No company should ever have a noreply email address - <AUTHOR> http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/09/no-company-should-ever-have-a-noreply-email-address/ <comment><USER2> That's a nice theory, in the abstract.

In the concrete... replying to email costs money... a lot of money. First of all, just wading through the out of office, change of address, and bounces probably costs 10-20 cents each. But answering a real customer email with a real person probably costs $5-$20 depending on the kind of company you are.

Now, there are many businesses (like Zappos) for whom it is worth it, and there are businesses (like Facebook) for whom it is not. If you have a million customers and you make about $2 off of each one, well, replying to their email is going to blow any hope you ever had of profiting from them. Customers who like to have penpal relationships with companies are costly customers. Some places might think that losing those customers is no big deal, especially if they have other, well-established ways of getting in touch. For example, the phone company. They're usually a monopoly or a duopoly. They might send out millions of emails to fulfill some legal requirement to notify you that from now on the APR on late fees has gone up. They literally do not need to talk to you about this. They really don't. Anyone that would reply to such a message is suddenly going to become an unprofitable customer. They're monopolies or near-monopolies so they don't care.

Don't get me wrong... ALL my email replies work... anything that Fog Creek every sends out and anything that I ever send out to the 60,000 people on my mailing list... I get every single bounce and delete them all by hand.

But that's me. The "one size fits all" belief that EVERY company needs to read ALL their email sounds good in theory but it's obvious that plenty of businesses are making a business decision not to send from real email addresses and they're not always doing it out of stupidity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some good points, but I think you're exaggerating.

 _First of all, just wading through the out of office, change of address, and bounces probably costs 10-20 cents each._

Just like spam, if it's costing you 10-20 cents to filter out these emails, you're doing it wrong. A well-trained bayesian system would probably correctly identify 99.9% of these emails. Sure, you might miss .1%, but you're missing 100% now.

 _But answering a real customer email with a real person probably costs $5-$20 depending on the kind of company you are._

And if this is the case, you're also doing it wrong. First of all, probably less than 1% of people are going to respond to these emails, especially things like order and shipping confirmations. Of those that do respond (and assuming you've already filtered out-of-office, bounces, etc), you can probably put the rest into one of three buckets:

      1. Emails where no response is required
      2. Emails where a simple canned response is sufficient
      3. Emails that require some kind of action or lenghty response

I'm willing to bet that the majority of emails would fall into bucket #2. The best way to handle this would be a system where the CS agents can see the email and select a pre-defined response with a single click. This is going to cost you almost nothing. Again, bayesian systems would help with suggested responses. Canned responses aren't ideal, but they're better than nothing, and they come from an actual human being who can deal with further messages if needed.

Responses to emails in category #3 are where you're right: it would cost $5 - 20 to handle. However, _these are customers who need real customer service_. Your proposed alternative is to bounce their messages and leave them frustrated. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid.

Finally, even if Facebook does make $2 / customer, losing a customer costs them more than $2.

PS - Your point about monopolies and legally-required notifications is a good one, though more as an example of why government-sponsored monopolies and arduous regulations are bad ideas.

<comment><USER3> It's also a case of a good problem to have, but a real problem nonetheless.

This is where people _must_ be able to come up with a solution.

It requires getting comfortable with tags and pasting canned responses. There are many people for whom tools like TypeIt4Me increase email productivity by 100%. This could translate into thousands of dollars a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And if you absolutely must stop your customers from responding to you, do not use a domain name that does not fit the RFC standard for useless domains, or you may inadvertently be setting yourself up for trouble:

[http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told...](http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told_you_not_to_reply.html)

<comment><USER5> I was a bit shocked when I got to the last line...

"Instead, he blogs about the most interesting ones. Companies embarrassed by having their e-mails posted online can get him to pull the entries from his blog for a small payment."

Blackmail for a good cause is still blackmail.

<comment><USER4> Yep. On the bright side, he is admitting he received the emails and is willing to pull them down. noreply.com is currently held by a domain sitter. Are they capturing emails behind the scenes? What other domain names are foolishly used for redirecting email?

Further, while there might be blackmail involved here, could those companies be sued for fraud for misrepresenting their identities to be this guy? Is "ignorance" a defense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Then why not a facebook account, a twitter account, an sms account, a 24/7 too-free number, a ever other form of communication?

It is very not cut and dried. It very much depends on the habits and needs of companies customers. And it very much depends on the nature of the company. Steel mill, taco cart two companies I'm not gonna begrudge not having email.

Finally it is far worse to do something poorly rather than not at all. If I can't find an email or get a bounce back I'll be miffed. If my emails aren't handled timely and well I be upset and developed a much poorer view of the company.

If you take on replying to customers you had better be committed to doing it excellently and have a clear understanding of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice post!

"Unless you're Google or Paypal, whose business models seem built around the idea of hating customer service"

Wow, I think that is a little harsh. I'd be the first to say that Google's lack of a feedback loop in their search interface as well as the myriad of other places where a _prominent_ feedback entry point could be attached is well within the top 10 things that they do wrong. But, they monitor what users do on their site and do their best to provide good service, so I'd say, "Google tries to handle customer service without communicating with the customer."

</comment><comment><USER8> Go further: company email should be from an actual human being, not from The Company. Anonymizing company statements makes it way to easy to be insensitive.

I've spent years deleting Official Company Email that has no name on it. It can't possibly be important if nobody said it.

<comment><USER4> Nah, some things are okay automated, such as the warning that your flight appointment is in one day.

<comment><USER8> I guess I object on principle: how do I know this email was authentic? Tho I can't think of a reason anybody wants me to miss my flight enough to mislead me about it.

Anyway, now I have that email, and I need to change my flight. Would it kill them to have a reply address I could actually use to accomplish that?

<comment><USER4> > Would it kill them to have a reply address I could actually use to > accomplish that?

I think that was Ryan's point -- with which I agree.

Admittedly, changing a flight might need a bit more back-and-forth than an e-mail exchange (they should provide their phone number in the email, and IIRC, airlines I have worked with do provide it). But you may have other reasons you need to reply, such as a quick clarification.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"The top story on HN is how to center text in CSS..." - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/589974366055636994/photo/1 <comment><USER2> Cuz HTML5 is the technology of the future! What was taking me minutes in XAML is now taking mere hours!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure what the joke is.

That CSS is awful? That people in the start-up scene are too dumb to center content on the web?

<comment><USER4> Html and CSS is many ways a wonderful thing giving us access to information in such powerful ways.

But at the same they are both awful in so many ways. The fact that when I'm mostly reading 10/20 documents my browser is by far the most resource hungry application often surpassing my java powered IDE is a shame. That my gmail tab can take more memory than a standalone email client is a disappointment.

Adding to that is the fact how many hours of experiment it takes to do so many of the basic thing does raise some questions.

<comment><USER5> >That my gmail tab can take more memory than a standalone email client is a disappointment

Is this surprising? Gmail is essentially an email client, but written in an interpreted language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We can push this on top too, if not naturally</comment>


In Spain, prisoners' brains are being electrically stimulated for science - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/9/18256821/prisoner-brain-study-spain-aggression-neurointervention-ethics <comment><USER2> Looks like a modern version of lobotomy. How can anyone say this is in any way ethical or moral ?

<comment><USER3> > All the inmates participating in Molero-Chamizo's study are volunteers > who've signed consent forms, yet they're also in an inherently coercive > situation. Under those conditions, the ethicists ask, is it even possible to > meaningfully consent to an experiment like this?

Seems like they are all volunteers so at least they are not forced to do it. But this being Spain you can not really trust it. They might as well have picked a bunch of mentally retarded prisoners and got them to sign the form by giving a few packs of cigarettes in return.</comment></comment>


Iranian Reyhaneh Was Executed for Murdering Her Rapist - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/reyhaneh-jabbari-executed-iran-hangs-woman-for-murder-of-her-alleged-attempted-rapist-9817712.html

<comment><USER2> 2 wrongs don't make a right. You can't murder someone because they wronged you (raped in this case), at least in most countries. From the article, it does not appear she pursued any sort of legal remedy prior to stabbing her attacker 2 days later.</comment>


Workplace drug testing is widespread but ineffective - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2015/12/workplace_drug_testing_is_widespread_but_ineffective.single.html <comment><USER3> At a job a few years back I was the manager of a small field maintenance crew. We were tasked with maintaining wireless equipment (antennas on towers and commercials buildings) for about 10,000 customers. Our company had been purchased recently and the policy of the new owners was that any time anyone was in any kind of 'incident' in a company vehicle, every employee in the vehicle had to be picked up by their manager, driven to the drug testing facility, tested, and driven home to their doorstep and then couldn't return to work until the test came back, sometimes several days later.

The last winter I was there we got hit with a major snowstorm. One of our towers on the top of a mountain was having problems, causing service interruptions for about 7,000 customers. Our safety policy mandated at least two technicians at a job like this, and one of my 3 technicians was out of town. I took one of the others with me and headed for the tower, which was about 2 miles up a dirt road that was now covered in about 2 feet of snow. Right after pulling on to the road, the company truck brushed up against a fence post that I didn't see because it had fallen over and was buried in the snow. The post left a scratch in one of the body panels of the truck that would have to be repaired. There was no way I'd be able to get it repaired without being asked about the drug test.

I called my manager and he made a few calls hoping we could get an exception to the drug test rule this time around. No luck. This was right around the time of the holidays - maybe even New Years Eve, if I remember correctly. The only drug testing center open was about an hour drive from where we were, in the opposite direction of where we lived. My manager had to come pick us up, take us to the center, drive us home, then go pick up my last remaining technician, drive back to the tower, drive up to the tower (by this time it was dark), and then start troubleshooting the problem. Turned a 90 minute outage in to a 6 hour outage. Then of course it took several days for the drug tests to come back, so my manager and one remaining technician had to deal with all of the aftermath of the storm in the same way.

I'll bet this one incident offset any positive outcomes that company has seen from drug testing, if indeed there have been any.

<comment><USER4> I think it was Slavoj Žižek who said one of the best way to fight back against stupid bureaucracy is to start following its rules as precisely as possible.

<comment><USER5> If anyone wants to learn more about this strategy (sabotage by rule- following), it's called "work to rule". ([http://www.spunk.org/texts/intro/practice/sp001703.html](http://www.spunk.org/texts/intro/practice/sp001703.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work in consulting in the oil and gas industry. Many E&P companies are struggling right now with crude in the $30-40/bbl range. The E&P I work for has reduced staff 4 times this year officially. Unofficially they've had 6 "random" drug tests in the past 8 months. That is a way to reduce payroll without having to do a press release stating you've dropped 26% of your workforce.

</comment><comment><USER7> Corporate culture is intrinsically tied to risk adversity and the reason it's allowed to spiral out of control is because of costs that are difficult or impossible to measure. If you can point to a risk and a cost associated with it while the detractors speak to morale or other intangibles you're going to win out in almost any big company. Is a drug testing policy going to keep you from hiring amazing employees? Quite possibly (the particulars of your industry and geographical area apply). But how do you measure that? No one is going to say "I didn't apply/take the job because I smoke marijuana on the weekends." Big companies miss out on opportunities and innovation because they allow risk adversity to take over their culture.

<comment><USER8> But what you describe isn't being risk-averse, its just prioritizing the obvious and easy-to-quantify risks (and ignoring other risks, including the higher-order risk of not conducting research to quantify the easy-to-identify- but-hard-to-quantify risks.)

But being willfully blind to broad categories of risk isn't being risk-averse.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but it is a symptom of a risk adverse culture. Risk adverse corporate cultures that pursue data that is difficult to quantify aren't exactly the norm. If your company culture values risk adversity why would you take the risk of measuring anything but the obvious? You might if you're that type of person, but risk adverse cultures select against risk takers.

<comment><USER8> > Sure, but it is a symptom of a risk adverse culture.

If there is aversion to risk involvedon, its not the _company_ being risk- averse, its the individuals being risk-averse, and the culture having demonstrated that failing to address quantified risks to the company (but _not_ failing to quantify and then, if appropriate, address identified-but- difficult-to-quantify risks to the company) will lead to negative _personal_ consequences.

But its not so much the aversion to risk that is the issue here so much as the particular personal risk profile in those environments. An environment with the same cultural degree of aversion to risk, but different personal risk profiles, would produce different outcomes.

> If your company culture values risk adversity why would you take the risk of > measuring anything but the obvious?

Because the lack of knowledge about a risk (especially one that is identified and qualitatively characterized, but not quantified) is _itself_ a risk, and if your company really values risk avoidance, than identifying and quantifying risks (and not just addressing the easily identified and quantified risks while ignoring the easily-identified-but-hard-to-quantify ones and the hard- to-identify ones) would be valued and rewarded.

<comment><USER7> >If there is aversion to risk involvedon, its not the company being risk- averse, its the individuals being risk-averse

So would you be happy if instead of "risk averse company culture" I said "pervasive personal risk aversion driven by a company culture designed to punish failure and reward safe decision making"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra More thoughts on the matter.

I have relatively high income, I come from affluent family, I have some savings, I'm kind of well-off, I have no troubles finding jobs.

This means I can quit a job over drug testing. A lot of people can't - <USER2> have mouths to feed, no savings to cover it up, not too desirable on job market.

This means I have an _obligation_ to abruptly terminate my employment in such situation. This will make employers consider drug testing policies against losing people like me. Which makes world less bad for everyone, even people who could not just quit.

This is where middle-class privilege comes in handy to shield us all.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I am downvoting you not because of your logic, which is sound, but your tone, which comes across as superior and smug, even if you are acknowledging the disadvantages of those who do not possess what you call "privilege." I am doing so because a less discerning reader may judge you own your tone alone and disregard your logic entirely, rendering your argument moot. You have made your point, but in an ineffective way.

<comment><USER9> And I'm down voting _you_ just because. Parent was not inflammatory, wasn't name-calling, and gave a well-reasoned argument that made me think about _my_ privilege and obligations that might go along with it. Are you saying that this kind of post is what you want to see less of on HN?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also a socio-economic level of agency filter effect. At least a couple percent of test results are false positives. Combine those two and you filter out poorer applicants and lower level, lower income employees. If you need to downsize 5% you can start with drug testing everyone and even if no one uses drugs the high false positive rate will get rid of some employees, now you only have to downsize 2% or something. This also works to reduce spend on welfare type programs and unemployment.

<comment><USER11> I honestly don't think people realize just how often these tests result in false positives until it happens to them. The only drug test I've ever taken came back positive for meth. XD In addition, people are mislead by % points. Even if only 2% of drug tests come back as false positives, when you multiply that across millions of people and when you have those same people take multiple tests a year... well that's a lot of people getting slapped around by faulty testing.

<comment><USER12> An excellent report on this subject: [http://www.cacj.org/documents/sf_crime_lab/studies__misc_mat...](http://www.cacj.org/documents/sf_crime_lab/studies__misc_materials/falsepositives.pdf)

More people should know this. There is a great piece in the Washington Post today about how a false positive result from tea bags left in the trash (which was being sifted through by Sheriff's Deputies after they saw a homeowner shopping at a gardening store, giving them what apparently passes for PC these days) led to a no-knock raid with a SWAT team holding a middle-aged couple that doesn't use drugs at gunpoint for an afternoon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can confirm. From outside the USA it looks extremely weird. But, you know, we do things that are weird for you.

For me the most ironic part is that by this rules you maybe will fire a really good worker that tried drugs. Why do you want to fire a good worker that doesn't causes any trouble?

Maybe makes sense for people, for example, that uses firearms at work. But it will not make sense if it is not complemented with some kind of mental health care.

Really, I see it as really really weird. I see that the journalist also sees it that way. But on the comments looks like it is not so much.

Is it really so usual to do this? Isn't this seen as an invasion of personal privacy?

</comment><comment><USER14> A few thoughts.

Drug testing is a great way for an employer to get rid of someone when they have no cause to fire them. For example, a friend of mine had a job throwing luggage at the airport. They had a policy that allowed them to arbitrarily drug test people, but they never did, so my friend figured smoking a little weed now and then would be OK. Then one day, he hurts his back. He goes in to fill out the forms for workman's comp, and guess what the first thing they ask him to do is? You can't fire someone for getting hurt, but you can for flunking a drug test!

Drug testing is not an effective way to determine whether someone is using drugs. I live in a self-run sober living house, specifically an Oxford House. We do random drug tests now and then, but it's really just to deter "I bet I can get away with..." thinking, and we rarely catch anyone using like that. The reason we never catch people with randoms is twofold - drug tests are stupid easy to beat (and most addicts know how), and we catch people relapsing because when addicts relapse, it's really an all or nothing thing. People will think they can smoke a joint at a concert (because their problem is booze, not weed!), but invariably they come staggering in drunk out of their mind within a week.

I believe employer drug testing is harmful and invasive[1]. What employees do on their own time is their business. If someone has a problem with drugs or alcohol that effects their work, that will become obvious and HR can either fire them or, and this is what's been done with me in the past, force them to go to treatment. This means that even though I get drug tested regularly where I live, I will straight up refuse to work for a company that drug tests any of it's employees (again [1]).

[1] There are some jobs where a person being intoxicated on the job would put lives or property at risk. In this case, drug and alcohol testing seems acceptable. Of course, with alcohol testing, one wonders why employers don't use the readily available UA's and mouth swabs to test for alcohol use in the past few days...social acceptability is a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER15> Part of drug testing is to create another way to terminate employment.

In some situations, it is rather difficult to terminate an employment. It gives employer's another out.

<comment><USER16> At a place I used to work they did random drug testing, and the only time I saw it happen was right at the beginning of a new year, my boss had one guy tested: the 100% straight-laced Asian Christian teetotaler. Maybe it was actually totally random (I highly doubt any of us used any kind of drugs), but I always figured his boss said, "you have to randomly drug test someone", and he didn't want to lose any of us so he picked the sure thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Consider the following, which is adapted from Pascal's Wager:

Let's say it costs $50k to replace a bad employee, and the drug test costs $50. Then the test only has to screen out one bad employee per thousand to pay for itself. It's inconceivable that the test is less effective than that, so by definition, it pays for itself.

I suspect that similar logic -- paying an small cost to ward off an incalculable threat -- is behind a lot of irrational HR behavior.

<comment><USER18> No HR employee has ever gotten paid for cost savings, just for ass covering.

A drug test is simply a checkbox that allows them to have even less responsibility for the person that they hired being at all capable at the job. (one of thousands)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it happening in states where weed is legal, too? I can't understand it.

My last workspace looked literally like these illustrations: a lot of folks smoking weed right in the office (open-air balcony), without any secrecy at all. And it's not even legal, although cops don't really care to enforce.

To drug test for a legal substance... Why would you agree to work at such a place?

<comment><USER20> Well, I can give you an anecdata point of one -- no. I know someone who recently got hired into a tech consulting position in Washington state, and there was no drug test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disregarding the Drug Free Workplace act.

Drug testing is a test for the risk tolerance of the employee. This forum may encourage a community of very risk tolerant people, which is evident from the other comments in the thread, but the level of risk tolerance that a person must have to actively use illegal drugs is a pretty strong statement of that persons risk decisions. Anyone's individual opinion on the legality of drugs is irrelevant in this situation, as the judgement call is based on the risk and reward decision regarding something that can cost someone that is caught and prosecuted thousands of dollars, jail time, and a record for something entertainment related. Obvious exceptions for this would be legalized states and medical use.

So if you consider what jobs have high cost outcomes for risky behavior, it will probably align pretty closely with high drug test rates. Some of those would be food service, industrial, transportation, medical, and construction which makes up around 30% of the workforce, and the other 20% is probably covered by governments both state and federal along with their contractors.

<comment><USER7> >Obvious exceptions for this would be legalized states and medical use.

If we're talking about marijuana another exception is states where it's decriminalized. If you're passing on a fantastic candidate in California because they tested positive for marijuana you are arguably insane. Possession of marijuana under an ounce is a violation (ticket) that doesn't require a court appearance or a criminal record (similar to a traffic violation).

<comment><USER22> I don't think that's how it works. Companies with drug testing policies are usually multi-state and they won't have a separate policy for NY and CA.

<comment><USER23> Actually, they do. I have seen organizations with separate HR policies, by state, to comply with the variances unique to each state (which is why employees in one state were subject to random testing, and the other only "for cause".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > _As was the case 30 years ago, testing has no solid base of evidence, no > proof that it succeeds. We don't know if screening workers for recent drug > use makes them more productive, lowers their risk of getting into accidents, > or otherwise helps maintain the social order._

I've never heard anyone suggest that is does. The reasons in favor of drug testing I've always heard is that you don't end up hiring people who are so incompetent as to be doing drugs while applying for new jobs. It's just one more piece of signalling.

I was drug-tested when I accepted employment at my current job. I had 3 or 4 days to make it in. Even if I was the type of person to regularly consume illegal drugs, I certainly would not have done so while applying for work.

I don't think it does much good, it's probably a waste of money, and I don't care what my coworkers smoke as long they're not doing it at work, but I also don't see how anyone can be incredulous or indignant about it.

<comment> guard-of-terra I can. The idea is extremely humiliating.

My body is my business. You don't get to poke in it just because you want to.

I would probably avoid employment where I would be expected to contribute not just code but also pee.

P. S. I nearly don't drink[1], I don't smoke, I don't do drugs. Because _I choose so_.

<comment><USER25> You're not really the class of employee that these policies are (or should be, at least) targeted at.

I had to take a piss test to get a job where I drove a company box truck on a route every day, with a hazardous material endorsement. I was fresh out of high school, no other qualifications. I didn't then, nor do I now, have a problem with that piss test.

I'm a programmer now. I'd have a problem with a piss test--which I would readily pass, even if it were effective.

<comment> guard-of-terra Yesterday, journalists weren't the class of employee that these policies are targeted at, but today they became so.

If this shit becomes the default (megacorp drones will think: why not extend this inexpensive procedure to everyony) we'll just live in even worse and more humiliating society than we do already.

You think, therefore you resist.

<comment><USER26> One journalist at an unnamed "national" magazine was drug tested. The author then makes a joke out of it. The story was a set up for the rest of the article. Worrying it's becoming the default is just irrational as outrage over Starbucks' war on Christmas.

 _Let me put this out there now, before you've read too far: I was not myself drug-tested before publishing this story. Neither was my editor, nor the copy editor, nor any of the designers, programmers, or art editors who worked on it. For all I know, the lot of them—the entire staff of Slate—could be huddled in a conference room right this very minute, passing joints around and shooting dope and snorting PCP. But ours is not the standard workplace in America._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hesitant to use Google for signup, am I being paranoid? - <AUTHOR> I recently wanted to sign up for a proxy service (luminati), and they offer an easy one-click signup with a Google account.  But I found myself suddenly worrying about something that never even occurred to me before - Google banning my account.  There has been quite a few horror stories about accounts being banned for seemingly trivial reasons, and without any recourse. And proxy services has a bad reputation I think. It feels crazy to me that I even have to think about this, maybe I'm being overly paranoid? <comment><USER2> Those horror stories are the reason why I am moving everything away from Google. I used to make Android apps and got a strike once. Then another app got delisted and I don't even know if it counts as a strike or not. Can't risk losing everything if my account gets closed. I will never again put all my eggs in one basket.

As per your specific case, I don't think you'd have to worry. But I still think in general anything of value should be separate from Google.

</comment><comment><USER3> at first, i thought you were concerned about Google accounts and the privacy of your data within Google's servers. i feel like i have not put enough consideration into this other kind of risk which you're describing. if it's any indication of general Google support quality, many users find Google's hardware support organization to be less than accommodating.

[https://9to5google.com/2019/08/15/comment-reddit-requests- go...](https://9to5google.com/2019/08/15/comment-reddit-requests-google- support/)</comment>


A case study about compression and binary formats for a REST service - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@julianojuliocosta/a-case-study-about-compression-and-binary-formats-for-a-rest-service-7de9c4535cb8 <comment><USER2> What about BSON?

<comment><USER3> We didn't have much time to explore many formats available at that time. However, we quickly evaluated BSON in a prototype, and as the overall size was bigger than Google Protobuf, we've decided that it wouldn't worth explore it further.</comment></comment>


Files and folders - <AUTHOR> http://jansen.co/files-and-folders

<comment><USER2> Search only interfaces are limiting. I feel you need both - a hierarchy is a valuable tool for browsing, if you aren't sure what you are searching for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree.

<comment><USER3> topic concluded.</comment></comment></comment>


Career advice needed - <AUTHOR>

I'm a technical product manager in Austin with just enough coding chops to look good on TV. (Rails, some Python, Bootstrap for styling, R; doing the Node & Backbone tutorials now.) The code's not good enough to impress anybody on GitHub, but I'll keep plugging away.
Any suggestions on how to increase visibility with hiring managers? PMs don't have anything like a GitHub to showcase their skills.
Appreciate it in advance. <comment><USER2> It might help if you list what career/job(s) you want to get noticed for. It's unclear whether you are wanting to stay as a technical product manager or move into more of a programming career.</comment>


Show HN: DonateYourStreams – Fund Watsi and charity:water with music royalties - <AUTHOR> http://www.donateyourstreams.com/?ref=showKevin

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the "Show Kevin" version of this submission.

It's nothing super technical, just a fun little project I did with my sister one weekend to show the YC Fellowship folks that we can ship something together.

Simple concept - loop these tracks on your favorite streaming music service while you work, meditate, or sleep and all royalty payouts will go directly to Watsi & charity:water.

In my mind it's the equivalent of donating spare CPU cycles to SETI or script- clicking those "donate rice to a hungry child" ads.

Idea came from a combination of two things - a band who uploaded silent tracks and had their fans stream them to generate tour money, and Taylor Swift accidentally uploading a track of static that hit #1 on iTunes.

There are tons of ambient noise & nature tracks people use for work, meditation, sleep, etc. available on all of the music services. The only difference is we're putting our royalties to good use!</comment>


"It's done in hardware so it's cheap" - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/its-done-in-hardware-so-its-cheap.html <comment><USER2> Slightly off topic, but it's widely accepted among physicists that the act of computation expends energy [1]. Thus, there are actually limits to how much the cost of a given computation can be reduced, regardless of how cleverly we build the computer, or what we build it out of (silicon, DNA, fiber optics, whatever) [2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle>

[2] If we're willing to use algorithms that don't destroy information, or willing to operate at arbitrarily low temperatures, as I understand it there's no theoretical limit to how small we can make the energy costs, but these restrictions seem highly impractical.

<comment><USER3> While this is true, current hardware is several orders of magnitude away from the Landauer limit, so there's still quite a bit of room for building computers more cleverly before we confront it.

However, reversible algorithms are not in fact particularly impractical. They require a somewhat different way of thinking about things, but they're dramatically easier than e.g. quantum computing speedup.

Similarly, cryogenic computation is entirely reasonable, especially in space.

<comment><USER4> "several orders of magnitude"???

We are an order of magnitude worth of orders of magnitude away from that limit.

Specifically: 5.539×10^11 times as much energy (for the I7 920, picked randomly).

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=130+w+%2F+%280.0178+ele...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=130+w+%2F+%280.0178+electron+volt+*+82300+MIPS+%2F+instruction%29)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for doing the calculation! I'm not checking it right now, but it's in the right range. However, in the tradeoff between shortest time of execution of serial programs and power efficiency per instruction, the i7 is way over at the shortest-time-of-execution extreme. Common GPUs are about a thousand times as power-efficient, and many embedded microcontrollers are nearly as power- efficient as GPUs. Check out the Bitcoin hardware performance Wiki pages for hard data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has done extensive work in image processing using custom hardware I am not really sure what he is talking about. Is this intended to suggest that software is cheaper than hardware? Or that it has performance advantages over specialized hardware? Not sure.

It's tough to beat smartly-designed specialized hardware in image processing. Some of the things I've done would require ten general purpose computers running in parallel to accomplish what I did in a single $100 chip. So, yes, less cost, higher data rate, reduced thermal load, reduced physical size, less power requirements, etc.

Maybe I don't get where he is going with this?

<comment><USER6> It is tough to pull a coherent thesis from this piece but it seems to be close to "be aware of the costs involved because, although specialised hardware can be useful in many situations, it is not a magic wand you can wave." The way it opens he seems to imply that he is used to people excusing slow/inefficient ideas by handwaving that doing it in hardware will be fast without doing any real critical evaluation on what gains hardware can actually bring. The fact that some systems can see real gains from specialised hardware does not serve as a counterargument if this is in fact his thesis.

<comment><USER7> You can get a bit better idea where he's coming from from his previous series (linked in the post) responding to people arguing that high-level languages would be faster if hardware were designed for them. In his view the Lisp- machine idea of HLL-specialized hardware design rarely pans out vs. just RISC with an optimizing compiler. This piece seems to be applying the same critique to algorithms more generally, that "we'll just do it in hardware" isn't a magic win, because it's not always an issue of impedance mismatches with the hardware that can be simply fixed by choosing different hardware.

The places he suggests you _can_ get a win seem sensible: 1) cases where the cost of dispatching instructions and handling intermediate results dominates, in which case a CISC-ish specialized instruction implemented in silicon may be a win over stringing together simpler operations; and 2) cases where you can get extra parallelization in hardware that isn't available through general- purpose instructions (e.g. doesn't map on nicely to SSE-style instructions).

<comment><USER8> So I guess the premise is that you have two extremes: minimal instruction set (RISC) and complex (a CPU designed to run Python, for example).

IMO, as is often the case, the answer lies in the middle. Look at the tremendous impact that adding AES acceleration features to x86 processors has on applications that require encryption.

<comment><USER7> That seems to be what he's arguing, actually; that you can get hardware speedups if you carefully target very specific things that a parsimonious addition of hardware features can enable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unlike Other Tech Giants, Amazon Doubles Down on Coal - <AUTHOR> http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/11/unlike-tech-giants-amazon-doubles-coal/

<comment><USER2> Title is sensationalist. Amazon is just going where there is cheap power, and Ohio has cheap power for many reasons. Coal is one, but another is plenty of spare capacity since the economy in the northern and rural parts of the state has been on the skids for decades.</comment>


When America Dreamed of a Nuclear-Powered Cargo Fleet - <AUTHOR> https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/ <comment><USER2> I really think it is a tragedy that nuclear power got such bad PR. In the U.S., outside of military applications, we really only got 20 or so years of refinements on the technology, before the greens and Three-Mile Island made nuclear power, well, nuclear. Imagine how much safer and more efficient the technology could have been with forty years more of large-scale investment and attention.

20 odd years in aviation only brought us from the Wright Flyer to the Spirit of Saint Louis. 20 odd years of automobiles brought us from the original Benz to the Model T. 20 odd years of computing only brought us from the ENIAC to the Intel 4004.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. We traded "no nukes" for the potential heat death of the planet.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone here have the actual statistics to back this up? In terms of Joules of energy, what is the cost of a nucular power plant? Equally, in terms of joules of energy (rather than some fiat petro-dollar debt money with compound interest), what is the price for any competing power source, be it a coal plant or a farm of wind turbines?

It seems we can do the maths for this easily to dismiss solar and wind, but, when it comes to nucular we are in denial. It takes a lot of energy to dig up Canada/Australia/wherever to get the U308 stuff, then a whole lot more to process it. Then there is the building of the nucular plant plus the decommissioning. Oh, and the waste disposal along the way, not cheap in raw energy terms.

Some costs such as the brains of the boffins needed to build these things may not have a raw energy price, that you might have to measure in pobble beads and pence, but, I just want a simple energy in -> energy out ratio. Do nucular power plants actually work out as cheap as the proponents imagine?

This I do not think is clear because there are so many other reasons nucular power plants get built. In the UK we ended up with so many nucular power plants because of the Cold War 'requirement' to have the bomb, and to create the bomb grade material needed for the U.S. (where there never were things like 'fast breeder' reactors).

France lost out when the oil reserves were carved up by Churchill and Roosevelt after WW2 so nucular became quite a thing in France. Their power is cheaper than what there is in the UK and most of the rest of Europe. So nucular is cheap, the French proven it so? Again, not really. They had their own reasons, e.g. also desiring nucular weapons, a seat at the UN and some (non-fossil) power. Sure, economics came into it but there were these other imperatives.

There is also the matter of 'Lockheed Martin' accounting. Bribes, billion dollar cost over runs, project delays, pork barrel politics and vested interests. We don't seem to have that in Denmark where the wind turbines seem to come from these days but nucular is mired in 'Lockheed Martin' accounting issues.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.withouthotair.com/](http://www.withouthotair.com/) \-- this book (available for free on-line) goes into very detailed energy-math-based comparison of all major power sources, focusing especially on various forms of wind, hydro and solar. It might be especially relevant to your concerns because it focuses on various ways of combining the above to make the UK run fully on sustainable energy.

RE various problems of costs you've mentioned, I do think we're applying a double-standard here, but it's a double-standard _against_ nuclear. I rarely see people talking just about how much solar is subsidized (two or three years ago AFAIR it was government subsidies that made PV installations make any economical sense for anyone, though I've heard it might have changed recently), or how much bribery is going on with those infrastructure projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went aboard the NS Savannah when she was on display in Charleston SC harbor. And the criticism that she was neither fish nor fowl is correct. Too much space was taken up by visitor/passenger compartments that could have been used for cargo. Or vice-versa.

The article also mentioned that she was built just as the container revolution was beginning, and that also doomed her to a diminishing availability of bulk cargo to haul.

Overall impressions were that it was a really nice ship. Too nice. It had portholes with rotating shades made of polarizing filters - you spun the inner one 180 degrees to block out the sun. Which is very very cool, but not something a cargo ship would normally feature.

Would a modern mega-huge container ship benefit from being nuclear powered? Maybe. The additional shielding and steel bracing needed to protect the piping and core would add significant cost to the construction, but the zero extended fuel cost might make that cost efficient. A larger question is whether a nuclear powered ship would be allowed in some ports, such as Japan or New Zealand.

<comment><USER7> It would only need to be allowed into LA/Long Beach and Shanghai to be profitable. And it would probably be allowed in those ports, even if it were emitting a bright Cherenkov glow while underway.

In fact, on the list of busiest ports by container volume, Rotterdam, at #11, is the first I might be worried about, and then Hamburg and Antwerp, at #15 and #16.

With the size of cargo container ships built nowadays, the additional engineering requirements of a full-blown built-in nuclear reactor is more than justified. Even retrofitting the largest bunker-burning ships might be justified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The environmental impact on shipping is massive:

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

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships- create-pollution-cars-world.html)

Utilizing nuclear power would be a great way of minimizing greenhouse emissions, plus it would be more cost effective in the long run. It's a shame the engineers were lazy and dumped eradicated waste overboard in their designs.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious how the new attempts at wind will work out. Some of the hybrid designs seem to be a good attempt especially since a lot of the bigger ships were being run at half-speed anyway.

<comment><USER10> Probably just much easier to drop Thorium reactors onboard in armored cargo containers. No meltdown risk, no proliferation risk, easy refueling, zero carbon impact.

You could even provide power to local ports if necessary during humanitarian efforts. Or sell power to the local utility while docked and get a check in the mail.

EDIT: Are you a Thorium startup reading this on HN? GO AFTER THIS MARKET.

<comment><USER9> I propose that when we finally get thorium working, they should call them "Thorium Batteries" and avoid the word reactor or nuclear all together.

I think the sail technology is much nearer term, but thorium will probably be the long-term. Helps the space industry if I understand the waste product correctly.

<comment><USER10> "Thorium Thermal Batteries". Yeah, I dig that.

<comment><USER11> It worked for MRIs. The technology was originally called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "How does a nuclear-powered ship work? In simple terms, conventional ships use diesel-powered boilers to produce steam to drive turbines"

Eh what? Boilers? Nope. Massive, bigger-than-house diesel ENGINES are used.

<comment><USER13> Gas turbines are still common on war ships.

<comment><USER12> A turbine is, as the name says, massively different from a boiler.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but it is not a _diesel_ engine.

So there are other means of propulsion for large ships besides diesel.

Oh, and even steam turbines are still used (on natural gas carriers, they simply burn some of the cargo!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aside from the real and perceived safety issues of nuclear propulsion, there is also the issue of operational availability. US submarines and aircraft carriers spend a lot of their careers unavailable due to planned maintenance. I wonder how much of that is due to the power plant? New naval reactors are designed to last from 1/2 to the entire life of the ship without refueling. And at the end of that life, the entire reactor compartments are cut out, defueled, and stored in open-air trenches at the Hanford Reservation.[1] Regardless of whether fission reactors are fueled with HEU, LEU, or Thorium, they leave a lot of long-term things that we been as-yet unable to muster the full technological and political means to deal with.

For the merchant ship application, it seems a reach to believe that the benefits of greenhouse gas reduction can be most efficiently achieved by replacing diesel engines with nuclear reactors.

[1][http://www.oregon.gov/energy/nucsaf/docs/naval_nuclear_react...](http://www.oregon.gov/energy/nucsaf/docs/naval_nuclear_reactor_fact_sheet.pdf?ga=t)

</comment><comment><USER9> "She was capable of circling the planet 14 times at 20 knots without needing more uranium. All this was accomplished while she emitted no greenhouse gases."

"In her first year she had to release more than 115,000 gallons of low-level radioactive water into the sea"

On the balance, I think I would prefer the greenhouse gases.

<comment><USER15> They say the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to mix it with the concrete we use to build our elementary schools. 115,000 gallons is a very small amount of water. That's 40 ft x 40 ft x 10 ft of water. Mix that into the ocean and the pollutants will disperse widely. One cubic mile holds 1.1 trillion gallons.

<comment><USER16> "They" are idiots if they actually say that, and countering anti-nuclear hysteria with pro-nuclear hyperbole doesn't do us any favors.

<comment><USER17> I am in favour of nuclear but some of the arguments you hear from advocates make my skin crawl. The caution people exercise over nuclear power is exactly what we should want for any activity that carries risk to health or the environment. Radioactive material is very dangerous, and fission is intrinsically difficult to control. We may be able to successfully deal with those risk, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that those risks don't exist just because physicists are so wonderfully clever.

The problem is not lack of support for nuclear but tolerance for dirty and unsafe fossil fuels. We need to deal with that using nuclear or solar or whatever.

<comment><USER16> Care is certainly called for, but the way it's treated goes too far. Waste is a good example. People insist on perfect safety, and not just for today, but insist on storing waste so that in a hypothetical future 10,000 years from now when civilization has fallen and nobody knows what nuclear anything is, the waste is _still_ safe. This is just not reasonable, and does more harm than good.

The problem is that you get people who think you'll glow in the dark if you live near a perfectly functioning power plant, then you get people on the other side who say it's fine to drink plutonium, and both sets of crazies are louder than any reasonable discussion in the middle.

<comment><USER18> What is the benefit of nuclear if we are left with uncontainable highly toxic radioactive waste? There are already problems with handling waste at existing storage sties. Radioactive waste isn't a problem to be solved 10,000 years from now, it's already a problem. Even guaranteeing safe containment for 50 - 100 years seems like a difficult task, and that is not an outrageous demand for people to make.

<comment><USER16> Handling waste isn't _that_ difficult of a problem. There are better reactor designs which use a lot of that waste as fuel, and what's left just needs to be sealed up real good and left to sit behind some good fences.

Basically all of the real-world problems with handling nuclear waste are because anti-nuclear advocates prevent any action from being taken to handle waste, but meanwhile there are operating reactors producing waste and that hasn't stopped. So nuclear plant operators are forced into ad-hoc solutions for waste disposal because nobody will let them do it right.

<comment><USER18> You're simply hand waiving away the problems. Even reprocessing creates waste that must be dealt with. Commercial fast/breeder reactors are always ten years away, and it has yet to be proven that they could even be economically viable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb Bookings Plunge Amid Coronavirus Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-bookings-plunge-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-11584032412 <comment><USER2> As a host I can confirm. 3 days ago I had March 100% booked. Yesterday the entire 2nd half of the month was empty. I slashed prices and bookings are starting to trickle back in. April is looking really lean, though, and May has multiple bookings from European citizens. It's only money, not health, but the economic impact of COV-19 seems immense.</comment>


Tell HN: China Underreported with a Value of 12.59370314842579 ( raw guess ) - <AUTHOR> > 42.000 cases based on cemetaries
42.000 unoficial deaths / 3335 ( reported deaths cases) * 81865 (reported cases )  = 1.030.983 total cases in China.
Sources:
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wuhan-deaths-03272020182846.html
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
There is also one day that the real numbers leaked, which could mean that the numbers are way higher:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> What proportion of the 42000 were natural deaths i.e. non-covid. All of those people will be represented in the 42,000 figure as well.

If you are talking about feb 12 as 'real' numbers, that was the day they included diagnoses based on scans (since the start of the epidemic) as well as positive tests.

The fact is counting deaths is hard: NYC has been underreporting deaths by up to 70% - [https://gothamist.com/news/death-count-expected-soar-nyc- say...](https://gothamist.com/news/death-count-expected-soar-nyc-says-it-will- begin-reporting-suspected-covid-deaths-addition-confirmed-ones)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if your estimation is correct or wrong, but please use less decimal to report the result when the estimation is so rough. Something like ~12 or ~13 would be much better, perhaps ~10.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was actually used as reference to not take it too literally.

Perhaps not too successful though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of numbers after the decimal in that figure.

Is there any accuracy in these figures?</comment>


Chrome's NaCL (Native Client) explained - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/96641-what-is-google-chromes-native-client

<comment><USER2> I always wondered why Google had decided to use native code and not a portable and somehow standardized solution like LLVM. (Yes, I know about PNaCl)</comment>


Ceasefire App Looks to Bridge Hostile, Polarized Political Divide - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnscottlewinski/2020/06/07/ceasefire-app-looks-to-bridge-hostile-polarized-political-divide/#4331adea23a1 <comment><AUTHOR> As of posting this, the Forbes article still contains the beta testing links, but the app launched today on ProductHunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ceasefire](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ceasefire)

It's available for both iOS and Android:

[https://apps.apple.com/app/id1506973446](https://apps.apple.com/app/id1506973446)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ceasefire....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ceasefire.cfmobile)

Also accessible via web browser at [https://ceasefire.net](https://ceasefire.net)</comment>


Apple PR: Steve Jobs iPhone 4 "it's just a phone" conversation was fake - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/01/apple-pr-steve-jobs-iphone-4-conversation-is-a-fake/

<comment><USER3> While I could certainly believe it was fake, isn't there a third option - <USER2> it's real, but that Apple is now denying it? No one seems to consider that PR could lie...

</comment><comment><USER4> If it is real very simple, show the headers. Solve all of the drama.

<comment><USER5> Headers are easy to fake.</comment></comment>


Educating towards a circular economy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ibo.org/blog/2016/10/16/educating-towards-a-circular-economy <comment><USER2> What is a circular economy?

> The notion of a circular economy has attracted increased attention in recent > years. The concept is characterised, more than defined, as an economy that > is restorative and regenerative by design and aims to keep products, > components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, > distinguishing between technical and biological cycles. It is conceived as a > continuous positive development cycle that preserves and enhances natural > capital, optimises resource yields, and minimises system risks by managing > finite stocks and renewable flows. It works effectively at every scale. This > economic model seeks to ultimately decouple global economic development from > finite resource consumption.

How do we get there?

1\. A key feature of a circular economy is to be restorative and regenerative by design. The recovery of materials and products is not only addressed at end of use, but is enabled at the design level (e.g., by the choice of materials or a design for disassembly). Companies will need to build core competencies in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading.

2\. Business models that move from ownership to performancebased payment models are instrumental in translating products designed for reuse into attractive value propositions. By prioritising access over ownership, these models drive a shift from consumers to users. Companies with significant market share and capabilities along several vertical steps of the linear value chain could play a major role in driving circularity into the mainstream by leveraging their scale and vertical integration.

3\. A value preserving materials backbone is a core requirement for the transition to a circular economy. To create value from materials and products after their use, they need to be collected and brought back.

The "circular economy" sounds like a buzzword for more aggressive recycling and eco-friendly materials use. Disposable goods are cheap. What incentives do companies/governments have to make their products more expensive?

<comment><USER3> Disposable goods are not cheap, they are in fact very expensive. They are perceived as cheap because a very large portion of the true cost is hidden, externalized. Creators have no incentive to create things that are easily recyclable because they are not responsable for what happens to it at the end of it's life. To close the loop one must integrate the economics of garbage management as an integral part of the product being designed on equal footing with production, distribution etc. Taxing pro-rated to the recyclability of a product, tax break on repairs, second-hand markets and other means to give a product a longer life. Make practices like planned obsolencence illegal, criminal even. I'm no expert but there are a great many solutions, implementing them however might require a lot more political good-will than most of our leaders are ready to spend.

<comment><USER4> These moves are also a bet on the future: a bet that the future cost of disposal stays high, so that increased costs earlier in the lifetime are justified.

The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now instead of later.

For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest- lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current integrated devices in weight and size.

(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)

<comment><USER5> "The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward..."

For how long can this be true when there are finite-easily-accessible resources?

<comment><USER4> Don't underestimate how many resources there are. There's a lot of stuff in the Earth's crust, and the sun is going to be shining for a while yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Garbage Tax. There should be a Garbage Tax on all manufacturers, distributors and resellers of non-recyclable/non-bio-degradable/non-bio-consumable products. We're all paying for the externalized cost of waste management but the ones who should be paying for it (and penalized for it) are the one who are profiting from it (all those who manufacture, distribute and sell non- reusable products that externalize the waste management cost to the rest of us)

</comment><comment><USER7> Good step toward a circular economy, require that the vast majority of things be repairable.

 __The disposable economy is the enemy of the circular economy. __

</comment><comment><USER8> This artical seemed to be more biographical than subject information. That aside, the problem that is worth discussing is how to incentivize more individuals to recycle every chance they get rather than throw everything away.

This however, presents a different problem.

\- can tie inflation to how much is recycled - if a government is willing to pay more money than a peice pf plastic is worth. It can provide insentive for individuals to recycle a lot more. However, it also opens up opportunities to take advantage of the system when done in massive bulk.

\- can add a tax to plastics - this already exists but the taxes can just be passed on to the consumer. Taxes at an extremety can be offset by High recycleable value. Though this can be considered rediculous overreach by the gov.

\- limit plastics use to only large quantities - boats, cars, etc. If plastics are not allowed to br used for plastic bags and soaps, controlling the recycling becomes mich easier

I would love to hear more insights about this

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want to get involved in Open Source Circular Economy stuff then OSCEdays is a good community - [https://oscedays.org](https://oscedays.org)

</comment><comment><USER10> A related topic is bioplastic, i.e. plastic from biofuels or biogeneration (on the short term rather than millions of years like plastic derived from petroleum). Maybe educate on that too and the importance in general of replacing petroleum-dependent industrial materials and processes.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's an admirable goal, but it would seem to violate the second law of thermodynamics. There is almost always waste. Even if we could create some reversible processes, adhering to these would require a lot of behavioral enforcement since there would be consumptive alternatives that were easier or cheaper. Our current regime is hardly panglossian, but there are always costs to idealistic schemes that the designers of such fail to anticipate.

<comment><USER12> I think the idea is to use energy input collected from the sun to push our material resources in a circle instead of the way we do it now, which is to use previously stored sun energy to push our natural resources in a line from a more useful place/form to a less useful place/form. This linear method leaves us with both less useful material and less easily collected energy when we're done.

We will have to change over sooner or later and it gets harder if we wait until later. The thermodynamics of it is simple. The energy input of a nearby star means its not a "closed system". There's plenty of energy input to keep it all going. How to use it is the choice. Eventually the costs of idealistic schemes will balance out, probably with interest, at the point where there is no longer a choice; the stored energy collected and spent, and our material wealth buried in landfills after being reduced to its least useful form.

<comment><USER13> If that is indeed the idea, isn't it much better to push for renewable energy instead of focusing on the use of carbon polymers?

Eventually we can just burn all that trash down, and reassemble the carbon the way we want. It's is not the bottleneck for decades already.</comment></comment></comment>


Expanding the Cloud – Introducing Amazon CloudSearch - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/04/amazon-cloudsearch.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder about Amazon's rapid expansion. If they later pull the plug on floundering services to regain focus (like google did), their customers have built technology and business around the service, which is pretty disastrous.

<comment><USER3> Google underpriced the services while Amazon leans towards the expensive side and rarely lowers prices, making the services profitable. For example EC2 is very expensive and you usually run on 5yo hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know what technology they are using to power this? Solr?

<comment><USER5> It's Amazon's in-house search stack, related to the A9 project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is this awesome?

<comment><USER7> I think it's the same as many other services from Amazon. It's the fact that you don't have to maintain it yourself. You use their APIs and it works. I don't know if you've ever tried to setup a search engine yourself but it can be a relative pain in the ass, especially if you want to do it at a large scale.

This service provides a search engine that gets you up and going very fast, especially if you don't know how to do it. I haven't tried it yet but if it saves me time and it's relatively full featured, then I'm going to use it for sure.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:Car insurance quoted based on connected car - <AUTHOR>

Is there a car insurance that quotes you based on data retrieved from your connected car <comment><USER2> Progressive Insurance uses a dongle that plugs into the OBCII port to gain driving data. Then they use that data, as well as driver demographics of the policy holder(s) and bases rates on that data.

<comment><AUTHOR> great, thanks</comment></comment>


Softbank has launched a self-powered vacuum at $499 (£381) a month - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50486914 <comment><USER2> Will it scrape the edges of the carpet with a butter knife to get the cat hair out?</comment>


Apple's $1 Billion Data Center Mystery - <AUTHOR> http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1630256/Apples-1-Billion-Data-Center-Mystery

<comment><USER2> It's simple really, you need to put all those souls somewhere. I'd store them digitally too.</comment>


Yet another Authentication in Phoenix - <AUTHOR> http://whatdidilearn.info/2018/02/18/authentication-in-phoenix.html <comment><USER2> GitHub project has no description and the README is Phoenix generic. What is Prater and why should it be used instead of another solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, I need to update the readme.

I have started the series of articles about learning Phoenix and the Prater is the example application I'm using to cover different topics in my learning way.

Prater is the chat application which should help me to cover many different topics about Phoenix and Elixir.

The series of articles are starting here [http://whatdidilearn.info/2018/01/14/phoenix-first- steps.htm...](http://whatdidilearn.info/2018/01/14/phoenix-first-steps.html) or you can filter by [Phoenix] tag to see all related articles [http://whatdidilearn.info/tags#Phoenix](http://whatdidilearn.info/tags#Phoenix)

<comment><USER2> These write-ups look really useful. There are many out there but they either tend to be too verbose, or cover too small an area. You cover a bit more end- to-end but in a concise and complete way.

Also, it's great to pick off-the-beaten-path topics: the Phoenix command-line one is one I recently actually had to sort out from bits I found here and there.

Other topics I'd be interested in (if you need some suggestions):

      - more advanced Ecto usage such has ways to work around some limitations (e.g. fragment() or execute(SQL) for migrations)
      - the whole GenServer thing. How these Erlang/Elixir tasks run in a logical machine seamlessly over the network with high uptimes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestions. Thanks. Cannot promise anything right now, but I hope I will get to those topics someday.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Swift WTF - <AUTHOR> http://swiftwtf.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> "Xcode 6 beta 3." AKA some software that was never released generally, from July 2014.

<comment><USER3> I thought that was curious, so I put one of their code samples to the test:

Swift WTF: [http://swiftwtf.tumblr.com/image/88465530183](http://swiftwtf.tumblr.com/image/88465530183))

But it looks fine on my machine (Xcode 6.2): [http://imgur.com/rJU7lcx](http://imgur.com/rJU7lcx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"Most perplexing feedback on Swift: folks who see it (and judge it) as the end of a trek - but don 't realize it is the start of a new world."_

Chris Lattner

[https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/474082459860992000](https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/474082459860992000)

</comment><comment><USER5> I predict this blog will run out of content real fast. I also notice the author conveniently left out the timestamps for their posts.

Swift is still very new, crashes in the language and in the IDE will not surprise anyone who calls himself a software engineer.

I don't write code on iOS or MacOS but Swift looks very solid to me and an obvious improvement over Objective C.

<comment><USER6> >Swift is still very new, crashes in the language and in the IDE will not surprise anyone who calls himself a software engineer.

And yet Rust is reliable as fuck even in its current shape.

Swift has no excuse to be so unpredictable, especially given that it's back by a humongous commercial company.

<comment><USER7> > And yet Rust is reliable as fuck even in its current shape.

I appreciate your vote of confidence in the team, but Rust has been in development for five years at this point, while Swift hasn't. :)

<comment><USER8> Swift started private development in July 2010.[1] So not quite five years, but pretty close.

1: [http://nondot.org/sabre/](http://nondot.org/sabre/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Learning iOS dev, coming from a js background, I have very few complaints about swift. It is in fact a very nice language.

The biggest pain is apple's frameworks and ide. The APIs are very inelegant and arbitrary. The worst thing is the drag and drop interface builder. I believe that the people who designed it never actually built an iPhone app with it. You can always get about 80% of what you want, then you have to resort to some outrageous hack and stitch the rest of it together with verbose imperative code. Declarative web dev with html really is a huge step up from Apple's stupid drag and drop thing.

Hopefully Swift is the start of Apple putting together a sane, modern development environment.

<comment><USER10> > The biggest pain is apple's frameworks and ide. The APIs are very inelegant > and arbitrary.

I can't agree with that at all – Apple's frameworks are among the most consistent I've ever seen. They have a small number of solid design patterns that they stick to that serve them very well. Picking up new frameworks is usually extremely easy because of this consistency. They are _far_ beyond JavaScript in this respect.

> The worst thing is the drag and drop interface builder. I believe that the > people who designed it never actually built an iPhone app with it. You can > always get about 80% of what you want, then you have to resort to some > outrageous hack and stitch the rest of it together with verbose imperative > code.

Interface Builder certainly has its shortcomings, but the most frequent complaints I see about it are from people who haven't taken the time to learn it properly and fall back to imperative code in preference to learning how to use Interface Builder properly.

Also, 80% declarative UI and 20% imperative code is a pretty fair mix – unless you are designing extremely simple applications, you shouldn't expect to put together an entire user interface using nothing but drag and drop tools. That's not an effective way to work regardless of the quality of the drag and drop tools.

> Declarative web dev with html really is a huge step up from Apple's stupid > drag and drop thing.

They are really two different worlds. Most of the time, one or the other is clearly the better choice for any given project, but it doesn't really make sense to say that one is better than the other overall.

<comment><USER9> Idunno... its a matter of opinion I suppose. But a drag and drop editor is just foolish, and they have never worked well. Here's how you adjust kerning:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7370013/how-to-set- kernin...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7370013/how-to-set-kerning-in- iphone-uilabel)

They really should have woken up and done a nice markup language and a styling language to go with it a very long time ago.

<comment><USER10> > a drag and drop editor is just foolish, and they have never worked well.

They work great for what they are designed for if you learn how to use them effectively. If you use them for things they aren't designed for or you assume that just because it's a GUI editor you can click around and build things without knowing what you are doing, then you're going to run into problems. This is not a problem with the tool.

> Here's how you adjust kerning

No, that's how you adjust kerning if you want to do it manually as a one-off task. It's trivial to wrap that up into something you can use in Interface Builder for day-to-day work.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was referring to wit the 80/20 split I mentioned. You use Interface Builder to create your user interface. It's not Photoshop. Fine control over the details, such as character-by-character adjustment of kerning, is more effectively done elsewhere. But just because you don't have Photoshop-level control over the details, it doesn't meant that it's not a great tool for the other 80% of GUI work.

I also don't understand how pointing out how to do kerning with code is a criticism of Interface Builder. You realise that if you create all your GUIs by avoiding Interface Builder you still have to use those APIs for kerning? That's not how you do kerning in Interface Builder, it's got nothing to do with Interface Builder. That's how you do it in code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The equality and truthiness oddities are the worst. One of my biggest pet peeves about languages is weird equality rules. PHP is one of the worst, there is a huge table of crazy rules that I suppose expert PHP people can remember, but it just seems crazy.

Languages like Ruby and Clojure have it best: nil and false are falsy, everything else is truthy.

<comment><USER12> PHP is pretty bad, but I think JS really takes the crown for insane equality comparisons. Basically every weird equality comparison from PHP is in JS, along with some other humdingers like 0 == [].

And my favorite, '\n\r\t' == 0

<comment><USER13> There is _never_ a good reason to use ==.

<comment><USER12> I totally agree, but they were bringing up the insane equality rules in PHP using the == operator, so I did likewise in Javascript. Both languages luckily have fantastically logical === operators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The examples look really scary.

So far I understood Swift to be the next big thing in terms of hot programming languages with a functional flavor.

Those more proficient with Swift, are posted screenshots manifestations of bugs or are we seeing correct output?

Hoping these are bugs that have been fixed in the meantime.. otherwise this reminds me of Javascript type promotion..

<comment><USER15> > So far I understood Swift to be the next big thing in terms of hot > programming languages with a functional flavor.

Swift is tightly coupled to Apple's platforms (which are of course commercially very viable, and if you develop for them you should be looking at Swift), under a proprietary license and developed under closed governance. It's a legitimate product, but under those circumstances it doesn't really have a shot at being a NBT in _programming_ by _itself_ , beyond contributing its ideas to wider discourse.

It's obvious that no generally relevant library/infrastructure will be written in Swift, for example; if anyone with a great idea choses to implement it in Swift first for whatever reason, it will be a reimplementation in another, more widely useful language that gains widespread popularity.

<comment><USER16> What does NBT stand for?

<comment><USER15> "Next Big Thing", taken from the OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

<comment><USER18> Swift may in fact be the exception to that rule, as everyone complains about it and almost no-one uses it ;)

<comment><USER19> If the ones complaining don't even use it, it says much more about those people. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This blog is from when the language was first announced, yet most people commenting seem to think it is current, and thus imply that SWIFT is in worse shape than it is.

Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER21> Are all the issues with Swift to be expected, or does it seem like there are more issues with Swift than one would normally expect normal from a new programming language?

</comment><comment><USER22> IMHO those bad examples are more or less bad, because of the high expectations and reputation of the company that released the language. Having in mind the age of Swift this site would not be so surprising if behind it there was a smaller team.

It would be really better if Apple go back in time and release working products in their first version. I understand having so big user (developer) base is hard, but as far as what we see from the financial reports they can easily afford having better software, by improving some development processes.

<comment><USER23> you classify a problem you don't even fully understand as easily solved because you're willing to spend other people's money freely. you have upper management written all over you.

<comment><USER22> Great reply, although I was hoping to make a discussion out of this.

Negative sentences doesn't contain as much information as positive ones.

"I don't like what you like" carries less information than "I like [something different]".

In other words. If you tell me what your opinion is I might change mine too.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find resources for garbage classification technology? - <AUTHOR> I am wondering whether the only solution for garbage classification is through manual labor; I suppose you can filter out metals, but can you do the same for plastic? <comment><USER2> Look for optical sorting nor near-infrared separator [http://www.sherbrooke- oem.com/optical-sorter](http://www.sherbrooke-oem.com/optical-sorter)

Here's a typical machine you can buy [https://www.alibaba.com/product- detail/Fully-automatic-urban...](https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Fully- automatic-urban-waste-classification-conveyor_60417669660.html)</comment>


How to fix the flatline economy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/09/29/how-to-fix-the-flatline-economy/ <comment><AUTHOR> Buried in the middle of the article is the main gist, and an astute point by the author:

      If more borrowing or more tax cutting aren't what the economy
      needs, what is? Optimism. Human psychology is a bigger force
      in economics than current policy debate acknowledges.

I tend to believe that, at least regarding domestic matters, there is a lot of FUD being disseminated. Most domestic indicators are trending well and for the global investor, the U.S. is still the BATNA (i.e. to the potential foreign economic alternatives).

Thought about differently, if the U.S. were run as a corporation, we would be utter fools to not take advantage of the historically low interest rates that investors are offering us.

Don't get me wrong, there are clear fiscal issues with the U.S. over the long- term, but they have been blown way out of proportion and have instilled a sense of fear in the public by those whose interests it suits. Provided we begin addressing these issues and lay out a plan within the next few years, it is very likely that much of the todays concerns will be looked back on as being completely over-hyped by a few hysterical and politically driven interests with a knack for getting disproportional media coverage. Hysterics aside though, I do believe that they this group has done a service by getting us to discuss some of the future sacrifices our citizens will have to make; I just hope they stop before the current political environment is damaged beyond the point were we are able to effectively deal with and compromise over these issues.</comment>


OEmbed - embedded representation of a URL on third party sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.oembed.com

<comment><USER2> I like the idea, and I'm glad to see sites already implementing it.

I worry about discovery, though.

"oEmbed providers can choose to make their oEmbed support discoverable by adding elements to the head of their existing (X)HTML documents."

So... I have to download the page, parse the link for oembed, make a request to the oembed service and THEN I can finally get the info I need to show the link?

I assume you'd only want to make this call once and store the result, so it's not -so- bad, but... That's a bit much. Of course, the alternative is to store the format for the service call for all major sites. (At least, as things stand.)

<comment><USER3> Apparently some specialize in tracking the oembed providers. See <http://oohembed.com/> & <http://api.embed.ly/documentation> for example.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Start Up or Sell Out? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working on my own startup and have been at it for a couple of months now. However, recently, I've been offered a place at another company.
The experience I could gain at that new company is probably loads more than I could ever get slogging away on my own. And of course, I'd get paid too, so that helps some in paying off the bills.
Then again, I've always wanted to make it on my own, and it feels a waste to abandon the project now that we've come so far.
So the question is: how many of you would take the job (or not) in this case, and why? <comment><USER2> "The experience I could gain at that new company is probably loads more than I could ever get slogging away on my own."

It kind of seems like you've already made up your mind here. If you think that you can get more value out of the job for the time being, don't feel bad about taking it.

I see the big variable that you haven't talked about here is your commitment level to this particular startup. Is it something that you love doing? Or is it just something you are passing time with.

In my experience, I've built startups that I could have jumped ship on. With others, that thought wouldn't have even entered my mind.

So I think the variables here are more than just should I take the job or not. We don't know your situation well enough. My guess is you are already leaning one way though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea I'm working on is definitely something that I want to do, and it's something that I truly believe could be useful to some people, so it's not something I could turn my back on at a moment's notice.

The other factor also is that I'd like to at least prove to myself that I'm able to launch something of my own, which, honestly speaking, constitutes a large part of the hesitation I'm facing.

I see benefits in both situations – self-validation vs opportunity, so I wouldn't say I'm leaning one way or another particularly.

All the same, I think your comment has given me some perspective to think about, thanks.

<comment><USER2> Well, I'm glad to hear you say that. I actually read you as leaning the other way. I'm glad I was wrong. So let me jump in on this side.

The question is not opportunity vs. self-validation, it's opportunity vs opportunity. If you believe in what your doing, and you can keep chugging along doing that, that's what I would do. Thank the company for the opportunity but tell them you are committed to your startup, they will respect that. And if they don't, you probably didn't want to work there anyway.

On the note of experience. At the job you are being offered, most likely you would gain specific technical experience. But you get hordes of experience from running a startup too. The startup experience tends to be on more of a macro level and you will find it useful in many aspects of your life. Running your own company will force you to put on lots of hats and give you a more complete look at how things fit together on a grander scale.

Not saying that the job experience is not valuable. Just reminding you not to forget about the experience you are already getting at your startup.

Self validation is cool too.

So what's this startup? =)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I forgot to mention that this job is with yet another startup. Though true, I'd probably be looking at a much narrower scope than running my own gig.

The team there is still small, but the guys at the helm have set up and sold their own companies before and have pretty good contacts and networks from what I hear (hence the opportunities for learning and gaining contacts). So unfortunately, it's not as clear cut as startup-vs-corporate life.

As for my startup, no offence, but I probably won't discuss it here… though hopefully we'll be able to announce something small soon =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments so far guys. Appreciate it =)

Quick question: for those juggling a job and a startup on the side, how does it go for you guys? I'm guessing any free time from work is spent on the startup?

<comment><USER3> It's not easy. At all. It's like having 3 jobs: the day job, the startup, and life. The usual life things like shopping for food, eating, even seeing a friend all take time, and for time-keeping purposes, they are like a job.

Something will have to give. Unfortunately the temptation is to skimp on the startup work. If you're really serious about doing this, you'll have to be super vigilant and force yourself into using sacred time slots: when you're supposed to be ralxing, you better be, and when you're churning code at 3am for the startup, you better not be distracted and it better not affect your day job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you can gain valuable experience and salary at the new job, and you've only invested a few months in your startup, I'd say take the job, and work on the startup in your spare time (with their written consent, of course.)

There's no need to abandon the project; plus, you can always abandon the job in a year (after you've gained experience and paid off the bills.)

</comment><comment><USER5> How passionate are you about what you are doing? And would excited about doing the job?

Without knowing much about the situation, I would stay stick at it...

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey

Your problem is common to many of us. Can you not do both together? After all, when you get old, atleast you can say you tried at breaking out on your own, ain't it? <USER6>
<comment><USER7> I would be great if you can juggle both. Working on your startup during your free time, i.e. weekends is quite common here.</comment></comment>


Sublime Text Setup - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mrmartineau/SublimeTextSetup A simple document that enables you to setup & connfigure Sublime Text 2 more quickly & efficiently.<p>Please let me know if you find errors or think that I've missed something. <comment><USER2> Hey, this is great! Thanks.</comment>