The demise of r/science AMAs on Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-r-science-ama/ <comment><USER2> I'm completely on the side of Reddit, here. Subreddit moderators have too much power. It's all very well saying "anyone can create a subreddit, if you don't like one, make another" but it's impossible to compete with subreddits sitting on common names, like "science".

The practice of _removing_ higher-voted posts in order to keep their AMAs at the top should never have been allowed, and I'm glad that it now isn't.

Abuse of moderator power is one of Reddit's biggest problems.

<comment><USER3> And yet, here you are on hacker news, and extremely heavily moderated forum.

The only way for popular forums to maintain interesting content is moderation. Otherwise the top posts tend towards generic mush that is vaguely interesting to most, and extremely interesting to very few.

<comment><AUTHOR> It appears a lot of people are not aware of this important function of moderation unless they see it for themselves, perhaps by doing some moderation. It is not surprising at all to people who have done some moderation that relying on just upvotes and downvotes does not surface good content.

<comment><USER4> Up- and downvotes work to a certain extend. But when the community grows big enough, the upvotes tend to heavily favor "funny" and other easily digestible content. Many subreddits and other online communities died the, what I call, 10,000 member death. If you don't apply moderation at that point, serious content will disappear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good journalism suffers if subjected to popularity algorithms. What a weird wave this has been, where Facebook's News Feed used to be okay and then sucked, where my curated Twitter feed used to be okay and then sucked, etc.

There's a difference between what people say they want (as interpreted by views, clicks, eyeballs), and what they want to want (as interpreted by values, what feels rewarding in hindsight, what they're glad they did later). I wonder if these algorithms will ever evolve to start serving up metaphorical vitamins instead of potato chips.

<comment><USER6> The "popularity" algorithm is potato chips.

Good moderation is vitamins.

<comment><USER7> Excessive consumption of vitamins will cause much bigger problems than excessive consumption of potato chips.

<comment><USER8> But in moderation (heh), eating vitamins is much, much better for you than eating potato chips.

Nobody's arguing for an excess of anything. Obviously a completely locked down subreddit that rejects and deletes all posts and comments would be useless, but so would one that's completely unmoderated.

<comment><USER9> >Obviously a completely locked down subreddit that rejects and deletes all posts and comments would be useless,

Not necessarily. Reddit used to have some of those as running jokes. /r/blackfathers and such. Disagreeable uses are still uses.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but that's more of an art installation. Duchamp's Fountains is a neat work of art, but I can't really use it for its intended purpose.

<comment><USER9> Firstly, you probably could do what you mean for that specific piece, at least once or twice. But more importantly, that statement presupposes the wrong intended purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At the start of the article I was revelling in the enjoyment of confimation bias washing over me around how reddit is changing, but then I read this

> Allen admitted to the Daily Dot that he deleted popular r/science posts so > AMAs would be more prominently featured. But he argues the controversial > action was required for his posts to gain widespread visibility.

Don't think Reddit is in the wrong here...

<comment><USER11> Honestly, Reddit needs to be doing _more_ to stop mods from running rampant all over the user base. A _lot_ more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "My posts weren't the most popular, so I had to delete the popular ones to get mine to the top of r/science!"

Did he really just say that post manipulation is allowed when he personally values the content and expected it to be accepted?

Reddit is so covered in arbitrary rules as it is. It's harder to get a post to stick on Reddit than it is here on HN sometimes, and HN isn't even for general discussion like Reddit is.

Now we're finding out that the social media website with the most red-tape and outright hostile attitude towards it's userbase deletes user content to substitute self-promotional content produced by organizers?

I think it's time to find an alternative. Reddit wreaks of hostility towards users. It's the online equivalent of a park bench with coin operated spikes to deter homeless people.

<comment><USER13> Temporarily deleted for the AMAs to gain traction. They were restored once the AMAs made it to the front page.

This sounds bad, but you have to realize that:

\- The AMAs had very high-profile guests, and it's easier to attract those guests if you can promise high visibility

\- Moderators have very little tools to curate and promote contents that they view as valuable.

<comment><USER12> "\- Moderators have very little tools to curate and promote contents that they view as valuable."

Why do moderators need tools to promote content they view as valuable? Isn't that what the upvote button is for?

These are moderators. Volunteer enthusiasts of the communities they moderate. They have no stake in Reddit and they get nothing regardless of what content gets seen by who. They're job is to make sure nobody breaks subreddit rules. They aren't supposed to be purveyors of content on a social media platform.

If I want to see structured, planned, and promoted content I'll go to CNN or Politico or NYT. I joined Reddit to be a part of a community that aggregates and promotes crowd-sourced content based on popular opinion.

Giving moderators tools to control the content beyond what they need to enforce the rules is manipulation of the underlying purpose of Reddit, and should be disallowed.

This isn't a Facebook page for a business that serves a purpose. It's an online forum whose purpose is to aggregate and rank crowd sourced content with crowd sourced input. Adding a "To The Top" button for moderators defeats the purpose of Reddit.

<comment><USER14> > Why do moderators need tools to promote content they view as valuable? Isn't > that what the upvote button is for?

The upvote button leads to Logan Paul and walmart. If that's what you want, there are plenty of unmoderated subreddits which provide that.

> These are moderators. Volunteer enthusiasts of the communities they > moderate. They have no stake in Reddit and they get nothing regardless of > what content gets seen by who.

They absolutely have a stake in the community they are nurturing actually working and leading towards the outcome they're looking for. Folks moderating /r/science want /r/science to be good according to their criteria of goodness, which are unlikely to be the same criteria used by moderators of /r/aww, /r/antm, /r/SWARJE/ or /r/SubredditSimulator/, all of which are different from one another.

Moderators are not unemotional robots doing busywork for a faceless corporation.

> They're job is to make sure nobody breaks subreddit rules.

Their "job" is to create and foster communities, moderators _define subreddit rules in the first place_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There seem to be two stages in the life cycle of social media sites that every one of them follows:

1) The site starts with transparent rules. The users are in power. Data access is open and easy. The user interface is friendly.

...the site becomes popular...

2) Rules become a secret. Power is taken away from the users. Data access becomes limited and more complicated. The user interface becomes bloated and hostile.

I really hope we will manage to get decentralized social media off the ground. It sucks that even after years of work, the content creators and community builders have nothing to show for it. They are just slaves to the platform owners.

<comment><USER16> > _The user interface is friendly._

One advantage of the systems that web fora largely replaced — mailing lists and usenet — is that content and presentation are not coupled, so each user can use their own preferred interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > First, the site replaced default communities—the 100 subreddits that once > made up the front page of Reddit—with r/popular, _which takes posts from all > subreddits_. The changes were made to help smaller subreddits compete with > the larger, more established communities.

That's wrong as /r/popular explicitly excludes a bunch of sub-reddits. While one could see it as the Reddit staff catering it to what's "popular", a more cynical view is that the entire concept was created to shape the definition of "popular". It's pretty easy to tip the scales when you're the one managing them.

Separately, does The Daily Dot have any sort of editing or review process? "Huffman" is misspelled "Hoffman", extra confusingly in a direct quote from him.

<comment><USER18> If you want to see a version of /r/popular with all subreddits, there's /r/all. /r/popular removes NSFW subbreddits, and subreddits that users often filter from /r/all (like sports subreddits).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Reddit has not confirmed what specifically it changed to prevent post > manipulation but said it's something it doesn't support or allow.

Presumably some of these changes had to do with removing e.g. r/The_Donald's ability to spam the front page. This article is really incomplete without talking about the problems that the new rules were designed to solve.

</comment><comment><USER20> The article is missing some context here where spez said that r/science mods removed the popular posts in the sub during AMA for increased attention which is allegedly vote manipulation from their end.

Full reply : [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8khscc/rscience_wi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8khscc/rscience_will_no_longer_be_hosting_amas/dz8nky8)

</comment><comment><USER21> I noticed HN fixes inaccurate titles, can that be done here? I don't think it's fair for the title to imply Reddit is to blame, based on the CEO's comment in the article, which goes into detail on the (completely reasonable) anti-abuse measures that resulted in this. The moderators were clearly manipulating the site to promote these AMAs (albeit with good intentions) so it seems things are more complicated than "Reddit censors science"

Edit: looks like it's been changed, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I took the title verbatim from the article to avoid editorializing. I am not sure where HN stands regarding changing the post title to something that is significantly different from the article title.

<comment><USER22> That's in the site guidelines:

 _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait._

The article title in this case is arguably both, so we changed it to use a more neutral phrase from the article. That's always the best way to change a title, btw, when you have to. Articles nearly always include some neutral representative phrase that describes what they're about, and it's much better to find a 'native' one that way than to make up a new title oneself. Trick of the trade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I do agree that the r/science moderator was wrong in attempting to game the frontpage algorithm (by removing popular r/science posts, temporarily, so that AMAs could float to the top). But I don't get why these AMAs, which ostensibly drew large audiences, wouldn't already be at the top of r/science at their peak?

<comment><USER24> There are many things I don't agree with on reddit such as locking of posts but r/science has to be one of the best moderated sites on reddit.

I'm not sure about removing posts I've never noticed that on r/science. But just because I have not witnessed it doesn't mean it isn't true. I do have to say in post comments all the jokes, anecdotal stories (I'm guilty!) or bickering are quickly removed and that seems appropriate for the science. Let actual verified scientists answer genuine questions or make comments in a post's comments section.

This seems like both sides have good points but one side is the overall owner. The majority of subreddits have abysmal moderation quickly locking what the mods can't be bothered to moderate. Locking posts stifles debate it's just pure moderator laziness.

<comment><USER25> >I'm not sure about removing posts I've never noticed that on r/science. But just because I have not witnessed it doesn't mean it isn't true.

Just FYI, there's no question if it's true. The mod admitted it in the article:

"Allen admitted to the Daily Dot that he deleted popular r/science posts so AMAs would be more prominently featured. But he argues the controversial action was required for his posts to gain widespread visibility.

"[deleting posts] is a consequence of the nature of the user base's interest in science," Allen told the Daily Dot. "Meaning, if science is put in front of them, they [Reddit users] like it. But they don't go seek it out. That's for stupid cat pictures and other relaxing things. Science isn't.""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They sure seem determined to re-enact the DIGG collapse.

</comment><comment><USER27> On an possibly unrelated note it seems my account has developed an issue where the front page tabs only shows articles from the last 12 hours, at best.

<comment><USER28> Is this the old "hot" front page, or the new default "best" front page? The latter is complete and utter garbage, and favours newness above all other criteria.

<comment><USER27> both actually, the hot tab showing a few more than the best tab.</comment></comment></comment>


We're grandparents doing a startup and Logan's run can bite me - <AUTHOR> http://www.thejuliagroup.com/blog/?p=3008

<comment><USER2> I'm really tired of the arrogance prevalent in startup culture. H;onesty is great, brutal honesty is usually quite helpful, but bragging and putting other people down under the guise of honesty is not.

This is particularly bad when combined with prejudices such as the one demonstrated by @techstepper. He makes these comments about "old people" like he is so wise and understanding. He hasn't been there. He's not "old". If he's anything like most of the people that talk like him, he probably doesn't even know very many "old people".

So how the hell would he know shit about being "old"?

I'm not trying to argue that I know any better. (I'm 17, so that would be rank hypocrisy). But I at least know not to disparage my elders and usually betters because of what the hip 20-somethings that the tech scene is filled with say.

You don't think that a lot of these "old people" used to be like you? Of course they did. They know what it's like to be 20-something, but you don't know jack shit about what it's like to be 40- or 50-something, so shut the fuck up about it.

I find nothing wrong with pointing out that people with families _usually_ can't take the risk of working at a startup, and people who have made a lot of money their whole lives _usually_ can't take the pay drop that comes from it. Is that true of all those people? Of course not! Are all "old people" like that? No!

It's stupid to cut yourself off from the experience of entire generations simply to be cool and hip. Companies that embrace "old people", rather than categorically dismiss them, while still acknowledging some of the _potential_ and _not always present_ challenges that can sometimes exist more often with them are going to do much better in the long run, because they can learn from the "old people's" mistakes and experience, rather than having to go make those mistakes on their own. It's great for character to make your own mistakes - not so much for building a company.

/rant. I don't usually swear, but sometimes people need to be called on the carpet. This practice (I hate the word "ageism", and I'm not entirely sure why) is stupid, petty, and destructive.

Good on AnnMaria for standing up to these people and calling them out. This is a problem that needs to be addressed more than it is, rather than being shoved under the carpet and ignored.

EDIT: I meant to point out that I'm using scare quotes around "old people" because calling 40- and 50-somethings "old" is patently absurd, and comes from this myopic view that looks at the 20s and 30s as the only time that really matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff. Being a 39 year old, I feel this issue more and more lately. Luckily, I haven't encountered a lot of overt / obvious ageism. If anyone has discriminated against me because of my age, I didn't recognize it as such. But maybe you never do, who knows?

Not sure if there's any "West coast / East coast" dichotomy or not though. It seems that you hear more stories about "ageism in startups" from the West coast, but, then again, there are more startup stories of any kind from the West coast, best as I can tell. Me, I'm on the East coast (NC) and I feel like the startup culture here is a little bit different. Ironically, it seems a bit more laid back, at least going from what you read / see / hear about WC startups.

</comment><comment><USER4> 54 really isn't that old, in fact back in the day (say the 90s) a typical entrepreneur would be at least a fortysomething who had cut their teeth at a previous company.</comment>


Going off the grid, our family story - <AUTHOR> http://www.fieldlines.com/index.php/topic,148881.0.html <comment><USER2> Sorry, that link doesn't seem to work.</comment>


Why Your Developer Wants to Use Document Databases – With Asya Kamsky - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPsRYZZHkdE <comment><AUTHOR> Asya Kamsky, veteran engineer at MongoDB and previously the world of SQL, talks about why developers want to use Document Databases.</comment>


Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.arunhasablog.com/2013/11/13/beware-uber-has-no-customer-service-and-still-has-bugs/ <comment><USER3> > _Going forward, I am probably just going to initiate a chargeback. They > aren't giving me many choices._

I've had great email support from Uber in New York. That said, a few years ago a lost iPhone turned into several phantom SUV rides in and out of New Jersey. An email to Uber revealed a policy against reversing such transactions.

"Okay," I thought, "chargeback it is." But it is not that simple - <USER2> chargeback prompted an account suspension. The issue was resolved a few months later, but still leaves a stink in the mouth whenever I start to recommend the service.

<comment><USER4> _" Okay," I thought, "chargeback it is." But it is not that simple_

It never is that simple. As best I can tell, a chargeback should be considered to be the ultimate burning of bridges with that company.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A Community Manager from LA got back to me via email. They refunded my trip and gave me a $50 credit. Transcript of his email:

Hi Arun,

Thanks for reaching out and so sorry for the delay here. We take customer support very seriously and the fact that it took a few days to get a response is definitely not cool or the standard. I'm working with my support team to make sure that emails like yours don't slip through the cracks again like this.

As for your trip and adjustment, the driver accidentally ended the trip prematurely and our operations team went in to adjust the fare to the amount that our estimator shows for this route (you can see a full breakdown for the charges below). However, it looks like there was a bug here that duplicated the adjustment (creating an additional $83 charge), which resulted in the $166 adjustment. Our engineers have already started looking into this to see exactly what went wrong.

I understand this is a big inconvenience and you shouldn't have to pay for this hassle, so I have refunded this trip in full (card receipt attached) -- you should see the refund back on your card in the next few business days. Additionally, for the delay in our response, I have added a $50 credit to your account. It looks like you ride in San Francisco most often, so this should get you a few rides on us. I promise this is not the norm and hope you can give us another shot!

Please reach out if there is anything else I can do.

==== Price Breakdown =====

Base Fare $3

Distance 32.5 miles x $2.55/mile $82.75

Time 4:30 minutes x $0.50/minute $2.50

Total $88

Best, James

Community Manager - LA Twitter - @Uber_LA

</comment><comment><USER5> I am permanently banned from Uber.

About 6 months ago, I noticed I was unable to log in to my account. Resetting the password did nothing, so I sent an email to the local support address. Almost two weeks later, I finally get the following reply:

      I looked into this situation and it appears that this
      device has been used on 25 different Uber accounts, which
      is a major red flag for us. We will not be reactivating
      your account.
      Uber Love,
      Sam

I have one of those "firewall" apps on my rooted Android phone that lets you restrict individual permissions for a given application. By default, I prevent applications from transmitting the IMEI. I assume at least 24 other people have done the same thing.

I sent an email explaining the issue, and they eventually emailed me back saying they would "check in with their engineering team and circle back soon." In May. My subsequent emails have been ignored. There is, as far as I can tell, no way to escalate the issue.

I used to really like Uber, but they sure did their best to keep me from using it.

<comment><USER6> If they don't know your real IMEI, how can they permanently ban you? They don't ask for a copy of your social security card or anything.

I can see why you might want to permanently ban _them_ , though. Blaming you for a bug in their software.

<comment><USER7> It is absolutely NOT a bug in their code. The relevant API is here: [https://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Te...](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/TelephonyManager.html#getDeviceId\(\))

If that firewall app is making those methods return anything other than null or a truly unique ID, then they are not a compatible android device, and someone using such a device is not in any position to complain when apps behave incorrectly.

It's worth mentioning that it's not required for the return value of those methods to be the IMEI, but it is required to be either unique or null.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kinda tangential, but I think this social hacking that happens in the search of customer support is really interesting. I've used and seen it used over and over, normally following something like this:

1\. There's a problem. Generally it's a pretty big deviation from normal service involving a non-trivial loss, like paying an order of magnitude more for a cab than is necessary.

2\. The customer tries to notify the company, normally just to recover the loss.

3\. If it's a start up, there probably is limited or isn't any customer service. Larger companies will generally put people through a large, automated, slow, and probably ineffective process with tickets and machine answering systems. The issue isn't resolved either way.

4\. Next up is a tweet. Some complaint about the issue @somecompany. A lot of companies large and small have embraced Twitter as a psuedo-support channel.

5\. If the subsequent tweets get ignored, some will take to writing a blog post about the situation and lack of support.

6\. If the blogger has any connections or visibility, aggregators or media might pick it up and republish it. Brief infamy ensues.

Reminds me of when that woman's AirBnB place got demolished. I'm not sure why Uber doesn't have killer support with $300 million to spend (maybe they do and this is an outlier), but I think the lesson for the start up community. People expect customer service, and customer service needs to be easier and faster than complaining publicly to a large number of people.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm long on Uber and Lyft but their approach to billing is lacking.

Uber really should provide some sort of cost breakdown on your previous rides. (They provide quotes, but not itemized receipts.) But at least you can get a sense for how much they charge on their website.

Lyft, hilariously, doesn't tell you how much they charge! At all! What on Earth is their thinking behind that? Is it miles? Minutes? Am I charged based on my Klout score? It's a total mystery to me.

I hate taking cabs, but at least their pricing is 100% transparent.

<comment><USER10> It's amusing that various local taxi regulations, which Uber and friends have long decried as being unfair, inefficient, outdated, etc. are pretty much the sole reason taxi pricing is transparent.

<comment><USER11> Not only transparent, but predictable: you don't have to read the fine print on each individual taxi to figure out if this particular fellow is charging you something absurd. That's something Sweden has run into with its deregulation of taxis: [http://www.thelocal.se/20120425/40476](http://www.thelocal.se/20120425/40476)

The gist of it is that some independent taxi drivers will legally post prices about 20x the going rate. Of course nobody who both knows what they're doing and reads the price will take such a taxi. But the business model / scam is to snag just a handful of clueless rides each day, especially targeting tourists arriving at Stockholm Airport. Then rack up huge profits on a small number of rides. It helps that tourists arriving at the Stockholm airport typically: 1) don't know what the going rate for taxi service is; 2) don't have an intuitive conception of what prices in Swedish Kronor mean; and 3) don't know how to quickly locate and read the posted prices.

<comment><USER12> Although being Sweden, there's a quick and efficient train from the airport to downtown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ran into the same thing with AirBnb actually - really poor support and messed up rule based billing. A host agreed to pick me up then couldn't make it for hours after. She had a strict cancelation policy, but agreed to refund anyway since it was her fault. She and I both contacted AirBnb to issue the refund, but they never did anything, and later even sent an automated survey asking how their support was. So they ignored what both I and the host wanted and wasted 1k of my money.

They've probably still saved me money over the long run vs. hotels, but honestly, I prefer to just call up previous hosts and offer them money outside AirBnb now and other similar options since I know AirBnb won't back me up when they screw up. The same option is available with cars as well. You can take Uber or Super Shuttle or whatever the first few times, but the drivers will usually give you a card so you can just call them direct and get a better rate.

</comment><comment><USER14> In Boston, I had an experience with a driver who took us to the right street in the wrong city, then drove the wrong way down a one way and was pulled over by the police.

I gave a 1 star review and explained what happened. Without further action on my part, the local Uber rep refunded the difference between the actual care and what it should have been had there not been the whole detour. Very thoughtfully proactive.

<comment><USER15> I've experienced something similar in San Fran, where a driver took me on a really weird route, and I gave a 3 star review, and just said they could have picked a much better route and they agreed, and refunded the difference between the route taken, and the best route.

<comment><USER16> So why doesn't Uber calculate the route to take and display it to the driver? Every Uber car I've taken, the driver has both the Uber driver app running on their phone, and a separate GPS device.

<comment><USER15> That driver didn't have a separate GPS device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I experienced an exact opposite response. We had a fairly troubling experience with an Uber driver late at night, and sent an email explaining what happened and requesting a response.

The next day we had an email response, refunding our money, requesting more information, and offering to talk on the phone. A little more discussion and we were told the driver had been terminated and got another heartfelt apology. It was great.

</comment><comment><USER18> NYE 2012 I got caught in the crash that brought down their system and lost all their reservations. The driver who was heading to pick me up at a 1x congestion rate probably got a brand new 5x faire after the system came back up and made an easy decision. A decision that left me in sub freezing temperatures waiting for a car that would never come.

It was my first uber experience and while it hasn't quite been my last, they certainly aren't my favorite choice.

I don't have the email archive available but I seem to recall them taking almost a week to get back to me. I imagine that the crash caused them quite a customer service backlog though. At the end of the day, for leaving me in sub freezing temeratures they gave me a $50 credit.

</comment><comment><USER19> This should probably be retitled "Man has problem with Uber on Sunday, declares crisis mode on Tuesday".

<comment><USER20> It's also worth pointing out that Monday was a federal holiday. So, he didn't even wait 1 business day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Going forward, I am probably just going to initiate a chargeback. They > aren't giving me many choices.

Give them a week to sort it out. Don't immediately chargeback, but call the credit card company and tell them about the irregularity. That way, you give Uber some room to sort it out, you don't have to worry about the charge in the process, and you established the timeline in case things do get hairy.

<comment><USER22> A week... Why?

24 hrs is plenty... they should have a phone # at minimum. Chargebacks, etc are how to get action.

<comment><USER23> Chargebacks are a valid tool to use when a business doesn't act in good faith with you and is trying to take your money, but some people use them way too casually for the type of aggressive tool it is. Not getting an email response in 24 hours isn't an unreasonable or unusual situation. Chargebacks can have serious repercussions for small businesses; everything from being forced to pay an additional penalty to some faceless algorithm closing off their payment account and people ultimately losing their jobs because of it.

While responding to an email in less than 24 hours is ideal, many smaller businesses don't have a 24 hour per day customer service center and can't always respond to an email in that time frame. Some businesses say 48 hours - 72 hours on their contact page and I think that's pretty reasonable for anything that's not an emergency.

<comment><USER24> If a company decides to be faceless by not providing a phone number and not communicating on their support practices†, then being penalized by some faceless algorithm sounds like the kind of lesson they need.

† It's not hard to send automatic emails if there are no supporters in the office for a few days or if the queue is too long.

<comment><USER25> Be careful, the lesson for the rider may end up being a ban from the service.

All because he couldn't wait a business day for a response (the ride was Sunday around noon, Monday was a holiday, a Tweet reply came Tuesday).

<comment><USER24> What makes you think he'd ever even want to trust them again when they happily take 80$ of him, make no movements to return them and leave him with exactly zero communication as to why that is?

<comment><USER25> They didn't happily take money form him. There apparently was a billing mistake or 2. And there has been at least one communication. I would be very surprised if he never wanted to use Uber again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've only had one serious issue w/ Uber requiring customer service. We were in Berkeley -- which is not a city I know very well -- and asked to be taken to the nearest BART station for our ride back into the city.

It seemed to take longer than I expected, and sure enough when I got the Uber receipt, it was plain as day: We literally drove _right by_ the Downtown Berkeley station north a ways to the North Berkeley station. It was galling to see it presented on their trip map. I don't blame the guy for not knowing the area that well I guess, I just didn't want to pay for it. They gave me a $20 credit to my account which was just a few bucks less than the entire ride that night. All in all I was pleased. The response took a bit more than 24 hours.

</comment><comment><USER27> In Chicago, I left my phone in a Black Car at 9 Am. After realizing this half an hour later, I put in a ticket to customer service with the name of the driver. Ten minutes later, Nicole from Chicago's community management team emailed back with the drivers number. I was able to call the driver and he returned it immediately.

I was incredibly impressed by the response time and helpfulness of both the driver whose name escapes and the Chicago community team/Nicole.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've used Uber 250+ times since 2010 and haven't had any issues that warranted any action beyond occasional 3 or 4 star ratings of drivers.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really dislike these kinds of posts that try to dramatize things with statements like Uber "has no customer service." It feels like you're trying to hold up the company by stirring up the mob. You should have given them more of a chance.

I had a problem where I rode in an Uber and the GPS tweaked out, causing the distance to be 2x what it should have been. I responded to the email, and they refunded me for the difference that was overcharged within a day.

</comment><comment><USER30> To have $180 taken from your account is certainly nothing to sneeze at. At certain points in my life that could have seriously affected my ability to pay rent!

It seems rather drastic to totally drop the service and do a chargeback after 3 days, though. Obviously something has slipped through the cracks.

Uber is a super slick system, but I'd bet money there's still people behind the scenes scrambling to keep the gears spinning.

<comment><USER31> > It seems rather drastic to totally drop the service and do a chargeback > after 3 days, though. Obviously something has slipped through the cracks.

That's the power of the chargeback, though. They might not have a customer service number but they've got a number the credit card company knows how to call. To avoid this situation in the future, an obvious solution presents itself...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's not very accurate to say they have "no customer service" when actually they just have slow customer service.

</comment><comment><USER33> For those who are in NY, you should check out Whisk at whisk.me: it's like Uber, but we have realtime pricing info during the ride, like a taxi! And our prices are cheaper too.

Disclosure: I'm a developer at Whisk.

<comment><USER34> I'd say the question most germane to this post is do you have a phone number for people who need support? or do you at least have an SLA on your email support?

<comment><USER24> They don't have a phone number and their contact form even has a silly captcha. As such the above post constitutes mindless and unreflected spam.

<comment><USER33> We do currently only do email support, but we respond to each email quickly and in a personable manner. We also have a process to check every single transaction that occurs to make sure that no extreme or inconsistent charges occur. And sorry about the captcha on the website; we are still growing rapidly better fulfill the transportation needs of New York!

<comment><USER24> Even if you don't do support via phone, you should have a phone number so one can get an actual human being in realtime interaction in case your system gets so fucked up that normal procedures break down.

As far as i'm concerned you're not a company that takes business seriously if i can't call you.

And this is echoed by many people i know, even though we prefer most of our communication to be online.

<comment><USER35> Come on with the phone number zealotry. It's very hard as a rapidly growing small-medium sized business to provide great phone service (on the level of being able to fix random problems on the spot), and if you can't provide great phone service, it's generally better to stick to asynchronous online methods where you can provide better service.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure if my post wasn't clear enough. Let me try and rephrase:

It's fine to deny phone support by default and demand usage of online tools. However if you don't provide a phone number for emergencies and cases where you fucked up, you don't take business seriously.

Doesn't mean i think you shouldn't do business. Simply means i won't trust you with anything remotely important.

<comment><USER31> The trouble with providing a phone number which is only intended for emergencies is that customers will learn that they can call it for ANYTHING. And woe to the company that says "That doesn't sound very serious! This number is only for emergencies, can you please send us an email? Bye now."

<comment><USER24> That's a matter of bad training.

<comment><USER31> No. The situation of any phone support professional who is under management pressure to both provide quality service and filter out "unimportant" requests is untenable. The quality of support will end up sucking.

The "serious problem phone support only" thing is a nice, MBAish compromise idea that won't work well. Everyone thinks their problems are serious. The way to make this work is to provide a phone support number AND to make the web- and app-based support tools work so well customers won't feel a need to call it very often.

<comment><USER24> I don't agree with your first statement, but i'm totally fine with your conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When I had issues I just put it through their "how was the ride" thing that pops up after every ride, and they sorted it for me that day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, it wasn't the ride that was the problem. It was how much they charged me. I had already submitted the "how was the ride" form.

<comment><USER36> Oh, now I see what you're driving at.

I'm still pretty stunned you weren't able to get in touch with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Another person with the exact opposite experience here: Uber has great customer service here in Seattle. Everything from lost items, bad drivers, bad routes – these happen rarely, but every time I've had a prompt customer service response. And the occasions that warranted a refund were taken care of without even requesting it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yesterday my friends called an Uber to get home from a bar. The car arrived in a few minutes as scheduled - and the driver put his head out the window to say his last fare was still in the car, he was going to go drop them off and would be back soon. They cancelled it and called another Uber.

</comment><comment><USER39> I had a small billing error with an Uber a couple months ago (I had a free ride promo that somehow got eclipsed by a $10 off Google account promo). I tweeted, got a DM a few hours later that telling me to send them an e-mail. I did, charge refunded same-day. No complaints.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've only had to use uber support once, and it was for an extreme edge technical error. I received immediate email reply from the SF CM at 2AM. She followed up twice in the following week to keep me updated on the status without me ever having to write back.

</comment><comment><USER41> Uber has been great in my experience. In NYC I had a couple terrible drivers, and I gave a couple terrible reviews.

Without me having to reach out, figured out the details, then they apologized and provided a refund.

</comment><comment><USER42> I had a couple Uber issues a while back. With a simple tweet to Uber SF, I had everything handled quickly and easily the next day (just hours later, really).

</comment><comment><USER43> I've only had things mess up once on Uber and I wrote them and they refunded the charge no problem.

</comment><comment><USER44> Camon, I understand being upset because of the overcharge, but it was just 3 days ago!! You definitely didn't pay the bill yet, if I buy a custom Macbook it will take 3 weeks to ship, I asked my bank for cheques it took 20 days, I contacted Kobo support it took 10 days to get a reply, just be f*cking patience.

<comment><USER45> Macbook: That's shipping. Irrelevant.

Asking your bank for a cheque: Again, irrelevant.

Kobo support: Well that's incredibly poor. Any support request that takes >24-48 hours is shoddy and unacceptable. It may be okay for you to 'be patient' and accept sub-par service but it doesn't mean everyone should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Outside of the Google-like lack of customer service, I am perplexed as to the software bug that led to such a bizarre calculation.</comment>


*args and **kwargs in python explained - <AUTHOR> http://freepythontips.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/args-and-kwargs-in-python-explained/

<comment><USER2> I find it interesting to see all of the comments on HN about the dislike of args and kwargs, especially given their necessity for higher order programming.

If you are making functions that modify other functions (like decorators), these are highly useful. In Python you can't guarantee that all functions you will want to modify are going to have the same type signature, so you need to be able to gracefully handle all possible combinations and pass them on to your function body. Sometimes you'll just pass args and kwargs on to a wrapped function...other times you'll do things like pick out a single argument from kwargs and use it to do something useful. But make no mistake, in Python these come in handy to have!

<comment><USER3> Personally it feels like spaghetti code. Tornado for instance is a web server written in Python and there are classes that have many parents and kwargs is used everywhere to pass named arguments up to each parent class in the constructor. The problem is it's hard to get a grasp by looking at the constructor as to what arguments should actually be passed to a class to initialize it. There's no contract or spec enforced in python so it's easy to see how errors can crop up by missing a random argument a certain parent class is expecting. It also makes it difficult to understand what a class does when the arguments a function expects are not declared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They are also easy to abuse and make APIs hard to figure out. You could see stuff like:

      process_payment_data(**kwargs)

In the docs and then have to go find out what possible values kwargs could take.

<comment><USER5> The thing that I love about python is keyword arguments. It makes the code so much more readable. The wildcards, while powerful, reduce readability.

For me, a equally powerful AND readable way is to have named arguments with defaults. So when you change the function definition to add more arguments you can insert defaults so as not to break existing code.

<comment><USER6> I find the wildcards most useful when implementing decorators or other cross- cutting metaprogramming features. For example, you could easily do a tracing decorator like this:

      def trace(fn):
        def worker(*args):
          logging.info('Called %s with args %r', fn.__name__, args)
          return fn(*args)
        worker.__name__ = fn.__name__
        # other decorator boilerplate
        return worker

      @trace
      def foo(bar, baz):
        ...

      @trace
      def foo2(x1, x2, x3):
        ...

(Note that logging.info itself takes args & kwargs as its arguments, and passes them along as formatting arguments for the string.)

If you've ever looked at AspectJ or even Haskell, this sort of functionality is virtually impossible in a statically-typed language. You go through all sorts of contortions to be able to say "I want to operate on any type of function, and I don't care how many or what type of arguments it has", and then come out with something insanely complicated that satisfies nobody. For certain use-cases, you really _don 't_ care what type of arguments it takes, you just want to pass it through to some other function.

I do wonder if there's some other language feature that could be used to achieve this without breaking documentation or static analysis, though.

<comment><USER7> You can use the `functools.wraps` decorator to deal with copying all (most) metadata from the wrapped function:

        def trace(fn):
            @functools.wraps(fn)
            def worker(*args):
                logging.info('Called %s with args %r', fn.__name__, args)
                return fn(*args)
            return worker

Docs: [http://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.wr...](http://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.wraps)

<comment><USER8> I've been looking for something exactly like this. It's so tedious trying to remember what metadata needs to be copied from a function when making a decorator. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always felt like the args and kwargs syntax in python is a blemish on an otherwise beautiful language. I'm wondering why not just let any function accept variable args, and reserve the keywords args and kwargs (without stars), where in a function body they refer to non-specified / explicitly defined arguments?

The only downside I see to that is the ability to write code poorly by passing junk arguments into functions that never get used. But you can do that with any function that declares kwargs or args right now.

Or just reserve args and kwargs and have it so functions with them in their arguments list have the same behavior as args an kwargs (just without the ugly stars). Maybe even denote them as __args__ and __kwargs__ in the same way you access special member functions of objects through __foo__ syntax, that would at least (to me) be consistent. I did a cursory google search if there is any language wide syntax surrounding star + variable name, and I couldn't find any, which seems to mean the name was just a hack using the syntax of a pointer dereference from C.

Am I wrong here and just missing some grand logic behind it? The rest of the language is really sensible so I probably am.

<comment><USER10> I work on Hy, a Lisp that compiles to Python AST, and my intuition tells me that it's a bit of a wart too. Particularly how the syntax for calling is conflated with the definition and partly in how the arguments are filled in the Call node (basically, left to right). It lets you do things like:

      >>> def foo(a, b="Default"):
      ...     print(a, b)
      ...
      >>> foo(1, 2)
      (1, 2)
      >>> foo(1)
      (1, 'Default')
      >>> foo(1, b="bar")
      (1, 'bar')
      >>> def baz(*args, **kwargs):
      ...     print(args, kwargs)
      ...
      >>> args = (1, 2, 3)
      >>> kwargs = {'foo': "bar"}
      >>> baz(*args, **kwargs)
      ((1, 2, 3), {'foo': 'bar'})

It's the first example that kind of seems 'off'. It's probably just cross- polination from my CL experience (which seems 'more correct'):

      ?> (defun foo (a &key (b "Default")) (list a b))
      FOO
      ?> (foo 1 2)
      Error: Incorrect keyword arguments

For the most part it hasn't been an issue when I'm writing the code. But when I read code that does this stuff on the call side frequently (or isn't consistent in its use over time) it can be a little frustrating.

<comment><USER11> Python 3 lets you define functions with keyword-only arguments:

        >>> def foo(a, *, b="Default"):
        ...     print((a, b))
        ...
        >>> foo(1, b="bar")
        (1, 'bar')
        >>> foo(1, 2)
        Traceback (most recent call last):
          File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
        TypeError: foo() takes 1 positional argument but 2 were given

<comment><USER10> Right, I should've specified the Python version. Python 3's grammar for argument lists changed a bit and added kwonlyargs to the mix. IIRC the call node's arglist isn't just filled in left-to-right and handed names for keyword arguments anymore.

Python 3 is definitely a step in the right direction. I wish adoption was a little more rapid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After a couple of years with Python I had a first use case for an ordered version of __kwargs. I haven 't really dived into the problem yet, but could this be done with a metaclass or is __kwargs rooted deeper in the stack?

<comment><USER13> you can't do it. see the comments in the constructor for OrderedDict (if i am remembering correctly - _somewhere_ there's _something_ in the python source that basically says "rats, need an ordered kwargs but that's not possible").

here you go - [http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/collections.py?v...](http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/collections.py?view=markup) \- line 32.

probably you need to pass in an OrderedDict instance.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I thought so. Otherwise there would be much more ordered kwargs decorators or hacks floating around. Thanks for the link to the source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found this article [http://freepythontips.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/a-url- shorten...](http://freepythontips.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/a-url-shortener-in- python/) also interesting and well-written.

</comment><comment><USER15> that has explained the mechanics of kwargs, but not explained _why_ we would use kwargs. I hardly ever use kwargs because I think they make the source code hard to read.

I think they are useful for systems with big configurations (that grow with features during development). I give every customizable function a reference to the big master config dict. Still not sure if that's a good design or not ...

<comment><USER16> I've used a couple of times for high-order functions. For example, I was playing around with sound generation and decided to create a 'stream' object. Instances of this object were defined by a function that generates the sound wave. This meant that the constructor took a parameter a somewhat generic function. I also found that some of my generator functions could take arguments themselves, such as pitch. Having _args and_ *kwargs allows you to pass these arbitrary variables through.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Distributed system areas you'd be interested in reading about - <AUTHOR> I happen to work on a large and interesting distributed system - so far, this has been one of the bigger and more complex systems I've worked on. I have previously written a post on a few concepts I picked up while building this system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295).
I'm in the process of drafting a follow-up post, covering the operational part of keeping this system up and running (a big part of the day to day!), and perhaps one on migrating from the old system to the new one, without having users notice.
Before I shout into the vacuum, I'd love to hear what areas or topics those interested in distributed or high-availability systems would be interested to read about. <comment><USER2> How does a new engineer to a project go from knowing nothing about how a distributed system to having a sense of mastery over the tasks of:

\- Explaining the architecture of the system at a high level

\- Given a change that needs to be made to the system, navigating to the relevant part of the codebases.

\- Write an integration test which checks some invariant involving multiple components of the system

\- Given an error report which might be noise or might indicate a real production issue, triage the report.

And how does the process of gaining mastery of these activities differ from doing so when joining as a contributor to a non-distributed system?</comment>


Missouri Attorney General launches investigation of Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article184113056.html <comment><USER2> It seems like an easy way to generate some publicity for an Attorney General to sue Google. I watched with interest when the Mississippi AG did this ([https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/mississippi- ag-j...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/mississippi-ag-jim-hood- sues-google-again/)).

It always seems to go back to some sort of privacy and/or surfacing web data that someone else doesn't want surfaced. I don't know if there is an easy answer here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yay! I am happy about this. I feel as if there are a ton of monopolies and trusts today that stifle competition. Does anyone else feel similar?

<comment><USER4> I don't.

Why do we want or even trust government to decide for us that a company is too big and needs to be smaller or that a company should conducts it business in the way that the government wants it to. As long as a company isn't somehow forcing me to use it services, I'm free to go elsewhere.

If you don't like Google don't use it. The fact that you desire something from Google that it isn't giving you (searching with more privacy, better free email service, whatever) doesn't give you some sort of moral claim against the company.

The public can vote for other companies by buying from or using them. As a last resort, start a new company and run it the way you want.

<comment><USER5> > If you don't like Google don't use it.

 _What happens when people don 't know they're using Google?_

I have an Android phone and one thing that is bugging me is how the default browser on the bottom "toolbar" is in fact named "Internet". This may be fine for techies like you and me, but I'm concerned for the older folk who may have difficulty with technology or non-techies. In this case, if one just went with the defaults, one wouldn't even know you were using a Google-built browser.

Remember that old story back when Internet Explorer was dominating the market, and most people surveyed couldn't tell the difference between the web and a web browser? They pointed to the "e" browser logo and said, _" That's the internet!"_

This is a nasty pattern in tech these days. On my laptop which carries Windows 10, the programs aren't named in such a way to identify that they are Microsoft programs [0]. You see an email client named "Mail" and a map service named "Maps". No indication that they are _Microsoft Mail_ or _Microsoft (Bing) Maps_.

Also, on Windows 10 when you log in you are presented with a "photo of the day". If you click on any of the links on that image, the URLs will be opened in Microsoft Edge, and any searches are performed using Bing, _regardless if you set your default browser to something else_!

[0] [https://s18.postimg.org/ipxt1962h/default.png](https://s18.postimg.org/ipxt1962h/default.png)

<comment><USER6> _Remember that old story back when Internet Explorer was dominating the market, and most people surveyed couldn 't tell the difference between the web and a web browser? They pointed to the "e" browser logo and said, "That's the internet!"_

How did that whole trying to use their monopoly to dominate the market work out for Microsoft in hindsight?

There was time that AOL was the number one ISP and MySpace was the number one social media platform.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, how did it work out that the EU forced Microsoft to unbundle its browser?

<comment><USER6> It's not "unbundling" the browser that caused Microsoft to lose its dominance in the technology industry. None of the big four major technology companies today - Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon -depend on their browser being dominant. Microsoft failed to take advantage of the next major technology waves - mobile, search, social, and ecommerce.

Unbundling the browser didn't help the other browser manufacturers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case you got a weird sense of deja vu, this is Missouri, not Mississippi.

Mississippi's AG, Jim Hood vs Google: [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/01/mississippi-ag-j...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/01/mississippi-ag-jim-hood-sues-google-again/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I haven't read Axios before, but I really appreciated that summary. I got the gist of what the lawsuit concerned and what the ulterior motive might be and there weren't 10 more unnecessary paragraphs with no real information padding it out. It's almost exactly the right amount of concise.

<comment><USER10> A politician elected on a populist platform doing things to stand up for his people is an "ulterior motive"? To me, an ulterior motive would be getting elected on a populist platform, then taking actions to benefit his own commercial interests.

<comment><USER9> Why does your definition of an "ulterior" motive require commercial benefit?

Are you suggesting that, if this man had a secret reason for going after Google, and that reason was that it was part of his plan to boost his popularity and name recognition with local conservatives by shitting on "liberal" companies in order to boost his chances of winning a seat in the Senate, it would somehow not count as an "ulterior motive"?

Mind you, I'm not saying that this is the case. Maybe he's just going after a big company for a good reason. But your suggestion that an ulterior motive could not even theoretical exist because he's not engaged in commerce seems ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> My definition doesn't _require_ a commercial interest. It's just amazing to me in an age where politicians are typically benefitting their or their crony's commercial interests that a guy who is elected on a populist platform is accused of having an ulterior motive for defending the interests of the people as he promised, because that might cause his constituents to elect him to a different office and serve them further.

<comment><USER11> Among other things, this seems to carry the implicit premise that prosecuting Google for antitrust violations is a populist issue. I would wager that if you polled it, you would find the exact opposite.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you might want to give this a read if you think Google's power is of no concern:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful- five...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five-start- ups.html)

<comment><USER11> That's not what I said. The claim is that it's not a populist position, not that it's not the correct one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are so many actual monopolies that seemly get ignored. Maybe google needs to buy I mean donate to more politicians.

<comment><USER13> They should learn from Comcast, which manages to bribe government in banning their competiton :)

<comment><USER14> If you're talking AT&T/Time Warner, then consider Time Warner own CNN's parent company.. I doubt Comcast's bribes are necessary for the current government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And I was just lobbying Google Fiber employees about expanding fiber (or wireless) to my hometown, St. Joseph, which is near Kansas City.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's actually correctly pronounced Missouri.

But it's nice to see our state in the news for a good purpose.

</comment><comment><USER17> We've updated the URL from [https://www.axios.com/missouri-ag-starts- antitrust-consumer-...](https://www.axios.com/missouri-ag-starts-antitrust- consumer-protection-probe-into-google-2509102675.html), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm guessing someone in Missouri didn't get their political payoff this month.

</comment><comment><USER19> Google is a target because of their strong relationship with Obama/Clinton/democrats.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/technology/google-in- post...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/technology/google-in-post-obama- era-aggressively-woos-republicans.html?mtrref=www.google.com)

<comment><USER17> Whether or not that's true we need commenters to include substantive information when making such claims, otherwise we're just gonna have another tedious partisan flamewar.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Translation: We need money and we are watching the EU take incredible amounts of money in fines, and it occurred to someone "Why can't we do that?!"

<comment><USER21> The EU doesn't fine to fund itself. Fines are not a good funding source.

<comment><USER22> Just look at where cops do traffic monitoring (aka speed traps). In Germany they are supposed to put speed traps in areas with a large amount of accidents caused by speeding, but many end up being placed simply where people casually speed in tiny amounts (e.g. 20 km/h too fast is 30€)... and a single trap can bring 15M € per year ([http://www.stuttgarter- nachrichten.de/inhalt.verkehrsueberwa...](http://www.stuttgarter- nachrichten.de/inhalt.verkehrsueberwachung-a-8-blitzer-bringt-dem-land- rekordeinnahmen.b2b85819-b0dc-455b-9f7b-8c4ffb582681.html)).

In total, speed traps in Germany are estimated to bring in billions of euros in revenue ([https://www.welt.de/motor/article13877289/Das- Milliardengesc...](https://www.welt.de/motor/article13877289/Das- Milliardengeschaeft-mit-den-Tempo-Blitzern.html)). There are many agencies which can place speed traps and profit - federal, country, county and city cops, in addition to city personnel and sometimes even private companies.

They are not a good funding source, but a very consistent one once you find the right spots to milk people.

<comment><USER23> Speeding fines can only be levied by the municipality in which the violation took place. That's exactly one entity.

What you didn't mention is that (since removed) 15 M€ speeding trap was located on a downhill stretch with a high risk of traffic jams and not only placed for revenue.

German speeding fines are minuscule in international comparison. Just try "casually speeding" 20 km/h in any neighboring country.

Speeding is a German national sport leading to a vicious circle of decreasing limits even further.

<comment><USER22> > Speeding fines can only be levied by the municipality in which the violation > took place. That's exactly one entity.

No, it's two entities at the least in urban areas: the police and the municipality.

> German speeding fines are minuscule in international comparison.

Yes, which makes people speed in higher amounts and only because of this the system of traps bringing in 15M+€ actually works - yes you get the occasional dumb moron with 50+ km/h, but the most part is netted by the small fish speeding 10-20 km/h.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is bizarre. It's also bizarre how the reporting on it doesn't mention how out of left field this is. Why Google? why Missouri? How come a republican is doing this?

As for: _The United States has lagged behind Europe in pursuing antitrust cases against tech giants_

This narrative is silly. The EU goes after "tech giants" partly because they are foreign, the US doesn't have that incentive.

<comment><USER25> Nah, the EU also goes after local champions, see for example the Vitamin case:

[http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-01-1625_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-01-1625_en.htm)

It's just that the US has become extremely lax in its anti-trust stance.

<comment><USER26> That's from 16 years ago. To give context, that's six years before the treaty of Lisbon which defines the EU Commission today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Missouri 2017 State Budget: $27 Billion [0]

Google Net Profit Last 4 Qs: $63 Billion

Google can literally fund the state of Missouri indefinately. How does Missouri make this a fair fight?

[0] [https://www.usnews.com/news/best- states/missouri/articles/20...](https://www.usnews.com/news/best- states/missouri/articles/2017-06-30/missouri-governor-signs-budget- cuts-250m-in-spending)

<comment><USER28> _How does Missouri make this a fair fight?_

The power of government. Missouri can definitely pay for quite a few attorneys (maybe do a tobacco litigation type deal) but the danger is that other states will join in. Having taken on Google can be quite a thing on your resume as you seek higher office...who will resist it?

<comment><USER29> Surely you mean the taxpayers of Missouri will be paying for a long and protracted legal battle. And once they find out the amount they paid to pad his resume they'll have a thing or two to say on how Missouri funds were used.

<comment><USER28> Always been like that. But personally I think Google should be investigated and stopped, smaller companies will again have a chance.

I assume that they are safeguards: the governor might be able to intervene if an AG goes nuts, the courts etc etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth - <AUTHOR> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1816021&CFID=553004824&CFTOKEN=74577277 <comment> T-A It should be noted that the paper is from 2010. In 2011 I pitted a then brand new Core i7-2600K against an AMD 5800 for an embarrassingly parallel workload, and ended up going with the i7. GPUs are evolving faster though. Glancing at current benchmarks, a Titan might be 2-3x faster than the GTX280 used in the article [1], while a Core i7-9600K seems to be only 25% faster than the Core i7-960 in the article [2]. Programming ease ha also improved, especially on the CUDA side, so these days I would guess the GPU advantage is significantly larger.

[1] [http://www.hwcompare.com/14040/geforce-gtx-280-vs-geforce- gt...](http://www.hwcompare.com/14040/geforce-gtx-280-vs-geforce-gtx-titan/)

[2] [http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-960-vs-Intel- Core-i7-6...](http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-960-vs-Intel- Core-i7-6700K)</comment>


What do users want? - <AUTHOR> http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22i+wish+i+could%22

<comment><USER2> Based on that research, I guess my next startup will end all home work and help people "be there" (wherever their friends are hanging out) instead of working.</comment>


Escher's "Ascending and Descending" in Lego - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/ascending.html <comment><USER2> This is excellent! I love recreations of illusions such as this -- a friend of mine's PhD student once knitted a klein bottle of all things!!! Pic here: [https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/dBRNg4lwQVKJ1r8ziQNi](https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/dBRNg4lwQVKJ1r8ziQNi)

There are also a lot of cool optical illusions you can recreate in your browser - e.g. [https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/tagged/illusions](https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/tagged/illusions)

(I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, so any feedback much appreciated, thanks!)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was my favourite of the Escher Legos. I seem to remember Andrew telling me the cowls only came in one Lego set. With one in each set...</comment>


Mr. 'Deling' Responds to 'I make 500K/yr and am not rich' - <AUTHOR> http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-mr-deling-responds-to-someone-who-might-be-professor-todd-henderson.html

<comment><USER2> I don't think I've ever met a person who made a lot of money who'd admit they were rich. The standard these days seems to be: you're rich if you could never work again for the rest of your life, and still live extremely lavishly, with the private jet and yachts and multiple houses. That sets the bar at maybe $100m net worth, which yes, very few people have.

Weirdly, I know people who make around $70k who claim that they're _very well off_ , and seem to actually feel that way. But the people making $300k, $500k, $800k? Invariably they feel middle class, perhaps upper-middle-class, but not even _that_ upper. My guess is that it has a lot to do with social circles and where you live. The guy making $70k who lives in a modest house and whose friends all work at coffee shops feels rich; the guy making $300k who lives on the upper east side of Manhattan and whose friends are all VPs doesn't.

<comment><USER3> My parents (both physicians) both readily admit they are rich. They also believe the highest tax bracket (their tax bracket) should be raised considerably.

<comment><USER4> How's 80%?

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but that seems like the kind of snarky one-liner that doesn't add anything to the discussion. Because davidw said it so well, I'll just inline quote him here:

 _This is exactly the kind of comment that I feared we would see when articles like this start gaining traction. It's a cheese puff comment: it's got some taste, but it's empty. It has nothing to back it up, no content, no reasoning, no well crafted argument. It's just an empty "rah rah" type of slogan of the type that politicians regularly regurgitate. There is nothing new or clever about the comment, it's the sort of thing that's made the rounds elsewhere 100's of times. Being such a cheap, throwaway comment, it mostly/usually doesn't lead to particularly interesting discussions, as we can see here, despite a few good comments, but more zingers, one liners and similar "go home team!" cheering for one political side._

<comment><USER4> I think you misinterpreted my comment. It was intended to be pithy, not snarky. So your parents think that their current tax rate is too low, so I named a higher rate. Why is 80% outlandish?

My point was simply that it's a bit silly to bemoan the low rate of taxes today unless you name a rate that you think _is_ reasonable. Clearly you think 80% is unreasonable. If one only thinks a 1-2% increase is reasonable, then stipulate that, rather than making the grandiose claim that taxes should raised _considerably_. Isn't an 80% rate a considerable increase?

The fact is, most people think that 80% is grossly unreasonable. Why? At least there should be a principled argument, not just a rich person bragging (via a complaint) that he/she could afford higher taxes.

<comment><USER3> _Clearly you think 80% is unreasonable_

I never said that. I said that, as given, your comment had no argument or reasoning. This is the comment you should have originally posted, not your two word question which vaguely implied your real argument.

<comment><USER4> That aside, do you have a response? How about 90%?

<comment><USER5> 90% superficially sounds unreasonable, because we have a tendency to think that wealth is distributed on a bell curve. But wealth is not distributed that way, it is distributed according to a power law, which means that a significant number of people make in excess of $100M per year while others make less than $1000. If wealth were distributed according to skill and ability, the ratio between the highest and lowest would be much lower and billionaires would be as rare as 100 ft tall people.

The idea that a person could personally contribute the equivalent of $100M of value in a year per their efforts and skills (which ARE distributed on a bell curve) is absurd. It is this mismatch between the distribution of ability and the distribution of wealth that the rich exploit. So for someone making $100M/year, a 90% tax rate is not unreasonable at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think this makes the point that 500k/yr isn't rich but it does make the point that people's expenses will grow to fit their income. I've known several people in this pay bracket and I've often found their standard of living isn't all that much better than mine. They have a 60" TV instead of my 42" and a BMW instead of my Chevy but their still watching the same shows and stuck in the same traffic.

<comment><USER7> Produce and reap the reward of wealth later. With some luck, you'll be able to afford that 60'' TV and a fancier Chevy.

It still won't solve the traffic congestion problem though. That will take explicit toll fee for using the roads, and that won't be popular.

Division of labor and global trade has made us incredibly wealthy compared to the past. So focus on a niche and make people richer. Remember, self- sufficiency mean we have to make our own clothes, grow our own food, etc.

<comment><USER8> Or, instead of going along like everybody else, find a job where you're valuable, take a pay cut, work 30 hours a week and take 2 months off a year and make your schedules so you're never stuck in traffic again.

The belief that material wealth is always more valuable than being able to spend time doing what you want is astounding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I feel sorry for the guy whose taxes are about to go up substantially, he shouldn't be trying to claim that $500K a year isn't rich. It is rich.

Instead he should be pushing the argument "Why the hell should I have to pay for all these government just because I'm more productive than other people? If I use $10,000 a year worth of government services why am I paying $200,000 for it while some other guy using $10,000 a year of government services pays nothing? Why can't the burden be spread more equally among all those who _use_ government services instead of lumped almost entirely on the top 10%?"

That's the argument he should be pushing. Of course there are possible responses to that, but it's a better starting point for debate than "I only make $500K a year, you should tax the _real_ rich, who are making $800K a year!"

<comment><USER10>
       While I feel sorry for the guy whose taxes are about to go up substantially

that's where you lost me.

His taxes aren't going to go up...his tax CUTS are about to expire...as they were supposed to. The sunset clause was part of the original bill...instead of bitching that his taxes are going to go back to normal...he should be happy he got to enjoy this tax break for all these years.

And "substantially"? His taxes are only going up by ~3%

<comment><USER9> _And "substantially"? His taxes are only going up by ~3%_

Which is, like, $15,000 a year. That's substantial -- in fact it's more than most people pay in taxes at all!

We should start from the fundamental question: why should this guy pay more than Joe Schmo at all? Why shouldn't the tax bill be spread equally over everybody, so it's (say) ten thousand dollars per head? That would be what I call "fair".

It's also not possible because some people just aren't getting off their butts and earning $10K per head, but that should be considered a deviation from fairness. We should look down upon those with below-average incomes as jerks who aren't working hard enough to pay their share.

<comment><USER11> You do realize that 48% of all Americans pay $0 dollars in Federal Income tax. The top 10% pay 40% of the pie. I'm for the tax cuts expiring but I do also agree with the whole "equality" argument. I'm of the generation where I'll probably never see any Social Security but I do know that I'm paying for it.

<comment><USER12> This is a wildly misleading figure.

First, the primary driver of this "inequality" is the widening gap between the rich and the poor in the US. The top 10% of earners in the US take home nearly 50% of the country's total income. Under a "flat tax" system (i.e. everyone pays 20%), they would still pay nearly 50% of the country's total income tax. Under our system they actually pay 70% of all taxes. Do you think it's "unequal" for people who take home more income to pay proportionally more income taxes?

Second, even people paying zero __income tax __pay ~15% of taxes on income for social security + medicare, as well as a disproportionate share of their income on regressive taxes, like sales tax and gas tax.

<comment><USER11> Nope, I don't think it's unfair that the people who earn more pay more. In fact, I'm for it. However, what I'm against is even a small group not paying for it. This "small" group right now is nearly half of the population.

The argument for regressive taxes is also poor. Come to New Hampshire where there is no sales tax or W-2 income tax. The air is clean, the mountains well hiked and the people friendly. Take a look at the state's finances too. The regressive taxes there are on inheritance, dividends, investment income and a few things else I can't remember. That hits the rich far more than the poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a few points where he really gives the game away:

-$60k/year for three children in private school -$50k building home equity -$50k in the 401k

But the real point is in the sections about having bought the house at the top of the market and the equity portfolio having fallen: Mr. Henderson feels poor because his net worth has dropped. He has less savings than he used to, so of course he feels he has to save several average family's annual income to catch up.

Being a high-powered law professor can't help, of course -- that's one of those jobs where your not-so-clever peers are big law firm partners and your half-decent students make your salary two years out of school. Even more so than the average 99%er, law professors have a ginormous amount of keeping-up- with-the-jones' self-pity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Every person I know who makes over $200K per year spends WAY too much time on tax-related paperwork instead of being productive at what they are good at.

Assume a scenario where a simplified tax (your choice of methods such as flat, no-income-but-higher-sales-tax, etc.) exists such that, say, 10 hours of time is enough to prepare a high net worth individuals' return.

Even if the net taxes were a little higher, productivity would go up because this busywork which does nothing for the economy disappears.

And since many CPA firms would be getting less hours, they could go and do something productive as well.

<comment><USER12> I agree with you that the tax code is in need of a drastic restructuring.

But realize that when you argue for a simplified tax, you're saying we need to get rid of the many incentives baked into the current code. These run the gamut, including things like:

 _Investing (lower capital gains rate + ability to deduct losses from gains)_

 _Education (credits/deductions for education spending + student loan interest)_

 _Homeownership (mortgage interest deduction - just imagine home prices without it)_

 _Alternative energy (credits for purchasing solar panels/green cars)_

 _Charitable giving_

And so on... I'm not saying that all of these credits/deductions are needed, just that their absence would cause changes to the US far bigger than your "lots of accountants +entrepreneurs would have some more free time" intended effect.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _This leaves about $90,000, a lousy $245 a day, for food, clothes, vacations, cable TV, and like that. You can walk into Nordstrom's on Upper Michigan and spend that in a minute, and for stuff you really need. Really, I don't know how these people get by; their adaptive skills, economical habits, and modest living style is an inspiration to all of us. Perhaps they are careful to tip no more than 15% at the Sizzler when they splurge._

<comment><USER15> Thats more "spare" cash in a week than I pay in rent over a fortnight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Being rich" is being able to buy something you want or need when you want or need it. I make less than $70K a year and consider myself wealthy: there's nothing that my wife and I have wanted or needed that I couldn't immediately pay for. (Single income, no kids).

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow. Don't think I've ever been as disgusted with anything posted on HN; if you don't think you're rich when you're in the top 1% of earners, then you are an arsehole or stupid. Pure an simple.

</comment><comment><USER18> > saith O'Hare: It's worth a close look because the author is a law professor, > not some high-school dropout Limbaugh lemming, and because the tone of > entitlement and whining is typical of a fair number of the comments I got on > my post about intergenerational equity (and by extension, equity).

That little snippet gives the whole game away. We have a strange situation in which Michael O'Hare, speaking as an ostensible advocate of "equity" and "the poor", nevertheless casually mentions that _he would not pay attention to a word coming out of the mouth of an actual poor person_ , and that only a law school professor is worth listening to.

Of course, he wouldn't frame it that way. There is a tacit and unspoken mental calculation in which "Limbaugh listener" cancels out and reverses the street cred of "high school dropout", and in which "rich" reverses the intellectual cred of "law professor". So he feels fully entitled in trashing a poor person who does not share his views.

He does not spare one moment to consider that perhaps his views are a function of his power and social class as a Berkeley professor, rather than the outcome of some Platonic reasoning process. He believes what he believes and mouths what he mouths because that's what everyone else around him believes, and because political deviation is punished with social ostracism.

In particular, he is one of those who calls most loudly for "equity" without practicing it himself in his treatment of others.

The point is that there are other things in life that people value beside income. Income can be quantified, so we tend to fixate on that. But what about things like looks? Or IQ? Or power? Or status? Like the status to get people to take you seriously. Especially the last.

That can't be taxed, at least not directly. Imagine how Harvard professors would howl if Harvard degrees were handed out willy nilly, or redistributed from the (no doubt privileged) people who'd earned them to the unprivileged who hadn't. Imagine if column inches of New York Times columnists were taxed and redistributed to people who don't have as much of a say in national affairs.

The narrow focus on income happens for a reason. People who have more status than money (like O'Hare and Delong) are using the government to attack people who have more money than status. There is no question that Brad Delong will come out better in this trade, because he and those like him are the ones dictating its terms.

</comment><comment><USER19> _But, curiously enough, not angry at the senior law firm partners who extract surplus value from their associates and their clients, or angry at the financiers, but angry at... Barack Obama, who dares to suggest that the U.S. government's funding gap should be closed partly by taxing him, and angry at the great hordes of the unwashed who will receive the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security payments that the government will make over the next several generations._

First, his jab at entrepreneurs who "extract surplus value" is an appeal to the core tenant of Marxism: that all profit is an exploitation and an unfair "extraction of value" from labor. I don't want to have a knee-jerk reaction to his argument just because of that, but it doesn't set a good tone for me.

Second, part of the problem I have with the tax increase is this: who knows _what_ all that money will be used for? It could be used for taking care of the great unwashed masses (disdainful much?), or it could just as easily be used to invade more foreign countries in the name of "freedom", prop up outdated and failing industries, or bail out gamblers on Wall Street. The government of the last twenty years seems to have been _shockingly_ bad at allocating the ridiculous amounts of money they collect from us; why should we give them more?

<comment><USER13> By way of being nitpicky: there is no jab at entrepreneurs here. The two named classes of undeserving rich people are financiers and law firm partners and I put it to you that a less value-creating lot relative to compensation could hardly be found in American society.

Law firm partners, really, are a paradigmatic example of surplus value extraction: law firms get paid by people who produce things to play negative- sum games on their behalf. And while I think it's very wrong to say that all profit is an extraction of value from labor, you could hardly find a purer example of value extraction than a law firm associate being paid <$100/hour and billed out at >$300/hour...

<comment><USER4> How is being an entrepreneur different from being a financier? Both are speculative. The financier invests dollars in risky schemes, the entrepreneur invests time and energy in them. If the scheme pans out, both get rich.

<comment><USER20> Astute, but I think they are very significantly different: An entrepreneur is risking _his own_ time and energy. Financiers are putting millions of other people's money at risk.

Edit: Seriously, markdown doesn't work?

<comment><USER4> Well, I'd argue that the financier is an employee of people who are voluntarily risking their capital. Similarly, a startup CEO is the employee of people who are voluntarily risking their capital.

<comment><USER13> The point really is that "risking your capital" is not in and of itself a productive activity -- making stuff is. I work as an investment analyst myself which is good in both the "fun" and "profit" departments, but I'm not about to pretend that I'm creating value for the world in any but the most indirect of ways.

<comment><USER4> Well, by matching investors with investments you are helping the market supply capital where it's needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From personal observation I find this statement to be true: "[the super rich] put $$$ in the Cayman Islands or use fancy investment vehicles to shelter their income".

It's for this reason that I find the concept of a "flat tax" so compelling.

There are plenty of holes in implementing a flat-tax, but fundamentally everybody putting an equal share of their income into the pool feels right to me.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax>

<comment><USER22> A flat tax is compelling because it's more efficient, easier to deal with, and ostensibly more fair. However I don't see how it helps at all with tax fraud.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. If they can't find the money, they can't tax it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Missing E.T. Denominator - <AUTHOR> https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/et-denominator.html <comment><USER2> > And if there are 20 left-handers with a graduating class of 180, we might > describe their prevalence as 180/20 = 9% lefties.

Primary school maths FAIL!</comment>


Querying a GraphQL API from React - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/naresh-bhatia/graphql-concepts-i-wish-someone-explained-to-me-a-year-ago-959b234ff430 <comment><AUTHOR> In Part 3 of my GraphQL series, we build querying capability into a freshly created React client.

We'll use Apollo Client's <Query> component. Also, we will cover the special case of executing multiple unrelated queries from a single React component.

Back when I first came across this use case, I was scratching my head

Just like we modularize code to make it reusable, we should do the same for queries. Fragments allow us to do this.

Despite careful documentation, it's easy to get client and server data structures out of sync – resulting in painful bugs.

I show you how to avoid this by generating TypeScript definitions from our schema and using them in React components.</comment>


America Collapsed - <AUTHOR> https://eand.co/this-is-how-america-collapsed-e12df59a7489 <comment><USER2> "50% of people working "low-income" jobs that'll never go anywhere…75% who struggle to pay the bills…80% who can't raise a tiny amount for an emergency…all of them, more or less, will die indebted— buried under debt they have never been able to pay off. Who do they "owe" to? A tiny handful of men who are richer than kings or dukes or barons of old."

This is fantasy. The rich may have gotten richer, but the poor and middle class have gotten richer too. America has the richest poor people in the world.

Right now, our economy is the best it's been for a decade with the lowest unemployment rate for all major groups.

The write of this article is completely ignorant of real poverty in countries like India.

"Masked, armed men waving machine guns and chanting neo-fascist slogans massed on the steps of a state capitol — on the anniversary of a society's major civil rights leader…who was gunned down to death."

No mention of anti-fascist lunatics parading around our college campuses and major cities like Seattle..who are actually violent fascists that want a revolution in this country and have been roaming the streets with impunity and attacking non-believers for the past four years (just look at Andy Ngo's Twitter account).

One peaceful protest for gun rights, with absolutely no violence is nothing in comparison.

"This is what a collapsing society looks like, my friends. America, here and now."

America is collapsing because the liberals in this country are solving crime by making it legal. Look at California: "non-violent offenders" are being let go with no bail, only to offend again (many times violently) and not show up to court dates.

In addition to this, left-leaning politicians can get away with all sorts of crime..and the media (and voters) just ignores it. The Obama administration was not only caught selling weapons to the Mexican cartels, the IRS targeted right-leaning groups (this was settled with a lawsuit and can be found in public records). These alone would have been major deals in any administration..and were completely ignored and buried.

The scariest part? If Hillary was president, we would know nothing about attempted Russian meddling, because she laughed it off and called Trump 'crazy' when he mentioned it during the 2016 election.

She was running her own email server with classified emails being sent through it (and many that suddenly went 'missing'), which should raise red flags to any tech-savvy person..and didn't get punished for it at all.

After this happened, I remember all of the tech people defending her and saying the most ignorant things regarding technology. It showed me that many in the tech community are so blinded by their bias, they are willing to look past criminal behavior to win.

This is what's contributing to America's collapse.</comment>


Lessons learned building an open source business - <AUTHOR> http://werd.io/2015/open-issues-lessons-learned-building-an-open-source-business <comment><AUTHOR> And a thoughtful response to this article: [http://upon2020.com/blog/2015/11/responding-to-ben- werdmulle...](http://upon2020.com/blog/2015/11/responding-to-ben-werdmullers- open-issues-lessons-learned-building-an-open-source-business/)</comment>


Build your own X: project-based programming tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x <comment><USER2> Similar for anyone interested:

[https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based- learning](https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based-learning)

[https://github.com/AlgoryL/Projects-from- Scratch](https://github.com/AlgoryL/Projects-from-Scratch)

[https://github.com/rby90/Project-Based-Tutorials- in-C](https://github.com/rby90/Project-Based-Tutorials-in-C)

<comment><USER3> I was hoping that second one was about Scratch, the visual blocks programming language for kids, similar to Logo, based on a Smalltalk development environment (which is a lot better than X!)

If you're interested in visual programming with a powerful Scheme-like language with first class functions, closures, special forms, macros, and even continuations so you can define your own control structures, check out Snap! (The exclamation mark is part of the name, so it's easy to get excited about Snap!)

It's a descendent of Scratch but more powerful, hand-written in JavaScript instead of Smalltalk, and it integrates easily with JS code. (There's a user defined JavaScript function block that you can use to integrate with the Snap VM and the browser!)

Snap was written by Jens Mönig and Brian Harvey, who know what they're doing! ;)

[https://snap.berkeley.edu](https://snap.berkeley.edu)

Y Combinator: [https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png](https://i.imgur.com/cOq8tvR.png)

A* Pathfinding Demo: [https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Usern...](https://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Username=jens&ProjectName=PathFinder) (press the diagonal arrow button at the top to see the block code in the development environment!)

Snap! is a visual programming language inspired by Scratch. Run Snap! in your browser at [http://snap.berkeley.edu/run](http://snap.berkeley.edu/run) The IIIA1 in the title means that this is the first tutorial corresponding to Chapter III, Section A of the Reference Manual at [http://snap.berkeley.edu/SnapManual.pdf](http://snap.berkeley.edu/SnapManual.pdf)

Snap! Tutorial IIIA1: Make a block [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbl2fh3igQ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbl2fh3igQ4)

Snap! Tutorial IIIA2: Custom Blocks with Inputs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZC2tDVYWBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZC2tDVYWBo)

The Basics of Snap! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxqwwg4uhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxqwwg4uhk)

Prototypical Inheritance in Snap! (no audio) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvlWvHgfrlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvlWvHgfrlw)

Editing Formulas in Snap! (no audio) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Went into this thinking it was about the X Window System[1]. Pleasantly surprised! Lots of cool stuff here.

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

<comment><USER3> I agree, it would have been such an unpleasant surprise to see another implementation of X-Windows! ;)

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows- disaster-128d39...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows- disaster-128d398ebd47)

<comment><USER5> Actually a less unwieldy implementation of X11 would be nice. Preferably in Go or Rust.

<comment><USER6> Why go _OR_ rust? Those are completely different languages with completely different goals and almost nothing in common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am truly disappointed that "Build your own X" has a list of things which does not include "Build your own X†" :p

† X Window System.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great! I always had this idea of trying to "build my own" to learn stuff ever since I followed along a book called "Rebuilding Rails" and so much stuff "clicked" for me.

I've already starred the repo and when I have time I'll search my Evernote because I know there a few notes there from projects that would fit this collection.

</comment><comment><USER9> A combination of this and some other tutorials and you can have a "build your own OS". Some coursera classes I took a while back delved into it but things like a usb controller or getting regular input were a bit of a limiting factor. (I.e. build a keyboard from scratch or support USB, build your own display... etc)

</comment><comment><USER10> An aside for those that appreciate being accurate / particular, but didn't happen to know -- there are only two s's in 'X Window System'.

To shorten it, just call it X. Eschew 'X Windows' \-- there's no such thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Something that I've been trying to learn how to do, but haven't found any information on and that seems missing from this tutorial, is how to write a 3D game in Vulkan. There are many entries in here about using OpenGL but nothing in here, it seems, about Vulkan. This seems like a common pattern online. Does anyone have any recommendations for a tutorial that could also be contributed to the master list?

<comment><USER12> This tutorial seems to be what you're looking for: [https://www.fasterthan.life/blog/2017/7/11/i-am-graphics- and...](https://www.fasterthan.life/blog/2017/7/11/i-am-graphics-and-so-can- you-part-1)

<comment><USER11> Amazing tutorial! I'll be reading this over many times. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love this idea. I always, take a famous open source project and try to re- create or go through the source of it. Its very tough, but when you do so the learning is very immense. Thanks for the link.

<comment><USER14> Late comment but a good way to do this when you're digging through the source and look at the early commits to see where it started. I remember going through Linux 0.0.1 to boil down the essentials of the kernel for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow this is great for educational purposes.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wonderful link</comment>


Palm Bribes Key Employees to Stick Around as SVP of Software Jumps Ship - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5519221/palm-bribes-key-employees-to-stick-around-as-svp-of-software-jumps-ship

<comment><USER2> I thought it was TechCrunch (but I can't find the article now) which pointed out that often companies will provide stock options to key executives when a company is being purchased, as an extra incentive for these executives to stick with the new owners beyond the initial transition.

<comment><USER3> Over at PIC there's some interesting discussion by people who have been watching Palm's finances for some time: [http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/6496/webos-svp-leaves- pal...](http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/6496/webos-svp-leaves- palm/#comments)</comment></comment>