Ask HN: State of the art in simulated browsing? - <AUTHOR>

What's the best way to simulate browsing programmatically? I'm aware of Mechanize / Mechanoid, but not of anything else. Is there anything that supports recent JavaScript and DOM? <comment><USER2> Mechanize is good and watir for ruby, and then there's Selenium. Be very cautious of selenium and similar because they invalidate a large amount of QA tests (depending on what you're testing). Selenium works in 1 of 3 ways, injecting javascript into the page via a Firefox plugin, injecting javascript via a proxy and having you add the javascript to your pages. Depending on what you're testing, the addition of the javascript is a change to the page (ie, invalidate the testing depending on what you need to verify). Watir is good as it programmatically controls the browser in the same way a user would, sending the events to the items. However, it's difficult to do a large volume of tests in a reasonable time frame. WWW::Mechanize on the other hand allows you to do as many tests at a time as you like, as fast as you can connect to the server. The difference is that with Mechanize, you don't render the page at all, just process the returned HTML (and javascript elements if you choose to fetch them as well).

Many of the "state of the art" tools are really glorified "recorders", using specific wait times rather than being able to determine when the document is actually fully loaded. Additionally, many of them require you to not use the system doing the testing for anything else, as they require the browser to have focus and the mouse to be non-moving. Mechanize and Watir don't have this requirement (and I don't remember about Selenium, it never fit for the tasks I had).

The final fit I have used is Mechanize for core functionality (page loads, load testing, spidering, link checking, non-cache download times, proper javascript detection, proper text returned, etc.), Watir for interactive functionality testing (browser hidden) and Watir for visual testing (browser not hidden, just sit there and stare at it clicking away).

There can easily be others that I haven't dealt with (I haven't had to do web app testing in a year or so), but from my experience, Mechanize and Watir filled the role very well.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Projects:Tes...](http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Projects:TestGen4Web)

<http://wtr.rubyforge.org/>

<http://seleniumhq.org/>

[http://ssscripting.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/dont-be- afraid-t...](http://ssscripting.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/dont-be-afraid-to- try-other-frameworks/)

[http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj- doh/inde...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj- doh/index.html)</comment>


Good news for Equal Pay Day: There is no gender pay gap - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/good-news-for-equal-pay-day-there-is-no-gender-pay-gap <comment><USER2> I think it is easy to dismiss everything as "choices". But why are people taking different paths? Did they have the same opportunities? Was the environment welcoming for both?

The 2017 top 500 CEO ranking included more female chiefs than any previous list since the first Fortune 500 ran in 1955. They were 6.4% -- 32 out of 500.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the shoe is on the other foot -- if we search fruitlessly for robust evidence of discrimination, why assume anything is wrong?

Assume for a moment that we investigate and find that people do indeed have the same opportunities and the environment is equally welcoming. Would that be it, case closed?

<comment><USER4> Sometimes when you just accidentally find out a male coworker is making way more than you (for lower quality work even), then you don't have to search very far. For a lot of women, we assume that there is discrimination because it happens to us directly, so further research into the extent of the problem seems very warranted.

<comment><USER3> _Sometimes when you just accidentally find out a male coworker is making way more than you (for lower quality work even), then you don 't have to search very far._

This is not the smoking gun it appears to be. Men also encounter male coworkers with the same job, who do worse work and make more money than them.

 _For a lot of women, we assume that there is discrimination because it happens to us directly, so further research into the extent of the problem seems very warranted._

But what do we do when the research suggests that discrimination is not a major driver of macro-trends in men's and women's career outcomes?

(Any research that showed there was _no_ discrimination would of course be suspect, because there are legitimate discrimination cases prosecuted each and every year.)

<comment><USER4> Right, but my point is that if you have actively experienced discrimation, you're less likely to judge the research as unwarranted. You can argue with my off-the-cuff example, but as you mentioned there are many documented cases of discrimination that are hard to argue with.

The 2-6% difference in wages (depending on which study you read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_States)) can still be very significant.

And of course we should continue to discuss all the other reasons women don't end up going into high paying jobs.

<comment><USER3> _Right, but my point is that if you have actively experienced discrimination, you 're less likely to judge the research as unwarranted._

The research is warranted, but seems not to support the idea that discrimination is a major driver in the difference in career outcomes or lifetime earnings.

 _And of course we should continue to discuss all the other reasons women don 't end up going into high paying jobs._

Why should we do that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are so many documented cases of inequal pay... I don't know where to begin.

The article isn't bunk though - it does point out cases that appear to be pay inequality but are actually functions of behavior; such as men preferring "things" and women preferring "people" \- where the latter does not scale.

But that doesn't make this article right, either. Women are often taken advantage of in payscale - largely because the less agreeable men can take advantage of the typically more agreeable women. We see this in the news, and I have friends who have been through it.

I think a better argument to make would be that pay inequality is not so cut & dry. Sometimes it's really just the result of side effects (like women uber drivers earning less), and other times it is discriminatory (like hollywood).

Still, I was surprised (more disappointed) to see such an accredited author making such a poor argument in an article. Needed some more time in the thinking oven if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER2> Here there is one piece of evidence that the author decided to ignore: [https://ctl.yale.edu/sites/default/files/basic-page- suppleme...](https://ctl.yale.edu/sites/default/files/basic-page- supplementary-materials- files/science_facultys_subtle_gender_biases_favor_male_students.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> In related news, the sky is blue and the water is wet. I honestly doubt anyone seriously believes in the pay gap hogwash, unless they are very conveniently pushing an agenda that is set to capitalize on this.

<comment><USER7> Just give the SJW's time to wake up. Always the same shit in the comments section.

<comment><USER8> You're proving that point spectacularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Washington Examiner also claims that global climate change is a hoax, and that Trump is the greatest president of all time.

</comment><comment><USER10> how come nobody is passing a bill so i can get a raise if i'm bad at salary negotiation?!</comment>


Show HN: Provide a CSV and a target field, generate a model and code to run it - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/minimaxir/automl-gs <comment><USER2> Nice project!

You use gridsearch for hyperparamter optimization and state that at some point you would like to add a bayesian approach. One simple change that could boost the performance, would be to use random search inplace of gridsearch. Grid search is known to perform worse than random search in cases where not all hyperparameters are of similar importance [1]. Intuitively, in grid search a lot of evaluations evaluate the same setting of an important hyperparameter with changing settings of not important ones.

[1] Section 1.3.1; Automatic Machine Learning: Methods, Systems, Challenges; Chapter Hyperparameter Optimization

[https://www.automl.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/11/hpo.pdf](https://www.automl.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/11/hpo.pdf)

<comment><USER3> What about HyperOpt?

<comment><USER2> HyperOpt is a library for hyperparameter optimization, my comment was about algorithms. From the homepage of hyperopt:

"Currently two algorithms are implemented in hyperopt: Random Search Tree of Parzen Estimators (TPE)"

(TPE is a Bayesian Optimization algorithm)

<comment><USER3> Ah yes indeed, I thought that hyperopt was actually the name for the TPE algorithm. TPE should outperform random search in all cases, right?

<comment><USER2> It depends on the number of evaluations. The more evaluations the stronger the model built by the TPE algorithm. With very few evaluations, we would expect TPE to match random sampling. This effect can for example be seen in the plots of the "Bayesian Optimization and Hyperband" paper [1, 2], where the plotted "Bayesian Optimization" approach is TPE.

Also, there might be model bias: for example if the objective function is stochastic (e.g., a reinforcement learning algorithm that only converges sometimes) or not very smooth, TPE might exploit areas that are not actually good based on one good evaluation. In those cases TPE might perform worse than random search! To alleviate the effect of model bias in model based hyperparameter optimization (e.g., TPE) and to obtain convergence guarantees, people often sample every k-th hyperparameter setting from a prior distribution (random search) (this is also the case for the plots in [1, 2].

If you are wondering which HPO algorithm you should use (or HPO in general), I would highly recommend the first part of the AutoML tutorial at NeurIPS2018 [3] given by my advisor.

[1] [https://www.automl.org/blog_bohb/](https://www.automl.org/blog_bohb/)

[2] [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/falkner18a.html](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/falkner18a.html)

[3] [https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/Schedule?showEvent=10979](https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/Schedule?showEvent=10979)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please, consider changing instances of "Generates native Python code" to something like "Generates standard Python code without 3rd party libraries dependencies" or equivalent. The term "native" here is not correct and is confusing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations on lunching! I'm also working on open source autoML solution and I have similar problem with finding good heuristics for column type inference - I always left the final choice to the user.

Have you compared the solution accuracy with other frameworks? (or is it not the priority for your package right now)

Do you have early stopping implemented?

I will play with your package and come back with more questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Have you compared the solution accuracy with other frameworks? (or is it not > the priority for your package right now)

Still working on that.

> Do you have early stopping implemented?

Early stopping is intentionally not implemented in order to keep things apples-to-apples between trials by doing a full run, but I'm open to reconsidering that, or at the least have a user-set option for early stopping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is extremely cool/useful. Really appreciated how well the project is explained/motivated, e.g. the DESIGN.md file. Thanks for making it public!

Question about the long-term vision: do you see this as potentially being an educational artifact? Seems like just reading through the code could be a great way to get familiar with good ETL practices, good vectorization practices, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> The titanic data is a nice demo, but I'm kinda disappointed you didn't try to predict WWMWD? Longer demo gif please!

<comment><USER8> Please ease up on acronyms or add the expanded form in parentheses. I have no idea what WWMWD is even after googling for it for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool project! Have you compared your results to Ludwig by Uber? It would be interesting to see where the results differ.

[https://uber.github.io/ludwig/](https://uber.github.io/ludwig/)

</comment><comment><USER10> There are some discussions on whether data scientists are going to be replaced by automatic tools in the near future.

Can this be considered an example of a tool that partially replaces the work done by a data scientist? At least it can save a lot of time.

<comment><USER11> Whenever anyone asks this, I always wonder whether I live in a bubble or they do.

Creating simple predictive models where your problem is already easily narrowed down to a "given x predict y" definition is pretty trivial. Having it automated is nice, but not exactly a hard thing to do.

Genuine question: how many people have jobs where those kinds of problems form any significant part of their workload?

I also often see a response to this sentiment along the lines of, "Yeah, but there's also data cleaning..." etc. My reaction to this is mixed. I mean, sure, there is also data cleaning involved, but is this really where people spend most of their time?

My team spends most of our time doing the following:

1\. Formulating problems. Figuring out the various different ways that a real- world problem can be expressed mathematically and feasibly attacked computationally.

2\. Engineering software to implement the solutions to these problems, sometimes using some of the (amazing) frameworks out there for ML or probabilistic programming, but often having to develop our own approaches from scratch.

3\. Doing all the management, stakeholder relationship stuff, business cases, etc. that make your work relevant and possible.

4\. Getting data. Always an issue.

I'm very genuine in my curiosity here: are we total snowflakes, and most data scientists spend their time cleaning data and building "given X predict y" models?

<comment><USER12> How many business analysts/low level coders have jobs because they just implement the same repeated CRUD screens/wireframes or maintain WordPress themes? Not the same as data science, but close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is fantastic! Thanks for putting this on Github. I am planning to build a [R] Shiny app for automl. This gives me good learning opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. Can you provide some details about how this tool architects models?

<comment><AUTHOR> The best way to do that is IMO to look at the templates itself: [https://github.com/minimaxir/automl- gs/tree/master/automl_gs...](https://github.com/minimaxir/automl- gs/tree/master/automl_gs/templates/models/tensorflow)

tl;dr it uses the standard encoder-combiner-MLP-output results, but with a lot of variability in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, how do you survive a Titanic accident?

<comment><USER16> You probably want "old fashioned" regression models if you want to understand which predictors affected survival and how they affected it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are you doing to counter the recession? - <AUTHOR>

What measure you took to counter recession (save bottom line) and to keep your project/startup floating? I am particularly interested to know measure you took before you decide to go ahead with staff reduction. <comment><USER2> _What measure you took to counter recession (save bottom line)_

In general, the thing to do in all economic conditions is to spend as little as possible, as infrequently as possible. Fortunately, my start-up has no employees yet, only contractors. So we haven't had a staff reduction issue, but we have been annoyed at not being able to build up as rapidly as we desired.

(P.S. Flagged to suggest to curators that something along the lines of the quoted phrase above should be added to the thread title.)</comment>


Show HN: Very quick site I made to convert times into your own timezone - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomytimezone.com/

<comment><USER2> Have you seen awesome timezone visualization web app by Thomas Fuchs? <http://everytimezone.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice idea and simple execution. But the color choice is VERY hard on the eyes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. I'm not very good with colors unfortunately :P Do you have any tips? It's all CSS so it's very easy to change.</comment></comment>


Lead Thinking - Incorporating a LLC - <AUTHOR> http://leadthinking.com/68-incorporating-a-llc

<comment><USER2> The advice about Delaware and Nevada isn't necessarily good advice in terms of liability and in terms of taxes.

If you're sued, you may have to go to Delaware or Nevada to defend yourself, and even if not, you may be subject to the laws of Delaware or Nevada, which will be different from the state you are operating from. From a book I have (called Asset Protection by Adkisson and Riser):

 _Under state law, having a registered agent in the state of incorporation creates nexus sufficient to allow the corporation to be sued in that state. This fact alone may affect the decision where to incorporate. A jurisdiction where jury verdicts tend to be very conservative may be preferable to one with a reputation for runaway jury awards. The cost of defending a lawsuit may also be a significant factor in this decision. Defending a lawsuit in the owner's home state will be substantially cheaper than defending the same lawsuit across the continent [or as one person here says, across the world]. This may be a factor in deciding where to incorporate_

Delaware also imposes different laws on the roles and duties of directors and treatment of Shareholders. Do you know what these are?

 _Further you do not avoid taxes by incorporating in Delaware!_ You have to pay taxes in the state you operate in. So even if you are a Delaware corporation, you would pay taxes in Pennsylvania if that is where you operate (and you have to operate in a different state to not pay Delaware corporate taxes).

</comment><comment><USER3> AFAIK, there aren't a lot of benefits to registering an LLC in a state other than your own and it can end up costing more when you register to conduct business in your own state. I recommend anyone considering this to treat out- of-state registration with skepticism and research it more. It's been discussed on HN, there's info on nolo.com and you can ask an attorney.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Delaware imposes no state income tax on a business that does not operate within the state._

Does this mean that I can incorporate there and run the business with a physical presence from some other country?

<comment><USER5> It certainly sounds like that's the case, based on this sentence from the article:

 _I recommend getting a firm to do it for you, especially if it's your first time, or you're outside the US._

<comment><USER6> That would be phreaking awesome, I wondered if that was possible for years.</comment></comment></comment>


Venture Pimp: Mixest is like Pandora but without all that thinking attached - <AUTHOR> http://venturepimp.com/post/773644355/mixest

<comment><USER2> It's interesting, but one of the big draws of Pandora is the ability to like/dislike a song and have a station get more and more tailored to what I like. This seems to just be a random sampling of indie stuff.

<comment><USER3> It's much more niche than Pandora, but I can see that if you like the kind of music it plays (mostly poorly-recorded very-indie rock songs of about two minutes in length, as far as I can tell) then you might like it better than Pandora, which has the downside that it seems to wind up playing a fairly small subset of songs on rapid rotation, at least in my experience.

Pandora aims to replace radio. This just aims to replace one radio station. Good luck to 'em.

<comment><USER4> One vertical to begin with isn't a bad strategy. I think the one they've chosen is a good vertical to start with — the genre has a strong online community looking for new things. If it works with indie music, Mixest can broaden out.

Of course this might not be what they're intending to do at all.

<comment><USER3> If I understand correctly, they're playing unsigned garage bands who want extra exposure and not paying any royalties. That will limit their ability to expand outside genres where such bands are common.

I wonder what kind of quality control they have. Will they accept my five- minute _a capella_ nose-singing version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow?

<comment><USER4> In the 2 minutes I've spent on there I've seen a number of artists I don't know (which could be unsigned garage bands) and number that I do including Of Montreal and Animal Collective — both well respected and successful groups. I'm not sure what quality control they have, but it doesn't seem like all they're looking for is unsigned groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pandora is allowed to license and stream music based on a contract and DRM restrictions built into Flash. If this gets at all large it may be shut down by the music industry. Right now I can go into the source, find the URL of the mp3 file and just download it to my hard drive. I'm not sure if streaming rights have been given by the authors and if they know that their music can be downloaded.

<comment><USER6> Hey Locke, the music we play is gathered from indie music blogs - we figure that if there are already direct links to the mp3 file then it is ok to stream as well. We could be totally wrong though.

<comment><USER5> It is a precarious legal ground... technically you don't have reproduction permission unless they explicitly say so. Still, thanks for the great answer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the idea of Mixest is great, but I also don't see it as a replacement for Pandora or even something like HypeM.

It's great to have the serendipity factor, but sometimes I just want to listen to 'custom-tailored-shuffle' ala Pandora, rather than actively managing the playlist.

To clarify: I find myself distracted by skipping a song much more often on Mixest than Pandora.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's run by Wasabi Ventures' - perhaps an effort to do something neat to attract attention to their program and companies?

I've never heard of them, but it looks like they're a mix between VC and startup consulting firm - taking very active roles. Many of their portfolio "companies" even say Wasabi Ventures in the copyright - interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> I get new music ideas from friends, I would never use this. What I want is a webapp where you type in a band name and it just plays that band, not pretending to have any idea what else I would like. If only that were legal.

<comment><USER10> Grooveshark.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like it (although I must admit I love indie rock to begin with), but isn't it quite similar to <http://www.thesixtyone.com/> ?

<comment><USER12> Except that T61 destroyed their usability in the name of a shiny new design, and drove away a ton of active users. I loved the old T61, but find the new site completely unusable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What thinking?

</comment><comment><USER14> simplicity in exchange for choice, imo .. is not really that compelling (I really don't find pandora that complicated to start with). I would like to judge this service a year from now, to see how compelling the use case is.

<comment><USER15> Pandora gives a lot less choice than it really claims... it's very easy to listen to songs I like that Pandora has, but they very quickly get to playing the same ones over and over again.

I'm willing to take a more niche selection if it means it's easier to find fresh stuff.

<comment><USER3> What we really need is for Pandora to change its algorithm. Remember that it played song X just yesterday, and relax its constraints to find me a song I haven't heard before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would like to see album covers.</comment>


A diagram of human consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/neurology/comments/4qpvru/a_diagram_of_human_consciousness/ <comment><USER2> Most people think there are only 5 senses but you are missing the sense of balance from the vestibular complex of the inner ear. Spacial orientation is an important sense for animals.</comment>


Investors buying shares in college students: Is this the wave of the future? - <AUTHOR> http://washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/27/investors-buying-shares-in-college-students-is-this-the-wave-of-the-future-purdue-university-thinks-so/ <comment><USER2> Does this mean we'll start seeing microloan platforms geared specifically toward students? Assuming a reasonable level of privacy for students, I mean.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not work on making education cheaper that way no one needs sign away their future?</comment>


Ode to the 767 - <AUTHOR> http://www.askthepilot.com/ode-to-the-767/ <comment><USER2> My son and I try to visit the cockpit every time we fly. This last trip included an AA 767-300.

After being in the glass cockpits on the newer aircraft, the 767 is a real throwback. It feels almost military in it's apperance and setup.

Compare the 767: [https://imgproc.airliners.net/photos/airliners/1/5/9/0247951...](https://imgproc.airliners.net/photos/airliners/1/5/9/0247951-v40-10.jpg)

To an A340: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/A3...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/A340-642_flight_deck.jpg/800px-A340-642_flight_deck.jpg)

<comment><USER3> I didn't know "visiting the cockpit" was still allowed anywhere since 9/11.

<comment><USER4> I'm brown and did it in 2005. The pilot and FA's were very nice!

In the planewatcher community it's very common to ask if you can talk to the pilots after you land. Apparently they're usually amenable to chat with plane bluffs!

<comment><USER2> Everyone loves talking about their job. =)

My kid is always wearing some kind of aviation-themed t-shirt or his favorite Boeing hoodie, so that kind of signals we're pretty safe...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some notable airlines have retired their 767 fleets recently. British Airways did a few months ago, a former BA 767 pilot posted a fantastic retrospective: [https://tim-the-pilot.co.uk/2018/11/23/a-personal-reflection...](https://tim- the-pilot.co.uk/2018/11/23/a-personal-reflection-on-the-b767-within-british- airways/)

And just this week, Hawaiian Airlines is flying their last 767 flights. More details: [http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=20974085](http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=20974085)

It looks like their last 767 revenue flight landed in HNL a few hours ago, HA43 SJC-HNL flown by N594HA, a 767-300 originally delivered to Delta in October 1986! An airframe that predates the Macintosh II, still flying. Crazy to think about.

<comment><USER6> None of the 76 B52 airframes in service are newer than 55 years old.

<comment><USER5> That is true, and they're planned to stay in service (with new engines and radars) until at least 2050! They fly _a lot_ less than a commercial airliner though, with wing surfaces limited to ~30,000 hours. ([https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b-52-life.htm](https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b-52-life.htm))

Whereas the 767 is rated up to 50,000 cycles. In 2010, the feet leader had 101,000 hours and 31,000 cycles. ([https://www.elal.com/en/ELALTech/Documents/Press_Releases/76...](https://www.elal.com/en/ELALTech/Documents/Press_Releases/767.pdf))

<comment><USER7> It's an apples to oranges comparison. The types of air-frames are totally different. A B52 has a wing that flops all over the place the entire fuselage is not pressurized like on a commercial jet.

Also commercial aviation is a lot less hard on equipment than military service because they optimize for comfort and cost whereas the military is going to doing combat readiness stuff regularly and that involves much more stress on the air-frames.

<comment><USER8> The military does run their stuff pretty hard but at the same time a commercial airliner pretty much runs 24/7 because every minute it's not in the air is a waste of money. Military stuff always has to be ready to go but that doesn't mean it's always actually doing something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The takeoff and landing stories seem to suggest that the excess thrust and responsive controls of the 767 make it safer than a more sluggish plane, since it can fly faster and higher out of a potentially dangerous situation.

I wonder if this is just the subjective feeling of a pilot, or if the 767 actually has a record of using its high power and maneuverability to avoid accidents that a 737, for example, would not have been able to avoid. There's a lot of information out there about actual crashes, but not much about narrowly avoided crashes.

<comment><USER10> >There's a lot of information out there about actual crashes, but not much about narrowly avoided crashes.

Actually the FAA collects information about near-misses too, and records them in the same database that it uses for crashes, the rather unfortunately named Accidents and Incidents Data System ([https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:12::::::](https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:12::::::)). Navigating the interface takes some doing, but every accident and near-miss is recorded there, sorted by carrier, source airport, destination airport, and aircraft make and model.

For example, here ([https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:18:::NO::AP_BRIEF_RPT...](https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:18:::NO::AP_BRIEF_RPT_VAR:20150117004509I)) is a incident in which a plane caused another plane to abort takeoff by using a taxiway without clearance.

Another incident ([https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:18:::NO::AP_BRIEF_RPT...](https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:18:::NO::AP_BRIEF_RPT_VAR:20130419011239I)) where the plane overran the end of the runway and ended up in the grass.

The FAA is really good about collecting data on aviation incidents. Making that data available to the public is another matter.

<comment><USER11> NASA's aviation close-call database, however, is entirely open to the public. And these reports make for some great reading!

[https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/search/database.html](https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/search/database.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> More related to the write up on the 757, but it really is a versatile plane.

They started taking the -300 into DCA a few years back and it's a bit nerve wracking. Barely enough runway for takeoff and doing the river visual approach -- which has you hang a hard right over the 14th Street bridge so low that you can read people's phones through their sunroofs -- is extra cozy.

<comment><USER13> That's my favorite approach. It's also by far the most nerve wracking :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related, an actual ode to a specific Boeing 727 nicknamed "Big Flo" that was used in a crash test in the Mexican desert:

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experime...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experiment)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJZ1eHU_JZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJZ1eHU_JZg)

</comment><comment><USER15> This same pilot wrote a love letter to the 757, too. In contrast, when I worked among all the aircraft nerds at Boeing, there was, interestingly, a clear favorite. The 767 was cool, and the 757 was a piece of junk. I don't think I ever got a straight answer as to why. It just was.

<comment><USER16> That's interesting. Most pilots I speak with who fly both prefer the 757. It's over powered and just really performs according to what I've been told.

<comment><USER15> It could be the pilot-versus-engineer difference. Maybe mere size: the 767 was built in the Big factory in Everett, while the 757 was down in the little factory in Renton. Knowing engineers, it could well have been some minor technical detail that no pilot or passenger would ever see.

Of course, the 767 performs pretty well even when underpowered! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_143](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_143)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And what's Boeing selling? 737 variants. First flight in 1967. Cabin diameter hasn't changed. The Greyhound Bus of airliners.

<comment><USER18> my kingdom for a cross country wide body flight.

six hours on a 737 is hell.

<comment><USER19> I find widebodies a lot more claustrophobic, as strange as it sounds - on a 737 at least you're never too far from a window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For anyone interested in getting really up close with a 767 there is one named the Spirit of Delta at Delta Air Lines' museum in Atlanta.

It's rare for a relatively modern airliner to be placed in a museum but the Spirit of Delta is notable because it was actually purchased through donations by the employees of Delta.

</comment><comment><USER20> This guy applauds airlines who fly the 757, like Icelandair. Icelandair has so many technical issues, that they rarely manage to make it across atlantic without significant delay. People who fly cross atlantic with Icelandair know what I mean

So no.

</comment><comment><USER21> Compare the big three airlines to Southwest's business model: [https://slate.com/business/2012/06/southwest-airlines- profit...](https://slate.com/business/2012/06/southwest-airlines- profitability-how-the-company-uses-operations-theory-to-fuel-its-success.html)

They essentially have kept operations streamlined by using one plane for all flights, so all pilots and flight crew can fly the entire fleet.

</comment><comment><USER22> Most modern jets are worse in key ways than the 767. More freaks and rattles during take off and landing. Airbus are particularly bad in this regard. The 767 by contrast feels like a big old Buick. (The triple 7 is my favorite though. Marvelous plane. It's been downhill ever since.)

<comment><USER23> > Most modern jets are worse in key ways than the 767. More freaks and rattles > during take off and landing

What a weird comment. Probably the reason you think modern aircraft have more "creaks and rattles" than older ones is that their engines are so much quieter you can actually hear some minor rattling of the cabin fitout on bumpy runways.

I've been an avgeek my whole life and while I'm nostalgic for the old planes, I don't think I could ever delude myself into thinking they're in any way "better". Turns out the manufacturers, and the airlines, and the passengers, agree. The 777 is my favourite too - from the outside. Tell me I have to spend 12 hours inside the damn thing though and I'll choose an a350 - or a b787 - every time.

<comment><USER22> I don't know if passengers agree. I go out of my way to take a 777 for international travel over a 787. But the latter is a lot more fuel efficient, which is why airlines prefer them.

<comment><USER23> Well, I suppose I would sometimes as well, but that's to do with airline seating choices more than anything else. Emirates has 10-across economy in its 777s - no thanks! Whereas Cathay stuck with 9, which is way better. Meanwhile a Qantas 787 is pretty nice to ride in, but a Jetstar or Scoot is cramped as hell. Noise cancelling headphones pretty much remove the noise issue for me.

You're right though, I over-generalised saying all passenger prefer newer planes all of the time - they don't. What they emphatically _do_ prefer, however, is point to point flights - which the new generations of planes open up. Bigger planes like the 777s and above are in many ways a relic of the hub and spoke system, with its multiple transfers and 24hr+ flight times.

I'm sad to see the big planes reduced in importance, but newcomers like the 787, a350 and even a321 render a lot more city pairs economically viable. For this reason they're far more versatile an investment for the airliners, and passengers choose direct every time if the price is reasonable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Crazily fast hashing with carry-less multiplications - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/2015/10/26/crazily-fast-hashing-with-carry-less-multiplications/ <comment><USER2> Oh come one. Comparing CLHash against CityHash and SipHash only? CityHash was replaced by FarmHash some year ago, and only python uses SipHash with its outrageously bad performance.

The fastest and mostly-secure 64bit hash functions are Metro, Spooky, xxHash64 and Multilinear-HM by the same author. See "Strongly universal string hashing is fast", Daniel Lemire and Owen Kaser, 2014.

CLHash doesn't even pass the avalanche test from smhasher [https://github.com/rurban/smhasher](https://github.com/rurban/smhasher) I'll add it there for better comparison, with the new leader falkhash: [https://github.com/gamozolabs/falkhash](https://github.com/gamozolabs/falkhash)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amusingly, this complete hack using the aesenc instruction claims 0.08 cycles per byte on haswell: [https://github.com/gamozolabs/falkhash](https://github.com/gamozolabs/falkhash)

<comment><USER4> Interesting how horrible the result may be when you use TDD for hash algorithm development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lemire's work always pops up in regards to high performance or data compression. The paper is interesting and I learned about a new field of math. I especially admire the FOSS implementation of the theory, which is often missing from many academic papers.

Makes me think there's a lot more improvements to be had with the much larger and specialized instruction sets we're seeing nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER6> How does it do under SMHasher (a library to test hash quality)?

<comment><USER7> The paper ([http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03465v7.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03465v7.pdf)) goes into that section 6.1, which Lemire mentions in a comment on the post-- summarizing as best I can:

CLHash, the hash the post is focused on, passes all except the avalanche test for strings <8 bytes, and could be made to pass it by adding a bit-mixing step to the end (that provably doesn't make random collisions more likely, since it's an invertible transform on the hash).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting work, I'll have to read through the universality proofs more later. :)</comment>


Another reason why Docker containers may be slow - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/another-reason-why-your-docker-containers-may-be-slow-d37207dec27f <comment><USER2> One time we observed a dramatic drop-off in performance from one of our services after a certain day that week. I looked at recent releases and saw it perfectly coincided with one.

I asked the engineer in question to investigate, but after looking he said, "It's nothing I could be doing."

So I sat with him and used git-bisect to prove to him it was his commit: he had added trace logging within a couple of tight loops in the hottest parts of the code base. I smiled.

"But it's trace. That's disabled in production. It can't be that," he said. But we had already proven it was that commit, and the only thing that changed was additional logging.

Long story short, the logging library was filtering calls by level just before actually writing, rather than as close as possible to the call site—a design bug, for sure.

I had him swap out the library everywhere it was being used.

Moral: logging is not free.

<comment><USER3> Logging is never free. Either you add additional compile time cost to remove it, or you add at the very least a single if and/or method call at runtime.

It's not easy problem to solve. The best I've come up with so far, is using a decorator in conjunction with a DI framework that supports it. It's still only a wrap around method calls, but it enables completely turning off logging in production, and enable it when it is needed without making a special build, or wasting resources during normal execution.

<comment><USER4> Preprocessor-disabled logging (and generally compile-time disabled logging) is free at run-time.

The compile-time cost of stripping out preprocessor macros disabled via #ifdef is close enough to free you'd have a really hard time measuring it - O(n) on number of lines of logging code, with n smaller than the number of lines of actual code for any real scenario, and a very small multiplier.

The "cost" there is in the visual appearance of the source code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why more people don't use Solaris Zones, they seem to me to be the superior solution by far, and with work done by Joyent you now have modern LX-branded zones also. Is the lack of adoption mainly due to the fact that it's Solaris, and not Linux?

(Solaris lives on in Illumos et al)

<comment><USER6> Solaris is not free software and the free software forks never gained much traction. Plus it is now also associated with Oracle which brings along a lot of extra distrust, particularly given how litigious they are.

<comment><USER7> Illumos/SmartOS is FOSS

<comment><USER8> I remember being told Java is FOSS too... now tell that to Google...

<comment><USER9> Java _is_ FOSS.

Oracle used excuse, that it's current OpenJDK license (GPLv2) is incompatible with license, used by Google's runtime (Apache 2). If Google re-licensed it's Java implementation under GPL, some of arguments, used by Oracle lawyers (code reuse and patent (?) violations), would have been void, and arguing about reuse of APIs would have been a lot harder.

Of course, this does not really matter, because the whole lawsuit is just excuse for power games between corporations. Oracle's goal wasn't about Java licensing, it was about gaining some degree of control over emerging Android ecosystem.

<comment><USER10> Can google pull a swift move?

<comment><USER11> Many would say they already are with Kotlin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Better title: "nother reason why my code is slow and I'm logging too much"

<comment><AUTHOR> The point was not to complain about how bad the Docker is but rather to highlight that a lot of unexpected things may come from the fact that the kernel is shared. "Logging too much" was just a reason for the posix_fadvise being called too often but this becomes a problem ONLY when the kernel is shared. In case of virtualization, everyone gets its own version of fadvise (the kernel) and the conflict doesn't happen.

<comment><USER13> If your VM call to `fadvise` is not calling the underlying host kernel operation, is it even working?

<comment><USER9> VM certainly does "call underlying host kernel operation", it just does so indirectly — the guest userspace calls fadvise(), kernel implementation of fadvise() asks the virtio disk driver to perform particular read/writes, the virtio driver asks underlying kernel disk driver to read/write individual disk sectors (without knowing, that they are related to specific file in guest filesystem).

This specific bug was caused by putting high load on "kernel dentry cache", e.g. a contention for memory structure, present in kernel memory. Guests normally don't share memory, so contending for it was avoided.

Incidentally, there are situations, when different guests can compete for same memory — when VM uses so-called "memory deduplication" techniques. Which is why enabling that stuff on production systems may be a bad idea.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for explanation. I've seen the damage of KSMD as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this kind of thing part of the reason why you log to stdout instead of handling disk writes in your app?

<comment><USER15> A comment in the Medium article asked the same thing. The author's response:

> I agree that piping all logs to stdout would be the best solution in case of > Dockerized microservices. It's just that in our case we were porting an > existing system, which a) already heavily relied on logging to files b) > consisted of many microservices itself, which we couldn't yet split into > separate Docker containers but also couldn't pipe all their logs to the same > stdout.

<comment><USER16> well that's just an argument to use a pluggable logging system like in python/log4j where you don't configure logging in your service/library and leave that up to the implementor. also let's you log to a structured format like JSON and pipe that to a logging aggregator

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://sysdig.com/blog/container-isolation-gone- wrong/](https://sysdig.com/blog/container-isolation-gone-wrong/)

</comment><comment><USER18> TL;DR logging using glog uncovered a bottleneck which was fixed upstream 9 months ago. Maybe keep your dependencies up2date? :)

<comment><USER19> Heh, was working with a router today that has a 6 (?) year old dependency - not everyone is so lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Due to a kernel bug..." made me question the whole article right there

</comment><comment><USER21> on osx, i know for a fact Docker for OSX is pretty darn slow due to its way they handle filesystem.

but using Dinghy greatly helped sped everything up due to it using nfs. just in case anyone wanted to know.

<comment><USER22> It can't be worse than the way they handle the filesystem on Windows. I can't even get events (e.g. watching for changes) to work on volumes.

<comment><USER23> Reading a bunch of small files from a volume is insanely slow from me in windows, so yeah...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice debugging story but the conclusion was totally wrong! The author even knows this. If they would be logging 3-4x the usual rate they would have seen the same problem on bare metal too. Nothing to do with docker or competing containers or whatever.

<comment><USER25> Not only that, but glog authors observed the overhead of frequent fadvise and added rate limiting almost a year and half ago. [https://github.com/google/glog/commit/dacd29679633c9b845708e...](https://github.com/google/glog/commit/dacd29679633c9b845708e7015bd2c79367a6ea2)

+1 perf. -1 stale library use. -1 misdirected learning

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is not the original title. The original title is "Another reason why _your_ Docker containers may be slow".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. I didn't notice that 'your' is not in the HN title. So, is it a filtering or I just forgot to type it?

<comment><AUTHOR> And yes, 'your' is important in this case. I definitely didn't want it to sound like another Docker-blaming article.</comment></comment></comment>


Double-Stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizers May Treat Most Viruses - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dracos-may-be-an-effective-cure-for-viral-diseases <comment> awinter-py Yikes. I'm not a biologist but just treating this as a systems problem -- if you introduce a change that triggers apoptosis when a cell comes into contact with viral DNA, does that mean that the virus that evolves to attack that would make the whole body melt at once.</comment>


Logical Literacy - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/logical-literacy/

<comment><USER2> It's unfortunate that this kind of logic isn't emphasized more in mathematics or science in a pure form. I'm pretty sure in high school I had one semester of this kind of logic associated with geometry. That was it until I hit discrete structures in college.

Failure to understand this logic might be part of the reason there's so much magical thinking about things relating to pseudoscience (e.g. paranormal activity, UFOs, conspiracy theories, New Age anything). A stronger base in logic would help people understand exactly why these things are impossible, stupid, or plain crazy with simple deductive and inductive reasoning techniques taught in logic courses.

<comment><USER3> I think a stronger base in real probability theory (as opposed to simply frequency analysis) would be more beneficial, especially if you follow Jaynes' route and treat it as an extension to logic. As a commenter noted above, "implication" is easy to grasp, except it's not, because logical implication is not necessarily causal or does not even have to make real-world sense, whereas one of the goals of Bayesian Probability Theory is that it should have a qualitative correspondence with common sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great example of how awesome teaching yourself using the Internet can be. If you read and understood that in 30 minutes then you learned it in about one quarter of the time we spent covering this stuff in my discrete math class--and I'm supposedly going to a really good college.

<comment><USER5> I don't see why you mention your college is good seemingly surprised it took longer than 30 minutes to cover this: wouldn't you expect a good college to have good teachers and wouldn't you expect a good teacher to go slowly enough that all or most students understand?

<comment><USER6> I suspect there is an optimum speed at which the greatest number of students are able to understand, and I suspect that it isn't the slowest speed possible.

In late elementary and junior high school I recall getting in trouble for being ahead of the class, particularly in computer-related classes and assignments. A faster pace would've allowed students like me to benefit from the class, but may have left slower students behind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Upvoted especially for his list of suggested reading at the end of the article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wonderfully straightforward resource for the basics.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good article overall, but I think I should make a comment:

> Many understand implication intuitively, yet find its symbolic formulation > puzzling.

Yes, and for a reason: material implication (the kind of implication discussed in the article) _cannot_ always explain our intuitive sense of implication. My favourite example, from Priest's _Introduction to Non-Classical Logic_ : (A ⇒ B) ∧ (C ⇒ D) ⊦ (A ⇒ D) ∨ (C ⇒ B) is valid when ⇒ is material, yet the statement:

"If John is in Paris he is in France, and if John is in London he is in England. Hence, it is the case either that if John is in Paris he is in England, or that if he is in London he is in France."

makes no intuitive sense. It is very important to discard intuition when dealing with implication in mathematics -- this is why although I'm a big fan of using English connectives instead of symbolic ones, I try to not use the English "if" and "then" in proofs.

<comment><USER10> I also think it is unfortunate that his first theorem is incorrect (n=1 cannot be written as the product of two distinct integers)

That may cost the author some of the readers for whom this text is the most educational, i.e. the ones that have trouble grasping the logic.

<comment><USER11> Even if it's not meant to be true, I find it even more disturbing that the symbolic and English formulations doesn't seem to quite match up. (IMHO the symbolic formulation doesn't state that n must be integer.)

It's like the source code and comments being out of sync - you don't know which one is wrong.

<comment><USER12> Another great point.

I fixed the broken theorem, and I added a blurb on the "universe of discourse."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What super projects could unite humanity? - <AUTHOR> For context, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742606<p>What kind of world changing super project could humanity solve that would unite us towards a common goal? <comment><USER3> Not exactly inspiring, but an alien enemy would be a pretty good way of uniting the planet towards a common goal.

<comment><USER4> If we have to invent an enemy alien civilization can I suggest we decide to go to war with the Culture?

Think of it: godless, drug-using communists in space!!!

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

[NB I've always suspected that Iain M. Banks is a Special Circumstances agent - installing an author to write "fiction" about themselves is exactly the kind of sneaky thing the Culture would do]. ;-)

<comment><USER4> And if they do exist, which of course they don't, quite a lot of people might just decide they rather like the idea of the Culture and immediately defect/surrender.

I know what I would do given the choice!

<comment><USER5> Traitor!

<comment><USER4> If it means I get to belong to the Culture, yes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I refuse to be united with humanity. And it's not just me.

Differences are good, disagreements are good, and diversity is good. Including differences in goals, values, priorities and everything else.

If you have some serious differences and if you want to avoid conflicts, you probably shouldn't keep pushing to unite. You probably should separate. Like, you know, if a family can't agree on some important set of issues, they probably shouldn't always try to find a compromise (which might as well be bad for all sides), or apply force to silence the weakest side. They would probably be much better off if they get divorced, and let each side to form a family with someone who shares their views.

I think the same logic applies to countries, and to disagreements about any serious issue -- like, i don't know, taxes, global warming, foreign affairs, gay marriage, controlled substances, etc etc.

So, tldr: I'd rather look for something to separate humanity, it tries too hard to get united.

<comment><USER7> I generally agree with you, but concerning an issue like global warming specifically, you are wrong.

For issues like global warming/pollution, it doesn't help to separate. If the US pollutes less and China picks up the slack, the earth will be just as warm (including the US). Separation is a great solution to some problems, but it doesn't solve the problem of how to pay for _global_ public goods (it deals with local ones nicely, however).

<comment><USER6> There are people who will refuse to care about global warming (or asteroid, or anything else), no matter what arguments you are going to provide. From here, you have to choices: A) suck it up, and B) force them.

I refuse to choose B, and I'm going to fight back if anyone chooses B wrt me.

<comment><USER7> The point is this - if my locality wishes to criminalize drugs and yours doesn't, we both get what we want. My locality has a bunch of drug users getting raped in prison, yours doesn't. We all get what we want.

This doesn't work for a few narrow issues. If you dump oil into your oceans, it floats into my oceans and you are forcing me to deal with polluted waters. If you allow piracy (the "arrr, matey" kind), the pirates rob everyone rather than just people in your locality. In cases like this, force will be used no matter what. There is no getting around it.

Look, I'm almost as libertarian as they come. I'm not even making a pro-AGW argument, since I'm unconvinced of AGW myself. I'm just pointing out that you need to fully think through your position - it's a great proposal, but doesn't solve every problem.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you are a libertarian, you probably know about all kinds of solutions for those issues, as outlined by Rothbard et ol. Do you find them all less realistic than e.g. "unite" plan?

<comment><USER7> For some issues they tend to work well. For others they don't. Rothbard was a fantastic intellectual, but he suffered the same problem that many specialists do - he carried a hammer, and thought every problem was a nail. I don't see any plausible mechanism by which spontaneous order will form to address environmental issues. Additionally, it has not tended to occur historically.

(Note: I don't even intend that as a harsh criticism. Rothbard's intellectual contributions are fantastic, and his hammer worked quite well for many things. Just not everything.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much of humanity? 10%? 40? 99?

I doubt you will get much more than about 20% of humanity to agree to anything at any given time. Extraterrestrial invasion? Nope, a bunch will just see them as gods and their own death as a journey to heaven? Another bunch will try to negotiate, another bunch will try to blast them into nonexistence?

Global catastrophe? See above.

And then there's the problem of who you're talking about. You can't e.g., reach everyone in every little town in India, Central Africa and South America. So if their "leaders" agree, does that mean that _they_ agree? Look at all the disagreement that happens with people and their elected officials in the US all the time.

Sorry dude, we're doomed to all die alone.

</comment><comment><USER9> A Killer Asteroid (one that is big enough to wipe out all humanity) on a guaranteed course to collide with Earth within the next 10 years unless we do something about it. If basic self preservation against a visible and quantifiable threat will not unite humanity - I have very little hope for anything else.

<comment><USER4> The problem with a Killer Asteroid for the purposes of this discussion is that the solution would have to be extremely high tech (presumably large H-bombs on large rockets). Apart from paying larger taxes I'm not sure what most of us could do to contribute to such a project, so as far as "uniting humanity" goes I suspect we would see fracturing along lines of:

\- It's a government plot to get us to pay more taxes and remove personal freedoms

\- It is God's will and trying to do anything to stop it is evil

\- I'll be OK if I dig a deep enough hole and take enough food, guns and ammo

\- Who cares, I'm going to make sure I enjoy the next ten years

<comment><USER10> > extremely high tech (presumably large H-bombs on large rockets)

How is 40s/50s technology high tech ?

<comment><USER4> You don't think designing a system that can deliver bombs deep into space is high tech?

It's not like we could get a Saturn-5 out of storage, fuel it up, stick a Tsar Bomba on the top and hope for the best.

<comment><USER11> H-bombs are sitting on tops of 30-year old space rockets right now.

Sending them to defeat asteroid might be even more devastating than not sending them though.

<comment><USER4> ICBMs don't even make it to orbit - if you wait till an asteroid is close enough that an ICBM could hit it then you might as well not bother.

[NB I do know that the SS-25 could do fractional orbits.]

<comment><USER10> No, but we've had rockets capable of delivering space probes across interplanetary distances for decades. Replace payload with nuclear warhead. Is that hard ? Maybe, but the manned Moon landings were hard, and we did those decades ago. Hard, but not "high tech".

Now whether or not such a solution would actually work is another matter. The original comment however was "extremely high tech such as H-Bombs on rockets". Both are examples of tech that's decades old.

<comment><USER4> But that argument also applies to stored program electronic computers - <USER2> are also 40s/50s tech.

So we have the technology to get a large enough device far enough out into the solar system quickly enough for it to make a difference and to engineer all of this within a limited timescale? I don't know about that....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ITER

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

<comment><USER13> Maybe not ITER (or even DEMO), but specifically nuclear fusion becoming a viable practical energy source.

I went to JET last year, which was amazing to see, but I couldn't help but get the nagging feeling that we won't see tritium/deuterium fusion hit mainstream within our lifetimes.

Mind you, once it does reach mainstream that will change everything. Hopefully there won't be a race to mine helium 3 from the moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Zombie apocalypse, for obvious reasons. The number of people considered a part of humanity is greatly reduced, making unification easier, and the goal is clear and simple - survival.

So keep up the work on that zombie-creating parasite!

</comment><comment><USER15> Making _all_ data collected by gov't agencies, institutes, universities etc. available, for free, in a standardized format.

<comment><USER16> this would make a big difference in the fight against rare diseases, I know someone who has an illness that is not adequately researched because it is too rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Universal Consciousness --- Realizing we are all made of the same atoms, cells, and revolve the same star. Also, seeing that we are all looking for the same things: Freedom, Wealth, and Love. The meaning of each is subjective but, we have biochemical need for all three to reach universal consoiousness.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Internet will provided it stays free and open. Through freely available information eventually we will resolve our petty differences, overcome destructive behavior and start fixing big problems like illness and space flight. Perhaps.

<comment><USER19> Ha. I get the feeling your comment is a little tongue in cheek. I have a pet theory that precisely the opposite will happen. That the internet will give rise to increased differences and destructive behaviour. Why? Because the internet allows people to be exposed to widely opposing views, to trolling by groups with opposing views, allows people to "meet" and argue, allows even the most extreme of viewpoints to build an audience, and allows disparate groups to rally together. E.g just look at Atheism vs Religion. I could see that coming to blows at some point.

<comment><USER18> So you say less/more difficult communication and perhaps even censorship is better in order to prevent conflict?

<comment><USER19> I don't know what the solution is, or if there is one, or even if I'm right. But as an example, look at the Pastor who was going to burn the Koran. 30 years ago before cable and internet news this guy would have never been heard of. But today, thanks to cable TV and the internet a huge amount of animosity has been generated, there's been demonstrations, reinforcement of cultural biases etc etc. Is this a good thing?

<comment><USER18> I don't share the view of the world that now somehow things are worse. This seems to be the view of a conservative person.

The opposite is true. The world is now the safest it's ever been. It's also the wealthiest and offers the most opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As history is witness, "united towards" doesn't work in large scale. It should be "united against". Human need an enemy to get united against. Alien invasion, asteroid collusion might be such thing. Otherwise no matter what, humanity will find one reason or another to form groups to fight one another.

Therefore humans are unlikely to get united to colonize a new planet few light years away. That's not in human nature.

Also check Monkey Sphere: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number>

<comment><USER21>
      > asteroid collusion

I mean no offense, but that was one of the most hilariously accurate typos I've ever seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would like to add in another factor into this question -

How long do you want that unity to last? the moment the question of commercialising the output of the project comes up, the competition will come out in the open and the unity will break.

Also, is it really required for the whole humanity to unite to take up a project that can affect humanity? Most of technologies and resources that can enable such a project are in the hands of a very few nations.

</comment><comment><USER23> The space elevator is the most game-changing investment we can make. The cost of getting into and out of orbit is the main barrier to any grand space scheme like mars, moon bases, or asteroid mining. It would also become a target of extremist anger and ignite divisions about tech. Runner-up might be a serious global scale geothermal plant for renewable power.

</comment><comment><USER24> Changing everyones genes so we are all a lot more tolerant of each other and so bigotry is wiped out.

Also we need much, much faster transportation, like trains that can travel around the world in 3-4 hours. This way we can see our "neighbors" much more often and no longer have a sub-concious fear of the unknown.

</comment><comment><USER25> Redesign more of the things we use to meet cradle-to-cradle standards (this includes changing laws/restrictions).

Granted, there's many things that can't be made this way, but it's also an approach that doesn't lead us down a malthusian path of wanting nothing either.

</comment><comment><USER26> Fully automated food production, shelter construction, power production, and transportation.

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought about immortality, but I suspect you'd fail to enlist the (massive) religious populations of Earth since you'd be competing directly with their existing power structure and investment.

It's odd to think that it's already a saturated market.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not just odd, its kinda depressing

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Divinely delivered message of abandonment and invasion from hell?

[http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=118769&high...](http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=118769&highlight)

</comment><comment><USER29> Has there ever in history been an example of a super project uniting people?

<comment><USER30> I thought of many attempts. They grow rapidly into mass slaugher. Forcing a particular religion onto people, forcing people to fund great mausoleums to the glory of their leaders, autocracy done in the name of socialism, "super- races" states from Sparta forward.

In fairness, I did think of one that could qualify, the vaccination of Polio.

<comment><USER31> If Polio counts, then small pox MUST count. We did an even better job with small pox than polio.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for your polite response. I said the wrong thing, small pox is what I was thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tesla Wardenclyffe Project

</comment><comment><USER19> Manned trip to Mars

Moon base

Space Elevator

<comment><USER10> More likely to lead to increased competition between nations/corporations (see the dash for colonization in 19c, leading up to WW1).

<comment><USER19> Possibly. My reasoning is that, unlike colonization, these projects are so big as to be impossible by one nation. They can only be attempted through co- operation by many.

<comment><USER33> A manned trip to Mars is estimated at ~$50 billion. Assume that NASA goes twice over budget and it costs $100 billion.

That's cheap! Any modern developed country could send a crew to Mars in 10 years. However, nobody has done it because nobody has devoted the resources to that cause.

The bank bailouts were around $700 billion, for comparison.

 _Space travel is cheap_ compared to the rest of what we do.

<comment><USER19> I think that's a low-ball cost. I've seen some estimates at $1 tr. But still yes, the US (and the US alone) could conceivably afford that (compare to cost of Iraq for example), so I take your point. However, even so, i don't think even the US would (or should) attempt this alone. (It's not just cash, but expertise too).

Re the bailout figure: this is slightly misleading. This isn't money that's just been "spent". It's been invested - in purchasing assets and equity from the bailed out institutions. These institutions are largely expected to buy back these investments at a later date netting the US govt a profit (some already have). Additionally of course, the cost of NOT bailing out the banks may have been much, much more. So I don't think it's a comparable number.

<comment><USER33> Your $1 trillion figure to Mars is absurd. The Mars Direct plan is about $55 billion. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct>

Could you cite where you heard $1 trillion? Nobody in the last 50 years has suggested it would cost anywhere near that much.

Sure, the bank bailouts were a bad example. But you gave an even better one! The Iraq War cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Define: humanity?

</comment><comment><USER35> Selfishness.

Oh wait, we recently achieved that...

</comment><comment><USER36> Very clear and indisputable impending global destruction with a short window before the event. (Think Asteroids or Aliens). Also, children who fall into wells or survive airliner crashes. Nothing else will work.

</comment><comment><USER37> Libertarian accountability for all. Individual democracies of 1 person. All human beings becoming literate craft-tech-open-source-hardwate tech people. Pantheism. Gaia.

</comment><comment><USER38> what a stupid topic...</comment>


Charles Sprawson wrote a celebrated book, then vanished - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21736119-bard-swimming-epitomises-caprices-literary-posterity-charles-sprawson-wrote <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/p4vxs](http://archive.is/p4vxs)

</comment><comment><USER3> It always gratifies me to hear about a dedicated writer receiving his or her due after the fact. Maybe they should have an annual Herman Melville literary award celebrating a great author or work by an author that flared or smoldered but never quite caught fire and yet still kept at it and produced something more than a timely bestseller with an attractive headshot.

On a very similar theme, I recommend this recent New Yorker article:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost- giant...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost-giant-of- american-literature)</comment>


Amazon's latest grocery store concept opens, with high-tech carts - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-store/amazons-latest-grocery-store-concept-opens-with-high-tech-carts-idUSKBN25N0QF <comment><USER2> As great as its image, in my view Whole Foods just isn't that great of a grocery store.

They were out of ground pork the other day and the staff at the butcher counter insisted they weren't allowed to grind more pork, despite it being on display. Bizarre.

They are regularly out of things just beyond the norm, like polenta.

Seems less like a grocery store for normal people and more of a spot for yuppies to buy $8 kombucha or whatever. Blows my mind.

Why can't we have HEB in California?

<comment><USER3> I don't buy kombucha but I'm vegan and since Amazon bought it the quality and diversity of the products i used to get has gone down, luckily local supermarket chains seem to have noticed and started to get more variety of those products since.

<comment><USER4> I like Whole Foods but a good number of the vegan products I buy are available cheaper at Target now, esp frozen. So I make the rounds... Safeway, Sprouts, a local gourmet shop, etc.

I don't like what Amazon has done to the selection, and they seem out of things more often these days. Guessing it's a mix of supply chain issues and contractual sourcing pressure that keeps some products out of stock because Amazon is very selective on product mix, pricing and delivery volumes. When you ask in the stores, they never seem to know. Peculiarly, they've been out of dry chickpeas a lot, recently.

The stores can be very different from location to location. The Park City store looks nice but is horrible. Sedona, Reno and Lafayette are great, IMO. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome article about "high-tech carts"... with no picture of the cart

<comment><USER6> [https://www.amazon.com/b?node=21289116011](https://www.amazon.com/b?node=21289116011)

You sign in by holding your phone with the Amazon app (QR code) up to a camera. Then scan every item as you place it in the cart. It has some load sensors so that it can weigh items that are sold by weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like making them pay a $15 minimum wage only expedited their constant desire to remove people from the equation.

<comment><USER8> They were making these moves regardless. Do you have any data that says that a higher minimum wage expedited it?

<comment><USER9> Do you have any data that says it did not?

In general, it's important to figure out this question because

A) People who believe there should be a higher minimum wage tend to believe it has zero impact on businesses' likelihood of cutting jobs

WHEREAS

B) People who believe there should be a free market tend to believe that having a minimum wage reduces jobs

I've never seen either party show Good Data and Stats to prove their point

 __*

So if you're asking him for data (a good question), you should also be willing to show data

<comment><USER8> He made a positive claim, so the onus is on him to prove it's true. The burden of proof isn't symmetrical. It is much harder to prove a negative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a rumor that one of these markets is opening soon near where I live. I'd love to shop and not wait in a line. I've been enjoying the Aldi's that's near me. Fast lines and good prices. They are pretty good keeping things in stock too.

</comment><comment><USER11> well, at least they're not making customers work for them like in the "self- checkout" stations that most of grocery stores have adapted to.

<comment><USER12> If the part of shopping where I transfer my goods from my cart into my bag is "work", then ought the part where I transfer goods from the shelf into my cart also be considered work?

IOW haven't grocers been making the customer work for them ever since the creation of the supermarket —— long before self-checkout —— based on your definition of work?

<comment><USER13> This is true. However, don't forget subscribing to the rest of the automobile culture: license, car, registration, driving to the store, parking, tickets, fuel, etc. These are really costs born by the consumer. Now they are also asking you to bring your own bags, pack your own bags, subscribe as a member to "save" (be monitored), and in some cases shop in specific hours to avoid the elderly due to COVID.

One of the most interesting things about living outside of western societies has been wet markets with zero accessibility for cars but great accessibility for walking, cycling and motorbikes. They are much friendlier and tend to have more stores with the same produce but different supply chains, which leads to more competition, greater variety and friendly personal service.</comment></comment></comment>


Gear Grinder: Grind coffee while riding your bike - <AUTHOR> http://www.geargrinder.co.uk/

<comment><USER2> I live in Amsterdam, so this instantly struck my eye! Sadly, the price is just too steep, I will keep on grinding by hand.</comment>


Sample from book about the periodic table - <AUTHOR> http://nostarch.com/download/samples/WLE_Sample.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> I preordered this a while ago and got my pdf copy yesterday. It's the first book about chemistry to make me giddy.</comment>


Is It Time For Programmers To Get Their Own Agents? - <AUTHOR> http://www.coderslexicon.com/is-it-time-for-programmers-to-get-their-own-agents/

<comment><USER2> So obviously, the answer is yes if said programmer can do better after expenses/overhead/time with an agent than without.

So I'll bite. Where does one find such an agent, how much do they typically charge, and are there any statistics on how earning power changes using an agent?

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems stupid and pretentious. Furthermore, the market is so hot that I can reach whoever is employing directly. Convincing them to pay more because they don't have to spend anything on recruiters or silly agents.

No reason someone else should make money for me finding a job.</comment>


Uber Driver Charged with Attempted Murder Had an 'Extensive Criminal Record' - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2016/05/uber-driver-charged-with-attempted-murder-had-an-extensive-criminal-record/ <comment><USER2> Brings up the broader question of "are people with criminal records simply unhireable?"

Give people a second chance, a few of them screw up, and it's your fault for hiring anyone with a record. Don't give anyone a second chance, and having a criminal record becomes a ticket to lifelong unemployment.

<comment><USER3> If the point is rehabilitation, and you never give anyone an actual second chance, ....

If the point is punishment, well, the reoffense rate for those prisoners that never are put into rehabilitation programs is 67% after 3 years, and 75% after 5 years.

[http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welco...](http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welcome.aspx)

So i'm going to suggest that unless we have a scheme for warehousing large numbers of people pretty much forever, and supporting them, we literally have to do something different.

<comment><USER4> The source you cited never mentions rehabilitation programs; just that 67% or prisoners reoffend after 3 years, rehabilitation program or no. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> (not sure why you were downvoted) IF you dig into their links, you can get to the data that separates out those in some sort of rehabilitation program and those not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Calgary's Mayor Naheed Nenshi was caught off the record a few months ago by a Lyft driver using Periscope speaking candidly about the city's headaches with Uber.

After filing a court injunction against Uber, part of which insisted Uber do background checks on it's drivers, the city sent some people with bad records to apply as Uber drivers to see if they could get through, and if course, Ubers claim to background checks turned out to be BS. Uber was discovered to have contracted registered sex offenders and drivers with violent criminal histories.

[https://youtu.be/YKglTLcw2rs](https://youtu.be/YKglTLcw2rs)

(Talk of background checks begins at 5:50)

<comment><USER6> Should we ban everyone who has a criminal history (violent or otherwise) from every job on the planet? If someone got in a bar fight and was convicted for assault ("has a violent criminal history") twenty years ago should that preclude them from driving an Uber?

"He/she has a criminal record" is too often the end of consideration for any position and it's really sad.

Edit: Not saying that Uber shouldn't background check, they should. I only meant what I said, nothing more. I don't work for Uber.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the crime, if you've nicked something from a shop as a kid or sold a bit of blow, who gives a shit? If it's a violent or sexual crime, probably not great to employ someone in a job where they can drive drunk people to places.

<comment><USER8> If you got into a drunken brawl at a bar at the age of 18, you forever have a "violent offender" badge. Should that stop you from getting any job in the future? In this case - driving a cab?

<comment><USER9> Any job? No. But we're not talking about any job. We're talking about one, very specific type of job.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but are you _really_ saying that someone who was in a fight at the age of 18, can't be a cab driver at say age 40? It doesn't make any sense to me.

<comment><USER7> Should be case by case really. If they viciously attacked someone then no, if they just got into a punch-up then who cares, shit happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This drumbeat that Uber needs to do background checks is so incredibly silly and naive.

The fact that an Uber driver killed someone does not mean _anything_ about Uber drivers. The fact that this person drove for Uber is completely incidental to their behavior. The idea that we need to start imposing regulations to 'solve' this complete non-problem is staggeringly stupid.

If this were actually a problem, and people actually cared about this, then Lyft would start doing extensive background checks and everyone would switch. But they don't. Instead they ask the government to impose regulation generalizing from the fear of isolated incidents.

Nobody asks the only question that actually matters: Does being an Uber driver make a violent criminal more likely to commit a violent crime? If the answer is 'no', then the only reason for sanitizing Uber drivers is to avoid these people committing crimes outside their own neighborhoods, with all of the racial and socioeconomic implications that has.

The soccer-momification (let's define that precisely as acts of security theater: the TSA, licensure of taxi drivers, licensure of hair stylists, etc..) of business is a profound drag on our economy and society, and more likely than not creates more violent crime by preventing criminals from pulling themselves up out of poverty.

<comment><USER11> I disagree with your probability equation. The question I should ask is "does being a violent criminal make it more likely that an Uber driver will attack a passenger?" I'd bet good money that the answer is yes. Being alone in someone else's car, potentially late at night and far from home, puts you at an extreme disadvantage -- it's a very dangerous situation that you would ordinarily stay far away from, unless you had a good reason to believe that you would be safe.

I am not in general a fan of security theater, but I think that doing thorough background checks of for-hire drivers _for relevant offenses_ such as moving violations, alcohol- or drug-related arrests and violent crimes is just smart.

<comment><USER10> I think if that is the case and it proves to be a pervasive problem, the market will sort it out pretty cleanly. If Uber drivers assaulting people becomes sufficiently common that people are willing to pay more, someone will create a solution to this problem.

This is something that the market should be able to solve extremely well on its own, without intervention from government. And there is no large correlated risk here or dearth of information for the public that should motivate the regulators to act.

<comment><USER11> I'm familiar with that argument. However, we've clearly decided as a society that that's not the path we want to take. We decided that we want the government to protect us from some baseline of risks, so that we don't have to spend all our time on which transportation service has the highest risk of being murdered by your driver, or which restaurant has the lowest risk of infecting you with typhoid.

<comment><USER10> Yes, my point is that that baseline has swung too far towards protectionist interventionism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like a lot of people want to excuse Uber in this case, or want to build around it an argument that we should be forgiving and not judge convicted felons overly harshly, lest we make it impossible for them to rebuild their lives. While I have some sympathy for the latter argument in particular, basing such arguments on Hemming's situation strikes me as unwise.

In five minutes or so on the Maryland state district courts' website, we discover that Hemming has considerable form [1], mostly around unlawful possession of controlled substances and prescription forgery, although there is a domestic abuse prosecution which doesn't appear to have gone to trial [2], probably because it was treated as mutual combat [3] and both parties chose to drop charges.

Would you feel safe in a car with this man?

Would you trust this man to drive a car for your hire service?

Would you consider it unreasonable to expect five minutes' due diligence of Uber?

[1] [http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquirySearc...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquirySearc..).

[2] [http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai..).

[3] [http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai..).

<comment><USER13> If the only convictions someone had were the possession and forgery charges, I wouldn't mind. The domestic abuse case, I'm not sure.

<comment><USER14> The larger point is that it shouldn't be up to the individual consumer to decide which employee criminal records are acceptable and which ones are not.

Brands exist for this very reason: so the consumer can choose to trust / not trust the brand at large based on their past experiences with the brand, which are of course influenced by hiring practices, among other things. It is a trust by proxy if you will, and it is the more critical for unsupervised "employees".

If Uber wants to build a trustworthy brand, it is up to Uber to 1. Define their hiring standards and practices loudly, transparently and clearly (like every other large company does) and 2. Enforce them consistently

As it stands right now, (and you may feel differently) I am not the kind of consumer that would do business with a company that leaves it up to the consumer to figure out whether their employees are violent criminals or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > It seems like an Uber driver is charged with a violent crime nearly every > day.

Every. day.

> [...] just three days ago, we reported on a driver who was arrested for > strangling a college student in a dorm parking lot.

Three days ago...

> A month ago, a Hawaii Uber driver was arrested for raping a teenage > passenger.

Over a month ago.

But every day!

<comment><USER16> > After placing Mr. Hemming in handcuffs, officers also found a needle cap, a > prescription vial, a syringe, rubber tie off straps, live shotgun shells, > live handgun rounds, a pill bottle, a metal pill holder, a handcuff key, > garden clippers and a pocket knife in his pants pocket.

I see he was also wearing his pants of holding +1, great journalism guys.

<comment><USER17> The way he wrote "live shotgun shells" and "live handgun rounds" signaled to me his intent to be alarmist rather than factual. Live as opposed to, what, inert? Inert rounds are way harder to get your hands on. Live rounds cost cents each and can be bought at tens of thousands of store with nothing beyond proof of age. Having ammunition means nothing and is completely routine to a very large swath of the country. Clarifying that it's "live" is using alarmist scare words.

<comment><USER18> I've yet to see anything in the "tens of thousands" in a retail setting except maybe .22LR on a pallet being delivered to Walmart and no round is cheap enough that an individual buys tens of thousands for personal use in one transaction.

I totally agree that the language came off as alarmist but find it amusing that you're alarmist in your response.

<comment><USER17> Can be bought _at_ tens of thousands of stores. I wasn't saying anything about quantity of purchase. And the reason I said that was to illustrate how utterly mundane it is to be able to purchase ammunition, including in Walmarts across most of the country.

How am I being alarmist? Be specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Given Mr. Hemming's extensive record it seems unlikely a background check would have cleared him. So the conclusion is either that Uber didn't do one, or that Hemming falsified his identity.

Fingerprints are the standard way of preventing falsified identity in criminal background checks. Just what Uber and Lyft insist are useless would have prevented Hemming's hiring, most likely.

Funny that a lot of cities are insisting on "useless" fingerprint checks now, isn't it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what that $1/ride "Safe Rides Fee" is for, if not to run background checks?</comment>


Show HN: Wrte.io – Charge for each email you get - <AUTHOR> http://wrte.io

<comment><USER2> Is the payment to get the email delivered or to get guaranteed response?

I'd prefer the latter for two reasons: 1) as a receiver I don't want to miss out on a potentially interesting email just because the sender couldn't pay (for technical or financial reasons), and 2) as a sender I'd like some sort of guarantee if I'm going to pay for something.

It's probably the more difficult approach of the two so I suggest testing both approaches and see what works best.

Congrats on getting this far already. Like you say it's not a new idea, but who cares about ideas. It's about execution anyway. Looking forward to the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

1) I think the fact of paying is already a good enough barrier. The price could be just a couple of dollars, which would be enough to convice sender to spend sometime on writing a personal email instead of using cold mail template.

2) Because of this barrier user will receive much less email + with much relevant content. As a result sender will have much higher chances for reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What a great way to make sure you only get emails from rich, tech-savvy people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaah :)

We think it will work for public people with tons of cold emails daily, like pg

<comment><USER3> The problem is that as soon as you tie the ability to send someone an email to your bank account you immediately put poor people at a grotesque disadvantage. I wouldn't presume to speak for pg, but I doubt any savvy investor would be happy passing up the opportunity to be the first to hear about the next Google/Uber/Facebook because the founder couldn't afford to send you an email. If you want to limit the number of emails people can send then you need to tie the ability to something else.

That's why Bill Gates' idea was so good - his plan was to make people's computers have to do useful work (say, Folding At Home or the distributed Seti search client) rather than merely transferring money around. Wealthy people wouldn't be at an advantage because the work unit would be _time_ : a rich person with a fast laptop that can test 1,000,000 protein folds in 2 minutes has to do 1,000,000 tests to send their email while a poorer person whose hardware can only do 1,000 folds in 2 minutes only has to do 1,000 tests to send their email. Time is effectively the same for everyone. It's a _beautiful_ solution. Far better than boring old money.

<comment><USER4> While we are getting good at proof-of-work stuff -- we aren't great a proof- of-power.

Meaning, it would be easy for me to emulate 10,000 slow computers with one powerful one, doing 2 minutes of work 10,000x parallel (claiming each of these computers is very weak) and that completely bypasses the "beautiful" solution.

Sending BTC works because it isn't gameable (at this point). I like the idea of a ฿0.0001 (or even ฿0.001, 20 cents) fee for each email sent to me. It is a little over 2 cents US -- would absolutely stop spammers (most it cost prohibitive for them), but hopefully would not stop normal users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could be interesting with an API to control pricing, that way it could be adjusted by BTC => local currency -- but also based on other things.

I for example, would like a multiplier based on my backlog. I might start at 20 cents an email -- but if I have 1,000 messages waiting for me to read, I would increase the price to contact me to $20 an email -- because at a certain point I can't keep up and the value per email drops to 0.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you have to pay for an email anyway, would You instead call or pick some other way of direct communication? Not quite sure that replacing the indirect communication, where You can procrastinate to some extent, with direct one will solve the issues it promises.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why limit this service to bitcoin if the generalized version for any currency exists already? Head over to [https://ningo.me](https://ningo.me)! Shall we join forces?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it like $100 or like $0.01? Look like very old idea of Bill Gates.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can hover with a mouse the bitcoin price and it will show you amount usd.

Probably it is Gate's idea and many others :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice!

Any plans to use micropayment channels?

<comment><USER9> micropayment channels ([https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with- micropayments](https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments)), are used between 2 parties to send a lot of micropayments. But here there is only one transaction even small. Also micropayments may help against spam but not agains cold emailing

<comment><USER8> You can have a micropayment channel between the user and their email provider, and between email providers.

When User A wants to send an email to User B, he sends a micropayment through one of these channels to his email provider. His email provider in turn sends a micropayment to User B's email provider. User B's email provider sends a micropayment to User B.

So in this way, value can be transferred without any on-chain BTC transactions, zero fees, and instantly.</comment></comment></comment>