The Rise of "Movie-Set Urbanism" - <AUTHOR> https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/6/movie-set-urbanism <comment><USER2> Correct it's no vibrant, bustling organic downtown.

But it's still a helluva lot better than nothing at all.

The suburbs I grew up in? There were a bunch of shitty strip malls, and a single indoor mall with a single food court with zero natural lighting, taken over by teenagers after school because it was literally the only place to congregate besides the parking lot outside the supermarket.

There was no local "center" at all for community.

This kind of development would have been a _huge_ life upgrade. Yes it's still built around parking -- but if life is already built around cars in suburbia, there's literally no alternative. Without parking, nobody can _get_ there in the first place.

This article seems to be dismissing the better because it only wants the perfect.

Edit: to people replying this is still terrible or no better than a mall... look at the photos. This has paths to stroll along, a waterfront, trees, outdoor dining/cafes, building facades that aren't horrible to look at the way painted flat concrete is. You can _hang out_ here and it _looks nice_. I think some people here must just not be aware of how horrible and ugly strip malls and 1970's-era indoor malls can be. This is objectively a gigantic upgrade for some people.

<comment><USER3> What is shown is not better than what you grew up in; it's the same. It's an outdoor mall, pretending to be a downtown.

The only difference is that this mall doesn't have the food court and the giant corridors; instead it's outside where the rain and bugs can get to you.

<comment><USER4> It is also near the water, which could be nice.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm sure that'll work out _just fine_ so long as the sea level never rises. At least it's in Florida where there's never any serious storms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish the author would hit the non-walkability a bit harder. To get from one section to another, cross a street. To get from one side to another, you have to cross several streets.

There is one area that did the same thing where I live (The Greene Town Center). I cannot simply think of why I would want to live there, and I was their target demographic! I really can't walk around inside of The Greene without having to watch traffic (I am simply amazed at how recklessly folks drive in there). If you look at both the Greene and that picture, the roads are pervasive in there.

The suburban neighborhood I live in is actually more walkable! I can walk through a park to get to the library, I have to cross a single one lane road to get to a Kroger, and I can walk within the neighborhood on the street with almost no concern for traffic (heck, it has better sidewalks then the Greene!)

If you really want to attract people to live there, make the place actually an area where you only need a car to drive to/from work (and try to bring jobs to there!). Bring Grocery Stores, Schools, a community center, local restaurants to the area. Have a park! Make it so I can walk/cycle to places surrounding the area. Shove parking/cars out of the way.

Heck, even downtowns have the same issue. The downtown in Dayton only has Second Street Market that could pass as a grocery store (don't get me wrong, that place is awesome, but it's only open Fri-Sun). I thought about living downtown, but once again, I have to drive to get anywhere anyways. I have no incentive to live downtown.

<comment><USER7> I first encountered this kind of shopping center in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Main Street at Exton struck me as incredibly strange - it's a strip mall dressed up to look like an urban downtown, right down to parallel parking spots on the street. Once you do park, it is actually fairly walkable.

A couple of years later, after having moved to Philadelphia, there was something I wanted to grab at a store in Main Street at Exton. There's a regional rail station a half mile from the shopping center, so I hopped a train. The absurd thing about this particular arrangement, which otherwise sounds like a great way to connect nearby markets, is that there is no sidewalk between the train station and the shopping center. The station sits where a major local road meets a major highway, so one way or another, you're crossing six lanes of traffic to get past the local road, and you have to cross two major highway four-lane on/off ramps as you go under the highway overpass, walking along a beaten grass path with only a curb between you and the traffic.

Exton Mall's another mile up the road, and while there's sporadic sidewalks between the two malls, I've never bothered with that walk.

Given the proximity of this shopping center to public transit, I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that the decision to exclude sidewalks was at best a classist choice, at worst a racist choice.

I live in a part of Philadelphia that's unusually pedestrian friendly, all things considered. I can walk to pick up groceries (except I get those delivered), the hardware store, coffee shops, restaurants, galleries, all manner of everyday things that, when I lived in the exurbs, I had to hop in the car and drive anywhere from 5-30 minutes to get to, and it's fantastic. We've also got more methods of public transit than almost anywhere in the world (not saying the coverage is great, mind you), and I've been here long enough that despite all the challenges that come with living in an old urban center, I hope I never have to go back to a suburban lifestyle.

It was clear from the moment I pulled up to "Main Street" that these psuedo- downtowns miss the point.

<comment><USER8> i'd read somewhere that these kinds of developments became popular with developers (over indoor malls) because of their success in southern california in the past couple decades: the revitalization of third street promenade in santa monica and the success of the grove in LA (as well as irvine company developments in orange county).

to be honest, the grove always gives me the fakeness willies, like it's all facade and no substance (broken only when i walk into a store and it becomes real somehow).

<comment><USER6> I've been to both of those places. The huge difference between them, the example I give, and the one from the website once you park and get to the grove, there's no car traffic in it!

The third street promenade likewise had entire blocks closed to traffic. Crossings where also very generous to the pedestrians, so you rarely had to wait to cross the street and knew that you wouldn't get hit. It was also very easy to walk to the Santa Monica beach.

Both examples were built for pedestrians.

<comment><USER8> yes, i was commenting more on the impetus for the rise of insular, faux "microcommunities" in general than on the walkability therein, which, as you point out, is better at 3rd street & the grove.

<comment><USER6> That's fair. I didn't mean to suggest you were incorrect, my point is I think folks are trying to replicate it without understanding why it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think he's barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't "movie set urbanism", it's just boring, old "too much parking". Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability. But putting parking behind stores ("movie sets") creates a human scale street space.

While organic urban growth should be cherished, there are extreme cases, like most American towns and cities, where urbanism needs to be forcefully bootstrapped. In this case, we're artificially accelerating the evolution of a neighborhood and skipping over the early rural and suburban forms, going straight to a small urban core. I can see the long term hope of infilling those parking lots with more buildings as the town grows outwards.

<comment><USER10> If you don't have of street parking you get congestion as people park on streets - that is the reason why planners mandate of street parking.

<comment><USER11> I my recommend "The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup to get a sense of what planners actually think about street parking.

<comment><USER12> My home town in Florida, and the town I just moved out of in New Jersey, think of street parking as a cash cow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Florida is almost entirely a place where you need a car to do anything. It is so absurdly spread-out that even driving at high speed on their high speed roads is a remarkably slow way to get anywhere. If people cannot park there, they cannot get there. Even if you built a real urban walkable neighbourhood with housing, stores, schools, offices, churches - a place where people could truly walk to all of their daily needs - the people that lived there would still need multiple cars per family in order to access the outside world. It would be like living on an island. Attempting to leave on foot would be like trying to swim across the ocean. If you don't die of dehydration or exhaustion first, you will probably killed by a shark/car before you get anywhere. Ironically, about 1 in 4 Florida drivers are uninsured. One fake town centre is merely a tiny, amusing symptom of a giant chicken-and-egg problem.

<comment><USER14> If it really was as a walkable neighborhood some people could get rid of the car. There would still be a lot of cars but we would have the start of people not having cars. Walkable means several possible jobs, a library, courthouse, many retailers at several price points including discount retail where you buy your daily groceries and clothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I live in a place exactly like this in Florida called Baldwin Park. It's much better designed and I love living here. The main difference is a few things (and these really matter to me):

1\. All the parking is parallel parking along all the streets. This ensures that the number of businesses don't need their own massive ugly parking lots

2\. There are actually apartments here above the businesses, so that it's always active, the people that live here keep the businesses below in business. We have everything from lawyers to gyms to dentists right below my feet in a single square mile.

3\. This is actually a community. We have multiple community events and I can just show up and be there. We have a big shopping day every first Friday of the month where local merchants will set up tents and sell their stuff. They also do some event for nearly every holiday.

4\. The entire town center is walkable. A square mile of walkable businesses, a park, a pool, etc.

<comment><USER16> The same author wrote about this place three years ago.

He seems to like it.

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/5/31/baldwin- park-a...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/5/31/baldwin-park-a-test- for-new-urbanism)

<comment><USER15> Wow I actually didn't know all the history of this town, and I've lived here for a few years.

Thanks for sharing this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Until you deal with the parking problem—which is done by building truly > mixed-use places where people can meet their daily needs without hopping in > the car—you haven't created true urbanism.

Daily needs means jobs for both you and your spouse, which won't be in some random subdivision in Florida. It means schools, which don't appear to be there either. It means the kids' after school activities, again, missing from this plan. And if you don't have kids or a spouse, then you should just live in the city anyway. This is an alternative to the sprawling suburban subdivision, not a downtown block.

Developers create these "drive to urbanism" layouts (like Reston Town Center in Northern Virginia) because thats what's workable given the planning constraints of the larger system. This happens in "real cities" too. When I lived in a newly-redeveloped area of downtown DC, we still ended up driving a lot. My work was on the other side of town. The grocery store across the street was an awful, over priced Safeway. My daughter's school was over in Georgetown, a 30 minute drive away. Driving is unavoidable unless these communities are highly self contained.

<comment><USER18> >Driving is unavoidable

What about public transport?

<comment><USER15> I live in one of the major metro areas of Florida, and even here public transport is abysmal. We have a single train line that goes north south about 30-50 miles. And a few buses that basically ferry the homeless around all day while they sleep on it.

That's it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While not perfect, this type of development is already a step-up above the unwalkable so called "power center". They have great upgrade potential when we'll figure out public transport. The parking lots closest to the walkable public strip can be turned into mixed use buildings.

Solving infrastructure and public transit problems is not the job of real estate developers. It is our job as a society. There has to be political consensus on how we want our communities to be planned. The developer will then do what they can with the rules we impose.

Unfortunately, the consensus is largely that we love cars. Maybe we should be paying for influential people to spend a month without a car in a walkable european city.

<comment><USER20> > Maybe we should be paying for influential people to spend a month without a > car in a walkable european city.

It is not just being walkable in European cities - it is also a lot to do with workable public transport.

Sure, I could walk the 2 miles from Point A to B, but in a bus/tram/metro/train that will take 5 mins rather than 30 walking it.

Even then though it is often only workable right in the center of town where there is a lot of good coverage. Most people will live further out where affordability is more realistic. At least for me about "half-way" out from the center of London, getting to my local grocery store is a 33 minute walk, 27 minute bus (assuming I did not have to wait at the stop at all first), or just an 8 minute drive.

Note also that the bus would be a £3.40 return ticket, which is enough for about 2.5-3 litres of petrol. A toyota prius that can do about 3.7l/100KM means that for the price of a bus ticket you could cover about 68KM (~42 miles) or for a tesla 3 that gets 240Wh/mile charging @ £0.24/khw you'd get about 95KM (~59 miles). For the case of this example where it is about a 5 mile round-trip, you'd be looking at 9 or 12 return trips to the grocery store depending on if you took the prius or the tesla, for the cost of a single round-trip on the bus.

It is doable without a car, but not easy. You get into a situation where you are trading off trying to carry 20+KG of shopping back on the (crowded) buses vs taking multiple separate trips a week (...and the £3.40 monetary cost + minimum 54 minute travel time cost). And it might be raining (not easy to hold an umbrella when you have 16 carrier bags you are trying to lug). With a car you can easy haul back many 10s of KGs of shopping in one trip, while staying dry, with just 16 minutes spent getting there and back ... and in a car you are guaranteed a seat too :)

Personally I did the trade off and found that having a car for day-to-day life is just so much easier (not just for shopping but for all sorts), but obviously I'd never drive into the centre of London (if nothing else, there is nowhere to park) and happily walk + get the tube when in the centre of town. Driving to work just feels 100% alien here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Been seeing these kinds of developments pop up a lot lately. The research triangle of NC is getting a lot of these with all their rapid development, and I've seen them around where I live currently.

The problem is they are really nothing more than a bandaid. They don't solve infrastructure problems, and they still encourage people to get into their cars (creating traffic) and driving to some place else far from their homes.

My point is, I don't see the purpose. They look fake, they feel fake, and I still have to drive there. It's not encouraging walking that much. It feels like a theme park, but at least at Disneyland they still pull the parking way outside the main park.

</comment><comment><USER22> One thing I dislike about this new trend is it supplants true community spaces. There is a downtown in the suburb I live in now but it is a place no one other than junkies and homeless go. A few business cling to life there but I don't know how since there is no foot traffic.

Some development company created one of these outdoor malls about 10 minutes outside of the downtown. It has a cinema, a few big box stores (including a Walmart super-center). They even got it right with mostly underground parking giving the outdoor mall a high-level of walkability between stores that have fronts directly on the wide side walks. The security keeps all of the undesirables away and there is a public playground for kids. It's like the commercial equivalent of a gated community. I find it unsettling and I wish we took public money to revitalize the downtown rather than creating these segregated spaces.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm confused. Every suburban city in California has the "main downtown" area facade with vast parking lots behind it. This design has been around for almost a century and works in lower density areas.

Do we all want sophisticated public transit? Sure! However, let's be realistic. Where would the public transit take you? How many residents would you need to make it sustainable?

Another thing, does the OP want NYC/SF building density in Florida? You could cram 10k people into a .5 mile area, sure. Then you would have HUGE under developed areas all around and no where for 10k people to go explore. Then there wouldn't even need to be public transit.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure this is totally a rip from Hollywood or a kind of modern Potemkin city.

I see this in old districts too. Facade in the front parking in the back. Strip malls are the inverse. With strip malls it looks ugly but you can tell at a glance if there is parking. The older form you don't know till you drive around the back on a typically one-way street.

The modern take is like the Emeryville Bay Street shopping center or Santana Row in SJ/Sta Clara. It's obviously artificial but people like it. In addition at least Santana Row integrates housing into the mix.

<comment><USER25> I agree that Santana Row is particularly well done... but I think the author is reminiscing for something more like downtown Palo Alto. What he misses is a few things:

a) Palo Alto can hold onto its old town feel because it's literally the epicenter of Facebook, google, sand hill road and Stanford university. Some random town in Florida isn't going to have all that.

B) in places like Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, etc, it's simply not feasible to constrain parking when a good part of the year no one wants to walk a half mile or more to get groceries.

There are other ways for places to be nice and not look like an early 1900s town center... I'd submit Austin as an example: it's totally car centered but has lots of intriguing and distinct neighborhoods and plenty of variety while also being quite suburban and housing quite a lot of strip mall retail.

The small downtown can also be very restrictive and expensive for lower income families. For example, in New Jersey, and eastern PA there are quite a few quaint little towns. Oh sure their town centers are full of small restaurants and dog grooming, pharmacies and banks, but conspicuously absent are grocery stores. I know of whole towns with 10-40k residents and not one grocery store. It's worse in places like Chicago where lack of access to quality fresh produce has been linked to higher rates of crime.

These small towns create high rates of NIMBY-ism and while they do retain their turn of the century charm, I would suggest that it's just as Hollywood as the new urbanism but in different ways.

I think we can all agree strip malls probably weren't the best invention and new urbanism isn't perfect but at least developers are trying to do something appealing rather than just put up another crappy building with nail salons and vape shops.

<comment><USER26> In Chicago, is the link between crime and lack of access to decent produce one way, or the other? Nobody wants to put grocery stores (or most stores) in high-crime areas.

<comment><USER24> I guess we might find out over the next few years.

The new DA in SF isn't pursuing shrinkage/theft under $950 (due to Prop 47). Of stores shutter due to losses at least we can say it contributes to the desertification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Existing urbanism makes me stressed. Even a shopping mall visit can bring a lot of negativity. A lot of people and noisy. On the contrary, I want peace, comfort and calm. For me, saving is watching at home with my family a good film about eternal values. I use [https://pirateproxy.space/](https://pirateproxy.space/) to find interesting films. It's so good when I can watch a movie in silence and family circle

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of Facadism as part of the larger pattern of cargo culting trends in development to try to gain the benefits of the "new way" without deeper changes resulting in nothing really different.

On the parking issue and related housing shortages I wonder how viable an attempted rail primary based housing development project to a major city would be in the US for NIMBY dodging. Apparently that is fairly common in Japan along with new rail line loops receiving housing developments and subway/train station centered commercial districts. In theory existing neighborhoods would scale up and add public transit as density rises but in practice they complain like hell over any changes. Optimistically successful examples could give a kick in the pants to NIMBYs as their property value drops anyway due to the competition of a new area and they realize commutter trains aren't the devil or a waste of money but reduce road traffic.

<comment><USER29> I think this is the idea behind culdesac (no private cars or parking in development, on light rail, carshare at periphery) but we'll see how that pans out.

<comment><USER30> No private cars in the development? OK, that means the housebound can't live there, because people like home health nurses can't be asked to drag equipment and other supplies from the closest parking to wherever the person lives. With many First-World countries looking at aging populations, this is going to limit the appeal of such developments.

<comment><USER29> Aging populations are exactly a reason to move away from car dependence. Instead they're trapped in suburban homes with no drivers' licence, often alone.

<comment><USER30> Old people should be in communities where driving is de-emphasized, I agree. However, home health services promote independence, too, and they depend on cars to practically transport meals, equipment, and people directly to the door, in ways which would be vastly impractical if cars were outright banned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Its almost as if we built a building... then put all the stores inside of it. People could walk around without concern for the weather or cars. Hell we could surround it with parking even!

-Pre-2000's Mall designers

Screw the building lets just cram the stores up close to each other in an outdoor square with trees and surround it with, parking.

-Post 2010 Mall designers

</comment><comment><USER32> The most surreal of these developments that I've visited is the Town Square of Copperopolis, California.[1]

It's not visually unappealing, but is a rather odd addendum to a historic 19th c. town which apparently won't suffice for tourists or affluent retirees (not enough parking). It's just as managed and tidy as the developments discussed here. Speakers on light poles blare top 40 hits from the 1950s, for some reason.

[1] [https://www.gocalaveras.com/location/california/gold- country...](https://www.gocalaveras.com/location/california/gold- country/copperopolis-california/)

</comment><comment><USER33> these are popping up in the DFW suburbs where they can be built from scratch. The standard setup is retail at street level with apartments on top and parking underground or at least concentrated in one large garage. They're not completely car free in the center of the development but it doesn't make sense to drive on the interior, there's no point. I think the streets on the inside are there mostly for fire/emergency access. It's ok I guess, the developments are like walking around an amusement park but it's retail instead of games and rides.

Another setup I see in the exurbs are planned communities. You basically take everything a neighborhood needs and build a wall around it. My sister lives in one on a lake, it's pretty neat, everyone drives golf-carts around instead of cars which is funny/interesting. Also, they have their own holiday festivals and events so the community is pretty close knit. My sister's kids know all the other neighborhood kids and all the parents know each other. The parents keep an eye out and so the kids are given a lot of freedom to roam and do kid stuff they wouldn't normally be able to do in the standard suburban neighborhood with heavy and fast traffic everywhere.

<comment><USER34> You can have largely pedestrianized areas in the interior with these sorts of things but, in general, you need to provide parking because a lot of people are going to need/want to use a car to get to them even if they're on some sort of transit route.

They also tend to work better in moderate climates. One example of something along these lines in the Bay Area is Santana Row. Very clearly artificial but still relatively pleasant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This sort of development is crying out for a big parking garage near the highway, and an automated train to shuttle people between the parking structure and the walkable/bicyclable city core.

That, along with commercial-under and residential-over vertical zoning, is the bridge we need between traditional suburban sprawl and walkable cities. You can't walk around if you can't get there, and you won't want to stay if you can't leave.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder why we don't see more developments with underground parking. Imagine a three-level underground parking space with a small public park on top. Access would be gated to residents of the surrounding buildings. You should still have some above-ground parking for deliveries, friends visiting, etc. but you can have the majority of parking underground.

<comment><USER37> Underground parking being expensive is the main reason.

Still, it is pretty common here in Northern Virginia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> When manually driven cars become a rare exception expect these layouts to change again. Instead of vast parking lots somewhat integrated with the destination, cars in surplus to immediate requirements drive themselves to "inconvenient" staging lots or back to their corporate homes. Developments become more dense again.

<comment><USER39> That's probably true, but in the intervening 75 years, cities would do well to build up their public transport.

<comment><USER40> The only thing that will cause cities to build up public transport is if people start living in more dense quarters. And the only thing that will make people start living in more dense quarters is if the cost of moving people and all the mass associated with their lives increases drastically. Therefore, the only solution is to cause the price of fuel to rise dramatically, or wait for the consequences of fuel use to raise the cost for us.

And then once people are living in smaller homes in higher density environments, a city government will be able to propose public transportation that is actually feasible.

<comment><USER39> I agree. Also cities and municipalities should charge for road usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The second example just seems to be a shopping mall without a roof.

</comment><comment><USER42> He complains it is all parking, but there's solutions to that. Here in Santa Monica there's a whole row of public parking buildings a few blocks from all the popular downtown areas (beach, pier, 3rd street promenade, mall, etc.). So if you shell out the money, you can compress the parking into one block along the otherwise active walkable downtown area. In this case the developer must have just calculated it's cheaper to have parking lots.

As someone who grew up in Manhattan, though, I do kind of laugh that he considers that development plan non-walkable. I was always happy to walk across the island east/west and only took subways north/south, so his impossible to walk to shopping center part of the development looks trivially walkable to my Manhattan self...

<comment><USER43> "Walkable" doesn't mean you _can 't_ walk (although it sometimes means that, too, of course).

By most measurements, walkability refers to a pedestrian's ability to reach amenities such as grocery stores within a short time (e.g. 5 minutes). By that metric, almost all of Manhattan is _extremely_ walkable.

Manhattan does have many isolated "deserts" where you can find yourself surrounded by just residential buildings (parts of UWS and UES, for example), or a heavy concentration of businesses, parking, industry (e.g. 11th-12th Ave around Hudson Yards, for example). Until a decade ago or so, the Finance District used to be pretty dead at night. And so on.

There's fairly low "pain threshold" in the US before people discard walking as an alternative and just go in their car. We all know the satiric image of the American who jumps in their car to go one block; in my experience (as a European living in the US), there's a certain amount of cultural indoctrination that has persuaded Americans that transportation by car is absolutely necessary.

<comment><USER14> If 99% of your trips cannot be reasonably made by walking you don't think to walk for that last 1% either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This makes me think of a lot of development projects in Detroit. They are promised to be these new urban multipurpose spaces and we don't even end up with the facade. Just tons of parking lots where there were supposed to be life.

</comment><comment><USER45> The origin of the mixed use movement (and the rebirth of cities) is The Death and Life of Great American Cities ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities)). The upshot is that mixed use is the holy grail. Here, I can't tell is residential mixed in with commercial - that's how you get people out of cars.

It says mixed use - does that means there's commercial and residential in the same space? In my mind that's what makes for a city.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love StrongTowns. They do a great service in bringing many different political dispositions together for common, practical goals of simply better living.

Often times, what they advocate for can be championed by Distributists, Libertarians, and Socialists alike. Because usually what divides these camps is mostly questions of scale and not the actual end goals.

<comment><USER47> Probably the best fit are geolibertarians. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This style is not new. The earliest planned community in Reston VA built 50 years ago [1] uses this approach, except the housing is more integrated.

Housing above the shops and immediately adjacent produces the ambiance of a walkable community around a lake.

Still, it has to be surrounded by parking lots. There's just no way around it unless you move all the work and the schools there too.

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

<comment><USER18> Or have like... A bus stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If you want to see real, "movie-set urbanism" go check out some of the newly gentrified neighborhoods in LA, like Highland Park. It looks like a set designer did a week's research in Brooklyn and came back with some kind of illness that causes people to open terrible restaurants.

By contrast, long standing neighborhoods like the fashion district in downtown LA, Lincoln Heights, Monterey Park, are so vibrant with amazing businesses and food that serve their local communities. It's night and day.

</comment><comment><USER49> Drew Austin (aka kneeling bus) talks about a similar perspective in "The city as weakly-escaped reality (revisiting the holey plane): [https://youtu.be/9HL2bh_EMyk](https://youtu.be/9HL2bh_EMyk)

I don't think the principle of hiding parking is necessarily bad though. Cohousing designs for this way to facilitate more interaction with neighbors. It's just one aspect though among others (consensus management, etc.)

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands This has been going on a for a long time now. I remember working as an installer for a high end AV company in the early 2000's. We installed pricey home theaters and distributed audio for the rich suburban folks.

I remember several "planned communities" where they had small strip malls on the outside of the community, and then it was all high end craftsman and cape cod style houses on the interior. They had removed as many streets into the main center of the community as possible. In order to get to two of the houses we were working on, we had to park several hundred yards away and walk in to the houses.

Sure, it was awesome for the kids as they could go about their business without fear of high speed traffic, but it was a royal pain to heft in all the wiring boxes, tools and other stuff we needed to do our job. I also noticed, all the houses were reduced to two car garages. When I started talking to one of the owners, he gave me a litany of things they had to agree to before being able to build their homes. The strict building codes forbid three level houses, more than a two car garage, and each lot had to leave a strict percentage of "green" space - aka grass on each lot, and you were required to have a porch (you know, to encourage "community" and bonding with your neighbors) which also had a bunch of requirements you had to meet. There were other ones, but those were the ones which always stood out to me.

In short, they were trying to create some kind of a movie like community in every sense.

</comment><comment><USER50> Sounds like we may be experiencing the revival of the folly:

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

I suppose extreme income inequality, along with deteriorating urban conditions that plague public spaces, could actually push society toward a folly based, key-card access future.

</comment><comment><USER51> Why is there no multilevel parking? All that space can't be cheap. Is there zoning laws against it?

<comment><USER52> I've often wondered that, why parking structures aren't considered more as a medium term solution to increasing density while not having to revolutionize public transit. Probably a combination of the cost to build and resistance to having one next to buildings because they're usually pretty ugly if I had to guess.

<comment><USER14> Because roads for all those cars take space as well. In a low density city it isn't a big deal (other than the expense of building all the roads), but as you move up the density levels your roads start to get full. Parking structures are common, and a useful part even the densest cities. They don't solve all the problems though and so are not a solution or even a mitigation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The trouble with "mixed-use development" is that an apartment building does not generate enough business for its ground floor shops. Which is why many of them are vacant. Or turned into low-value places like nail salons.

<comment><USER14> Very true. I estimate you need 15-20 floors above ground floor shopping to fill all the spaces. This based on observations that in Paris (4-5 stories) there is a block of ground floor shopping and then 3-5 without. Since I'm not an expert on Paris (never been there only seen picture and read reports) take that with some salt...

Also most apartment developers don't know how to rent commercial spaces. So some ground floor spaces are vacant because it was only put in to allow the apartments above and so it isn't actually possible to get a commercial lease. (commercial leases allow a lot of remodeling and have other terms different from the standard residential lease, so anyone looking that a commercial lease will refuse the space)

<comment><USER53> It's definitely a problem with the "mixed use" buildings going up on the SF peninsula. The ground floor stores are marginal, vacant, or used as office space. A 5-story building can't support a convenience store by itself.

There have been startups which tried convenience stores that were giant vending machines, but that hasn't been successful. Amazon Go didn't really work out; there are a few stores, but no major deployment. There's a startup in China which puts automated stores in a shipping container sized box, but that hasn't been successful in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > these places tend not to hold their value over time, and to feel very dated > after a couple decades.

Is anybody building property near the coast of Florida hoping for more than a couple of decades of value? Sea levels are rising.

</comment><comment><USER55> We have a couple of developments in austin the "domain" which is an outdoor mall integrated with tons of apartments and a ton of actual jobs. The entertainment district serves those who live there, but is probably good enough to attract people from north austin who dont want to go downtown. It is disappointing to see classic strip malls continuing to be built in the suburbs with massive parking lots, when this dense form of living works so well. [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-97...](https://email@example.com,-97.7273151,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x8644cc71ec3d3b05:0x77c4a76c643f0420!8m2!3d30.4006016!4d-97.7251211)

There is another development "mueller" which took the old airport and turned it into a neighborhood. It is much less commercial but the parks make it amazing. There are a ton of amenities, but the amenities are car centric. There are some jobs, but not quite enough. As a kid with a bike though there are multiple pools, movie theater, ice cream shop, pizza within biking distance. The small backyards means that everyone gathers at the park to play. [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mueller,+Austin,+email@example.com...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mueller,+Austin,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-97.7095403,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x8644b5fe5b3bfc47:0x78dc0a5de60a06d6!8m2!3d30.2986834!4d-97.700371)

Both of the developments are heavily influencing the areas around them

Austin is trying to fix old neighborhoods with an updated land development code. The NIMBYS are out in force - they absolutely love the neighborhood character of their car dependent semi suburbs.

I live in "northwest hills" which was developed in the 60s-80s. The developer didnt do a bad job (lots of multi family, missing middle, and SFH), but all the commercial is heavily on one side down a steep hill, which means most of the SFH people are physically separated from the multifamily/commercial area. That means huge parking lots and everyone driving. The commercial should have been pushed more into the SFH area. The city is trying to increase density via zoning and the neighborhood is going crazy. There should be commercial along mesa between far west and spicewood springs rd. The city is upzoning it to 4 plexes which is a step in the right direction.

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-97.7681162,15z](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-97.7681162,15z)

</comment><comment><USER56> The main issue he cites seem to be parking taking up so much space. Wouldn't a parking deck solve this? Build a 6 story garage and the 18% goes to 3%.

<comment><USER57> Parking garages are enormously expensive. They can cost up to 50k per space. For instance the parking garage at the Chinese theater cost as much as the theater itself

<comment><USER56> Wow, really? Did not know or expect that. Not intuitive that they should be that expensive. In my mind they are just giant blocks of shaped concrete and should be extraordinarily simple to put together compared to something like a mall.

What makes them so expensive?

<comment><USER40> [https://watrydesign.com/insights/top-10-issues-affecting- cos...](https://watrydesign.com/insights/top-10-issues-affecting-cost-of- building-a-parking-space)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> So his issue is people needing someplace to park their cars?

They arranged the buildings in an aesthetically pleasing way to disguise all the parking, I say bravo.

<comment><USER40> The very existence of personal transportation in the form of current size vehicles works against "walkability". It is clear one cannot have both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> American Village in Okinawa is exactly like this. Outside of Naha, getting around Okinawa strangely feels like an American suburb.

<comment><USER60> I blame Okinawa's abysmal public transit situation on:

1\. The US administering the island until 1972, while Japan itself was undergoing very effective reconstruction and public works projects post-war.

2\. The mainland Japanese government treating the Okinawans almost like unwanted red-headed step-children.

And yes, the southern third of the island has the building and traffic density of an urban area with the inconvenience of American suburbs. Almost the entire population has at least a kei car, unless you work in a snack bar/kabakura (where transportation is often provided, and your job involves getting shit- faced drunk every night so you can't drive home anyway).

American Village is also my least-favorite place to go on the island: the traffic to get into that area is abysmal, especially after 4pm, and during the summer the brutal heat, sunlight, and humidity makes walking around between the buildings unappealing. Ashibina Outlet Mall is similar, but at least has slightly better overhead cover to protect from the sun.

<comment><USER59> I guess they resolved the heating issue with an even more American institution. Stepping into Aeon Mall Rycom is a like a localized version of my youth in New Jersey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I thought that it was a ripoff of the town from the Truman Show.

</comment><comment><USER62> People with jobs and families like these neighborhoods because they provide a walkable downtown main street with access to jobs. Strongtowns is becoming Jacobin like in its militancy against compromises that serve real people in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm bullish on autonomous electric vehicles making these kind of neighborhoods perfectly sustainable and, for many people, preferable to higher density walkable neighborhoods.

</comment><comment><USER64> The structure of America being car dependent is that the "youths" who mayor Bloomberg recently commented commit 95% of murders don't have cars or gas money to get there. The car dependent lifestyle is to create areas where undesirable elements are excluded.

In many areas "youths" gather in shopping malls and so forth and generate a lot of petty crime, vandalism, shoplifting, playing loud music and generally making everyone uncomfortable. Dead malls and downtowns have declined because of excessive presence of "youths". For example, Halloween in San Francisco's Castro got cancelled permanently because "youths" showed up and started shooting at each other. If you make it hard to get places, these "youths" tend to not show up and keep everything nice, peaceful and upscale.

Without the "youths" problem, America would have a far lower homicide rate and public transit, bikes, walkable neighborhoods, free public festivals and all that stuff would be far more popular.

<comment><USER65> Woah</comment></comment>


How PayPal is helping Iranian government's internet censorship - <AUTHOR> http://byterot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/how-paypal-is-helping-iranian.html

<comment><USER2> This is not a matter of PayPal blocking anyone in Iran from buying specific services in order to help the Iranian government. This is your account being accessed from a new and well known scammer hotpot successfully, and PayPal attempting to stop any damage that might be taking place. (you kind of state this)

I run and have helped run many ecommerce stores, and the middle east and nigeria are the two places where all the attempted scams are from… and they use PayPal to do it. I've accessed PayPal from another country and had similar things happen, and a phone call or two fixed things up quickly.

I completely understand it sucks that your account is blocked; but _call_ customer service, and if you have any real history with PayPal, tell them that. "I've been a great customer for X years and have moved $XXXXX through PayPal over that time. I need your help please." Don't count on emails to help… scammers use emails too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will pay you 100$ if you could show me a single case of scamming from Iran. Honest.

I am saying they cannot access internet now you say they are using internet to scam? With money transfers impossible due to financial sanctions, it is impossible to do any scamming from Iran.

The reason mentioned by PayPal was the financial restrictions due to sanctions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does HN sort/rank the comments thread? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Comment of pg, 1362 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398250#up_1398764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398250#up_1398764)

> _I did recently (about 3 weeks ago) tweak the algorithm for ranking > comments, and that has had a noticeable effect. Previously it was the same > as the one for ranking frontpage stories. Now it also considers among other > things the average comment score of the submitter. With any luck this will > keep HN poised in its usual position mid-way over the shark for another 6 > months._

AFAIK the exact weights are part of the secret sauce, and the current algorithm may have a few modifications and can change without previous notice.

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that it's the same as for the threads. There's a "score" which is effectively points divided by some power of the age, with a penalty applied for flags. Then they are sorted by that score.

A version of the source is available - it will be pretty similar.

Why do you ask?</comment>


Natural Selection 2 trailer is out (indie video game) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjPywj1TODo& <comment><AUTHOR> This deserves posting on Hacker News because the team are some of the most passionate and determined entrepreneurs I have ever encountered. They have been working on this for years, building a _proper_ video game is an intense marathon and I commend them for being so close to finishing.

You hear stories of companies raising money and then struggling, these guys are not in a sexy industry, I doubt any VC would touch them, they self funded themselves from pre-orders. True grit.</comment>


High-level CPU (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html

<comment><USER2> I personally think that a CPU with part / most of its instruction set microcode user-writable (read: push-inst / pop-inst) would be a potentially interesting intermediate between FPGAs and CPUs. Because there isn't much conceptual difference between a CISC-that-is-a-RISC-internally (like, say, a modern x86 processor) and an FPGA beyond an FPGA having a more complete set of routing paths and a CPU not having the microcode user-writable.

You could set up the current instructions to be optimized for the specific program you are running. Or even specific function, or lower.

If you made it recursive you could potentially start running higher-level programming languages natively.

And depending on how complex the microcode is, you could very well avoid the issues with "classic" high-level CPUs - namely that they sacrifice generality. They force you into the mindset of the specific high-level language if you want speed.

It doesn't help with working memory bandwidth, but does help with instruction bandwidth, as it basically ends up compressing your machine code.</comment>


Frank Ramsey: A Genius by All Tests for Genius - <AUTHOR> https://hnn.us/article/174250 <comment><USER2> > The economist John Maynard Keynes identified Ramsey as a major talent when > he was a mathematics student at Cambridge in the early 1920s. During his > undergraduate days, Ramsey demolished Keynes' theory of probability and...

> Keynes, in an impressive show of administrative skill and sleight of hand, > made the 21-year-old Ramsey a fellow of King's College at a time when only > someone who had studied there could be a fellow. (Ramsey had done his degree > at Trinity).

Wow, seriously, that's the way we ought to treat people who "demolish" our ideas :-)

Edit: I should probably say that I have been trying to behave like this for a few years already at my scale, my point is that this is inspiring.

Oh, and there exist people who are so toxic on top of being blunt that I probably wouldn't work with them even if it gave me a 5% chance to make the worlds first commercial viable fusion reactor.

<comment><USER3> By the way, it's alleged by a famous professor(?) and amazon reviewer Michael Emmet Brady that Ramsey in no way "demolished" his theory and that this particular problem has drawn people away from respecting and appreciating Keynes immense work in philosophy of probability

here is the review: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2927587](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2927587)

"An Examination of the Fundamental Reasons Why Frank Ramsey Failed in His Reviews of J M Keynes's a Treatise on Probability"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you would like to know more about Frank Ramsey from the perspective of his wife, brother, friends, coworkers and even himself, I found the BBC program "Better than the Stars", from 1978, blissfully exciting.

You will hear what he thinks about Bertrand Russells remark on the small size of men in relation to the universe, truth and probability, mountain walking and even how many hours he worked every day +++! :-) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeDc8UB2Gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeDc8UB2Gs)

</comment><comment><USER5> > He had a profound influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, persuading him to drop > the quest for certainty, purity, and sparse metaphysical landscapes in the > Tractatus and turn to ordinary language and human practices.

Interesting. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein credits the Neo-Ricardian economist Pierro Sraffa with something like the same influence. I'd be curious to know what led Misak to this conclusion.

<comment><USER6> Ramsey was the one who dug Wittgenstein up out of his self-imposed village solitude and convinced him that the Tractatus was fatally flawed (he attacked W's treatment of the color exclusion problem), and remained a significant influence on W. More so the Sraffa in real terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> His proof of Ramsey's Theorem [0] is possibly my favorite proof of all time.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem)

<comment><USER8> It was pretty mind-blowing to realize during a discrete math class that chaos is basically impossible. Then learning that Ramsey passed away very young felt terrible.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I'd interpret that result as "chaos is impossible". I'd rather say that you can always find some apparent pattern (of smallish size) by searching through enough randomness/chaos. That seems intuitively to be fairly unsurprising considering everyday experiences like cloud gazing, or the existence of conspiracy theorists. Whether the pattern you find has any important meaning is an entirely different question.

<comment><USER7> I think a reasonable interpretation of the result is the idea that all "chaotic" graphs of sufficient size _must_ contain order, which isn't as strong as "chaos is impossible", but isn't very intuitive to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're interested in his papers, I spent some time putting them online: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_P._Ramsey#References](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_P._Ramsey#References) \+ [https://old.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/comments/aj6v87/fran...](https://old.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/comments/aj6v87/frank_p_ramseys_papers/)

</comment><comment><USER11> > It is hard to get our ordinary minds around the achievements of the great > Cambridge mathematician, philosopher, and economist, Frank Ramsey.

How is anyone not immediately repelled by this style of writing? Seriously, though.

<comment><USER12> I find the whole Genius-fetish quite annoying - people who actually call themselves geniuses tend to be more Tommy Wiseau than Tom Kibble

<comment><USER13> Did he call himself a genius?

<comment><USER3> I think my all reasonable estimates, he was a polymath, maybe not on the level of Kolmogorov or something but it's the fact that he died so young, had such immense influence, and worked in so many fields.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I built an app to share/request files using your own s3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bucketio.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this a bit ago, but got some awesome feedback and made a ton of changes. The app no longer requires any amazon keys to use at all. I also added more info explaining how the connection process works. I've found this app insanely useful over the past couple weeks, and find myself using it all the time. Just want to see if anyone else finds it useful!</comment>


IPad 2 Rumors: The Comprehensive Guide - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/12/28/ipad-2-rumors-the-comprehensive-guide/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't be so sure about that 99% on the retina display. While there were existing (relatively) cheap, production 3-4" screens approaching the 300+ PPI resolution of the iPhone 4 when it was announced, there is nothing like that in the sizes (or quantities) needed to produce a 300+ PPI screen for the iPad.

Remember, Apple is a design company. The "sauce" is in how they combine existing (production or future) parts designs into a single device and then load it with software that makes it work for consumers. Apple is like a chef, taking various types of ingredients and combining them into a dish that makes people fawn.

<comment><USER3> Yeah and considering the iPad gpu already has fillrate issues at 1024x768, quadrupling the number of pixels seems unreasonable.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be surprised if the iPad got a slight bump to 1280x960 just to fill out the "720p HD" spec though.

<comment><USER5> Breaking or blackboxing every single application in the process?

I don't think so, that's not how Jobs leads Apple. If you didn't see the iPhone's resolution change until the doubling in the iPhone 4, you won't see any different on the iPad.

<comment><USER6> Jobs has broken every single app several times before, I wouldn't put it past him (not that I think a retina like display is coming to the iPad).

<comment><USER5> Breaking as in "they don't fucking launch" sure, but breaking as in "those things look like shit now"? Not a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Front-facing camera makes a lot of sense for the iPad. I don't think there is going to be a back-facing one though, it would be pretty unusable with the iPad's dimensions.

<comment><USER8> Indeed.

It would be very nice e.g. for Skyping on e.g. the couch to have a [web] cam in the device.. or when on the road/travelling. :)

Perhaps the feature I missed most when the device was released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do wonder if Apple will treat the iPad like the iPhone and keep the lowest version of the current iPad in production at a reduced price, or if they will have an across the board price reduction like the early days of the iPod.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have been thinking of getting an Ipad for development purposes. Wondering if I should wait now till IPad 2 comes out.

<comment><USER11> Depends. Could you get an app out and selling before the second model comes out? It's possible you could very easily recoup the cost of the current one and then some between now and that release date.</comment></comment>


Indexing the Sphere with the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701164 <comment><USER2> It's a pretty nifty concept. Had to use this type of processing a couple years ago when doing some calculations that involved rotating azimuth/elevation/distance values around a sphere. Fortunately, I was able to find a nicely-licensed C implementation in [https://github.com/smonkewitz/scisql](https://github.com/smonkewitz/scisql) that was originally intended for embedded use in a database.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool, what were you working on that required those calculations, it sounds neat.</comment></comment>


Are rich people meaner? Two teams find errors in each other's work - <AUTHOR> http://retractionwatch.com/2017/10/13/rich-people-meaner-trying-find-two-teams-find-errors-others-work/ <comment><USER2> The majority of wealthy people became that way by some combination of lying, cheating, stealing, fraud, misrepresentation, intimidation (extortion and/or blackmail), market manipulation, insider trading, aggressive selling to vulnerable people such as seniors, etc...... If you succeed on Wall Street, you're most likely engaging in that behavior. Do people actually think that most of these billionaires added billions in value? That every exchange is voluntary and makes each side better off? Is the old lady with dementia who unknowingly signed up to a terrible annuity "better off". Was the woman with dementia a "sucker" for signing up and placing trust in the broker? The ethical way to become rich is largely by inventing or innovating. Corporate raiders such as Kravis, Icahn and Peltz are very far from being moral. Arguably sociopaths with a mean streak. Surprised with the naive posts.

<comment><USER3> Who, besides dementia sufferers, are being cheated by those rich people? Anyone with a sounds mind is surely making a rational decision that they probably benefits themselves. If they're just trading at better prices than the market, that still means they're providing value by actually being available to trade with.

<comment><USER2> There are enough vulnerable people to become rich off of? When I worked in sales the calculus was pretty simple - either you sell to these people to make money or you'll barely make money. The dirty little secret of success in sales is is scoping out people who can be manipulated. Most products being sold do not benefit the buyer. There is not enough ingenuity for that. The view that capitalism just creates a collection of voluntary exchanges that better both sides, is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People often conflate nebulous "evil" with more specific rational self- interest, good investments and cheating/underpaying/stealing from people.

There are a lot of middling rich people whom do underpay people because it works and don't care about long-term views of themselves or of the relationship... this can sabotage greater opportunities later on or current income streams now (it's a small world and a hyperconnected one). There are many whom don't because it also reflects poorly on them and their associates, and it turns off their friends, potential customers, investors and partners... also some people have integrity and wouldn't dream of it.

In fact, the more connected someone is, the less likely they are to screw people over because it's a bigger risk. The big headlines of harassment or scams are the exceptions. Certainly, there are instutions like many banks whom obscure their wealth extraction from less rich and transfer it to their investor/owners. They are culpable but may not believe or realize they are.

Wealth is a spectrum, as are integrity and personality. How is squishy "science" going to "measure" take those nuances or mentally- compartmentalized/hidden wealth transfer into account?

<comment><USER5> > Wealth is a spectrum, as are integrity and personality. How is squishy > "science" going to "measure" take those nuances or mentally- > compartmentalized/hidden wealth transfer into account?

By measuring on a spectrum of wealth and integrity, and choosing a sample size so as to to ameliorate personality to p < .05. They have graphs of socioeconomic class vs. unethical behavior. A few studies also included priming the subjects to think in "greed is good" ways and measure the impact.

<comment><USER4> Spectrum isn't an axis. There is much grey in the world statistics can't capture. Looking for data to fit a narrative is political science, not science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The game is selfish, players must be selfish or self-interested to survive. This game efficiently works out niceness/sharing as a matter of survival.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any research to back up that claim? In my experience, selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile. Gotta care about other people and be a team player to succeed

<comment><USER8> If you are being a team player because that's what's needed for you to succeed personally then isn't being a team player the selfish strategy?

<comment><USER9> Taken to the extreme: If you do good to feel good, you are selfish. But I don't think it matters to the outside. Let's judge the whole person and not some Freudian ego of him.

<comment><USER10> I agree with this as a standard for judging others, which is what your post addresses, so I have no disagreement with it.

For your self, though, if you are doing good only to feed your ego, the appetite of your ego is still the driving force, so your morality will be subject to the whims of your ego, which means that you're a fair-weather do- gooder - sure to do bad when your ego demands it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was super interested to read how they defined "rich". Is it just networth greater than X? Is someone who saves diligently for 50 years to get X also rich in their definition?

Sadly those details appear to be behind a paywall and it seems what they really wanted to determine was the relationship between greedy attitudes and social economic status although their summary does use the word rich plenty, again, without defining it.

<comment><USER12> Equally important is how you define "unethical." I'd imagine people in higher socioeconomic levels are more likely to lie in a negotiation or ignore traffic laws (traffic penalties fines are regressive in the sense they are fixed, skill in negotiating is probably correlated with skill in lying), but less likely to commit violent crimes or engage in drug abuse.

<comment><USER13> > _less likely ... to engage in drug abuse._

i really doubt this.

<comment><USER14> Less likely _to get caught engaging_ in drug abuse, maybe

<comment><USER15> Or be convicted, definitely.

<comment><USER16> There is so much right in the above three posts that I'd vote twice, if I could.

The wealthy buy drugs from people who drive nice sports sedans and wear suits, or similar. They aren't down at the crack house giving blowjobs for dime bags.

Some of the biggest stashes of drugs, that I have seen, have been inside what you'd probably call a mansion. No, this wasn't dealers. This was for personal consumption and/or to be consumed by their guests.

Those guests may well have included people who work in the judicial system, by the way.

<comment><USER17> Back in college my cocaine dealer was a city police officer. I had no idea until I saw him eating at a local restaurant in his police gear.

<comment><USER16> I don't want to be too specific, but one of the best 'cooks' that I've known was the ADA and now holds a higher elected position.

Cooks, for those who don't know, turn coke into crack, a smokable form.

She would do it with a stove and a coffee pot, as much as an ounce at a time.

<comment><USER13> the biggest dealer at my college went to a "very good" law school and is now working in DC.

go figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is confirmation bias epitomized. Rich people mean? Or do rich people simply have a different view of the world than not-rich people? My kids think I am mean. They are not rich by comparison. The differences in our behaviors are the major reasons for our differences in incomes.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think wealth can sometimes give a false sense of superiority and invincibility

<comment><USER3> You imply there is a true sense of superiority somewhere. What could be more a true measure of general superiority than wealth? It comes from succeeding in a game that everyone's playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this even a question?

Having spent my teenage years in what would otherwise be called a ghetto and now living in a wealthier suburb, poor neighborhoods have _way_ more selfish assholes. I'm very glad I got out of there.

I think being an asshole hurts you more than is helps you as you get richer.

<comment><USER21> I have the same experience. When I was younger I was puzzled when my friends mom (richer family) was so nice. Cooked large breakfast for us when I stayed over, etc. And his friends were nice. And they talked normally to each other and were funny and clever.

Where I came from, the norm was just anger. And the conversation was mostly putting each other down. Or challenging each other. Still trying to overcome that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do you define rich?

<comment><USER5> You don't. You compare wealth/class to mean-ness. Arbitrarily defining a cutoff would affect the results from the onset.</comment></comment>


Apache OpenOffice Building Guide - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide_AOO

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a thought... instead of criticizing AOO, consider jumping in and helping out a bit.

      git clone https://github.com/apache/openoffice

For my own part, I haven't been as involved as I should have been. I aim to remedy that, and have the code downloading as we speak. Time to dig in...</comment>


Show HN: Anechoic Dashboard, an iGoogle Replacement - <AUTHOR> https://www.anechoicnews.com

<comment><USER2> Thanks for this! I've been playing around with a few of the other offerings out there and they're all bloatware rubbish. Netvibes was the one I landed on, and I hate it with every fibre of my being.

This seems to be nice and simple. I really only want to see my gmail, HN, reddit, and maybe some basic news RSS.

If I was going to build something for myself, it'd be an igoogle replacement. I still might, but I'm hoping now I don't have to.</comment>


A Year in Computer Vision - <AUTHOR> http://www.themtank.org/a-year-in-computer-vision <comment><USER2> It amazes me that there is seemingly complete void of ethical consideration here.

I can come up with handful of completely malevolent uses for facial recognition in no time flat. Automated weapons, increased surveillance, targeted marketing.

The only good use I can come up with is spotting terrorist. But they are already the one group of people who seem to have the luxury of occasionally using masks.

Involvement in this stuff could very well yield more problems with your personal conscience than what Mikhail Kalashnikov has ever had. "Someone will do it anyhow" Yes. But you can drive up the price and availability of malevolence by personally avoiding it.

<comment><USER3> "The only good use I can come up with is spotting terrorist"

I can come up with a handful of benevolent uses for facial recognition in no time flat.

1.) Automated ID systems for supermarkets. Walk into a store, store knows who you are. No checkout needed. Just walk out.

2.) Security for venues/work/etc. No more backstage passes getting copied - computer vision knows who's allowed where.

3.) Emergency response after a disaster. Automatically notify loved ones if you've been detected alive in a news feed.

4.) Voting systems. Got a stadium full of people? Just have them raise their hands - computer vision does a tally along with ID'ing who voted for what.

5.) Guest lists / ticketing. Show up to a venue, walk in. No ticket needed. Venue knows who's if you're allowed in. No more lost tickets.

6.) FaceID for the iphoneX. I'm personally loving it on mine.

Like many new technologies, it can be used for both good and bad. Harnessing nuclear reactions can be used to generate massive amounts of electricity, or to level cities. What's important is that it's regulated, not that it's banned.

<comment><USER4> 1.) Automated ID systems for supermarkets. Walk into a store, store knows who you are. No checkout needed. Just walk out.

Of course, nobody will ever use this feature as a mean of enhancing their "targeted marketing" nor creating a "targeted pricing" strategy. For me, this is a big NO-NO and should go straight to the malevolent usage list.

<comment><USER5> If enough people won't tolerate price discrimination, there's money to be made if a store will pledge not to do it.

But if there's only one walk-out supermarket available, and it does price discriminate, and it's not too outrageous, I'm in. Waiting in line for checkout is very bothersome for me, and I like my job very much, so I'll pay more than my hourly rate at work to get out of each hour of line.

(extra bothersome if there's untargeted marketing blaring through some speakers while I wait, 1984-style. But I already avoid those supermarkets)

Nobody likes price discrimination, but there are advantages. Poor people pay much, much less. It's ironic that we're always coming up with inefficient measures full of collateral damage to ease thing up on the poor, but we'll rail against price discrimination like it's Salem.

<comment><USER6> Did you know grocery delivery is available?

<comment><USER5> Not in my city, but thanks for the intention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's really fascinating about the current state of the art in computer vision/deep learning is just how many of the top research papers basically say "We tried this, it works, we're not really sure why"

<comment><USER8> This has been my experience as well. I'm also am afraid that these researchers will succumb to a similar replication crisis that devastated the social sciences [0]. If you can't necessarily explain why something works, it's probably difficult to explain trying it again in the future didn't work

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)

<comment><USER9> It's more like the opposite problem.

Psychology researchers try to justify deep, compelling theories of human behavior with small experiments that are hard to reproduce.

Deep Learning experiments are comparatively easy to run and reproduce because the field has both a common set of performance benchmarks and a large community of people implementing cutting-edge ideas in common frameworks. The harder part is building useful theory on top of those experiments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the most thorough write-up around computer vision.

Can anyone else recommend other equally broad works worth looking at?

<comment><USER11> Two Minute Papers on YouTube does short overviews of cutting edge graphics and vision research.

[https://youtube.com/user/keeroyz](https://youtube.com/user/keeroyz)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it me or is the advance in AI seem much faster than any other tech that came before it? The rapid advancement in just one year is pretty mind boggling. Very hard to catch up.

<comment><USER13> Remember Smartphones only started really existing in 2007. Mobile phones are from 1990s. Personal computers from 1970s. Transistor from 1920s

Pace of innovation is generally increasing as more and more complex stuff becomes commoditized. But also we forget just how recent a lot of things we take for granted really are.

Give it 10 years and AI will feel just as common and boring as a laptop does today. Remember how excited you were in the 1990s when you upgraded a new PC.

<comment><USER14> > Transistor from 1920s

Since 1947, when it was invented.

<comment><USER13> Touche.

I must have been thinking of those glass things that came before transistors and filled a similar purpose then

<comment><USER14> Radio tubes, specifically the Triode (basic amplification tube, a lot like a transistor only not solid state and _much_ higher voltage). Invented in 1904.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At 1,50 in the Yolo V2 youtube video I couldn't help but laugh when the algorithm detected the gun in the woman's hand as a cell-phone, made me think of the whole ET Walkie-Talkie/gun censorship scenario.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I saw that. It seems that the algorithm was trained and optimised only for that video. Person, bike, suitcase, tie, chair, cellphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The standard of super-resolution algos is impressive. I wonder if anyone has tried up-ressing the sound and audio of pirate videos by training models on Cam vs Blu-ray

</comment><comment><USER18> Could be a fun game to guess the movie based on only YOLOv2s output ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOC3huqHrss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOC3huqHrss)).

</comment><comment><USER19> Great summary of recent Computer Vision. Over 203 references!

One exciting topic I did not see mentioned (maybe I missed it) is image denoising. Excellent paper here - [https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03981](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03981). The CNN proposed in the paper is really compute intensive but the denoised images are really amazing.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty nice work, but isn't it a summary of 2016 work?

ImageNet 2017 has happen since then[1] (small incremental progress), but lots of progress in things like super resolution.

[1] [http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2017/results](http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2017/results)

</comment><comment><USER21> Excellent!

I'd suggest anyone interested in jumping into building computer vision models should check out the excellent free MOOC on fast.ai

</comment><comment><USER22> Nothing about capsules?

<comment><USER23> Capsule networks[1] have literally not been used on anything larger than what is considered a toy dataset for computer vision yet. Whilst there is potential there I'd argue it's too early to ascribe extreme levels of excitement towards it.

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09829](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09829)

<comment><USER24> Very good explanation of capsule networks: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPN8d0E3900](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPN8d0E3900)</comment></comment></comment>


Missilemap - <AUTHOR> http://nuclearsecrecy.com/missilemap/faq/ <comment><USER2> If anyone is interested in a real-life simulation of a nuclear missile crisis: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA)

I try to plug it whenever I can. It's an amazing piece of art, and it's one of the best ghost stories ever told.

Wow. It's gone.

And I didn't wget the video when I had the chance.

I can't believe it's gone. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508078) All of them. There were like nine versions of the video, published by an anonymous author over the course of a year and a half. People were suspecting it was more than just a talented amateur. We'll never know.

That's so strange! Ben Marking, who are you?

EDIT: It's up. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE) Thanks to dcgoss and junkculture for looking. Apparently they removed all the old revisions, so we're left with this one.

<comment><USER3> What is the point of this, other then scaremongering?

<comment><USER4> It serves as a reminder that it's wise to have a mentally stable commander in chief.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related: the author recently wrote this 5-year retrospective about NUKEMAP, which is MISSILEMAP's precursor

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2017/02/03/nukemap-5-years/](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2017/02/03/nukemap-5-years/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. What I really admire is the work that went into it, like documenting how to construct a permalink, and hide various elements. Or use the JS console to disable the dynamic Monte Carlo length.

</comment><comment><USER7> "It was made to aid in discussions about missile development, since the technical nature of honest-to-god 'rocket science' can make it rather impenetrable from the perspective of laymen, yet many of the fundamental questions are key to local understanding of geopolitical questions (e.g., 'could North Korea hit my city with their latest missile?')."

And in case you're curious, here are the latest figures I could dig up on N. Korea's launch capabilities. Caveat emptor!

Range: 10,000 km (Hwasong-14 aka KN-20 test successes indicate >6690km range, though the missile appears to break up on reentry)

Circular Error Probable: ? Poor. Could not hit a city, especially since it breaks up before hitting the target. The fine article says 2 km is what early Chinese ICBMs could achieve, so it makes sense as a starting point.

Yield: 7-8 kilotons according to seismic estimates.

<comment><USER8> > Circular Error Probable: ? Poor.

In a paper from a defense think tank, I read that when nuclear weapons were developed, at least one major tactical reason was that the accuracy of all munitions at the time was similarly poor (long before modern precision weapons); remember it could take waves of bombers and hundreds of bombs to destroy one building in WWII. The blast radius of nuclear weapons was a solution to that problem.

They also said that precision weapons could, in that way, replace nuclear weapons. If your weapon is accurate enough to hit a building reliably, you need a much smaller blast radius, and destroying the entire city doesn't have a military benefit. For awhile, and maybe still, the U.S. was considering a system called Prompt Global Strike with that application in mind.

<comment><USER9> I don't think precision weapons could entirely replace nuclear weapons. They could to a degree, but if you want to destroy, say, _every_ enemy military base simultaneously, the number of conventional precision weapons needed for that would be cost prohibitive.

Accuracy is also a reason why nuclear weapons got bigger and bigger up to the 1960s or so, then began to shrink. It's also why the Soviets tended to have larger ones than the Americans. If your bombers or ICBMs are only accurate to within a couple of miles, then you need a _big_ bomb to reliably destroy your target. If they're accurate to within a couple hundred feet, you can use a much smaller bomb.

Prompt global strike is still being worked on, but I don't think they have it figured out yet. It would be relatively easy to stick a conventional bomb on an ICBM and do it that way, but the enemy couldn't distinguish that from a nuclear launch, so there are fears of false alarms.

<comment><USER8> > if you want to destroy, say, every enemy military base simultaneously, the > number of conventional precision weapons needed for that would be cost > prohibitive

For the U.S. and similarly wealthy militaries, the math doesn't seem to support that statement. You don't need to destroy every base, just enough to effectively eliminate the enemy's military capability. Let's say that's even 10,000 targets - that's not a lot of munitions for a war. At $2 million a pop - rounding up Wikipedia's price for a high-end cruise missile - that's $20 billion, a pittance in war. The Iraq War, not a major one, cost over $1 trillion AFAIK (up to the first pullout, that is; it's not over yet).

For poor countries, who lack international networks for targeting and communication in addition to the munitions and launch systems, I think the statement holds up. It's also cost-effective for another reason: 1 nuke aimed at Seoul or Tokyo or LA is enough to deter attackers in almost any situation.

<comment><USER9> 10,000 conventional targets doesn't seem anywhere close to enough to destroy the military capacity of a superpower.

Look at the US's cruise missile attack on that Syrian airbase a few months back. That was something like 50 missiles and the base was back in service in a day.

<comment><USER8> > Look at the US's cruise missile attack on that Syrian airbase a few months > back. That was something like 50 missiles and the base was back in service > in a day.

Excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any idea what's that thing in North-West Algeria that's on the map by default?

Seems like the only launch site that you can see on the map by default, which doesn't make a lot of sense since Algeria is a non-nuclear weapon state. Quick searching around tells me no other country stores nukes there neither.

<comment><USER11> It's precisely 35 degrees North latitude and 0 degrees longitude. There's nothing actually there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone watched the live entry of the US mirv's launched from one of our subs to the range of 4k miles? The warheads enter and hit the intended targets within 100m. US ICBMs eliminate guidance error using multiple methods, some of which require no outside signals. They are wicked accurate, without GPS or ground signals. I assume the Russians have the same. Ergo we are all fukered

<comment><USER13> It bugs me that engineers spent countless hours perfecting these killing machines and yet we still don't have a cure for most forms of cancer. It's ludicrous.

<comment><USER14> If you take the engineers building rockets and ask them to cure cancer instead we probably still wouldn't get a cure for cancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shall we play a game?

<comment><USER16> Tic Tac Toe ? :-)</comment></comment>


Java7 Hotspot broken? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/thetaph1/status/94850643935772672 <comment><USER2> I noticed that the Ubuntu images on EC2 (search the Community AMIs for "oneiric") provide Java 7 if you want to try it out for yourself. I tried it out briefly and it worked ok for me on running Apache Zookeeper.</comment>


Panasonic to move Europe headquarters from UK to Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45351288 <comment><USER2> [https://www.businessleader.co.uk/from-london-to-amsterdam- pa...](https://www.businessleader.co.uk/from-london-to-amsterdam-panasonic- set-to-move-its-european-headquarters/51049/)

>Up to 20 people could be affected out of a staff of 30

So it's just a ghost office for tax purposes.

</comment><comment><USER3> "In the case of Panasonic, it's concerned that if the U.K. gets designated a tax-haven by Japan it could be saddled with back taxes back home. So moving to stay regionally headquartered within the European Union removes that risk." . Eh? Obama called he Netherlands a tax haven as well. Wikipedia: "The Netherlands has been known internationally, since at least the 1970s, as a tax haven". Source: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_Netherl...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_Netherlands)

<comment><USER4> The Netherlands may be considered a tax haven colloquially, but they're not blacklisted as one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Which is neither here, not there.

Companies are opportunistic and will go wherever makes them more money, has less tax, and laxer laws. That why tons of factories, support, and even development jobs moved out of Europe and US and into third world countries with el cheapo wages and laws accommodating sweatshop practices.

In this case, it's because of easier import/export procedures and bureaucracy for selling to the rest of the EU.

When the UK is able to set its own lower tax rates and cuts special deals for such matters (which they'll do), lots of companies will flock back there too (same as they did with Ireland).

<comment><USER6> Companies are unlikely to flock back to the UK is it has expensive trade barriers with the rest of the European market, regardless of the "tax deals" which are cut.

<comment><USER7> Precisely, companies want free access to eu market, not just geographical presence in Europe, therefore UK will only make sense for UK market once brexit is complete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Techcrunch reported on most of the article from Nikkei, except this part:

> Of the 20 to 30 people employed at the London office, the 10 to 20 who > handle auditing and financial operations will be moved to the Netherlands, > with only investor relations staff staying.

Is the headquarters nominal, or does it pay signicifant tax where it is located?

</comment><comment><USER9> Not the first, and won't be the last. We have to stop this madness.

<comment><USER10> We can either stop this madness or accept the results of a democratic referendum.

<comment><USER11> A democratic referendum can be rigged by the emotions ruling at the moment of said referendum. You'd think if it would be repeated it would get the same outcome?

<comment><USER5> So let's have people who know our best interests and are not "rigged" themselves decide for us?

<comment><USER11> Well, in my opinion the "people who know our best interests" are the ones who sold Brexit as the new solution for everything, skipping the true nature of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Brexit, the present that keeps on taking

<comment><USER13> But they will be able to buy their straight bananas or have their blue passport back or some other BS I forgot</comment></comment>


I used primary data from WHO to predict the trajectory of the coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/micah.siegel/posts/10105250719128573 <comment><USER2> We are going for a ride that sux. Please, everyone, get and be ready!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I used primary data from the World Health Organization to predict the trajectory of the 2019 Coronavirus outbreak on a country-by-country basis. I normalized the number of cases in each country to the population of that country. This resulted in a normalized number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants for each country for each day.

Using the date of the first confirmed coronavirus case in each country as its day 0, I tracked the growth by day in normalized coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants, from the earliest known start of the epidemic in each country.

Summary

1\. The 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak is at an inflection point.

2\. The data strongly suggests that the number of coronavirus cases grows exponentially in countries that do not mandate quarantines, restrictions on travel and public gatherings, and closing of schools, universities and workplaces ("Social Distancing").

3\. The number of coronavirus cases compounds at more than 25% per day in countries that do not mandate social distancing. This behavior is consistent across Iran, Italy, Spain, France, and the UK, each measured independently from the date of the first case in that country, with root-mean-square accuracy R^2 > 99%.

4\. The highly precise exponential growth strongly suggests that the growth in these cases is due to an underlying biological phenomenon (e.g. virus transmission) rather than due to an increase in the availability of tests or the number of tests performed.

5\. At a density of approximately 9.7 coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants, Italy mandated on 3/8/20 a complete regional lock-down, with movement restrictions applying to about 16 million people (25% of the population of Italy). The following day, on 3/9/20, the lock-down was extended to the entire country (100% of the population of Italy).

Predictions

6\. US — I predict that the US density will reach the Italian threshold of 9.7 US coronavirus cases per 100,000 US inhabitants by March 30, 2020. This threshold density is equal to the density of cases when Italy implemented a regional lock-down that affected 25% of its population.

7\. US — I predict that the density could reach 87 US coronavirus cases per 100,000 US inhabitants by April 9, 2020, in some regions, unless further social controls are adopted. I computed 87 cases per 100,000 inhabitants as the threshold density at which all currently unoccupied intensive care unit (ICU) beds would be occupied by a US person who is infected with coronavirus and has severe, life-threatening symptoms. In other words, no regional beds to house patients who are severely ill.

All of these numbers are an underestimate of the actual numbers with the US numbers being one of the most underestimated. However, this underestimate won't affect the March 30 or April 9 prediction much (moving them sooner by a few days) since the underestimate is a multiplicative factor whereas the growth is exponential.</comment>


Exchange Between the Ubuntu Community Council and the Kubuntu Council - <AUTHOR> https://skitterman.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/information-exchange-between-the-ubuntu-community-council-and-the-kubuntu-council/

<comment><USER2> Some sort of summary (TLDR):

The Ubuntu "Community Council" sends, apparently out of the blue, a "request" to the Kubuntu leader that he resign his position. They give reasonable- sounding but vague reasons, and with no references to back them up. When he refuses, Mark Shuttleworth weighs in and clarifies that it isn't really a request. Numerous people claim that they can't find any evidence of the reasons that the CC gave. It also is mentioned that the Kubuntu leader has tried to raise a licensing issue with Ubuntu for some time but has not gotten a satisfactory reply, and so has continued to raise it. The CC seems to be disinclined to discuss any future of Kubuntu which includes him as its elected leader.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I am a Debian Maintainer (not a Developer, just a Maintainer), and I maintain a Debian package. This package has been included in the Ubuntu "universe" component, but I don't maintain it in Ubuntu except to notify Ubuntu of new releases. This is the extent of my current association with Ubuntu.

<comment><USER3> An anonymous council member points to examples:

[http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2015/03/19/%23ubuntu- meeting.html#...](http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2015/03/19/%23ubuntu- meeting.html#t17:40)

[https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-community- team/2015...](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-community- team/2015-May/000466.html)

To me it seems that there is a frustration at the lack of progress in the answering of legal questions. That in turn has created friction.

The truth is that they are all correct from their own points of view. Jonathan Riddell is complaining that the council are not doing enough, whilst the council are waiting on lawyers but still keeping things active.

My biggest question on this would be whether Jonathan Riddell could quit and claim constructive dismissal? If this were a company (and its kind of mixed in) it could be considered that technically he's done nothing wrong in a legal sense to earn a demotion. He would have had to have been given a couple of official warning first.</comment></comment>


Reverse Ajax - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Ajax

<comment><USER2> _Another_ term for this easy as hell simple technique that doesn't really need explaining anyway?

I can already see the books devoted to 'comet' and 'reverse ajax'. I'm sure they'll sell, but you can explain it to someone in a couple of sentences.

</comment><comment><USER3> See the much more useful <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29> instead.</comment>


Ask HN: What non-standard questions do you ask on interviews? - <AUTHOR>

Jobs should be a good fit for both employer and employee, so asking relevant questions is important for both parties.  A lot of attention is paid to what employers ask you, but what about the other direction?<p>Ignoring obvious questions (salary, benefits, etc), what kind of questions do you ask to make sure you will be working in a fulfilling and stimulating environment?  As talented and in-demand individuals, I'm curious to see what the HN community views as good questions. <comment><USER2> I usually attempt to ask a software engineering question. Sure it takes an educated guess on your part but if you know enough about the position to decide weather or not you want to take it, being able to ask about how they handled some generic technical problem ought to be easy enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> I ask my interviewers, some classic behavioral questions like what is you proudest accomplishment or what is the most difficult aspect of the job. While it seems ironic, but you would get a lot of insight into their work as well as insight if this job is right for you.</comment>


Popular herbicide glyphosate doesn't cause cancer, European Union agency says - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2015/11/popular-herbicide-doesn-t-cause-cancer-european-union-agency-says <comment><AUTHOR> (Glyphosate)

<comment><USER2> You used the original title, as recommended by the site guidelines, but most of the times it's possible to use small variations, that don't editorialize it or make a linkbait title.

I think it would be better to use this title: "Popular herbicide (Glyphosate) doesn't cause cancer, European Union agency says"

(The mods may decide to change it back anyway.)

<comment><USER3> Ok, we'll add glyphosate.</comment></comment></comment>


Yunohost – Server O.S aiming to make self-hosting accessible to everyone - <AUTHOR> https://yunohost.org/ <comment><USER2> I'm wondering if the name's pronounced Why You No Host?</comment>


Ask HN: I edited the website for my startup. please critique - <AUTHOR>

I posted the site for my startup last month and received some amazing advice. I decided to post again to show the the improvements and ask that y'all critique the changes.
Changes: Reordered the slides, removed the subheadings from the menu bar, slightly changed the copy on the 3rd slide.
The company is called Rentr and acts as a universal rental application to help people land housing.
Thank you!
https://myrentr.com/ <comment><USER2> Nice website. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!</comment></comment>


Offer HN: copy editing - <AUTHOR>

I like to edit interesting copy. Or make boring copy by gracious or interesting people more flattering. Hit me with either either. <comment><USER2> Hey Lanerapp, I'll take you on this offer: would you mind proofreading my headlines on <http://gmbhnews.com/make-mobile-site/> ? The very first taglines on the white zone. Thanks for the offer.

Edit:If you don't mind, please to send me your suggestions via email (see profile)

<comment><AUTHOR> sure

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey this is great, is there something I can do for you in return? I'd really appreciate it if you would proofread a short article I wrote about global warming. It's only 3 columns / one page. I can do coding, hosting or payment if you'd be willing to accept something in return. The article is here <http://sam.ai.ki/co2-and-forests.html> and my email address is on it.

I'm not sure if you mean very short text like headlines when you say 'copy'; if so, no problemo!

<comment><USER3> by the way, there's a plain text version of the page here if that would be easier for you to read / edit. <http://sam.ai.ki/co2-and-forests.txt></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are bubbles caused by inaccurate data? - <AUTHOR>

Faux Valuation A click is worth x An application is worth n clicks * x
What happens when value is mis-attributed?
What I am really getting at; are there data indices out there? Like the stock market, but with data
1 Medical Record is worth .... 1 Verified Facebook user is worth... 1 minute of engaged use is worth...
etc etc
Call to action! Relevant VC's: please liberate and collaborate on this data to increase startup valuation transparency and benefit all beings <comment><USER2> So, yes, but in a more general way than you're describing. It's more like "Uber will displace car ownership, and the automobile industry is worth at least a $trillion, so $40B is actually undervaluing Uber", and then if it turns out that Uber doesn't actually displace car ownership the whole valuation equation falls apart. Or sometimes it's using assumptions in places where they don't hold, eg. "Google makes $X per search result shown, and Facebook has more pageviews than Google, therefore Facebook should be worth more than Google" even though people search when they're further down the purchasing funnel than looking at social media and so search clicks are often worth a lot more.

Anyway, capitalism is naturally self-correcting in this regard. People who build their businesses on invalid assumptions go out of business; what's left are the people whose assumptions turned out to be right. All bubbles eventually pop. A lot of people view bubbles as a bad thing, but they're really part of the normal operation of capitalism. If you believe that somebody else is being an idiot, take the other side of the trade.

<comment><AUTHOR> ^^^right on!^^^

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the inaccuracies naturally swing in both directions (undervaluing certain aspects of a business, overvaluing others), so in a calm marketplace, this does not cause a bubble.

But when the natural level of inaccuracies is combined with human emotions like greed and fear, inaccuracies can start swinging in one direction or the other more prominently (and this trend manifests itself in the form of a bubble, or a recession).</comment>


Understanding Money: Where Does It Come From? - <AUTHOR> https://shubhamjain.co/2017/04/13/understanding-money-where-does-it-come-from/ <comment><USER2> Also, magnets</comment>