contractor) would take me in to work when she didn't have a sitter. I got to hang out in the computer room and play adventure on the minicomputers they had in the late 70s. I had the typical Apple II experience many of us had in the early 80s. I learned to type by typing in those games from Byte (and how to debug by finding my typos), eventually writing my own games and learning 6502 assembly.

Flash forward to university and my first Unix account on an always-melting- down sparc server. There were dozens of DEC VT220 terminals in our public lab at UB in 1989, but only a few Xterminals which were highly coveted. My friends and I jumped at the chance to use them. Most of us eventually got on-campus jobs or internships with the goal of getting unfettered access to Sun or DECstation workstations. I _STILL_ use some of the same keyboard shortcuts from my 1990 .twmrc, and my .cshrc, .Xdefaults and .emacs files have all just evolved from then (and yes, I still use tcsh).

The first time I installed Linux was from a stack of 3.5" floppies sometime in 1993 when I was a grad student at a different school. I was a huge Linux fan.

A year later, I met Linus at the '94 Linux BOF at the USENIX in Boston. At the time, I was trying to convince our dept to buy PCs rather than Suns or DECs to replace some wheezing grad student workstations. However, I ran into a problem where we used LaTeX, and it kept its fonts on a central NFS server (these were the days when disk space was precious, there were no package managers, and everything was installed by hand --- so installing stuff to NFS was very common). The 12MHz Mips R2000 DECstation 2100s we had (our slowest machines) would render a page of text in a second or two using xdvi. However, a test Linux machine (which was a blazingly fast 66MHz 486) would take 10x as long. I eventually figured out that this was because Linux NFS did not do any file caching at the time, and xdvi was seeking around byte by byte in the font files.

I was very excited to meet Linus, and was really looking forward to the USENIX BOF. So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. So I went to the very friendly and welcoming FreeBSD BOF, found out that NFS works, and never looked back.

<comment><USER11> > So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now > know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS.

I have always wondered if Linus was a bit for friendly, would the Linux community have gotten a lot more mainstream faster?

<comment><USER6> >I have always wondered if Linus was a bit for friendly, would the Linux community have gotten a lot more mainstream faster?

I don't think it would have made a difference. *BSD has never really become mainstream unless you count Apple, which I don't. I think the main barrier to Linux success on the desktop is the fact that in my life I've rarely seen advertisements for Linux, while Apple and Microsoft seem to be everywhere.

I think if a Linux distro had a huge advertising campaign it could actually snag a sizable portion of the desktop market.

<comment><USER12> FreeBSD powered both Yahoo and Hotmail initially, though both have _largely_ replaced it (I don't know that they've completely done so). BSD's networking stack offered genuine advantages at the time.

<comment><USER13> It still does, since Linux, OSX _and_ Windows' stacks are all based on it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I discovered Slackware Linux in 1995's summer with 1.0.9 kernel, still using a.out format and first support for non SCSI CD-ROM drives. Had to use the installation from a MS-DOS partition.

Already knew Aix and Xenix back then, but having UNIX at home was great and I became a bit too much FOSS Zealot.

Nowadays I use all OSes and the Zealot guy has been replaced by a pragmatic guy that uses whatever makes sense for the business.

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember the joy I felt when I downloaded Linux for the first time and booted it on my 386 .. it was like I was suddenly granted access to the hallowed halls of technology. I'd been a Unix guy for a decade before that, but never able to afford my own machine .. working with a Magnum pizzabox at work, but a lame DOS PC at home, it was always very frustrating to me. But when I got on the minix-list and saw Linus' post a few days later, I was instantly transported into an .. at the time .. elite new world.

Never looked back, and its amazing to me today to see just how far we've come. Truly a phenomenal technology ..

<comment><USER16> And now the situation for many of us is reversed - I have a powerful Linux workstation at home where I work on my own projects, and a crappy under- specced Dell running Windows at work. It is very frustrating to me :(

<comment><USER15> That is indeed a quandry! Virtualbox for the win! :)

<comment><USER16> Try connecting a Linux box (or vm) to the network and you'll get to watch Corporate IT throw a massive hissy-fit :|

<comment><USER17> Need they ever know if you do NAT instead of introducing a new IP on the network (making sure that the Linux image isn't advertising any naughty services like SSH of course)? Of course, on a corporate Windows box you may not be root, i suppose...

Courage to you nonetheless! Time to find a job where you're root on your machine? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l I was setting up one of those new fangled web sites at the software company for which I worked back in 1995. It was just two of us doing it in our spare time, with me doing the software side of things and a colleague looking after the hardware. He installed Slackware Linux on some hardware he had scavenged, and I installed Apache, Perl and (slightly later) MySQL. These choices weren't because we were visionaries or anything like that, but because we had zero budget and didn't know any alternatives.

The funny thing is, I remember a few years later going for interviews and being slightly bashful about our use of free software. But it was only after I subsequently got a job at a much bigger company using very expensive commercial software, which was an order of magnitude slower and mind bogglingly unreliable not to mention completely opaque, that I came to realise just how good some of the free software is.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, that's quite a story, he clearly took it more seriously than I did. Mine is pretty simple, because I loved to tinker with OS's, and since everyone is sharing...

My local ISP gave away shell account I could telnet to and access a home directory that became a free website, ie theirispname.whatever/~myusername

I logged in, used HTML and Perl to do what I thought at the time to be the most amazing stuff in the world. Found out they used a variety of Linux as I sniffed around the commands available to me (like I had done with MS-DOS over the past couple years).

Thought it was awesome, and I ended up putting Slackware on a couple of my old systems people had donated to me and run little servers in my bedroom. Eventually went to RedHat, then CentOS, now mostly Ubuntu.

At the time I saved up for, and bought, any books that said "Linux" on them that came with CD's stuck to the back with a distro I could install :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Being used to Sun workstations, and then DEC Alpha boxen, it was rather cool to be able to download and install a pretty complete Unix system on my PC at home in '93/'94.

No Internet at home though so I had to get multiple boxes of floppies from stores and download everything at work and then cycle home with them - I seem to remember X and its applications being the single largest chunk of stuff to install.

<comment><USER20> I went through the floppy hell my self with something called minilinux first, then slackware. After failing both I went out and bought a slackware book with a CD and everything went much better.

Been a linux user ever since :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember being very chuffed with the fact that the boot and root disks (on 3.5" floppies) were physically smaller than my copy of "Portable Unix" [0]

Then a year or two later getting Dec$Write running on a V8650 to display on the X11 server of a Linux box elsewhere on the campus instead of one of the creaking DecStations we normally used.

Now I'm sitting in front of a laptop running Ubuntu and have an Android phone in my pocket. Good times (then and now).

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W- Topham/dp/0471...](http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W- Topham/dp/0471579262)

</comment><comment><USER22> heh - in 1997-1999 I was replacing a novel network on token ring with a new IP net. I had some B2B EDI crap that needed to be scripted to deliver files from us to Sun...

I installed several linux servers and hired a couple contractors I knew to manage the deployment. They setup these linux boxes and consulted supporting them....

I went to one of them on day and said "you guys should just start a consulting company offering linux support!"

A few weeks later, one of my consultants came back and said "Hey guess what! We are starting a linux consulting company!"

I was excited... we talked briefly about me joining them, but that didnt work out...

A little later - they were valued at over $1B!

Those consultants that worked for me on this in 99? Dave Sifry, Art Tide and Chris DiBona.... They founded LinuxCare.

I later met Linus at one of the conferences and chatted with him for a bit, I don't recall him not being friendly though... but that was the only time I met with him.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember that in 1994-1995 Linux was a shock: you were able to run for free in your personal computer a system that did similar things to SCO Unix or Coherent (Unix clone) without the need of pirating it (students were used to pirate SCO Unix 20 1.44MB floppies using a special DOS copy program called "PC Trace" in order to copy non-DOS formatted disks, that "tradition" was lost because Linux was able to run using less space, and usually performing quite well on cheap hardware)

</comment><comment><USER24> Even after all these years, sometimes something like this article makes me stop and think how awesome it is, and how fortunate I am to have had Linux and open source available. Having the freedom to learn about and tinker with _everything_ is incredibly cool, and one reason I don't think I'll ever give up Linux as my OS for... pretty much everything.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, I did exactly the same thing, sneaking around in labs, carrying floppies, saving pennies.

The only difference is that it was Duke Nukem on my floppies. I bet this guy has a better paying gig these days :/

<comment><USER26> I have no clue about his pay, but his karma must be very very high. Thank you for giving us Debian!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Murdock mentions that he was studying management at the time he got into Linux. I couldn't find any further information about it. In Wikipedia it says that he studied computer science in Germany. At some point in life he changed majors. I'd very much like to read a post about that decision.

I share the love of computers. I spend all my free time in front of computers, programming and reading. It's been like this for my whole life. Due to a twist of fate (couldn't get a scholarship) I ended up in law school. I have no interest in anything beside computers. I can't live without them, but it's killing me to know that I can't study computer science. Any suggestions??

<comment><USER28> If you spend as much of your free time programming as you say, you'll probably be spending more time programming than many CS students I've come across who have no interest in computing, and you'll probably be much better at programming than many CS graduates I've come across, who have hardly any interest in computing.

Your passion will take you further than your college programme.

<comment><USER14> That wouldn't work at my university, unless it changed a lot on the last 20 years.

<comment><USER29> Must be a minority then you know they built the raspberry pi to try and get kids to have some programing experience at GCSE and A level (15-18)

This was so they didn't have to teach the basics on CS and EE courses

<comment><USER14> You are talking about UK.

On my Portuguese university, we got to code in standard Pascal, C, C++, Prolog, Smalltalk, Caml Light, PL/SQL, 80x86 and MIPS Assembly, Java.

Many of the lectures were composed by exam + mini-project.

Anyone that made it without much coding was getting a ride in workgroups, on single projects it was either code or fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Although my favorite free Unix-like is NetBSD, I have a great deal of admiration for what Debian does and how it does it. To me, it is one of the best Linux distibutions, along with Slackware and Arch.

<comment><USER31> Debian and Slackware: both roughly same age (Slackware releasing first). Contrasting package management, patching policies and governance models. I find the stable releases of both to be, well, _stable_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For me it was visiting a friend who was using RH4 and seeing the stuff he was doing, I was already a computer geek and programming quite a lot so the idea of an open source operating system I could have the source code to was incredible.

I broke the family PC a whole bunch of times (software not hardware) before I managed to get linux onto and then onto the internet, after that nothing came close as a platform to work on and so it's nearly 20 years and I still run it to this day.

</comment><comment><USER33> Awesome. I read the whole thing without reading the name of the author, so I got to read the whole story without knowing it was written by Ian Murdock

</comment><comment><USER34> I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal through SSH or Telnet. Since I wasn't going to get Unix on my PC, I needed to find an alternative and remember hearing about Linux in the past. This was probably right around 2000.

I don't remember the reasons why, but I didn't download a distro and instead went to Staples and bought the cheapest flavor they had for sale. I can't remember what it was, but it had a GUI and text editor and all the backend programming stuff I needed to do the project much more efficiently.

I ended up keeping that Linux partition around and used it to teach myself Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is what got me my first job our of college. That company was an Apple shop, so that's when I was first introduced to OSX and the need for a Linux desktop was eliminated for me.

<comment><USER35> My university was still using telnet around the same time. So I resorted to floppies before finally breaking down and getting a laptop. Red Hat came loaded on some of the college's surplus equipment. Before long I ended up trying it on my laptop too.

Updating and driver support was weak back then. Thankfully this has improved a lot. Ubuntu is also a more novice friendly alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think it was Redhat Zoot (6.2) that was my first experience with Linux. It had linuxconfig installed by default (I desperately needed the assistance). The command line was so powerful over what Windows 95 had that I found it very intriguing. It seemed like MS Dos 6 but so much better!

The later versions had xEarth installed which is so cool.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think my first encounter was as a CD attached to a magazine. Sadly someone had goofed and gotten a German variant of Slackware, as best i recall.

After that it was Suse and Mandrake in half-serious fashion.

Right now though i am using Gobolinux, after having it sit as a CD for a time until i had Windows blow up on me for the nth time.

I should really do a clean reinstall, as some major changes has come down the Linux pipeline since then. But at the same time, it basically works as it stands.

And in a telling expression of where Linux is heading, the guy that prepared the last iso for Gobolinux claims he spent more time getting the desktop parts (Consolekit, polkit, dbus, etc) working than the kernel etc.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've started about 9 years ago, we have only one computer in home used also by my brother and father (diehard EE engineer that started with punched card programming and _still_ writes, albeit great, software for embedded in notepad++(syntax coloring) and copy-paste into IAR IDE) and I was craving for linux but no one would allow me to install some strange OS. In 2006 I finally got _mine_ first PC and I've installed ubuntu. I was enlightened so to speak, ubuntu worked for me for quite a while until gnome3 and unity, then I've switched to Arch and am using it ever since.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels similar to mine (which isn't to say it's a special story). I too got interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business school at first and eventually switched to computer science (started in 2010).

I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to 'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)

<comment><USER40> I suspect a there's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. All we seem to hear about on sites like HN, Reddit, TechCrunch are those individuals whose interest in computers started at a very young age. I suspect if you aggregated to all developers, a significant number, if not the majority have a story similar to yours. For what it's worth, my story is like yours, I was interested in my youth, found other interests, and didn't "find myself" until college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Could someone explain or link me to how revision control worked in the very early days of the Linux kernel? I'm aware of BitKeeper, Git et al. but interested in how things worked at its outset.

<comment><USER42> Tarballs and patches for the first 10 years apparently!

[https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcr...](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcript)

<comment><USER37> And partially why Linus insist on patches being broken down into digestible parts before being sent his way. He would (will?) outright refuse patches that touched multiple kernel subsystems in one go.

<comment><USER43> This also forces you to keep a backwards-compatible interface between the two subsystems.

<comment><USER37> One lesson userspace fails to take in time and time again...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article writer's hook with being my own "superuser".

For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much of the Linux backstory.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)

<comment><USER45> amazing that in 2015 people are still saying stuff like "windoze", "micro$haft", etc.

<comment><USER46> >amazing

It really isn't.

<comment><USER47> Yup. Slashdot is still one of the ~1,500 most popular sites on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> anti-shill I have used and installed linux many times. I have ubuntu on a dual boot on this computer. But linux on the desktop is going nowhere now that android is on the scene. Yeah, I understand that android is based on linux. But android is the big alternative man on campus now.

<comment><USER48> For me, as Linux on the desktop got more and more mainstream, I started to feel more and more left out. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu because I thought "I just want my computer to work without having to mess with it". Over time, Ubuntu made many decisions that I disagreed with and I spent huge amounts of effort trying to figure out how to uninstall things (which is quite difficult for a Debian based distro since the configuration often assumes you want everything integrated).

I finally ended up with an Arch system running xmonad and huge numbers of terminal based apps. I'm finally happy with my system again. What I realized is that I specifically _don 't_ want a Mac-like/Windows-like/shinkwrapped experience. I want choice and freedom, because what I like is not necessarily what the masses (or Mark Shuttleworth or Redhat or Gnome developers) want.

I kind of picked on your post because even though it is kind of negative, I think there are quite a lot of people who think the same way. It's a valid opinion, but a bit unfortunate. The advantage of a (dare I say Gnu/) Linux system or a BSD system is the freedom from being told how you are going to use your computer. It's not having to put up with some stupid design decision just because it was pushed by a popular company and now the masses are used to it. It the ability to explore, experiment and create with absolutely no boundaries.

It is popular enough and gives me more of everything I want than OSes that are more visible to the masses.

<comment><USER17> A hundred times this. Same setup for me, except that i'm considering moving to Stump WM or Guile-WM as a result of heavily drinking the Lisp / Libre koolaid. Let people pry my Emacs and tiling window manager from my cold dead hands! :)

<comment><USER49> StumpWM is really, _really_ nice to use. And it integrates great with emacs+SLIME.

It's really the wave of the future.

<comment><USER17> Yeah so i'm not sure, i'm probably saying really stupid stuff now, but i love the way my WM (Xmonad as stated before) is really simple as far as key bindings go: no chords. I like that, because i don't want RSI. I have the impression though that moving more towards an Emacs way of managing my desktops would be laborious, frankly. Maybe i'm just projecting after my disagreeable experience with Ratpoison (only a 2-pane split? Hm.).

<comment><USER49> > i love the way my WM (Xmonad as stated before) is really simple as far as > key bindings go: no chords

Really? Looking at the docs ([http://xmonad.org/manpage.html#default-keyboard- bindings](http://xmonad.org/manpage.html#default-keyboard-bindings)) it looks like it has mod-KEY and mod-shift-KEY chords. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

It's easy enough to set up StumpWM to support those bindings, if one wishes. Not saying that everyone should be using it, of course! xmonad's a fine WM I'm sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Duck Duck Go Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-architecture.html <comment><USER2> It'd be more interesting to see how it's changed in the 2 and a bit years since this was written.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the info, it is refreshing to see FreeBSD + Perl development... :-D</comment>


SmileMiner – A Java library of state-of-art machine learning algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/haifengl/smile

<comment><USER2> A little tip to the authors, migrate the project form an Eclipse-based one to Maven or Gradle. Not everyone uses Eclipse and it's more friendlier that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maven pom.xml files are added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool, though a more community friendly license would be great ("Confidential Proprietary" doesn't seem encouraging...)

<comment><USER4> What? From the license file it appears to be Apache [https://github.com/haifengl/smile/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/haifengl/smile/blob/master/LICENSE)

<comment><USER5> It does say "Confidential Proprietary" on top of .java files. Maybe they forgot to update those when they placed it on github?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it somewhat funny that the term "machine intelligence" seems like it was coined in part to distinguish it from "machine learning", but, while this project is clearly part of the latter, they have chosen a moniker using "machine intelligence". Obviously no one owns the word, but it just seems people love using new buzz words and efforts to distinguish these things are quickly muddied.

<comment><AUTHOR> The project was started five years ago. It is not really about buzz words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be curious as to how this compares to [https://github.com/SmileWide/main](https://github.com/SmileWide/main), in terms of maturity and ability to run in a distributed mode.

</comment><comment><USER8> Surprised this was written in Java - I thought Lisp did well in this area and Clojure is right there on the JVM.

<comment><USER9> It's easier to achieve a high level of performance in raw, idiomatic Java than in Clojure. Eg, it's really important to be able to mutate arrays directly and use primitives with no boxing. You _can_ do that kind of thing in Clojure, but it just ends up looking like Java with parens instead of squirrely brackets and more explicit casting.

The proper use for Clojure is to express higher-order application logic more concisely, not to implement high performance math algos.

<comment><USER10> Well, there are "high-performance things" I like more in Clojure, for example:

\- areduce / amap

\- Uncleaned data is often of Object type (due to missing or invalid values) upon which one can apply the complete core.reducer functions without intermediate representations. In Java this would be horrible.

Still, you're right in the sense that Clojure execution isn't fast than Java's, just its development.

<comment><USER11> Transients (mutable Clojure collection types) are also high performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool stuff! How does it differ from other java ML libraries (like Weka)?

<comment><USER13> Technical merits aside, Weka is GPL-licensed (commercial licenses available), and this library Apache 2.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an amazing, thank you for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER15> Rescale image thumbmails on github readme. It takes forever to load and costs fortune on mobile internet.

<comment><USER16> definitely should resize the thumbnails... instead of using for example an image that is 2640x1854 being displayed at 345x242

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome, awesome, awesome

</comment><comment><USER18> would be great if there was a similar library for python

<comment><USER19> You mean something like scikit-learn?

[http://scikit-learn.org/stable/](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/)</comment></comment>


YouTube's seven-year stand-off ends - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37839038 <comment><USER2> German here. I'm happy that the whole thing is finally over, but also at the same time very angry that GEMA succeeded in getting it their way, once again. I don't think it's known how much money really changed hands, but knowing Google and the scale of the situation, I think it's a fair bet that GEMA got a huge sum out of this.

<comment><USER3> Before, YT was completely unusable in Germany. You're right about GEMA, but it's a win for most ordinary people. Unfortunately many other streaming sites are useless still in all of EU. Netflix for example. Only with VPN through United States or maybe Britain do you achieve full value.

<comment><USER4>
      > Before, YT was completely unusable in Germany

This is gross exaggeration. I use Youtube extensively and I encountered a blocked video maybe 3% of the time, and only when looking at music videos. Even when that happened I simply enabled the (installed but usually remaining disabled) Proxmate Chrome extension to use a proxy and get the (music) video anyway. The change is welcome but won't have much of an effect on me. People using Youtube extensively for music - and "current" music - are probably most affected. I'd say the majority of music still was accessible. Often you would have another video upload of the same song accessible when one was blocked.

Which reminds me of a different issue, is it possible that Youtube, and possibly other video portals too, deliberately ever so slightly messes up the sound of music videos? Maybe to ensure there still is an incentive to buy? I can't really tell for sure, but a lot of music to me sounds a little worse than I would have expected.

<comment><USER5> Actually I'm with the GP: A large number of videos I cared about were unwatchable - and the reason was usually low key background music from say an uploaded twitch stream.

In other words: I don't (usually, it's quite rare) go to YT for music and still I really believe that this change improves my usage.

I don't bother with proxy solutions, so this change is most welcome to me.

<comment><USER4>
      > I don't bother with proxy solutions

Note that you didn't really have to do anything but install a Chrome extension. If you left it turned on it would detect when a video was blocked and reload the page through some proxy. Pretty low effort overall. Otherwise I would not have done it myself, the only videos I ever needed it for were pure music videos, which I can easily live without if it's even slightly inconvenient to see them.

And remember the comment I replied to said "YT was completely unusable in Germany", which is definitely not true no matter how any one individual person might have been affected. It's one thing to speak about ones own experiences, but YT wasn't "unusable in Germany".

<comment><USER5> Sure, "completely unusable" is similar to the "literally unplayable" gaming meme: Way over the top. I tried to point out that our experience (yours, mine) differ and mine was repeatedly/often disturbed due to random GEMA claims, while not even looking for music.

(I don't use Chrome, but I assume there'd be a Firefox extension. Then again, I remember that there used to be a ~shady~ extension for exactly this YT issue and I just never felt good about installing an extension for my browser for this narrow a use case.)

<comment><USER4> I agree about the extensions in general. I had a very strange issue that Google kept asking me for confirmation that I'm not a robot. I initially suspected my aging router had been captured, so I replaced it. But only when I removed the BTTV (Better Twitch TV) extension did it stop. I repeated the experiment, one or two days after reinstalling it I was again blocked by Google, and the block again disappeared very shortly after removing it a second time. That extension actually loads most of its code from a server, which they even write about in their README - I have no idea how this is allowed in the Chrome store.

This is why I had the Youtube-proxy extension disabled, and only enabled briefly for when I needed it for a specific video. Incidentally, today in the headlines: WOT - Web Of Trust - an extension used by millions on several browsers, has sold all browsing data of all their users to 3rd parties. Worst part: According to journalists who purchased the data they were able to actually identify individual users because of the many details that were included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was really a ridiculous situation. Sometimes you couldn't see a movie trailer (which is basically an ad) because there was a GEMA song in it, and sometimes you couldn't watch the song video from the musicians official channel because GEMA. I really hope that this will all be opened now that the case is finished.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe they got cold feet because finally a cool alternative to GEMA is emerging: [https://www.c3s.cc/](https://www.c3s.cc/) (current status: somewhere in the bureaucratic labyrinth, but slowly making progress)

</comment><comment><USER8> I still see "This Content is not available in your Country" on many Japanese Youtube Videos (browsing from USA). And even stranger, it only shows that message when browsing from a mobile phone's browser (ex: iPhone Safari). Here's an example of a cat video (there are many more) : [https://www.pawpurrazi.com/cat-toilet-paper-sit- roll/](https://www.pawpurrazi.com/cat-toilet-paper-sit-roll/)

Watch the youtube embed video on that page in a mobile phone.

So what gives? Is Japan also in some dispute?

<comment><USER9> Also in the USA. That cat video plays on Firefox and Chrome for Android, but if I open the link on my laptop and open the embed in a new tab (because I block external scripts on my laptop), it "contains content from Jukin Media. It is restricted from playback on certain sites." So my guess in this particular case would be that something in Safari prevents YouTube from recognizing that the video is embedded on a site that bought an embed license.

The more general problem with watching Japanese videos from the US is largely due to the fact that many Japanese media companies like to sell exclusive international distribution rights for all of their content, regardless of whether the buyer will actually distribute all of the content, or if the buyer is only going to use it in China or Korea. So they block their videos outside of Japan and we often can't find a version available in the US.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. This makes sense. So I guess the content owner / "Licensor" is the problem here, and not Youtube. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally. I hated internet in Germany because of this and the lack of public wifi access points.

<comment><USER11> We don't need public wifi access points in most European countries because our 3G and 4G connections tend to be quite good, at least in the main cities.

<comment><USER12> Except 3G and 4G is ridiculously costly if you want a reasonable amount of data without taking on a 2 year contract. I live in Berlin and the Germans I talk to about this usually don't see a problem.

I moved here from the Nordics so you could say I'm spoiled but I think it's reasonable to have near unlimited data so that I can actually watch YouTube/Spotify/Netflix without worrying that it'll make me unreachable on Whatsapp/Messenger when I'm out and about.

Public access points would be great in Berlin (can't say for other cities) for sure, but they'd have to change that stupid law where the owner of a connection (say, a café) is persecuted if one of its visitors do something illegal on their connection.

<comment><USER11> I have 1 GB per month on a O2 pre-paid card in Germany.

That is a reasonable amount of data for me.

Also that law applies to everyone with an wlan router, not just coffee owners.

<comment><USER12> > Also that law applies to everyone with an wlan router, not just coffee > owners.

Very true. I'm only really thinking about it when I try out a new café that doesn't have WIFI.

I used to have 1GB on Blau. I'm trying desperately to cut all ties and get some money back from them but they're horrible, that's another story though.

In any case I've been paying about 10e for 1GB per month. Yes I can live it for sure, I often don't even go beyond 600Mb per month.

With unlimited data I would use my phone a lot differently though. I'd likely stream Audible Channels if I got the urge or found something interesting while on train, maybe I'd watch something on YT or check out new music.

Because of these expensive limited plans I'm not using my phone a lot. It's both a good thing but also a bit sad I think. I'm very much ranting here, sorry for that.

It's just weird coming from unlimited data that you pay 15e/month for (4G unlimited mind you) to this thing. Friends at home regularly surpass 10Gb per month because they're streaming music constantly. Some even use their phones as the only internet connection they have, skipping landlines entirely!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure I'd come across this particular rights / negotiation case in the past but I'm grateful to get a chance to read this article posted here. Quite useful to stay in the know. I hope all the parties are pretty satisfied with the terms and processes now.</comment>


Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset and It Is Disappointing - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/2018/magic-leap-demo-video <comment><USER2> Digg is still a thing?

And is anyone surprised it has thus far failed to live up to any of the insane hype that was generated?</comment>


The House Votes in Favor of Disastrous Copyright Bill - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disastrous-copyright-bill <comment><USER2> Is this description really accurate? Some random person can wind up owing $30,000 because some bureaucrat decides that they do? Without a court proceeding? That seems... almost certainly unconstitutional, and absolutely certainly a _terrible_ idea.

Then there's the little matter of malicious misuse or harassment. I mean, forget swatting someone, you could cause serious havoc by "mistakenly" dropping a few of these accusations on someone.

What's the best way to persuade senators that this is a terrible idea (or at least a politically toxic one)?

<comment><USER3> The description isn't inaccurate. Instead, in what has become an EFF norm, it's selectively accurate. The CASE Act creates a voluntary small claims court procedure for low value copyright claims: [https://thehill.com/blogs/congress- blog/judicial/466742-the-...](https://thehill.com/blogs/congress- blog/judicial/466742-the-case-for-the-case-act). That is currently impossible today because the Copyright Act requires claims to be brought in federal court. Parties can, at their election, proceed before the Copyright Office, with or without lawyers. There is still an adjudication of sorts, but the procedures are relaxed just as they are with small claims. Parties can also exercise their right to go to federal court.

The EFF has some legitimate concerns here. The CASE Act lowers the barrier to asserting copyright claims, which might be a bad thing. The same point could have been made in an article that didn't read like a Trump tweet series.

<comment><USER4> So EFF's description is accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought HN banned blatantly editorialized headlines.

EFF Deep Links is reliably extremist in its interpretation of news.

Here's a more neutral report:

[https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8531531/case...](https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8531531/case- act-supporters-passage-senators-reservations)

And a pro-CASE opinion from the President of the American Bar Association: [https://thehill.com/blogs/congress- blog/judicial/466742-the-...](https://thehill.com/blogs/congress- blog/judicial/466742-the-case-for-the-case-act)

<comment><USER2> You expect Billboard to be _neutral_ on this? That seems possible, but unlikely.</comment></comment>


Sprint to acquire Clearwire - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/sprint-said-to-talk-with-cable-companies-about-clearwire-buyout-08182011.html

<comment><USER2> sprint /in talks/ to acquire Clearwire</comment>