TransitMatters, a transit advocacy group in Boston - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/25/what-works-boston-transit-221839 <comment><USER2> Improving regional rail in greater Boston can also serve as a key to improving the housing crisis that the city is experiencing, especially if some of the suburbs served by regional rail can be convinced to re-zone for higher density mixed-use development in an area around their commuter train stations.

> millennials who've rejected suburban life to go car-free or car-light in the > city

I'm one such millennial living car-free in Boston. I would gladly move to the suburbs if I could complete all my ordinary day-to-day tasks (commuting, grocery store shopping, hitting my favorite local restaurant, etc) without touching a car. But the fact is, aside from the commercial/residential zoning divide, having these stores in walking distance is not economically feasible without a certain level of density that American suburbs just can't fulfill. America's strange obsession with big lawns and single family housing has shut down the dream of living without a car everywhere except for the urban cores of the few top metro areas in the country. Furthermore, this dispersed suburban housing style is enforced by local zoning ordinance (& requires supermajority of town vote to change zoning rules in the state of MA)!

<comment><USER3> Waltham has that. Within walking distance of the commuter rail station (which is also a bus nexus), there are apartment buildings, two supermarkets, a large number of restaurants, and most of the other non-big-box store types you want. A nice movie theater, too. Waltham has a big stock of rental housing because there are two colleges (Brandeis in the south and Bentley in the north). Crime tends towards shoplifting and driving with a suspended license.

It's 23 minutes on the commuter rail to North Station, less to Porter Square. The 70 bus runs to Central Square Cambridge, stopping at the Arsenal Mall along the way.

Come be my neighbor.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. I've actually been looking at renting in Waltham when my current lease ends (as well as a few other places I've been looking - Quincy, Malden, Somerville). A while back I was thinking of buying, but prices are really damn expensive right now.

<comment><USER4> I lived in Quincy not far from the north Quincy redline stop. Aside from the typical delays it was pretty affordable and there is grocery and shopping in walking distance for the most part. Waltham has gotten a bit expensive the past few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is amazing what this community advocacy group is accomplishing in Boston. If you want to improve transit in the Bay Area and beyond, starting with SF, there's a group of people volunteering at Code for America working on similar things as TrasnitMatters for MUNI and Bay Area public transit. Not meeting on Halloween this Wednesday, but the following Wednesday and each week at 115 9th St (a few blocks from Market Street) at 6PM - ~9:15PM.

The group: [http://opentransit.city/](http://opentransit.city/) Part of SF Code for America: [https://codeforsanfrancisco.org/](https://codeforsanfrancisco.org/)

Currently using GraphQL, Node, Cassandra, HTML, CSS, JS, Bootstrap, and React.

Always open for developers, data scientists, product and marketing people, transit people, and whoever else wants to improve public transit in the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm more than a little glad that public transit is becoming cool again, and people are seeing it as a thing they can improve rather than a "big bad government" artifact.

Maybe in 20 years we might get some transit out here in the Midwest!

</comment><comment><USER7> This part's exciting for me:

"Early this year, TransitMatters' leaders released their most ambitious proposal yet: a "regional rail" plan to speed up and electrify the MBTA's sprawling, aging commuter rail system, which covers most of eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. With faster, quick-accelerating electric trains, and high-level platforms for every train car in each station to speed up entry and exit, TransitMatters predicts that its plan could cut the commuter rail's Boston-to-Providence travel times from as long as 73 minutes down to 45 minutes."

<comment><USER8> This excites exactly nobody who rides the commuter rail.

What would excite us is more staff. You can only get on/off a train at a door where there is a conductor (you only get on/off at a door opened by a conductor) regardless of platform height, most time spend getting on/off is waiting in line for everyone in front of you to go through whichever few doors are open. We don't need faster clock speeds, we need more cores (metaphorically speaking). Even the conductors complain about this. They could literally hire more people tomorrow if they wanted to. Three is no need to go through a long RFP + proposals + procurement process like they would need to do for new rolling stock.

This entire piece reads like some aloof central planners telling everyone else what they need without actually assessing the situation.

Another thing that would be exiting is trains that run on time. Whether they run on diesel or whale oil won't matter to most people as long as they're an improvement over the status quo. A week doesn't go by when there isn't a (mechanical breakdown related) 1hr+ delay on any given line.

Edit: Yes, raised platforms are faster but they're not so much faster (and they're certainly not cheaper) than utilizing the existing infrastructure (i.e. all the doors on the train) to a greater extent.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Raised platforms would allow using automatic doors and all-door boarding. Right now, doors can't be automatic because you don't know which ones board at platform level and which need to have the builtin stairs dropped down to track level. As it is, not only does it take time for a conductor to drop the stairs, but staffing is a major part of the T's operational expense for each ride.

Also, the passenger throughput per door is higher when they can just walk off, instead of having to teeter down stairs. (Not everybody can just hop down the stairs)

Oh yeah, frustrated passengers opening the door and lowering the stairs themselves is a dangerous no-no.

2\. Electric trains accelerate and decelerate much faster, cutting time off the trip. They have more rated HP and can "burst" up to something like 2x the rated HP when accelerating from a stop.

(Except on those fun fall days when the train slides on the wet leaves...)

Source: personal experience as an MBTA commuter rail rider (reverse commuting to Concord) for four years, former occasional NJ Transit rider (on the electrified Northeast Corridor)

<comment><USER8> Sure all that stuff is nice but increased staffing can create the same improvement as all of that right now without the massive up front cost of new stations or rolling stock.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but with massive ongoing operational costs. That's not sustainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who took the E trains of the Green Line to high school every day, the fact that they were holding up the entire system at night is not surprising in the least.

</comment><comment><USER12> Was the author getting paid per use of the word "millennial"?

<comment><USER13> That's certainly annoying, but please don't start a new thread with a shallow dismissal. It leads to lousy discussion, and this article has a lot more interesting stuff in it than that.

The guideline that asks "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" applies to articles as well.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >TransitMatters has gone big, with an ambitious, high-cost proposal to speed up and electrify the T's diesel-chugging commuter rail system.

Make the damn thing run on time and nobody will care if it burns whale oil and exhausts powdered asbestos

The schedule change for conductors was last week and we've already discussed with the new conductor what kind of pizza we should order when we have our multi-hour "the switches are frozen and nothing can leave north station" delays this winter.

>Ofsevit steps off an MBTA commuter-rail train onto a platform, then turns and looks behind him. His train car has already emptied, but the rear cars haven't. Instead of stepping quickly onto platforms, riders are stepping slowly and gingerly from the train to footstools, then to the ground.

This is pure BS. There are no footstools or anything like that at Waltham. If they wanted people to get off the train fast they'd let people exit at doors where there isn't a conductor or they'd use more conductors to staff more doors. This would also reduce conductor workload and let them eliminate all the ticket checkers at the stations.

>high-level platforms for every train car in each station to speed up entry and exit,

This requirement does not allow for partial implementation. Many towns are stuck maintaining grandfathered in stations because they don't have the money to do a full length, full height platform. If you want to save time open more doors for people to use. Of course a bunch of transit budget planners in Boston would rather tell the towns to build platforms rather than hire more bodies to open more doors because the towns are the ones who have to pay for the platforms.

<comment><USER14> > Make the damn thing run on time and nobody will care if it burns whale oil > and exhausts powdered asbestos

I beg to differ; it really stinks when one of those old diesel commuter trains goes by. They are also very noisy (electric trains are basically silent at the slow, slow speed of the MBTA commuter rail). Ask anyone who lives near or passes by the tracks regularly what they think - there's tens of thousands of us.

<comment><USER15> You get used to it in an incredibly short period of time. I'm less than a hundred feet from the Amtrak line, and you just don't even notice them going by after a while. It's the 100+ long freights that aren't slowing down to stop at the station in town that shake the windows....</comment></comment></comment>


The Debate Over Time's Place in the Universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/the-debate-over-times-place-in-the-universe/492464/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I will only provide two clues, if you are genius then this should be enough to solve the debate.

1) Entropy and time are epistemological not a metaphysical concepts.

2) The "Big Bang" and the ultimate "Singularity" was not 13.x billion years ago but... rightnow!, i.e. the present. The now is all that exists, everything else is a memory or a projection in consciousness.</comment>


New Google reader UI - <AUTHOR>

www.google.com/reader <comment><USER2> I can't stand this new UI. It's slower, took away screen real estate, and I don't see where they put my unshared notes. Blah!</comment>


Indian immigrants are tech's new titans - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-indians-in-tech-20150812-story.html <comment><USER3> This article generalises way too many things for me to be interesting.

"Unlike the people in some cultures, Indians learn to challenge authority" \- This can't be further from the truth. At the risk of generalising myself I'd still like to say that Indian culture in general doesn't want anyone to challenge authority (parents/teachers/bosses) this is something we are taught as children.

<comment><USER4> As an Indian, you're spot on. Rebellion is the last thing you see among Indian youth. Most of my friends still can't tell their parents that they drink/party/have sex. We are a deeply conservative society and the middle class expectation is to get a stable job at a known name brand.

<comment><USER5> I had a close friend who refused to wear his Patka/Keski Dastaar anymore (sorry if this is incorrect, I'm going off of images on google) and was nearly disowned by his family.

The crazy thing is his family wasn't, to my eyes, even particularly religious.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes, this plays out in hilarious ways. Infosys and TCS, for example, are well-known companies in India. Tower Research, on the other hand, is not known at all. A friend got an offer from Tower Research (he went to the same college as Sundar Pichai), but his relatives were appalled that he would choose it over a code monkey role at Infosys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a Reason why Indian Immigrants are CEO's of Companies like Google and Microsoft rather than founder of Companies like Google and Microsoft.

Current EB2 (For people who have done masters) green card wait time for Indian Born immigrants is 10 Years (mind you this is for people who have done masters and would have worked for a company at least a year to start the process). By the time an Indian Immigrant can legally start a company and work for the same, he/she has to be atleast 35.

<comment><USER7> Yup. 12 yrs and still no GC in sight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Challenging authority is far from norm in Indian culture. There is just a hint of this in the current generation. Plus running a company is hardly challenging any authority.

Taking my example. I am working on a startup, plus doing some freelancing work to pay the bills. I am constantly pestered by relatives, parents, friends to get a 9 to 5 stable job. There have been times when I have been told that I should work instead of staying at home (thank heavens that I am living by myself) and being on the computer by some friends and relatives. Kind of funny.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think hypocrisy is more our thing, rather than this rebellious, challenging the authority attitude. I am talking of the vast majority of the country. I wouldn't use Indians as a way to generalize, because I think most of us lack passion and interests, the willingness to do something new, to do it flawlessly. This is why a few Indian immigrants who do extremely well, will stand out and I think they deserve the respect for it. The rest are there for the opportunity to make more money, to live a more comfortable life. I do not think the vast majority of us can ride this 'tech titans' tag.

I'm sure we all are going to react with - hey, I know a lot of rebellious, passionate people. I agree, I know a lot of people too, but they do not make up for the big majority we're calling Indian immigrants.

<comment><USER10> >>I think most of us lack passion and interests

This is not generalization, you are making blanket statements which are straight untrue. Most people can't chase their passion because, they first need to bail out of shitty conditions they were born in. Passion and interests are the luxury of the rich. For vast majority of Indians, they have to undergo at least two to three generation of slogging to get their kids to college and a decent day job. This is if you break out of caste problems, poverty and low income jobs. Else its life as usual.

When your father and grandfather toiled in a farm for their whole lives to get you a 9 - 5 job, you don't throw it way. Not only would that be disrespectful to their whole lives. It would also be stupid. Most entrepreneurs fail, if you are one of them you are gambling three generations of sincere effort in providing your descendents a good future.

The very fact that some of us complain about things like these shows how far detached we are from lives of fellow Indians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real tech titans will always be founders, not the promoted CEOs of companies on their descent. People of all cultures should aspire to create their own new things in the world, not run bureaucracies created by other people. It may be prestigious and make you rich but that's true of many terrible jobs.

<comment><USER12> Microsoft is still one of the largest companies in the world. Adobe. Pepsi. What, would you have them run uber or something small like that?

<comment><USER13> He's just saying its more impressive to make a ball from scratch and get it rolling than it is to keep a ball rolling. Extra-ordinarily hard to do either one imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this just post-hoc rationalization? I mean what if Germans were running the show? Wouldn't the article say all the same things with Indians replaced with Germans? I mean good for all the CEOs but I don't think it has anything to do with being Indian.

<comment><USER15> It's post-hoc rationalization _from a tiny sample_. If this isn't reading signal in noise, I don't know what is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The reaction of anyone, male, female, whatever race or sexual orientation, should be: "Cool story brah, I have work to do."

A lot of engineers aren't appreciated for the good work they do. But none of them will benefit from worrying that it's because they're not Indian.

</comment><comment><USER17> Selection bias is an important factor to consider why emigrant societies are seen as industrious, innovative and ultimately successful.

If you survived an oppressive homeland government, escaped harsh socio- economic living conditions, bootstrapped yourself (or your family) out of illiteracy, invented creative ways to succeed the stowaway journey, brave the xenophobia of an alien culture, solidified your determination to "stick around" ... chances are you are already in the group that has the top 5% of successful leadership across the world.

Not just Indians - you see this with almost every expat society in different countries.

</comment><comment><USER18> We're very argumentative

Indians, as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen tells us, are argumentative by nature and given the opportunity, we will debate and discuss till the cows at home. Jean-Christophe Lettelier got a taste of this as soon as he took charge at L'Oreal India last year. The meetings he conducted would go on interminably with everyone going in circles.

"Maybe it's because of an inductive approach to understanding things, but Indians make things more complex than they really are," he says. "I value the depth of thinking, but sometimes I have to just close the topic. Else there is complete chaos."

Mitsubishi's Makoto Kitai is another expat CEO who has had a hard time conducting meetings. "Japanese are very good listeners. We as a culture never speak out of turn which ensures that our suggestion would be asked every time. My Indian colleagues, on the other hand, are very ardent speakers and are always impatient when it comes to an opportunity to articulate their views," he says. We also have a propensity to get into time consuming discussions just about anywhere.

As Tetsuya Takano, MD of Ricoh India points out: "In India it's easy to form a discussion group. You only have to ask someone something and suddenly five people are around you and you can discuss anything. The preferable subject is politics."

[https://justpaste.it/Argumentative](https://justpaste.it/Argumentative)

</comment><comment><USER19> Off my head - Softbank, Sandisk, Cognizant, NetApp and pepsi ceo's are indian as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> well.. i have positive experience working for an indian company. they were pretty relaxed and kind and let people do their thing without interference. they also let me in when nobody else would. It's definitely not by chance they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER18> We Have Petitioned US/UK To Stop Issuing Visas To Indians, The Most Racist People On Earth;

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/stop-issuing- visa...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/stop-issuing-visas-people- india-most-racist-people-earth)

[https://www.change.org/p/president-of-usa-and-prime- minister...](https://www.change.org/p/president-of-usa-and-prime-minister-of- uk-stop-issuing-visas-to-indians-the-most-racist-people-on-earth)

</comment><comment><USER21> 'that a generation of Indians has benefited from upbringings in a culture that, at its best, values humility, close-knit family ties and respect for all walks of life.'

Lol, how does that match with India's caste system? So much respect for lower castes, a huge gap between poor and rich...so much humility...

Probably a corporate environment very much matches a caste system, hence Indians are the most suitable for running such an environment.

And lets not forget, the author is Indian.

</comment><comment><USER22> How many % of the world population does Indian make up ? I say its just starting to reflect that.... nothing to see here..

<comment><USER23> Nope. China, Brazil, Russia are all humongous % populations - <USER2> representation.

<comment><USER24> As is Nigeria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sundar Pichai is a [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmin) They've mastered the art of manipulating and using people/professionals/programmers for past 2000 years;

Good luck to Google;

</comment><comment><USER25> I know only one tech titan, and he is South African; the other one was half- Lebanese, but he is dead now.

<comment><USER22> half-syrian...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You cannot survive/succeed in a corporate world unless you're a sociopath.

</comment><comment><USER26> I get that positively singling out a disadvantaged minority is not racist, but still, who cares about the race or home culture of the CEOs of Microsoft and Google? Isn't the whole reason these guys are able to get these roles _because_ the tech scene as a whole doesn't care much where you're from? (as long as you have a penis, of course)

<comment><USER27> It matters because it a lot of these people didn't grow up or studied primarily in India or in Indian Universities.

They only ended up doing a Msc or Phd in the US as a way to enter the US labour market. Not always but often enough.

Most of that education was paid for by Indian taxpayers. So I think its unfair to Indian taxpayers.

I cringe whenever I hear people talk about "entrepreneurship" and "free- enterprise" as the reason for silicon valley's success.

You cannot start a electronics company when your country's philosophy is a darwinist one of man eating man.

Silicon Valley is lucky that they get a free supply of highly specialized labour from the rest of the world that they didn't pay for.

<comment><USER28> Lots of large international cities have sizeable numbers of expats who got educated back home, Singapore, London, Hong Kong, etc. None of the home countries would cry "brain drain" in seriousness.

If they did they'd be wrong to say that. Make it attractive to stay home and on balance people will. Stifle opportunity and people will leave.

And conversely, Europe and north america don't cry, third world, you're off loading your undereducted and you have us foot their education, etc.

People go where they see opportunity. Countries allow immigration of poor if it makes economic sense to them. And of course they welcome highly skilled, for the most part though quotas exist to appease the professionals in host country. The working classes enjoy no such protection, again, because economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are 1.2B Indians and 300M Americans. And there are strong ties between the Indian middle class and the u.s. In education and business. The indian middle class is around 300M. It's surprising that there aren't more Indians in high corporate roles considering how many there are in universities, for example.

Something that is disturbing long-term is the low number of Chinese nationals in corporate roles in the u.s. China is arguably ahead of India socially and economically. They have 500M in the middle class. But we don't have strong ties with mainland China like we do with India. We run the risk of continuing to diverge.

<comment><USER29> Couldn't it be that the perception of China being ahead of India socially/economically is why you don't see as many Chinese nationals in corporate roles in the US?

I've talked to a number of Indian workers in IT here in Japan who've said that they'd do "anything" not to have to go back to their family homes. But Chinese IT workers I know don't seem to mind the idea; in fact, they usually go back a couple of times a year.

If you replace "Chinese nationals" with a first-world European country, does it sound disturbing? e.g.: "the low number of German nationals in corporate roles in the u.s." It doesn't to me.

</comment></comment><comment> anti-shill we desperately need to increase immigration from india in order to save our economy

</comment><comment><USER18> Satya Nadella/Sundar Pichai are NOT Entrepreneurs;

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

</comment><comment><USER18> Four degrees in hand, he still cleans sewers due to Caste system in India

[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Four- degrees-...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Four-degrees-in- hand-he-still-cleans-Mumbais-sewers/articleshow/48129319.cms)

</comment><comment><USER18> Indian regime owes reparations to 300 million Untouchables for 2000 years of Caste system;

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont- disa...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disappear- india_b_6257354.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Indians immigrants have mastered the art of

What you know is NOT important. Who you know is very important.

[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and- nation...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and- nation/seventh-pay-commission-may-bump-up-salaries-but-ias-has- institutionalized-the-caste-system/articleshow/48128107.cms)

</comment><comment><USER18> 49% of children dropping out of school are Untouchables and 25% are Muslims

[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/49-of-children- out-...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/49-of-children-out-of- school-are-SC/STs-25-are-Muslims-Survey/articleshow/48230596.cms)

[https://www.change.org/p/independent-nation- for-300-million-...](https://www.change.org/p/independent-nation- for-300-million-india-s-untouchables)

</comment><comment><USER30> So we're doing racist fluff pieces now? Look, generalizations about a race of people, positive or negative, are just wrong. We are going to need an international code of conduct for the industry because people from outside the US obviously have no problem making gross generalizations like "Indians are just better in tech." Obviously it is unprofessional for Americans to say "Americans are the best at tech" or "Whites make the best programmers." People from other countries are getting away with WAY too much fucking bullshit.

<comment><USER23> Relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw_mRaIHb-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw_mRaIHb-M) :)

<comment><USER30> Oh BTW, India has 13.9 million slaves right now.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Your point? Are you also trying to make a point about the supremacy of the Indian race/nationality/culture?

</comment><comment><USER18> Wish they do not inject 'covert' racism into your society [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating- map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Tell us more of your 4th grade social studies stories.

<comment><USER32> We've banned this account for repeatedly posting uncivil, unsubstantive comments to HN.

<comment> anti-shill it seemed quite substantive to me...of course, it goes against the mainstream politically correct paradigm, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality. The whole country's economy is based on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a pioneer in the field. The most recent example of this ideology is the "Business Process Outsourcing" industry. New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable. This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum. Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.

</comment><comment><USER33> Titans give us 0 to 1.

I'm waiting.

</comment><comment><USER34> Or, it could be a coincidence :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I think the key is this "They have my values yet all the American advantages. They can achieve the same as my generation at much younger age." Most of these guys have done their masters in respectable places and their experience is in USA.

The way the US top 10 schools collaborate with Industry is yet to come in India though it is starting slowly. But I see Indian companies still family owned business though it is traded so working in Indian company even thinking that you will be the super boss is not there. It is going one of the major owners kin.</comment>


Kent Beck: minimal (sometimes no) automated testing before product/market fit - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-automated-testing-should-a-startup-have-from-the-beginning-through-the-first-six-months-of-live-operation? <comment><USER2> Here is a copy of Kent's response:

"Kent Beck, _Husband, father, programmer, goat farmer._

The needs of a startup before product/market fit are very different than those after. Before, you need the absolute lowest possible latency from idea through implementation to validation. If you can do that without any code at all, so much the better. Reducing latency gives you the chance to experiment as many times as possible for a given amount of money to increase your chances of survival. After you find a product that meets a real market need, you need to shift to a throughput-oriented engineering strategy so you can last until revenue ramps up.

The practical implications of this for testing is that before product/market fit you should only write tests that reduce latency. Sometimes this means no automated tests. As a feature proves promising and you begin to elaborate it, this means just enough tests to keep the validation cycle short. If a feature is complicated AND YOU CAN'T THINK OF A CHEAP WAY TO TEST IT, you may have to write extensive tests to get the feature to a verifiable state.

Then comes the transition. You've started growing. You're feeling the pain of scaling. Now you need testing. More than that, though, the whole organization needs to begin valuing throughput instead of latency. If that shift takes place, then extensive testing comes along as a natural consequence."

This is a far cry from TDD. I'm glad Kent wrote it, though, because it is so true.</comment>


Ask HN: You develop in an imperfect system; what would you do to fix the API? - <AUTHOR> This question is kind of vague, but I'm certain that there is a ton of "lesson learned" experience in the HN community that would be good to pass on.
What infrastructure do you code on top of that could have been done better. Actually, the name of the infrastructure is irrelevant, but please share the "fatal flaw" of a common design challenge you've come across.
I was thinking about OS services in particular (xwindows having to support networking, for example), but any library, first-party software, or even embedded code would be interesting to hear about. <comment><USER2> All of them.

Very little infrastructure is a perfect fit, and you often find yourself fighting with it to do something you need to be able to do.

Sometimes a new approach, sometimes not.

Here's a few examples:

* Python's GIL : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4)

* Node's processes : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o8B3L0-d9c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o8B3L0-d9c)

* PHP's Super Globals : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZQ_V_ZJUjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZQ_V_ZJUjA)

For more anecdotal information: ARM is my bane.

Though the ARM processor is cool, and lets me use whatever toolchain I want... Instruction sets in the wild can be:

* Incomplete

* Inconsistent

* "Extended" with unexpected, and often undocumented, side-effects

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard of the other issues, but the ARM example was great; thanks!</comment></comment>


Broker: A fast data visualization platform - <AUTHOR> http://broker.is/

<comment><USER2> Some feedback on the site (is it yours?): the home page is disappointing because the it doesn't say anything. I'm interested in this space (e.g. crossfilter/pourover) but this provides no information to contrast against those, so the call to action doesn't work on me even though I might be your target market.

The first few examples given are displaying really small sets of data -- e.g. realty and showroom are each displaying ~500 data points, which is small enough that a straightforward JavaScript loop that filters by checking each datum would be "ridiculously fast".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure your description is accurate. When I think visualization platform, I think of something like D3 or raphael.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Maybe something like "Ridiculously fast local faceted search" would be more appropriate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I looked at this with interest, and it's just a showcase page with a "contact us" button. I don't click on showcases, I click on documentation, getting started, and pricing links.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Things like a showcase page, an email-signup page, or a fundraising page are often not very substantive. The best kind of product post is a Show HN pointing to something people can play with. The second best is a detailed description of the product and technology.

Because HN generally doesn't allow reposts for about a year, it's not usually in one's interest to post about a product too early. It's better, for both the product and for the community, to wait until something is ready for the sweet spot of HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I think fast, I think being able to rendering hundreds of thousands of data points in real time, kind of like 'Google Maps' but for Time instead of Space, you should be able to fly over and analyze vast datasets.

As a historical note, since this is an area near and dear to my heart, I shipped an open source library several years ago circa 2007 that attempted to do this by applying the 3D graphics concept of a "mip map" to time series, with several representations of the data at various LOD automatically computed by sampling and filtering. I demoed it at Google I/O 2008 rendering 1 million data points in real time. Location here: [https://code.google.com/p/gwt- chronoscope/](https://code.google.com/p/gwt-chronoscope/), it's written in Java using GWT, and also the same code runs on the server for Java2D rasterization, and on Android. It has a JS API and Microformat API as well.

Here's a screencast of it in action, including things like animation, markers, synthetic datasets (technical analysis), styling, and history undo/redo. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLYNHQVIeNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLYNHQVIeNg)

I eventually wanted to get to a point where people could collaborately analyze data and tell stories about it. This screencast shows "Timelord" which was a integrated with social networks and supported a concept called "Micro- presentations", using a markdown-like format to allow people to write animated two-way video/chart synchronized stories. In this video, Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" is synchronized to a Chart of CO2 and Temperature.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Y21t0u_Zw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Y21t0u_Zw)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't mind links to cool commercial services, but not having a pricing page means I close the tab and move on.

At the very least, some sort of comment on HN giving a pricing ballpark would be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it a crime to not have a pricing model, yet?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We also have music artists' tour dates, powered by SeatGeek:

\- [http://george-strait.gigs.is](http://george-strait.gigs.is)

\- [http://dave-matthews-band.gigs.is](http://dave-matthews-band.gigs.is)

\- [http://billy-joel.gigs.is](http://billy-joel.gigs.is)

\- [http://bruce-springsteen-the-e-street-band.gigs.is](http://bruce- springsteen-the-e-street-band.gigs.is)

etc, etc. Basically any SeatGeek <slug>.gigs.is.

Obviously we'll build a UI around this at some point.</comment>


How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding - <AUTHOR> https://blog.garrytan.com/masterclass-with-algolia-how-to-capture-the-heart-of-20m-software-developers <comment><USER2> I tend to feel a little intimidated by companies that offer fantastic experiences like this, but then I keep trying to remember this:

Algolia looked like shit when it started. There was none of this shine and polish. IIRC it was some text styled with Bootstrap 2. Or might have been 1.

Stripe also looked like shit when it started. No shine or polish, no developer website based developer experience to speak of, no world leading 60fps animations, no fantastically versioned docs, nothing.

Build something people want / something that solves a hard problem and makes people powerful and more enabled. Companies that do this can afford to build fantastic developer experiences after 10 years of doing it, but companies that try hard to build excellent developer experiences will not necessarily be successful.

<comment><USER3> If someone starts a Algolia or a Stripe competitor today, they _have_ to have good user experience to even compete, isn't it? Because Stripe and Algolia have already shown what is possible.

<comment><USER4> If you plan to compete using their feature set, then yes. But that's a terrible idea.

Find something that Algolia or Stripe won't or cannot do (for deep reasons) and offer that. Stripe has a list of "Restricted Businesses" each of which is a market that would be delighted to be served _at all_ , let alone with some polish. Of course there are complicating factors... but you don't expect this to be easy, do you?

<comment><USER5> Algolia sadly cannot yet do things like "show me the items around/about $200", i don't care if the are +/\- a few dollars

<comment><USER6> Hi there! I work at Algolia and I may have a solution for you: you can filter on ranges to offer that kind of experience.

For instance, if you decide to accept a +/\- $20 margin, instead of filtering on exact price, you'd create a filter like `price < 180 AND price > 220` (replacing the numbers with your formula to calculate the range).

This gives you full power on what is the "error margin" you accept. Hope this helps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Except its right there in the transcript. It used to be a self-service SaaS application, to enterprise sales. Nearly all features are gated behind an enterprise-sales "contact us" box with no transparency in pricing.

They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product.

As a developer, I __need __to see transparent pricing up-front. It 's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway.

Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.

<comment><USER8> (Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years, but this is one more signal for us to act!

The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.

<comment><USER9> This has always been a major deterrent to me wanting to use Algolia. It's basically impossible for me to know whether for x number of users doing y number of searches Algolia will cost $100/month or $1,000/month or $10,000/month. It amazes me that anyone commits to investing development effort in using Algolia (with lock-in, to boot) when you have no idea whether it's something you can even afford.

<comment><USER10> As with all usage-based product, when you start it is cheap (much cheaper than building on your own), then as you grow your resources will hopefully scale with the number of users.

If your resources don't scale with usage, yes, you have a problem, but I'd say not limited to algolia

<comment><USER9> What's different is that with other products, i.e., those that have clear and understandable pricing, you can forecast the future costs and make a decision about whether it's an affordable solution for the particular product/business you're building. With Algolia, you can't.

Why would I want to build a product/business that uses Algolia technology as a key component when I have no idea whether the eventual cost of Algolia will be acceptable? I wouldn't, which is why despite Algolia's extremely attractive features, I have time and time again been unable to recommend its use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend Algolia to my friends who are working on side projects or want to implement search for small datasets (less than 100k documents to index). Algolia is indeed an amazing service / api!

But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes (a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing, and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit every use cases in the world.

<comment><USER12> There is some truth to this, API pricing is difficult. Hard to make it work for every use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My experience (target is small teams)

– Be up front about pricing and terms (depends on target business size though)

– Easy to understand but detailed feature lists, tier comparisons, screenshots, videos

– Public, well organized documentation that goes in depth and is easy to search/navigate, also acts as good SEO

– Plenty of samples in documentation so you can paste and go

– Quick support that can get technical enough

– Offer yearly and monthly subscriptions

Developers usually spend a few minutes scanning each solution they're comparing, so within very short time and clicks, they should be able to decide why you should be a pick and not the next one. There's usually a hard criteria. They need to solve a problem. Investigate what kinds of features your users picked you for.

Also, trials: If you don't offer trials, you'll get higher quality customers. (But still offer refunds just in case.) They'll be the type who can spend the first monthly fee to check out your site, and have realistic expectations.

</comment><comment><USER14> And if you go to their home page and try and click on "Developers" in the navigation bar, nothing will happen...

You have to click on one of the other links that actually shows a correct hover icon and THEN click on the "Developers" link to get there.

Maybe their docs are great, but a bunch of links on the main site are broken...

<comment><USER8> Oh that's weird, a dropdown menu should appear and give you access to a list of developer resources :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund.

But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well.

Interactivity in particular is _really_ important to nail in first time experience.

I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.

<comment><USER16> > Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. > I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down > discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first > developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and > developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point > to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to > nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in > all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to > implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when > I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In > retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) > And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having > something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely > believe it's pretty magical.

You didn't answer OP's question, which was:

> This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.

<comment><USER17> It's certainly advertising, but he did seem to offer some extra role of: > wanting to point to things that work well

Which is more inline with normal HN content. Pointing to some technical thing which works well we can integrate into our coding/startups/etc.. In this case it happens to be a non-open source subscription business replacement for coding your own search, so it's very commercial, of course, but paid off the shelf solutions are technically an alternative to coding your own search with open source stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I see a lot of comments here deriding this as an ad for Algolia. With all the conflicts of interest, that may well be true.

However, automatically dismissing an entire piece of content because of a conflict of interest, which actually may not be that big (e.g. what percentage of their portfolio is Algolia, that it'd be worth pushing), seems closed- minded.

Investors are people, and like anyone, being excited about a company/product and using their platform to share it, is a pretty benign thing to do.

The over-the-top cynicism seems unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER19> Meta question: @garry - Do you have a post on the your video making process and what equipment you're using? Would be curious to know if you're mostly making these videos all yourself or if you hired a video production agency to help with the recording, editing, etc. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER20> Call this whatever you want, but it really feels like it's primary purpose is to sell me something, not to teach me something. And that's fine- that's something every company has to do eventually - but it doesn't feel like real HN content to me.

<comment><USER21> i would guess that a full %50-%70 of HN content is content marketing of some sort (either for a startup or for someone's personal brand). so many prescriptions on HN but no ban on this kind of content. makes you think.

<comment><USER22> The content has to meet certain quality standard to survive here. Most content marketing dones't, but some does, sometimes. And when it does, you may as well leave it up - per [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/).

<comment><USER23> Wow, that's fantastic, best xkcd ever!

<comment><USER22> Nice try :).

<comment><USER23> Oooh, oh, are you kidding me?! This is the meanest and most hilarious thing anyone has ever said to me on HN! Two words and I got accused of being a spam bot making a "not constructive" and/or "unhelpful" comment!

Destroyed!

I tip my hat to you good sir. I have been roasted, but well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Trying to add search features in my personal blog. Its free plan looks good enough.

p.s. looks like Hacker News is using algolia for searching right now.

<comment><USER25> HN Search has been using Algolia for many years now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looking at the docs at 4:37 ([https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277](https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277)), I'd suggest they add Elixir and Rust as options!

<comment><USER27> Disclaimer: I'm maintaining the Java/Scala/C#/Go API clients at Algolia.

Exilir and Rust would indeed be great additions to our integrations. However, we are really cautious when considering to support new languages. As said in the interview, we try to provide those API clients in the most idiomatic way for each language.

At the moment, we do not have a lot of demands for those languages nor the necessary workforce to onboard on those two languages (only very few people are proficient with those languages at Algolia and we don't have any production code using them IIRC).

<comment><USER26> Sure, I understand. It was a purely selfish request since 100% of my production code is currently Elixir and I'm also interested in Rust.

Can't blame a dev for being drawn to newer languages!</comment></comment></comment>


Marijuana Legalization Fails in California - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/marijuana-legalization-fails-in-california/65835/ <comment><USER2> So...

This was a legalization measure that, before anyone else much cared, _split the pro-pot base_. Many commercial (grey and black market) growers were agin' it (fearing a market crash). Many medical pot providers were agin' it (fearing being taxed to death and/or getting shut down in the ensuing chaos, stranding needful patients either way). In "the community" of casual tokers, BS rumors were all around about various ways in which Prop 19 was eeevil.

So, right off the bat, the base was split.

Then, for everyone else, comes a lot of other BS like "this will legalize driving while stoned; this will legalize getting stoned at work; etc. And all because -- while legalization might be a fine idea -- this law is badly flawed."

Well, actually, a lot of that BS was pretty far off the mark but it was convincing enough to scare away a lot of voters who might otherwise have been fine with legalization.

 _NOBODY_ on the yes campaign made the serious and needed case about lowering the incarceration rate, about undermining organized crime, etc.

Frankly, I never saw any serious message from the "yes" campaign. I couldn't tell you their talking points if I wanted to. Meanwhile, the "no" campaign's are easy to tick off one by one.

Prop 19 lost because the "yes" campaign was very -- amazingly -- incompetently run.

<comment><USER3> And yet, even with the most amateur and underfunded campaign imaginable and opposition at all levels of government, it still got ~45% of the vote in a year that heavily favored conservatives.

I choose not to interpret this as a setback for legalization, but as proof that prohibition is in its dying throes.

<comment><USER4> That's a glass-half-full interpretation of what happened, but be aware that there is a valid half-empty take: 55-45 is, in political terms, a sound defeat. It wasn't a squeaker. The measure lost in a way that will make it harder --- either marginally or significantly, who knows? --- to legalize statewide in California in the next cycle.

<comment><USER5> Definitely a solid defeat, I dunno if I'd conclude that that means it'll be harder next time, though. Look at gay marriage initiatives, a series of defeats in state after state, but getting a little closer most of the time until they wound up passing in a lot of places (except CA, heh).

A 45% showing makes it a definitively non-fringe opinion and moves the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well this is a rather discouraging result.

I've never understood why people want to lose tax revenue and provide a massive source of revenue to criminals when marijuana is going to be sold regardless.

<comment><USER7> One reason is that people (like me) don't want to further legitimize something they want society to discourage. I am strongly against drug use, and believe it sends the wrong message to impressionable kids to make it (more) legal.

<comment><USER8> Having Government enforce what people can or cannot do in their private lives is a slippery slope, David. If I don't want homosexuality legitimized, let's keep sodomy illegal, okay?

<comment><USER9> Slippery slope arguments are also a slippery slope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was sort-of expecting this. I am very disappointed, even though I don't smoke pot. To me, it was a question of personal freedoms.

Here are some reasons why Prop 19 didn't pass, as far as I can see:

1\. Fear of the unknown. People are fairly comfortable with the situation right now: small-time tokers don't usually get busted; anyone who wants to light up can get it from a neighborhood 'pharmacy' with a doctor's letter (or via a friend with a doctor's letter). So why change a good thing?

2\. Fear of the feds. Eric Holder deliberately came and put the fear of federal retaliation into people. Why did he have to come down and take sides in this _state_ proposition?

3\. Medical Marijuana folks. I was surprised to see that quite a few medical cannabis dispensaries were strongly opposing Prop 19. I guess they're doing a roaring business now; if Prop 19 passed, their business would have suffered badly as the recreational smokers no longer needed them. Shame on them for putting profits before principles.

4\. More fear, this time about the wording of Prop 19. A lot of people came out and claimed that Prop 19 was flawed, it would make matters worse, etc. Just this evening one anti-19 guy was on TV, saying "Prop 19 doesn't ban smoking weed just before you get into the car and drive". Well d'uh! There's already DUI for that; does the Prop have to explicitly lay out and ban each and every way one can get high on pot? Use common sense, people.

5\. Recent law in Sacramento that turns possession into an infraction. Many people are unaware of this, but the State legislature passed a law a few weeks ago (and signed by Arnold) that reduces the penalty for possessing a small amount (1oz or less) to and infraction; just a $100 fine, and no jail time. This, to me, is still a victory for Prop 19: had Prop 19 not been leading, the legislators would not have passed this new law.

So all in all: I'm disappointed that Prop 19 failed; but at least we got a law in the State that makes possession just an infraction.

<comment><USER11> On point 3, I'm pretty sure CA cannabis dispensaries are required to be non- profit.

<comment><USER10> There are ways to be "non-profit" and still make a ton of money. "Non-profit" only means that the organization should not make a "profit". A trivial example would be if you ran your own non-profit, and basically paid yourself all of the "profits" as salary. There are non-profits where the top leadership makes in the high 6-figure range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Have a friend who posted this elsewhere, an interesting take on the unconstitutionality of 19.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Prop 19 is 100% unconstitutional, and it's not even close. It will get struck down by every court that reviews it, unanimously so by SCOTUS (if it makes it that far). It violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution which says Federal Law trumps State law (when they conflict) and Prop 19 clearly contradicts the Federal Controlled Substances Act.

Now, medical marijuana also violates the Federal Controlled Substances Act, and so technically the Feds could go in and enforce federal drug laws against medical marijuana users/growers in CA, and they actually threatened to do so, but they have since opted to let California enforce that law on its own, which CA has basically decided not to do. That same thing could play out here, with the Feds making an empty threat to enforce FCSA in California, and CA calling the Feds bluff and basically refusing to enforce Federal law.

Even if you support marijuana legalization (which I do), you shouldn't condone states simply ignoring Federal Law. If you think its acceptable for CA to ignore the FCSA, do you also think it's acceptable for states to ignore the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Obamacare, Federal Minimum Wage Laws?

Also, it won't be hard for the Feds to force California's hand. The Feds can threaten to withhold funding from CA unless they follow what the Feds want. This is how the Feds forced a nationwide drinking age of 21 (see: South Dakota v. Dole).

<comment><USER2> The Supremacy Clause does not mean that "Prop 19 is unconstitutional" it means that Prop 19 would not protect people from prosecution under federal law. For example, if I have a warehouse full of pot and the feds bust me, I can't point to Prop 19 (if it had passed) to get out of the bust.

You are sort of right that the federal gov't can kind of use the commerce clause to (in my view) over-reach (e.g., threats of withholding various forms of funding). As a question of realpolitik, it's not so obvious how far that would have gotten.

<comment><USER13> FTR the relevant supreme court case is Gonzales v Raich, which says the commerce clause covers marijuana grown in California, sold in California, and consumed in California. Passed by a conservative SCOTUS no less :).

<comment><USER14> Thanks, I looked it up and it's very relevant to the discussion so I'll link it:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich>

"The Controlled Substances Act does not recognize the medical use of marijuana."

"The government also contended that consuming one's locally grown marijuana for medical purposes affects the interstate market of marijuana, and hence that the federal government may regulate and prohibit such consumption. This argument stems from the landmark New Deal case Wickard v. Filburn, which held that the government may regulate personal cultivation and consumption of crops, due to the effect of that consumption on interstate commerce, however minute it may be."

<comment><USER15> It's fungible (according to the Court).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> With 92% precincts reporting, the Arizona bill to legalize medicinal marijuana is 50.3% against. Surprisingly close for a conservative state (McCain was overwhelmingly re-elected despite some debatably racist campaign commercials).

<comment><USER17> Despite?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sad day indeed. I never had much interest in pot, but I find the general populations stance w.r.t. to Marijuana irrational.

1\. A lot of tax money is wasted in prosecuting non-violent recreational users.

2\. Most studies place Marijuana as less harmful than alcohol or nicotine. Many attribute beneficial effects to it.

3\. This way we'll maintain the artificial scarcity providing a high value market for organized crime.

4\. Lost tax revenue.

5\. Officially controlled substances are usually safer (since regulated, inspected etc)

</comment><comment><USER19> It's ok. We get to try again in two years, four years, six years, however long it takes. Someone who isn't me can still drive three miles to Oakland and buy weed at a non-medical dispensary.

And Proposition 25 passed, which is actually more important to California, as it fixes the fatal flaw in California's constitution.

<http://www.economist.com/node/13649050>

<comment><USER20> From what I've read, while Prop 25 removes the 2/3 majority requirement to pass the budget, it also removes the 2/3 majority requirement to raise taxes due to a "poison pill" provision in the language. This is bad news, as it gives democrats pretty much free reign. If you thought taxes were already high...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd wait till the votes are counted...

</comment><comment><USER22> There was little real support for this among the general public. Prop. 215 (medical MJ) passed in 1996 because it seemed like it might benefit people (patients) who needed it. Without the medical appeal, it sounds a lot more like just making it easier for people to get high.

People are pretty ambivalent about MJ. A lot of cities have outlawed medical MJ dispensaries, or limited them.

And Prop 19 was not very well-written (like many propositions). Among other problems, it allowed each city and county to set their own rules for MJ regulation, which would have been a huge mess. It's not clear that there would have been significant tax revenues, for example.

There's a bill (AB 390) bouncing around the legislature now which is better crafted.

<comment><USER23> 45% is not "little real support." That's 1 in 20 people from passing. I'd put some money that it got overwhelming support in the cities, particularly San Francisco.

<comment><USER24> Worse - it's 20 million people preventing 17 million people from enjoying a leisure activity through force.

Democracy sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't help but feel that a good portion of the blame for the failure of Prop. 19 is attributable to the increasing polarization and isolation of political debate.

The vast majority of political debate now seems to come down to: preaching to the choir / echo chamber; circus acts from the mainstream media; and people ignoring or talking past each other. We have to get to a state where people are actually talking to each other like reasonable adults rather than just shouting at each other or skulking back to their private clubs.

</comment><comment><USER10> The voting patterns for this prop look interesting: <http://vote.sos.ca.gov/maps/ballot-measures/19/>

It's surprising that even Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties voted against it. Otherwise, the Bay Area seems to have been the primary driver for this prop.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's not link-baiting when you release an article about poll-results with < 50% reporting, right? Kind of sad for the atlantic.

<http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/california>

</comment><comment><USER15> _Holder sent "a message to all those swing voters that, even if this makes sense to me, maybe it isn't okay with the Democrats running the country," said a California Democratic strategist._

Any voting Californian democrats care to comment on this?

</comment><comment><USER27> Here's the breakdown by county. As you can see, this is quite the popular initiative in startup land:

<http://vote.sos.ca.gov/maps/ballot-measures/19/>

</comment><comment><USER28> At least prop 23 went down. To me that is way more significant than prop 19.

<comment><USER29> I have been unable to find any logical discussion on prop 23. Was AB32 tied to some massive layoffs?

<comment><USER28> The way the proponents spin this is that AB32 means higher energy costs which they say results in a loss of blue-collar jobs.

The opponents point to the large number of green energy jobs that can be directly attributed to AB32 plus the obvious environmental benefits.

Personally I find the job loss argument hard to quantify because there is no direct correlation while it is pretty easy to count the number of green energy companies and the resulting jobs that have sprung up in California.

Also, it is pretty much impossible to ignore the fact that the proponents of prop 23 that are touting blue collar job losses as the reason to suspend AB32 are not the folks who traditionally would give a crap about blue collar job losses.

The list of Donors for prop 23 is pretty telling:

[http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposi...](http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_23_\(2010\)#Donors)

Compare that to the list of opponents:

[http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposi...](http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_23_\(2010\)#Opponents)

Pretty amazing that 42% (as of the current numbers) voted Yes on this one.

<comment><USER29> Although you come off as somewhat biased, your circumstantial evidence could be convincing.

<comment><USER28> Well, you asked who "Texas Oil" was. I gave you a nice list that told you exactly who they were. It is Valero, Tesoro, Flint Hills, Marathon, Occidental, Tower, World Oil, Frontier, etc. vs. the American Lung Association, Pediatrics, Firefighters, AARP, League of Women Voters, just about every chamber of commerce, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, and even the Teamsters. If you are going to pretend to fight for blue collar jobs and you have the Teamsters against you, something is fishy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yeah - from the Vancouver chamber of commerce

<comment><USER31> In all seriousness, this is probably true. Marijuana is BC's 2nd largest industry behind construction and ahead of forestry. I believe it contributes over $7 billion/year to our GDP. I'm sure there are articles somewhere to back this up. :) Had Prop 19 passed it would have been bad news for BC's economy.

<comment><USER32> PacNorWest states may have followed suit in next few years if Prop 19 passed. But I doubt BC pot has a big impact on CA.

<comment><USER31> Don't underestimate the power and reach of "BC Bud"!

<comment><USER30> You should have seen the size of the promo event they had here in february - just to sell it to snowboarders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think some people got confused and thought the election was on 4/20.</comment>


Get Ready For Java On AppEngine - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/26/get-ready-for-java-on-appengine/# <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533760></comment>


The 3-Door Monty Hall Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-3-door-monty-hall-problem/ <comment><USER2> So often when the Monty Hall Problem is posed, Monty's strategy is never fully explained, so there's no way to solve the problem. At least here, the second paragraph clearly states the rules.</comment>


People living in storage units in order to avoid paying Boston rents - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2018/08/officials_people_living_illegally_in_rented_spaces <comment><USER2> Just another real symptom of a supposedly booming economy.

<comment><USER3> I did this myself for 3 months.

Saved about $4k doing so.

You start to appreciate simpler things and realize how cluttered your life was before

<comment><USER4> Did you do it out of choice or necessity? This sounds so out of touch. Most of these people aren't doing it as an experiment to bolster their savings and achieve some kind of minimalist zen, they're doing it because real affordable housing is out of reach.

Like I'd love to imagine that Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl are somewhere in Boston, but our current cyberpunk reality is mostly very sad.

<comment><USER5> Why does it matter why he did it? It's a more efficient alternative. If affordable housing is out of reach, adapt your housing. Live somewhere else, or find a way to live where you want more cheaply - like living in a storage space.

<comment><USER6> This is, again, out of touch with the actualities of poverty. How does someone with no money "live somewhere else?" When someone who is impoverished is evicted, they take their children on a trip to a shelter and go to work the next day for 12 hours physical labor, skipping a few meals to feed their children as needed.

<comment><USER5> Take a bus. Buses are cheap. Nobody gets evicted without warning. You have time to prepare.

<comment><USER6> I do not know why you insist down this line of thinking when I am talking about _impoverished_ people. If someone is skipping meals to feed their child, what funds are they using for the bus? And what are they going to do when they arrive at some magical "cheaper COL" and they have no job?

I implore you to go volunteer at your local homeless shelter. After talking with several perfectly sane and working homeless individuals you will realize some people really have no money leftover to better their plight. They really are trapped.

If you don't feel like actually meeting people whose life and privilege is drastically different than yours, at least read Matthew Desmond's Evicted to round out your knowledge on the America in which you live.

<comment><USER5> I haven't done those things, and i'm not going to any time soon. However, you apparently have, and i'm more than happy to listen to what you have to say on the matter.

I don't really buy the idea that someone who is employed can't scrape together a $19 bus fare. Buying the bare amount of food and water necessary to live can be done for $1-2/day, even in a developed country. If you're employed in any sort of regular way, you're making more than that, so I don't really understand the argument that these people are financially incapable of saving up that much money.

That being said, i'm more than happy to be wrong if there's some aspect of the issue that I don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that the article mentions why people would do this (much, much cheaper) but avoids talking about any possible solutions to rising rent costs in urban areas.

<comment><USER8> That's because the city has no solutions.

So far they've only tried telling the universities to build more dorms and give up some of the housing they have.

I mean, there's plenty of new apartment buildings going up around Boston, but they're all luxury.

<comment><USER9> There is a belief, with a number of associated caveats, that "Today's luxury apartment's are tomorrow's affordable housing" [1]. They are one piece of the puzzle, and I don't think it's helpful to block their construction. That said, they aren't the only thing that's necessary for affordable and equitable housing, but I've become less hostile towards the luxury condo/shopping complex projects near me, even if I can neither afford them nor have much interest in living in one.

[1] [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/todays- luxury...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/todays-luxury- apartments-may-be-tomorrows-affordable-housing/)

<comment><USER10> luxury units can create affordability immediately.

if 100 thousand luxury units suddenly came online at a cost of 1.5M each

Here are a few possible outcomes: 1) 100K people can afford them and decide to move from their current homes into the luxury homes. Homes that were 1.5m get downward pressure. As every level moves up it puts downward pricing pressure on the level below. Luxury housing will impact entry level housing if enough is built.

2) 100K people choose to not buy the new luxury housing a) the owners go bankrupt and the price of the luxury housing goes down. Then see 1) b) the owners lower the price of the new luxury housing. then see 1

The point is that any inventory puts downward pricing pressure on existing inventory.

You generally don't see the effect so obviously because the new supply of luxury housing rarely keeps up with demand in hot markets. You can see the impact in flat markets where new housing dries up demand for existing houses such that agents recommend you not buy existing homes in areas that are being actively developed.

<comment><USER11> Don't forget 3) Foreign oligarch parks questionable money in the entire building and then leaves it unoccuped for a decade in the hopes that he could sell it to another foreign investor at double the price

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have actually seriously considered doing this in Belgium, instead of working ~4 months a year, I would only have to work ~1 month a year...

<comment><USER13> You only have to work 4 months a year in Belgium?

<comment><USER12> Sure, I've even worked ~3 months a year before, but that was very cheap, and no occasional electronics or whatever to keep myself motivated (oscilloscope etc)

I keep my food and fun expenses very low, and rent a flat with a friend, so its half as much as renting a flat on my own. Still rent and associated living expenses is about 2/3 of my expenses.

<comment><USER13> That's awesome. Jealous. Have a drink for us 60 hour a week people in America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And i have a russian roomate, too.

I hear the scene's better in LA...

</comment><comment><USER15> I would have expected this to be illegal! Can you really get away with it? It sounds like an easy way to handle crashing after a night out downtown without having to look for a cab/DD.

<comment><USER16> It is illegal, the headline is "Officials: People living illegally in rented spaces". Storage spaces are private, nobody is going to inspect it without good cause, so you can get away with it for a while by being discreet.

<comment><USER17> Yep, I know of several people who have done it when down on their luck. Beats sleeping under a bridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I moved back to Cambridge this spring after over a decade mostly in NYC. It was surprising to see that while cheaper it wasn't _too_ much cheaper.

On the other hand, the job market here seems robust and I hear fewer tales of appalling living conditions and insane 2+ hour commutes like in NYC and California.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is nothing new. People living on the street will often do this in Atlanta in order to have a safer place to live. Storage facilities do the best they can to keep people from doing it. \- source. Have purchased foreclosed storage units off and on for 15+ years.

</comment><comment><USER20> At that you would just buy a cheap rv and park it in south boston

<comment><USER21> It's not legal to park an RV for any reasonable period on most curbs.

Had a chat with someone who'd parked an RV next to my house (SF Bay) for a week. He said he was down on his luck (claimed to previous live in one of the nearby houses but got booted because his mom had to sell and he couldn't afford rent) and insisted it was his right.

I reminded him of the law (72hrs max for an RV in my neighborhood), and that I wouldn't take action if he would move around a bit. Next day he was gone.

I sympathize with folks in this situation but it's pretty weird having someone living in a vehicle that looks into your living room window from the sidewalk - esp if you have kids.

<comment><USER22> > 72hrs max for an RV in my neighborhood

You can rely on this being the longest possible time limit, for any vehicle, not just RVs, on any public street/highway anywhere in California.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wasn't that something that happened in _Snow Crash_?

<comment><USER24> Yes it was.

 _Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious 20 by 30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab floor, corrugated steel walls separating it from the neighboring units and - this is a mark of distinction separating it from the neighboring units - a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays at times like this, when the sun is setting over LAX. But there are worse places to live… slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets._</comment></comment>


Apple Wants to Bypass Carriers and Deliver Data Directly from Satellites - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90446468/apple-wants-to-bypass-carriers-and-beam-internet-data-directly-to-iphones-via-satellites <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843503)</comment>


Delicious acquired by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/feeds/will-delicious-get-tastier-after-its-departure-from-yahoo/3855

<comment><AUTHOR> I, for one, am excited to see Delicious under the control of some capable people again. I used to use it all the time.</comment>


Ask HN: Experience from implementing and using Ipsoft Amelia chatbot? - throwaway-aadeq I was recently asked by a senior executive to look into the business case and feasibility of the ongoing implementation of a chatbot. The company are in the early phases of implementing IPsofts Amelia chatbot for customer interactions (activation, support, and up-sell) in an online retail bank setting.
The project immediately triggered a number of red flags from my side: - Significant manual work (>1 man year) to the document the full possible conversation tree in a type of flow chart as well as full time employee only writing every possible question that can be asked in as many variants as possible, e.g. "How do I withdraw deposits?" formulated in +100 ways - No quantified goals or examples from other customers on the timeline for the bot to reach the target accuracy of handling +90% of incoming questions independently - Senior executives not understanding the technology in-depth but talking about the software as a real person that will in time "handle all customer interactions", while product owner jumping ship as quickly as possible when they understand the maturity of the technology - Bank in the same market struggling for multiple years to implement the product without succeeding due to poor accuracy and very limited domain in where the bot can work independently
I would love to be proven wrong, it would be great if the technology is mature enough to handle all these fairly complex customer interactions independently. Using throwaway account not risk disclosing any client information.
Anyone here has experience from working with IPsofts Amelia product (or something similar) and have any insights to share on how the project went (resources needed, results, etc)? <comment><AUTHOR> I have worked with Amelia. Few quick comments:

\- understanding intent is tricky in general (not just Amelia). Typical approach is to ask for annotated data from chat logs. Most companies don't have this, so in our case we had a bunch of people (~10) enter a form as if they were asking the question, and used that as a baseline to train the intent recognition classifier.

\- distinguished 3 possibilities in chat outcomes:

      1. Intent understood and handled
      2. Intent understood and redirected to the correct agent
      3. Intent not understood

In our case we had +90% for the first 2 combined after about 1-2 months, with handled rate (1) increasing as processes were ported. (Figures will depend on how varied your processes are)

Time involvement varies. In hindsight it's probably best to sit someone currently handling those chats down with the team and work rapidly through the implementation. Depending on your back end systems (and processes/bureaucracy) the integration with the back end can take up more time than expected

</comment><comment><USER2> Creating training data for a chatbot that has thousands of intents in a single domain like banking, takes MANY months even if you have a team creating the training data.

We have worked around this with creating pre-trained intent modules with complete training data for all the most common inquires. I would be surprised if IPSoft did not sell pre-trained data that you can use immediately.</comment>


CES 2014: Audi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523351/ces-2014-audi-shows-off-a-compact-brain-for-self-driving-cars/

<comment><USER2> This is really cool. I think autonomous driving is a solved problem, however its not yet practical and too expensive. These innovations help to bridge that gap.

However another unsolved problem here is not the driving itself, but the behaviour of a human in a self-driving car. How will humans behave? How do you indicate that a human should take over control? Will they be in constant fear?

There is research being done on this, both by google: [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520746/data-shows- googl...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520746/data-shows-googles- robot-cars-are-smoother-safer-drivers-than-you-or-i/)

and by Universities in Europe: [https://sites.google.com/site/itnhfauto/](https://sites.google.com/site/itnhfauto/)</comment>


The Space Shuttle and the Horse's Rear End (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html <comment><USER2> Okay, people love telling this story, but the story is really a load of stuff coming out a horse's rear end.

Let's start with the track gauge. Standard gauge rail is 1435mm or 4'8½", but only about 55% of the world's track is standard gauge. Russia standardized on a 1520mm or 5' gauge, India uses a 5'6" gauge, the former British colonies in Africa use 3'6" gauge, and there's a few other gauges kicking about.

In the US itself, the South predominantly used a 5' gauge for all operations, until they shifted on May 31 and June 1, 1886 to the 4'9" gauge of the Pennsylvania Railroad (yes, the US shifted ~11k miles of track in just 36 hours). Notice how I said 4'9" there--the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the largest railroads in US history, did not use 4'8½" gauge at the time but 4'9"; it only shifted to 4'8½" sometime in the early 20th century.

Go back in history, and the gauge proliferation was even worse, because there was little reason to standardize when railroads mostly didn't interconnect with each other. The notion that railroads adopted the distance between ruts on roads is largely bullshit because those distances weren't uniform. But if you're designing vehicles drawn by teams of horses, you're going to end up with a harness spacing of about 5', give or take a foot. The line that the Stephensons worked on used 4'8" (and was increased ½" for technical reasons) for its horse-drawn operations, so Stephenson built his locomotive to the dimension of the line, and used that dimension for later lines not directly connected to the original line. That seed of 4'8½" lines for interconnection eventually led to it winning out over alternative gauges, but the younger Stephenson is reported to have personally preferred a slightly broader gauge of perhaps 5'.

Now, the discussion of track gauge is perhaps interesting, but it's completely irrelevant to the sizing of SRBs for the Space Shuttle. The relevant metric there is what is known as the loading gauge--the maximum permissible envelope that can fit within tunnels and bridges (and station platforms). Track gauge is mostly irrelevant to loading gauge--unlike cars, where the body of the car sits between the wheels for the most part, train bodies sit above the wheels, and so the body can extend beyond the track gauge.

Loading gauge is far more variable than track gauge and is a more serious constraint on railroad operations than track gauge. Most European trains can't run in the UK, because the UK's loading gauge is absolutely tiny. Europe generally runs on a ~10'4" wide by ~13-14' high gauge. The US uses a very liberal gauge, with 10'8" by 14'6" the old norm but mostly replaced with a 20'2" gauge for double-stacked container freight.

A final point is that even the maximum size of a tunnel isn't determinative for parts. You can break parts into multiple pieces and assemble them after shipping. You can also ship oversize parts if you've got careful logistics planning. Ever seen oversize trucks on the road? There's similar games you can play with railroads; the oversized cargo wagons for freight are known as Schnabel cars, and you can do things such as shift your load so that it's off track center and get extra clearance in tunnels.

So to respond to the questions posed correctly:

> That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

The ½" comes from a moderately arcane fix to an old coal railway to improve operation. Otherwise, 4'8½" is basically "the first successful railway used this."

> I see, but why did the English build them like that?

Because any number between ~4-6" is basically good enough, and the die in this one case just rolled on 4'8".

> Well, why did they use that gauge in England?

It was nowhere near universal, see prior answer. The answer given here is basically someone making stuff up. Remember, this is before interchangeable parts was deemed to be a workable concept, and standardization was not that precise.

> Okay! Why did their wagons use that odd wheel spacing?

As mentioned above, a team of horses two wide naturally needs you to 5±1' gauge. The answer given is pretty much crock. (Not going to bother with the next two questions, which are just doubling down on the crock).

> So, just what does this have to do with the exploration of space?

Nothing. The maximum dimensions of tunnels and bridges aren't as hard a constraint as it's made out to be, since there are several ways you can squeeze out extra space if you have to.

Just going to call out one bit that's particularly egregious.

> The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track

10'6" is not "slightly" wider than 4'8½", it's well over twice the size. If you've ever ridden a train in your life, you should realize that it is definitely far larger than just "slightly" wider than the railroad track.

P.S., for what it's worth, the SRBs on the Space Shuttle are 12'2" in diameter, according to Wikipedia. That doesn't fit in the normal loading gauge of even the US system.

<comment><USER3> OT: Isn't there a bot that can convert all these to metric?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This comes up every so often, but is unfortunately not really true: [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge- chariots/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/)

Rail gauges are an interesting topic and there are a variety of gauges and many were experimented with over the years. Russia and Eastern Europe mostly runs on 1,520mm broad gauge. New Zealand and non-high-speed Japanese rails are 3'6". Wider gauges make trains more stable at high speed but require much larger corners, and vice versa.

<comment><USER5> Snopes rates it as partly true, and the author is a pedantic killjoy.

It is broadly true that for 2000 years European vehicles matched their roads and adapting existing vehicles to new technology led to using axles that were the same size. Do other gauges exist? Of course. Are the true elements of this worth repeating? Sure.

As an unrelated aside here's Richard Feynman explaining why train axles don't need differentials.

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

<comment><USER2> Honestly, rating it as partly true is giving it too much credit.

The only parts that are true are that a) the US adopted 4'8½" gauge largely from British standardization, and b) the 4'8½" gauge was chosen by extension of a pre-existing horse-drawn system. The moral of the story, however, is supposed to be that "the SRB was constrained by a Roman standardized wagon size by a long chain of events." And the first postulate is false before the chain can start (as far as I know, the Romans never standardized wagon sizes, not even informally--except insofar as you're going to end up picking roughly the same size, to within a foot or two, given similar constraints), while the last postulate is also false because _track gauge does not determine loading gauge_.

It also appears, judging from what I can find, that the loading gauge is actually smaller than the SRBs anyways. So even the loosest version of the final step of the chain appears to be false. So what's the elements worth repeating?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Modern computing analog: the first sentient AI to arrive in the Centauri system will contain CPU cores executing x86-64 instructions, a 64-bit extension to a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit segmented extension to an 8-bit teletype CPU.

<comment><USER7> Surely 128 or 256 bits? Or is 64 enough for ever?

<comment><USER8> As far as memory addressing goes, 64 bits should be good enough until the exabyte RAM era, and there is no reason to switch the whole arquitecture before that.

<comment><USER7> I wonder when the exabyte Era might begin, a log plot of historical desktop memory capacities would be interesting. I can't seem to find one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of a really cool video I just watched "The Day the Gauge Changed"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v81Gwu6BTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v81Gwu6BTE)

Learned a lot of cool facts about the railroad days.</comment>


Off-Path TCP Sequence Number Inference Attack - <AUTHOR> http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~zhiyunq/tcp_sequence_number_inference/ <comment><USER2> This is a grab-bag of clever tricks, based on one idea.

As you know, a TCP connection consists of a (sender_IP, sender_port, receiver_IP, receiver_port) tuple, and individual packets additionally need a valid sequence number ("valid" is rather complicated; TCP opens two of these connections at once, one host1->host2 and one host2->host1.) An attacker with these five numbers can inject arbitrary data into the connection.

The linked article assumes that between the client and server there is a firewall that does sequence number checking (i.e. drops any packets that couldn't possibly be valid; note that packet loss may cause the firewall to see packet2 and packet3 but not packet1, so it has to accept "valid plus a little bit".)

Now, if you have a little information from the client (such as can be obtained by running "netstat", which is an unprivileged operation on pretty much all OSes) and know the server's (IP, port) information (e.g. (www.facebook.com, 80)), you can play around with the firewall.

The most basic attack is simple: send packets with randomly-chosen sequence numbers through the firewall, and see if they make it to the client (the firewall will forward anything in "valid" to "valid + something", and drop anything else; the client will increment the netstat-visible error counter if it receives anything but "valid".) Once a packet makes it through the firewall, you know that the "valid" sequence number is within "something" of the sequence number of that packet. Various refinements and nastier attacks are explored.

<comment><USER3> I don't get how this is an issue with the firewall. If the firewall wasn't there tossing away packets with invalid sequence numbers, then the actual host would toss them away anyhow right? So what's the difference having the firewall there or not? Either way you can figure out the sequence number by trying until you guess right.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the host would toss drop/reject them anyway. However, having the firewall allows you to find the valid number in all_numbers / something + something (where "something" is as in the grandparent) by first using the firewall to find the correct interval ([0, something[, [something, 2 * something[, ...) and then bruteforcing only those sequence numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In a nutshell, given IP spoofing, in order to hijack a TCP connection they need to work out the sequence number. They take advantage of a firewall that throws away invalid sequence numbers to pervert it into a device that reveals the valid sequence number.

It hinges on knowing if a packet was tossed or not. They do this with either a TTL that will expire between the firewall and destination, or by an unprivileged conspirator program on the target device (e.g. watching the linux packet counters on an android phone).

They apparently have success with about one third of the mobile carriers they have tried.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is ip spoofing generally do-able on todays internet? don't core routers In general implement ingress filters? So if I send a packet with a src ip outside of my providers op space it will get dropped?</comment>


Why French kids don't have ADHD - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd

<comment><AUTHOR> I can never help to think that these kind of things are the latest fashion. When I was a kid in the 80's, about half of our class had their tonsils removed. A couple of years later, almost no-one had their tonsils removed, but had little tubes in their ears for medical reasons. Nowadays you never hear about tubes in ears, but ADHD/ADD seems to be the latest fad.</comment>


Electrorheology leads to healthier and tastier chocolate - <AUTHOR> http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/16/1605416113 <comment><USER2> If only the paper were accessible..</comment>


Ask HN: Todo lists - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a better way to write and manage todo lists.
I really like Things (http://culturedcode.com/things/) but I've found it to end up too cluttered with all of my different projects. I have difficulty keeping future stuff separate.
I've also used Todo.sh (http://ginatrapani.github.com/todo.txt-cli/) in the past, but what I'm looking for is something like that but with revision control.
I've tried paper. I feel that I use too much paper, and I also don't like the way archiving works. It's just not easily searchable, and managing someday tasks is difficult. (Note that I've also tried HipsterPDAs, and variants.)
I also view scheduling as separate from task management. I would just use iCal if I didn't.
Web Apps like Remember the Milk also don't catch my eye. I have relatively large amounts of data that I manage. I also do not consider it secure enough. I do like remote access functionality. SSH from my BlackBerry works for todo.sh, or the todobot.pl extension with AIM, so something similar to that would be fine.
I would like to be able to have extensive tagging support. I have many layers of lists. I include a lending list (stuff I've lent out) and a wish list (birthday/xmas/shopping list). Some lists include stuff that I will not address for long periods of time like ideas for children names or housing design ideas.
I'm at a loss for solutions. There probably is an obvious one. Crowdsourcing solution searching. Go. <comment> a-priori I've recently just started using an org-mode document in Emacs to track the state of projects (among other things). Simple and effective.

<comment><USER2> Yes, org-mode is a great way to do this. I've been using it for a year now, and although it takes a while to get used to, it's very efficient and simple.

Org-mode is now the place where I keep everything that fits in text (or simple tables). Recipes, todos, personal goals, gift ideas, outlines for future projects, wine tips, my diary, stuff to buy at Ikea, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I've also used Todo.sh (<http://ginatrapani.github.com/todo.txt-cli/>) in the past, but what I'm looking for is something like that but with revision control." -- Why not use it with git or similar?

</comment><comment><USER4> I keep my TODO list in a single text file. I have a key bound in my window manager to open it in an editor, and ask me whether to record changes to version control when I close the editor.

The formal is very informal and ad hoc. You can see it here:

<http://pastebin.com/f53965a01>

I also have an hourly cron jobs that extracts the tasks under "TODAY" and mails them to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use 'taskfreak', installed on a local machine. It worked wonders for my productivity in all kinds of fields.

<http://www.taskfreak.com/> is where you can download it, it's written in PHP so it should be fairly easy to host it.

Good enough for a 9 minute response time ;) ?

Ask HN is one of the greatest features of HN I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> 509 Error. Google cache wasn't enough for me. I added it to my todo.txt to check if it is up later. ;)

<comment><USER5> Wow that sucks, let me see if I have a tarred version for you somewhere here. It looks like they've maxed out their bandwidth quota. Silly hosting services...

ok, you can get it here:

<http://ww.com/tf.tar>

They probably have a newer version out by now, when they're back up you can get the latest but like this you can at least see if it is what you are looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found a screenshot on the Wayback machine. I'll try this out tomorrow though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like Tasks: <http://crowdfavorite.com/products/> I have a multi-user version installed on some hosted space and it works really well - I needed heirarchical to-do lists that could be shared with my girlfriend, and this gave me that.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's something about Todoist's hierarchical functionality that I really love. It's def not the best out there, but by far the best organization oriented task list manager.

<http://www.todoist.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out Tracks.

<http://getontracks.org>

</comment><comment><USER9> google tasks? part of gmail.

</comment><comment><USER10> MonkeyGTD?

<comment><AUTHOR> I forgot to mention, but I have used many variants of TiddlyWikis also to no avail.</comment></comment>