NSW and Victoria just jumped 1.8 metres north - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw-and-victoria-just-jumped-1-8-metres-north-20200102-p53ocx.html <comment><USER2> Somewhat clickbaity headline. The change is being made to fix a 1.8 metre inaccuracy that has crept into our GPS coordinates, caused by Australia slowly drifting north.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It will take some time for companies like Google to pick up and implement > the new data. But when they do, you will enjoy slightly more accurate > satellite navigation.

I wouldn't hold my breath. Google's adoption of updated information for anything other than the capital cities is extremely slow. On the order of the data has been in OSM for five years slow.

Google has photographs of my house from above, and from the road, and doesn't list the road as existing.

They're probably inclined to add this GPS shift data for the capital cities - but the mapping data will probably be inconsistently updated.

Especially as the state and territories provide the data in an incredibly wide range of formats.

VIC, NSW, SA provide shapefiles, which is great, as it is becoming one of the more popular standard. (They also export for a range of other data types).

The NT provides a strange mix of shapefiles and custom xlsx sheets. Unless you're looking at Darwin or the heart of the Kimberly's, you'll be looking at human-written Excel sheets for a lot of this.

QLD, the ACT and WA seem to use OpenGIS/ArcGIS XML files.

Tasmania doesn't maintain their own data, but relies on ANZLIC to do it for them, and seem to be in the middle of an argument over who will do the maintenance moving forward. (The last update to any of their public data appears to be in 2016.) This was shapefile/export like VIC, NSW and SA, but it becomes somewhat useless if it never gets updated.

If you're an islander, you sort of have to hope that the state/territory includes you in their dataset. They don't always. And they're not consistent about when they include you. Regressions are common. Councils tend to maintain their own data, but rarely allow anyone access, paid or not. If you hand them a FOIA request to see the data, then... Well, I got handed a series of printed XML documents, after six months of them threatening to take me to court for requesting it. Multiple island "councils" (often different names, but similar functions) did this.

<comment><USER4> You should be able to easily submit corrections to the Google maps data, especially if the overhead satellite data already matches. I was able to get my house and street corrected with just a couple requests.

<comment><USER5> Tried that as well. (extensively documented to show they swapped street names.) Ticket was closed after half a year without comment.

They have a system but seem to be missing the processes.

<comment><USER6> I tried getting them to correct the location for the apartment I used to live in for months but it kept bieng rejected. I recently got a message 3 years after I had moved that my edit was accepeted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This animation [0], from the Australia Government, made my day on why it's important to have correct coordinates for your country.

[https://www.icsm.gov.au/sites/default/files/inline- images/Fi...](https://www.icsm.gov.au/sites/default/files/inline- images/Field_Gif.gif) [0]

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want some details from a more rigorous point of view, check out

[https://www.icsm.gov.au/gda2020/what-changing-and- why](https://www.icsm.gov.au/gda2020/what-changing-and-why)

Similar efforts are going on elsewhere, e.g.

[https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/datums/newdatums/TrackOurProgress.s...](https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/datums/newdatums/TrackOurProgress.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER9> > To fix this, all Australian states and territories have agreed to update > their coordinates by June. However, they are all doing it at their own > speeds.

> Official government road maps and property boundaries will now line up > perfectly with GPS location data.

> It will take some time for companies like Google to pick up and implement > the new data. But when they do, you will enjoy slightly more accurate > satellite navigation.

I don't get it. Does Google have to wait for government? Why couldn't Google incrementally add 1.8 meter to its maps on its own schedule, years ago?

<comment><USER10> _Does Google have to wait for government?_

Thought we like to think of Google as a big data company, for many of its projects it's more an aggregator of other people's data. Yes, it does create original data. But a lot of its data is from outside sources. Very often data that you paid for with your tax dollars, and then get to pay for again with your privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't a novel thing, as far as I can tell. A decade ago when I was working on routing of over-the-road trucking, our maps provider moved the entire United States a couple meters and it broke all our road restrictions.

The problem for us -- and likely for those in Australia now -- is that converting physical address descriptions and lat/long becomes a little more fraught. We described road restrictions as being "on the road that is found between X1,Y1 and X2,Y2." A separate layer would snap those X,Y coordinates to the road network and find the road between them. Before the move, that meant converting to "Highway 6 Southbound from milemarker 16 to milemarker 28"

But when you moved the world, X1,Y1 no longer landed on Highway 6, and instead snapped over to the frontage road. Your restriction now read as "Highway 6 Southbound, down to exit 21, around the corner to the frontage road, then down the frontage road". And your restriction that used to say "stay off this one section of road" now says "stay off the highway, the frontage road, and don't use this exit."

<comment><USER12> While the problem isn't novel, that's probably not what happened with what you're describing, for a number of reasons.

Most local datums are anchored to the local geology. So in the US, if you're using nad27 or nad83, the reference system is "moving" along with the continent (nad83 = North American Datum 1983), based on some weighted benchmark vectors and a lot of math. It's one reason why different datums with defined epochs exist. Some are static, but some are actually dynamic with time (eg ITRF).

But most people don't grok any of that and just stick with defaults, or guess- and-check during map setup and go with whatever looks "close enough".

In your case, chances are the map provider switched datums with the update, from nad27 to nad83, and your software wasn't told about the change. Or it was, but your road restriction data was drawn in the old projection, and not converted / transformed to the new one.

Or, you could have had data that initially was mislabeled, recorded with GPS (wgs84) and entered using one of the many datums that's similar, but not the same. Or maybe collected using one of the many state plane coordinate systems (which people tend to like because it's more or less Cartesian- east,north) which are themselves built in top of one of the datums. You can pick the right coordinate zone, but wrong underlying datum.

If any data provider or aggregator or if your company GIS guru ever selected the wrong projection (choices often are dozens of coded options that look nearly identical), or left it blank (undefined) because they weren't sure...

A instant "shift" would happen as soon as you "corrected" the error, (or upgraded software, or any other number of situations).

This is where a good GIS guru earns their keep, because conversions between projections and datums are just math, and data can often be corrected in seconds by running it through a manual "inverse" conversion, assuming one can recognize what happened.

Back to Australia: if people used GPS coordinates (wgs84) and didn't convert to a Australian centric datum (which is the default option for most collectors), the data would "stay still" while the continent moves. Which is one of many reasons why selecting an appropriate datum/ projection is so important.

For the US: While there is some intra-datum movement between nad27 and nad83, most of the differences are do to improvements in the quality and accuracy of surveys over half a century. So the differences between the two datums tend to grow as you get further from the beginning points of the surveys.

Which means some areas, like a lot of the East coast, have minimal differences, and areas out West have larger deltas, but it varies.

A couple of meters would be better explained by a bad datum transformation than by drift, which is likely an order of magnitude smaller at even the worst locations for the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anybody know how what3words is dealing with this? Do locations suddenly have a new 3 word location, or have the words stayed the same and the location they refer to (in GPS co-ordinates) changed?

<comment><USER3> I believe what3words encodes latitude and longitude, so the location they refer to will have changed.

However, what3words is only accurate to 3m, so this change may not have affected their system at all.

<comment><USER14> well, plenty of places could have moved out of their box. many urban properties are quite narrow; i lived on one not even 2.5 metres wide, so every 3m box would be in use (and potentially then some) on that street. (i didn't have an address living there either, but w3w wasn't going to help that problem much. easier to give a recognisable landmark.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very exciting to have a tangible feeling for plate tectonics like this, and great reporting. As the article says, in the course of a lifetime the continental plate has drifted enough for GPS to mean your Uber shows up on the wrong side of the street.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised big GPS users like Google haven't already fixed this on their apps as post-GPS corrective step. Another example of caring little and doing the job so-so :/

<comment><USER17> Sometimes it's better if everyone uses the same _wrong_ value vs one entity using a different _correct_ value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Non clickbaity version: they did not "jump" anywhere, the coordinates for GPS were just updated for the first time since 1994 to account for the constant movement of 7cm per year. And it's not just these 2 parts of Australia, it's all if it. NSW and Victoria just moved slightly more than the rest (1.8m vs. 1.5m or 1.7m for other parts).

<comment><USER19> Not quite: "To fix this, all Australian states and territories have agreed to update their coordinates by June. However, they are all doing it at their own speeds. On January 1, the Victorian and NSW governments updated the coordinates of every road, property and geographical feature in their states, essentially moving the south-eastern seaboard 1.8 metres north-east overnight."

So all of Australia will move by June, but so far only NSW and Victoria have.

I don't see why it's a good idea to update coordinates of different parts of a continent at different times. Likely a political decision, not a technical one.

<comment><USER18> The complaint was towards the clickbaity title which leads one to believe there must have been a sudden tectonic event that caused the continent to move.

"Florida man jumps back in time by one hour!" - leap hour reporting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This mentioned Google hasn't updated to this change, do we know when they will?

<comment><USER21> The trickiness is going to be two-fold.

The trickiest part is going to be that some previous GPS coordinates will have been "pinned" to the 1994 grid, and others will have been taken live over that time span.

See, surveyors have always known that you can't _actually_ just write down the GPS coordinates of a boundary or intersection or bridge, because of this exact problem. So surveyors do the math (well, most likely their specialized surveying GPS equipment does the math) and write down the coordinates relative to the baseline for the continental plate in question.

If you have coordinates you know were LAT, LNG in the 1994 baseline, it's easy to apply the transform and get the LAT', LNG' in the new 2020 baseline.

But what happens if your coordinates _weren 't_ provided by a surveyor carefully surveying a location in the appropriate baseline? What if your coordinates were measured by a jerk walking to a place last year with a GPS and writing down whatever was displayed? _Those_ coordinates don't need to be transformed, they were already basically correct for the 2020 baseline. If you add the correction to those numbers you're introducing a new error. And to make matters worse, people have been entering non-calibrated numbers into your data set for _25 years_ \-- some numbers will have 5 years of drift, some 15 years. If you know _when_ an uncalibrated measurement was made, you can kind- of interpolate the drift, but without that you're just SoL.

To make matters worse, a company like Google is using data from a wide variety of sources, some they gathered themselves, some they get from others. With your own data, you might at least know either whether it was calibrated to the previous baseline or at least when it was collected, but someone else's dataset might be _messy_ in unknownable ways.

Say you previously got the location of a park entrance from a government parks department, in the 1994 coordinates. Now you go through your aggregated dataset and apply the transformation to the coordinates and get the new number in 2020 coordinates (which thankfully will match what a consumer GPS actually says, now). Next month, when you update your data from the government parks department, it gives you a _different_ coordinate for the park entrance, which is neither the number you had previously for the entrance in 1994 coordinates nor the number you computed in 2020 coordinates.

Now, do you assume that new number is in the new coordinate system, or might it still have been measured in the old coordinate system, either having been measured prior to the changeover or just on old equipment that was not updated? Ideally your interchange format would include the time a GPS measurement was taken as well as any baseline it was calibrated to, but do you want to guess how often interchange formats are "ideal"?

So, long story short, it's going to be a long time before most of the old coordinates are flushed from the system, and you'll probably occasionally see a "wrong" coordinate that can be traced to this sort of thing every now and again for the rest of your life.

<comment><USER22> I hadn't thought of this, thanks for explaining it so thoroughly.

Could you explain though, how you record LAT, LNG coords relative to a continental plate baseline? I thought to solve this problem you simply recorded the time that the measurement was taken, so that you can update the coords based on known plate position data at a given time (e.g. if you know a position was recorded somewhere in Aus in 2018, you just add 2cm x 7cm/yr = 14cm north east to the measurement to get the 2020 coords).

<comment><USER21> That's honestly getting to a point I only know vaguely about -- my real-world experience is just from chatting with surveyors when I needed to get a couple of parcels of land surveyed (once for a boundary survey, wherein I'm not sure this came up, and once for a FEMA/flood zone survey, where matching the site data to the FEMA data was much more important).

Part of the answer, in the US, (and the expensive equipment -- one of the smaller surveyors I talked to just rented it on an as-needed basis) are the Continuously Operating Reference Stations, which is a network of ground-based stations of defined positions which are used to refine GPS coordinates relative to the National Spatial Reference System: [https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/](https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> tl;dr Australia moves north by about the speed your hair and fingernails grow.

<comment><USER24> West Iceland drifts west, and east Iceland drifts east, resulting in a 2cm widening per year: [https://icelandmag.is/article/how-fast-iceland-growing- due-t...](https://icelandmag.is/article/how-fast-iceland-growing-due-tectonic- plates-drifting-apart)

<comment><USER25> Well that's one way to tackle the over-tourism problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Stop refreshing HN - <AUTHOR> https://www.8hrs.xyz/ <comment><USER2> It includes flagged and dead items (e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950163)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for noticing. I will do what i can.</comment></comment>


Machine Learning #2 - Hill Climbing (Meaning of Life?) - <AUTHOR> https://www.iamtrask.squarespace.com/blog/2013/12/18/machine-learning-2-hill-climbing-search-lifes-journey

<comment><USER2> Another way to look at AI climbing hills is "causal entropic forces" [1], which can make the AI spontaneously want to climb, because it maximizes entropy — it gives more future opportunities than going down.

On an unrelated note, your certificate is for _.squarespace.com which does not include www.iamtrask.squarespace.com and triggers an SSL exception.

[1] Wissner-Gross and Freer. "Causal Entropic Forces", in _PhysRL* 110 (2013) — [http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pd...](http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The problem being that "more possible futures" doesn't actually learn any specific function or direct actions towards a specific goal.

<comment><USER2> You are right, it does better: it discovers the goal on its own.

<comment><USER3> That makes no freaking sense. If I want to teach a program to play Pac-Man, it will have more _possible_ futures in situations where it runs away from ghosts and _avoids_ eating fruit. But I want it to eat the fruit!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Predictive models to calculate more accurate Covid-19 case fatality ratios - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/21/researchers-attempt-to-minimize-bias-in-covid-19-case-fatality-ratios/ <comment><USER2> Where are the models that predict how many people will have long term disabilities due to COVID-19?</comment>


LivingSocial Is Laying Off More Than 50 Percent of Its Staff - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/03/16/livingsocial-is-laying-off-more-than-50-percent-of-its-staff/ <comment><USER2> "The company has raised more than $900 million to date from Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Lightspeed Venture Partners."

That's the biggest red flag for me. General rule of thumb is that your VCs won't approve an exit unless it's for at least 10x the funding you've taken, which means they need a minimum exit of about 10 billion.

That's a tough spot to be in, and really changes your thinking. I know of at least one company that had an exit opportunity but it was only 2x funding, so the investors wouldn't allow it. They then slogged along for _8 more years_ until they finally had an exit that was 0.2x and it all went to the series A investors with their preference. Founders got nothing, angels got nothing, employees got nothing, and series B and beyond (the ones who blocked the 2x exit) got nothing.

Edit to clarify: I'm not saying the VCs are doing anything wrong here or being irrational or anything like that. I'm saying as a founder you need to watch out for this because the VC has a diversified portfolio and the founder doesn't.

<comment><USER3> A bird in the hand and all that.

Surely the VCs have the data on how often they get burned by blocking a profitable exit. How often do they block a 2x return and later get 10x? Is it really enough the compensate for the (sure more common) result of getting 0.2x or 0?

<comment><USER4> I worked at a .com era startup that went through something similar. Biggish acquisition offers came in circa 2001, but much smaller than the theoretical enterprise value if the product worked out.

Company finally sold in 2005, preferred shareholders got everything but still lost money. Founders got nothing, employees got nothing. But everyone got to keep their jobs which was better than just going out of business.

This seems to happen pretty often. Also common is founders turning down acquisitions because they are _sure_ they can make more if they keep at it. You wouldn't start a company if you didn't believe it.

<comment><USER5> I "lost" well over a half million dollars because founders turned down a $50-$60mm acquisition offer to try to hit a home run. The problem was the ceo had been previously acquired and left before he fully vested in order to start the company I worked at, and had walked away from $5m in the process. (Which is crazy, right? That's a $5m bird in hand if he just didn't get fired for 2 years.) Anyway, he was really attached to the idea of building a company worth $300m plus so instead he built a company worth a handful of millions.

It was pretty damn frustrating for me.

<comment><USER6> There are so many of these stories of wealthy founders turning down bird in the hand offers and then losing it all X years later even though the company got 'big'. I too got burned by one myself.

I advise friends now to avoid those companies as employees, because an exit that would be very good for you might be turned down by wealthy founders. Joining a startup with a wealthy founder means they will go huge or bust, and nothing in between. Great if you want to do that yourself, but you usually want to be wealthy already.

<comment><USER7> Which is kind of funny advice since essentially you're suggesting to avoid working for companies with successful founders.

<comment><USER8> Just because the founder is successful doesn't mean they have your interests at heart.

<comment><USER9> It's very naive to bet your future on the hypothetical benevolence of other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny, typing "livingsocial layoffs" in google gives me these suggestions "livingsocial layoffs 2015", "livingsocial layoffs 2014", "livingsocial layoffs 2013"

<comment><USER11> Don't forget 2012—that's when I got it.

<comment><USER12> I see, an early adopter!

<comment><USER13> Damn hipsters

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised these sites are still around. To me, offering your services at 50% off screams desperation or that your business is going under. I bought a deal once from Groupon and couldn't even bring myself to use it at the restaurant. It was a high-end establishment and the thought of pulling out the crumpled paper voucher, which I printed when the ink cartridge levels were low, cheapened the whole experience.

<comment><USER15> I don't think your Groupon experience is representative.

<comment><USER16> But it's still an experience. Enough of one that he/she is willing to post about it publicly, perpetuating how the service feels - cheap.

<comment><USER17> It was a good thought too. I've known about Groupon and Living Social for years, but have heard too many stories about the businesses they supposedly work for frowning upon customers that attempt to use the coupons. Restaurants putting patrons in the back or in some side room, giving them limited options on the menu etc...

<comment><USER18> Seems counter-intuitive that restaurants would treat them poorly. If you're savvy enough to use Groupon, you're probably savvy enough to leave a Yelp review.

It's interesting how one's perspective on something differs, one sees it as "cheap" while another sees it as "thrifty". Related to upbringing, perhaps? I love it when I can get two $60 meals for one $60 price.

<comment><USER19> Your point about Yelp reviews is good, but I'd say that reviews from people with Groupons, Living Social deals, going on Restaurant Week, etc. are generally worthless, and I've often wished for a way to filter them out. And it's really for much the same reason that I think restaurants tend to not value those customers a lot. First, if they'll only come in with a really great deal, they're not likely to become repeat customers at full price. And it's not profitable to nurture a customer base who only buys when there is a sale (just ask JC Penney). And since they've already demonstrated themslves to be "thrifty," they're also less likely to buy extras like alcohol, dessert, etc. that make the visit profitable. There are few businesses that want to attract people who care only about price, but that's the behavior that Living Social and Groupon encourage.

Secondly, and admittedly on a much more anecdotal note, it seems that these customers are prone to acting entitled and complaining loudly about things that are non-issues compared to the regular clientele. Most people who don't like Thai food simply don't go to Thai restaurants. But there's a pretty decent Thai place near my house that tried Groupon, and got a handful of really bad Yelp reviews from people who seriously seemed to just hate Thai food. A couple of them explicitly mentioned Groupon, and the owner told me that she believes that all of those reviews were Grouponers (and the deal didn't restrict what they could buy, so they got the same food as everyone else). Their complaints had nothing to do about the specifics of the restaurant (which has almost universally good reviews). This serves no one. The diners get a meal they didn't like. The restaurant takes a ratings hit. And Yelp users see artifically low ratings for a good restaurant. If I'm looking for a Thai restaurant, I don't care what people who dislike Thai food think -- I already know they'll hate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Coupon circular not worth billions?

Maybe they can hold another round of funding where investors pay $30 for "$100" in stock.

<comment><USER21> only 48 hours left and over 100 people have claimed it already!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> NEW DEAL: 50% off your burn rate!

Hurry! This deal expires Q1 2016.

<comment><USER23> That was a burn in and of itself.

<comment><USER24> At half off. Don't forget!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's even worse than that if you include recent past job cuts too:

> LivingSocial will employ around 200 to 225 people after the cuts.

> [...]

> The Washington, D.C.-based company has now cut nearly 900 jobs over three > rounds of layoffs since Thakar took over for founder Tim O'Shaughnessy 18 > months ago.

<comment><USER26> With numbers like that I bet that the people that remain are barely able to maintain their existing systems and hold on to existing customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "though around 120 of those jobs in customer service will be replaced through outsourcing."

Hiring a cheap call center in some other country I suppose.

<comment><USER28> So what? Would you rather have the company scale and have a chance to do well or let it fail given their current cost structure. Think long term. If the company does well, they will hire more Americans workers in roles which do require more application and intellect.

<comment><USER29> I actually think customer service require more skills than it may appear straight away - you have to learn to make angry people like you, or at least think they have been treated fairly.

And I have never seen a successful startup that didn't listen to its users - which you can't do if the people who are supposed to talk with them are in a different continent and don't understand the language really well.

<comment><USER30> I agree. Customer Service needs to be an equal partner on the team with Sales and Development. Growth is great, but it means nothing if you're bleeding yourself dry by not serving those customers you're obtaining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So anyone been keeps it a running list of the tech layoffs? We have IBM, optimizely, zenefits, and who else?

<comment><USER32> I miss f __ __*dcompany.com so much. There really should be a 2.0 these days.

<comment><USER33> I once owned the domain deadherring.com (with the idea of something like FC with more in depth analysis). I regret letting that go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, they'll be down to ~200 employees. They were at around ~5,000 in 2011/2012, I think.

<comment><USER34> A lot of those employees were also via their international acquisitions, which I believe have all been sold for pennies on the dollar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> ...and this, my friends, is why I am bootstrapped.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sad, met some of the LivingSocial developers at RubyConf. Not sure how many are involved. I hope everyone lands on their feet.

</comment><comment><USER37> 2016 reminds me of Eminem's song "Lose Yourself" when he says, "Snap back to reality. Oh, there goes gravity..."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vksfnZaZ0A4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vksfnZaZ0A4)

</comment><comment><USER38> _Always negotiate severance pay._

Do not ever let an HR respresentative make you feel like it is greedy or disloyal for you to ask for fair severance pay to protect you in the event of unexpected job loss.</comment>


Ask HN: Charging for Training for an App? - <AUTHOR>

I develop paid iOS apps that are mostly focused on the business and legal markets.  These apps are all less than $30 US per download so they are not cost prohibitive for these types of customers.
Now I'm looking to develop some advanced training packages that include videos, PDFs, sample files, and other types of media that will help customers take full advantage of the apps.
I'd like to offer different training packages at different various points but I'm afraid of alienating customers by charging for training rather than providing it for free.
Have you ever encountered a similar situation and do you have any advice regarding this matter?  I'd be curious to learn how others have dealt with this before.  Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> _I'm afraid of alienating customers by charging for training rather than providing it for free._

Not only are businesses not alienated by this sort of thing, many of them will either a) have explicit budgets for it or b) have explicit requirements that _they cannot buy your stuff if they cannot also buy the training_.

An Appointment Reminder customer wanted a quote for training. I said "Do you want me there to lead an in-person training session, a webinar, or several videos showing operation of the software which your team can review at their leisure?" She said "Quote me all of those." I think I picked $10k, $4k, and $2k. She said "Hmm -- no need to fly you out here but we can greenlight either of the other two without needing to talk to anybody."

(n.b. Assume that the yearly contract for the service itself is in the four figure region. That sometimes matters -- a few companies will just automatically assume support/training costs 20% of invoice.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response - your advice is greatly appreciated. Do you notice that customers are more inclined to choose the in person, webinar, or prerecord option? Or is it usually different on a case by case basis?

<comment><USER2> I don't have nearly enough data to give you any confidence in that answer -- all my enterprise sales are essentially one-offs, still.</comment></comment></comment>


Electric scooter startup Grin raises ~$45M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/electric-scooter-startup-grin-raises-45-million/ <comment><USER2> Gotta love the cover image on the story. Hipster with a "man-bun".</comment>


Mom helped hide laptops from FBI in cabinet, gets 6 months probation  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/mom-helped-hide-laptops-from-fbi-in-dishwasher-gets-6-months-probation/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the Romanian art thief whose mother apparently burnt the paintings he stole to try and help his case: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/romanian-art- thief-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/romanian-art-thief-offers- works-in-return-for-dutch-trial.html)</comment>


The lost tunnels of Liverpool - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150902-the-lost-tunnels-of-liverpool <comment><USER2> Parts of them are open to visitors. Well worth a visit.

[http://www.williamsontunnels.co.uk/](http://www.williamsontunnels.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am pretty certain I've heard Williamson referred to as the 'mole' of edge hill rather than the 'king' as this story says

<comment><USER4> GoogleFight would overwhelmingly tend to agree with you: [http://www.googlefight.com/%22king+of+edge+hill%22-vs-%22mol...](http://www.googlefight.com/%22king+of+edge+hill%22-vs-%22mole+of+edge+hill%22.php)

:)

<comment><USER3> I feel validated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alexei Sayle mentioned these tunnels in his autobiography "Stalin Ate My Homework" \- I wasn't sure he was being completely serious.

[NB I strongly recommend the audio version of the book as Alexei narrates it]

</comment><comment><USER6> Well that is some H.P. Lovecraft material right there...

<comment><USER7> My thoughts as well. Let's hope they don't finish excavating the tunnels and accidentally walk the path in the wrong pattern. Who knows what hidden realm you'd end up in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of a story I saw a while back about people apparently becoming obsessed with tunnel-digging for its own sake. I can't seem to be able to dig up the story itself, but [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_Schmidt_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_Schmidt_Tunnel) was one of the cases mentioned in it.

<comment><USER9> This sounds fascinating. If you or anybody else can find the article please post it!

<comment><USER10> related: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-final-look-at-dcs- tunn...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-final-look-at-dcs-tunnel- digging-bug-man/2012/11/07/a43a6744-27ba-11e2-9972-71bf64ea091c_story.html)</comment></comment></comment>


The Largest Prison Strike In American History Goes Ignored By US Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/41235/the-largest-prison-strike-in-american-history-goes-ignored-by-us-media/ <comment><USER2> The article is wrong.

This was covered in the NY Times. The articles were published on the same day.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/us/16prison.html>

Edit-- Actually, this was covered in the NYT 4 days ago, and the article was submitted to Hacker News and ignored:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996994>

Plus, the issue of it being "ignored by US media" is not covered by the article in anything resembling an intellectual way, and merely serves as a sensational hook to get people reading a story already covered by other sources.

[http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/12/georgia-prisoner- stri...](http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/12/georgia-prisoner-strike-comes- out-of-lockdown.html)

[http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=georgia_prison_strike_in...](http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=georgia_prison_strike_interview_update_dec15)

<comment><USER3> You'll see the "ignored by the MSM!" angle a lot on these kind of political stories. It's on reddit all the time. Look for headlines like "WTF?! Prisoners on strike and Fox News refuses to report on it! FUCK YOU FOX!!"

It's an easy angle to drum up interest in the story and pander to your readers by making them think they're getting the "real" story.

<comment><USER4> Well it was being ignored for the first few days, it only just started to get picked up by NYT etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "... prisoners in Georgia are forced to work without pay for their labor-- seemingly a violation of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude."

I hadn't thought about that before, but that's a very interesting point. The fact that such a high percentage of the prison population is black makes it hit home a little harder.

<comment><USER6> "Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, _except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted_ , shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

<comment><USER7> There are many ways to interpret that statement. One interpretation would go towards that a judge may specify involuntary servitude (eg. community service) as punishment, and another would say that involuntary servitude is implied by the prison sentence.

I'm sure the prisoners take the former interpretation that involuntary servitude was not specified as punishment and thus is unconstitutional.

Also, the 13th amendment absolutely bans slavery, so if you can construe characteristics of ownership then you could make it unconstitutional. Georgia also has a history of abusing the law to keep slavery in all but name going which would negatively impact the states' case in a non-southern court, and would make a good case as to the intent of Georgian legislation being to revive slavery. I mean when they're trying to put the Confederate flag back on their flag it gives a person pause as to the intent of not paying their labor. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,85078,00.html>

This is why most states pay their employees in prison a pittance rather than absolutely nothing. It avoids the issue entirely and makes it one of labor law.

Re-education through labor, not just for communists anymore!

<comment><USER8> _Re-education through labor, not just for communists anymore!_

It is also for capitalists. Georgia has a number of privately operated, for profit prisons. (It does not appear that any of them were involved in this strike.)

[ [http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/Divisions/Corrections/PrivatePri...](http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/Divisions/Corrections/PrivatePrisons.html) ] [ <http://www.thegeogroupinc.com/> ] [ <http://www.correctionscorp.com/> ]

<comment><USER9> Welcome to the Prison-Industrial Complex: it's like slavery but with more rape jokes!

<comment><USER10> While sarcastic, the state of the "Prison-Industrial" complex reads like a science fiction novel.

<comment><USER11> You know sci-fi is frequently not about predicting the future, but preventing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Their demands seem entirely reasonable to me. I'm ashamed to belong to a society in which such demands must be made, more so that they would be ignored.

<comment><USER13> I'm not inclined to believe things prisoners say about their conditions.

So while I agree the demands are reasonable, I'm not (yet) convinced that they needed to be made or that they are ignored.

(Except for the fruits/vegetables, because realistically while they may ask for it, they aren't going to eat it.)

<comment><USER10> I'll make this quick, and monitor to see if interest demands me go into more detail (personal experience).

We do not rehabilitate prisoners. We have a ridiculous recidivism rate (60%+ depending on your data, demographic, etc).

We have the highest amount of citizens in prison then any Western country.

If the Mandatory Minimum Federal laws for drugs were flipped with actual State Violent crimes, we would have a much better society.

I would love to see inmates having the ability to pursue a trade, learn programming, learn a skill which Trumps their felony..which is incredibly difficult. Felon's are obligated by law to note if they have been Charged with a Felony (depending on the wording, for example: "convicted in the last 7 years" you may mark NO if, it has in fact, been 8).

Something that may be of interest.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/02/getting_out_life_after...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/02/getting_out_life_after_prison_1.html)

<comment><USER14> If there were less people in prison, and less reoffenders, who would make all the military equipment, household appliances, license plates etc etc for free?

The US would have no slaves to work with!

edit: Since I'm being downmodded for stating fact:

[http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=82...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289) [http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/slavery-in-u-s-prison- sys...](http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/slavery-in-u-s-prison-system/) [http://newworkerfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/02/us-prison- labo...](http://newworkerfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/02/us-prison-labour- return-to-slavery.html) <http://www.insideprison.com/prison-industry- labor.asp>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwT6CisM0mU>

There was also a great wikipedia article listing all the different things that inmates make. If they refuse, they're subjected to solitary confinement.

The US should be thoroughly ashamed. Not that it'll ever be reported by the mainstream media.

<comment><USER15> That misses the mark.. prisons are expensive. We'd be better off paying people $8/hr to make that stuff and not paying to house and guard them.

The real reason is because you immediately lose a political argument if you're accused of being soft on crime. So there's absolutely no reasoned debate on the topic, the only time it comes up is when every so often a pol comes up with some dumbass punitive and counter-productive measure to get a headline. Additionally, most prisoners are black, and everyone knows this, while 80% of voters in most districts are white.

So basically, the way we're acting is both short-term stupid (could just pay day laborers and save money) and long-term stupid (creating lifetime criminals by destroying other options for them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it's important to note that breaking the law isn't necessarily unethical, therefore we should carefully consider our treatment towards "criminals". The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with Georgia leading the US. It isn't pretty.

<comment><USER7> The law being ethical is what lawyers would call a 'legal fiction'.

This is why the first juries established jury nullification.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, it seems recently most of the time juries are not informed of their nullification abilities (and the defense is often prohibited from mentioning it). Sadly this line of reasoning has been upheld in court.

<comment><USER18> They didn't "establish nullification" - nullification is simply the logical outcome that the jury's decision is final, and can't be questioned.

The reason judges don't want this fact brought up by counsel during court is because it would render the legal system meaningless... in general I think we'd all LIKE the jury focused on the law and the evidence, not their gut feelings.

This always comes up in discussions when we feel the law is unjust and the accused isn't getting a fair trial - but please consider, if counsel were allowed to bring this up in court and instruct the jury that, you know, regardless of what you have heard here, you can vote however you feel like it and, you know, nobody is allowed to give you shit over it afterwards.... that street runs both ways. You'd have people who DO deserve punishment getting off scott free.

<comment><USER7> It wouldn't render the legal system meaningless. It would return verdicts according to your 12 peers. Jury Nullification is not about using your gut feelings its used for when the application of the law would return an unjust or immoral result. There is in my estimation, no better judge of the law than 12 of your peers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We have the Crips and the Bloods, we have the Muslims, we have the head Mexicans, and we have the Aryans all with a peaceful understanding, all on common ground."

Whatever's happening, they must have done something terrible to cause that.

<comment><USER20> I found it surprising that the strike was apparently coordinated across many state prisons by use of cell phones. I thought possession of cell phones was generally banned in prisons.

<comment><USER21> Many times guards will bring in cell phones and sell them to inmates for upwards of $1000/each.

It helps to supplement the (relatively) poor wages most guards receive.

<comment><USER22> It's interesting that some inmates have thousands of dollars in cash on their persons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Based on the accuracy of the headline, I'm not sure how much trust I have in the source. Doesn't seem as if this news is being ignored by the MSM:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12prison.html> Prisoners Strike in Georgia

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/us/16prison.html> Some Georgia Inmates Return to Work

</comment><comment><USER24> At the very least, it seems like it'd be a good idea to respond to this positively if only to encourage non-violent, instead of violent, prison protests in the future.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's also a good interview about the strikes on Democracy Now with prisoner advocate Elaine Brown.

 _"Repression Breeds Resistance"_

[http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/14/prisoner_advocate_ela...](http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/14/prisoner_advocate_elaine_brown_on_georgia)

</comment><comment><USER25> Somebody connect this to Hacker News for me. If this is Hacker News, what human rights story isn't?

<comment><USER26> It's a media issue. It's seemingly an important issue, but it isn't covered much. Admittedly, "media" is on the fringes of programming and business.

Besides, many programmers have a libertarian bent, and locking people up, often for questionable stuff, and treating them like dirt rankles. Not that many of them don't deserve to be worked to pay back societal debt. But don't abuse them and feed them junk.

<comment><USER27> It's an article that appeals to us and I'm glad I saw it, but I don't think it's hacker news.

<comment><USER28> Not HN, and annoyingly US-centric...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Easy fix to crowding due to budget cuts: Release all prisoners who are held only on drug charges.

<comment><USER30> Private prison lobbies won't let that happen

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It will be interesting to see how the strike dissipates, or fails to dissipate, based on the effectiveness of prisoner's communication networks.

</comment><comment><USER32> Non-violent, therefore not newsworthy.

</comment><comment><USER33> In the 1830s de Tocqueville reported on a reformatory in Massachusetts where the prisoners had a voting system in order to make decisions about mealtimes and exercise etc. The interesting thing was the way in which the voting worked. All prisoners had a vote regardless of disciplinary actions but if you stayed out of trouble you had two votes and this system worked very well according to Alexis. Tocqueville in America was quite a good read, although long, and has many insights into early America.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Today marks the end of a seven-day strike where tens of thousands of inmates in Georgia refused to work or leave their cells until their demands had been met. The odd thing is, that until today, no one had ever heard about this strike."

FALSE

I posted this NYT article 4 days ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996994>

<comment><USER2> Seriously.

That death+taxes site set off all kinds of propaganda alarms in my head, and a 5-second google search debunked the initial assertion.

I'm very disappointed with Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I believe prisoners do have minimal rights, and to the extent feasible, should get a decent meal and perhaps reading material. Weights and playgrounds? Not so much. They should be busting rocks or chopping wood, or something else that is not fun.

Make prison too cozy and beneficial, and you give an incentive for crime.

Also, an alternative cost-cutter to triple bunking prisoners is to incarcerate fewer people, by decriminalizing victim-less acts (cough cough).

<comment><USER35> And yet, study after study has shown that harsher punishments do little to deter crime, and that despite the poor state that prisons are in, and the conditions one experiences there, recidivism is still ridiculously high.

I've heard the same argument for homelessness and their support structures - make homelessness too easy, who wants to work? I've always asked people who spout this nonsense to go take a look at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen line - I regularly volunteer at both - and then come back and tell me with a straight face that _anyone_ sane will deliberately put themselves in that situation.

I'd tell you do so for prison, but that's not really plausible short of actually ending up in the big house. So instead, I'll urge you to go talk to some people who _have_ been in prison, and figure out a little bit of what happens there. It is not "fun", nor is it any place a sane person would willingly and deliberately put themselves.

<comment><USER36> But _are_ prisons primarily for rehabilitation or deterrence?

If someone were to hurt or kill someone close to me, I would want him to go to prison for _punishment_ , if we couldn't just kill him and be done with it.

When I think about this hypothetical person getting, say, programming lessons with my tax dollars, that only makes me angry.

I assume prisons are how they are in part because my attitude is fairly common.

None of the above diminishes the problems of wrongful convictions, cruel and unusual punishments, prison rape, victimless crimes, and so on.

<comment> brown9-2 _But are prisons primarily for rehabilitation or deterrence?If someone were to hurt or kill someone close to me, I would want him to go to prison for punishment, if we couldn't just kill him and be done with it_

And this is why the justice system is about punishing people in regards to what is best for society and the community/public as a whole, not judgments based on the need for personal retribution.

<comment><USER36> True -- but don't forget that prisons exist as a replacement for retribution, which was often less accurate and had a tendency to escalate into open feuding between families, ethnic groups, or religious groups.

If prisons aren't an adequate replacement for personal retribution, but a need for personal retribution still exists, the public will either correct the prisons or revert to their previous practices.

I'm all for certain aspects of prison reform, but we mess with their role as punishment at our peril.

As a side note, I suspect that the United States' use of the death penalty and comparatively poor prison conditions is largely due to its relatively recent history of vigilantism, the increased tendency of its people to distrust the government, and the relative predominance of firearms. The punishment aspect of prisons needs to be more pronounced in the United States than, say, Europe, in order to keep its citizenry content.

I suspect there's also regional variations - in states where distrust of governmental authority is more predominant and vigilantism more recent and frequent, prisons are harsher and the death penalty used more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> _Poor conditions and substandard medical care are also on the inmates' list of demands._

Somehow I doubt that..

<comment><USER38> Tsk tsk, HN. As written, the quoted sentence suggests the inmates are demanding poor conditions, the opposite of what was intended.</comment></comment>


BootCamp 4.0 is Windows 7 only - <AUTHOR> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4840

<comment><USER2> I suspect this won't affect many people. Let's not forget that XP is nearly 10 years old, and nobody liked Vista anyway. Windows 7 has been out for 3 years already and 8 is on it's way.

I'm not surprised that Apple wouldn't support a competitors old products beyond 10 years. Microsoft is ending support for some of these products as well <http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows/help/end-support></comment>


We're a 2.5 man team vs millions in VC. Please review our skunk-works project - <AUTHOR> http://www.giftdish.com/

<comment><USER2> Two things this needs before it's the thing I'd want to use:

\- Let me pick a specific gift. I don't want to give a $35 gift card. I want to give a remote control helicopter. Let me pick it out from Amazon and send it to somebody via email.

\- Don't require Facebook. I want to send helicopters to everybody on my team the day we ship. I know their email addresses and that should be enough (it's enough to be able to send them _money_ via paypal, so why not gifts through your thing?) I'm not going to friend them on Facebook[1], so at the moment there's no way to send them anything.

Fix that and you've got me. I've been looking for exactly this all week, so if you could do the things above I'd spend $500 through your site today.

[1] The important point here is that the people who you friend on Facebook are a different (though possibly overlapping) set of people from the people you give gifts too. I'm not going to add my Mother as a Facebook friend, but I'll send her gifts on her birthday.

Yes, there do exist people who add everybody they've ever met as friends on Facebook. But there are also people who don't. If you make it impossible for those people to send gifts through your thing, you're losing business.

<comment><USER3> Hey Jason,

This is Charlie from the GiftDish team. I'm locked out of comments from the GiftDish account.

Thanks for the feedback.

1) We're currently evaluating product gifting. Currently, all gifts are "instant" and we're worried about the complexities around shipping/returns/etc that come with products. It's a great use case and we're trying to figure out the best way to do it.

2) We currently working to enable other sign-in options besides Facebook. As stated below, without automatic events, the site is very empty. Additionally, we're soon going to allow invites via email, so you can send gifts and collaborate with non facebook friends.

<comment><USER2> Why are we inviting people? Why are we collaborating? Isn't the "Sending Gifts" the main thing your site does? The mechanism you use to login should not affect that in any way.

Further, why is the site based on Events? I tried to send a gift to test it out, but there's no "Send a Gift" button. Why is that not a big giant element at the top of the page, sitting next to a box where I can type an email address?

Instead, I need to find the "add an event" button in the nav, then jump through a bunch of steps to create a new event with a date and find the one option in the list of event types that lets me actually send a gift without entering more information. Seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity that detracts from the central focus of the site.

That said, it's quite pretty. And the workflow to send birthday gifts to my facebook friends is pretty cool. You just need a way to send gifts to people who aren't in my Facebook list and/or aren't having a birthday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great looking site and clear focus, but your Facebook Connect permission requirements caused me to give up before trying your product!

Getting past the home page requires connecting with facebook and providing the following info:

Your basic info

Your e-mail address

Your birthday

Your relationship status

Your photos

Friends' birthdays

Photos shared with you

This app may post on your behalf, including status updates, photos and more.

I suggest you allow me to browse more of your site while not logged in, limit the initial permission request to just my basic info + email, and/or provide alternate login method.

<comment><AUTHOR> Collins,

Good points, we know people will be turned off by Facebook connect (as evidenced by comments...), and we're working hard to add more login options.

We definitely should not require "extended permissions" at login, we should wait until the posting is needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not quite sure why so many people are complaining about Facebook Connect... I know it is the hot thing to do, but this product is actually using the data from Facebook, not just requiring an account to login for sake of ease. The entire point of this project seems to be to hook into Facebook, grab the numerous events/birthdays, and then track those for you, so that you can respond. If you don't have a Facebook account, I don't think you are the target audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> nik_0_0,

You nailed why we're using Facebook connect, without it the site is very empty, since we can't automatically pull events in. We need to communicate that better.

<comment><USER6> You could connect with other websites where you can input each birtday date to remember, etc. A lot of friends are putting fake birthday dates just to check if people remember their real date and I didn't even put mine (or at least it is not displayed) but I have a google doc storing every birthday I want to remember. And no I don't want to wish happy birthday to everyone in my FB list, nor see "do you want to send a gift to XXX" and feel guilty about it.

TLDR : add the possibility to give dates/names/mail in the site instead of just facebook scraping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the only way to sign in is with Facebook, then I guess I'm not signing in.

Edit: I realize you may have done this because it makes it easy to just quickly slurp in your friends' birthdays through the Facebook API. But I am willing to do more legwork on my behalf because I have other special dates I might want to give gifts for, and I am willing to manually key those in myself along with my friends' birthdays.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the kind of business where your competition really doesn't matter. They can't take away from your business very easily, as in they can't make deals with certain partners to cut you out and being first to market or having lots of leverage doesn't matter.

Focus in the product. The site is great, although it's hard to know what a gift is at first glance. It almost has the look of an eCard site, which lead me to believe it was those annoying virtual gifts. The first three lines don't mention gift cards, just gifts.

There's a difference, I like the idea of sending someone a gift card with this slick product but not virtual or physical gifts. For me this makes all the difference.

The idea of giving something with physical value but digitally makes a lot of sense. I think this model could be taken further if after some traction you made deals with certain partners to offer more or make it even more unique.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brackin,

Agreed, we need to clarify what types of gifts you can give. Digital (e)Gift Cards are one of the types you can give, they're delivered instantly but have physical value, as they can be redeemed online or printed out and redeemed in- store.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, very interesting business. I think the option to post to a wall might be interesting. Part of giving a gift is the social gratitude that you have given a gift. Which is why these 'pay for virtual gift' apps in Facebook even exist and why people go as far as posting publicly rather than a message. It also makes the product very viral and would allow you to grow much faster, of course making message or wall post a choice.

Update: Thinking about it, not sure if it's possible as anyone could access your giftcard. If it is then it'd be interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brackin,

That's actually how most of our gifts are sent. You can make a gift public or private. If it's public, it's posted to the recipient's Facebook wall (and you get all the social gratitude that comes along).

We make everyone login before seeing their gifts, so people can send gift cards to the wall, and we make sure only the recipient can view it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking through a couple of the comments, I see one of the most immediate reactions is disinterest in the product because it requires a Facebook sign- in. I think that attitude is a bit silly. Facebook has 845 million users. That's a pretty big potential user-base.

As for the site itself, it does look really nice. I agree with brackin's comment about it being a bit difficult to tell what a "gift" is at first glance. It took too much reading for me to figure out that this is different from all of those free Facebook "gift" apps.

I like the idea. I logged in, and was immediately impressed with how nice the site looks. The layout of events is really well done. Good luck guys, I think this could be really useful and fun.

<comment><USER10> 845 million users is a lot, but it's not the entire internet. I still manage to have friends despite not having digitized them with a Facebook account, and I could still use help keeping track of their birthdays and what to get them-- if that's what this site lets you do.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough, but I think if you look at it from the developer's point of view, they are trying to get a minimally viable product in front of their target market - which happens to be immense. Yeah, sure, some people might be inconvenienced by not being able to use this without Facebook, but for now, they have an easy* way to connect with the vast majority of their target market.

*easy used relatively here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > sign in with Facebook

I don't have an account, so I basically just closed the tab

First impressions, your product allows me to give people e-gifts that are actually worth something instead of pixels

But, the whacking great "Facebook" button makes me kinda close the tab

Give me the ability to import my iPhone's contact book (Protip: iCloud is a single page app backed by some client-side MVC framework, so basically a free JSON API once you've got the login stuff worked out), then overlay reminders x days in advance on my iCalendar to go to your service and buy a gift, then you can handle everything from there

But, I'm always an edge case :)

Good luck, I hope you work everything out OK

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We wanted to end the boring Facebook "happy birthday" post, so we built GiftDish.

GiftDish is a social gifting site, helping users manage important gifting events and makes giving personal gifts simple and social.

After months of off-hours work, we convinced our employer to let us spend some "official" time working on this. In that time, numerous competitors have launched or are close, including startups backed by Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Still, onward we go...

The site is still very much in beta - All thoughts and feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

<comment><USER12> For the record, I don't find it meaningless when someone wishes me happy birthday on facebook (or using any other medium). For me, saying the actual words "Happy Birthday" is my preferred method of being wished a happy birthday... You may want to re-word the first line of your post.

<comment><AUTHOR> nanijoe, agreed, some can be meaningful. Changed to boring.

<comment><USER12> How about, "We want to create a more exciting(fun?) way to say Happy Birthday"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The hackerati clearly doesn't like this because of facebook connect. Remember that the average consumer has a _totally different_ relationship to the 'net & facebook (if they use it) than the HN set. I saw your app requires access to friends' photos: it appears that this is to put a photo with the date in a nice little reminders display. Tinfoil hats notwithstanding, I expect many people will _love_ this interface.

I use ghostery & abp & avoid facebook connect apps myself, but I recognize that I'm not an average consumer. I think many people will really like your application. In any event, keep in mind that the sample group here is tiny and not representative before overhaul the interface based on our advice. ;)

I might suggest making it clear what you do more quickly: "Automatically send gifts to Facebook friends on their birthday" or something. "Remember friends' special occasions and give personal gifts" is a bit vague, imo. am _I_ supposed to remember them? Do I send the gift? What does this service do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sequoia,

Thanks for the feedback. Agreed on the clarified messaging, we're working on that now. HN skews against Facebook, so I was expecting most of this feedback, we will start opening it up, but won't rush it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like this idea, but dont have a facebook.

Its frustrating that I can't get into see all the gift options without logging in. You should make that "... and may more" reveal the full list of GC options.

I do appreciate the short walk-through near the bottom though.

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks great, and one of the apps where social will continue to win over mobile.

I wish there were a way to do group buys of gift cards. There are a lot of people I'd buy a $1-5 item for, but not a $25 gift card. A $1 gift card is less than useless to he recipient. If you could do group contributions to a single gift card, a lot of the marginal $1 people could become $100 gift card.

Also, please add amazon.

<comment><AUTHOR> rdl,

You actually can give "group gifts", we haven't played up that point yet until we're sure the messaging is clear.

If you send a gift card, you can invite friends to contribute. The recipient will get one card from all of you, for the summed amount.

edit: Lot's more brands, including Amazon are coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As mirrored by a few people already, I would be interested in this product but I don't have a Facebook account.

Could you not provide options of where to pull event data from? iCal or a phonebook for example? This would give many of the users here a route into your application and you would still have the option of using the facebook api.

</comment><comment><USER17> Keep going! It's more fun to compete with no funding! It frustrates competitors with deep pockets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is so important. Buying gifts for people is such a pain. Just give me some simple suggestions and reminders and I'm hooked. I'll pay.

</comment><comment><USER19> Saw this in r/startups a couple months ago - you made a lot of improvements, this looks absolutely wonderful. Where are you based?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the compliments Prez,

We're based up in cold Portland, Maine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would take off the 'Gift Social' part of the tag.

I'm a customer, not an investor, so please use traditional English.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to but I don't use FaceBook.

</comment><comment><USER22> Who does your design? I love it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Facebook login - no go!

</comment><comment><USER24> The first thing that put me off was "Begin here <Facebook login button>". I don't use Facebook, I don't even have a Facebook account, and I am not sure how I feel about having something as personal as a Facebook account instantly connected and associated with another service, even just to try it out.

To state the obvious I have nothing further to say about your service, as the mere login procedure scared me away.</comment>


Something about functions in Bash (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-functions/ <comment><USER2> Just a note that defining a function using the keyword "function" is a BASHism, not generalizable to every POSIX-compliant shell.

In BASH, as well as any POSIX shell, you can define a function with function_name () and just remove the "function" from the front.

one of the many things I learned by using Shellcheck for static analysis [https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck](https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck)

<comment><USER3> Shellcheck is one of those rare tools that made me a significantly better developer. In part because the more bash a dev knows the more effective they are at life in general, in part because it made it easy to follow rigorous coding standards- allowing me to take the quality-code mindset to less rigorous environments.

<comment><USER4> I wrote a short book for novices on shell usage, because it is extremely important for developers to know. Bash one-liners are usually even pretty defensible. But I dream about how the world would be if Bash were actually a good scripting language. It compares favorably to csh, and I fear that's about the best you can say for it.

<comment><USER5> > _But I dream about how the world would be if Bash were actually a good > scripting language. It compares favorably to csh, and I fear that 's about > the best you can say for it._

I finally started appreciating Perl after having to write some nontrivial Bash scripts.

(My hierarchy is: default to Bash when my task is mostly running commands. If there's a bit of text-processing or regex required, Perl. If I need any hierarchical datastructures, Python)

<comment><USER6> What's difficult about hierarchial data structures in Perl?

<comment><USER7> Agreed, it's rather one of Perl's strengths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nitpick: although the linked page states that defining functions as compund commands is a `bash` feature, it is actually in the POSIX `sh` standard [1] so it should work with any POSIX-compliant shell.

[1]: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_09_05)

That said, I'm curious what are the nifty tricks that one can do by using functions as "aliases" for compound commands -- I cannot see much of a difference between `function sleep1 () { while true; do "$@"; sleep 1; done; }` and the similar definition without the curly braces. Only once in my life I have _had_ to use the `function foo () ( ... )` syntax (i.e., using subshell instead of normal `{ ... }` grouping).

<comment><USER9> I'm always amazed at how many Unix features I assume are GNUisms or bashisms that turn out to be in POSIX and be much more portable than I've expected!

<comment><USER10> I'm always amazed at how scripts intented to use only POSIX features become buggy when dash is used instead of bash.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Yeah, for anything that I want to be portable, I explicitly run it with bash, dash, mksh, and heirloom sh. I figure that if it works in all of those, then the result is either truly portable... or nobody will ever notice:)

It also should really help that Debian, IIRC, actually sets /bin/sh to dash by default?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am always impressed how powerful and efficient shell scripts are but the syntax is just a killer. Is there a strong reason why all shells have this crazy syntax? Is it not possible to create a shell with a more expressive syntax like Java, C# or whatever?

<comment><USER12> Alternatively, Is there any reason today to not just use a language like Python/Ruby/JS for where shell languages would have been used?

<comment><USER13> Number one reason is availability. Do all of your current and future targets have the right version of Ruby installed? What if you have a mix of python 2.7 and 3.6?

<comment><USER4> I'm strongly considering making it a point to do just that: include Ruby in all the images I can, just to not have to use Bash. For one-liners it's fine, but I don't get ten lines into a Bash script before missing scripting-language features. However, if someone were to try to talk me out of what they consider to be an absurd notion, I would be prepared to take their criticism seriously.

<comment><USER14> I have multiple ~10 line POSIX shell scripts in my dotfiles. I also have a bunch each of Perl and Python ones [1]. I'd rather not rewrite my shell scripts with neither of that languages, or Ruby (which I like and use a bit).

When scripting, I find general-purpose languages are better when you have structured data (i.e. some JSON coming in) or you want to use libraries, and shell scripting better when you're wiring up multiple programs to work together, or starting up a program after setting up the environment for it.

IIRC, the FreeBSD sh(1) man page was a good entry to writing POSIX compliant, thus quite portable shell scripts.

[1] Compare the ones here: [https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/tree/master/bin](https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/tree/master/bin)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you rely on `(` instead of `{` to create a subshell and you don't comment the heck out of it, you are doing evil

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Why? () is the obvious way to get an independent subshell. I guess it's annoying if you're not used to the distinction, but it's not hard. Is it really not common knowledge?

<comment><USER15> Because it parses, visually, EXTREMELY similarly to `{` in a place where almost everybody who programs in a brace-y language will expect a brace.

Thus most people will not notice it unless you point it out very explicitly, and it has the potential to cause great confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you get bored with basic shell commands, I highly recommend learning what GNU coreutils provide. I never would have loved Linux without this installed.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/inde...](https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Something else you can do with BASH functions is use:

        declare -f function_name

to print out the contents of a function, in a format that can be directly evaluated with command substitution. This is useful if you want to send a function (or a number of functions) into another BASH instance (such as via an SSH connection).

A google search for "RPC in Bash" will take you to a GIST I put up on Github a while back that gives details of how this works.

You can do this in ksh93 also, I believe you use typeset -f instead of declare -f.

<comment><USER18> You can do this in PowerShell also:

        get-content function:function_name

`function:` being a filesystem-like PS Provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Not only do these tricks make your code nicer [...]

Huh.

<comment><USER20> for context, author of blog post has written two published Perl books. To make matters worse, they are called "Perl One Liners", "Perl One Liners Explained".

<comment><USER21> To clarify: "Perl One-Liners Explained" is self-published, and "Perl One- Liners" is based on it and published by No Starch Press. Not sure why that makes "matters worse"?

He also self-published "Awk One-Liners Explained" and "Sed One-Liners Explained" and has a "Bash One-Liners Explained" in the pipeline, see [http://www.catonmat.net/books](http://www.catonmat.net/books)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a good place to ask. I've been putting off properly learning bash (instead of googling for basic structures whenever I need to write a script) for quite a while now, what resources do you recommend for doing so?

</comment><comment><USER23> Hmm, why doesn't `fn() echo test; fn` work? It seems to work in zsh, but not bash.

<comment><USER8> Because `echo test` is not a compound command.

Informally, a compound command is a list of commands (`( ... )` or `{ ... }`) or a looping or conditional construct. See [1] for a precise definition.

[1]: [https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashref.html#Compound-...](https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashref.html#Compound- Commands)</comment></comment>


Self-Study Plan for Becoming a Quantitative Trader - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Self-Study-Plan-for-Becoming-a-Quantitative-Trader-Part-I <comment><USER2> Is this the point where I can ask why someone who is successful at quantitative trading would waste time giving away his secrets rather than spend that time making money on the market?

<comment><USER3> I wonder why programmers who are successful at building money making software would waste their time giving it away for free when they could spend it writing commercial software and selling it.</comment></comment>


Monkeys Sense the Uncanny Valley (link to pdf) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/07/0910063106.full.pdf#page=1&view=FitH

<comment><AUTHOR> Wired summary:

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/uncanny-monkey/></comment>


Xiaomi Registers New Sliding Camera Patent to Increase Screen-to-Body Ratio - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchsnipers.com/xiaomi-registers-new-sliding-camera-patent-to-increase-screen-to-body-ratio/ <comment><USER2> Last year they also released a phone with the front camera embedded behind the screen, which I thought was a great idea.

I wonder what's happened to that.</comment>


Verifications.io Leaks Personal Records of 2B Users - <AUTHOR> https://cybarrior.com/blog/2019/03/28/verifications-io-leaks/ <comment><USER2> Why are so many MongoDB databases left unsecured? Are they extraordinarily hard to secure? I imagine the people who are working with these databases must be aware of the numerous leaks, and pay close attention to securing the data, no?

<comment><USER3> Historically, MongoDB was unauthenticated and insecure by default. Because _that 's_ always a good idea.

You should never assume anyone is going to use your product in a secure fashion, and make it so that they have to at least make _some_ effort towards security.

Other than that, writing new features is fun, and you can get so many developers (that don't think about security) for the same amount of money as a good security professional, or a developer with even half an ounce of security sense, commands.

Security is always inconvenient, takes extra effort, and is invisible. So many companies and managers deprioritise it over more visible feature work, forgetting that security in and of itself _IS_ a feature.

<comment><USER4> A lot of databases have this weird idea that there is some secure "internal network" and its OK to just pretend its 1995 in there. Antirez actively blogs about how "insecure" Redis is but its OK because just don't put it on the internet [1]. Others just avoid the subject completely. Never mind that internal networks get infiltrated all the time.

Security in depth is just not a thing a lot of people think about right now.

[1] [http://antirez.com/news/96](http://antirez.com/news/96)

<comment><USER5> Okay, let's be fair, and I'm sure you realize this: having network ACLs that prevent unauthorized access is absolutely a good idea. "Internal networks" are not dead - they've become more advanced with "VPC" services and software defined networking.

Tunnelling Redis protocol over mutual TLS or something like that sounds like a good idea, but I don't think I've seen anyone doing that :(

Frankly, I would love it if there were a simple, open standard for authentication so every database didn't have to redo it. Maybe mutual TLS is that answer, though traditionally getting the infrastructure for that correct has been difficult.

<comment><USER6> > I would love it if there were a simple, open standard for authentication so > every database didn't have to redo it

There is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Authentication_and_Secu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Authentication_and_Security_Layer)

<comment><USER5> I've only ever seen it used with IRC but this most certainly is the closest thing. Guess I hope for more adoption in the future.

<comment> X-Istence SASL is also used with Dovecot/Postfix for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "However, after further investigation and examination, DynaRisk updated its report to state that the combined number of emails leaked is 982,864,972 to be exact, and not 2 billion as previously reported."

The headline seems wrong.

</comment><comment><USER2> Source [https://securitydiscovery.com/800-million-emails-leaked- onli...](https://securitydiscovery.com/800-million-emails-leaked-online-by- email-verification-service/)

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19333600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19333600)

</comment><comment><USER9> How exactly did this get pushed to the front page?

This adds _nothing_ new to the conversation and consists mostly of quotes from another article.

I was expecting an actual follow-up, and this is not it.

<comment><USER10> From the HN Guidelines:

 _" Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."_

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

<comment><USER9> Oopsie! Thanks for the heads-up.</comment></comment></comment>


The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/03/31/united-states-manufacturing-china/ <comment><USER2> I haven't been myself but my wife is a process engineer and had to go to China to install and train people on a new machine so this is only second hand...

But one of the reasons China is so good at manufacturing is because everything is in one place (or at least clusters)... need 10,000 of an Integrated Circuit? The company that makes it is literally down the street. Need some raw materials? That's down the other street.

I can't think of a place in the US that is like that. If we need parts we have to wait for them to ship. (often from China)

It's not just a labor problem. It is my understanding to be competitive in manufacturing you need to be vertically integrated. And I think that is harder to do in the US.

Although I hope it is true. I live in the US but I don't believe in inherit United States exceptionalism but I do feel like shipping goods by container ship is bad for the environment and bad for consumers. I'd much rather see things made locally.

<comment><USER3> > Although I hope it is true.

I don't know if being a manufacturing powerhouse is actually all that exciting anymore. There aren't really that many jobs in manufacturing anymore. Some of Toyota's modern car plants employ a meager 1500 people which is about and order of magnitude decrease from what car plants used to employ.

This las election was frustrating for this very reason everybody assumes getting manufacturing back is going to be great. It's not. Sorry, it just won't be.

Manufacturing is moving back to the US because distributed supply chains are becoming worth the cost increase in labor.

<comment><USER4> Producing our own food is not exciting either, but would you like to live in a place that produces no food and has to import 100% of what is needed to survive? This is the same thing here. Manufacturing is not a sexy activity anymore, but it is necessary, as long as we still live in a physical (non- virtual) world.

<comment><USER5> > a place that produces no food and has to import 100% of what is needed to > survive

like, say, New York City? Sure!

 _No, the rooftop garden on the Park Slope Whole Foods does not count._

<comment><USER6> Ny is not in a position where the people whom feed it could use it as a leverage in diplomatic relationships

<comment><USER7> 'Who feed it', not 'whom'. The latter is the objective case of the pronoun, parallel to e.g. "them"; just as we wouldn't say "them feed it", we wouldn't say "whom feed it", either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A link to the full study pdf (1) and a link to a more interactive version of the data (2)

(1) [https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/...](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/manufacturing/us- gmci.pdf)

(2) [https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/manufacturing/arti...](https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/manufacturing/articles/global- manufacturing-competitiveness-index.html)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for those links. One thing that jumps out from the links is it looks like the US has an absurdly high corporate tax rate but if you click through you see it is only high because there are few data points and China and India bring down the average.

Very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While manufacturing may comeback to US, the employment in Manufacturing sector may not increase as much due to automation.

<comment><USER9> We really need economic indicators that reflect conditions for most people, not just the top few. Indicators that are often used in the news like rising GDP, house prices and manufacturing output are pretty useless if only a few get benefits from them.

<comment><USER10> We should also start treating rising housing prices as a policy failure.

<comment><USER11> What about inflation? Why would anyone buy land if it was guaranteed to depreciate.

I'd be better off renting from someone else losing money.

<comment><USER10> Lots of people buy vehicles that depreciate like mad because they believe the total value of the purchase exceeds the total cost.

I'm not necessarily saying that prices should have significant downward trajectory. Of course desirable locations will command a premium over time and so on. But as a society we probably shouldn't be excited that housing sometimes goes up substantially, even as the stock deteriorates.

<comment><USER12> Vehicles are a consumable, not an investment. Land is generally not, because most uses increase its value.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but I'm talking about housing rather than land.

Most housing suffers from use and age.

(Note where I conceded the point about some land having value due to location or such)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Couldn't one country's CEO be unreasonably bullish or bearish on their country's capabilities relative to others? Do they really know how far along foreign manufacturing schemes are evolving? Nobody is sitting on their hands here; "Made in China 2025" and Germany's "Industrie 4.0" are pretty strong desires to push into advanced production using IoT, smarter automation, and all that jazz. Anecdotally, in a factory visit near Shenzhen, the manager claimed that moving to an automated production line has been pretty easy. Some areas are kept manual only because the worker is cheaper, for now.

Outcomes from competition are hard to predict. It's interesting that Deloitte predicts Germany "holds strong and steady at the number three position" in 2020 when their own survey has them jumping between 2nd and 8th within a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure our manufacturing output exceeded China's for most of the oughts, also. The myth that "we don't make things here anymore" is, well, a myth. We just don't employ people to make things anymore.

<comment><USER15> It's a well founded myth based on an extremely high percentage of consumer goods produced overseas.

I can't find hard data on this, but anecdotally it's very hard to find things made in the US unless it's a high end store. Chinese manufacturing filled the burst in consumer demand for budget-level products...

<comment><USER14> True, but that's a relatively small part of the economy to begin with. We make most of the heavy plant in the world, so we're essentially building the factories China uses to make the plastic crap we buy.

<comment><USER16> How might one know the truth about this, what could I read?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read the article and skimmed the full study and was left scratching my head:

\- What exactly do they mean by 'Competitiveness'?

\- Why so much focus on labour costs, when manufacturing cost is increasingly driven by large capital investments (especially in China, where low interest rates and government encouragement have expanded capital investments for years)

\- Why all the talk about R&D expenditure. Is that really a driver of manufacturing competitiveness (whatever that means) or manufacturing output?

\- How do they expect (on page 46) China's consumption to rise to 46% of GDP by 2025, if GDP will rise at 6.5% per year during the period? Such a shift would require consumption to go up by ~10% per year.

<comment><USER18> The focus on labour cost is, I believe, because China have been suppressing it's own currency to stay competitive. But it's just a guess as I am only reading through the article and the study as we speak.

<comment><USER19> > because China have been suppressing it's own currency to stay competitive.

Had been.

China's currency is facing pressure to depreciate nowadays, and the Chinese government is having a hard choice between propping the value of CNY and preserving its reserves of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Jobs that are vulnerable to automation are generally not worth keeping. That's no comfort to those loosing them though.

Science fiction from the 60's painted a world where people would lounge around in their airships hopping between beaches, and mountains and parties while robots took care of everything and the lord scientists and engineers that gifted the wold with such plenty smiled benevolently down on the citizens of the Age of Plenty. Yea that did not happen, nobody thought about who would own those automatons, and lo, it was not us.

<comment><USER14> Did it not happen? Even poor people today have objectively much better living standards than rich people 100 years ago.

<comment><USER21> Please explain what you mean by: poor people today, rich people 100 years ago, living standards.

hard to argue with your statement, one way or another, if those aren't clearly defined.

<comment><USER14> Since I'm not interested in arguing about it I'm not particularly motivated to define it clearly. But good examples are life expectancy, physical pain relief, availability of the entire sum of human knowledge through a small glass and metal rectangle that fits in your pocket, likelihood of living in a democratic country, likelihood of avoiding a violent death, etc.

<comment><USER22> But housing and education prices continue to outpace wage growth, with medical care becoming increasingly expensive. Things are objectively better, but the non-wealthy see their societies stagnate and wealth being extracted and concentrated far away from their communities.

<comment><USER23> Education at least, the best chemist, economist, physicist or whatever fresh out of school probably wouldn't do to well against even a poor graduate today.

Relativity, quantum mechanics, crystal growth, there is just so much they didn't know. In any field, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We could just all stop buying made in China. Seriously, all these things are laws of economics. You can't bypass them, as they are natural laws. Economics is the study of human motivation. Motivation is what dictates what we do and don't, it rules our actions.

If you wanted to have an impact, be conscious about your actions, pay that extra cost and buy local if you care so much, and don't buy at all if there's no local options.

</comment><comment><USER25> I live in europe. I'd assume 80% of the things i own are mostly made in china. Maybe 19% are made within the EU and 1% everywhere else. I cant recall a single product i own that was producted or even manufactured in the U.S. therfore i have a hard time believing that title.

</comment><comment><USER26> We're not even using the right metric system, so our export abilities are crippled, right? I remember trying to find parts for my 3d printer in the US.

<comment><USER27> Try McMaster-Carr. Virtually everything is available in US and metric units. There is less variety of things like metric fasteners, because designs have improved to use fewer weird parts.

Since almost everything is designed in CAD and manufactured by CNC these days, the real distinction between US and metric units has practically vanished. A dimension is a floating point number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> But is it good news?

</comment><comment><USER29> Making America Great Again...

<comment><USER30> No Trump will cement the US's inevitable trend towards mediocrity.

Manufacturing are not the jobs of the future. They are too easy to automate and will far too easily flow to cheaper countries with lots of young, skilled people e.g. China, India.

What should be happening is a massive skills and education investment in the US combined with some sort of basic income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What a joke ! Why is this even on hackernews ? Does anyone even know the economics of manufacturing and why China is on top of this ?

</comment><comment><USER32> Worst graphic ever.

</comment><comment><USER33> I totally agree with that!

</comment><comment><USER34> Upon what data and assumptions is this prediction based? How will this help Joe Six-pack?

<comment><USER35> It won't help Joe Six-pack. And your questions make me think you did not read the article. The manufacturing output will increase due to automation & other improved techniques.

My fave quote from the article:

> So while it's understandable the state of manufacturing is of concern to > presidential candidates, those who say they can bring back lost jobs in the > sector either don't know what they are talking about, or are being > disingenuous.

<comment><USER36> > So while it's understandable the state of manufacturing is of concern to > presidential candidates, those who say they can bring back lost jobs in the > sector either don't know what they are talking about, or are being > disingenuous.

Or both, in case of the current president-elect.

<comment><USER16> How can you be disingenuous if you don't know what you're talking about?

<comment><USER37> I think the sky is red but I tell you today it is teal -- I am lying about something I misunderstand

<comment><USER16> Does "lying" not imply one knows the truth?

<comment><USER38> No. It implies one is attempting to pass of a false statement as true. If you know your statement is false, you are lying. Just because you don't know the truth doesn't mean you can't lie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yc-kraln Who cares? China has more middle-class citizens than the US has citizens. Manufacturing does not move the needle on people's quality of life.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anglo-Saxons think they can retreat to their shell and prosper again. Great news. Because it never ends badly.

<comment><USER40> Since when did Anglo-Saxons ever live in a shell?

Since when (post-Renaissance) did Anglo-Saxons not prosper?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This was posted back in March, right?

Is it a "year-end round-up" of stories or something?

Because if so, this story is kind of dry. Aside from the tiny hyperlink to the Deloitte study, there's NO data in this at all.

What's the deal?</comment>


Coronavirus: Why New York has 12 times as many deaths as California - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2020/4/7/21205890/coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-new-york-california <comment><USER2> No mention of the New York subway system vs LA & San Francisco not having this. I mean did the journalist even visit the two areas in the past?

<comment><USER3> Huh? SF Bay Area BART had ~117 million riders last year and trains out of SF to East Bay have been SRO from 4-6PM most weekdays for years now. I was taking at least 10 BART rides weekly to/from an underground station until March 10.</comment></comment>


Twitter removes Trump campaign tribute to George Floyd: copyright complaint - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/501270-twitter-removes-trump-campaign-tribute-to-george-floyd-claiming-copyright <comment><AUTHOR> This is the video mentioned in the article which as of right now is still up on Facebook.

[https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2693822447544087](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2693822447544087)

Original title was too long. It was:

Twitter removes Trump campaign tribute to George Floyd claiming copyright complaint</comment>