Taxi deregulation coming to Finland - <AUTHOR> https://metropolitan.fi/entry/taxi-deregulation-brings-cheap-rides-and-innovation-to-finland-in-2018 <comment><USER2> Taxi's don't scale in an urban environment. Their use is exactly for night or irregular use. Go to Mumbai, Jakarta, or any low income country and you'll find yourself stuck for hours in a cheap taxi. We need regulation because the market will not build railroads and metro's.

"A developed country is not where the poor drive a car, but where the rich take public transportation". Visit and compare Switzerland with Egypt/India/... and you'll see.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, from experience. I live in an urban environment in the UK with extensive public transport and haven't had a car for the last 5 years.

I have friends and family who live in the 'burbs. There are plenty of times I take a taxi over public transport, including:

        1. I'm in a rush
        2. I need to transport something not small
        3. I'm feeling lazy

Note, that all public transport suffers from some fundamental problems (at the moment[1]). I live in the south of the city. For anywhere I want to travel to in the north I have to walk 10 minutes to get to the bus stop. In certain hours buses get out of sync with their timetables, so you can add another 10/15 minutes of waiting.

Also a lot of public transport has moved to the "hub" model, where you have a central hub which connects different routes. While perhaps more efficient in some ways, it's incredibly inefficient for the traveller. It adds a minimum of 20 minutes to any journey where you have to go through a hub. My sister used to joke it takes an hour and 20 minutes to visit a friend living on a different tube line in London. My home town is either 3 lines switches away, adding an hour and a half of waiting to a journey, or I go through the London Hub, inexplicably having to pay a premium.

So while I like and appreciate our public transport, it can be a huge timesink and when you don't want to pay the "time tax" of public transport, taxis fill the role.

[1]I say at the moment as we can imagine a point in the future where you request public transport with your phone and it can on-the-fly accommodate you.

<comment><USER4> _So while I like and appreciate our public transport, it can be a huge timesink and when you don 't want to pay the "time tax" of public transport, taxis fill the role._

Last time I was in London for work I naively hopped in a Taxi at Paddington Station because I was late for a meeting and the tube would take 30 minutes. The taxi took 35 minutes and cost an order of magnitude more.

<comment><USER3> Well, yeah, it depends on the town and the time. Here in Notts the buses have lots of dedicated lanes, so in rush hour it can be better to take a bus than a taxi.

<comment><USER5> Taxis* can drive in bus lanes

*Not private hire vehicles, which are not legally considered taxis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uber left Finland last summer due to the harassment from the government and police, but it still made huge difference to the Finnish taxi system.

Before the taxi rides were expensive, service was mediocre and there was no apps nor anything else. After Uber started mixing the market, many new companies have started operating in the field offering travel packages etc. and almost all taxis can now be ordered with an app and people can see their location in real time.

Only thing that hasn't changed is the pricing (taxis are extremely expensive in Finland) but thankfully that's about to change soon.

<comment><USER7> Taxis aren't that expensive in Finland compared to other Nordic countries or countries with similar living costs as Finland.

Swedish taxis are unregulated and there fares have risen faster than in Finland.

And Uber as a ride hailing service was perfectly legal in Finland. The issue was they were hiring drivers that didn't have taxi permits (and didn't pay taxes).

<comment><USER8> C'mon. Getting a taxi permit in Finland requires taking a bunch of mandatory courses on highly Uber-relevant topics like "how to use your taxi meter" (185 EUR) and "local navigation without a GPS" (260 EUR), then passing an exam with questions like "from memory, name all roads between random location X and random location Y", meaning you're looking at a bare minimum of 700 EUR and several weeks of full-time study to get licensed: [https://taksikoulu.net/kurssit/#hinnasto](https://taksikoulu.net/kurssit/#hinnasto)

And Uber was _way_ (as in, 30-50%) cheaper than taxis while it operated in Helsinki.

<comment><USER9> Uber is cheaper because Uber's investors subsidize each ride. Don't let this fool you. Uber will get a lot more expensive when those investors want to see returns.

<comment><USER10> Uber's prices will remain competitive so long as there is healthy competition. If Uber is able to establish a quasi-monopoly in a particular market, then prices will rise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought Finland was one of the few places where taxi prices were high enough that taxi drivers could make a fair living off it. Those days are probably gone.. I don't see the great innovations that ride hailing services bring to the table at this point.

Having another person drive you around should expensive in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> You have to keep in mind that prices are, generally, not magical. The price is a balance between what people are willing to sell something for and what people are willing to buy it for. Of course that's elementary, but thinking about this will explain why drivers, in general, will not be well paid.

Driving is a low value skill that the vast majority of people have, and if they don't have - they can learn it rapidly. Let's imagine now being a driver was lucrative. Well you'd have a ton of people racing to become drivers, no pun intended. But with so many people willing to drive people around, it'd mean a shortage of work for all the drivers. And so somebody would offer to drive people for a little bit less. And that'd repeat on downward until we reached the equilibrium point at which not enough drivers were willing to go below.

There are some exceptions like truck driving where people spend hours and hours on the road driving vehicles that do require some degree of skill to manage. And so the wages there are still pretty decent. It's not just driving per se, but unpleasant work that requires some degree of skill.

Ride sharing apps bring market efficiency. If you're willing to drive for $x and people are willing to pay $x, well - why shouldn't you be able to? They're still centralized of course, but I think it takes us one step closer to decentralizing the entire industry which would be amazing, as it entirely removes the middle man and let's people simply directly offer and purchase each others' labor. Of course this ideal is pointless in this particular case as automation is imminent and will super-centralize the industry. Although there prices will likely be lower than even a decentralized market could offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Taxi service has been great in finland. Competent drivers (they know their way around the city) and clean cars. Pretty good availability, except for the one hour when the bars close when you have to fight for your life at the taxi stop :)

And you could actually make a decent living driving cabs.

This will probably change and the foreigners who now deliver our food (Foodora et.al.) will start driving taxis.

So drivers getting lost and crashing in the winter months because of lacking skills in snow driving. And of course not speaking finnish so handling the eldery and school transports which are a big service taxis provide here might get more difficult. We'll see... But in my opinnion it is not possible to operate taxis much more cheaply (and with the same quality) as we have now.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder where Finland draws the line between "taxi" and "ride sharing" (stuff like the Waze commute thing).

<comment><USER15> If they deregulate it's not unthinkable that they are looking across the water to Sweden. In Sweden there is no difference between different operators, Uber is a Taxi company. You can't drive anyone for money without being a taxi company.

 _Actual_ ride sharing where no one makes money is obviously not taxi. What Waze commute will count as I suspect is still up in the air so long as neither of the people in the car makes any money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finland doesn't exists.

<comment><USER16> Exist _

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reads more like a promotional piece for Whim - rather than a neutral article - as well as no reference for the regulation change (although it is happening).

<comment><USER18> They mention Whim twice + a pic of the app. I don't really see how that's too promotional. Even Fixutaxi is mentioned more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Finland is just killing it lately, I wish Sweden could be more like Finland.

<comment><USER17> It's funny the outsiders perspective of Finland. I can assure you there are plenty of problems here. The government being broke for one and making obscene cuts across the board.

<comment><USER20> By the numbers Finland looks like one of the not-so-broke governments in EU: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/269684/national-debt- in-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/269684/national-debt-in-eu- countries-in-relation-to-gross-domestic-product-gdp/)

A common neoliberal political strategy is to kick up drama about state finances to justify tax cuts and reductions in public services in spite of popular support for welfare, maybe the same here?</comment></comment></comment>


How to convert 70%+ of website traffic - <AUTHOR> http://donfitchcpa.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> In case your wondering, a slam dunk like that sounds like this: [http://youtu.be/nNSf4KshCUI?t=2m27s](http://youtu.be/nNSf4KshCUI?t=2m27s)</comment>


Decaf:Administer your infrastracture on Amazon EC2 from Android  - <AUTHOR> http://decaf.9apps.net

<comment><USER2> It'd be nice to see an app like this take advantage of libcloud (<http://libcloud.org/>) to support multiple providers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know of a good tool like this for iPhone?

<comment><USER4> hi, my name is jurg. i am one of the developers of decaf. we started out with an android version, because there are several things we need that an android can do easily and are somewhat problematic on an iphone.

but because everyone is so enthusiastic we have no choice, i think. we extended our team with iphone experience and are starting the process of porting/transforming decaf for the iphone.

you can check the site (a bit difficult still) or follow one of our team members or me on twitter. or wait until you see us in the app store.

<comment><USER5> Looks like a cool app, I would like to see some Rackspace cloud support though.</comment></comment></comment>


Crack the Bitcoin Pinata and Get 10 Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://ownme.ipredator.se/ <comment><USER2> Please someone on HN get this cracked...</comment>


Simple but powerful serializer for Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tuvistavie/serializer

<comment><USER2> Very nice, I could see myself using this in a lot of my projects. I noticed it doesn't have a license, this could pose a problem if I wanted to use it at work. Could you include a LICENSE file?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Sure, I will add the LICENSE file as soon as I get home. It will be an MIT license, so feel free to use it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Just added the license file.</comment></comment></comment>


Getting to Trust (and Beyond) - <AUTHOR> http://www.speakhuman.com/ch19_Getting_to_Trust_and_Beyond

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the most recent chapter from my book: Speak Human. I'm releasing it online (for free) one chapter at a time. (Currently, about three-quarters of the book is available on the site.)

For some of you, the contents of the book will be less useful than others. That being said, we really worked hard to pack a lot of useful information into it. As a result, a number of folks have found it useful. Some reviews on Amazon: <http://gu.nu/sKY>

We're not making loads of cash off of the book, and giving it away doesn't help that out either. We do like the idea of others gaining insight from it, though. If you have a moment, check it out, and if you like it, please share with fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Cheers!</comment>


Can't believe Microsoft came up with this ad for Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://bgr.com/2012/11/29/internet-explorer-10-ad-microsoft/

<comment><USER2> The interesting question is...How did they know which buttons to push (KWS) in order to make him like the browser?

</comment><comment><USER3> that's actually very good and clever. It would have been neat for them to have a twitter @ie (or something similar) that would auto respond to @ie with clever comments like that.</comment>


Reddit, Twitch, and Imgur have created a research partnership called DERP - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/19/6044403/derp-research-partnership-launched-by-reddit-twitch-imgur-fark-stack-exchange

<comment><USER2> Dear DERP, I need one question to be answered : "Why cats?"</comment>


Amazon 'Lotto' Winners in New York and Virginia See Housing Jackpot - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/amazon-lotto-winners-in-new-york-virginia-see-housing-jackpot <comment><AUTHOR> "Over the last week I've received 50 inquiries on that one property -- we hadn't received 50 inquiries over the previous 100 days,"</comment>


Is your application an ass-kisser? - <AUTHOR> http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_your_app_an_.html <comment><USER2> Those photos are awesome, especially the Just-Trust-Me Guy. I can think of a couple apps for The Show-Off...

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does she get this constant stream of stock photos?</comment>


The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thetaphi.de/2011/07/real-story-behind-java-7-ga-bugs.html <comment><USER2> I'm actually flabbergasted that neither the Lucene project nor Oracle tested and found this bug long ago. Java 7 builds have been available for years. Makes me wonder how many developers tried an early Java 7 build, got this error and then didn't report it because they assumed someone else was going to find it and report / fix it.

Update: Earlier report of this bug on June 20th: [http://osdir.com/ml/solr- user.lucene.apache.org/2011-06/msg0...](http://osdir.com/ml/solr- user.lucene.apache.org/2011-06/msg01012.html) Another report of AggressiveOpts crashing PorterStemFilter in Jan: [http://elasticsearch- users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Java-6u23-an...](http://elasticsearch- users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Java-6u23-and-ES-0-14-2-crashing-on- signal-6-SIGABT-td2289578.html)

<comment><USER3> If you see something, say something!

<comment><USER4> There are serious fifteen year old reported errors in java.util.Random which have never been fixed and have finally been declared WONTFIX. Ten years ago I reported that ArrayList's get(), set(), and add() methods were non-inlineable (!) and could be trivially repaired with a single line of code: this was never fixed until recent versions of HotSpot which finally obviated the issue.

We're talking core classes here. So I don't have a lot of faith in the bug reporting process.

<comment><USER5> The java classes have always had major warts and _no one in charge has ever seemed to care_.

My personal bugbear: java.lang.Object depends on hundreds of classes including, among other absurdities, the Turkish locale (IIRC). This was about 13 years ago. Of course, the bug was eventually marked WONTFIX.

14 years ago, I adopted Java because it was a beautiful escape from the warty giant that C++ was becoming. Sun sat on it's laurels and, like many others, I moved on to Python.

Now Java is the new C++: unpleasant and to be avoided when possible.

<comment><USER6> Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER5> Sorry for the late reply. Not sure which you wanted details on:

\- java issues / sun not caring - there are examples above by SeanLuke, gojomo and myself

\- java.lang.Object depends on hundreds of classes - violates basic design principles of modularity and avoiding cyclic dependencies

\- "Sun sat on it's laurels..." - apart from ignoring existing issues, they also ignored requests for language enhancements (e.g. dynamic language support, covariance, etc) for a long time causing many developers to give up on java for web development and move to python & ruby

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it funny how the more glacially slow the pace a language takes, the more things break when a tiny little change happens?</comment>


Broke teen who sold kidney for an iPhone now bedridden for life - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/broke-teen-who-sold-kidney-for-an-iphone-now-bedridden-for-life/news-story/6e76c09316bfdff8a1eaf09243fc14e7 <comment><USER2> That's terrible and the article says he did it to show off to his friends.

What about the following year when a new model comes out? Not a lot of foreplanning there.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you give up a kidney in sanitary conditions (apparently lacking in this case) it should be quite safe and may well save someone's life. This article is irresponsible to deride the decision as stupid. I haven't done it but I applaud anyone who does. [http://www.giveakidney.org/](http://www.giveakidney.org/)</comment>


Phone peripherals powered by audio jack - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/

<comment><USER2> Only have to do this because the accessory kit in iOS is so locked down and Apple wraps that mess up in their "Works for iPhone" program.

The dock connector has full serial bus for accessories with power. It's easy to program and build accessories. No weird hacks converting to analog and then doing software signal processing and generating power with continuous tone.

Apple just locks it down from developers getting access unless you follow their strict guidelines. One of which is that your accessory works for iPhone and only iPhone and not multiple devices. They also have licensing fees involved. It's arbitrary.

The also do this same program for Bluetooth. They claimed custom protocols at WWDC a few years ago that gave me hope I could connect to common bluetooth devices (like a laptops and my Lego NXT device). Entirely not the case.

<comment><USER3> _03/15/2011: Google donates Android phones to the project._

 _02/18/2011: Microsoft donates Windows Phone 7 phones to the project._

Cheap, multi-platform sensors. With a little tweaking, I assume they could transmit data over a phone line. This means you don't have to build for any specific target platform: any no-name, off-brand phone in some Harare phone shop can record data.

What happens when we bake these into a toxin module, and distribute them to people in LDCs? It'll be a lot easier to start seeing evidence and location of toxic spills, chemical safety violations, whatever.

A cheap platform shouldn't be hampered by any specific pathway: we're building a parasite here, people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why can't the same "hobbyist" effort that's applied to breaking the handshake and encryption on Playstations and Xboxes be applied to reverse-engineering Apple's peripheral chip?

<comment><USER5> It has already been hacked. Basically a voltage drop across 2 pins IIRC.

EDIT: More than 2 pins, actually. According this guide <http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml>, depending on the type of device you want to emulate(charger, stereo dock, etc.) you'll need to either short or drop the voltage on different pins.

<comment><USER4> The way to hack in a charger against the "this charger not supported" has been known a while.

I'm talking about the data connection on the iPod/iPhone docking connector. You can't access the dock API unless you're an approved Apple "Made for iPod" vendor and purchase special chips from Apple that handshake between your docking peripheral and the device.

Hacking power is one thing, but it's useless unless you can move data in and out of the device. Using the headphone jack to move data with FSK is clever but slow and not very robust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Alternatively: <http://code.google.com/p/microbridge/>, <http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585>, <http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331>, [http://robots- everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=PropBri...](http://robots- everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=PropBridge)

</comment><comment><USER7> It says Phone peripherals, not iPhone. It says audio jack, not 30-pin connector. It doesn't seem like everyone is glad we have a multi-platform smartphone connection, why? Even Micro-usb is bulkier than this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seen before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104408>

</comment><comment><USER9> How much could you do with this? Also, why does Apple allow Square into the app store when it does this?

<comment><USER4> The Square unit uses the headphone jack. It exchanges data through tones being sent back and forth over the speaker and microphone pins.

Since there are no unpublished APIs being used, no App Store terms are being violated.

You can do a lot when you can send and receive serial data over a port. Millions upon millions of devices that you never see or know about communicate in this very manner.

<comment><USER9> like what devices? not doubting, just curious

<comment><USER4> Your home is filled with microprocessors that talk to each other over two-wire serial protocols. Your oven probably has a control panel that talks over I2C or some other serial protocol to a control module.

That credit card terminal on the shop counter has a modem that talks to another computer the old-fashioned way: frequency-keyed tones over a phone line.

Your car has more chips than you think, all talking over a shared serial bus like CAN or DBUS (not the desktop protocol, the Bosch one).

That touchscreen on your smart phone communicates with the host processor over a serial protocol.

In the embedded systems world it's cheaper and easier to use these ancient protocols than to try and install ethernet lines and TCP/IP stacks...just so that your oven can start a bake cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hasn't been updated since March 5th.</comment>


AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income - <AUTHOR> https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB2712 <comment><USER2> Can they not do basic math? There are around 30 mil adults in California. Even if provision 18992.1 (b) is 5 mil people, that's still 25 mil people. That's 25 mil * $12,000 = $300 bil a year. The ENTIRE California state budget for 2020 is only $220 bil.

They would have to more than double the tax revenue for a state with already very high taxes.

Now, assuming the most generous interpretation of their 10% VAT proposal... which means a 10% VAT on things like rent, transportation, etc. CA has around 11.5mil households with apx $40k/household of spending, which yields $460bil @ 10% => $46bil in additional tax revenue.

This won't work. It's just meaningless hot hair.

<comment><USER3> Boy, I already pay some of the highest taxes in the country and now I get to pay more. For what? They cannot manage anything else properly in this state.

<comment><USER4> What percentage of your income goes to taxes? In the EU almost half of your income would be withheld for different taxes, and depending on the country, you would also get absymal health care, with a system that forces you to pay out of pocket, after a part of your salary was already taken to pay for universal health care.

<comment><USER5> The top tax bracket in CA would require you to make well over $1M for a married couple: a rate of 37% federal + 13.3% state. But depending on your definition of "almost half", this could be much lower - a combined rate of 41.3% starts at about $325k for a couple. These are income taxes only, mandatory medicare and social security taxes add a bit more.

<comment><USER6> Those are marginal rates though. A couple making $325k would pay about $98k per year in taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you pass this without passing radical reform of zoning and building millions more homes, it will be yet another wealth transfer mechanism from poor consumers to wealthy California landholders. Rents will eventually match the increase in income as way too much demand chases an incredible, inhumane, History Will Judge You shortage of supply.

Which, amazingly, is one of the reasons this could actually pass. California's property class seem to get everything they want, even if it's voting down small and inadequate reforms like SB-50 was (it was a start but not even remotely enough).

California should be thinking about absolutely nothing else that's big except fixing their housing crisis. It's so big at this point that it's actually causing most of the other major problems.

<comment><USER8> You write as if markets are a zero sum game, however they are most certainly not.

You say the poor tenant will transfer wealth to the wealthy landlord as if the tenant is losing. However -- they are both gaining.

Say the rent is $1000.

Obviously, the property usage right is worth to the landlord less than $1000, otherwise he would've just used the property himself. He gains.

The property usage right is worth more than $1000 to the tenant, otherwise he would've just kept the money. He gains.

Both people gain. Both people get richer. Both people ended up with more than they had prior to the transaction.

<comment><USER9> Housing markets are a zero-sum game if you _refuse to build more housing when demand exceeds supply_

If ten families want houses and there are only nine on the market, one family will go without whether you have auctions, price caps, land taxes, means testing, subsidies, or any other economic intervention, because _nine is less than ten_

<comment><USER10> Houses get built, maybe just not in the favorite places. People get roommates. Sure housing is more inflexible than some products, but not a whole lot.

<comment><USER11> > Houses get built, maybe just not in the favorite places.

So 9 out of 10 families get to live in a commutable distance to where they work, or 2 families get to live in half the appropriate space. Not good for the economy, not good for the families, very good for landlords.

Whether or not housing is naturally flexible, CA's government has done pretty darn well making it inflexible. See rents vs. inflation.

Every dollar of rent above costs for construction and __necessary __administration is a monetary redistribution from the renting class to property owners. CA doesn 't lack land, and it doesn't lack the ability to pour concrete into earthquake-safe cubes with plumbing; the difficulty in construction and resulting high rents is the result of intentional obstruction and regulatory capture by the benefiting property owners.

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure it's not the landlords and wealthier classes that are making CA's government into a giant tarpit. They'd love to see less and smaller government.

Over-regulation is only a part of the cost. The biggest part is the demand. But don't worry, whenever people figure out that silicon valley jobs can easily be relocated, to basically anywhere, that will all work itself out.

<comment><USER11> > Pretty sure it's not the landlords and wealthier classes that are making > CA's government into a giant tarpit. They'd love to see less and smaller > government.

They, like anyone else, want to see a government act in their interest. Sometimes that means less government, sometimes it means more. Democrats want more government in healthcare, Republicans want more government in immigration; it is about what they want not how they get it.

And yes it will sort itself out, much like Detroit has worked itself out after the auto boom. It is just sad seeing myopic governance[0] lead CA towards that future.

[0]"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm confused by "18992.1 (B)." So if you fall on hard times (e.g. unemployment) and UBI would be most beneficial you now have to pick between UBI and health insurance? That doesn't make basic sense to me, and undermines the whole "universal" part.

Plus managing those exclusions would likely cost more than it would save (imagine all the additional management overhead of cross-checking programs and or having people certify they aren't on them/policing fraud).

Actually I find the under-18 restriction kind of questionable too, since this could be a great system for supporting poor families. The real reason this cannot just happen outright is that it "competes" with too many other benefits that it could just outright replace instead.

The biggest problem with scrapping health insurance for UBI is that health insurance is astronomically expensive. I can see the argument for giving families with kids $1K/per kid, and just scrapping the food program to name one example.

<comment><USER14> If Medicare 4 All is adopted then that would free up a lot of folks from that predicament.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very mixed feelings on this. I'm in favor of UBI, but the devil is in the details and this bill doesn't pass the smell test.

As noted elsewhere, $1000/month for all adult residents adds up to more than the state's current budget.

The bill doesn't appear to remove other welfare programs. UBI is usually touted as a moral-judgement free program that replaces all the targeted welfare programs (food stamps, housing allowances, etc).

So, I'm glad people are taking UBI seriously. But, bills like this feel like a footgun. People are rightly suspicious of UBI (at minimum, it's new and untested) and bills like this do nothing to assuage their fears.

<comment><USER16> > The bill doesn't appear to remove other welfare programs

And I think that is the correct move. I'd expect the need for SNAP benefits, housing assistance, etc. would decrease (probably dramatically so) after UBI's implemented. But there will always be people who need help. You can't turn a blind eye to someone in need just because they're getting $12k/yr.

<comment><USER15> In theory, any UBI program would provide an amount equal to, or greater than, whatever amount was previously being provided.

So, if CA food stamps + local housing assistance = $12k, then UBI would also be $12k. Otherwise, as you say, UBI isn't enough.

If this were part of a broader plan to consolidate benefits into a single program, it would make more sense. Give everybody the $1000 (or whatever amount) and if they qualify, bump that $1000 to $2000 (or whatever amount works out).

The whole point of UBI is to get out of managing many programs, with the overhead those entail. And if you have a libertarian tilt, it also gets us out of dictating morals to the poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps the authors of the bill are unaware that the U in UBI means Universal.

If your unemployment benefits are less that UBI, you should get the difference in UBI, similarly excluding Medicaid recipients seems well, plain stupid.

<comment><USER18> It doesn't exclude medicaid, that's a federal program. These are the programs it excludes:

> Medi-Cal program, the County Medical Services Program, the CalFresh program, > the CalWORKs program, or Unemployment Insurance

I'm not entirely sure why, though.

<comment><USER19> [https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi- cal](https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal)

> Medi-Cal is California's Medicaid program.

Because the ACA basically allows states to opt-out of providing medicaid, Medicaid has separate agencies for every state.

<comment><USER18> Good to know thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If I read it correctly it seems to apply to all residents over 18, present legally or not.

Combining UBI with open borders / non enforcement of immigration policy is going to be interesting from a budget point of view.

<comment><USER21> "California Resident" is a significant phrase. Here's an entire document that details how California determines it [0], specifically how it _taxes_ those individuals. Sections F through I, with specific details in G, govern these specifications. How about doing a little digging before appealing to wild speculation?

[0]: [https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2019/2019-1031-publication.pdf](https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2019/2019-1031-publication.pdf)

<comment><USER20> > _How about doing a little digging before appealing to wild speculation?_

Since you are being condescendent about this, would you perhaps mind letting me know where in that document it states that you need to have entered the US legally to be resident?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > (b) California residents who are 18 years of age or older and receiving > benefits under the Medi-Cal program, the County Medical Services Program, > the CalFresh program, the CalWORKs program, or Unemployment Insurance shall > not be eligible to receive a universal basic income under the CalUBI > Program.

I must be misunderstanding something. If you're unemployed and getting unemployment benefits you don't get your UBI? Isn't that part of the _point_ of UBI?

Edit: Thanks to everyone helping me understand what I was missing!

<comment><USER23> One of the stated benefits of UBI is that it has the potential to replace other forms of welfare more efficiently. Instead of people getting separate benefits for food, housing, unemployment, etc, they get the one benefit: UBI. This removes the problem of "I don't work hard enough to be poor in America", where the people going through the worst situations have to spend the most time going through forms and bureaucracies.

Instead, you just get UBI. In good times and in bad, so there's no weird income caps and disincentives to work. People don't have to deal with welfare cliffs ([https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and- why-...](https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and-why-many-low- income-workers-will-never-overcome-poverty/)) and/or multiple welfare off- ramps simultaneously anymore.

Having UBI and still keeping means-tested welfare removes one of the best benefits of UBI. Most serious UBI proposals do what this one does: Either keep your current benefits or go on a UBI, whatever works best for you.

<comment><USER9> _> Most serious UBI proposals do what this one does: Either keep your current benefits or go on a UBI, whatever works best for you._

I appreciate that we wouldn't want the situation where instituting UBI stops (for example) severely disabled veterans getting specially adapted cars.

But doesn't this mean we retain all the forms and bureaucracies and weird income caps and disincentives to work, and the administrative costs that go with them?

<comment><USER24> > But doesn't this mean we retain all the forms and bureaucracies and weird > income caps and disincentives to work, and the administrative costs that go > with them?

Mostly not, because everyone whose weird byzantine collection of benefits doesn't add up to more than the UBI will abandon all of them and choose the UBI. That should be nearly everybody even if it isn't literally everybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has also indicated she'll be putting a UBI legislation on the US Congress house floor in the coming weeks.

Edit: making it clear it's federal level not state level legislation.

</comment><comment><USER26> My main problem with this is that if you're poor you'll have to give up Medi- Cal (California's Medicaid program -- aka health insurance for the poor) and other state-funded benefits to be eligible.

Health care spending can and has bankrupted many people with private insurance who are very well off compared to Medi-Cal recipients, so if the poor were forced to give up Medi-Cal to get $12k of UBI per year, and then spend that money on private health insurance, and spend even more of that money on food (since they'd also have to give up food stamps), it makes absolutely no economic sense for them to do that.

As far as the poor are concerned, this is an attempt to get rid of Medi-Cal and substitute it with private health insurance, and same with the other state-funded programs that help the poor.

The way it stands now this is an awful idea, and I'd only support it if it was truly universal and did not require the poor to give up the state support they have now.

If this proposed program doesn't actually help the poor then what is the fucking point?

<comment><USER24> > Health care spending can and has bankrupted many people who are very well > off compared to Medi-Cal recipients, so if they were forced to give up Medi- > Cal to get $12k of UBI per year, and then spend that money on private health > insurance, and spend even more of that money on food (since they'd also have > to give up food stamps), it makes absolutely no economic sense for them to > do that.

So then they wouldn't do that. It says you can't get the UBI if you get Medi- Cal, it doesn't say you can't decline the UBI and continue to get Medi-Cal, right?

The entire point of a UBI is that it replaces all of these hacked together assistance programs with something with less overhead (no eligibility testing bureaucracy) and less economic distortion (giving restaurant workers food assistance when they already have access to food and could better use the money for transportation or education etc.)

If you like Medi-Cal, propose it as a "public option" \-- instead of getting it if you're poor, you get it if you pay $6000/year or whatever it actually costs the state. Then people can take their $12,000 UBI, use $6000 to buy Medi-Cal and have $6000 left over. But then it lets people to choose _not to_ , e.g. because their spouse's employer-subsidized private insurance would cover them for an additional $4000/year and they'd rather come out ahead by $2000.

Having both is silly because it doesn't get rid of that inefficiency. If you instead wanted people to have a $12,000 UBI _and_ $6000 in medical coverage then just give them $18,000 and let them decide whether they want to buy $6000 in medical coverage or something else. You can debate the amount of assistance but it still makes no sense to force people to buy specific things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It seems that the line at the bottom about the 10% VAT on many goods and services seems just as interesting as the UBI (especially when the UBI seems to exclude many of the poorest Californians).

I wonder how they will administer the VAT without other states cooperating with them.

<comment><USER28> I am very confused about the math of this, unless California has a surplus of taxes coming in.

Without even taking into account the existing tax rate in California, wouldn't this need an average of 10k of spending per person a month getting this to work out?

Then again there are enough restrictions on this (seemingly largely the ones that would actually benefit the most from this) that it actually works out...

<comment><USER29> A VAT would apply to businesses as well as people. Considering the amount of manufacturing in CA, this would be quite significant.

<comment><USER28> Ok so that is the part that I was missing.

So that does spread that out a bit if you take into account anyone buying those manufactured goods outside of the state.

Then that personally raises the question on how this would scale nationwide, the cost to the business would ultimately be largely pushed down to the consumer. Maybe that is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but I keep hearing about a UBI and I struggle with seeing the logistics of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> States solving their own problems. If it's also properly funded by the state, it's the way it should be.

<comment><USER31> It says it will be funded by a 10% VAT.

<comment><USER17> Which is only a couple percent more than existing sales tax

<comment><USER32> Current sales tax is ~7.5%. Sales + VAT will be 17.5%, right?

<comment><USER33> For reference, VAT in the UK is 20%

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> We're due for a recession here in California. I follow the real estate gurus and they're a bit perplexed on why we aren't in one yet.

The timing of UBI and an impending recession are a bad formula for the state and will definitely change the political landscape of California. ie likely to see some politicians voted out of office and flipping the majority.

</comment><comment><USER35> Good - let's have a real world test and see whether there is something behind UBI as a concept.

And perhaps this'll be the first program to survive the trolls and nay-sayers who will find the smallest niche failures and sspout the "If ANYONE falls through the cracks it's a FAILURE!"

<comment><USER36> It's not UBI if you means test a lot of the poor out of it, which this bill actually does. Instead, it's just going to push them even further away from things like stable housing, as landlords jack up rents to eat it all up.

<comment><USER32> Also, it's funded by a regressive tax. Also, my reading says everyone's rent (edit: and child care!) is going up 10%, but hopefully, I'm wrong:

> _It is the intent of the Legislature to fund the CalUBI Program with a > value-added tax of 10 percent on goods and services, except medicine, > medical supplies and equipment, educational materials, including textbooks, > tuition or fees for education, food, groceries, and clothing._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ubi ... it's right there in the name: universal.

A ubi test that isn't universal seems potentially counterproductive to me.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd be a lot more interested if they'd fund it via property tax instead of VAT. Since California has such severe restrictions on housing construction, anything that puts more money in people pockets just gets absorbed by higher rent. The entire CA game is the fixed supply of housing eating up most of the economic output of individuals who aren't grandfathered in. So if you're going to fix it, collecting against the property owners who have spent decades greatly enriching themselves by making it prohibitively difficult for anyone new to move in would be a good start. Then when you go to try and remove the barriers to housing supply, they'd suddenly have a lot more reason to get on board (or at least get out of the way).

<comment><USER39> _I'd be a lot more interested if they'd fund it via property tax instead of VAT. Since California has such severe restrictions on housing construction_

If you increase property taxes, doesn't that make housing developers less likely to build high-value, high-density housing? And don't the property tax increases on existing housing just get passed on to the renters?

I've never rented in California, but I've rented in 13 other states, and in the handful of cities where I've lived during a property tax increase, the rent went up quite a bit (especially Chicago). One place even itemized it on the rent statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Do any other hackers wonder what the overhead is for collecting / enforcing a new tax (VAT)?

Like others have mentioned, it seemed like the benefits of UBI were to eliminate some redundancy from similar programs that require more administration. Creating a new tax seems non-trivial, but on the other hand would be easy to ratchet up down the road.

</comment><comment><USER41> The worse the better I say, as long as it doesn't spill over into other states. The long suffering CA taxpayer will wake up en masse one day, and sweep this bullshit aside, at which point CA might become livable again.

</comment><comment><USER42> The precautionary principle seems to be thrown to the wind here.

The unintended consequences of such a policy are far-reaching and poorly understood. UBI has seen a lot of coverage in the media recently and gets a lot of people excited on social media. Most coverage of it is shallow, but even the most in-depth studies of it that have been performed have been too small scale to have any bearing on the reality of transforming an entire state's economy.

It would be nice if we lived in a post-scarcity (or sufficiently close) economy where we could afford these things. I doubt we do.

<comment><USER43> Although both a smaller payout and a smaller state, the Alaska Permanent Fund is interesting precedent.

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

I agree that the CA proposal feels reckless, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think UBI is kind of dumb, but UBI on the state level is just plain stupid. If you don't control your currency, UBI is a non-starter.

<comment><USER45> Maybe we should start issuing Golden State Doubloons

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why only $1000/month, why not make it $10,000?

</comment><comment><USER47> There is no hope of something like this passing in the US. If it doesn't disenfranchise at least a few hated social groups its flat out un-American and the people won't stand for it. Fuck over felons, recent immigrants, black people, or someone like this and you might have a chance of getting it through. I'll grant you that California is its own weird little world, so yeah maybe its possible there, but for sure this won't fly in the US.

<comment><USER48> > Fuck over felons, recent immigrants, black people, or someone like this and > you might have a chance of getting it through.

This is surprising to me. Which recent california laws are you referring to that have done this?

<comment><USER47> Ah no, I am not saying California is up to this, but the rest of the US definitely is. I am from VA and can assure you that people would not be comfortable giving money equally to say, sex offenders or black people, as their WASP neighbor here. California is not like the rest of the US at all, so I withhold my opinion on what could pass there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm in favor of UBI, but it only works with floors on housing, healthcare, and possibly even food (which are more or less in place through ag subsidies anyway). All of this will just be eaten up by rents and rising healthcare costs, and means testing it makes it even more absurd, as it will exclude most vulnerable populations.

Given the recent state-wide rent control, it's hard to see this as anything other than a sop to landlords.

<comment><USER49> Wouldn't it be easier to move away from the big cities and the big rents with ubi?

<comment><USER36> No, because that's where the vast majority of jobs and other services are located.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Think there is an illegal immigration problem in CA now? Wait until UBI.

<comment><USER46> If you buy into some of the logic I've seen kicking around recently that: >housing shortage prevents poor people from participating in centers of high productivity, which reduces their economic output

then attracting as many warm bodies as possible to these "centers of productivity" will result in an explosion of wealth production

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Evan Low introduced this bill. He is on the ballot right now, please vote accordingly

<comment><USER52> Sadly, I'm not in his district, so I can't vote for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> how many people will move to Texas after this, to vote the same policies?

</comment><comment><USER41> Funny how HN readers can be at the same time overwhelmingly for Andrew Yang, and against the measure that implements one of the selling points of his campaign. :-)

<comment><USER54> "HN readers" aren't a person. They're a large population sample that is divided on divisive issues the same way any other large population sample is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you own real estate in California, I would sell while you still can.

<comment><USER56> Proposition 13 treats all California property taxes the same. Voters could change that in 2020</comment></comment>


Multifunctional (superhydrophobic) surfaces produced by femtosecond laser pulses - <AUTHOR> http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/117/3/10.1063/1.4905616

<comment><AUTHOR> The videos here:

[http://sploid.gizmodo.com/new-amazing-metal-is-so- hydrophobi...](http://sploid.gizmodo.com/new-amazing-metal-is-so-hydrophobic- it-makes-water-boun-1680799039)

are pretty amazing. Water bounces when it's dropped on the surfaces created this way.

They mention uses such as aircraft wings (no de-icing) and sanitation. I didn't see a mention of boat hulls, but that would be another area with a ton of commercial application.

</comment><comment> shawn-butler Relevant youtube video: [http://youtu.be/FLegmQ8_dHg](http://youtu.be/FLegmQ8_dHg)

I was wondering whether this could be done on glasses / transparent surfaces without greatly affecting the refractive index.

Possibilities are endless.</comment>


There are 700k open tech jobs in the US. Here is how companies can fill them - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/18/there-are-70000-open-tech-jobs-here-is-how-firms-are-hiring-for-them.html <comment><USER2> Perhaps the easiest suggestion: be open to hiring someone over the age of 25. When you read an article like this after seeing all the evidence of discrimination, it's hard to be sympathetic to employers.

<comment><USER3> I'm attempting to currently move into a junior SWE role after completing a second BS in Computer Science (I'll be done this fall). I'm 31 and my first degree is in finance. This is a major fear of mine.

<comment><USER4> You'll be fine. Have faith.

<comment><USER3> Thanks -- I got in my head a bit today after being passed over for two jobs. I appreciate the positive words, even in this anonymous internet form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it me, or are universities increasingly being expected to act as training and employment agencies for white collar jobs? The cost of job training has been shifted onto employees, and nobody seems to mind.

</comment><comment><USER6> 0\. Pay more.</comment>


The New York Times Proves that Newspapers Aren't Dead - <AUTHOR> http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-new-york-times-proves-that-newspapers-arent-dead/

<comment><USER2> Rather, the NYT proves quality content isn't dead. "Newspaper" is a distribution method, not a business model, or content model. Pretty sure the distribution model formerly known as Newspapers is indeed dead or dying. The article references gains in digital subscriptions only.</comment>


Are pilots with Android devices cheap? A new study says yes. - <AUTHOR> http://insidetakeoff.com/are-pilots-with-android-devices-less-likely-to-pay-for-apps/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a trend that expands far beyond aviation apps, but an interesting look from one developer. What do you think is behind this? Google Play has come a long way, and prompts for credit cards up front. Devices on Android aren't universally cheap, and shipments of Android devices crush that of iOS. What is the missing link?</comment>


Vimeo Disabled My Account for Submitting HTML - <AUTHOR> https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/vimeo-disabled-my-account-for-submitting-html <comment><USER2> I work at Vimeo. We use automated detection to flag suspicious accounts. This was a clear false-positive, and the account has been unsuspended.

We don't convert urls to hyperlinks in video descriptions when the user has signed up recently, because hyperlinked urls have been used by spammers to trick visitors into visiting fraudulent sites.

This is clearly legitimate behaviour in context, but a brand-new user posting identical descriptions and urls on multiple videos is behaviour commonly seen in spam accounts, and we tend to err on the side of caution.

Edit: clarified circumstances under which urls are converted

<comment><USER3> This is great and fast response here.

Does Vimeo has a way for human employee to proactively (not as a result of social media shaming) look at- and unblock customer account in case it was a result of false positive?

Ban-first, handle-later is not exactly customer friendly policy.

<comment><USER2> > Does Vimeo has a way for human employee to proactively (not as a result of > social media shaming) look at- and unblock customer account in case it was a > result of false positive?

No, but we have a great support team that responds to all customer enquiries (though paying customers get priority).

> Ban-first, handle-later is not exactly customer friendly policy.

It is when the content being banned might harm customers.

<comment><USER4> > It is when the content being banned might harm customers.

I think this is the right way to approach it because it seems, and this is entirely my unscientific view, a lot of those scammer websites target uploading to Vimeo, Dailymotion, and so on (basically, the websites that aren't as big as YouTube) because they think that being a smaller outfit, the company is less likely to flag and remove the viedo.

Then those scam videos turn up relatively high in Google Searches for full movies, full episodes, etc.

I notice this especially for non-English, non-Hollywood content. Lots of French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean stuff, all with dubious links.

<comment><USER5> I think it's not.

If the scoring system detects some suspicious activity, it's the current operation which should be halted (in this context, the video should have been retired), but not the user account.

If after a human review, the account present evident violation of TOS, then, yes, ban the user.

edit: bad grammar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something I've found to be true in both game design and software UX is that generally speaking, you want users to feel safe trying new things. This helps sidestep some problems that tech-illiterate users have where they become scared to guess where anything is and have to be shown how to do everything. In game design, it makes it easier to teach users new mechanics.

It's also a prerequisite to having more intuitive, predictable interface. You can train people to just try clicking things or looking in their settings to see if something will work, but only if they're not worried that they're about to break the application. In a game, people will experiment and learn new mechanics, but not if they're worried that doing something wrong will come with severe consequences.

Reading this, I'm suddenly struck that policies and terms are subject to the same rules.

Of course I know that the point of having vague policies around stuff like this is very explicitly to _not_ allow bad actors to feel safe probing your system. The point is to _avoid_ the above scenario. But it occurs to me that this is a tradeoff. In order to keep bad actors from experimenting, you are also going to keep good actors from experimenting. People will be very careful not to go off the beaten path with your service, even to the point where they'll avoid building creative things.

They'll contact support more often instead of just trying things, and they'll be less creative with how they use your platform. Back when Youtube still had annotations working, I saw people building weird overlays and choose-your-own- adventure videos. Seeing that I could get banned this quickly for even accidentally stepping out of line in one place, I would never try something like that on Vimeo.

This doesn't mean that Vimeo's policies are bad. Vimeo may not even _want_ people to experiment with their service. But the choice to immediately ban users, rather than popping up a notification or error message -- it's not just a policy decision, it's a UX/design decision, and it changes the way that ordinary people will interact with the company.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's important to quickly abandon companies that have automated account closure systems.

The message has to be conveyed to these companies that automated account closures result in loss of business.

Automated suspicious activity systems should be flagging the issue for human attention within that company, where presumably someone will make a considered decision about the issue and communicate effectively with the account holder about what the issue is to understand and resolve it.

Auto account closures are completely unacceptable where someone is paying for that service.

<comment><USER8> First, he mentioned explicitly that he did not pay for their service, he was a free user.

Second, every system open to the public that has even a moderate amount of users has automated abuse detection and mitigation techniques in place. It's flat out irresponsible to not have such systems in place, ESPECIALLY if you have paying customers s the opportunity for abuse are huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of that startup that recently got knocked off the web by digital oceans automated system.

Scary to think that for us average Joes, our accounts can be nuked with no recourse unless you have a large Twitter following to get someone important to notice

<comment><USER10> I'm surprised customer service just doesn't exist. Google can get away with it but vimeo with 15% market share can't afford to throw in the towel on support already.

<comment><USER11> How much customer service should a $0/month subscription buy?

<comment><USER10> Put another way videos uploaded by the average user earned vimeo 'x' dollars over the last month.

Without any revenue they close up.

How many customers can they afford to lose? 5%,10%, 90%

If they don't support the free tier users they will lose them. At one point vimeo was making a serious run for global marketshare.. now it looks like they are in a different market..

<comment><USER2> > At one point vimeo was making a serious run for global marketshare

Vimeo hasn't been going for global marketshare of video watching in well over a decade - it ceded that competition to YouTube very early on by policing content more actively (Viacom sued YouTube in 2007 for $1B because of its lax enforcement of rules).

Vimeo chose a different direction, launching a paid account in 2008: [https://vimeo.com/1977937](https://vimeo.com/1977937)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm thinking about making a website that lists all dark patterns and user experience fudges of a given service/app/website so that we users/customers can better choose where our time/money is going.

Users would be able to complain about: Phantom credit card charges, captcha walls, requiring cellphone verification, random account termination, etc.

What do you think about it? I think it's really susceptible to astroturfing, but maybe there's a way to fix that.

<comment><USER13> If I grabbed 50 friends and we all posted identical and untrue complaints on your website, stating that you randomly deleted our accounts, would you delete our accounts?

<comment><USER12> Not those accounts specifically.

Maybe I would have to implement a system that deletes accounts automatically when comments are identical. It's unlikely though, because I prefer to err on the side of deregulation and would not like to delete accounts, even if I'm 90% sure that those accounts are bots. I presume innocence until proven guilty (where guilty: breaking the site rules).

It's impossible for me to know what complaints are true and which aren't for every complaint in the site, so I wouldn't delete any of them based solely on their truth value. I wouldn't even delete those that I know are false.

It's all imagination though, I don't know if I'm ever going to create the site. I just wanted to gauge interest and maybe receive some criticism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to use Vimeo for hosting product videos that I embedded onto my website. It was better than YouTube because it didn't show "recommended videos" (often with competitors' products or useless videos) after it finished playing. But then Vimeo started doing it too for embedded videos, so I switched to YouTube since users are more familiar with its UI.

<comment><USER15> You can pass rel=0 to YouTube iframes to only recommend additional videos from the same channel. [https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel](https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel)

<comment><USER16> For now, at least. "rel=0" used to mean "don't show related videos at all"; now it means "only show related videos from the same uploader", and I wouldn't be shocked if YouTube limited its functionality even further in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least they tell you what's going on, some other websites will just throw you a "login failed" and that's it.

</comment><comment><USER18> >indicating that it may be in violation of our Acceptable User Policy.

Well, was it? The author makes no claim that he didn't violate the policy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't find anything in any of their policies that submitting markup for inclusion in the video description is a violation.</comment></comment>


ECG Machine On The Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://www.swharden.com/blog/2009-08-14-diy-ecg-machine-on-the-cheap/

<comment><USER2> Make sure to look at the comments about isolation before trying to build this!</comment>


RMS Speaking at Berkeley - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/events/20091116berkeley

<comment><USER2> RMS is going to be sleeping on a friend of mine's couch (no joke). Apparently he prefers to stay with graduate students, rather than sleep in a hotel.

<comment><USER3> Hotels have standards, grad students not so much... (sorry, it had to be said :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> at Cal, I was in a student organization that kept a disused plastic grocery sack supposedly dropped by RMS inside an altoids tin marked "RMS BAG" as if it were a piece of the true cross.

<comment><USER5> Stallman and the tragedy of the commons? Irony? Or just zealots?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> He's worth listening to even if you disagree with him, IMO.</comment>


We Are Bad at Moderation: Why I'm Deleting Twitter and Instagram from My Phone - <AUTHOR> https://shawnblanc.net/2019/01/we-are-bad-at-moderation/ <comment><USER2> Two good questions from the article that are great to ask:

\--What is something in your life right now that you think is very essential and important, but is something you are not giving very much time or attention to?

\--What is something in your life that you do NOT consider to be essential but yet it is receiving too much of your time and attention?"</comment>


Ale – A Lisp Environment Written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.ale-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> I believe every new LISP author should begin their presentation with how does their language compare to other LISPs (CommonLisp, Racket and Clojure in particular). Mentioning it's a LISP-1 in the beginning is nice but not really enough.

<comment><USER3> I agree, though they did put some of the first-questions-that-come-to-mind on the second page, "[https://www.ale-lang.org/intro/"](https://www.ale- lang.org/intro/"):

> _What is Ale?_

> _Ale is a Lisp-1. In this way it is more like Scheme than like Common Lisp. > Unlike many Lisps, Ale does not support both interpreted and compiled > operation. Instead, when the programmer performs an (eval), Ale immediately > compiles the form and invokes its virtual machine. And unlike nearly all > Lisps, bindings in Ale are immutable, even in namespaces._

> _Ale borrows from Clojure where syntax is concerned, but it diverges in many > ways. It is designed to be hosted in a Go process. It is also designed to > allow multiple hosted instances within that process, each one being > completely isolated from the other._

Most new Lisp implementations are hobby/educational, and/or driven by a particular corner of implementation or language design (e.g., target the JVM or some other language backend, fit on a microcontroller, support a million threads, support STM or some unusual evaluation model, new terse syntax).

Would be nice if new Lisps that were focused only on implementation (rather than language design) used R7RS Scheme or CL as their language design. Then they'd have a better chance of uptake, compared to a new "generic Lisp".

<comment><USER4> [https://twitter.com/kode4food/status/1137335122330566657](https://twitter.com/kode4food/status/1137335122330566657)

<comment><USER3> Excellent. You might also like R5RS or R7RS, plus `syntax-case` (though `syntax-rules` is very nice, when the problem fits it). For work that builds upon Scheme's syntax extension mechanisms, see Racket for ideas, including its syntax objects, very powerful `syntax-parse`, a very simple template-based syntax transformer, and the `#lang` feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this has a lot of potential if it's able to call Go functions, like Clojure can call Java functions. The language would have a healthy ecosystem of libraries to boot.

<comment><USER5> It's weird to me that there aren't more compile-to-Go languages. The ecosystem of Go packages is great, and the runtime is undergoing continuous refinement by a team of really smart people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who like Clojure's LISP syntax, there is also Joker, which is similarly written in Go.

<comment><USER7> And Ferret too. [https://nakkaya.com/2016/06/10/ferret-a-hard-real-time- cloju...](https://nakkaya.com/2016/06/10/ferret-a-hard-real-time-clojure-for- lisp-machines/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a similar concept in Python: [http://hylang.org/](http://hylang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's another one:

[https://github.com/glycerine/zygomys](https://github.com/glycerine/zygomys)

I think he wrote it with a TSDB in mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks great. I want a compile to Go lisp 2, though. Just putting it out there. :-) My efforts are likely to take a while...

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd prefer the reverse probably.

Or forget go and just write lisp in lisp, as McCarthy intended. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER12> The main feature Go was missing that took away most of the usefulness of writing a Lisp in it was FFI. If you can't dynamically get identifiers (constants, functions, variables) by a string at runtime, you lose most of the interesting desktop possibilities. It's probably still useful as a server-side language but Lisps seem the most useful in the GUI space.

Also it says this in the author's latest blog post:

> _" Yes, there are a lot of parens, but that is a small price to pay for a > language that is capable of morphing itself into nearly anything you need it > to be. And the way that Lisp does that is with a macro system that puts > #define to shame!"_

I'm convinced this is not the real benefit of a Lisp. The only thing macros can do that functions can't is hide control flow. And 99% of the time that's a _bad thing_ that library authors should _not_ use. It could be used to make other language features such as concurrency, but that's a slippery slope.

The real benefit of macros in my opinion is a balanced syntax that makes things like Emacs + paredit possible, which increases your productivity like 5x-10x. It's on another level, definitely worth trying for a few months if you work with a Lisp already. But I don't see any other real value in Lisp's syntax or in macros.

<comment><USER13> Nah man,macros are the bee's knees! Being able to add new constructs to a language is neat. My favourite examples are match.scm - a pattern matcher that produces zero overhead code - and racket's for loops, which are just regular macros.

Being able to add features like that is amazing. Clojure'sarrow syntax? No problem. Python's list comprehensions? Can be done! A library for Pattern matching? Many to chose from!

Pattern matchers that were added to other languages as libraries are often weird to use. Match.scm has the same syntax as cond or case.

<comment><USER14> Lisp always sounds cool to me until someone starts talking about macros. What's it like inheriting a lisp code base, finding out its full of homemade macros like list comprehensions, and that they're not documented? Inheriting a code base is always scary, but I feel like it kicks it up a notch when your predecessors can customize the language itself. Are my fears justified?

<comment><USER15> > _What 's it like inheriting a lisp code base, finding out its full of > homemade macros like list comprehensions, and that they're not documented?_

If such a macro is used in more than two places, it's generally a relief that the author did _that_ instead of doing copy and paste by hand.

The author had some coding idea, and formalized it into a little robot that writes that idea, which has a name.

Even if that thing isn't accompanied by documentation, it can serve as a kind of documentation to what it's doing.

Code is going to be full of homemade functions that are not documented; whether they are functions that write code at compile time, or whether they are run-time functions, is kind of a minor concern.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An argument against call/cc (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/against-callcc.html

<comment><USER2> FWIW, the behavior of call/cc, et. al., is implementation dependent, and memory leakiness varies considerably.

I tried the "memory leak" tests in Chicken (4.9.1) using the CSI REPL. The only modification made to the example "gen-leak.scm" was uncommenting the (display ...) line in (print-stream ...).

The result with (print-stream #f (gen-stream ones)) was non-terminating production of "1", like an infinite loop, but it _didn 't run out of memory_, even after running >10 minutes in a resource-constrained VM.

I'm not familiar enough with how call/cc is implemented in Scheme48 vs. Chicken to comment in detail, but I'm sure there are substantial differences. The Chicken site ([http://call-cc.org](http://call-cc.org)) provides quite a bit of info about its own implementation.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you generalize labels so that they become first class, then call/cc can be written in terms of goto. [http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/goto.html](http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/goto.html)

<comment><USER4> It's longjmp.

<comment><USER5> not quite. It is similar to longjmp except that this can jump down the stack. these labels can be jumped to even after the function returns

<comment><USER6> Right. The way it was explained to me years ago that really stuck with me is that one way to implement call/cc is to copy the stack onto the heap.

(And another way to do it is to simply allocate all your function call frames on the heap to begin with and not have a stack. Then call/cc is essentially free, but you need a really good incremental garbage collector because now every function call conses.)

<comment><USER3> Does copying the stack really work? What if some local variable changes in between the call/cc and calling the continuation? If the stack is a copy, that change will not be reflected when the continuation runs.

<comment><USER6> That's a very interesting point. AFAICT, the Scheme standard doesn't actually say what should happen in this case. But here's what e.g. Chibi scheme does:

        > (let ((x 0)) (list (call/cc (lambda (f) (set! x 1) (f 2))) x))
        (2 0)

<comment><USER3> The equivalent in Oort produces:

        localhost:~/oort/examples% ../oort callcc2.nl
        2
        1

as expected since Oort uses heap allocated activation records.

The Oort program:

        typedef continuation_t = fn (p: int32) -> void;

        call_cc (fun: fn(k: continuation_t) -> void) -> int32
        {
            retval: int32;

            fun (fn (v: int32) -> void {
                retval = v;
                goto current_continuation;
            });

            // If fun returns without calling the continuation,
            // then just return 0
            return 0;

        @current_continuation:
            return retval;
        }

        x: int32 = 0;

        print call_cc (fn (k: continuation_t) {
            x = 1;
            k (2);
            });

        print x;

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Delimited continuations are better. Guile has them, and they rock. It's very easy to implement coroutines and other control flow structures with them.

<comment><USER8> This is covered in the article

<comment><USER9> I wonder how much that paper influenced guile delimited continuations support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems a bit ironic to see this posted on one of the few sites on the internet that use continuations as it's primary control flow mechanism.</comment>


Show HN: A Developer's Business Card - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sindresorhus/sindresorhus <comment><USER2> I'm struggling to imagine the use case where anyone would use this. Who wants to run an arbitrary script from the internet directly on their machine, instead of just looking at a web page? How do you even find this without looking at the page first?

Cool demo nonetheless though.

It'd be really neat actually (and more practical) if these were autogenerated and available more widely with something like `npm whois [username]`</comment>


Babel 6 plugin which allows to use webpack loaders - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/istarkov/babel-plugin-webpack-loaders <comment><USER2> On the other hand you can just have Webpack target Node, which sort of results in the same thing with a Webpack bootstrap around it. With exactly the same downsides, but convenient if you're already using Webpack for your clientside code.

I've recently set up a project with server and browser JS (and some shared things), having both bundled by Webpack and just NPM scripts to glue everything together. It's nice to have a single powerful tool that can handle pretty much all of your bundling and transpiling needs, the mental overhead gets smaller that way.

<comment><USER3> Have things changed since [http://jlongster.com/Backend-Apps-with-Webpack-- Part-I](http://jlongster.com/Backend-Apps-with-Webpack--Part-I) ? It sounded like there were a ton of workarounds to get Webpack working on the backend.

<comment><USER2> It's not as much of a mess as it seems there. I started out with James Long's config as well but quickly simplified everything and ended up with the following (left out some project-specific stuff):

[https://gist.github.com/Ambroos/8299d0c0d322cd3a736d](https://gist.github.com/Ambroos/8299d0c0d322cd3a736d)

As most complex things in Webpack do, it still feels like a hack at first.

Using simply _/ ^(?!\\.|\/).+/i_ in externals is way easier than scanning the filesystem for module names and usually more reliable. You simply assume that everything that is accessed with a relative path is local, and everything else is an external module. Add _libraryTarget: 'commonjs'_ to tell Webpack to simply use classic requires for externals and to bundle everything up in the end, and you're done. Add loaders and plugins to your own preference.

You end up with one giant Javascript file that, when ran through Node, does exactly what you expect it to (but still requires NPM dependencies externally, so you can't 'just' use the bundled file without _npm install_ ).</comment></comment></comment>


The Ubiquitous B-Tree (1979) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://wwwold.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2002/cmsc818s/Readings/b-tree.pdf <comment><USER2> Both times before this was posted it garnered 0 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317545)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243568)

When I read this I immediately recognized it as a PDF that I have in GoodReader (where I store all my technical PDFs). So I'm curious if it will start a good conversation about b-trees this time :)

To get the conversation started, a couple of years ago, I decided to write a b-tree data structure to refresh my skills a bit. I wrote it in C since I've been doing a lot of Java the last 10 years or so. I only got as far as an in- memory b-tree and had started working on getting it stored to disk before I abandoned the project (think I was working on it during Christmas holidays and the holiday ended).

I subsequently read that in-memory b-trees can actually outperform other tree data structures like rb-trees due to cache coherency. I never bothered to performance test my b-tree vs. an rb-tree I also wrote for fun.

Anyway, that's my story about b-trees!

<comment><USER3> Cache coherency is something else.

But ya, B-Trees will (sometimes significantly) outperform BSTs for small keys because they will have fewer cache misses. Also interesting is that the idea that RB-Trees are faster than AVL trees for insert/delete may be outdated as well. I've seen benchmarks of AVL trees beating std::set in both libstdc++ and libc++ for both of those operations. Again this is probably due to less cache misses.

My B-Tree story is actually a B+Tree story. B-Trees (and B+Trees) can can actually be used for more than just ordered sets/maps, I've implemented a C++ sequence container[1] that allows O(log n) random access insertion and deletion. It is _much_ faster than a similar container[2] implemented using AVL trees, but at the cost of iterator stability.

[1] [https://github.com/det/segmented_tree_seq](https://github.com/det/segmented_tree_seq)

[2] [http://avl-array.sourceforge.net](http://avl-array.sourceforge.net)

<comment><USER2> > Cache coherency is something else.

Ugh, yes, sorry about that. I meant that they are more cache friendly.

Not to disagree with anything you've said and only to back up what I was trying to get at is this SO answer:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/647537/b-tree-faster- than...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/647537/b-tree-faster-than-avl-or- redblack-tree?answertab=votes#tab-top)

The part I'm talking about is:

      Also, unless you play nasty allocation tricks with the red-
      black trees, it seems reasonable to conjecture that B-trees
      have better caching behavior (it accesses an array, not
      pointers strewn about all over the place, and has less
      allocation overhead increasing memory locality even more),
      which might help it in the speed race.

That's not exactly the reference I was thinking of, but it says what I remember about it.

Again, not taking away from what you're saying and not disagreeing with you in any way, more backing up what I originally said ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are interested in an overview of B-Trees, similar data structures, and how well they work on modern hardware, you may also find the survey bit of my master thesis interesting:

See here: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian_Gross/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian_Gross/publicati..).

Along those lines:

* CSS Trees: Pointerless b-Trees with a layout optimized for cache lines ([http://www.vldb.org/conf/1999/P7.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/conf/1999/P7.pdf))

* Intel & Oracle's fast architecture-sensitive tree search (combines huge pages, cache line blocking, and SIMD in an optimal layout): [http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jatin_Chhugani/publicati...](http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jatin_Chhugani/publication/221213860_FAST_fast_architecture_sensitive_tree_search_on_modern_CPUs_and_GPUs/links/0c96051f5d2990770d000000.pdf)

* Adaptive radix trees ([http://codematch.muehe.org/~leis/papers/ART.pdf](http://codematch.muehe.org/~leis/papers/ART.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER5> A lucid, enjoyable paper that allowed me to write a very fast B-Tree implementation in nascent ANSI C back in the day. Comer's books always struck just the right balance between scholarly completeness and clarity, at least to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why does the root have only two children and not d, like every other non-leaf node?

<comment><USER3> Because when you split the root, it can only have 2 children.

<comment><USER6> I didn't understand your answer even after rereading about tree operations but I think I found out the actual reason why the root can have less than d children:

it is because of rebalancing after deletion. Underflows can go all the way up to the root so its children can borrow its indices. And when root has only one index (and two children) and another underflow occurs then its children combined with its index can form a new root decreasing the tree height by one.</comment></comment></comment>


That's it, finding co-founders is SproutRobot's new #1 priority - <AUTHOR> http://tumblr.sproutrobot.com/post/3927090937/were-bringing-gardening-to-the-masses-join-us

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this for two years now. We launched 10 months ago, and we've got 5000+ users signed up and just under 100 paying subscribers. I've had help off and on over the years, but the I've been shouldering all of the long-term responsibility.

I've learned a lot going it alone... and I'll keep going alone as long as it takes. The basic concept is proven, a lot of the technology is in place, and I think we can grow a lot faster than we are, but not if I'm doing all the work by myself.

So, I'm cutting back on development a bit, and I'm putting my energy into finding co-founders. I'm looking for tech, biz, and gardening people, so please get in touch if you're interested.

And if you like the service, you think it's a good idea, you think gardening SHOULD be easier and you want to help us succeed.... please help spread the word.

<comment><USER2> Where are you based?

I have sent your link to a buddy of mine who would be perfect for your Gardening CoFounder...

He is in Marin (SF Bay Area)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm based in Phoenix right now, but I'm happy to work in a distributed way for now. At some point, we'll potentially incubate somewhere. And when the time comes, we'll have to set up offices. But right now, I am just looking for people who are really excited about the space, and we'll figure out a way to make it work!</comment></comment></comment>


Shady Microsoft Plugin Pokes "Critical" Hole In Firefox Security - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5383413/shady-microsoft-plugin-pokes-critical-hole-in-firefox-security <comment><USER2> Adobe, Skype, and almost every client software developer automatically and silently adds plugins to Firefox and other browsers. I recommend looking at your list of Firefox add-ons now (especially the plugins tab) and see how many of them were never specifically added to Firefox by you.

This is the kind of situation where the software vendor is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Mozilla simultaneously complains when they aren't getting the same treatment as IE, and when they do. People hate multi-page installation wizards that ask them to check all kinds of boxes; people hate when the software decides automatically what to do in order to avoid those pages of checkboxes.

<comment><USER3> Why don't firefox make it so that the only way a plugin can be installed is with user confirmation? I'd never want a plugin automatically installed without knowing about it (I've never had that happen, but may be different on OSX).

<comment><USER4> That's impossible under traditional system configurations. Windows Update can always update whatever "user has confirmed" record Firefox stores, because it has administrative access to the machine.

<comment><USER3> Surely just make the [user confirmed plugin install] update something with a secret hash token.

When firefox starts, it checks each plugin has been explicitly accepted by the user. If not, it alerts them.

Sure, you could reverse engineer the signing token, and hack around it, but that wouldn't get you many friends.

<comment><USER4> Neither does including anti-Microsoft code in your product. (it doesn't protect against shadier players because those don't care about having friends.)

<comment><USER3> That's not anti-ms. That's just good security. I'd like to know when something is messing with my browser executable.

<comment><USER4> Like I said, it's not effective. If malware wants to futz with your browser executable, it's just going to patch the executable, not conveniently go through the plugin interface around which you've designed some forgeable security token.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I seem to recall Microsoft criticizing Chrome Frame for making IE less secure just a few weeks ago...

<comment><USER2> I wonder if people who support this move would support Microsoft adding Chrome Frame to IE's ActiveX blacklist under the same circumstances.

<comment><USER6> If it made IE vulnerable to a drive-by owning, and was installed without the express permission of IE's users? I find it hard to imagine an argument against blacklisting it. So far all we have is conjecture though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great... I actually JUST got a popup from Firefox about this. This is why I don't use my old windows laptop for anything important.

<comment><USER8> Ack, I got this notice from Fx last night. Yikes!

<comment><USER9> yeah me too and was confused and after reading this removed it off my Windows Vista laptop. Damn MICROSOFT! Just kill IE already!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only reason I kept from switching to Opera was that I would have to re- learn some keyboard shortcuts.

But you know what? I don't care anymore. Firefox has become too bloated anyway, and this just seals the deal.

<comment><USER11> You can actually remap all the Opera keyboard shortcuts to match your preferences - it's reasonably robust.

Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From a legal point of view, how can they justify silently and without my approval, modifying non-Microsoft software running on my computer ?

<comment><USER13> They didn't modify FF. FF includes a way to use plugins. They just put a plugin in a specified place. They didn't really change anything about other programs.

<comment><USER12> I'm not talking about tehnical aspects here. Firefox had no known security holes before the update. They clearly modified it in some way. How they did it is irrelevant. They should be liable, whether they modified FF direcly or indirectly via plugins etc. What they did fits the definition of malware to the letter: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware>

(Oh, and for the record, I'm not a anti-MS zealot, it's just kinda scary to think about the power MS has, to push updates to HUNDERDS of millions of PC. I think with that power should also come great responsability)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The patch has been out for a week. You've already got it if you're running Windows update. Firefox's reaction was all post-patch.

Lots of things install themselves in your browser to work. Acrobat, Java, etc. (In fact, the add-in is mostly equivalent to Java.)

I don't have sympathy with people who are worried about running a few thousand lines of Microsoft code on a platform that already contains hundreds of millions of lines of it.

On the other hand, the lack of uninstall is just bad. Microsoft is reliable about shooting itself in the foot, that's for sure.

<comment><USER15> There's a distinction though. Acrobat, Java, and others all asked to be let into Firefox. They update silently after that but they initially asked permission. If Microsoft made a .Net Assistant plug-in I can't imagine people would be upset.

But using Windows update (which most expect to update "Windows" not your other programs) is, imho, considered sneaking it in.

<comment><USER16> This is the geek's way of looking at the world, where we are God Lord and Master of all bits on our computer.

The average user is _not_. They do not understand that the browser and the operating system are separate. For that matter, they don't understand that the browser is not the Internet or Google.

(If you've ever done technical support for a web application with non- technical end users you end up answering many, many fun questions such as "I signed up for your website at home -- can I also use it at school? My email address there is different.")

Asking users to make complex install/update/etc decisions is _asking users to fail_. They should be presented with sensible defaults and a minimum of fuss. Windows Update is quite sensible: "This comes turned on. Turn it off only if you understand what you're doing. As long as you keep it on, we'll keep you mostly covered." Installing ActiveX, Java, Adobe PDF Reader, and Flash by default is also very sensible, because otherwise many users will have "The Internet is broken!" experiences.</comment></comment></comment>


UK to get first commercial refinery for extracting precious metals from e-waste - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/22/britain-first-commercial-refinery-extracting-precious-metals-e-waste-mint-innovation <comment><USER2> Hmm... Could be bullshit but if it works I'd be all for recycling stuff locally instead of sending it to impoverished countries for what basically amounts to slave labour</comment>


Welcome to the Old Internet Again - <AUTHOR> http://theoldnet.com/browser/ <comment><USER2> Now that's something else! How delightful. Drawn from the Wayback Machine perhaps?</comment>


What happens when you pay PayPal $15k in fees? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/paypal/comments/6lhxme/what_happens_when_you_pay_paypal_15k_in_fees/ <comment><USER2> TLDR; don't use paypal unless your business can sustain large amounts of frozen funds, terrible customer support, and shady fees and business practices.

<comment><USER3> I'm baffled by the ongoing willingness to use Paypal. It's been a terrible company since seemingly forever. 116 days I wrote a comment about how terrible it is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851855) that in turn references my own horror story, from more than a decade ago, 28 days before that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624393).

<comment><USER4> This is because consumers love PayPal. It means I am not giving my credit card to a potentially shady person and that I have a way to cancel the service. I also have 1 place where I can see all my subscriptions, so I don't keep subscribed to services I don't use but forgot about.

In general, if there are two equivalent options and one takes PayPal and the other doesn't, I am going with the one that takes PayPal.

<comment><USER5> As a consumer, I prefer Stripe's interface. It is low friction; I enter my details one a site when making a purchase, and if I opt-in, those details are available on any site using Stripe. And protected behind SMS temp passwords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This company is pure scum.

Without sharing the details of my personal grievances I can assure you that you are better off sending money to others securely using any other payment system on the planet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Who is the payment processing leader at this point for digital payments? I assume Stripe, no?

<comment><USER8> We've had issues with Stripe as well. For example, one of our customers forgot they were paying (happily) for a subscription to our software, and they flagged a recurring charge with their CC company. When Stripe notified us of the flag, we quickly showed them server logs showing that the customer was still actively using our software. We also provided the original purchase information and screenshot of what the user saw right before making the purchase.

Stripe said we lost the dispute because we didn't provide the customer's driver's license. (What?!) We persisted and at this point contacted the customer, who readily admitted that he was still using our software and was happy to pay for it. Unfortunately, even this was not enough for Stripe, who refused to reverse their levy on us. They claimed that someone had stolen the CC from its true owner, signed up for our software, and was emailing us from a fraudulent email address.

At this point, the customer (who was really nice) called their CC company several times to say that it was all a misunderstanding and that the charge was justified. But Stripe refused to accept this as proof. They might not be as bad as PayPal, but they're not saints either.

<comment><USER9> To be honest, this sounds like the experience you would have with any other merchant bank. They have zero impact on if you win the dispute or not, and most of those charges from them are likely (marked up) pass-thru.

The deeper you go into this world the more upset you are going to get. Basically the answer in pretty much absolutely any dispute or anything out of the ordinary is "merchant pays". It's not worth your time to dispute it in the manner you did, as you will likely find out over time.

Your story sounds like at least a dozen merchant banks I've worked with in the past in various capacities, I'm honestly surprised they even spent that much time talking to you about it. Things may be changing this day in age, but 10 years ago basically any card not present transaction that was disputed you automatically lost, and the Visa or Mastercard network would charge you the $35 for the trouble of you being defrauded by a customer :)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it seems the only point in responding is to avoid being flagged as a fraudster. It is unclear whether Stripe's fraud detection system treats you differently if you (1) are flagged by a customer and do not respond; or (2) are flagged by a customer, respond substantively, but are nonetheless denied. If these have the same impact on your risk profile as a vendor, it is 100% not worth it to respond.

<comment><USER9> Good point, I didn't really consider that aspect. I truly do wonder now if it matters at all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not unique to PayPal, it's standard in the credit card processing business. [https://www.merchantmaverick.com/understanding-rolling- reser...](https://www.merchantmaverick.com/understanding-rolling-reserve-put- business/)

However, they do seem particularly aggressive in applying a reserve in this case.

We are missing a lot of data here, for example the business' chargeback rate.

<comment><USER11> >It's worth noting that our chargeback rate is well under 0.1%

<comment><USER10> Thanks for highlighting. This does seem pretty aggressive.

This does stink, but they have options. If their revenue is as large as they state, they can likely go to a bank and get a line of credit with their receivables as collateral. If they were in a B2B business, they would likely be facing Net 45 terms from their customers anyway. [http://www.comcapfactoring.com/blog/line-of-credit- secured-b...](http://www.comcapfactoring.com/blog/line-of-credit-secured-by- accounts-receivable/)

<comment><USER9> I'm curious if they need Paypal due to customer preference, or if they could simply accept credit cards directly. At that volume, implementing your own merchant account sounds like a much better idea than paying the absurd rates Paypal charges.

However, I'm fairly certain that they would have thought of this :) I'm assuming they need to accept Paypal due to customer demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Back in my college years, the standard procedure was to have multiple accounts. Paypal guys can easily close/freeze like 10 out of 20 accs after first chargeback dispute, but to leave remaining 10 even when they were listed on the same webpage. I thank their lazyness

</comment><comment><USER13> Lots of complaints about receiving money from a stolen credit card, and surprise surprise _Paypal takes the money back_. What, they should eat the cost of cheaters? Why? They should use their resources to get your goods back? Why?

Selling stuff mail-order is risky; you get cheated sometimes. Paypal is not going to fix that for you.

</comment><comment><USER14> Are we talking paypal or payflow? Because 15k in fees is virtually nothing.</comment>


Post-Darwinian Evolution - <AUTHOR> http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/01/post-darwinian-evolution.html

<comment><USER2> The article's title isn't supported by its content. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is in fact the result of natural selection with the aid of random mutations. The difference between this and conventional natural selection is that the random mutations are already present in the bacterial population exposed to the antibiotic. This speeds up the process of natural selection, it doesn't contradict it.

There is no such thing as "post-Darwinian evolution". It's link-bait, not a coherent argument.</comment>


The face behind your website - <AUTHOR> http://wistia.com/blog/the-face-behind-your-website/ <comment><USER2> Chris is a really good dude. Every company should be doing this, and the effects (such as the names above the people) and the quality video editing made it stellar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't help myself: if you love the video, you need to check out Chris Lavigne at crlvideo.com. he did all the shooting and editing (and did a super job!)

<comment><USER4> +1, Chris did a great job and was a pleasure to work with!

<comment><USER5> Plus, he has perhaps the coolest tripod ever!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love Wistia. They understand customers better than anyone.

</comment><comment><USER7> okay, this is AWESOME!</comment>


From an email and form to $25k in 3 months - <AUTHOR> http://medium.com/who-what-why/c744d79a6e76

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6213196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6213196)</comment>