The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid - <AUTHOR> http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau230410.htm

<comment><USER3> _Look at this graph and be afraid. It does not come from Earth First. It does not come from the Sierra Club. It was not drawn by Socialists or Nazis or Osama Bin Laden or anyone from Goldman-Sachs. If you are a Republican Tea- Partier, rest assured it does not come from a progressive Democrat. And vice versa. It was drawn by the United States Department of Energy, and the United States military's Joint Forces Command concurs with the overall picture._

I hate to break it to the authors, but just because something comes directly from the government does not necessarily make it "correct" or even "free from bias".

<comment><USER4> Here is a direct link to some of the governmental figures.

<http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/liquid_fuels.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The graph suggests strongly that in the worst case the price of oil will rise in a slow and predictable fashion, readily allowing alternatives to be introduced profitably, preventing the need for coercion.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately the graph doesn't take the geopolitics of the situation into account. American oil reserves are long past their peak (about 40 years ago) and we are largely dependent on foreign oil. If demand begins to outstrip supply, what's stopping the Saudis from keeping their oil to themselves? Or better yet, what's stopping them from selling it to China for a much higher price than what American oil companies can bid.

<comment><USER7> Oil is fungible. As long as the product is sold into the market, it doesn't matter who is purchasing/selling it. So, if Canada were to switch it's contracts to China, then the people who were previously selling to China, would then sell to the US.

The only possible concern would be an embargo, in which countries _refused_ to sell to the US at any price. That would be problematic - but it isn't related to Peak Oil and could occur at any time (and, in fact, has in the past) - <USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis>

<comment><USER8> It's fungible until it becomes strategic.

<comment><USER9> No. It's always fungible. Crude oil is crude oil is crude oil.

Now, problems could still arise where many countries refuse to sell to us or where China just buys a bunch of oil and starts a huge strategic petroleum reserve that's mainly meant to give us more of a shortage (but that would get expensive quickly, even for China.). But that has nothing to do with whether oil is fungible.

Fungibility means that it makes no difference if Saudi Arabia decides they won't sell to us and instead sells the 100B barrels/day that they would have sold to us (made up number) to China, and because of that, China buys 100B fewer barrels/day from Canada, who sells that 100B to us instead.

<comment><USER8> _No. It's always fungible. Crude oil is crude oil is crude oil._

Well that's what everyone thought up until the 1970's, when America's oil fields went into rapid decline. Here's how it went down:

US> Hello, Saudi Arabia? We would like oil.

SAUDI> No.

US> That's ok! As Jacko says, oil is fungible! Hello, UAE? Oil please.

UAE> No.

US> That's ok! As Jacko says, oil is fungible! Hello, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait?

> No.

US> Fungible! It's fungible! Hello, Libya, Qatar, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia?

> No.

And suddenly, there was oil panic. Because while oil is fungible, that's an attribute of market dynamics. You have 18 suppliers? Great. Oil is fungible. If one won't sell there are 17 more. But what happens if all 18 won't sell?

Without oil, some countries, like America and its military, can't function. That makes it also strategic.

According your logic, the 1973 crisis wouldn't have happened. Yet it did. And it could again. Oil is fungible until it's strategic. End of sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sort of interesting to see the peak oil meme spring up again and again for over a decade and always be right around the corner.

Obviously at some point the production levels will gradually decline, but people will either boost efficiency or substitute away from oil.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Prices rise when demand outstrips supply and people respond by seeking alternatives and by doing more exploration.

We'll never truly run out of oil as long as there is a free market. It will just keep getting more expensive.

The runup in oil prices that finally turned around in 2008 had nothing to do with long term supply but was caused too much easy credit overheating the economy.

<comment><USER12> /We'll never truly run out of oil as long is there is a free market/

That is a completely absurd statement. Oil is a finite resource that cannot be reused (at least when it is used for its main purpose). By definition it /must/ run out someday. We can hope to keep pushing that date back, but not forever.

<comment><USER13> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The crude traders don't seem that worried. Look at light sweet [http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light- sweet...](http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet- crude.html) or Brent [http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/brent- crude...](http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/brent-crude-oil- last-day.html) If they seriously though there was going to be a major shortage in the moderately near future (5~10 years) the December prices for 2012~2018 would be higher.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would be a lot more supportive of this kind of thinking if it hadn't been going on for more than 40 years.

Obviously there is a finite supply of oil, and it will start to run low sooner or later. But I would question any forecaster's ability to make pinpoint accurate judgements on this, given that so many have tried over the last 40 years, and so many have gotten it wrong.

In general, I think that it is very dangerous to pivot thinking around a particular data point or graph. It ascribes a lot of importance to a set of data, that, in summary view looks very concrete and real, but might be made up of a lot of layers of uncertainty and plain old guesswork. I'm not suggesting that this graph is necessarily wrong, but you'd have to be pretty idealistic to believe any simplified piece of information about something has chaotic and complicated as all of the conventional and unconvential oil still in the ground, and able to be extracted, with timeframes and technologies thrown in. There's not even any uncertainty bars in the information.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've decided to start flagging all posts with headlines that promote social fear.

A nice side effect: they're usually written by ignorant people for ignorant people and aren't worth reading.

<comment><USER17> I see one person wallowing in ignorance here, and it's not the author of the article or the one who posted it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Same old story. Same old BS. I've heard it for over ten years.

1\. Oil companies have a variety of categories for reporting reserves. 15+ years ago companies used to regularly report liberal reserve numbers for the sake of stock price boosting. Since then the regulators have pushed companies to be conservative in their "findings". The historical shift makes it look worse than it is -which doesn't look bad to me (33 years of known resources is so much frikin oil).... There are so many companies sitting on thousands of drill opportunities and they simply don't have the upfront capital or even people to work on them.

2\. Even if CONVENTIONAL Oil is harder to find there's plenty of Natural Gas and Non-Conventional resources to move towards without it being a big deal. This is how the market works - when the price of oil is too high due to supply constraints then technology/infrastructure will shift. This seems fairly normal to me - certainly not a panic situation. And quite frankly it's great for our economy to make these shifts - more jobs, new jobs.

3\. > " _Although there are large deposits of "unconventional" oil such as the Canadian tar sands, most are making only slow progress at development and consume as much or more energy in their production as they can generate._ "

What a load of Malarky. There's absolutely no truth to this what so ever. Canadian Oil Sands are the most poorly understood commodity on the market. It doesn't consume more energy to produce - there's no substance in the article for me to even bother counter stating (and all the environmental concerns, relatively speaking, are just completely unfounded).

</comment><comment><USER19> These predictions come since as long ago as 30 or 40 years ago (check 'The End of Oil' on Amazon: in 2004 when this book was printed, the 'end of oil' was predicted (once again) to happen... in just few years! Did it?) The thing is every time such prediction is made, new and new oil fields are discovered, technology of oil extraction improved and these folks have to revise their forecast again. Don't be scared:) It's all printed by folks who want to speculate on oil prices.

</comment><comment><USER20> What good is being afraid going to do?

<comment><USER21> Exactly. If the Department of Energy were truly worried about running out of oil they would be investing in nuclear power stations and a overhaul of the power grid to prepare for the day that we all have to plug our cars into the grid.

<comment><USER22> I was thinking the same thing when the author was hypothesizing about carbon credits being a secret scheme to prepare us for peak oil; if our government really was preparing us for this and really had our best interests at heart there's many other things they would be doing. Telling us, for one. ("Keep things secret so people don't panic" applies to acute crises, not gradual crises perceivable decades in advance. If indeed it applies at all.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, basically we should be looking at ways to reduce our dependency on oil? If I buy a car today, I should buy one that gets really good mileage, because oil is going to be more expensive in the future?

<sarcasm>This is just total news to me. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER24> Not at all. You do not reduce your oil dependency by buying a car with good mileage. You'd rather keep your gas guzzler and find a telecommuting job. Then you take the money you saved from the car loan, and stop buying shit made in china (by finding properly priced local substitutes). That's pretty much it.

Oh, yes... and forget about that vacation across Europe. Cheap air travel is going to be an early casualty in this ride. :>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sigh. We have been hearing for decades that we have only a decade left.

<comment><USER25> Not exactly, We have been hearing for A decade that global peak oil was coming. The original Peak Oil Theory reference a peak in US oil production which we hit somewhere around the 1970's - just as was predicted. (I guess you are hoping if we ignore the problem long enough maybe it will go away?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this will happen sooner rather than later, but man oh man is this going to ruin people's day.

</comment><comment><USER27> This has the potential to cripple the economy and society (see Mad Max). There is a great book that discusses Peak Oil and the potential crash we are facing called "The Long Emergency" for anyone interested. I really hope we attempt to hedge this looming problem proactively instead of waiting until we have gone off the edge of the cliff. This has been discussed over and over for the past 30ish years though (if not longer) and many consider it a non-problem, but it is worth planning for and diversifying away from oil, be very very bad if we got this one wrong.</comment>


Things men have actually said to me at tech events - <AUTHOR> http://leahweitz.com/things-men-have-actually-said-to-me-at-tech-events/ <comment><USER2> My daughter has been going with me to DEF CON since she was eleven. She's 20 now and this year at DEF CON while she was hanging out at a party with our pen-test team an individual walked up and asked: "how much for the girl." I'm honestly very glad I wasn't there to hear that. This whole behavior is completely confusing. On what planet is that sort of behavior, even when inebriated even remotely acceptable? It's degrading, unprofessional, and frankly well beyond just being sexist. Maybe the guy just wanted to be punched in the face?

<comment><USER3> _Maybe the guy just wanted to be punched in the face?_

Because jokes justify violence?

<comment><USER4> Touch the fire and get burned. Imply someones daughter is a prostitute to them and I think a violent reaction might not be __that __uncommon.

<comment><USER5> To a3voices:

Violence occurs along a spectrum. Punching != trying to kill, in all cases.

<comment><USER3> Well in some cases it could be considered a felony, and you could go to prison for years, not to mention possible hospital bills and grief you caused the person you struck.

<comment><USER6> Not if I was on the jury.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everytime something like this comes up a portion of men will respond with either "It's a public place, people are free to look at and talk to strangers, etc" or "Men are like that, deal with it." Oh, and also the "It's no big deal" rendered in so many ways. Here's a mental exercize for all the men who think this way: You have to go to a conference, and the whole place is filled with big, muscular, thug-looking men. You walk around and you notice they're all staring at you. Every now and then when you stop, one or two will approach you, and they will do it with _that_ look in their eye. You know, like you're their prison meat. So the huge thug comes up to you and starts some small talk, asks your name, what you do, if you're there by yourself, and then, you know, he says you have a nice little ass, and wouldn't you want to go there in the back with him. He's just talking, you know, didn't touch you or anything. Plus, it's a public place. You're just unconfortable because he is a huge guy, looks like a mma fighter, but, hey, he's just talking to you, saying he wants to have sex with you. No big deal, right? You just deal with him and all the others and won't make a fuss about this behavior, and I'm pretty sure you'll attend all future conferences with a great mood and won't think there's anything wrong with all the thugs wanting to have sex with you. Thugs are like that. No big deal.

<comment><USER8> God, I am sick of this sterotype, everywhere I seem to turn people fall back on that classic tech sterotype about everyone being a thuggish 6'4" homosexual MMA fighter with an attitude like Pepé Le Pew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article just plunged down the front page.

Calling out the jerks that think this isn't relevant tech material. Bullshit. Tech culture is frequently mentioned. Articles about work-life balance don't get downmodded this much.

<comment><USER10> Two things are probably happening here.

First: there are people who flag these kinds of stories, for more than one reason (some people, for instance, just don't want to see ugliness on the front page).

Second: not enough people have upvoted the story to counteract the number of comments on the thread, which is part of the signal HN uses to automatically detect threads with flamewar characteristics.

<comment><USER9> I +1'd your comment, but I think the algorithm hasn't worked in this instance.

The fact there would be a flamewar about someones experiences at a tech event says more about the culture of tech than that article about michelin star reviewers that is on the frontpage at the moment.

edit: But I did like that michelin-focused article :D

<comment><USER10> Oh, I'm not saying it's working. I mean: this comment thread _is_ a full-on unproductive flamewar, but I think the immune system on HN should probably let this particular fever burn itself out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is it wrong to ask someone if they are technical?

Programmers, engineers, scientists go to tech conferences to talk about work, projects, side interests. They dont want to get sucked into a sales pitch.

I especially dont understand why this would offend the author- the resume on her website implies that she actually is more of a marketing person / copywriter than a technical person.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I don't really understand this, either.

Most of the sales folks (just look at her resume..) I've worked with 'look' like a non-technical person. They absolutely look like they're trying to sell me something - whether it's through mannerisms, appearance, attitude or way of speaking. I'm going to ask them if they're technical if they're giving non- technical vibes as they try to sell me a complicated piece of software. Why wouldn't I? Why does it suddenly become sexist if she's a woman?

One of the most impressively technically proficient sysadmins I've ever worked with was an extremely attractive, high-energy woman. She's often not taken seriously because she's a woman. How does she prove her gender isn't a factor? She does good fucking work and never, EVER, brings her gender into it because it's not relevant. That's how gender equality gets solved, dammit.

I understand that she's basically being treated as a piece of meat at these places.. But the focus of her article is that she's not being treated seriously as a technical person at a tech conference, despite NOT being a technical person! Fluff and more fluff.

<comment><USER13> _How does she prove her gender isn 't a factor? She does good fucking work and never, EVER, brings her gender into it because it's not relevant. That's how gender equality gets solved, dammit._

Gender equality would be solved if more women were doing good work while being silent about gender inequality? I … don't buy it.

Gender equality gets solved by making gender inequality unacceptable. Men are the primary imposers of inequality; it's our responsibility to fix it.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, should've been clear. It's one of the MANY ways to make it less acceptable to be shits towards others based on gender.

Also, It's "our" responsibility to fix it? Can we let "them" help out with fixing this, too? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something important to mention is that the author felt really supported when her co-workers called out bad behavior. If you haven't already, maybe its time to have a discussion about how your coworkers feel about these issues, and if they have been effected. Make them know they are being listened to!

<comment><USER14> This is how to bring about a tipping point - get men to recognize and call out sexism. While this kind of behavior is sadly quite commonplace, attitudes and behaviors can change quite quickly. Just think how much more common it was ten years ago to have "gay" as a widespread pejorative - I almost never hear it now. I think the rapid reduction came from straight people recognizing the offense it caused and starting to call out people who used it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the other hand, I've worked with an astonishing number of men who live in a state of rather tortured denial of the outsize challenges women face in the workplace. I've even known a couple of women who deny it. It's even more stupefying than those who insist that racism is a solved problem in America.

I'm not sure where it comes from. Personal experience, background must be important factors. But it strikes me as a fairly activist, difficult position to take. I think some of these folks think they are just fitting in by voicing denial and anger about patently obvious forms of sexism. A lot of it comes from political group identification, too.

<comment><USER16> "It's even more stupefying than those who insist that racism is a solved problem in America."

disagree w/ that statement, in that i'd say it's equally stupefying. but yes, otherwise totally agreed.

<comment><USER15> I hear you. It's hard to understand, but at least I can _imagine_ how someone could reach that conclusion.

But I've known full well that men had a better deal since I was 10.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I work in a male-dominated office with only two women and have been trying to share these stories with my coworkers at every opportunity. I can see it _starting_ to make a difference. Just the other day one of my male colleagues came up to me and said "I can't believe I used to think like that," referring to a comment where a man justified sexist behaviour by calling it "normal." There is such a long road ahead of us.

If you're looking for more stories of difficulties faced by women in tech, a previous colleague of mine wrote this account of her internships and university degree: [http://words.samipeachey.com.au/?p=77](http://words.samipeachey.com.au/?p=77)

<comment><USER18> Sexism _is_ normal in our society. The top rated television shows are filled with sexist and off color jokes, but you rarely see the feminists trying to take down The Simpsons. So how can you take them seriously when they seem to be focused on calling all programmers who aren't proactively brigading for their political ideology a "racist" or "sexist" while not paying much attention to the root causes of sexism?

The reality is that media from the 50's, 60's, 70's, etc was much more racist/sexist than media today. Society _has_ come a long way. Society is still progressing. Things aren't going to change over night. But the feminists seem to suggest that things are getting worse or are worse now than they've ever been.

<comment><USER17> In my post I suggested things are getting better, but we still have a long road ahead. It sounds like you agree.

Jokes in TV shows are absolutely not what I am referring to. I am referring to situations in which your colleagues — or even your bosses — make value judgments of your person on the basis of gender. I am referring to what the parent article and the article I linked directly confront.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always feel weird when I read (especially the comments on) stories like this. Hearing folks who assume that, if a woman is at a technical event, she is either incompetent, only there for the sake of her husband, or both, open their mouths is irritating enough to witness as an outsider; I can hardly imagine how annoying it must be to be the recipient of such baseless disrespect.

Hell, I almost incited a screaming match at my last job because one of my coworkers, who is a proud Republican, wouldn't shut up about politics and his only criticism of Hillary Clinton wasn't that her opinions would have negative consequences or her logic was poor, but because "she's got kankles". The only reason it didn't escalate is because he ignored me. It still pisses me off to even recall how stupid this was.

Maybe I've been fortunate enough to know plenty of great people throughout the years, _not all of whom were men_ , that exuded technical knowledge and practical wisdom.

How many infosec folks can, in the subject of cryptography, hold a candle to Dr. Tanja Lange?

How many PHP programmers can hope to even _approximate_ the Herculean efforts of Andrea Faulds to make PHP 7 something great?

We didn't get to where we are today, in terms of technological progress, because sexist ideas or behaviors have any merit.

</comment><comment><USER20> My personal favorite of the ones that I've gotten...

"Normally, when a woman is dressed like that, I'm paying her to whip me."

(What I was wearing included but was not limited to a leather jacket and black shoes.)

<comment><USER21> Isn't that a self deprecating joke?

<comment><USER22> It's not at all appropriate in a business setting.

<comment><USER21> I guess it depends whether you see tech events as business setting or social setting.

Also, wouldn't the aforementioned dress code be deemed inappropriate in a business setting?

<comment><USER23> If you're there for work it's business. (and what's so inappropriate about a leather coat and black shoes?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is my experience as well. Often I'll be the most knowledgeable person at our booth (for Neo4j) and people always look to my male coworkers when asking questions.

And one of my personal favorites: "So I'm guessing you're in marketing?"

<comment><USER4> This behaviour needs to change, it really does. But (ugh, here we go..) this particular instance is probably learned behaviour from past conferences or situations some people have been in. I haven't been to many conferences, but there's been a few times where I've spoken to a woman at a booth just to be passed off to someone else when I've asked technical questions. I'm finding this happens less and less though. Really though, it doesn't hurt to ask the question you want to ask first, even if you do end up having to ask it again of someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> OP: Did you find that the age of the man made a difference?

So are older or younger men the worst offenders? I would like to think that older man are worse and the younger generation are more aware and less sexist. But maybe that is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER26> If male engineers had to endure similar stuff said to them, I wonder how they'd feel - 'hey nerd', 'are you this socially awkward in every situation?', 'do you shower daily?', 'do you have any hobbies?', and the list goes on.

OP: I'm happy that your good experiences outweigh the bad ones.

<comment><USER25> Funnily enough I have noticed that this does actually happen. My current position is at a company that works in the building industry and we often get non-IT members of the company saying stuff like that about IT people.

But I don't think really compares to the sexism though. Being in a different department means they do not have any actual control over us and we actually make more money than other departments (not including management positions). So I am sure it does not feel as threating and demeaning as the sexism experienced by woman.

<comment><USER12> It definitely does. I'm 27, look 20, and work as a senior linux engineer at a relatively high profile trading company. Until people see the work I do, they think I've been hired entirely through nepotism. It's incredibly frustrating, but I'm finally starting to "get used to it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's the part where I don't get it. Doesn't this happen to other industries, like banking, politic, entertainment, etc?

The framing it as "hey tech, we have a sexist problem" is making it sounds like there's no sexist problem in other industry.

I'm not supportive of sexism in the industry, but when it is framed that way, a part of me just couldn't bring myself to align with it.

We can say, hey sexism is a society issue but we tech industry can do better than others. We proud ourselves as the progressive front runner of civilization, so let's make sure we show it.

If you remove [tech] from the title, this article will still make sense, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER28> Just a point about "taking pictures without my permission"

In public spaces there are few restrictions against this (ex. military zones). In private spaces this can be regulated by the organizer, I believe, but that prohibition must be posted. This is how the "street photography" gender of photography can exist.

Now, to be fair, there are regulations against commercial use of photos from "street photography" without permission. There you can sue for compensation if your likeness was used to advertise and sell (selling a book with street photographs does not require permission, as that is not "commercial use", that's to say, it's "art")

It becomes an issue if the photographer videographer follows you and thus engages in harassment (in some jurisdictions).

Remember that videographer who taunted people at an outdoor restaurant. They had little recourse against him.

<comment><USER29> Something doesn't have to be illegal to be rude.

As to norms, there is a big difference between someone appearing in a crowd shot or background, and someone being the sole focus of the picture.

<comment><USER28> The courts say otherwise see sole focus picture in case of Nussenzweig v. DiCorcia[1]. If it were not possible, we would not have "street photography" we would not have Robert Frank, Cartier-Bresson, Winogrand, Meier or Arbus. Picture in question[2] We also would not have documentary photography.

Certainly it can feel rude to us, but the law allows it and moreover the feeling of rudeness comes more from believing we "own" our likelinesses in public spaces, which we do not. So, yes, I could feel intruded upon by a documentary or street photographer, no question, but at the same time, they have the right to take my picture, no question.

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

[2][https://wmuphoto.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/nussenzweig-v- dico...](https://wmuphoto.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/nussenzweig-v-dicorcia/)

If you disagree with the position, post a link to law which states otherwise. There is lots of case law asserting the right of photographers to take pictures unimpeded in public spaces.

<comment><USER29> I don't see your citations speaking to rudeness. Moreover, even if they did it is not generally the place of the courts to dictate what is and is not rude. I very much agree that this kind of photography is not _illegal_. In no way does that mean it is not rude.

C.f. I can hurl a long stream of insults at you. Rude? Unquestionably. Legal? Also unquestionably. On those grounds you could rightly complain, choose not to associate with me, choose to avoid places I might go, tell others you find me to be a rude person. You could not enlist the government to fine or imprison me. What was being discussed here, before you brought legality into the picture, was actions like those on the former list.

<comment><USER28> Rudeness is one of those things that's very unique to the individual claimant and I think for art and expression in general, we tend to give the artist (in this case the photographer) lots of leeway. I'm sure lots of religious people would think my thoughts on religion are quite rude, but that does not and should not deter my art or anyone else's art depicting religion unfavorably.

Basically, I don't want photography thrown under the bus on this one.

<comment><USER29> If you feel you need to do something people consider rude for the sake of your art, you can do it and suffer the consequences. Those consequences should certainly not extend to physical violence, should not extend to the involvement of law enforcement.

You should be able to mitigate those consequences somewhat by treating your subjects like people - explaining what you're doing, engaging with them respectfully. They may still feel uncomfortable.

In this case, the person complaining felt violated, and that's not unreasonable. She is plenty within her rights to complain.

<comment><USER28> >treating your subjects like people - explaining what you're doing, engaging with them respectfully

No qualms with that --most experienced photographers will follow that advice. Still, all photographers have the right to photograph in public.

A tiny minority of the time people don't give the photographer time to explain, fortunately most times, people act indifferently, but sometimes annoyed and self righteous and seldomly violent.

There is a misconception however, by some people, even the ones who are agreeable that a photographer needs permission. It's simply not true. But yes, I agree they need to respect people as much as they can. (if you're going to photograph a man passed out in vomit for some kind of documentary, avoid showing their recognizable face, for example, but that's not a fast rule.

<comment><USER29> _" Still, all photographers have the right to photograph in public."_

I've always agreed with that. What I have been saying is that there are ways they can exercise that right that will be perceived as rude, and that that perception is _definitely_ not made unreasonable by any absence of law on the matter, and is often in fact reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is this behavior worse than just being around a bunch of guys in general? I'm not condoning the behavior, but we're all animals and sex is a thing - it gets the best of many of us and we end up acting like baboons. I'm curious if the tech industry is actually worse, because I would expect us to behave better considering we actually give it a voice and properly label it as negative behavior.

<comment><USER31>
      I would expect us to behave better considering we actually
      give it a voice and properly label it as negative behavior.

If only this were true. Apparently the greater (male-dominated) culture surrounding technology doesn't dissuade this behavior enough.

      I'm not condoning the behavior, but we're all animals and
      sex is a thing - it gets the best of many of us and we end
      up acting like baboons

Despite your disclaimer this still echoes the "boys will be boys" sentiment, one used to justify harm / mistreatment of women by dismissing their actions as part of male nature. This is a lie and needs to change; individuals are responsible for their words, actions, and any harm they cause.

<comment><USER32> I don't think toolz was trying to say "boys will be boys", I think toolz was saying we should try to fix society, rather than pretend this is only a problem in tech

<comment><USER31>
      I think toolz was saying we should try to fix society,
      rather than pretend this is only a problem in tech

Who's pretending the problem is only in tech? Attacking the problem in our industry is part of fixing society as a whole (it's a subproblem).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > "He treated you so differently!" he said. "His whole tone changed!"

Depending on what was meant by "tone", this could be due to very deeply- ingrained learned sociolinguistic customs. I don't mean that justifies it, but it could be very subconscious, is not specific to "tech", and seems much less offensive than some of the other examples.

To whatever extent men adopt a different tone when talking to women, it would probably take quite a lot of conscious concentration to control, and generations to eradicate (possibly never, if they can be picked up again by watching our contemporary media.) So, I guess it's something to keep an eye on and fix where you can, but not so simple as eliminating stuff like "They only let you work here 'cause you're hot."

Edit: tl/dr: If "tone" meant treating her like an idiot/non-technical, bad. If it meant different pitch of voice and body language, not good per se but not that bad either.

P.S. Actually, maintaining gender-based differences might be desirable. Women probably don't want to be treated exactly like "one of the guys", right? Modifying your message and presentation based on your audience is a part of effective communication. If it's offending your audience, change that, but maybe it's not a bad starting position.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thoughtfully written, concise, and helpful. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER8> As coding and technology become more prestigous it will draw in the top female talent that has been pulled into companies with much more societal respect. Below is a list of a few companies that were built by a female founder/co- founder. The unpopular view that this "problem", will fix itself, is somewhat true in my opinion. There will be a day when a list like the one below doesn't exist, there will be a single one. Females (and everyone really) realize tech. is one of the most important components of the future and there are many shows/movies/media that reflect this societal change.

Until then, if you think the world would be better off with more woman in tech, help get young people excited about technology and entrepreneurship. The ecosystem is primarily men who started companies internet companies in the early days, which have splintered into tons of new ventures and startups largely comprised of people from those companies.

The list below are great companies (well, a couple have rough patches but what doesn't) and there doesn't need to be a qualifier like "woman" founded. Get out there and kill it, and if you are out there be civil and rational in your appraisal of others.

* Theranos, $9B Biotech

* Y COmbinator, >$4B VC/Tech

* Fanduel, ? Skill Based Wagers

* 23 & Me, ? Genetics

* Kabam, ~$1B Gaming

* CloudFlare, ~$1B Cloud/CDN

* NastyGal, ? Clothing

</comment><comment><USER35> There are a certain percentage of the population who are just assholes.

Let's assume for a moment that both men and women are assholes in equal proportion, that say 10% of the population of either gender are assholes.

For a 50 person company, 80% male: 40 men total 4 male assholes 10 women 1 woman asshole

Take that ratio up to 90% male as many tech conferences are: 45 men of those 45 men, 5 will be assholes, rounding up 5 women 1 woman asshole

In that scenario there actually the same number of male assholes as ALL of the women.

This is why changing the ratio of male and female matters.

<comment><USER35> downvoted. ha. keep it classy, HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This suggests improving the ratio, but honestly, if the rate is genuinely 99% good and 1% bad, then the truth may be that you're at a point where you won't notice improvements.

Say we make a huge effort and halve the rate of such harassment. That's a change from 99% good to 99.5% good. Will you notice the difference? Maybe, but it's likely you won't. You're still guaranteed to have bad experiences at regular intervals if you go to tech events.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was at at a conference recently (codeconf for github Atom) and I noticed there were a number of women (30%?). I commented to a women next to me that it was happy that there was such a good turnout of women. (I have been to many conferences where there were none). She said she was there representing women in technology and she did not give me a happy look. I thought it was an improvement.

One step at a time.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't understand why this is a tech industry issue? I can imagine this being a problem in all industries (esp. finance). Douchebags aren't exclusive to the tech industry.

<comment><USER39> Why is your first response to get defensive about the tech industry and not to respond to the problem in the post? If its a problem everywhere, fine -- we have a chance to make it _less_ of a problem in the tech industry than everywhere else. Wouldn't that be something?

<comment><USER38> I'm not defending anyone, my point is that this is a societal problem. How do you propose to change people's thinking? People in the our (tech) industry fight over coding standards, programming languages, frameworks etc.; good luck changing their outdated views on something that's been ingrained for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Recollecting a few situations I've experiences in the workplace.

I remember in my first job out of uni (early 90s) our team was having lunch. I don't remember the discussion that lead up to it, but one of my fellow male colleagues said there was no such thing as rape, because a women enjoy the sex anyway. The only woman at the table just got up and walked away.

I must admit I just completely froze. I was just stunned that someone said something so insanely ignorant. Being a shy young man at the time I really just didn't know how to react. Afterwards I did go check that my female colleague was okay and express my disbelief at what happened.

That incident pretty much made me ready to believe any terrible story about male behaviour.

§

At a software vendor's offices for two days of training on their product. Walking out of the training area, through the cubicle farm to use the washroom facilities up the back, and seeing explicit pornographic images being used as desktop wallpapers on employees' computers.

§

One office I worked in, a female colleague had a beefcake photo as her desktop wallpaper. Although I felt this was as inappropriate as say, a male employee using a swimsuit photo, nothing was said, by me or anyone else.

§

At a conference, out getting coffee on a warm day and chatting with another attendee. Four young women in smart business attire, including reasonably tight skirts, walk past. This guy's focus was completely lossed on the conversation, coffee, sunlight, or me smacking him in the back of the head, while he stared unblinkingly at these women until they went around the corner. Ugh. [1]

§

Another job working in the city, the building across the alleyway from us was an apartment building, and it appears several of the residents were young, nubile, not fully clothed and forget to close their curtains.

Was not uncommon to look up from my desk and see two or three guys standing at the window staring across. They were not actually licking the glass or otherwise being a nuisance, and being a visually oriented young man myself I understood the distraction it was. Still, I've always seem to have had more self control then my contemporaries. Perhaps I just have enough blood in my circulatory system to be able to power both brains at the same time.

§

Same job, Lotus Notes was used for email for the company. This had the feature of replication for offline access and such. Male colleague, who was sharing use of a loptop for email access with a female colleague when they were off- site at the customer's office, turns to her and asks, "Do you want me to replicate your box?"

Absolutely innocent, but a contagious fit of uncontrolled giggles spread around those within earshot. Aside from an observation or two that the enquiry should probably have been phrased differently, nobody made any stupid follow- up comments, and everyone took it in good humour for the unintentional faux pas it was.

§

Last one, and my favourite. Dropping my librarian wife off at her workplace at the start of the day. The library had just opened and about ten or so people were drifting in. One of her colleagues was clearing the overnight returns chute when she exclaims at the top of her voice, "'Fantastic Sex,' I was looking for that last night!"

She looks up into the sudden silence were you could hear a pin drop, then goes, "The book! The book! Someone wanted the book!" while waving the titular tome.

§

[1] That conference was about the same time the "Shit people say to XXX" meme was doing the rounds of the internet. At the time I thought it would be funny to do a "Shit people say to programmers" version where every forth or fifth one was, "Can you fix my computer?"

I also thought one on "Shit programmers say to women" where it would just be five minutes of awkward guys staring at womens' chests would be too distressingly realistic. Apropos?

</comment><comment><USER41> This happens everywhere. Tech is nothing different.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand why the emphasis is on the tech community. If this were an automotive convention it would probably be worse. A hansom male at a beauty convention will likely be ogled by some of the women.

I also don't understand why feminists rarely attack mass media like the shows they have on Fox and Comedy Central, which are probably much closer to the root cause of "sexism" seeing as they make it seem like casual sexism is okay.

It's very hard to take the feminist seriously when their biggest enemy seems to be the 2% of pasty awkward nerds who happen to make a cultural faux pas. They weren't born sexist. They're victims of society. Blaming them is blaming the victim. Most of them probably have not had much interaction with the opposite sex and don't even know how to initiate conversation.

<comment><USER42> > I don't understand why the emphasis is on the tech community.

Because that's the industry that the author (and presumably, most of us readers) are in.

> If this were an automotive convention it would probably be worse.

Probably, but like... do you go to automotive conventions? I don't, so what goes on in them is really outside of anything I know about or can change. So... I'm not sure the relevance.

> Most of them probably have not had much interaction with the opposite sex > and don't even know how to initiate conversation.

Well, hopefully some of them will read this article and find out some things not to do.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why is this getting downvoted by mods?

<comment><USER43> Don't question the mods, they'll down vote you.

<comment><USER43> See?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Things women have actually said to me a tech events after I said hello: "I have a boyfriend." "Sorry, I'm waiting for someone." "My husband will be here in a minute." -says nothing, pulls out her phone and pretends she didn't hear me-

</comment><comment><USER44> Possible band aid: a webcam at each booth, recording the entire conference audio/video, which will then managed by the convention/conference organizers. If sexual harassement is noted, the person who was harassed can go to the organizers who can then review the recordings which they can then use as a rationale to blacklist that person at their conference (but not at all).

Reasons why this might not be a terrible idea:

1) It's a public place and you are interacting, often times, with complete strangers. While I can't speak for everyone, these social events make me be on my best behavior, which is conveniently the same behavior I would have if I were on camera.

2) By virtue of being handled by the conference organizers, one company won't be singled out. One company recording people is strange, but an accepted practice by a third party would be far more forgivable.

<comment><USER45> That's going to be problematic, lots of people at conferences talk in low voice about confidential things. Surely there's better ways to combat harassment than pervasive surveillance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> If 99% of males are decent as the article describes, all this does is creates the illusion that all police officers are racist. It's only news because it's sensational.

<comment><USER47> This is a terrible idea, and is basically like a cop out towards "I don't want to have to think about this // it happens everywhere so stop talking about it."

The community/work atmosphere around tech, and the implications that atmosphere has on acceptance within the tech community, has direct implications for the future of education and work within the field.

It's absolutely vital that people (especially women) have a relevant place to discuss these things, so that people who read tech news are not ignorant to the ongoing discrimination and oppression within the industry.

<comment><USER46> If 99% of males are decent as the article describes, all this does is creates the illusion that all police officers are racist. It's only news because it's sensational.

<comment><USER47> Do you actually believe that 99% of males do not take particular actions against women that could make them feel oppressed in some way?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Geek hardware to buy once you have money « Max Klein - <AUTHOR> http://maxkle.in/geek-hardware-to-once-you-have-money/ <comment><USER2> This was posted yesterday. It was and still is a list of items that people with well paid jobs probably already have. Not a list of particularly exciting exotic inventions.</comment>


R.I.P. Microsoft Zune. We'll always have the memories... - <AUTHOR> http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/03/15/microsoft-zune-discontinued/

<comment><USER2> I have a Zune (16gb), my partner has a Zune, and there's one that's the house Zune. The house Zune was my first one, which I got for free from a guy I know from Microsoft who was given it as a reward for shipping early. The second Zune I bought because, well, I liked the Zune and wanted more storage. The 2nd gen Zune was a good, well designed MP3 player. Too bad it's not worth much for a product to just an MP3 player any more. The Zune desktop software sucks less than iTunes (which, let's face it, is a real pain in the ass), and the all- you-can eat model of the Zune marketplace is better than iTune's $0.99 or whatever it is now per song. I'm still thinking about getting the HD Zune at some point because I like having just a straight MP3 player, I'm well invested in the Zune marketplace at this point, and I am not going to buy a Windows 7 Phone any time soon (not as long as I have my iPhone...)

</comment><comment><USER3> Never thought I'd see the day when an ew.com link was posted to HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/what-kind-of-man-gets- a-z...](http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/what-kind-of-man-gets-a-zune- tattoo/) This guy must really feel sorry now.

<comment><USER5> I always loved the logo - it's very clever. In five years nobody will remember the Zune and he can just say he liked the design. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always hated this thing, I think mostly just because of the name- Something about it is just so contrived, so "board room" it just pained me to hear it.

<comment><USER7> You mean to say that you don't want to SQUIRT songs to your friends with Zune players!?

<comment><USER8> That was really the problem with having the Zune. No one ever squirted at me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I never saw one in the wild, neither in SF nor Seattle. I think it died because from the beginning the perception was like getting the Dodge Neon instead of the Honda Civic. Also with iTunes in the national lexicon, who wanted to be left out? "Thanks for the iTunes gift card, Grandma. Maybe we can spend it at the Zune Marketplace."

</comment><comment><USER10> That's slightly lame. I saw a model released shortly before everything went touchscreen (I think?), and it was slick. The lack of a touchscreen was made up for with clickable directional touchpad thing, and the menus were all fadey and such.

I guess Windows Phone 7 is effectively Microsoft's new Zune line now.

</comment><comment><USER11> Please, please open the device up before you stop supporting it. When you sync images to the device they get resized to the native resolution. This means when you "zoom" in on a photo, it looks like crap. Why even have a zoom function?

<comment><USER12> And please give some information to the kind folks at Rockbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worth seeing this article just for the hilarious line "What a bitch. I deserve no one."

</comment><comment><USER14> Why did the Zune die?

<comment><USER15> Check out [http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1264866011/...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1264866011/ref=zg_bs_nav)

<comment><USER16> It's in at #9 ? #9 on Amazon's list isn't bad at all.

<comment><USER15> It's not awful (Zune is holding its own against non-Apple players), but with a quick back of the envelope calculation I estimate iPods outselling zunes at least 20:1 (<http://tinyurl.com/47x4rv3>). Nobody wants to be in 9th place :).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hold off on AWS Aurora and Postgres until further notice - <AUTHOR> We've had a sudden crash of the underlying storage (apparently) on one of our production workloads - and because the crash is in the underlying storage the MultiAZ setting makes no difference. Neither the primary nor the replica work.
The point in time restore can't complete a restore to the last available point, so this looks like data loss to me. Points a earlier in time work fine, so might be an issue with a recent patch or failure.
I'm currently in conversation with support, will update when I have more information. <comment><USER2> The cloud is not immune from failure. Moving to the cloud just moves the line of responsibility for who manages a service, but it does not remove the risks.

Hardware and software fail. Amazon does a better job mitigating the damage from failures than me, but their still still fails.

I'm sorry for your data loss. I hope the recovery isn't too painful. Live and learn.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a tough situation to be in. Hopefully Amazon is working on a solution for you.

Cloud is definitely not bullet-proof and risks are always there. I think it generally still wins however because as Cloud solutions get better, with better SLAs...companies can get better at what they specialize and offer.

At least that is the goal and how I understand it.

</comment><comment><USER4> We've been using Postgres on RDS for years and were considering moving to Aurora. I am very curious to know more about the fix and planned remedy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Current suspects are GIN index problems, but nothing confirmed yet.

<comment><USER5> Per my remarks here, I think that there is an obscure bug in GIN vacuuming that the community has yet to identify:

[https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wz=GTnAPzEEZqYELOv3h1Fxpo5xhMrBP6aM...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com)

It's possible that this upstream PostgreSQL issue affected you. What is known for sure is that there was a bugfix for GIN, that just missed the latest round of point releases. See:

[https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...](https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=3b2787e1f8f1eeeb6bd9565288ab210262705b56)

This fix alone could have made all the difference here (though this is a guess). I assume you won't have this fix with Aurora just yet (not sure -- I don't work for Amazon). But, I'd mention this to AWS support if it seems at all relevant. Hopefully they'll get in touch with the community if that's what it is.

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will pass this on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's the friday before a holiday curse. I'm sorry for your loss.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interested in what Amazon's final position on this is. I assumed part of the value proposition was that they handled redundancy and recovery.

</comment><comment><USER8> " because the crash is in the underlying storage the MultiAZ setting makes no difference."

@OP - I don't understand this line... can you explain more?

<comment><USER9> Aurora read replicas are just compute heads decoupled from the storage. They increase availability and read performance, but don't do anything for the reliability of the storage.

[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/)

"Each 10GB chunk of your database volume is replicated six ways, across three Availability Zones."

So, if there has been a storage layer failure, most likely it was a software bug in Aurora itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see anything on the status page. I know the status page lags an actual incident, but I'd imagine something would be up by now. Is this a widespread problem?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The data has been recovered, no post mortem yet.

<comment><USER11> That's lucky. Was your service down for the entire time until the data was recovered?

<comment><AUTHOR> We moved to a new DB as a clean slate, took fresh orders, and then merged the old ones in as they became available. Was able to do that because all primary keys were uuids and the order history API was being served somewhere else.

<comment><USER11> How did you handle other tables like users and sessions?

<comment><AUTHOR> This microservice didn't have them, but even they're all keyed by UUID, so it's possible to start a clean slate pretty fast. Filling in existing users later should also be easy, the problems will occur if and when users try to sign up again with the same key (email / FBid etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hello! Was this ever resolved? It seems like there was one update from the poster, but then nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Resolved, managed to get the data back, don't have a postmortem yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For what it's worth, this appears localized to your account. Sorry for your situation, though.

</comment><comment><USER14> sorry to hear this, good luck. always sucks on a fri.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sorry</comment>


Ask HN: How do you use Google Spreadsheets? - <AUTHOR> My team at work has been increasing relying on Google Spreadsheets to keep track of data. For example, our internal KPI dashboard runs on top of Google Sheets. I've largely ported my Excel models to Google Sheets so that it can be easily shared (we don't subscribe to Office 365, and even then, the collaboration experience is way better on Google Sheets)<p>For lack of a better term, I feel that Google Sheets has become a "data warehouse" for our business folks. Does this experience mirror yours? <comment><USER2> My experience with Google spreadsheets in a business environment setting is that it served to compensate what is missing in our logistics software.

It seems to be a go to tool for quick fixes, implemented without high level planning. Although I do not know for certain, it is apparent that most formulas and templates on google spreadsheets were created by low-mid employee initiatives.

In other words, employee Z is fed up of X feature lacking in our logistics software and would create a template to address this.

The problem is all the data is segregated and not assembled under one point of view. However, the google search function reduces this weakness significantly.

From my personal point of view, our organization loved it.

Organization profile: Large business,~500-1000 employees

To answer your question, yes it had become a data warehouse, only on niche data segments, that were not addressed in our main tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> Saw this recently: [https://medium.com/why-not/how-we-re-doing-stats-at- howdy-29...](https://medium.com/why-not/how-we-re-doing-stats-at- howdy-2956f88115f6#.pl5aauwqa)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is really helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> labnol.org has great articles about doing cool things with Google Sheets, e.g. logging/alerting web site up time, mail merges, monitoring changes to web sites.

I really like the sharing functionality, and would hate to go back to the days of emailing around multiple versions of a spreadsheet.

The ability to pull in arbitrary stuff from the web (using IMPORTXML()) and easy access to exchange rates and stock prices (using GOOGLEFINANCE()) are great.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is cool. Do you update your sheets for the dashboard via an API?</comment>


Life Extension [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.scienceagainstaging.org/Books/Booklet_25_ENG.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I'm not seeing too much commentary... I'll bite:

"TLDR" version on 'Idea 01': any cell can be regressed to a less developed version and can be used as a general purpose "stem cell"

"Did Read" version: One item on this list which looks particular promising is the idea of "induced pluripotent cells"

literally: gone are the days of embryonic stem cells, and the social injustice associated with them.

It is in my experience when talking with individuals on this topic in particular that they really have a hard time disconnecting "stem cells" from "killing babies"

We literally now have the technology to regress these endo exo and meso ( differentiated cells ) into their previous undifferentiated states.

This is HUGE! Previously once a cell had "differentiated" to one of the above mentioned states, It could only further develop along that differentiation. Thus it was excluded from migrating from a endo to exo ... or meso to endo etc.

<comment><USER2> The issue was never killing babies. The embryos were going to be destroyed anyways, and parental consent was needed. It's like organ donation on a smaller scale.

The real issue is that a large section of the US population is committed to an ideological social conservatism. "Playing God", i.e. changing the fundamentals of social relations that were unchanged for millenia, is what really ticks them off. You see how even a relatively minor thing, like gay marriage, is heavily opposed; practical biological engineering will face ten times more vocal opposition, regardless of the way it may be achieved.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. I think as soon as you put this into the perspective of personal gain there is no cap on the change that can be made.

Just look at what the beauty industry sells now... creams that erase years... I can't begin to comment on the financial windfall of legitimately turning back the clock.

I don't think anyone legitimately WANTS to get old and accrue physical decay...

<comment><USER2> Yes and all the beauty creams are made from "natural" ingredients too. As long as the fiction that great-grandma could have made the same thing with forest- picked herbs is maintained, all is great.

<comment><USER3> Social conservatives eat GMO food all day long while remaining blissfully unaware of its existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some context from earlier this year:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/25-scientific- ide...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/25-scientific-ideas-of- life-extension.php)

"The Science for Life Extension Foundation is a Russian organization consisting of advocates and aging researchers. They are similar to the SENS Foundation in that they undertake a mix of fundraising, directing research, organizing events, advocacy for longevity science, and publishing on potential methodologies to extend the healthy human life span."

And another of the rather nice materials from the Science for Life Extension Foundation here:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/biomarkers-of- agi...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/biomarkers-of-aging-and- age-related-conditions.php)

If you read Russian there's a whole livejournal full of these things from one of the people involved:

<http://aging-genes.livejournal.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> This thread not getting much attention because most HN readers are young and therefore don't think about their own impending mortality.

<comment><USER6> Not everyone indifferent to immortality is "young". Some of us actually appreciate being a life form, expiration date and all. To live long/forever is to halt evolution. I'm more than happy to take my shot at life, live my 8 decades, then get out of life's way.

After a certain stage in life, we take more than we contribute in terms of scarce resource. When my time comes, I will be more than happy to get out of the way and let time march on.

<comment><USER7> >Some of us actually appreciate being a life form, expiration date and all.

Good for you. Some of us, however, think that people should be able to choose their own fates, time of death included. People are not defined by their expiration dates, but by their lives, accomplishments and so on. To accept death as "natural" makes as much sense as accepting polio as natural and just allowing the disease to ravage the body instead of applying medicine. Hey, it's "natural" after all, right? Can't be bad if it's from nature, right?

>To live long/forever is to halt evolution.

FYI evolution does not mean progress, just adaptation. What does it matter to halt or slow down this completely arbitrary mechanism at this point in our evolution? (Which many would argue happened a long time ago anyways.)

>I'm more than happy to take my shot at life, live my 8 decades, then get out of life's way. After a certain stage in life, we take more than we contribute in terms of scarce resource.

It's funny to think that the life expectancy has increased so much in the last few millennia. What would you have said if the average life span was around 25 like it was a few thousand years ago?

>When my time comes, I will be more than happy to get out of the way and let time march on.

Okay, go ahead and be apathetic about death if you want, but don't pretend you're some vanguard of the sanctity of life.

I'm not saying life extension will be without problems, of course. All I'm saying is that accepting death as inevitable when we are ever closer to conquering it, is not noble, it's defeatist. It's clinging to tradition. I say research away and may our children live to at least 200.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm against life extension. I think science has the wrong end of the stick.

Whilst death looks like a scary thing and the primary motivation is to avoid the scary bit, people need to keep dying or the population increase caused by them not dying is going to make the standard of living for everyone very low. It's pretty selfish really.

It's better to had a prosperous and happy existence than live 5x as long and suffer through it.

<comment><USER9> What if the problem is not too many people but too few?

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big- prob...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-problem.html)

<comment><USER10> Ending that with the "labor shortage" bit really undermined the rest. I read that in much of India it's a _faux pas_ to buy a washing machine rather than hire the little old lady down the block. Labor shortages drive technological innovation, while labor surpluses lead to desperate workers taking menial jobs which are beneath their potential as human beings, as well as Luddism.</comment></comment></comment>


You Don't Have to Use JavaScript - berserker-one https://medium.com/javascript-non-grata/the-super-surrogates-of-javascript-862460199915 <comment><AUTHOR> Using a language that compiles to javascript is still using javascript, though.

I think what the author meant to say is "you can pretend you're not writing javascript, even though you really are."

But once you compile that better, safer, saner language into the untyped, dynamic, poorly designed mess that is javascript, and run it in the volatile environment of a browser, it's still javascript running in a browser.

<comment><USER2> That's like saying if you compile C++ to Intel x86 assembler, you're still programming in assembler. JavaScript is the "assembly language" of the web; compiling (transpiling) to it is not _directly_ programming in it.

Now, you're half-right in that you may occasionally need to drop into JavaScript to do some "low level" things. This is no different from C++, where you may occasionally need to drop into x86 assembler to do some low level things, such as local speed optimization, or hitting memory-mapped registers.

In both cases, you're programming at a higher level using safer and more sophisticated abstractions.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's similar, but not the same. Moving from C++ to assembler is dropping from a high level of abstraction to a low level of abstraction. Moving from, say, Python to Javascript is just switching one high level language for another - there is no "lower level." You could just as well save the trouble of the second language and run a type checker or linter on javascript code itself and wind up with the same degree of "safety", such as it is.

<comment><USER2> As you pointed out yourself, JavaScript is a poorly designed mess. It may be a "high level" language, but it's also dangerous to use. None of the linters do a perfect job of ferreting out all the problems. In other words, JavaScript will never be 100 per cent "safe" to use. Treating it as a lower level of abstraction _doesn 't harm us_. It simply gives us a foundation for using better languages, and that has to be a Good Thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love how every JS rant has type safety in it. You can immediately tell that "ranter" does not use JS. Dynamic types are one of the best parts of J s

<comment> berserker-one ??? I don't see any reference to type safety. Are we reading the same article?

<comment><USER2> MoD411 is referring to "loose typing and freewheeling coercions." This is not about "type safety." It's about having a predictable and reasonable binding of types. JavaScript is very sloppy in this respect, _especially with regards to the underlying semantics_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find that the easiest and most reliable way to avoid having to deal with JavaScript is to simply avoid doing anything related to the web. Life is better that way.

<comment> berserker-one That's pretty hard to do, since nearly _everything_ in IT today is web- related: enterprise client/server applications; mobile apps; the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT).

<comment><USER4> ...with full awareness of the irony involved, I will note that I actually did have to write some JavaScript code last year, for work - not because I was doing anything related to the web, but because I was building some test cases for our static-analysis tool. So even in this nearly web-free paradise, JavaScript still managed to wriggle in.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Eureka, run compute tasks on the cloud with no DevOps or setup - <AUTHOR> https://get.eureka.guru <comment><USER2> Sounds pretty cool! What are the limits?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! On the free web demo you can only run 3 concurrent tasks. By joining the beta you can increase that limit to any amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where is pricing info? Fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> We wanted to keep the website simple :). We charge a few % over the infra costs, which comes out to about $0.05 per hour per core. Anyway, it's in prototype stage, and we're not charging anybody yet.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I wrote a realtime search and/or pubsub (in memory, C) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fizx/sit#sit-streaming-index-toy

<comment><USER2> 404 not found. I'm guessing it's still a private repo? I'm curious as to why a broken link would be upvoted.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd. I made it public and it's public now. Try again?

<comment><USER2> It's working now. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix open sources resilience engineering library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki <comment><USER2> I used roughly the same philosophy recently at work in dealing with a library that could block for intolerable periods of time (sometimes indefinitely). Basically, I used a pthread_mutex_trylock and a pthread_cond_signal to pass data to a worker thread that interacted with the library. If the worker thread was still holding the mutex when main thread wanted to send data to the worker thread, I simply say "f*ck it" and generate an error, rather than queueing up requests or locking up the system. The reason why it was okay to do this is that the library calls were to gather non-critical metrics, and calls into the library were fairly infrequent.

(I just drank an entire bottle of wine, so please excuse any apparent lack of reasoning, typing ability, or general coherence in the above comment.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great set of reading materials. It is great to find out how teams are building in resiliency at the micro level. That being said, I would never actually use this project for building things. IMHO: Libraries > Frameworks.

<comment><USER4> Glad to hear the documentation is thought-provoking - it was intended to not just explain the project but also communicate our learnings in operating at scale and how the Hystrix library is used by Netflix.

I also agree that libraries are preferable to frameworks and Hystrix is in fact just a java library that can be used as little or as much as one wishes.

It purposefully tries to have a small number of dependencies so should be easy to pull in without significant impact.

@benjchristensen

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had the "pleasure" of using the predecessor of this library at work.

The code written by someone who's just completed reading the GoF book feels remarkably similar...

<comment><AUTHOR> From the 10 minutes I glanced at the code I kinda got lost in the abstractions and that's where I decided it's worth a deep look later, but I wouldn't say it's over-engineered.

Can you elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER5> my problem with this library (well, actually the internal version, I haven't looked much at the code in github) is that it was written from the perspective of an edge service - the netflix API. The needs of that system are quite different from the needs of middle-tier systems.

The API has a hell of a lot more surface area but is trivial in complexity compared other systems at netflix, and therefor this library has some huge gaps in design.

The two biggest issues IMHO are putting the throttling/fallback handling at the outermost edge of an external service rather than at the lowest level (i.e. the actual rpc) and a very C/errno like method of handling errors.

I'm also quite unhappy with the API. It require creating boilerplate classes to implement the commands. Yuck. A bit of magic with annotations or code gen would've been much cleaner and much less prone to errors caused by programmer fatigue or boredom.

<comment><USER6> Thanks - you expressed the uneasy feeling I had more eloquently than I could have. Between the library's architecture, the (IMHO) architectural inversion, and the (let's be honest) stilted writing style in the documentation, this project gives me an "I'm just out of college" feeling, which in turn usually makes me run like hell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So it's a wrapper that aborts an entire request if an API call made by the code processing that request times out? What am I missing?

<comment><USER7> I was reading it trying to tease out it's core purpose as well. I reached a similar conclusion. The only piece that seems incremental is the way it remembers past performance and will fail-fast if the service is down or failing rather than keep sending every request to the downstream service. Like client-side back-off logic or throttling.

<comment><USER6> Right. This behavior, and a few other things, is nice, but I'd be hesitant to say it belongs in its own library. If this kind of baroque architecture (and the stilted writing demonstrated by the documentation) is de rigueur at Netflix, I don't think I'd ever want to work there.

<comment><USER8> Care to elaborate? I think Amazon does it similarly, so what's so baroque about it?

<comment><USER6> I agree that the behavior Hysterix provides is a Good Thing, but I'm not convinced that packaging up this behavior into a separate library and open source project is architecturally elegant. Instead, the base-level web services client library should provide this functionality. I'm wary of adding too many modules and too many dependencies to a system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reinventing Erlang in Java for investor's money?)

People who don't know CS are doomed to poorly reinvent Lisp or Erlang again and again..))

But why not, if someone pays for it..

And the whole idea of using Java for serving media content, while there is a specialized, well-engineered solution, created especially for this purpose in the telecom world, is such a brilliant management decision.. In Java we trust.)

<comment><USER10> With due respect to the library, there are certain parts of it which is not supported out of the box in Erlang. On the other hand, building tools like what the library has is not going to take a long time.

<comment><USER11> What in particular jumps out at you? I don't know Erlang or this library well enough to pick it out right away, but I think it'd be an interesting thing to look at. Erlang is often cited, but probably not as widely used, so sometimes gets some 'magic properties' associated with it.</comment></comment></comment>


Revolutionizing marketing with interactive email - <AUTHOR> https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/customers/2015/10/how-bigdog-is-revolutionizing-marketing-with-interactive-email/ <comment><AUTHOR> I received an "interactive" e-mail from Taco Bell today and of course had to know what black magic was happening on my iPhone. I guess this has been brewing for a while but it's the first I've seen of it. I love the fact that it took some junior developers to question the assumptions that everyone knows about e-mail development and discover these solutions.</comment>


Help to improve react-ui-builder - <AUTHOR>

Help us to improve https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-ui-builder<p>Tell what features will help you in your projects, or maybe some are not needed. <comment><USER2> hey nice video!!! im doing an internship in Modesto, Ca for web development and find your react ui builder to be pretty interesting. Im doing a talk on new technologies and techniques and am going to be doing it on your React UI builder. I will be talking about what is it, why its useful to me, the pros' and cons'. I will do my best to describe how to use your builder. Once done I can send you a link to the blog, and maybe even my talk. Thanks again for putting in the time to build this.</comment>


NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/courtroom-files/ny-man-arrested-for-cutting-wires-to-red-light-cameras-exposing-revenue-scheme-TmvQ7-MX9U-VXG26D11tdg/ <comment><USER2> > Ruth pointed out some cameras that were put up have been taken down after > they fell short of daily contract-quota with Xerox to produce 25 citations, > per camera, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which costs Suffolk County $2,132 > per day, according to the Xerox contract with the county.

> Xerox collects $13 from Suffolk County for each ticket, which increases to > $33 per ticket when a camera generates more than 90 tickets in a month.

Wow, talk about a misalignment of incentives.

<comment><USER3> > Wow, talk about a misalignment of incentives.

Even though I lean libertarian I despise most of these public/private partnerships for this reason. Profit seeking combined with governments use of force (for monopoly or as part of the business model) is almost always worse than pure public services or markets.

Private prisons are a classic example of that, but there are countless less obvious ones in every local government. And it sucks because people blame capitalism for these failures, despite the arrangement looking nothing like a traditional market.

<comment><USER4> All traditional markets require the use of force; just its limited in effect by consent in contract.

<comment><USER3> The market may require it at some point but it's not fundamental to the organizations business-models which is very, very different. Society as a whole is structured around these forces as well, so there is no way any economic system can operate without it. And we're better off for it.

99% of libertarians are for minimal government use of force, not zero government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, recap of the article, lots of WTFs.

1\. Cameras lowered from 5 to 3 seconds.

2\. Cameras placed in low income neighborhoods.

3\. They put a camera at the mans house!

4\. John Lang, a traffic-light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death in his burned down house.

<comment><USER6> The coroner's report notes that firefighters discovered his home was barricaded at the time of the fire. The cause of death was not stab wounds but smoke inhalation and fire: [http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/JohnLang-16-01-222.pdf](http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/JohnLang-16-01-222.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Thats an odd document. Cause of death: smoke inhalation; contributing factor, multiple stab wounds. Conclusion: suicide.

<comment><USER8> Towards the back of the article it talks about video from inside the house where the man shows the knife to the camera then turns off the camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Another vexing problem for Ruth is the coverage the issue has gotten from > local news, specifically News12, which is owned by CableVision who provides > the internet service to the cameras at the lights. ...... When victims of > the lights went to News12 about the deaths of their family members due to > the shortened lights, News12 interviewed them, but never ran the story. And > while other local media outlets report from Ruth's point of view and most of > the public's, News12 has painted Ruth a criminal.

And yet we're supposed to treat the for-profit media in this country as sainted individuals, with no biases or influences whatsoever?

<comment><USER10> I hope not. I'd be curious who's telling you to treat them as sainted inviduals.

Here's my media literacy guide that catalogs all the biases (contributions welcome):

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER11> Comparing media coverage of death with actual causes is misleading. There are many other reasons why something may be covered, other than just frequency of occurrence. Often coverage is for things that we might do something about. For example, there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is preventable. When systems break down and the barriers to it no longer work, we get Syria.

<comment><USER12> _> Often coverage is for things that we might do something about._

I disagree. IMO it is almost always about maximizing "engagement" to the news source itself through those ways described in that github - getting the viewer to feel emotions/outrage/etc.

What am I, as a private citizen, meant to do to prevent a plane crash, random act of violence, terrorism, or whatever else that is being massively overreported?

 _> there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is preventable._

In what way do you propose I, as a normal middle-class office worker, prevent terrorism (which is already a vanishingly unlikely cause of death anyway)?

Or even more broadly, how do you propose our government prevents terrorism? Surprisingly, the unprecedented levels of spying and monitoring of our own people doesn't seem to have stopped it yet. Maybe even more spying will enable us to win that pesky war on terror.

We are not dealing with rational actors here. These are people who truly believe they are going to be martyrs and have eternal happiness just for dying in the right way at the right time. You can't negotiate or reason with that. Also you can't prevent every danger. There will always be, eg footpaths that people can drive cars onto, or whatever other ways to kill random people if you are crazy enough.

As a normal citizen, I would much prefer my government spent its resources preventing the overwhelmingly more likely (and preventable) forms of death or injury - but that doesn't sell papers, fund the war machine, or enable massive and ineffective civil rights degradation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _When he was in jail for his most recent arrest, a sheriff's deputy even offered to bail him out._

:)

If only real life more often played out like that scene in _Scent of a Woman_ where righteousness wins out and doesn't end in the bad guys ruining the guy taking a stand:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtzy-l3H1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtzy-l3H1g)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcj1wMZRitI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcj1wMZRitI)

</comment><comment><USER14> Certainly the programming of the lights is public information. If it's not, a stop watch could document the setting. From there, I would imagine there are published best practices. That is, if the speed limit is X, the duration of the amber light has a very defined duration.

The town itself acknowledged the sub optimal programming of the light.

How is it that someone needs to resort to civil disobedience in order to have his/her fellow citizens properly protected; protected from their own (local) gov?

<comment><USER15> Be careful, that kind of speech could get you charged with practicing engineering^Wcommon sense without a license:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2017/12/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2017/12/08/criticizing-red-light-cameras-is-not-a-punishable-offense- oregon-concedes)

<comment><USER16> Is Xerox a front for the Illuminati or something? /s

How is so much power being exerted against people questioning red light cameras? Feels like there is some national entity providing support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How reliable is this source of news? The farther I go, the less tied to the truth the content seems to be.

<comment><USER18> Zero. Read the rest of the site. These are paranoid ramblings of mostly one individual. The fact that this is on the front page of hacker news really makes me worry about the critical thinking skills of the forum.

<comment><USER9> Actually, critical thinkers will separate ideas from their source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries._

This is exactly what lawsuits are for.

<comment><USER20> Lawsuits cost a lot of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Apparently the (very cynical) lesson in all of this is that you don't get between the State and its money.

They'll either incarcerate or kill you.

</comment><comment><USER22> anybody ever been to Milbrae? It's a tiny town with no courts and no police of its own. The cameras at intersections around the BART station make $millions for the city, mostly for vaguely marked and unnecessary no right turn on red.

<comment><USER23> Yep, total trap. The in and out is there. Be careful getting a burger and leaving, you need to watch it turning right to go back to 101

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If the claim that standard 5 second yellow lights were shortened to 3 seconds for traffic cameras is true, Suffolk county officials should be ashamed. This is simply extortion.

<comment><USER25> If true, they should be ashamed and THEN go to prison. That kills people.

<comment><USER26> Fyi - light goes to yellow for 3 seconds before going to red in all of EU and people don't die because of it. I'd say 5 seconds in US is unusually long.

<comment><USER27> It depends on size of intersection and speed limits. Are you saying all intersections in the EU are 3s?

<comment><USER28> I cannot remember seeing 5s yellow light ever (and I drove across almost all the EU). 5s yellow would certainly caught my attention in a "WTF is this" style as 5s is not just long, it's actually enormous and kinda defeats the purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We need more boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, voting with our feet, delete Facebook/Google/Uber/etc, Robin Hoods.

We need a society driven by values and humanity, not the Dollar Almighty.

If not us, then who?

<comment><USER30> _If not us, then who?_

Probably our great, great grandkids, when things end up far, far worse for them because it wasn't us doing anything about it now.

You know, to play devil's legal counsel. Er, I mean advocate /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a person outside of US, I find this interesting. In Finland, the duration of a yellow light is defined in Finnish directive for traffic lights. For speed limits of 40-50 (km per h) duration is three seconds and for 60 kmph it is four seconds and over that it must be 5 seconds.

So the three second time is a norm here in a city area. I wonder how much that affects the statistics of traffic safety. Can someone explain me, why a shorter duration of yellow light causes more accidents?

In Finland I think it is not illegal to drive pass red light if it is not safe to stop before them, so when you see the yellow light you must consider if it is possible stop the vehicle safely.

<comment><USER32> > Can someone explain me, why a shorter duration of yellow light causes more > accidents?

The purpose of an amber/yellow light is to give drivers a transitionary stage.

Consider the limiting case, that a light goes from green to red with no intermediate period.

Drivers will not be able to avoid running red lights. They'll approach the junction at 30mph, the light will change just before they reach it, and they'll go through.

Now you've normalised running red lights. Drivers can't stop if they're 5m from the red (at 30mph), but what about 30m? 50m? 100m? There's no clear cutoff.

So either you make the all-red cycle really quite long, or accidents increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> These are easy to get around though. It might depend on the State, but in Oregon, in order to actually get ticketed by those stupid things, the image of the driver in the car must match the picture of the driver the car is registered to. So if you're married, just register your wife's car in your name and hers in yours. The pics will never match, and no ticket. If you have to go to court, you can show the judge the pic and it's clearly not you driving, so no ticket.

<comment><USER34> Some states are "owner responsibility" states which means it doesn't matter who is driving.

And going through red lights is dangerous. Wouldn't it be better to stop doing it rather than come up with a way to outsmart the system?

<comment><USER33> Sure, one should never intentionally run a red light, and I wasn't suggesting that they do.

The article specifically talks about them shortening the duration of a yellow light from 5 seconds to 3 in order to increase revenue by catching more people running the (shorter) light. They purposefully are creating a situation where people feel the need to speed up to make it through the shorter duration light and more people are getting killed because of it.

I don't know about where you live, but in a lot of places if you cross the crosswalk and are now in the intersection and the light just changes from green to yellow, 3 seconds isn't enough to clear the intersection before it turns red unless you were already traveling the speed limit and the lane is clear ahead of you. Imagine yourself in rush hour traffic and you're the first car stopped at a green light because you can't safely clear the intersection. The car ahead moves and you start to enter the intersection because there is now space to clear the intersection without having to stop in it. Just as you start to accelerate it turns yellow, and then red 3 seconds later before you clear it because they shortened the time. If the light stayed at a 5 second yellow light, you would have made it through. Is that genuinely your fault if you did everything according to the book but only got caught because they artificially lowered the yellow light time?

<comment><USER34> Shortening light cycle times to increase revenue is evil. But one thing that is not widely known is that it is illegal to enter an intersection while the light is yellow. The only time it is legal to enter an intersection is while the light is green.

So if the light turns yellow, you enter the intersection and leave it while the light is still yellow... that is just as illegal as if you entered the intersection when the light was red.

<comment><USER35> Not true in the first few states I checked. The closest is Wisconsin, where the motorist "must stop at a yellow light except when the motorist is so close to the intersection when the light turns yellow that it's unsafe to do so" [1].

In other words, you're wrong. Also, there are multiple degrees of illegal, and I'm certain the punishment for running a yellow light isn't of the same magnitude as the punishment for running a red light.

It seems that you like correcting people enough that you're biased towards believing in unintuitive things.

1: [https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/wisconsin-red-light- st...](https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/wisconsin-red-light-stop-sign- tickets.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> He's probably right about being a scheme... goes about it entirely the wrong way to stop the scheme.

<comment><USER37> What approach can a normal, non wealthy, non connected citizen take?

<comment><USER38> Any way to get a law in the books that specifies a minimum yellow light duration for a given speed limit?

www.shortyellowlights.com/standards/ has a formula.

<comment><USER27> I know there is a state wide rules in California. And because of complaints about red light cameras, they even increased some of the limits by 0.5s. I'm not sure of the exact numbers right now. I know my own city was caught doing some of these games but after the changes were made, they saw a 77% drop in red light tickets at some locations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The legality of issuing tickets without being able to identify the driver is beyond me. I"m sure there is a "reason" it just seems inherently unjust to me.

Heck I'd rather just have humans deal with it as a sort of jobs program even ;)

<comment><USER40> A ticket is a summons, not a conviction; the owner of the car can, of course, argue that they were not driving, and present evidence to that effect.

<comment><USER39> A summons for a person based on "I saw your car" seems unjust too.

<comment><USER41> It seems reasonable that an individual should bear at least some responsibility for who they allow to borrow their car.

<comment><USER39> If they know the other person is going to commit a crime yeah.

Otherwise, no it is not reasonable at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> More creative would be to inject an altered video feed with the license plates changed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Did I just a read an upcoming movie script?

</comment><comment><USER44> Painting the lens black might be a better balance of quick and effective.

<comment><USER45> But you'd have to reach the lens. The wires might be handier...

<comment><USER44> Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but protected at ground level. Maybe not?

I wonder if putting a bag over it is a lesser degree crime.

<comment><USER46> _Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but protected at ground level._

In some red light camera installations you can use an Allen wrench to open an oblong metal panel at the base of the camera pole and expose the power circuit.

...said a friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Vertical integration in law enforcement is coming. Some components are already here - private cameras, private prisons, that judge getting kickbacks for sending children to the private prison...

<comment><USER40> > Vertical integration in law enforcement is coming.

It's been around for a long time, it's called "the state".

<comment><USER47> I stated it badly - I meant that private components of law enforcement start to form their own structure instead of being just a separate components embedded in the state structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What a patriot...

</comment><comment><USER49> Is this a crime?

</comment><comment><USER50> A few years ago these claims would have been considered conspiratorial, and would have yielded public outrage. Now it's just banal and accepted that a municipality and private company got together to manipulate and effectively rob their own citizens.

How have politics become so corrupt? At the early days of the broadly available internet I was sure it would lead to a more informed public, and from that a more accountable, responsible leadership. If anything we have gone in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER51> Last time I got one of these "tickets", it came from the red light camera company and informed me that as long as I paid the fine on time, I would not be reported to the authorities and therefore would not receive a moving violation (and so points on my license). The money went to the red light camera company.

So, as a private entity, they collected evidence of a "crime" I committed, and threatened to expose me to the authorities unless I paid them off. How is this not extortion?

<comment><USER52> Have you contacted your state's attorney general? This sounds like exactly the sort of case that their office would be interested in pursuing.

<comment><USER51> I actually considered that but wasn't able to gauge how realistic an option that might actually be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> _If you think Ruth may be paranoid, consider the case of John Lang, a traffic- light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death in his burned down house.

Police ruled his death a suicide._

Wow Xerox don't play.

[EDIT:] after a bit of online research, it seems plausible that Mr. Lang's death was actually a suicide. That doesn't change the fact that a three second yellow would be unsafe at most normal automotive speeds...

<comment><USER26> >> That doesn't change the fact that a three second yellow would be unsafe at most normal automotive speeds...

Lights go to yellow for 3 seconds in all of EU and the only EU country that has more fatalities per 100k citizens than US is Lithuania[0]. If anything, it seems to me like the American 5 seconds is unusually long.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic- related_death_rate)

<comment><USER54> Fatalities per distance driven is probably a more useful metric, since the US has more cars and typically longer commutes (when you check this the US is behind 4 European countries). 3 seconds seems like a really short time for a yellow. If it takes 1 second to react, make a decision, and physically push the brake pedal, that only gives you 2 seconds to come to a complete stop. If I'm doing the math right for a 25 foot wide intersection (enough room for 1 lane in each direction), at 60mph (~95 kph) that gives a stopping distance of about 150 feet / 46 meters.

Lots of cars are barely capable of that in test conditions with new tires on dry roads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Why is an article from 2016 a top story now?</comment>