How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1101-hanson-rural-urban-divide-20151101-story.html <comment><USER2> Victor David Hanson is a pretty conservative guy and his point certainly has some merit, but there's definitely some "rose-tinted" glasses here. For example, while I tend to agree with him on the water and environmental assessment studies, the biggest issue in CA is that those farmers' don't pay anywhere near market-pricing for the water, which in turns provides a significant incentive to grow water-hungry crops. That's not the necessarily the best example to illustrate the divide he highlights.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the- california-water-shortage-again.html)

<comment><USER3> The author is a liar.

To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.

We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using approximately one gallon of water _per almond_. I love almonds, but we will live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.

We export a _hundred billion gallons of water_ per year via alfalfa. ie a year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the environmental impact of their food choices.

We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.

etc...

I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as effectively free.

<comment><USER4> And yet I'm still forced to use a heavily throttled shower head on pain of major fines, as if it makes any difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At risk of reductio ad hitlerum -- at the time Jefferson wrote the quote given in the article, the wisdom of the rural folk was that slavery was awesome and should continue forever. It was the out-of-touch urban interlopers who thought it should stop

<comment><USER6> Are you sure? They rural farmers, in the south, would have competition from the slave plantations. And the farmers in the north were generally of the northern protestant branches which saw modern slavery in a very poor light.

<comment><USER7> "The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the priviledged ranks. In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white." [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This read like a really angry rant against modern culture in general. Yes, politicians don't always make very good choices and yes people spend a lot of time on the web now. This is no reason to call the urban population "clueless."

Rural life is also unscalable. Rural citizens won't always be more knowledge in agriculture. They do not have more or less "common sense" than the urban population.

/rant

</comment><comment><USER9> I spend significant time in very urban areas and very rural areas, and I'm seeing more convergence because of the net.

There is covergence thanks to major sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. And near-ubiquitous smartphones help.

More-powerful convergence is happening thanks to the rural areas adopting tech for farming, weather, robotics, construction, how-to learning, and broad support for personal freedom.

<comment><USER10> If your thesis was correct, it would be evident to the author who is actually time-sharing (taking advantage of all the things you say). But what he describes in his essay is how even he is of a different mindset...this essay is more about context switching. Its impossible to context switch when you never leave the house/office/facy neighborhood. Or to use some data, look at the dismal % of african americans that go to yosemite or even know how to swim. There's lots of racial and historical bias at play in that data, but the empirical point remains--context switching for urbanites is _hard_. And the poorer you are the harder it is. The reverse is also true--the poorer and more white you are in appalachia, the less likely you are to context switch with the weathy coastal cities. So we have money and culture paying a part as barriers to context switching, notwithstanding the revolutions in transportation (train, plan, auto, jet) and communications (telegraphy, telephone, tv, internet...etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Except that where I live (rural Southern Oregon) there is some of the highest rates of welfare and foodstamp dependence in the West. Sort of tears apart the premise of this story. Note that the author is with the Hoover Institute.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think one of best examples of this was the push to make mandatory the National Animal Identification System. The idea was put every farm animal into a database and RFID the larger ones. I'd heard that farmers would need to log the timestamp of every feeding or watering (though I can't find any source for that in 2 minutes of Googling.)

I did find this. "... the animal owner would be required to report: the birthdate of an animal, the application of every animal's ID tag, every time an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours." From [http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary- zanoni](http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-zanoni)

I would argue that this is burdensome and easier to rationalize for an urbanite. Also note that they likely didn't consider how small farmers will often arrange to have their animals graze on a neighbor's field, which would mean logging entry and exit twice a day.

</comment><comment><USER13> Don't underestimate though, the power of social pressure to influence the belief system and overall culture of immediate neighbors. Usually first your are born into an area, then you adopt the culture in order to get along. It can be very difficult to hold counter-beliefs in many groups.

</comment><comment><USER14> In this bit, Hanson indulges in pure fantasy:

"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does, even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."

In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the 1930s.

This is strange:

"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more"

I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers, but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.

I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":

"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source."

So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?

<comment><USER15> Victor is against farm subsidies as well. Just read some of his other writing.

As for Julia, i think his argument is that waste is waste. Sure you might have good intentions by helping Julia and it's a noble cause, but current gov't programs do a terrible job at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I drove through central Utah; it was on a road with no shoulder and grass growing through some cracks (but well-paved enough to drive at highway speeds). And that was it - the only visible presence of government. There were miles between houses.

Many people reading this are in cities. Step outside and look around for the presence of government: Roads, sidewalks, streetlights, stoplights, road signs, police, buses, power lines, sewer, manholes, turn the tap for city water, fire hydrants, regulated things everywhere - buildings, parking, restaurants, etc etc. And people everywhere, of all kinds, almost all of whom you don't know.

Perhaps that explains the differing perspectives of people who live in urban and rural areas. And consider that that who lives in rural and who lives in urban areas is to a great extent self-selected.

<comment><USER17> I get what you're getting at, but the difference isn't quite _that_ stark among most of the actual population of rural areas, at least today (pre-1930s is another story). There are some really off-the-grid rural areas, and those people have quite different views, but that's less than 1% of the U.S. population. The vast majority of the population of rural areas has grid electricity, running tap water, mail delivery, a phone line, a sheriff's department, etc. The federal government's rural-electrification push still has visible results all over the place, the National Rural Utilities Cooperative is present in thousands of communities, subsidized rural mail delivery is almost ubiquitous, most people's kids go to public schools, kids get vaccinated, many farmers receive government subsidies and loan guarantees, many people have FDIC-insured bank deposits, many people live on Social Security, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Jeez... it's like the guy is looking for an excuse to find a new thing groups can hate one another about.

</comment><comment><USER16> Climate change causes significant losses for farmers, and very likely will cause many more. Yet it's the city folk who vote to do something about it and the rural population that makes it a point of ideology to reject even looking into the possibility of it.

</comment><comment><USER19> The urban-rural divide does create issues, though the author is very selective and invents a fractious view of reality concocted from stereotypes that does more to perpetuate the problem than help, and blurs cultural and political lines. Politically, rural States are inherently over-represented Federally by virtue of each State having two Senators regardless of population, and that has and will continue work to the detriment of urbanized States. Politically the complaints about government dependence by urbanites selectively ignore that more tax dollars are sent proportionally to rural States than urban states, which are in no small part a product of rural States having immense power over the Feds. relative to urbanized States. Slagging the "The Life of Julia" as a "dependency narrative" ignores that a big point of the narrative was keeping the government out of Julia's reproductive choices and other life choices, freedoms rural religious-minded folks are not keen on protecting. On top of that (and perversely amusingly), rural areas have steadily outgrown proportional rates for use of food stamps and food assistance programs than urban areas. Culturally, rural states idealize a kind of independence that's a product of a political structure that hands out capital and favors to quietly prop those rural areas up while turning a blind eye to their benefit from the government to assist themselves.

</comment><comment><USER20> "These differences wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the fact that the nation's urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation."

Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"

Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because .22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.

From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can apply general rules to social issues...

"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed. Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."

...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.

<comment><USER21> 22LR is marginal for taking deer at close range with a rifle. Taking one with a revolver would require almost contact distance to be tenable - and if you shoot it in the lung or heart, it's going to run a long way until it dies.

I doubt the person telling you the story has much experience with taking deer, let alone with a 22.

<comment><USER22> And the idea that someone is going to poach a deer and throw it in the back of the truck on the way home from work is also laughable. The penalties for poaching are far too harsh for anyone who cares about ever hunting, fishing, or owning a gun for the rest of their lives. It's not something that happens in broad daylight for sure.

<comment><USER23> Oh man, you'd be surprised - I'm an avid predator hunter and spend ridiculous amounts of time out in hay fields at 2:00 AM with a night vision system, and you would not believe the stories I've got about poachers. One night, I had a couple of good old boys roll up and shoot a deer that couldn't have been more than about 75 yards away from me.

EDIT: There's a whole cottage industry around robot wildlife that are used to catch poachers, both day and night: [http://www.roboticwildlife.com/enforcement_decoys/index.php](http://www.roboticwildlife.com/enforcement_decoys/index.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps America, the concept, deserves to be threatened at this point. There is increasingly little binding "us" together as a nation at this point: some historical borders, increasingly irrelevant legal and social structures, a few holidays. There is no common foundational creed or concept.

Perhaps its time to politely say our goodbyes.

<comment><USER25> I disagree with the premise that there is little binding that holds us together. I hope we all still consider the Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness to be of the same high importance as Founding Fathers did.

<comment><USER24> That isn't the case anymore, and it is becoming less the case as time goes on. Life? Sure, but every country at least pays lip service to that now. Pursuit of happiness? A pretty, but vacuous concept. Liberty? The only concept of the bunch with any teeth, and, since the Irish, German and Jewish immigrations of the 1800's, a concept in decline.

America is no longer a nation, rather it is a multi-ethinic empire, held together by force and historical momentum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Idea for solving two problems at once: require every prospective college student to spend a certain term (six months, whatever) performing agricultural labour in order to qualify.

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of the Maoist solution to the urban/rural divide: send the urban elites to work on the farms for a period, so they could unlearn their bourgeois attitudes, and learn how the rural masses live [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Moveme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Movement)</comment></comment>


Show HN: YouTube Channel Totals - <AUTHOR> http://channeltotals.herokuapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Quick little weekend project. This week some buddies are working on a nice new layout for it and I'm adding a couple of features:

\- Click to show seconds as minutes, hours, days etc

\- Share button for Twitter, a la "I've uploaded 2.3 days worth of videos to YouTube!"

\- Best / worst received videos (based views, engagement, etc)

I probably won't build much more than those items into this. This week I'll float it to a bunch of top youtubers I know and see if it spreads.

If there's interest the idea is to make a separate product that gives a deeper look at video and engagement data.

I'd love your comments!</comment>


Ask HN: Idea for startup. Lets Help our mothers using a pc - <AUTHOR>

Hello Guys.
Today I was studing for my finals, and my mother called me. She wanted to burn some pics she took in a trip for europe inside a dvd. So she called me and was some kind of a painfull eexperience. I know you guys have been through this. She started asking so many things, and in each alert window she asked what to do. And when I asked her the location of the folder she put the pictures, she could'nt find it. Well, in the end she almost cried for not fiding the folder again. Well, I think all of you understand what I am saying.
I was wondering, Why not make a web app where our mothers ( by mothers I mean the majority of women 40+ years old, or man in the same age, that are not very tech savvy), could log in, and connect with some guy in his twenties that could get remote access and control of her pc, and help her in a webcam. This guy could be his son, or any guy who wanted to get some cash. We could charge the mothers by our or a monthly fee, and pay our guys by our.
So, what you think about this idea? What are the technological challenges, and business chalenges? Do you know anyone who already do or will do this?
Thank you for your time and feedback! =)
Ps. Sorry about the not so plain english. I'm a skilled reader, but not so good writer. <comment><USER2> It's good idea. I know a couple of companies that do Windows Support this way. Even Norton does Virus cleaning this way. But, how easy/hard is it to going to be for them to login/register to your site , create an account and make payments themselves ? It gets harder for them to enter credit card numbers online and I don't think you can provide support for that.

</comment><comment><USER3> There you go - <http://www.crossloop.com> \- exactly what you described.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a great idea. We'd love to help. MySocialVenture.com</comment>


How will Brexit impact my startup? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ahousley/initial-thoughts-how-will-brexit-impact-my-start-up-c8d194f8fd1?source=linkShare-88621414dc10-1466967038 <comment><USER2> > This is not a time for an unelected Prime Minister to take the helm. The UK > needs a General Election with a clear mandate around Brexit to decide if the > advisory role of the EU Referendum should be acted upon before invoking > Article 50.

There is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding both how a PM is elected and also how a general election is called.

First of all a PM is ascended to power through his or hers party winning a majority in a general election or being able form a stable coalition. The British electorate elect local members of parliament not a prime minister. A party leader who is able to form a stable government then is given royal ascent by the Queen to become Prime Minister.

In the event that the PM then leaves their post through death (Perceval), choice (Blair) or is forced out (Thatcher) then there will be an internal party election for a new leader. Anyone can join to become a member of a political party to take part in this internal election.

Secondly because of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 only a vote of no confidence in the Government (by MPs) or two third majority of MPs deciding there should be a general election will actually result in a general election. A demand by a small percentage of the population for a GE will not come to fruition.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree — my part about the GE doesn't give enough detail on how that might happen. I was thinking along the lines of the methods in your final paragraph, although appreciate it's a long shot. Great point on becoming a member of a political party to take part in the internal election.</comment></comment>


Node-Index v0.1.0 release - <AUTHOR> http://blog.indutny.com/post/6727013558/node-index-0-1-0

<comment><USER2> If you're like me, you probably don't know what Node-Index is.

"This module is a (sic) implementation of a (sic) append-only B+ Tree [index] fully written in coffee-script."

<https://github.com/indutny/node-index></comment>


Committed emissions from existing energy infrastructure jeopardize 1.5 °C target - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1364-3.epdf <comment><USER2> There's lots of faulty reasoning going around society:

* There is no climate change.

* The temperature charts are rigged.

* Scientists conspire to get more funding.

* Dissenting opinions are suppressed by the mainstream.

* Taxing CO2 is a way to control the economy and stifle growth.

* CO2 is actually good for plants.

* CO2 does not cause climate change.

* If there is climate change, CO2 is only a minor contributor.

* Humans do not cause CO2, nature does that.

* Climate change is not caused by humans.

* Climate change is not bad.

* If it is bad, there is nothing we can do.

* It's only bad for other people.

* It will only hit us hard in the far future.

* We cannot make compromises in our lifestyle or risk our economy.

* We have invested much too much in fossil fuel technology to give it up.

* Renewable energy is not feasible. It's a joke. Don't even think about it.

* Solar cells cost more energy than they produce.

* Batteries produce lots of CO2 during production.

* Windmills will never harvest the energy that was needed to produce them.

* Our electric grid will fail if we add too much renewable energy.

* We cannot store enough electric energy.

* Renewables can never work because they cannot produce energy on demand.

* Even if renewables were feasible they would be too expensive.

* Why don't we just build more nuclear plants?

* Thorium will save us in time, so no hurry.

* Fusion is only 30 years away, so why invest in renewables?

... this is only what came into my mind spontaneously and some points are really hard to argue, especially with non-technical people who do not see scientific facts as something solid but something that can be negotiated.

<comment><USER3> You forgot about:

"Oil industry is totally _not_ lobbing against any movement that could bring us closer to the solution"

<comment><USER4> What you call the "oil" industry is really the energy industry, and they really don't care which way things go as far as climate policy is concerned. They're set up to make money either way. Who do you think all those government grants for "renewable energy" research go to?

<comment><USER5> They absolutely care. If renewable energy catches on, the values of their oil reserves will plummet. That's why they continue to fight against any reduction of emissions.

<comment><USER4> _> If renewable energy catches on, the values of their oil reserves will plummet._

Not when everyone realizes all the other alternative uses for petroleum besides burning it, many of which are _more_ valuable than burning it.

<comment><USER6> The value of the uses has nothing to do with the value of the petroleum. If we stop burning it, demand falls off and the price drops. Dramatically, because if we stop burning it then we have way more than enough for all the other uses.

That's actually the primary reason we need a carbon tax -- if we make any real progress toward replacing oil in some other way then the partial progress causes the price of oil to fall and interfere with additional progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know that there are many climate depressed people on this forum, frustrated by the fact that nothing is being done and, at the same time, under the illusion that they themselves cannot do much about it.

Yes you can.

Eventually, the solution will have to come from the government. But the government won't act unless we demand it.

\- Change your lifestyle. Less flying, driving, meat. More non-electronically powered forms of play.

\- Divest fossil. Invest renewable.

\- Most importantly, get away from keyword and join other people. e.g. [https://xrebellion.org](https://xrebellion.org)

<comment><USER8> > Eventually, the solution will have to come from the government.

I see your argument, but not sure if I agree with this part.

If we/entrepreneur/engineers can figure 2 things: 1\. Figure the engineering problem which would be something along the lines of: a. consume CO2 from air and use product something else b. bring alternative sources of energy at part with fossil fuels c. etc. 2\. Figure a way to provide it as a service so that people can pay for it.

We can fix it. Still doable without hoping for governments to come and bail us.

<comment><USER7> This could have been a valid argument 30 years ago. We simply don't have time for "Figure the engineering problem" any more. We are at the point where we need firefighters, not fire safety consultants.

<comment><USER8> > We simply don't have time for "Figure the engineering problem" any more.

Honest question, how do you prove this?

Here are my arguments against the motion:

1\. 30 years ago we did not have internet. Now most of us have access to vast amount of technical data

2\. 30 years ago stakes were not high enough. Now next generation is about to see very high impact.

3\. 30 years ago most of the tech that we have now were still in research (ML, cheap computers, availability of funds etc)

Now let's assume you are right, we are out of time. Then following is my argument: Attempting to fix our ecosystem is worthy goal nonetheless and instead of expecting "them" or "government" or "billionaires" to bail us out, I'd rather have us take the responsibility. In worst case, it'll be a adventure and will be worth it.

<comment><USER7> Hm, I don't think we are actually in much of a disagreement. Maybe you are misreading my comment. When I say "Eventually, the solution will have to come from the government" I don't mean that we should just sit around and wait for the government to "bail us out". Of course we should all do what we can. And of course we should invest in R&D and develop new technologies.

But I don't have any illusion that 100% of people will suddenly (voluntarily) stop flying or consuming unnecessary crap. Or that "free market" will somehow solve the problem all by itself. We need a WW2 level of economic and political mobilisation. But that won't happen by itself. We need to make it happen. And the best way to do it at this stage I believe is radical activism (e.g. [https://xrebellion.org](https://xrebellion.org)). And we know from history that it works. Think about civil rights movement etc.

<comment><USER8> I guess I misread your comment. I agree that most of the people will not change their habits and we need to engage our governments too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is this news? Did anyone expect otherwise?

<comment><USER9> I'm genuinely curious about the answer to this question. It's confusing me that the impression from any scientific source is that 1.5 is long gone, 2.0 is a pipe dream and any likely scenario is far higher, and that is if we start to implement drastic measures right now. Yet even the most hardcore "green" politicians talk about the issue as if we can drag our feets another decade or two with minimal impact on current generations. Why the big gulf here?

<comment><USER10> Because most people have heard the scaremongering about global warming for decades already, and nothing that requires a total realignment of the economy and society hasn't happened yet (and no, some heatwaves and some extra hurricanes are not a big deal enough to make people care). Politicians understand that nothing serious will happen in their lifetimes either, and scientists, when asked, don't paint nearly as bleak picture of the warming as the activists suggest.

Look at the most recent IPCC report: the predicted sea level rise by 2100 is below 1 meter with 95% confidence, and the economic cost of global warming is predicted to be at only a few percent of global GDP. Sure, we'll need to build a few sea walls here and there, rebuild a few more houses destroyed in hurricanes, shift cultivation from the newly-desertified areas to the areas where the climate change increases precipitation, but that's not a disastrous outcome that we need to avert by spending huge amounts of effort right now. Of course, if you support yourself by back-breaking subsistence farming, these things would in fact be a disaster for you, but this is a problem for poor people in poor places very far from developed countries. We (both society and the politicians) don't care much about their plight today, and we won't care about them in future either.

That's why hardcore "green" politicians don't push the society for some serious change: because there's not much need to do so in developed countries. People wouldn't like the change, because it would make their lives clearly worse, while doing nothing won't make it significantly worse. Some people though like the mood affiliation brought by "green" people fighting for "climate", which is why the green politicians only need to hit those notes in their hearts to get the support. Making real change is optional.

<comment><USER9> This was my understanding until a few weeks ago. But reading up on the subject paints a different picture. With the non-linear changes likely to be hit soon. Things are going to get serious for us too, and likely noticeably so within the next decade.

<comment><USER10> Where did you read about these non-linear changes? Do these represent the climate change consensus, like e.g. IPCC?

<comment><USER9> To be honest I'm extrapolating a bit based on my own understanding of complex systems, and how the IPCC report things vs, how individual scientists interpret things, and how scientists tend to report things. But when reading IPCC watch out for language about "safe predictions" (linear extrapolations from historical data based is kind of safe, since it's easily quantifiable, model based on uncertain non-linear changes in unprecedented conditions are less safe, so official reports are wary of quantifying things beyond hand wavy descriptions.

This YouTube channel was suggested here on HN a while back, and has been interesting to follow: [https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulHBeckwith](https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulHBeckwith)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deep Learning Illustrated: Building Natural Language Processing Models - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dominodatalab.com/deep-learning-illustrated-building-natural-language-processing-models/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's easy to miss but there's a link in the post to play around with the project but if you try to fork it you'll get an error. To get around this you have to create an account[0] first and then return to the project.[1] Then you can fork/copy and re-run it.

[0] [https://www.dominodatalab.com/try](https://www.dominodatalab.com/try)

[1] [https://try.dominodatalab.com/u/domino-andrealowe/Natural- La...](https://try.dominodatalab.com/u/domino-andrealowe/Natural-Language- Processing/overview)

<comment><USER2> Hi! I'm the author of the Deep Learning Illustrated book that the blog post is based on.

One could alternatively fork the book's GitHub repo ([https://github.com/the- deep-learners/deep-learning-illustrat...](https://github.com/the-deep- learners/deep-learning-illustrated/)), which includes all of the code covered in the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool, but this seems to contain very few illustrations.

<comment><USER2> haha touché! While the blog post contains few illustrations, the book that it's based on, Deep Learning Illustrated, contains north of a hundred of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there similar thing just for the Deep Fakes?

<comment><USER2> Chapter 12 of the book Deep Learning Illustrated is an introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks, so yes!</comment></comment>


FriendFeed Built The Ultimate Live Blogging Tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/15/friendfeed-built-the-ultimate-live-blogging-tool/

<comment><USER2> I love FriendFeed, and I think that this improves their virality by a lot.

I think that the next step for FriendFeed is to dump in some collaborative filtering so that I can get recommendations of feeds that I might be interested based on what I comment on and the types of things I subscribe to. If they can get that down, FriendFeed will be every tech nerd's new TV.

A question I have is whether or not you guys think FriendFeed can cross into the mainstream? It seems to me that most mainstream internet users only use 1 or 2 web services, so perhaps they are not suitable for the FriendFeed model.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps it could do well if college kids got into it, but I think this requires a level of organization that isn't typical of the mainstream social networker.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you know whats happening in Chattanooga, Tennessee? - <AUTHOR>

I just moved to Chattanooga last month & there are seriously some amazing things happening here. The community (check out here: http://tgemayel.github.com/Nooga-Startups/) Reminds me of Austin, Tx pre 2006.<p>Chattanooga has a lot of really awesome things about it, here are a few:<p>- Booming startup scene with dozens of startups all close together & growing quickly.<p>- Low cost of living. I pay about 1/4th of what the average cost of an apartment in the valley is, for a beautiful loft located right in Downtown ( I ride my longboard to work everyday)<p>- Chattanooga was the first city in the northern hemisphere with gigabit internet http://www.thegigcity.com/<p>- Amazing outdoor scene for rock climbing, kayaking, hiking and more<p>- The local government & the state of tennessee are investing heavily in the tech scene (see gigcity)<p>- Big & active angel investment scene. We raised money here & in the valley with no problems. The quality & integrity of investors here is also very high.<p>- A very high quality of designers. Chattanooga is a hip & art inspired place<p>- Just an hour and a half from Atlanta (Georgia Tech), Nashville, & other larger cities<p>- High quality engineers at a low cost w/ great cultural fits for us ( they like whiskey & working hard) <comment><USER2> Can't agree enough with @twog here.

we were funded in Chattanooga over a year ago and have had an incredible experience. We started as a completely green 3 man startup spread across the country, recruited a cofounder from UT Knoxville CS, and have since been able to bring on 8 amazing people.

PG says, 'If you can just avoid dying, you get rich'. Now, obviously there is a lot more to it - but taking that sentiment at its face, being in Chattanooga is one of the best business decisions your startup can make.

Sure, you'll have to travel further to conferences or won't meet the latest A16Z founder at the coffee shop (well, until they invest in us), but think of the benefits...

We have 12 incredibly talented people... and what we've spent in 20 months is what most Valley startups burn through in 6. Thus, our 'avoid dying budget' metrics are pretty healthy for a 'seed' payroll.

Cost of living is incredible. I bought a house a mile from our downtown office, and my mortgage is ~ 30% of what people are scrambling to pay in rent in SOMA - with a park and an awesome tavern less than a 1 minute walk.

Which brings up the next crucial piece, Quality of Life. Simply amazing. Yes, to catch an NFL or NBA game, you'll have to make a 90 minute trip - but that is not much worse than SV, and much better than Austin. Downtown Chattanooga is incredibly accessible with a great bar/ music scene, a rapidly redeveloping former industrial area with lofts, coffee shops, etc, and is literally 20 minutes from some of the best climbing/ hiking in the world.

To wrap up, if you want an amazing quality of life, great startup culture and energized scene, great community support, and _most importantly_ want to survive longer than your east or west coast competition, check out Chattanooga.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds great. My family and I took a vacation in and around Chattanooga a few years ago and we thought it was a great part of the country (from northern Virginia).

Your experience confirms this. I think the idea of "having" to be in Silicon Valley, or even other tech hotspots like Boston or the D.C. metro area (where I live) is just wrong.

The cost of living in those places ranges from high to insane, but there are lots of great places to live in this country. Physical proximity should be treated as less critical, because _it is_.

I hope it works out for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> I once posted an article here at HN which got some interesting discussions about Chattanooga and how it is actually paying techies to relocate.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4615159>

</comment><comment><USER5> Chattanooga is a special place. The entire community is a living breathing organism that exists to see you succeed. You can "Feel" the energy/excitement. Proud to have started my company in CHA. Love to tell anyone more nd [at] supplyhog.com

</comment><comment><USER6> Chattanooga is doing some amazing things. I grew up an hour and half north in Knoxville, traveling to Chattanooga nearly every weekend to Rock Climb. Its easily one of the best climbing cities in the country & IMO destroys boulder in quantity and quality of routes/rock. I moved here from California to start a company about 2 years ago and have been very lucky to work with and meet so many great people. Between the amazing people, great companies moving/starting here, and the immense outdoor opportunities only minutes from downtown - it's ripe for any tech/outdoor people.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. It's great to see startup culture blossoming in different areas. I'm especially enticed by the internet speeds; we've had a real problem lately even with fiber.

</comment><comment><USER8> This may have more to do with my ignorance of the possibilities out there, but as a soon to be college grad who would love to work in a growing community such as Chattanooga, where does one look for available positions? The sites often mentioned, like the one in the OP, usually highlight startups which are not publicly hiring. Are there startup job boards?

<comment><USER2> reach out to some of the companies on OP's page or feel free to shoot me an email with your background/passion & I'll def pass it along - btrautsc [at] gmail

<comment><AUTHOR> Im also working on a job board soon. Drop me your email and I will make sure to follow up with you when it launches

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Chattanooga: Silicon Riverbend.</comment>


Visiting Australia? Your laptop may be searched for porn - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/visiting-australia-your-laptop-may-be-searched-for-porn-20100521/

<comment><USER2> The title is a little misleading. Your laptop can be searched for porn when crossing just about any border (certainly that's true between Canada and the US). The point is that you're now being asked to explicitly declare whether you have something called "pornography", a word that probably has twelve definitions for every ten people.</comment>


Chirp — Let's teach the machines to sing  - <AUTHOR> http://chirp.io/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like Star Wars droids, but a bit more annoying. Designing a system of sounds that would be robust to noise and distortion, high bandwidth, and pleasant-sounding for humans would be a really interesting challenge.

</comment><comment><USER3> A very interesting idea. How many tones are there? How many beeps need to be made for 1KB of data?

</comment><comment><USER4> Straight up genius!!! Would love to see it built in at OS level as it has all sorts of uses.

</comment><comment><USER5> Holy shit. This is genius!</comment>


TSMC Says It's Not Impacted by U.S. Ban Against Huawei - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-not-impacted-huawei-ban,39416.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if TSMC will audit Huawei's designs to enforce ARM's license revocation. Presumably TSMC will do so, they have much to potentially lose if IP compliance isn't assured (eg: iPhone SOC manufacturing, Qualcomm chip manufacturing & all the other chips they make for ARM licensees).</comment>


How long will Flash survive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34799790 <comment><USER2> I can only assume this was posted BECAUSE of the amazing irony embodied by the page.

[http://f.cl.ly/items/180t2H0a1Y143U0O3Z35/Screen%20Shot%2020...](http://f.cl.ly/items/180t2H0a1Y143U0O3Z35/Screen%20Shot%202015-11-13%20at%209.38.06%20AM.png)

and then just below the frame:

      Read more
      BBC iPlayer moves away from Flash and towards HTML5

so much facepalm.</comment>


The Deals That Made Daily Fantasy Take Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deals-that-made-daily-fantasy-take-off-1445043328 <comment><USER2> I cofounded a daily fantasy sports site in 2004, so it's funny to see FanDuel's 2009 launch date described as "early to market". But the environment for fantasy sports in 2004–2005 was incredibly different, with the major leagues often showing overt hostility (including the NFL Players Association suing a company for using the players' names without permission). It's yet another example of how big a factor timing can be in the startup game.

<comment><USER3> We all would've been robbed of the best RoR book of all time had your timing been right...

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I suppose I could have consoled myself with the millions and millions of dollars, but then maybe that just wouldn't have been the same…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that the revenue share of winnings is projected to remain 10%. This suggests players don't value playing on a site that takes a smaller percentage of the game - or that the sites collude. Do any of the companies that occupy the 5% of the market not Fanduel/Draftkings try to differentiate based on cost?

</comment><comment><USER3> So it's perfectly kosher to list big-time "investors" when your company gives them free equity? I was always under the impression that MLB, NFL, etc. voluntarily ponied up to invest in DraftKings.</comment>


My Startup: A Different Take on UML - What do you think? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.architexa.com/2010/05/different-take-on-uml-a-sneak-preview/

<comment><USER2> When you're modifying stuff in the video, a dialog with a progress bar pops up for a split-second, but since the task finishes very quickly is disappears so quickly I feel it's unnecessary. Maybe move the progess bar to the status bar to avoid this annoyance.

<comment><USER3> Hey Maro,

Good point! We have been debating this. As the resource was small in the shown case the dialog just popped up for a split second. The reason why we have it is because nothing else can be done when processing is happening and if the resource is large it takes a little longer to process, so it makes sense to have a dialog there for that period. Any suggestions about how it can be made better are welcome.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps a small progress bar embedded in the element you activated? For the first example in the video, double clicking 'lapis' would show a small progress bar embedded in the bottom of that element itself. That would indicate that it has reacted to the user action, which is what's important. You could even do a safari-type thing and make the whole element into a progress bar.

Clicking the item again while it's still processing could bring up the dialog for more detail, or to let the user cancel the operation if it's taking too long. If long running operations don't actually happen, you could do away with the progress display altogether and just use a throbber. But they probably do happen.

If your engine can deal with it, this design also affords doing operations in parallel. If not, then you could queue up commands as they're performed.

<comment><AUTHOR> mullr, Thanks for the comment. We definitely want to investigate such ideas.

So far we have been mostly focusing on the 'big picture' ideas, but will be working on improving such details as we get time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can this be used with other languages or only Java?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have designed it in mind to easily add other languages. Currently their is a prototype for C++ built, but we want to do a really good job for one group of people (Java currently).

What language(s) would you like support for?

<comment><USER6> Ruby would be great as well, even though Eclipse's ruby support is not the best among IDEs. Maybe this could encourage this situation to change it.

Not sure if you already implemented it, but from the video it feels you click a lot when navigating through the uml graphs. Showing all nodes on the uml graph within a distance of 2 or 3 (depending on the ammount of nodes) would make it less _clicky_. Not to mention that a node on its own not really useful.

Grats on the very nice tool.

<comment><USER7> Ruby support may be implemented down the road depending on customer demand.

Many UML tools add too much info automatically, we have a number of features that allow users to add the nodes they care about with a single context menu click: Show Super/Subtype Hierarchy, show Extending/Extended Classes, and show referencing types / methods.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to a Geeky Girl's Heart - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/02/10-ways-to-a-geeky-girls-heart/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> This title no verb.</comment>


16 hours of coding... Stock estimating on live data - <AUTHOR> http://188.8.131.52/scatter/sc.processtext.php

<comment><USER2> BAC, GS, and C seem like risky picks with legislation on capital hill.

It seems to favor tech and banking, is that just a bias for risk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, there are a bunch of keywords I look for, I tried to even them out.

I updated the site, with a bit of an explanation of how I did it:

<http://220.127.116.11/scatter/sc.processtext.php>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll be adding buy/sell to this over the weekend. I'd appreciate some comments on the picks! :D

<comment><AUTHOR> added: <http://184.108.40.206/scatter/sc.transactions.php></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe - <AUTHOR> https://fiddle.md/b836w36wh2h8mv3fj23t8r

<comment><USER2> Shameless plug: I worked on a similar tool mdocs [1]. The main difference is that is opensource, it supports authentication and authorization [2] similar to Google Docs. The authorization part allows you to share documents at company level.

It is a 100% client-side application, it uses Firebase as backend and Auth0 for authentication.

[1] [https://auth0.github.io/mdocs2](https://auth0.github.io/mdocs2)

[2] [https://dl.dropbox.com/s/w6bmji4t698v8qn/ss-2015-03-25T10-40...](https://dl.dropbox.com/s/w6bmji4t698v8qn/ss-2015-03-25T10-40-32.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER3> Interesting, looks like Firebase syncs the who record at a time, how do you avoid conflicts with 2 people editing at the same time?

<comment><USER2> It uses a theory called Operational Transformation [1] which is roughly the base for most collaborative tools like google docs.

My first attempt was using a library called ot.js [2], I changed it to support an async db since it only supported a in-memory store and I adapted to use mongodb. The experiment is in [3] and it has some bugs still.

Then I found out the guys at firebase adapted ot.js client side to work with their own db, and created something called Firepad [4]. So, I used that instead which was more stable and I added auth and authn.

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

[2]: [https://github.com/Operational- Transformation/ot.js/](https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/)

[3]: [http://github.com/auth0/mdocs](http://github.com/auth0/mdocs) and [http://mdocs.io](http://mdocs.io)

[4]: [http://www.firepad.io/](http://www.firepad.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Collaborative editing is great, and I wonder if this project could be adapted as some sort of browser extension that would allow teams to collaboratively edit on pages that don't otherwise support it.

For instance, the project-management software my team currently uses does not allow us to collaboratively edit tickets. Sometimes we've resorted to writing tickets together in Google Docs and then transferring the text back into the project-management tool. It would be awesome if we could use Fiddle.md or a similar tool right there on the page, rather than having to transfer text between tabs.

<comment><USER5> Hey, I'm one of the co-founders at Swipe, thank you so much for the comment! That's a really interesting idea. Our scope with this is very narrow now and we wouldn't want to promise something like that at the moment. But it's something we haven't thought about before, it sounds really useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be nice if the tab key inserted a tab instead of jumping to the next field (for writing code, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. That is something we discussed, and we have it on the list of upcoming improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> .md is the ccTLD for my country (Moldova), which got me excited and confused for a bit - was trying to find the connection with music in Eastern Europe. I'm not sure how to feel about such ccTLD abuse and conflating TLDs with file extensions in general.

<comment><USER8> While it would be nice if websites always had some connection to the country whose TLDs they're using, I think that ship has sailed. I wonder what someone from Tuvalu would have to say about it though. They handed out a lot of the best TLDs before anyone had any idea what to do with the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was thinking with this idea for some time and the killers features for me are:

\- Allow custom CSS

\- Post a json with the markdown content to a custom URL

Do you plan to open source it?

<comment><USER10> Yes, we plan to open source it :)

If we can allow custom CSS in a secure way, why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Got it working with on-the-fly yUML diagrams.

Example:

[http://fiddle.md/c74bgs3vthgqm8mtt9kx3z](http://fiddle.md/c74bgs3vthgqm8mtt9kx3z)

Not perfect, but wouldn't take much to make it play nicely?

<comment><USER11> Hey, I'm one of the people behind Fiddle.md. I think your example works very well, what do you feel is missing?

<comment><USER3> Hello there!

I'm using it today for a sales document, it's sweet.

Well, there are some more complex yUML diagrams on the yUML samples page that don't work. It's probably yUML's fault because the syntax isn't quite "proper". But it would be nice if fiddle.md had a way of embedding yUML DSL. E.g.

==== yUML Class Diagram ==== [Company]<>- _> [User] [Company]<>-_>[Record] [User]-.-[note: A regular user] ==== end ====

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm confused how this is collaborative. If a friend sends me a fiddle.md link and I change the content of the document, how do they become aware of my changes? Do I send them my link back?

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried to approach collaboration in a very simple way that doesn't require accounts and heavy realtime Google Docs-style co-editing. Our collaboration relies on versions and links. Every refresh creates a new version, so as soon as you pass a link to someone, they create a new version automatically. This way you're never editing the same version, even though you're editing the same "document". So it definitely is based on passing links around but making sure there are no conflicts. We're definitely looking into simple ways to notify you that there's a new version created by someone else so it runs even smoother.

You can think of it a bit like a tree system, where you start on the stem and as you share it with others you build independent branches. Hope it makes sense, we're definitely going to work more on that part in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an academic that writes in Markdown (usually solo, offline), this ticks so many boxes for me. I love that for once I may be able to convince my co- authors to collaborate in Markdown instead of Google Docs. Integration with Dropbox is crucial to accomplish this (most academics use Dropbox), but it is missing one step: IMPORT!

It's great to see that I can export to Dropbox, but then how do I roundtrip? Rather than remembering the URL (or copy and pasting from a desktop app), it would be great to be able to load up an existing document from Dropbox, send off a collaboration link, and then have the ability to send the completed (collaboratively written) text back to Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER14> As soon as the content is over a page long, the "preview" doesn't really work, since what is supposed to be previewed is out of bounds.

I had developed a few years ago a markdown editor with live preview, with a mechanism that synchronized the source and the preview, scroll-wise, so the preview would always display the part that was being edited.

It didn't take off (at all) so I let it go, but I wish there would be a standardized way to do this.

Other than that, great tool! Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER10> It should be possible to scroll in the preview section, and then keep typing for more than one page length without any problems.

Which browser are you using? What is the bahaviour you're seeing? Does the preview "reset" to the top scrolling position?

Glad you like it :)

<comment><USER14> > _It should be possible to scroll in the preview section, and then keep > typing..._

Yes of course, that works, but you have to scroll manually.

Maybe I don't write the way other people do, and that's why I need automatic sync and most people don't: I don't write linearly, I write "all over the place".

I constantly go up and down a document when I'm writing something: what's getting written at the bottom impacts what was written at the top. Also I think of better ways of saying something once I've written it, and once I do I need to make changes.

If, every time I change sections, I need to scroll the preview, it's incredibly distracting/annoying (or, useless: but then it's better to have no preview at all).

Also, once a document is of any serious length (say, over 3 pages), finding the part where you are in the preview can get a little difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The only thing that prevents me from using this that I can't make an account to save my documents, and I can't get that url bar to go away. The giant bar that says "fiddle.md/b836w36wh2h8mv3fj23t8r/edit" even though I can already see the link in my own URL bar. If there were a way to remove that I might use this. Looks great though!

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks just like a bit more polished version of Socrates[1]

[1] [http://socrates.io/](http://socrates.io/)

</comment><comment><USER17> What about user accounts where we can keep track of Fiddles, so we can organize them with tags and categories?

<comment><USER5> That's definitely something we'd want to add. At the moment we wanted to release an MVP and see if people like it before adding accounts and other features. We didn't think it was crucial to getting the core experience with the product, but we're going to keep improving it over time. For now, you could save locally or to Dropbox to avoid losing revisions. Thank you for the comment, I'd recommend signing up to the mailing list to hear about when things like accounts would launch.

<comment><USER17> For me the only feature that's missing in Google Drive is not being able to use Markdown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love MD support, it makes writing things easy and looks polished, therefore I love this!

On top of that I believe It's going to make it onto swipe.to ? I hope so because it would be a a much needed addition tool for editing presentations and rendering it on the fly :D

</comment><comment><USER19> These types of projects are all really awesome; I just wish they would support RestructuredText.

<comment><USER20> No offense and all (I'm a huge python guy) but... why? RST is a pretty god damn awful format. Markdown lacks a proper standard but that's really the only problem with it... I wish the python community would just adopt Markdown for good and stop trying so hard with rst.

<comment><USER21> I've wondered about the same question, and I also personally greatly prefer markdown. I got into Python in 2002, and my recollection is that RST was introduced a few years before Markdown. Thus RST was more mature than Markdown at the time when Python documentation was a disaster zone and people were looking around for technology on which to build Sphinx. So I think RST versus Markdown for Python is more or less a "historical accident"; by now, there's a massive amount of documentation in RST, and it's too hard to switch everybody over. This situation reminds me somewhat of how Python uses Mercurial instead Git (see [1]); many years ago it was unclear whether Mercurial or Git would "win", and in fact many people (at least myself included, with SageMath!) thought incorrectly that Mercurial would win. Hindsight is 20/20, and fixing making the wrong bet on which technology will win can be extremely painful (at least it was very hard for us to switch SageMath from Mercurial to Git).

[1] [https://docs.python.org/devguide/faq.html#where-can-i- learn-...](https://docs.python.org/devguide/faq.html#where-can-i-learn-about- the-version-control-system-used-mercurial-hg)

<comment><USER20> Yeah you're absolutely right. RST was great when Markdown wasn't around, but Markdown is just better.

It's a bit of a toughie, the python community doesn't have much to deal with Markdown itself. pypi expects rst etc. There's also very few tools available in general, which is a huge shame.

Part of this is due to different Markdown "flavours". At this point though, Github being the largest provider of Markdown, a safe bet would be to standardize on Github's flavour and call it a day.

<comment><USER21> "a safe bet would be to standardize on Github's flavour and call it a day." \- yes, definitely. That's precisely what I'm doing in SageMathCloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've played a bit and it looks really interesting.

I see you currently support saving the fiddles to dropbox. Do you plan to add other storage systems?

I'm thinking it would be great to use that along with github to write documentation or even websites using jekyll.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We started with Dropbox because that is what we all use, but we do want to add support for other services. Your idea for GitHub integration is very interesting, and it's not something that previously occurred to us. It's something we'll definitely look into!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks interesting... Dark theme?

<comment><USER5> That's a very good idea, we've added it high up on the suggestions list. Very handy for writing at night probably. Thank you!

<comment><USER23> Don't forget that it also looks good :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love the syntax helper in the bottom. I've added markdown to a few projects and usually, I just added a help text summary near the input to remind users of the syntax; this is a much better solution.

</comment><comment><USER25> Really like the design, especially the search/menu box. It would be very nice to add proper support for tabs, especially when inserting larger blocks of code.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm a fan of this - elegant and simple way to make markdown more accessible to those who would otherwise shy away from it's learning curve

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the comment! The project actually started as we were building a tool to teach people Markdown a la Codecademy. We realized this probably does an equally good job at that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very nice! I love how easy you have made it to start a new fiddle, eliminating the signup. I'm all in for less signup walls on the internet!

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it a feature or a bug that the page's title tag also toggles when you toggle the preview/html button?

<comment><USER11> It's a bug we failed to spot, but it does look interesting ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Over Quota > This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please > try again later.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on fixing that now. It should be back up very soon!

Edit: It's back. Thanks for the patience.

<comment><USER28> Great! Looks very good! :)

Although, table-support seems to be very limited. The table is generated correctly, but it doesn't look nice _enough_. Take a look at LightPaper for inspiration.

<comment><USER29> The HTML generated correctly, but the actual table didn't render at all in the preview for me. Text was aligned...sort of, but there was zero white space, and no dividers. Maybe it's simply my rusty MD skills.

<comment><USER8> I think it just needs some CSS love. Switch to HTML and you can definitely see it's putting out a table—it's just not a very pretty table.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, we need to add some styles for tables. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> @ggordan : is it using etherpad api for backend ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not using etherpad. The backend is written in Go and hosted on appengine, and on the front end we use React.</comment></comment>


WinRT and Mono - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Sep-26.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand. Yes, use best practices in the development of software. No, this doesn't explain why you won't support X and even recommend to use a bunch of different frameworks and potentially runtimes/languages.

<comment><USER3> I think WinRT on top of Linux could be waste of resources (as it was with moonlight). WinRT might not even succeed on Windows

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The less Miguel is involved in anything Linux related, the better.

<comment><USER5> Despite that not being a very HN-worthy comment, i'm curious: why? To me limited knowledge, he's responsible for allowing using an excellent language+framework cross-platform, for which I'm thankful.

<comment><USER4> Well, he's also largely responsible for early Gnome and his problematic views live on there. Whenever I read one of his posts, he's gushing over with excitement about some new technology from either Microsoft or Apple that he wants to bring to Linux, which then quickly proceeds to be a giant PITA to people who create distros, build embedded systems and so on. These projects tend to be abandoned rather quickly in the scheme of unix software (X, vim, emacs, bash - anyone replaced these 3 times in the last 10 years?). The mess he helped create (and recently admitted to be sort of guilty for, in a lengthy blog post why the Linux desktop has failed - or some similar hyperbole) is then left to deal with for everyone else.

Meanwhile, the Linux desktop (and for that matter, BSD) is perfectly usable with a well selected mixture of window managers that have been around from before I was born, audio players that don't require mysql backends, editors that work just fine from embedded systems to servers, and so on. Nobody ever missed a registry in this world. Nobody ever thought: "hey, a program that modifies its own config files is great, lets write a bunch, or use a database!" - resulting in the insanity that you can't version control your config files anymore, or keep your $HOME on NFS.

His ideas are great in the world of consumer operating systems - locked down, shiny, and limited to the "brilliance" of its designer. But I don't want to live in his world, therefore I'm very happy whenever he does something that does not involve "improving" the Linux desktop experience.

<comment><USER6> _> hey, a program that modifies its own config files is great_

I think that all the time. On a server I might be willing to muck around with configuration files. On a desktop? You're damned right I want a discoverable UI for configuration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And so the grand unified Microsoft bridgehead fragments.</comment>


Your iOS app's reviews, translated to your language, in your inbox, daily - <AUTHOR> http://www.reviewmatic.co

<comment><USER2> Are you using Bing for the translations?</comment>


Hiring Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://reprogramming.com/hiring-programmers/

<comment><USER2> _If a programmer cares a lot about money, that is a red flag._

If you're only looking to hire from a pool of early-20s unattached white males, maybe. Other people may have obligations that make it a requirement to care a lot about money regardless of whether they are a fantastic programmer.

 _People who call themselves "coders" or "hackers" are likely to be highly competent...people who call themselves "developers" are generally less desirable._

I don't find this at all. Someone who calls themself a "coder" or "hacker" sounds like an 18-year-old who wants to pretend to be Mark Zuckerberg. "Engineer" and "developer" are pretty interchangeable and I'm likely to use either to describe myself depending on the conversational context.

I don't know of anyone who calls themselves a "programmer." I'm not saying it's not a term someone should or could use, it's just not something I hear.

 _He's also now too expensive...$90,000 a year_

I think this might elucidate some of my different perspective. If you live in Silicon Valley and $90k is too expensive for a programmer, you're not looking at the top tier of talent. At < $90k in today's market you're going to have to be very lucky and hire someone junior who grows into someone awesome.</comment>


Suburbs That Haven't Recovered from the Recession - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/suburban-poverty-and-recession/549350/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> There's a lot to digest in this article:

1) Absentee landlords are terrible. I can't say I know what the solution is, but perhaps simply lowering the price of the houses until the (low income) workers could afford to _buy_ and therefore take stake in the community is preferable?

2) Unfortunately the sprawling layout of Hemet in particular is unconducive for creating the kinds of businesses that could at least mark the beginning of a more dense mixed use area. In this case there will have to be pain to raze some of the houses at the very least to help things go in that direction.

3) Broken window effect seems to be in full force with the absentee landlords only throwing fuel to the fire. Ideally the city would help some of these residents sue these landlords to resolve some of these issues, which would help slow the downward spiral of non-maintenance by the residents.

<comment><USER3> As a landlord (I don't like that name, it kinda has a negative connotation) I can see first-hand in dealing with new potential properties the lack of care most landlords have towards their investments. They approach it as an entirely passive income without ponying up the relatively small amount for someone to _actually maintain_ it (Since they're too old or bothered to do it themselves).

I think a major windfall could be had with better regulations and rights renters could have protecting them from abusive landlords.

The rental regulations in my city are laughable and I have to deal with it almost every time we look at a potential property when I "assess" how much care has been put into its structure, mechanical, appliances, etc. That's even assuming the previous owner permitted the property for such use.

<comment><USER4> Personal anecdote:

I know of a retired magistrate judge that acquired over 30 residential properties via tax-delinquency sales.

These properties, not in the best condition, were used as Section 8 HUD housing, with no improvements made.

Tactics included keeping the utilities in the landlord's name to be able to shut-off water, electric, or gas at a moment's notice.

Many of the tenants were former defendants with the magistrate court that the judge oversaw.

Additionally, barter was used in lieu of security deposits and partial rent payments - the tenant could fix-up the property.

However, the tenants lacked any ability to properly repair anything, and the repairs caused further damage to the properties.

The wife of the landlord, insisted he divest himself of these properties before his death, so she would not have to continue to deal with this.

However, he did die, she inherited the properties, and is too old to have the energy to deal with this.

As you said, "too old or bothered to do it themselves".

Some of these properties now sit unoccupied, but cannot pass inspection because of the substandard repairs, and further disintegrate.

I know of one particular property that was not winterized (unoccupied), and I am certain the pipes have frozen and cracked.

At this point, the property should be razed (roof issues, structural issues, mildew, pests), but that costs money too.

<comment><USER5> Some more incoming personal anecdotes from California

I briefly rented a small single family home from an 85 yo woman (managed by her son who lived a few towns away). We quickly found out there was black mold everywhere from a bad leak in the garage and a small one in the kitchen, and that she smoked her whole life in the place. She had no interest in keeping it up, she just "wanted to rent it out." Her son had no interest in dealing with it either as he readily admitted to us. I don't think he had seen the place in a long, long time considering the state of the damage.

We ended up recouping our costs and moving after a few days. She bought it for $150k 20 years ago, pays $600/year in property taxes so there's no incentive for her to give it up (prop 13). It's valued at $500k and was renting for $2500/mo.

Our new place is owned by chinese investors, and also has issues which they aren't interested in fixing. They haven't responded to a single email (I think they are in their early 20s, live in china, and i'm not entirely sure they speak english), we also tried to go thru the property manager who said he won't fix stuff since the landlords are unresponsive. We gave both of them 30 days notice that we need about $500 worth of things fixed. We never heard back, so we did the repairs and just deducted it from the rent, as you're legally allowed to do... come to thing of it, I could propbably not pay rent and squat the place and I'm sure they couldn't give less of a shit.

<comment><USER6> Property tax in California is at least 1% (typically a bit higher due to various local fees, but let's say 1% for this example).

That means if she bought the property 20 years ago for $150K, the property tax in year one was 1% of 150K, or $1500.

Under Prop 13 property taxes go up 2% ever year (compounded). So after 20 years that property tax would be up to roughly $2400.

<comment><USER5> The assessed value is $61k, the estimated value (according to zillow) is $480k. Property taxes in 2016 were $640. There is a law where 55+ can transfer valuations if they move within counties that participate. [https://www.ocgov.com/gov/assessor/programs/55plus#2179](https://www.ocgov.com/gov/assessor/programs/55plus#2179)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't cities grow and fade though? If whatever attracted people is lost, it should shrink. The problem is it's really hard to shrink concrete. In Louisiana after Katrina, the main solution was bulldozers. Think of them as the macrophages of the urban immune system.

<comment><USER8> > _The problem is it 's really hard to shrink concrete._

A better summary in one line than most essays on the topic.

We've put together a system that's unstable in the face of even modest shrinkage - and in some cases a mere failure to grow. The result is that even non-crisis change, like people moving to take better jobs, creates crisis results in shrinking cities.

In the short term, promoting growth is probably an inescapable part of the solution. But if we keep up the pattern of debt-financing expansion by planning for growth, we're never going to do better than deferring the crisis.

Long term, we need to build financially-stable cities and work out actual strategies for managed decline. 'Shrinking' and 'failing' are equivalent today, but that pattern needs to be broken if we're going to get out of crisis mode.

<comment><USER9> For that matter it's hard to grow concrete above a certain rate both for physical and political reasons. It's one of the problems causing the housing crunch in certain cities. Yes, in each case, there are specific issues. But, generally, when everyone and their dog suddenly wants to move into certain areas of certain cities that were actually declining in population not all that long ago, you're going to have issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I went looking for a house about four years ago. That was in 2013, a full 5 years post recession. I was surprised to see how many foreclosures were still on the market. I asked my realtor to show me, despite his misgivings about possibly buying a foreclosed property.

It was pretty much exactly how the article described it. I looked at about five or six lower priced large houses (5-6 bedrooms, 4-5 bathrooms, in the 4-5k ft range) and all were the same. They were all totally run down. Gutters falling off, carpets destroyed, holes in walls, kitchens in total disrepair. All kinds of stuff were left behind like there was a fire and the owners just fled.

My realtor also pointed out a few of the houses where the workmanship of the house was way below where it should be. The houses were built quickly for the boom. Corners were cut and it was clear even after five years, the houses would need a ton of work.

One other thing the article didn't touch on was the huge availability of retail and commercial space. There's a bunch of suburbs around where I live where businesses went under during the recession and nothing has filled those buildings yet. Retail is the same thing. There are businesses that either moved out or closed shops and those spaces remain empty, almost ten years after the recession.

<comment><USER10> I would describe 4000 square feet as enormous.

2000 square feet is plenty of upkeep if you aren't paying someone to do it.

<comment> at-fates-hands It was and I was surprised at how far the costs of houses in that range had come down. I guess the balance of the cost of work needed, essentially then pushed them back into the proper range. As you noted, the upkeep would've killed me.

I ended up with a 2500 sq ft mid century modern that was in rock solid condition that I got for a steal. I haven't had to do anything substantial in the last five years. Some things will be due in the next three years (windows and HVAC) but otherwise, it's been easy to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like there's a market opportunity to create a property management company that operates on a Wal-Mart or McDonalds scale. Franchises all over the country, consistent architectural design for apartments, consistent management and maintenance. I'm surprised something like this doesn't exist already.

<comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this basically what REITs do minus the franchising? (Walmart doesn't franchise either)

There's also large privately own property management/real estate companies, I lived in a complex owned by one for 4 years. They own and operate properties in 25 states.

<comment><USER13> REITs don't necessarily run the building management or development sides of the business. Normally these functions are bid out to developers and property management companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People who want to live in the cities are moving to the cities, and so house prices in those suburbs are dropping and people who can't afford houses in the city are moving to places where they can afford houses. Both of those seem like good things. Of course if you look only at the suburb then it looks like a decline.

A country that has built enough housing for its population _should_ have empty houses, should have houses that are not worth keeping up slowly falling into disrepair, available on the cheap to anyone who decides they do want them. Build more houses where people want to live - the cities. Let them rot where people don't.

</comment><comment><USER15> "This dynamic changes the housing markets of these cities, too, with big cities getting more expensive as more high-wage workers migrate there, and low-wage workers leaving cities to seek more affordable housing in the far- away suburbs they can afford. Now that the dust of the recession has cleared, it is evident that the geography of poverty has changed in America."

There was just an article posted here a couple of weeks ago about a woman who was pushed out of LA and moved to Hemet while continuing to commute to LA for work. IIRC the woman was in her 50s and still renting in Hemet despite the lower housing costs. There are no jobs in cities like Hemet but you'd expect that a significant enough number of LA expats moving there would revitalize the local economy some what, just from the higher earnings of super commuters.

<comment><USER16> For that to happen, those people would have to be spending money in Hemet, and not just at the grocery store or the gas station. They'd have to be dining out in restaurants in Hemet (local ones, preferably, not just fast food chains), going to bars in Hemet, buying things in little shops in Hemet, etc. As it stands, a lot of these people are probably still commuting to LA, not just for work, but for their leisure as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Decentralization of bigger cities is one of the key things where govern should take action in the foreseeable future. I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which receives 2 million workers every day. Govern should pass laws to incentivize companies to move out of the city, banks to give credits on underdeveloped areas, and heavily invest of public transportation to those areas. We are reaching a level bigger cities are not capable to scale any longer.

<comment><USER18> Visit Atlanta, Georgia, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or Phoenix, Arizona before wishing that on your own city.

We made that particular mistake already. You don't need to repeat it.

<comment><USER19> Can you expand on this? Are large businesses spread across the land in these areas?

<comment><USER20> In addition to what others have said, it's common that the suburbs of sprawling American cities are unwalkable, and completely impossible to live in without access to a car.

I grew up in a Suburb in Colorado where the only buildings for miles were other houses. It was impossible to walk to the grocery store or any other amenity. It's extremely isolating, and a hostile and depressing living experience in my experience

<comment><USER12> Yes. In a previous life I lived in an area that's mostly a spread out suburb. I got so depressed that I couldn't _walk_ anywhere, I mean, absolutely nowhere. I felt pretty housebound during the summer and yet I felt at the same time there wasn't really any place to go. Jumping in the car every time I needed to leave the house was just not relaxing!

Now I live in a small town and boy do I love it! Since it's a small town there's not really any huge roads and very little traffic. The streets beyond the major thru fares are quiet and the neighbors are friendly. If I'm bored and feeling restless I can walk to the park (half mile, maybe), the local watering hole (2 blocks), the coffee shop (1 block), or even the convenience store (about a quarter mile). I mean, just getting up and taking a short walk to the convenience store seems to be really beneficial to my mental health for some reason, yet driving there does the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Haven't recovered... What if it is should have not been?

Many things were built and new subdivisions were creates with the notion the economy was ready for it.

It clearly was all built on lies and bad practice.

That is why I question not that it is recovering but maybe it should have not been.

I think the real solution is to leave these areas that clearly can't be supported by the local economy.

And sorry to say. Yeah it's going to suck for a lot of people. But that is life. Not everything is going to be perfect. Holding on to a dying dream is only going to make it worse.

(I am not cold hearted. I have just experience life enough to not let a sob story make me make irrational decisions).

<comment><USER22> If you don't like suburbs, you're really going to hate what self driving cars bring. Get ready for sprawl like you've never seen it before.

I, for one, plan on moving further out of the city as soon as my car can drive itself. The dream isn't dying. It hasn't even started yet.

<comment><USER23> I could see it going either way. I actually have become more likely to use transit since ride-hailing is so much easier—if I'm ever stranded anywhere (lack of good bus route, after hours, etc.), I just have to open the Lyft app.

Furthermore, when car ownership is no longer considered a necessity (as it is today in most of the US), the economics will change. Right now, my personal vehicle is a sunk cost, so I view car trips as costing close to zero—unlike the up-front, immediate transactions inherent to taking the bus or Lyft. Once I no longer own that vehicle (I'm not planning to replace it), all of my options will be on more equal footing, since they'll all be priced per-trip. Even self-driving vehicles will not be able to compete with mass transit when they're both priced similarly.

<comment><USER24> Exactly, owning a car in a city can easily cost 25+$/day. That buys a lot of public transportation.

<comment><USER22> Self driving cars will eventually be much, much less expensive to own and operate than cards of today. That's assuming there isn't a massive per-mile tax imposed.

I would also guess public transportation will evolve as well. I could see small and medium sized cities getting rid of buses, fixed schedules, and fixed routes and instead deploy a fleet of van-sized vehicles to pick up people on demand. I could see this as being something that gets outsourced to Uber and Lyft. Maybe it will be less expensive and better to just subsidize rides from private companies.

<comment><USER24> Mechanically, self driving cars are not going to be cheaper to build or maintain, and they will need just as much fuel if not significantly more to go park somewhere distant. You also need 2 parking spaces @ 100+$/month (one at home, one at the office) and pay to park other places. Insurance might get slightly cheaper, but I don't see the economics changing much and the added electronics are not going to be free.

<comment><USER22> Electronics will do what they always do - get cheaper and better.

The cars (eventually) will not be like current cars. If they don't crash, they don't need as many safety features. They can be made much lighter and from cheaper materials. When the car is way lighter, it can use a smaller, simpler drivetrain. They will likely be electric. Maintenance on electric cars is far less than gasoline or diesel vehicles. Your robot car will likely be serviced by another robot.

Don't think of a Lexus with an instrument package bolted to the roof, think about adding a few hundred dollars of sensors and actuators on a fancy golf cart. I wouldn't be surprised if self driving cars are eventually available for less than $10,000. I think the low cost of the vehicles combined with the low cost of operating them will result in an explosion of ownership, not a reduction. I think when the cost of the vehicle drops and the cost of a trip drops, more vehicles will be sold and more trips will be made.

<comment><USER24> A self driving golf cart is not a self driving car. Until we outlaw humans from driving anything self driving cars will need all their current safety tech. That might happen in 100+ years, but it may also never happen because hitting something due to mechanical / software failure is always going to be possible.

PS: Adding a camera may get cheaper over time, that does not mean it's ever cheaper than not having one in the first place.

<comment><USER22> 100 years? I was thinking more like 50.

Mechanical and software failures will always be possible. However, we already accept a really high rate of death and injury when both could be eliminated. I don't think that will change with self-driving cars.

Adding a camera is cheaper when it results in being able to eliminate hundreds of pounds of metal and airbags. We don't make bus riders wear a seatbelt because it just doesn't solve a huge problem. When the injury rate of car passengers gets to a similar level, we probably don't need seatbelts there either.

<comment><USER24> We have zero production self driving cars today or in the next 3 years and will not be on 90% of new cars for at least a decade after they show up. Hyundai for example is targeting 2030 for urban driving _as an option_.

Cars last for ~25 years in normal use (average car in US is 11.5 years old and accidents take many out before reaching their lifespan). So, at a minimum we are talking 50 years before essentially every car is even capable of being self driven. Laws are unlikely to change before self driving goes from a novelty to assumed behavior call it another 25 years at a minimum. Now, add a few more years for phasing in the law, and then a few more for statistics to validate reducing safty equipment.

So, 100+ seems fairly optimistic as that's the happy path assuming zero major issues show up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is this thing I was thinking about:

Single homes ought to be owned, and multi-tenant apartment buildings ought to be rented.

Why? One case you are observing in the article. Renters of home don't care about keeping up their house. Spending any kind of money on it is just not their priority. The only one who can keep up the house is owner, but as you can see in this case they'll just choose to pocket the rent.

But there's a different angle. Imagine an apartment building where every apartment is owned. Some of them by elderly, some of them by poor. Now the common areas and house territory would deteriorate, because apartment owners don't have incentive to spend on either one. You could try to roll these charges into their utilities bill, but they will fight tooth and nail. Poor will say "we don't have money for this", elderly will say "we don't care and also don't have money", the rest will say "we're not paying for the aforementioned if they're not".

This is becoming a problem in countries where owned apartments are a thing. The city has to pay from its pocket for the upkeep of territories around such apartment blocks.

Naturally when apartments are rented out, landlord is interested in its state because they have to maintain steady number of new tenants to replace people moving out. Bad upkeep = no more tenants = lost money.

<comment><USER26> In the UK, it's normal for apartment buildings where people buy the apartments to have what's called ground rent. This is an additional charge that is specifically for the upkeep of the buildings shared areas and grounds. I don't know if perhaps that's missing in other places, but it seems to work ok here.

<comment><USER27> In the US, owner-occupied flats are called condominiums. And ground rent exists as "condo fees".

In my area, condo fees are often high enough to make buying a condo a strange proposition - you really must want to live in a multi-unit building because mortgage+fees > mortgage for a detached dwelling.

<comment><USER28> Some places have the worst of both worlds in the form of HOA dues. You pay yearly for the upkeep of common areas that are so far away from your front door that you never even see them unless you make a special effort.

<comment><USER27> Oh yeah, I know all about those! I live in Reston, VA, one of the early planned communities. I live in small townhome development, with it's own "cluster" dues (paid quarterly), then I have the Reston Association fees (paid annually), special district real estate taxes, and county real estate taxes. Quadruple whammy of taxes/fees! And four levels of incompetence to deal with!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Record-shattering 2.7M-year-old ice core reveals start of the ice ages - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/record-shattering-27-million-year-old-ice-core-reveals-start-ice-ages?utm_source=newsfromscience&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=icecore-14698 <comment><USER2> I work for the company that built the ice coring drill used on this project. It looks like one of our old models circa 2000 that they've refitted slightly. Seeing this just made my day.</comment>


The Anti-Java Professor: Wrong Again - <AUTHOR> http://catsonkeyboards.blogspot.com/2008/08/anti-java-professor-still-off-base.html

<comment><USER2> I've encountered C programmers who view the compiler as a kind of magic in the same way that Prof. Dewar fears many Java educated CS students view the JVM. But then again, you also see incompetent mechanics and plumbers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a test automation engineer in Austin. I have worked with JUnit (Java) and CPPUnit (C++) for unit testing, and also with Borland SilkTest for GUI automation. So whereas I certainly cannot really comment too much one way or another in terms of what schools should be teaching, I will say that I have found java plug-ins to silktest essentially work when and where the JVM feels like working. They might work on one box, but not on another box, even though the code is the same. Java will not work the same from version to version, nor even from box to box on the same version, at least not reliably enough for proper automation testing to get done on a repeatable fashion. So now I write the silk-plugins in c instead of java, and that hasn't let me down yet. I don't know what we should teach in schools, I will leave that up to professors to figure out. I do know that if I am in an airplane at 35,000 feet, I do not want to have to rely upon the whims of the JVM to get my safely to my destination. When I am that far above sea-level, believe me, I am praying that the airplane's software was written in C! :-)</comment>


UK has biggest fossil fuel subsidies in the EU - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/23/uk-has-biggest-fossil-fuel-subsidies-in-the-eu-finds-commission <comment><AUTHOR> In this case subsidies are reduced sales tax - which is charged at the standard rate for petrol fuel alone would pay the entire salary fee of every doctor and nurse in the NHS</comment>


EventVue post-mortem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eventvue.com/post/372936164/post-mortem

<comment><USER2> Funny, the startup I work for made three of his deadly strategic mistakes, and ended up doing very well. In fact, we believe that selling before the product was ready and not making it self-serve were essential to our success. Sometimes, there is just a lot of luck involved in finding product-market fit.

<comment><USER3> I think it is safe to replace 'sometimes' with 'almost always'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I came close to joining Eventvue last year and making the big move from SF to Boulder just because I liked these two so much, so I'm bummed to see their baby wind down and know they put a lot of heart into it. Closing their second round during the "RIP Good Times" winter of 2008 was pretty difficult and definitely impacted their ability to hire, among other things.

I'm happy to call Josh and Rob friends and am excited to see what they do next.

</comment><comment><USER5> One has to appreciate the audacity and ability to reflect on their mistakes. Good luck to them on their future ventures.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. I'm sure we'll be hearing from Rob and Josh again soon. As others have said, this is not a failure, it's milestone on their journey and learning experience.

Their story has inspired me to write a blog post based around the following premise:

Taking that VC money is a root cause of most/all of the "Deadly Mistakes" Rob and Josh made.

Whatever you think about that premise, hopefully you'll agree that it's not a bad idea to stop, think, and discuss before you make an irreversible, and potentially fatal, decision.

Here is the blog post (too long to cut and paste here): ""Bootstrap or Die - Lessons Learned From a Web Startup's Murder/Suicide"": [http://bootstrappy.blogspot.com/2010/02/bootstrap-or-die- les...](http://bootstrappy.blogspot.com/2010/02/bootstrap-or-die-lessons- learned-from.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> What an excellent analysis of your troubles, I hope very much that you will be successful in whatever you pursue next.

Your candidness and willingness to reflect and learn from your mistakes are a good indicator for future success.</comment>