Kansas City is first major city in U.S. to offer no-cost public transportation - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/12/free-transit-how-much-cost-kansas-city-bus-streetcar-fare/603397/ <comment><USER2> Seattle used to have this for an area of the city. It was called the "Free Ride Zone" \- and it had some unexpected consequences.

The primary problem is that homeless people would get on the bus because it's warm, and would fall asleep. The busses became rolling homeless shelters.

This caused other people to take the bus less, because of public safety concerns, as well as simple quality-of-life issues like unpleasant smells.

Eventually it was scrapped.

But this issue has been returning as it's now common knowledge that Seattle bus drivers are instructed not to collect fares from anyone that declines to pay.

<comment><USER3> Arh, is this why why people in US hate public transport and prefer to drive themselves or go by taxi?

For those of us living in the "outside" world where public transport are the norm, it is sometimes hard to understand why public transport is treated so differently in US.

<comment><USER4> _> it is sometimes hard to understand why public transport is treated so differently in US. _

It is worth remembering that the US is much larger than all of Europe, is considerably less dense, and much of it was not well-developed until after automobiles were in wide use.

Public transit doesn't make logistical sense in much of the country. It _does_ make sense in some places, of course, but it's less of a part of the national culture because there are so many areas where it's not a good idea.

<comment><USER5> That argument falls apart when you look at countries like Australia, China, Brazil - plenty of open space but cities have public transport because the nation culture isn't dead against it.

<comment><USER4> I feel like none of the replies to my comment read my second sentence.

Yes, there are many cities in the US with enough density to support public transit. Most of them have it.

My point is that public transit is not a large part of _American culture and history_ which significantly depresses demand for it.

Most Americans grew up in families that owned a car or two and used them to get everywhere. When you ask an American how to get groceries, their immediate mental image is getting in a car, taking a long drive to a big store, and filling up the car with a week or two's worth of stuff. Tell them they can't own a car and all of a sudden they don't know how to solve mundane problems like this anymore. There are _other_ perfectly fine solutions, of course, but they don't _know_ those solutions yet. It's not part of their culture.

Also, most Americans live or at least grew up in cities whose urban planning was designed around automobiles and parking lots. They are spread out to make room for parking lots, which in turn makes public transit slower and less economical. People need cars because cities are too spread out for transit because people prefer to drive because they have cars because cities are too spread out...

There is a huge path dependent effect here where most cities aren't laid out for public transit and most people don't prioritize it.

People from outside of the US love to criticize how stupid Americans are for not having great buses and rail everywhere, but few want to acknowledge that no country is free of its own history and culture. Cars are a big part of ours. We are making progress, but the physical topology of cities and the culture loaded into the heads of several hundred million people cannot be refactored as easily as code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great to see. Our tax money subsidizes car ownership (quite massively) already, glad to see some equity here. Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" but nobody asks the same of huge highways in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER7> The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. The KC transit system is poorly designed and making it free isn't going to make it good. Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service, then reevaluate when ridership is growing.

Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country.

<comment><USER8> > The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it > attractive to riders.

It seems to me that public transit probably follows the law of demand fairly strongly, and reducing the price will almost certainly make it more attractive to riders. Of course this won't fix _all_ problems with public transit, and I don't think that's the goal. It sounds like the goal is to increase ridership (and specifically to increase access to people who cannot easily afford the fares).

> Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service

Or...use tax revenue to improve the service. That's the point, and is exactly what happens with most public roads.

<comment><USER9> The question is whether or not $9M annually would be better off making more useful transit. As it stands, very little of KC is covered by frequent transit throughout the day, and in fact much of it is covered by services that don't run the entire day. [https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route- maps/SystemMap.pdf](https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route- maps/SystemMap.pdf)

A free bus that runs every hour is still going to screw you over if you mistime your walk to the bus stop and it leaves without you. The bus not being available at noon is not made better because it is free, because there's still no bus to take.

<comment><USER8> But the point is to offer rides for free and use other money (presumably tax money) to maintain (and hopefully invest in more) infrastructure. I don't see how the current quality of the KC infrastructure is relevant: if it's bad, then they clearly the $9m in fare revenue isn't cutting it, and they already need tax revenue to make it better. If they can't or don't get the tax revenue they need, then that's definitely a problem!

<comment><USER9> Or, you could use the tax money that you could use for free rides (that only makes bad service marginally more useful) and put it towards more useful service? It's not as if this money came out of a box labeled "only for free fares." Right now this is a $9M opportunity cost, annually. To get both the free fares and $9M of better transit would double the cost of this, but then you'd have to ask why not use all $18M on better transit, etc.

Making a service that isn't usable most of the day free still makes it unusable for most of the day.

<comment><USER10> > To get both the free fares and $9M of better transit would double the cost > of this, but then you'd have to ask why not use all $18M on better transit, > etc.

But then there is a reason for that -- spending has diminishing returns. If you have some money and you could use it to serve an area with 1500 riders then that may be worth it, but once you've served it, the next best unserved area which costs just as much to serve would only have 750 riders, which may not be worth it. The point where you stop is where the value of the service no longer exceeds the cost.

And the value of eliminating fares has a major comparative advantage because it allows you to eliminate the cost of _collecting_ fares, which is typically a huge fraction of the money collected in fares. Especially when the fares are already subsidized (which they are most everywhere), because then you still have the pay the full cost of the collection infrastructure but generate much less revenue. In some places the cost of collection can exceed the total revenue from the fares. And even if you beat break-even, the little amount left over is hardly worth losing the benefits of having fewer cars on the road.

<comment><USER9> I would argue that KC is nowhere near diminishing returns on transit spending. Right now, despite having lower fares and higher metro population than, say, Rochester NY, KC has less than half the transit ridership per capita.

[https://www.apta.com/wp- content/uploads/Resources/resources/...](https://www.apta.com/wp- content/uploads/Resources/resources/statistics/Documents/FactBook/2018-APTA- Fact-Book.pdf#page=29)

Off peak travel is generally also much less expensive, since you already have the buses and drivers doing peak-only shifts generally spend the middle of the day just sitting around. KC could run a lot more all-day service and garner a lot more ridership.

<comment><USER10> > I would argue that KC is nowhere near diminishing returns on transit > spending.

The status quo doesn't really have anything to do with it though. If it's optimal for them to spend $X on transit while also eliminating fares, then that's what's optimal whether they're currently spending $X or $0.2X.

> Off peak travel is generally also much less expensive, since you already > have the buses and drivers doing peak-only shifts generally spend the middle > of the day just sitting around. KC could run a lot more all-day service and > garner a lot more ridership.

Which would tend to make it so that you would build more transit before you hit the point of diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean the point of diminishing returns doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't also eliminate fares. They're just two independent questions.

It's like asking whether we should increase the size of the child tax credit or subsidize solar panels. Maybe we should do both. Maybe we should do neither. But the answer to each question has more to do with whether its benefits exceed its costs than how you answer the other question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The hope among lawmakers and transportation officials is that the city will > recoup that expense, and more

A poor goal that's hard to quantify and often not met (especially for social services at smaller community levels). Just consider it a sunk cost up front and be honest about it. Then the debate can at least be about whether it's a worthy cost socially. Putting a monetary recoup hope unhelpfully moves the debate away from the social obligation side.

<comment><USER9> Compare this to Intercity Transit in Olympia, WA, which is going fare-free mostly because it needs to replace the fare collection system on older buses and install them on new ones, but

\- the regional pass is on a path of deprecation in favor of a new system. So they'd need to buy two sets of fare collection systems in the span of a few years

\- the cost to install these fare collection systems even once is more than what the agency currently collects in fares

\- the fares only make up 1.5% of revenue anyways, so the impact is not as large as it would be in, say, New York where fares are north of 40% of revenue

[https://www.intercitytransit.com/zerofare](https://www.intercitytransit.com/zerofare)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately, I think this is a step backwards. According to the US Census, about 1% of commuters in Kansas City use public transportation.

[https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US28140-kansas- city...](https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US28140-kansas-city-mo-ks- metro-area/)

It's hardly "public" transportation at all, if it's only useful to 1% of residents.

If public transportation is going to make any impact on the lives of Kansas City residents, it first has to be providing a useful service to them. That probably means expanding its reach, and putting more vehicles on existing lines. Making it free means that any expansion has become more expensive, and is now less likely to happen.

<comment><USER13> _If public transportation is going to make any impact on the lives of Kansas City residents, it first has to be providing a useful service to them._

Why does that have to be "first?"

Why not make it free, and also make it useful?

If the goal is to increase ridership, making the rides free lowers the barrier for people in transit-served areas. Then you can subsequently or simultaneously expand it.

It makes no sense to keep charging during the expansion to some mythical point in the future where it will suddenly become free because it's reached a certain number of users.

<comment><USER14> What if making it free makes it less useful to most people? There's another comment talking about how they became rolling homeless shelters when they went to free, and use dropped because of hygiene issues.

<comment><USER13> I've seen people speculate about homeless use of transit as a deterrent to ridership, but I've never seen any actual numbers on that, and I think it's mostly overblown.

Either way, homeless people making homes on transit isn't a transportation issue, it's a law enforcement/social services issue.

<comment><USER14> Are you doubting that homeless people tend to have worse hygiene? Or that people don't want to use public transit when it smells bad?

<comment><USER13> What I doubt is the notion that the number of people who don't use transit because of the homeless is statistically significant.

The people who seem to complain about it most are also the sort of people who won't ride transit anyway and just use it as an excuse to stay in their cars.

<comment><USER15> I don't think that it's strictly the homeless, but rather that public transit is seen as a low class option that "the poors" have to use. Middle class people can afford nicer options and don't have to be associated with a "poor" thing. There are exceptions in a few cities with transit systems that are actually better than driving, where you see bankers in suits using the subway.

Getting rid of homeless/ppor people overnight wouldn't fix the perception issue immediately. It would take a while for word to get out that the buses weren't associated with being poor again.

Strangely, I think that making transit completely free removes some of the "poor" stigma. If two things cost money, then you compare the prices and benefits of both to decide what to pick. If one option is completely free, then that comparison isn't performed the same way because of weird mechanisms in our brains. Most middle class people will pay more to drink name brand Coca-Cola instead of an off-brand cola, but if you made the off-brand cola free, then a lot of middle class people would start drinking the off-brand stuff. It's not really rational, but middle class people love a bargain. And once the middle class people start to realize how much of a bargain they get from free transit, then more will start riding and the proportion of poor people will go down, and then even more middle class people will start using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In Gavin Newsom's book Citizenville he talked about how, after becoming SF mayor, he discovered that fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started the process of making the bus free but was told by so many advisors that the busses would become "dumpsters on wheels," from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan was scrapped.

<comment><USER17> > fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares

WTF!?

That's freakin insane.

If that's true, why do they keep raising the fares and upgrading the fareboxes!?

If that's true, the SF city gov is effectively collecting money and lighting it on fire as a way to "throttle" bad behaviour on the bus!?

<comment><USER18> > If that's true, why do they keep raising the fares and upgrading the > fareboxes!?

To pay for the new fareboxes, of course.

Just as Uber is a way to get away from "bus people", fares are away to get away from "free bus people".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-iWBCL12Qg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-iWBCL12Qg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In Pittsburgh, travel within Downtown and the North Shore is free 24/7 on the "T" (light rail).

Buses still aren't free and the "T" doesn't cover a ton of Downtown Pittsburgh, though. The "T" has been like this for 20+ years and is an awesome resource.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome.

And also in stark contrast with progressive Portland, which recently hired a gaggle of new fare-enforcement workers: [https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/10/trimet- beefing-...](https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/10/trimet-beefing-up- fare-enforcement-will-rely-less-on-uniformed-police.html)

<comment><USER21> As recently as last week it seems, TriMet's board has been discussing how free fares might work: [https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/12/is-trimet- discu...](https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/12/is-trimet-discussing-a- free-transit-system-2-board-members-say-yes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not really a major city, but Chapel Hill has done this for a long time. Bus service is frequent and reliable, and is used by people from all walks of life. High income professors and scientists will be on the same bus as the poor.

It seems paradoxical that making the service free would lead the rich to use it, but it's good quality and receives substantial funding from the area's high property taxes. There's no stigma to the bus in Chapel Hill since everyone uses it.

</comment><comment><USER23> In Baltimore, the Charm City Circulator (bus) is free.

[https://www.charmcitycirculator.com/](https://www.charmcitycirculator.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The small town of my alma mater is entirely built around the university. There's school bus serves everyone in the town (not limited to student, no validation required), and is basically no-cost public transit.

I suspect this applies to many other college towns across US.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. "No price signal[1]" is very different from "no cost". It will cost plenty. Any service priced at zero simply has no back-pressure mechanism to respond to demand, nor to forecast demand, nor to measure demand in relation to alternative transportation options.

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

<comment><USER10> All of those problems already apply to any government program. The answer is to calculate demand and allocate supply based on factors such as ridership. That will be less efficient in a sense than pricing, but not necessarily so, because pricing in a market with network effects and significant fixed costs can also create significant inefficiency. Pricing, especially pricing that exceeds the variable cost or has to include the cost of a fare collection infrastructure, can reduce usage and thereby reduce the network effect. Which is a feedback loop that can lead to a death spiral. That's hardly efficient either.

And ridership is effectively a price signal anyway, because even when there is no monetary cost there is still an opportunity cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess Salt Lake City must be too small to count. Or not qualify on some other metric. All the light rail trains in the city are free, but once you get outside of a certain region there is a charge.

<comment><USER27> This isn't true. ([https://www.rideuta.com/Fares-And-Passes/Current- Fares](https://www.rideuta.com/Fares-And-Passes/Current-Fares))

<comment><USER28> No, it is true that Salt Lake City passengers may ride buses and light rail for free within the Free Fare Zone mapped out here: [https://www.rideuta.com/Fares-And-Passes/Free-Fare- Zone](https://www.rideuta.com/Fares-And-Passes/Free-Fare-Zone)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks like KC transit ridership has been declining since 2014: [https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/missouri/kansas-city- are...](https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/missouri/kansas-city-area- transportation-authority/)

</comment><comment><USER30> What's their definition of "major"? Missoula has been offering no-cost buses for years now.

<comment><USER31> Whatever the definition might be, Missoula doesn't qualify. Missoula is #328 on the list of 384 metropolitan statistical areas in USA, just between Owensboro KY and Morristown TN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> On my first visit to Seattle, you could ride the bus anywhere downtown for free. It seemed like a great way to provide mobility to those in need, while still having a paid option for those in the outer areas of the city to get home to their suburbs.

The first conversation I had with someone on the bus there was with someone going to an employment counselling office. Not sure why that struck me, but it always stuck with me.

No I see that the free ride zone has been gone since 2012. Too bad!

<comment><USER13> IIRC, the reason Seattle instituted the free fares downtown scheme was to reduce bus boarding times, especially in the tunnel beneath downtown where buses would often get backed up.

/No longer live in Seattle, so I may not be remembering this correctly.

<comment><USER33> The free ride zone predated the tunnel by 17 years. The original reason for it was to entice people to use the bus.

From the 1973-09-09 NY Times [1]:

> "I make a flat prediction," said Mayor Wes Uhlman, who conceived the plan. > "With the E.P.A. [Environmental Protection Agency] breathing down the neck > of all of us, every major city in the country will be providing free transit > within two years.

> "The downtowns are becoming congested and polluted, and we simply have to > reclaim them for people away from the automobile."

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/seattle- joining-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/seattle-joining- movement-for-free-bus-rides-10-increase-in-riders.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Quick question, has anyone here heard of a very odd company in Kansas City called...[https://joesdatacenter.com](https://joesdatacenter.com).

All of the staff on LinkedIn exist...but there are only 3 of them and apparently the founder and CEO just got out of community college?

They claim to have at least a few ten thousands of floor space, so that must be minimum $25 million in server capital assuming all are used.

They also for some reason broadcast incredibly interesting weather data from the top of the building: [https://joesdatacenter.com/hvac/](https://joesdatacenter.com/hvac/)

I currently work in San Antonio as a short term contractor for a SOC (many military bases and sizeable banks here) and last night an incident was raised and a breach somewhat close to being declared and we are getting pinged is it Tsinghua? is it APT 17? to which we have to respond seriously on Slack...no it's "Joes Datacenter" ASN 19969 out of Kansas City.

<comment><USER31> Haha there's no way that weather data is right. They're reporting a high of "54.4°F" when it was snowing most of the day? Pull the other one.

Maybe all the "APTs" should route through Joe's if they don't want a serious response?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "proponents of the plan say that helping marginalized communities move around more easily will translate into deeper benefits."

Well yeah, we kept them marginalized, for some reason ... but right now we _really need them_. Later on, ...

</comment><comment><USER36> Park City, Utah has this for years. It's a very rich ski resort, so they can afford it, and it solves the transport and parking problem. Many other rich ski resorts are doing the same for decades.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great to visualize, even if it is not entirely successful.

Seems like this needs to happen.

</comment><comment><USER38> How is this sustainable? It costs _someone_ , right?

</comment><comment> ur-whale At the risk of pointing out the obvious, 'no cost' is a physical impossibility.

Someone does pay for transportation, and the question is, who does?

</comment><comment><USER39> Nothing is "no-cost." Something must be given up by someone.

<comment><USER40> Ugh. Won't even bother refuting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am trying to formulate a theory of wealth in modern society - I think that the vast vast majority of wealth resides in, or useless without, huge reservoirs of public wealth - from aqueducts still supplying Rome after 2000 years to public roads and rail.

The active capitalist stuff going on, is mostly the frothy but as water fills up the reservoir - it the deep water is public, social wealth.

It's a bit nebulous but I think it is worth us asking when is the right time to stop treating something as "frothy capitalism" and needs to be left of the free market and when it is deep water and needs to be just free to all.

<comment><USER42> > The active capitalist stuff going on, is mostly the frothy but as water > fills up the reservoir - it the deep water is public, social wealth.

Even privately held capital is underpinned by public, social "wealth" in the form of a system of property rights and the means to arbitrate those.

Society, as manifested in government and the courts, is protecting all our claims to ownership of property with the threat of force. If it stops doing that, the value of much of our property/capital will plummet quickly.

<comment><USER41> yes..

There are two attitudes to tax - one it is a service fee for government services, something short term to be haggled down, or it is a long term investment in this depp water wealth.

Threat of force is technically what underpins all this but that needs to be a credible threat - just having force without knowing where and when to apply it leads to applying it in wrong place or as "encourage les autres". And knowing when to apply it is likely the job of civil servente.

I think I am diving into late night undergraduate philosophy and economics - hmmm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Baltimore essentially has no-fare public transit. Anyone can get on the light rail without a ticket, and inspection is spotty at best. If you're caught, you just wait for the next train.

<comment><USER44> In Portland, you will be cited for non-payment and repeat offenders are "excluded", typically for 30 days. Meaning if you try to board a bus or train you can be arrested for trespass. Does Baltimore not do this?

<comment><USER45> Imagine if they did this for parking infractions.

30 day license suspension. Heavy fines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > "I believe that people have a right to move about this city,"

KC Resident here. Of course you have a right to move about the city! You don't have a right for someone else to pay for it though. Interesting choice of words.

<comment><USER47> And yet you believe you're entitled to drive on the roads for free?

<comment><USER46> Nice straw man

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't think cost is the biggest problem with public transportation. It's almost always much much slower than any other way to get around. This is doubly so if your current location and destination are on different routes/ lines.

</comment><comment><USER49> Kansas was running on fumes for a long time by not taxing. Now, this? One group of idealists were replaced with another with no more sensibility than their counterparts.

<comment><USER50> You're mistaking Kansas City, MO with Kansas City, KS. Kansas (the state) was running on fumes for a long time. Kansas (the state) also has nothing to do with this.

These are literally the first three words of the article: "Kansas City, Missouri"

<comment><USER31> Kansas the state was named after Missouri's second city. I guess they were just clever enough not to name it "Joplin"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Doesn't literal "no cost" public transportation lead to issues with folks abusing the service as a place to hang out? Also, does the service never get congested in other ways? I'd argue that public transportation should be paid for when congested, so that users are incented to shift their use to other times.

<comment><USER52> Points against charging extra for public transit during congested times.

1\. It's much better for someone traveling during congestion to use public transport than to use a private vehicle.

2\. Traveling during congestion almost always is accompanied by increased travel times —- a natural incentive to adjust travel times.

3\. Keeping fare prices consistent and simple makes the system easier for everyone to understand and less confusing to new users.

<comment><USER51> > It's much better for someone traveling during congestion to use public > transport than to use a private vehicle.

Sure, but charging a nominal price for public transit wouldn't meaningfully affect the incentive to avoid traffic congestion outside of it. i.e. by and large, the users aren't going to move back to private vehicles, because shifting the time of use is often easier.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple guide to build TWS API on AWS EC2 instance - <AUTHOR> https://www.strategic-options.com/insight/2020/02/23/simple-guide-to-build-tws-api-on-aws-ec2-instance/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a very simple guide on how to build an IB trading algo on EC2. So you can do your day job, while your algo trades during the day. :)</comment>


Flair: A simple framework for natural language processing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zalandoresearch/flair <comment><USER2> The closest alternatives in this space would be allennlp [1], the recently released pytext [2] and spacy [3]. pytext's authors wrote some comparison on the accompanying paper [4] and this GitHub issue [5].

[1] [https://github.com/allenai/allennlp](https://github.com/allenai/allennlp)

[2] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext](https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext)

[3] [https://spacy.io](https://spacy.io)

[4] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08729.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08729.pdf)

[5] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext/issues/110](https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext/issues/110)

<comment><USER3> Do you know if any of these can be used for text prediction? (I.e. guessing what the next word/token will be.)

<comment><USER4> Text prediction is usually called "language modeling" in NLP. Because it's useful as a weak supervision signal to improve performance on other tasks, most of the mentioned libraries support it. However, they might not always provide complete examples, instead assuming that you know how to express the model and train it using the primitives provided by the library.

Flair: [https://github.com/zalandoresearch/flair/blob/master/flair/m...](https://github.com/zalandoresearch/flair/blob/master/flair/models/language_model.py)

Allen NLP: [https://github.com/allenai/allennlp/blob/master/allennlp/dat...](https://github.com/allenai/allennlp/blob/master/allennlp/data/dataset_readers/language_modeling.py)

PyText: [https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext/blob/master/pytex...](https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext/blob/master/pytext/models/language_models/lmlstm.py)

spaCy seems to focus on language analysis and I couldn't find an API that'd be directly usable for text generation.

<comment><USER5> Flair looks really promising to me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be wary of being dazzled by the performance metrics here. I've been disappointed in the past using out of the box language models on data that they weren't trained on, e.g. SpaCy. I feel like people put too much emphasis on trying to get the high score on benchmark datasets, and they're overtraining to those particular domains.

For example, try using named entity models trained on CoNLL (newspaper articles) on free text (e.g. tweets, or text from application forms), you generally get pretty bad results. When the domain is different, I've even seen them screw up basic things like times and dates, where regexes will suffice. If you're using it for newspaper articles you're sorted, if you're not, the performance metrics here are probably not all that meaningful.

<comment><USER7> Here's the thing: the authors, and most people in the NLP community (as opposed to people who can use off-the-shelf tools and nothing more) know how to get better performance on other domains. It's just that "it requires some adjustments and manual labour" doesn't add anything to the "deep learning solves the problem" narrative that is predominant in research articles and most blog posts on the topic.

On the other hand, you can bet that actual practice in Zalando (the authors are all from Zalando's reasearch lab) involves more regexes and retraining models on proprietary datasets and less using off-the-shelf models and hope they stick.

No one claims either that you can solve every Vision problem with a model trained on ImageNet - you'd do transfer learning, or for non-understanding problems (estimating colors and contrast or anything else that's unrelated to objects in the image) you'd use something else that doesn't involve deep learning models at all.

<comment><USER6> Right, but my point is - once you start needing to add ad-hoc retraining, or regex hacks, it's not clear to me that shaving a point off baseline f1 scores is really all that relevant anymore.

<comment><USER4> You'd have to do the same modifications to the baseline models to adapt them to a different domain. If they managed to shave off percentage points on a large number of benchmarks, then it's likely that using their models will also help you with the task you care about.

<comment><USER6> Not convinced. Pretty much all baseline NER datasets are on news corpuses, which are written in well formatted prose, tend not to have spelling mistakes, abbreviations, bad punctuation, etc. etc. Why do you think that a better performance on these kinds of datasets will translate to better performance in other domains? I wouldn't even be surprised if it's the opposite, maybe it relies more heavily on these assumptions. The truth is there is no way to know a priori - you need a different kind of benchmark to test this.

<comment><USER8> I had the same experience when trying to do NER on customer support requests. My model performed great for research datasets but it was mediocre at best for my own dataset. Do you have any suggestions on how to achieve better results in domains where mistakes, bad punctuation, etc are common?

<comment><USER9> Label more training data.

Do more clustering.

Label more training data.

Strip out more garbage.

Label more training data.

PS you can get an idea of how much value additional training data will give you by training models on various subsets of your dataset (e.g. 10%, 20%...), evaluating them against the same test dataset, and plotting the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is research in commercial companies becoming a driving factor in today's scientific achievements?

<comment><USER11> That's the free market at work I would guess. Zalando seems to see NLP research as a valuable asset so they pay for projects like this plus they open source it assumably because of employer branding. I don't see anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER12> Zalando Research is an internal team of researches, their work is primarily shared with the research community through publications: [https://research.zalando.com/welcome/mission/publications/](https://research.zalando.com/welcome/mission/publications/)

In the case of Flair, research led to a reference implementation, which was then matured through internal use and open sourced to further mature it and get external feedback. While employer branding is a nice benefit, it is a positive side-effect, not the motivation in itself :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain what the expected behaviour is with punctuation and Named Entity Recognition? Is there an assumption that punctuation is preprocessed in some form?

I'm a noob but it's not what I expect - periods change what is extracted in inconsistent ways.

e.g.

"I love Berlin." -> "Berlin."

"I love Berlin ." -> "Berlin"

"George Washington loves Berlin." -> "George Washington"

"George Washington loves Berlin ." -> ["George Washington", "Berlin"]

<comment><USER14> If you go to their first tutorial, "Tutorial 1: Basics", you will see this comment in the code: "# Make a sentence object by passing a whitespace tokenized string"

In that simple example you posted, they already did the tokenization manually, as it's pretty trivial. But yes, in many cases, you have preprocessors that do the tokenization. In some libraries, you actually have a class/object_type for tokens, but it's pretty common to just preprocess and take every space as a token separator.

In some contexts and cases, it's possible to see tokens like "social_network", where multiple words are considered a single token.

In that first tutorial, they also mention they have a tokenizer if you need it: "In some use cases, you might not have your text already tokenized. For this case, we added a simple tokenizer using the lightweight segtok library."

So for your example you would simply run the tokenizer first, then the named entity recognition.

EDIT: apparently you can do this directly: "sentence = Sentence('The grass is green.', use_tokenizer=True)"

<comment><USER13> Thanks. I assumed it was French style punctuation with a space before the period rather than space tokenization!

<comment><USER4> French doesn't put spaces before single-part punctuation like periods or commas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like the way Zalando is doing tech. They release (and maintain!) tons of open source stuff in several domains.

</comment><comment><USER16> Flair 0.4 was released just 14 days ago, and contiains LOTS of improvements for a point release: [https://github.com/zalandoresearch/flair/releases](https://github.com/zalandoresearch/flair/releases)

</comment><comment><USER17> What are the main advantages of Flair over Spacy?

Is it easy to add a new language in Flair? In Spacy adding a language looks pretty straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice! Was using stanford POS tagger which is both bad in quality and sooo slow in execution. Looking forward to trying this out.

</comment><comment><USER19> How does it compare to managed NLP services like Google's Cloud Natural Language API and AWS's Comprehend?

<comment><USER7> Google and Amazon have proprietary datasets for important sub-tasks (e.g. recognizing "consumer good" entities, or more accurate sentiment recognition, or supporting other languages better) that are not available to the public.

In other words, if your problem looks like one of the benchmarking tasks in NLP research (e.g. recognizing persons and locations in fluent text) you can expect good performance out of open source tools. If you go beyond that, you have to concoct your own dataset and/or use proprietary cloud services.

<comment><USER20> would you mind linking to ones you are aware of. it would be super helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very great and elegant API, look promising. Has anyone tried it? How does it stand against NLTK, Spacy or gensim ?

<comment><USER7> It solves different problems. flair doesn't include parsing, Spacy doesn't support embeddings, gensim doesn't do tagging or parsing at all but contains the most practical word2vec implementation. NLTK is nice for learning, but don't use it in production unless you're ready to reimplement things in a more efficient way when parts start falling off.

The message is - again - learn about the mental framework, not individual tools, to understand where each strengths are and what the gaps are in between them. Or choose a problem, find the best tool for that problem and get progressively better at the tool(s) that helps you with most of your problems.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Phonsole – stream terminal output to your phone/tablet - <AUTHOR> https://www.phonsole.co.uk/help <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys. Phonsole is an app that allows you to view console output from your PC on your phone or tablet. This lets you use your phone as a wireless secondary monitor just for console output, without the extra CPU and battery usage of something like duet display.

I've found it very useful for displaying output from gulp/grunt watch tasks when I'm on my laptop, and I'm sure there are lots of other uses for it as well (e.g. monitoring a command running on a server).

The app's written almost entirely in clojure/clojurescript, and is completely open source (links to the github repos below). If you find a bug, or have a feature request, please either reply here or make an issue on github. All PRs are welcome. Also, if anyone can think of a better name than phonsole I'd appreciate it :P.

[https://github.com/DaveWM/phonsole- client](https://github.com/DaveWM/phonsole-client) [https://github.com/DaveWM/phonsole- server](https://github.com/DaveWM/phonsole-server) [https://github.com/DaveWM/phonsole-cli](https://github.com/DaveWM/phonsole- cli)

<comment><USER2> Name Idea:

Pipesole, Pipe your console output to other devices, would require more apps for it tho e.g. phones, tablets and 2 in 1's

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Gotta say, not a fan of that login popup to even read the content... F12 delete overlay all the way :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha sorry about that, I'll get that fixed when I have time :)</comment></comment>


Study confirms women are more productive in warmer offices - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/work-productivity-office-temperature-warm-cold-women-men-a8925661.html <comment><USER3> I remember reading somewhere that the different temperature preference has to do with different metabolisms among sexes.

Higher temperatures resulted in increased productivity among women and decreased productivity among men.

It seams that the optimal solution would be sex segregation - <USER2> offices for women and men.

<comment><USER4> Try to promote that and see how it works out for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The study doesn't say did they controlled for a clothing of a participant. Different genders tend to prefer different styles of clothing, it could have an impact on an ability to withstand uncomfortable temperature. So it is unclear are the differences found are caused by biological differences or by clothing (i.e. cultural ones).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd be careful generalizing this beyond Germany; DE is a weird place to do studies about AC because it's so much less common there than it is in e.g. the USA.

However, anecdotally, it's not just women. It's basically everyone except for obese men.

Tough issue, especially since we don't allow partial nudity in work environments and it's much easier to put on a sweater than it is to lose weight (or, in some cases, muscle).

<comment><USER7> > However, anecdotally, it's not just women. It's basically everyone except > for obese men.

The study found men (all - not just obese) are more productive in a cooler environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The converse was also found. Men are more productive in a cooler environment, although the effect was not as dramatic.</comment>


So you want to be a PHP Developer? - <AUTHOR> http://dannynunez.com/want-to-be-a-php-developer/ <comment><USER2> This is a rather low effort post. PHP The Right Way [1] already covers the basics of modern PHP, without turning into a laundry list.

Today the most important thing is Composer, not frameworks, especially to those who are just starting out. Learning a full framework is pointless if they just want to see the basics in action. Fabien Potencier's Create your own framework series [2] is really good for this: it shows how much you can do with just a couple of Symfony components and a front controller.

[1]: [http://www.phptherightway.com/](http://www.phptherightway.com/)

[2]: [http://fabien.potencier.org/article/53/create-your-own- frame...](http://fabien.potencier.org/article/53/create-your-own-framework-on- top-of-the-symfony2-components-part-4)

<comment><USER3> This is certainly also the most important thing for existing PHP developers still hanging on to the "old" way of writing PHP code. Having worked on sites where everything is an undocumented mess of manual multi-level includes with shared globals and half-baked implementations of things which already exist, in a better form, well tested and documented elsewhere, I feel like I need to shout from the rooftops _php has a package manager! f_ing use it! and url routers are a thing now!_

It really is surpising how far you can get with a little effort now in PHP, and how much suffering you can avoid by just letting go (of what, admittedly, makes the language fun for some - it's raw, ugly, stupid simple quick-and- dirty hackability) and embracing structure. And open source code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again!

<comment><USER5> I for one needed to Google it ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)): Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

<comment><USER6> Simply add "why" or "how" on the beginning of sentence i.e. Why you want to be PHP developer? In marketing they are calling them "open questions", the question to which you have to answer with more than just yes or no

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Drupal: Pros:

Low Learning Curve Cons:

Oversaturated Job Market

I will be the first to admit that Drupal does not have a low learning curve. (And you can blame me for some of that. Or a lot of that if you wish :P)

But oversaturated job market?? There has been a shortage of good developers ever since there was such a thing as Drupal-developer-as-a-job, at least a decade.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Any Drupal developer who is having a hard time finding work, come to DC. There are over a dozen shops hiring Drupal devs right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Drupal absolutely does NOT have a low learning curve. If you want to do anything beyond a basic configuration blog-style site, good luck finding developers who know how to deal with Drupal's internals, especially in the last version.

<comment><USER10> I was wondering at that too, but I don't have experience with some of the other frameworks so I thought perhaps it was just all relative :)

I love Drupal, despite some of the flack it gets, I think on the whole it does what it does really well. But easy to get into "it aint".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This list fails to mention [http://www.phptherightway.com/](http://www.phptherightway.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> So anyone in here can give me a opinion, how i can improve myself as a worthy developer.. I am 22 years old fresh graduate and a ruby developer with currently 1 year experience, before i have learn node.js(express), php(cms, news site), db(sql,nosql)... but i got a feel(*is it true?) that america, europe is getting a worthed salary as a programmer they are valued rather than here in my country i got around $6000/year with living cost $3600/year this is really a standart in my country. its really hurt me, so as a fellow programmer here can you guys give me a suggestion to improve my living?how bout emigrate?

<comment><USER13> where do you live currently?

<comment><USER12> Well i am in indonesia..

<comment><USER14> I would suggest you to find a job in Singapore or even Malaysia. Browse [http://startupjobs.asia/](http://startupjobs.asia/) and try to apply for jobs in countries around you.

After you have 3 to 5 years experience, try to emigrate to United States, Canada, News Zealand or a couple of good European countries. Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden off the top of my head. In the mean time, try to learn French or Spanish beside improving your English. It will give you much better advantages when you speak different languages.

<comment><USER12> that is what i aim for, unfortunetly some prefer local people so they didnot need to mess with working permit or anything, for now i am looking for a post- graduate 1year study chance and give me 2-3years stay in that country did you know any of the country like that?, Thanks for the suggestion :)

<comment><USER14> My personal advise is to stop wasting your time with studying anymore. A lot of web agencies and startups do not care if you have a university degrees or not, they only care about your programming skills. Find a job in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc. If you look at [http://www.startupjobs.asia/](http://www.startupjobs.asia/) you will see that a lot of startups welcome developers from other countries.

But then again, this is my personal advise. If you firmly decided to continue studying aboard, don't let a random stranger on internet change your mind. Good luck to you anyway!

<comment><USER12> The best thank you :)... God bless you..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't recommend Zend (I find it rather resource heavy) - but rather Laravel or Symphony, CodeIgniter is also nice and extremely easy to learn - probably the lowest entry level that I can think of, but 2.0 is taking it's sweet time to come along so that's a huge downside, plus, Ellislab wants to sell the project...

Regarding CMS work, I have personally found that Magento is one of the best things to specialise in. Ecommerce is a huge market.

<comment><USER16> No, don't even think of learning CodeIgniter. Besides being pretty much dead (version 3 has been coming out for, what, about 2 years now?), it has terrible architecture. The superglobal singleton is just awful and will kill you slowly.

<comment><USER17> This. I don't understand why CodeIgniter gets mentioned in the same breath as Zend or Symphony, or any other fully-fledged framework. CI is, to start with, much smaller: it's tiny, the sort of thing you could knock out in a week. It also has deep-rooted architectural issues that are preventing some of the longest standing bugs being fixed (for example, take a look at the router). Lastly it's not anywhere near as modular as it purports to be, and the code and architecture quality is rather poor.

<comment><USER15> The only reason why I mentioned it is because it's extremely easy - for a beginner, it's not a bad choice because it doesn't overwhelm you. Take baby steps.

<comment><USER16> Just because something it easy does not make it the right choice.

Conversely, it is a bad choice because it teaches you bad practices and you will be forced to implement so many hacks on any reasonable sized project. Just don't use it.

<comment><USER18> I found CodeIgniter to be really useful for a self-taught, spaghetti-style PHP programmer. It is the only framework that most such programmers can grasp by themselves using tutorials and docs available online. Any other framework, and they would require a lot of hand-holding.

Switching from CI to something better later is really not that hard and it's much, much easier that learning one of the modern frameworks from scratch.

I'm talking about self-taught begginers without CS degree or working-in-a- large-team experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A big suggestion missing here is a CS degree. I like Steve Yegge's take on it[1]:

> The best tip is: go get a computer science degree. The more computer science > you have, the better. You don't have to have a CS degree, but it helps. It > doesn't have to be an advanced degree, but that helps too.

My own take on it is that most programming languages are like cars and the skill of driving computer science: if you can drive one car, you can learn to drive the other and with programming if you can program in one language you can probably program in the other. Knowing the fundamentals about computers, how information is represented as bits, how they store and process information, how they communicate over networks, how you can use them to solve problems like sorting, cache invalidation, etc is really important stuff that is orthogonal to learning a programming language. Personally if I am using programming language X at my job, and you have 0 experience with it, but are a good programmer, I may not give a shit and hire you anyways.

[1] [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/03/get-that-job-at- googl...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite parts:

>Unicorn Skills That will be required – (Some how through magic)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you're going down the Drupal route you're just as likely to need Drupal 6 - one of the challenges in this market is there is a lot of legacy work to be done, so you often have to know two or three versions of the framework.

In the "Unicorn skills" section, you're as likely to need cPanel or Plesk as pure Linux skills (although having the latter will make the former much easier). I would also say you'll probably be using SVN and not git. Lastly, add FTP and SSH to the skills you'll need.

<comment><USER20> > I would also say you'll probably be using SVN and not git.

According to [http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/php.do](http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/php.do) these are the number of PHP jobs asking for Git and Subversion respectively in the UK in the past six months:

Git: 2244 jobs Subversion: 1559 jobs

So no, you're actually more likely to be asked for Git than SVN.

<comment><USER21> Being that both are popular and it's common to see both, you really ought to know both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone have any good "tick-offs" that you'd ideally have to meet before you could be classified as a PHP Dev?

I had a look at the Zend certification link, and I know most of things on the list. It was surprising, because I wouldn't classify myself as a "dev" or anything even close to it. I learnt (and use) PHP via the "hack and see" method.

</comment><comment><USER23> Recommend the Flight ([http://flightphp.com/learn](http://flightphp.com/learn)) framework for creating RESTful APIs in PHP. It is lightweight, flexible, and does routing nicely.

</comment><comment><USER8> Drupal 8 incorporates quite a bit of Symfony, so learning Symfony starting now will probably open some Drupal doors in a year or two when 8 is stable and being heavily used.

</comment><comment><USER24> Also, this: [https://github.com/ziadoz/awesome- php](https://github.com/ziadoz/awesome-php)

</comment><comment><USER25> What's the best of learning a CMS or Framework? or which one should a beginner start with and how can I go about the first steps?

</comment><comment><USER26> No, as a full stack web developer, I use node.js so that I don't need to switch between js and php frequently.

</comment><comment><USER25> is it easy to find job in the PHP world? and does it even pay good comparing to other languages like Ruby or Python

<comment><USER9> Yes, pretty easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why would I want to be a PHP developer? :O

<comment><USER28> Because finding a job is incredibly easy. Because it pays well if you know your stuff. Because you don't have to work with people who will judge you based on something as in-significant as what programming language you decide to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> TIL: Symfony has a high learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about [http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com) ? Shameless plug.

<comment><USER31> Chrome 35.0.1916.153 Contribute: Need to define QP/contribute/response/column1 Need to define QP/contribute/response/column2

Features: The "You will just have to try it yourself."-Button is not doing anything.

Sign Up Link: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'login' of undefined features:1

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congrats to the author on breaking the stupidly absurd font-size world record!

</comment><comment><USER33> no, because i'm a perl developer, and perl is php's big brother

<comment><USER33> haters gonna hate

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "PHP-elitist" is an oxymoron, right? Like a dumpster-foodie or an instant- coffee aficionado?

<comment><USER35> Stating that disliking/hating the mess that is wordpress makes someone an elitist is stupid and sounds like an apologist to me.

Would you call someone a ruby elitist because they embraced best practices and disliked/hated a project that refuses to embrace best practices and encourages bad practices?

<comment><USER36> That comment is also under joomla, which is even worse than WP.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple to acquire digital magazine service Texture - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/03/apple-to-acquire-digital-magazine-service-texture/ <comment><USER2> Finger's crossed for this one.

Hopefully this purchase will bolster Apple News. Just yesterday I was wondering if Apple News would be discontinued because Apple seems to have lost interest in it. Which is a shame, because it's probably the best news reader I've encountered. Fast. Versatile. Clean. I'm OK with ads, and the ones in Apple News are very unobtrusive.

I just wish there was an Apple News app for the desktop or web, because I don't always want to read on a tiny screen.

I have used (and often paid for) lots of magazine and newspaper apps over the last ten years, and most of them have been not great. Some not even good.

Some of the publishers have noticed this, and put out their own apps, usually with even worse results. But at least they're not paying someone else to make their brand look terrible. The only one I've found that isn't completely terrible is the New York Times, but even that has its problems.

<comment><USER3> What makes you feel like they've lost interest in Apple News? I don't use the app much at all so I don't have an opinion but I think it just got a visual overhaul with iOS 11, didn't it? I'm always surprised how many of my friends seem to use it a lot. So I've wondered if it might be a dark horse that we'll all eventually realize is a big deal, like iMessage.

<comment><USER4> It's not really a secret that Apple News is incredibly popular. Everyone on the publisher side has been talking about how much traffic it drives to their stories for a while now. Journalists even pitch their stories to the Apple News editors to try and get them featured [1].

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2018/02/14/the-information-apple- news/](https://9to5mac.com/2018/02/14/the-information-apple-news/)

<comment><USER3> Ah, I'm behind the times. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One part of Apple's media strategy that's confusing to me is how they brand these things.

For instance, how come their exclusive TV programming is branded under Apple Music? How come iTunes is the wrapper for all media ... not just "tunes"?

Seems like they'd benefit from rebranding these products as "Apple Media" (or something like that) then have Apple Music, Apple Video, Apple Texture, etc. as sub-brands under Apple Media. Then, offer a sampling of these services for free to owners of Apple hardware (or at a flat annual fee similar to Amazon Prime's bundled services) and offer premium upsells for those that want a more-expansive or unlimited selection of content.

<comment><USER5> "Media" is too bland and generic. Might as well call it "Apple Content". Yuuuuck

<comment><USER6> "Apple Records". Gives you access to anything that was recorded.

<comment><USER7> If this were all possible it would likely involve a very expensive licensing deal with Apple Corps. as Apple Records already exists.

<comment><USER6> That was the joke... Apple Inc. has already trampled on Apple Corps multiple times, with the latest settlement giving them right to the name in every other context except this one, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully Apple will turn Apple News into a News spotify. I would happily pay a subscription - say 2 tiers light <2> heavy (hr pw) $10 / $20 pm - with the subs shared amoungst content providers based on time spent reading. I subscribe to several now such as FT, Economist, Times. Expensive and a real pain though, having multiple subs so I may drop them soon, an aggregated sub would be so much better. Apple News would be an excellent platform for this, I love it's layout, quality and Font size controls. I tried Readly App it's reader is truly awfull based on pdf version of paper mags so you have to pan and scan and scroll all the time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this good news or bad news (or no news even) for Blendle? [https://launch.blendle.com/](https://launch.blendle.com/) "Discover the best journalism. No paywalls, no ads, just stories you'll love. We're in beta. Reserve your spot."

edit: What the hell is with the downvotes? I only ask because someone on here mentioned that Blendle are in roughly the same business–meaning, as Texture they also claim to offer a "multi-title subscription service giving users the ability to instantly access some of the most widely read magazines while on the go"

<comment><USER10> My first thought too. And since services like Blendle lean heavily on iOS for generating money I think it's probably bad news for them. But at least they had a great time playing with their investors money while they were growing ;)

[https://twitter.com/alexandernl/status/585415710546993153](https://twitter.com/alexandernl/status/585415710546993153)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least it's Apple, so chances are they will do something useful with it.

Google could've bought it and shut it down.

</comment><comment><USER12> Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook eating up every business

</comment><comment><USER13> Any chance they will continue to support non-Apple platforms?

</comment><comment><USER14> Apple is a fascinating company, with their massive cash reserves they have a lot of options. I feel like they're exploring banking, publishing in all forms, in addition to their software and hardware ventures. I hope it works out, although I look at the bugs and issues with iOS and MacOS and worry that there is a loss of focus on what makes them Apple in the first place.

<comment><USER15> I'm honestly surprised with myself for forgetting that iTunes once felt like the go-to place for media; it seems to me like this move is in support of those sorts of endeavors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apple might be moving into the era Oracle Corp moved into 15 years ago, where all innovation will occur through acquisition.

<comment><USER17> That is not entirely true. People have these fantasy where innovation == invention. Apple is the one with the ecosystem and marketing power that brings new invention with value to customers. And mostly with an improved version of the invention.

The day Apple make acquisition and brings a poor product or services out is the day they enter Oracle Era. Given how I think Oracle makes ( mostly ) absolutely appalling products I say the day is yet to come and far from happening in near future.

<comment><USER2> > The day Apple make acquisition and brings a poor product or services out is > the day they enter Oracle Era.

What about Siri?

/Siri, add ginger ale to my groceries list. // I've added gaming hammer to your groceries list.

/Siri, what's the weather? // Here are some web sites I found about "weather."

<comment><USER18> Hey Siri, play Delta Blues!

..Delta Blues starts playing.

Hey Siri, play the first album from T-Bone Burnet.

..and it plays.

Play the number one song from 1983..

And Every Breath You Take by The Police starts playing.

<comment><USER19> "Hey Siri, play Förgätmigej by Raubtier"

..good luck with that one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: The most useful equations/instructions in the event of an Apocalypse - <AUTHOR>

The other side of a business card is always a bit of a waste of space so I want to use it wisely - in the event of an apocalypse, what's the most useful bit of information that would fit* on the back of a business card?<p>* limit is probably ~500 chars in a compact font, i'll send you a copy of the business card if I use your suggestion ;) <comment><USER2> Put some instructions using TeX/LaTeX code as it is probably the only language to survive an Apocalypse

          \documentclass{article}
          \begin{document}
          \def\alist{boil water, keep calm, move to countyside,
            carry a knife, take food, take clothes, take 3 books}
          \makeatletter
          \@for \i:=\alist \do{
            \texttt{\i $\rightarrow$ }
          }
          \makeatother
          \end{document}

</comment><comment><USER3> "DON'T PANIC"

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a keeper ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> while ( apocalypse ) { run("like hell") }</comment>


Show HN: I Made Date Countdown Timers Webpage. OpenSource. No Ads. No Login - <AUTHOR> https://timerto.xyz <comment><USER2> Cool idea love the simple UI.

Couple of notes:

\- The date picker is not super keyboard friendly, let me type to go faster than a select.

\- You can save the event on some basic server and generate a uuid to share/edit them, that way i can link to my countdown.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you feedback - I assumed date picker will be easier for user. Interesting to hear the other way around would be better.

When it comes to persistency - maybe I will add it some point, but no plans at this point

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice little site, hope you had a good time making it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I did and I've learnt a lot

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, my side project created to learn Svelte. To/Since date countdown timers. Private - data is saved in browser storage. No ads, no login, no nothing just time passing by.

</comment><comment><USER4> What website did you get your imagery from? I've seen it before but I've lost the link!

Cool site too, bookmarked :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! For opening graphics I've used [https://undraw.co](https://undraw.co)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that it has the mm/dd/yyyy format makes me dislike the website

<comment><AUTHOR> OK.. so give it a second try ;) formatting is now based on detected browser locale.

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

But it still shows the date as mm/dd/yyyy format on the top right of the event box.

BTW you dont need momentjs, you can use Intl.DateTimeFormat [https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/JavaScript/Referen...](https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/DateTimeFormat)

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad - bug fixed

Thanks for pointing me to Intl formatting - I will probably migrate in next iteration.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CSS-Only Components for Pure CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joe-crick/pure-css-components <comment><USER2> We actually removed our CSS tabs recently because apparently modern screen readers had more issues with them than JavaScript tabs surprisingly enough.

<comment><USER3> Not really that surprising, since there is no way to apply the correct aria- selected and aria-expanded attributes using just CSS. (You can apply the correct ARIA roles in the HTML though, just not save the change of state.)

It's a shame there is not a native HTML tab construction, since you really shouldn't need JS to make tabs. Using the radio buttons to set active state is a clever hack, but it's not what they were intended for.

Ref: WAI-ARIA section on tabs: [https://www.w3.org/TR/wai- aria-1.1/#tab](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#tab)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been checking out some of these Github posts today on HN (there have been several) and then spinning up dashboards for them at Chart.ly.

[https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/joe-crick/pure-css- compone...](https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/joe-crick/pure-css-components)

Interesting that this project has a negative streak of 440 days (440 days since a commit has been made). So not a super fresh project.

Also interesting that it made it to the front page of HN! Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER5> I like Pure CSS, it's one of the few CSS frameworks that makes it easy to pick and choose only the parts you need. Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER6> I think calling something "css-only" and having it break because you didn't add a radio input element in the markup is a little misleading. The dynamic functionality hinges on the behavior of these html elements. And if having required html elements is ok, why not just lose the hacky markup and include a required javascript file to get the desired behavior in a more traditional and standard way?

</comment><comment><USER7> Their CSS is 3.8K while Bootstrap (4.1.1) is 21K. Both being minified and gzipped.

<comment><USER8> Would that result in significantly faster page speeds if you switch from Bootstrap?

<comment><USER9> No, unless you count milliseconds as significant. You might as well remove one image in your content or save with a better image compression.

<comment><USER7> IMO an image is much less important than CSS, since most of the time without the CSS framework loading the page is not usable. Also progressive JPEGs make a big difference for the effect of loading time if you have a large splash image or background image.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forestall the "Debt Crisis": Mint a 5 Trillion Dollar Coin - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2300428/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government- bond...](http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/us/) says that the current yield on 1-year US treasuries is 0.20%. If I understand correctly, that means that if you plow US$100 000 into 1-year US treasuries in the open market, you get treasuries redeemable (at the Treasury) a year from now for US$100 200. (Thanks for the correction to the number, aquark and perlgeek.)

In other words, the bond market says that the big banks are betting heavily against any kind of hyperinflationary move like this.

<comment><USER3> I think you are missing a 0 ... it would be $100 200.

Still at that rate you'd figure the transaction costs of moving the money around would swamp most of the return

<comment><USER2> The return is surely already negative if you take into account inflation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Krugman is even talking about this on the NY Times blog.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/lawyers-coins- an...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/lawyers-coins-and-money/)

<comment><USER5> I love how all of that stuff is legal, and yet inaction could lead to a totally illegal violation of the 14th amendment. Irony at it's most expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like this entire house of cards that is the international financial system is going to completely collapse in my lifetime. I'm not extremely familiar with the details, but the more I learn, the more fragile and arbitrary the whole thing seems.

<comment><USER7> I recently read a fiction book, "The Panic of '89" by Paul Erdman, which discusses a hypothetical terrorist plot to create an international run on US- priced financial instruments and institutions. Interesting hypotheticals abound.

It also mentions the Gramm-Rudman act, which I had not heard of prior to reading the book. It was an 'Emergency Deficit Reduction Act' from 1985.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Rudman%E2%80%93Ho...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Rudman%E2%80%93Hollings_Balanced_Budget_Act)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly enough, there are conspiracy theories that say JFK did something similar to try to subvert the FED's total authority to "print money" by doing something similar to what is suggested in the article. The order gave the Treasury the power to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.

See executive order 11110: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11110>

</comment><comment><USER8> Jack Balkin has been engaging in a sort of parlor game of making up other alternatives as well. The main issue is that issuing debt is just one way of acquiring/manufacturing cash; you can do it lots of other ways. A straightforward way is minting coins. But you can even do it ways that the private-sector can also do, like by selling options on government assets, or inventing and selling derivative securities.

For example, he has an only-half-tongue-in-cheek article about how to use some of the magic from the recent financial crisis to gain a bunch of cash on hand. Banks can in effect mint money by writing and selling derivative securities. Well, if the Treasury issues credit-default-swaps on its own debt, it collects a premium up front (the value of the CDS), and if it never defaults, it never has to make a payout. Even better, it could write a gigantic CDS for the entire debt, and deposit it with the Federal Reserve, which would credit the account for the value of the instrument, like they do with any member bank that deposits a financial instrument. Of course, that financial instrument was just recently manufactured from thin air before it was deposited, but that's true of any CDS.

[http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/07/end-debt-crisis-now- with-...](http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/07/end-debt-crisis-now-with-credit- default.html)

<comment><USER9> The treasury selling CDS on its own debt makes no sense, because the credit- worthiness of your insurer is completely correlated to the underlying credit. So people would pay zero for the credit protection.

Quite why people away from the financial markets assume that those that are are going to fall for something so obvious is a mystery to me. And if you think that the housing crisis is a counterexample, I should point out that people over-leveraging themselves to invest in property at ever-increasing prices was common wisdom back in 2005.

<comment><USER8> Hmm true, but I believe the Fed would be the buyer in this case, not the open market. The government would be selling its own instruments to a quasi- governmental entity, like BoA writing a CDS and selling it to a BoA subsidiary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If they actually do this I think any faith I have left in the US's monetary system will be gone. This is just _too_ absurd.

<comment><USER11> Same here. Can I have my paycheck in Swiss Francs?

<comment><USER10> Nice that you bring that up. Why _can't_ it work like that? Sure the burrito lunch truck guy would look at me kind of funny if I tried to pay _him_ that way, but that is what we have exchange rates for. Why isn't it a thing that I work out with my employer what currency I want to be paid in?

I don't buy all the mumbo jumbo about different economies rising and falling in different geographic regions and whatnot either. If that were the real reason then we should have seperate currencies for the west, middle, and east areas of the US. Hell, each city should have their own currency in that case, why should Detroit's shittyness drag down the economies of cities thousands of miles away?

Geography is a terribly abstract concept in this world where communication is for all intents and purposes instant and I can get packages to anyone regardless of location in less than 24 hours. Companies paying people with US currency just because that particular building happens to be located in the US is just absurd if you think about it.

<comment><USER12> If your employer receives revenue in US dollars, and you pay your expenses in US dollars, committing to pay in Swiss francs adds volatility from both their perspective and yours.

This is the essential bar to adoption of any new currency.

<comment><USER10> My employer happens to receive revenue in _numerous_ currencies. I do think that it should be up to the employer which currencies they want to offer payment in, but I really think that it should be something that is legal (is it not? I don't know) and to a certain degree expected.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure that it's legal for me to pay you in pesos, franks, shekels or whatever else you and i find mutually agreeable. Note, though, that this does not get me out of paying payroll taxes in dollars or you out of paying your income taxes in dollars; I've still gotta figure your payroll taxes based on the value of whatever I'm giving you in dollars, and then pay that to the government in dollars.

This does make doing so rather a lot more complex; I mean, do you pay taxes based on the value of the foreign coin in dollars when you are paid? at the end of the year? etc, etc. It'd get complicated pretty fast, so it's usually easiest for a business to operate in a main currency, and if the employee wants franks or what have you, the employee can go buy them after they get paid in whatever the standard currency is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't sound too much different than QE1 & QE2 -- where the Federal Reserve created a trillion dollars out of thin air and used it to buy US debt and mortgage securities.

I'm not a lawyer, but don't the courts usually sort out conflicting laws? It seems that's the case -- congress demanded the executive branch spend money -- and congress has now decided the executive branch can't spend money. Why doesn't Obama take it to the courts?

<comment><USER8> It's quite possible the courts would punt on this one due to separation-of- powers concerns. If Congress passes a law requiring the president to execute some laws, but also refuses to fund him sufficiently to do so, resolving the problem arguably is the responsibility of the executive branch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wouldn't this cause massive inflation almost instantly? We could have the next Zimbabwean Dollar (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar>). Isn't this extra just 'printing money' the type of thing that you learn in Econ 101 is about the worst possible thing for an economy? Sounds like the medicine will be worse than the disease?

<comment><AUTHOR> It can only cause inflation when the money actually hits the economy. The effect would be no different than raising the debt ceiling. Some special book keeping (which is what this whole mess is) will do nothing by itself.

<comment><USER15> the coin doesn't hit the economy but it enables further borrowing which does.

surprised at all the 'no this is actually quote ok' arguments. you can't print value out of thin air. you only print volume which taxes the holders of existing USD.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't say it wouldn't be inflationary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What if Fidel Castro steals it?

<comment><USER17> Give what back?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, is America now a complete laughing stock abroad? I really wonder what non- USian folks think about all this political posturing and willingness to play chicken with the financial reputation of the US.

<comment><USER19> I don't think anyone is doing that. There is precisely no risk of sovereign default, even if we don't raise the debt ceiling for a couple years.

<comment><USER9> The consequences of a downgrade are TERRIBLE : So much of modern finance relies on Treasuries being AAA to act as some kind of bed-rock.

Just like your idea of 'precisely no risk' of default, what would happen if the programming constant ZERO was only guaranteed to be close to 0? And not really a constant?

<comment><USER19> I said that there was no risk of sovereign default. Our tax revenue exceeds the cost of our debt service by a factor of more than 10. Do you anticipate that our blended interest rate will increase by a factor of 10 in the near future?

We would certainly run a great risk of downgrade (but not of default) if we raise the debt ceiling without making any significant effort to lower our deficit going forward. This seems to be the plan of our politicians, however.</comment></comment></comment></comment>