Stripe to move to South San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-valuable-U-S-startup-to-leave-SF-as-14558067.php <comment> dawg- I am not in the bay area, in fact I've never even been to the West Coast. So I am going to ask what may seem like a stupid question to some of you.

I mean this in as polite a way as possible, but why wouldn't established companies like Stripe just fuck off to another city entirely? It's a successful company with a great product - that I'm sure many people would like to work for. They could surely lure talent from the bay area by moving to a lower cost of living area where mid-level employees can afford to buy an actual house relatively close to work? And they could pull a mini-Amazon and get some sweet tax breaks to boot. Is there some hidden reason that companies like this insist on staying in the same area despite the many potential advantages of looking elsewhere?

<comment><USER2> 1\. San Francisco is really nice. It's 87 degrees today at the end of October. There is good food, decent public transportation, culture, ocean, forests, etc. It doesn't snow here or get blistering hot, so productivity is very steady year round.

2\. Because San Francisco is very nice (perhaps) and we have good schools around here. A lot of hires come from UCB, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and other UCs. Those account for several of the top engineering schools in the country/world.

3\. Silicon Valley has hit an inflection point where we're now the best place in the world to find TOP talent in tech. It's not a great place for mid and junior level talent, but if you need top talent for an opportunity that is high growth and high per employee leverage, there is no place better in the world.

Ultimately, the main issue is that everything is too nice and worked too well so the cost of living has sky rocketed. And that is driving out everyone that isn't a top tier talent (engineering and opts). It's really sad, to be honest, I love San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and I wish we could find a way to solve the living cost issue and continue to grow as a hub for innovation.

<comment><USER3> SF has always been expensive. When I moved here, my grandfather who was an actuary for an insurance company (i.e. walking financial database) told me that back in the 1930s, they had to pay 2-3x salary for people based there due to the high cost of living. If you read old issues of the SF Chronicle, you'll find the same story repeated across generations.

The only time SF was every really cheap was during the 70s into the late 80s, which was due to a combination of white flight, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and the AIDS plague depopulating the city. Apart from that anomaly, it has been super pricey ever since the Gold Rush.

<comment><USER4> And the Bay Area as a whole wasn't cheap in the late 80s. (SF may have been cheaper because, as you suggest, upper middle class people weren't rushing to move to SF or most other cities in that period.) But I turned down recruiting from the Bay Area during that period in part because the cost of living was too high relative to where I lived on the East Coast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a completely unexpected consequence of the restrictions on office space, spearheaded by John Elberling of TODCO. /s

He is now trying to make office space even more restricted, and his allies are working to reduce office space alternatively by raising the fees on office construction. [https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-Mayor- SoMa-n...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-Mayor-SoMa- nonprofit-clash-over-office-growth-14541749.php) [https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/10/22/sf-...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/10/22/sf- moves-forward-with-controversial-jobs-housing.html) (More about John Elberling: [http://sfbamo.com/news/tenants-in-todco-property-allege- abus...](http://sfbamo.com/news/tenants-in-todco-property-allege-abuse- neglect-and-intimidation/))

San Francisco prevents office space from being abundant and cheap, and therefore the office jobs are being moved to counties with even worse jobs- housing balance, turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for (the richer individuals working in) the peninsula.

<comment><USER6> _> working to reduce office space_

That's a rather uncharitable characterization. SF is just trying to tie jobs to adequate housing construction. We already have way too few houses, especially low-income housing.[1] Which is what makes Stripe's move here particularly low integrity: they'll have all the housing impact on SF without paying any of the corporate taxes.

From your own source: "A separate economic feasibility study from the City's Office of Economic and Workforce Development found that a range of office projects are 'currently infeasible,' even without a city fee increase. The study did contend that an improvement in market conditions could make a modest fee increase viable."

[1] [https://hoodline.com/2019/10/report-sf-adding-equal- numbers-...](https://hoodline.com/2019/10/report-sf-adding-equal-numbers-of- high-and-low-wage-jobs-but-not-nearly-enough-low-wage-housing)

<comment><USER7> > SF is just trying to tie jobs to adequate housing construction

And also making the assumption that only people who work in San Fransisco will live in San Fransisco? Because those Stripe employees who live in SF right now are likely not going to change their apartments. They'll continue living where they are, except now SF now longer benefits from the taxes that Stripe would otherwise have paid.

<comment><USER8> What alternative solution actually fixes this, though? All you can really do is build more housing (to fix housing undersupply caused by the excess office space) and limit growth of office space (to prevent the imbalance from getting worse).

The fact that companies can open up offices somewhere else shouldn't be very surprising, and it shouldn't be shocking that people will choose to live where they already live unless their commute gets too long and they can afford to move.

I just don't see what you expect SF leadership to do about this that doesn't fit into the two categories I mentioned, other than give up.

<comment><USER9> > _What alternative solution actually fixes this, though?_

Lower the cost of building housing. Streamline permits, zoning, and environmental review. Publicly commit, in other words, to driving down housing prices over a decade. (Note: not land prices! That's the compromise.) This makes it cheaper to...

Build enough shelters for the transient homeless population. Now that they're a stable problem, we can focus on the gritty bits.

Fund mental-health intervention for the permanently homeless so afflicted. And there has to be an element of coercion. Leaving the mentally ill to waste on the street isn't compassion, it's dereliction.

Fund drug-addiction intervention for the permanently homeless so afflicted. Carrot is clean places to use, seek counselling and get preventative medical care. Stick _has_ to be arresting (and preferably transferring to clinics, not prisons) public users of hard, illicit drugs.

With the above in place, encampments can be humanely cleared and/or relocated. It also lets law enforcement tackle the minority of the homeless who are threatening, violent or thieving, a minority that creates most of the problems for other San Franciscans.

(Oh, and regional transit co-operation. If you make it easier for people to get around the Bay Area, they don't have to stack up on each other. Why is the Caltrain a single trunk? Where is the network of every-fifteen-minutes ferries? Why is the BART so loud and expensive?)

<comment><USER10> I've lived in the SF Bay Area pretty much my whole life and I just want to say you hit the nail on the head. Do you know of any politicians who are working to make this happen? I'm pretty liberal, but I sometimes feel we live in such a bubble here that even ideas like these are a third rail...

<comment><USER5> Permit streamlining (in order to make affordable and supportive housing more tractable), increasing regional transit cooperation, these are projects of sub-groups of YIMBY Action. [https://yimbyaction.org/join/](https://yimbyaction.org/join/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stripe cofounder here. Quick comment to say that we're excited about the move. South San Francisco is a cooperative and open-minded city. In being an infrastructure company, we have to take a long-term view, and we think this can be a good for many years. And while the Bay is tricky from a commuting standpoint no matter what the location, the the presence of a marina right beside this site opens up a lot of interesting new transportation options for us throughout the Bay.

<comment><USER5> South City is also one of the worst cities in the Bay Area in building offices and rejecting homes. The long-term view is that we need more homes near jobs. What are you doing to get South City to build more homes?

<comment><USER12> IIRC, he/they have funded political efforts in that direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Articles misses that this is in response to SF's gross receipts tax. Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city.

<comment><USER14> Also, the tax oddly targets Stripe and Square.

People don't talk about this very much. But it seems extremely unfair that Stripe/Square pay way more tax than Saleforce in terms of ratio to their revenues. (I don't recall the numbers. Anyone?)

Jack Dorsey tried to raise this point multiple times. But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless :S

<comment><USER15> > But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless

JFC, it's not because of a lack of money that SF has a problem with homeless people, and it's not that more money would make the problem magically go away.

<comment><USER16> It's a national issue and SF is a symptom. Instead of pushing for healthcare, housing, more aids, and so on, people are just blaming it on mental health.

<comment><USER17> It's not "national issue." Aid and housing are local issues. San Francisco and California in general have much worse homelessness problems than many other places in the country. (For example, Mississippi has one of the lowest homelessness rates in the country.)

<comment><USER18> It's a national issue because people are mobile and will go to wherever the services are best. If San Francisco decides to house every homeless person who appears on its streets, it's going to have to house every homeless person in America.

Coordination at the federal level could even out geographical imbalances in services and also prevent all services from having to be delivered in the few places where it's most expensive to do so. Doing all the free housing in the most expensive market is crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can tell you recruiting for South San Francisco was way harder than recruiting for SF. If I lived in SF without a car, that'd be a deal breaker for me. They're going to start losing people, or see a huge spike in chronic working from home. I guess they have to move somewhere at some point, and no move is without trade-offs.

Regarding the gross receipts tax, couldn't they just move their HQ-on-paper to any place that doesn't have a gross receipts tax?

<comment><USER20> I'd say that's an exaggeration. I know _tons_ of people who commute from the city to south bay and vice versa. Plus South SF is pretty well connected by transit.

<comment><USER21> I've never heard anyone in SF say that South San Francisco is well connected by transit before. BART takes a rather circuitous route to get to the city's western edge and most Caltrain service skips its (rather sad) station.

<comment><USER22> Is that the station where you might exit onto the tracks of an oncoming (but waiting) train?

<comment><USER21> It is. They have a holdout rule though, trains only pull into the station and open their doors when the track is clear for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who has worked in South SF for years, it is pretty bad for employees. It is a cultural wasteland with few restaurants or interesting things to do. Transit is also poor as both BART and Caltrain are in awkward locations. And the fog is worse. This will be like Uber's move to Oakland, which got rolled back pretty quickly

<comment><USER24> North of the GG Bridge has great restaurants and plenty to do. More tech companies should move up there, I don't understand why they usually go south of SF. Also, real estate can be found that are still within a range middle class can afford.

<comment><USER25> Marin is over an hour away by bus from SF, with no train or BART. Basically to work in Marin you have to live in Marin, so any company that moved there wouldn't be taking advantage of the SF/South Bay labor market.

<comment><USER26> _Marin is over an hour away by bus from SF, with no train or BART. Basically to work in Marin you have to live in Marin, so any company that moved there wouldn 't be taking advantage of the SF/South Bay labor market. _

You're looking at closer to three hours depending on where you're coming from. There is a ferry from Larkspur but transit connectivity and parking are limited. The Tiburon and Sausalito ferries are worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Though Stripe also strongly opposed last November's Proposition C, which > raised business taxes to fund more homelessness services, the company said > that wasn't a major factor for the move.

It would be PR suicide for a company to admit that the increased tax to fund homlessness was a major factor for the move. To accounting though a tax is a tax.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I don't really get the point of mentioning something like this. Does anyone expect them to say, "Yeah, we moved because we don't want to pay to help the homeless." PR 101.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find myself confused about the new tax and unwilling to invoke Cunningham's Law to get clarity.

So I went to the source (I think) and it appears Stripe would have been taxed at 0.560% on its gross receipts. [0,1]

Assumptions: 1) Stripe would be classed as a "financial services" company per the law and subject to section 953.6 of the law 2) Stripe has gross receipts over $25 million

My confusion is the discussion of a 1% tax rate on gross receipts. I don't see any business taxed at that rate and on this case neither Stripe nor Square would be.

[0] [https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/gross- receipts-t...](https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/gross-receipts-tax- gr) [1] [http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll?f=templates&fn=de...](http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll?f=templates&fn=default.htm&vid=amlegal:sanfrancisco_ca_m&anc=JD_953.6)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised to not see any current Stripe employees in here commenting on the move. Usually you'd see one of The Brothers Collison in a HN Stripe thread.

As a former Stripe (ex-Stripe?), I do buy the story of running out of room. That office is lovely, but they keep growing on a pretty steep curve, and the floors weren't as dense in there as you might imagine. Decidedly cool interior design tho!

<comment><USER31> It's sort of late, I'm sure we'll hear from them eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These days I was thinking about San Francisco and wondering how it had come to that. There's so much demand, so many people want to move to SF, yet its population has barely moved in the last decade. Why is that?

If anything had gone right, SF should be a HK-like dystopian city filled with electronics and high-tech.

But instead we have a horizontally limited place, that is filled with homeless and restricts new advances like shared kick scooters.

It's sad.

<comment><USER32> I suspect that they're paying a dear price for it. The growth that would have contributed to a HK-like metropolis has been displaced to everywhere else: Seattle, Austin, Boulder, LA/NYC, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Kilroy Oyster Point is a pretty inaccessible area from San Francisco, you would need to take a limited train via Caltrain that's around 40 minutes to get there. I'm pretty sure this is definitely a blowback from the gross receipts tax and nothing more, even for commuters from the Peninsula would still have to get to the really strange south SF station which is also only accessible via limited express...or commute into one the worst traffic corridors in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER34> It's right on the freeway, and there's a ferry. I think it's probably about as good as where the AirBnb and GitHub offices are, which are half a mile from BART. I think a lot of their employees are going to be driving in at times that avoid rush hour.

<comment><USER16> Wat. Airbnb is super well located in soma. Unless Stripe has shuttles it's going to be rough.

<comment><USER35> Stripe will definitely have at least limited shuttles from public transit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The gross receipts tax was ridiculously misguided and is going to cause irreparable harm to the city's economy if not fixed. Square and other FinTech companies are most definitely next.

<comment><USER36> No, it's a very good move as many digital economy businesses are great at creative accounting making their net receipts look ridiculously small or negative.

<comment><USER37> And what about companies whose net receipts _are_ actually small?

<comment><USER36> I think the current binary law (either gross revenue or net receipts for everybody) is flawed. We have to acknowledge different kind of companies exist. One method of taxation cannot be applied to all. Specifically if you engage in activity like trade and your margins are low, gross revenue taxation is clearly unfair. But devising a balanced and bulletproof taxation system that would protect honest companies while preventing abuse seems extremely hard.

<comment><USER38> Yet almost every other city in the US has managed to do it. Complete incompetence or just willful negligence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > "Taxes don't have a lot of impact on business decisions. It's something that > has been exaggerated for years"

What a laughable comment, as anyone can just look at the overseas behavior of large companies to see how this is false.

<comment><USER40> Thornberg skipped ECON101.

<comment><USER39> "Taxes do not drive business decisions" as a company leaves a city immediately after said city passed a massive tax increase on said company for a city with demonstrably lower taxes.

"Real estate prices drive business decisions, not taxes" as though business are not capable of understanding that real estate costs should take into account the tax implications of said real estate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> They spent a couple of years building a shiny new building, only to move out of it after a year?! What a waste...

</comment><comment><USER42> This is described as somehow bad news for San Francisco, but I don't see it. Load balancing can be good news both for the old location (less crowded, less competition for housing) and the new one.

Maybe it's counterintuitive for some, but San Francisco is nothing like a old Midwest factory town where reduced jobs and economic activity would be a serious issue. It would be even better if they had moved somewhere further away that needed the jobs and economic growth more, but this isn't a bad result.

<comment><USER5> This absolutely is bad for San Francisco. South San Francisco is building lots and lots of offices, but not building nearly as many homes. While San Francisco is harmfully negligent at building homes, it is at least building more than its (painfully low-ball) estimated need for high-priced housing. The rest of the peninsula isn't even building that much. All the counties are far behind at building less-fancy housing.

The effect of moving these high-income jobs to San Mateo County is that Stripe employees will now live in San Francisco and commute to San Mateo, increasing the pressure to gentrify communities near the transit infrastructure, while freeing Stripe's former office space for another high-tech company that can make even more profit per employee.

<comment><USER42> Maybe in the short term, but I would expect Stripe workers would now find the peninsula more attractive and gradually move there. There is also the Marina, which might make some ferry commutes from the east bay reasonable and even pleasant. (I still remember commuting from Alameda to Market Street by ferry to be quite nice.)

More density near transit seems like a good result.

<comment><USER5> More density near transit is not a foregone result. It has to be through political will. This is the YIMBY movement.

The peninsula would absolutely be more attractive for Stripe employees. But as I said, the peninsula is building a tiny fraction of the housing as opposed to jobs. The richest executives can move to the few vacancies that open up, but unless something changes, the rest of the employees have to live elsewhere. [https://yimbyaction.org/join/](https://yimbyaction.org/join/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "Taxes don't have a lot of impact on business decisions. It's something that has been exaggerated for years"

If I'm paying 50% in taxes as opposed to 10%, I will be making different business decisions.

Most SF startups incorporate in Delaware because of the low corporate taxes.

<comment><USER44> > Most SF startups incorporate in Delaware because of the low corporate taxes.

That is not true. Most startups everywhere incorporate in Delaware because Delaware has the most robust legal system (e.g. the Court of Chancery) dedicated to handling corporate disputes. More info: [https://whyy.org/articles/why-do-so-many-corporations- choose...](https://whyy.org/articles/why-do-so-many-corporations-choose-to- incorporate-in-delaware/)

<comment><USER43> This sounds like something a VC would tell the press as an excuse.

It's no coincidence that Delaware has very low corporate taxes:

[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/09251...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/092515/4-reasons-why-delaware-considered-tax-shelter.asp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I find it disappointing that Stripe is moving to a development that is a housing wasteland.

Oyster Point was slated for 1,200 housing units, but biotech opposed them.

> The residential development proposal was met by resistance from > representatives of the life sciences industry though, with claims residents > living in the area could make it less attractive to businesses.

[https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/new-builder- buys-o...](https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/new-builder-buys-oyster- point-project-in-south-city/article_8d28937a-6880-11e8-8950-e7656ecdc914.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> You know, the more I read about this sort of thing, the more I appreciate working for a company with a strong remote-friendly culture.

It's not universal within the organization, but _very_ common in the tech groups I interact with. All this talk about whether one can have pleasing weather vs cost of living highlights that for some, having both is quite possible.

I'm on Canada's west coast, so Vancouver (with crowding, culture and cost) is my nearest approximation to the Bay area. Being at or near HQ is irrelevant when remote work is common-place, and very occasional travel ceases to be a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER47> Expect this to add at least an hour a day to the commutes of those employees living in East Bay. Oyster Point is a long way from the Bart station. The fastest option will be to change to the shuttle at Glen Park. The ferry is nice for those who live near the terminal, but slower than Bart and shuttle for everyone else.

On a more positive note the Caltrain station is closer, so the East Bay commute could improve significantly in 20-30 years if the Caltrain to Oakland tunnel is ever built.

</comment><comment><USER48> Stripe CEO was actively against paying taxes to support SF homeless through Prop C. This isn't suprising.

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tech-moguls- wor...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tech-moguls-workers- views-on-homeless-tax-13356716.php)

</comment><comment><USER6> This blows, not so much because Stripe is leaving SF, but because it's going just over the border for tax purposes so 100% of employees who live in SF will stay in SF. The company just won't pay their fair share to the city to offset their impact.

The line about this being about space and not taxes is hard to believe.[1] And for good reason. Last year Stripe funded an anti-homeless campaign just $1 shy of the reporting threshold, initially, until they were exposed.[2] That's not something you do if you're proud of sharing your true motivations.

[1] [https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/affordable-housing-fee- hike-...](https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/affordable-housing-fee-hike-on- office-development-in-sf-advances-toward-approval/)

[2] [https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/orgy-of-big-money- donations...](https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/orgy-of-big-money-donations- flowing-into-prop-c-battle-both-for-and-against/)

<comment><USER9> > _Last year Stripe funded an anti-homeless campaign just $1 shy of the > reporting threshold_

I don't get the sense that San Francisco's homeless problem can be solved by throwing dollars at it. San Francisco chooses high housing prices by restricting construction. Its NIMBYs block tackling its homelessness problem.

Money won't change those choices by San Francisco's voters. It will just swell another city bureaucracy.

<comment><USER8> Both things can be true: NIMBYs are contributing to skyrocketing housing prices (and thus a growth in homelessness), AND essential city/county/state services require tax dollars.

I can think of plenty of things that SF locals complain about when I talk to them that would be mitigated by more tax dollars spent by the appropriate agencies. If your argument is that SF local government is a black hole that spends 0% of its tax income on important programs, then that's another matter but requires a bit more support...

<comment><USER49> > NIMBYs are contributing to skyrocketing housing prices (and thus a growth in > homelessness)

My impression was that the homeless there cannot afford a home at any price due to life circumstances.

<comment><USER50> Yes but let's assume we built free or nearly free housing. We can't even do that in SF with any speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Can't wait until we learn how to work remotely. Would save a ton of resources.

</comment><comment><USER52> Or you know they could move to a much more accessible and cheaper city like Oakland

</comment><comment> sneeze-slayer Are there good bike paths in San Franciso? It seems like the weather is good enough for year-round biking, which would be a big plus.

<comment><USER53> Well... their new office is on the SF2G Bayway route, but the whole area is absolutely unfriendly to bikes. Use Google Maps and look at the intersection of Gateway Blvd and Oyster Point Blvd. It's special.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> SF won't care as it is the only major American city that seems to want fewer high paying jobs.

</comment><comment><USER55> > The company will move more than 1,000 employees just 10 miles south of its > current South of Market headquarters, which it plans to vacate.

Click bait. They're moving ten miles south of their current office ...

<comment><USER56> I mean, it eliminates the entire East Bay from its pool of possible employees, so that sucks for anyone who lives out there. That's a pretty big deal for their quality of life.

<comment><USER57> I'd agree with it being bad for the quality of life, but _eliminates_ is a bit of an exaggeration. It makes it more difficult, to be sure, but there's a BART station in South San Francisco and a free shuttle that runs between there and Oyster Point. For anyone coming up from the Peninsula or the South Bay, though, this might be a commuting improvement.

Of course, the big difference is that Stripe's current office is at the edge of SOMA and Mission Bay, within pretty short distance of the Embarcadero and Financial District. Their new office will be...a business park. No offense to business parks -- Bishop Ranch in San Ramon is unexpectedly lovely -- but they're rarely known for their vibrant cafés, restaurants and nightlife.

<comment><USER58> Do you ride Bart?

You're going from a local commute to bart -> walking to the office, to a local commute to bart -> going to a station that is skipped by 3/4 of bart lines (ie requires an xfer for Antioch, Pleasanton, or Fremont) -> a shitty bus. NB: Bart is ass and generally is too incompetent to align train and bus schedules.

This adds probably _at least_ 45 minutes each way for anyone coming from SF or East Bay locations and using public transit. It's an enormous downgrade.

<comment><USER26> _Do you ride Bart?_

How do you think most East Bay commuters are getting to San Francisco?

<comment><USER59> This isn't a very helpful argument. I live in Oakland and commute to San Francisco and rarely take Bart because there are many other options that don't involve me breathing directly from someone else's exhalation like we all are forced to on Bart.

Personally, I take casual carpool, [https://sfcasualcarpool.com/](https://sfcasualcarpool.com/), to work and a transbay bus home. Total cost is $6.50/day, which is cheaper than commuting by Bart, and because I live 30 mins walking from Bart, it is also much faster.

<comment><USER26> Yeah I couldn't give you stats on how many people do that commute via car, but bus vs BART is a no brainer. A 10-car BART train can hold about 1,000 people. Bus service can't scale like that (especially not on shared right of ways) which would definitely put you in the minority.

South city may as well be the middle of nowhere transit-wise but the difference between taking BART to Market St vs SSF isn't all that big.

<comment><USER59> I'm not sure it matters why I'm in the minority in my commute. And if I am in the minority in some populations, I might not be in others. It would seem that quite a few people that live in my neighborhood use the same transportation options that I am, although this is obviously anec-data.

I disagree with your last statement. BART is 4 miles from oyster point, so you would have to take a shuttle. I'm going to assume that is at least 20 minutes more, if I'm being generous. So, for me, that would equate to about a 90 minute commute each way, at a minimum, where as a commute to Market street via BART would be about a 50 minute minimum. 80 minutes per day is not a trivial amount of time for me.

Overall, I'm not sure what the argument here is. That a lot of people take BART? That we should be ok with more commute time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Why are all these companies in San Francisco?

Because that's where it was the place to be for cool tech companies, start- ups, and venture capitalism.

Now that companies realize they can just move to Witchita, Kansas or wherever else they want, they will.

</comment><comment><USER61> It's a disappointingly boring corporate campus (the second photo in the article) for a well run company with lots of smart people.

The rendering shows a sad 1990's office park, complete with a path winding artificially along the water, office windows overlooking parking lots, and useless lawn accents that no one will ever play on. Imagine the desolate dystopian feeling when you came in to do a few hours work on a Saturday.

We should have the will, talent, and state capacity to build more San Francisco style urban landscape. High prices cause San Francisco's worst problems. More high quality urban areas would make these areas cheaper and more people could enjoy them.

<comment><USER62> Come on, that's slightly unfair... "office windows overlooking parking lots" \- but with a pretty nice sea view. And the path seems like a nice place to jog at lunch. Maybe even go for a swim?</comment></comment>


Go implementation of Rumpetroll server  - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/nf/Rumpetroll/tree/master/go/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the discussion on the original Rumpetroll: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741260></comment>


Zuckerberg Slams Elon Musk on Superintelligent AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/irresponsible-mark-zuckerberg-slams-elon-musks-doomsday-attitude <comment><USER2> Well he doesn't slam Elon Musk on AI but gives a more reasonable point of view, but I'm glad other high profile tech CEO's are calling out Musk's fear mongering about AI.</comment>


Ask HN: Why not accept resume in JSON format? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Maybe because resumes/CVs go through Human Resources first, and HR people wouldn't know how to deal with one in JSON.

<comment><AUTHOR> That HRs read CVs in formats as they were submitted isn't universal. Most CVs go through parsers and presented in a standardized format. I have not seen good PDF parser and that means what they read is with noise, biased against a good outcome for the candidate.

The industry could simply standardize a JSON structure and ask candidates to submit in such a format.

and that people with bachelors degree cannot teach themselves how to write simple JSON structure is laughable.

<comment><USER2> >and that people with bachelors degree cannot teach themselves how to write simple JSON structure is laughable.

That's not the point. Would they want to? Would they need to? How many technical people would actually submit a resume or CV as JSON? This seems a bit edge case-y. Interesting, but edge case-y.

<comment><AUTHOR> If we were to optimize the time put in editing templates, JSONs make sense, but the downside is sentence correction features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because most people are not techies?

What would they do with it?

Which format is easier to read and write?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly techies use JSON (for good reason) and its not that hard for others to catch up with it. Does it take 5-10mins? It's not C programming bruh.

<comment><USER3> Ok tech bruh, we can see why you don't get it. Might want to work on your empathy skills

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> there is a standard json resume format , easy to build and parse

[https://jsonresume.org/](https://jsonresume.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> So, why is this not promoted by companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe we need an OpenResume specification?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely!! Resumes are something everyone has to deal with but I am surprised there is no standardization.

Are we expected to be creative at resume template? I don't think candidates who are really applying for jobs care about it.</comment></comment>


Why the Display Server DOES matter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/why-the-display-server-does-matter/

<comment><USER2> Canonical KNOWS they are wasting everyone else's man-hours on Mir and they know that it won't be kittens and roses. They just don't care.

<comment><AUTHOR> Though in theory, "the toolkit should handle this" doesn't sound too bad. But it is probably not that surprising that it isn't true, as the toolkits worked so long mainly with X only, and not for stuff so close to X like window managers.

That's why I liked this article, he shows good examples.

<comment><USER3> It is not just technology, see the addition by Aaron Seigo at [http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/03/more-on-why-display- serve...](http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/03/more-on-why-display-server-does- matter.html). I also wrote a blogpost about it: [http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2014/03/25/on-change- managem...](http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2014/03/25/on-change-management- and-display-servers/), but then more stressing on ideas from change management theory vs the approach Canonical seems to be taking.</comment></comment></comment>


Query optimization in MySQL with Subqueries - <AUTHOR> http://gergerconsulting.blogspot.com/2011/02/query-optimization-in-mysql-with.html <comment><USER2> There's no question that correlated subqueries are piss-poor in MySQL and instead creating derived tables is quicker.

And in most cases it'll be quick enough.

But I have exeprience recently on much larger datasets -- always over a million and often upwards of 10 Million -- and the truth is, 2 queries is better.

I didn't read the SQL closely enough but most cases of subquery (whether in the select, from or where clauses) is to do in 1 query what really takes 2. So assuming that applies here, yeah, if you've got large datasets, doing several simple queries is better than fewer complex queries.

The MySQL query optimizer is just not there. It's not game-day ready the way Oracle and MSSQL is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't the first query generating a cartesian product ?

select e. _, u._ , l.* from entry e, user u, location l where e.location in (select l2.from location l2 where (l2.lat between x1 and x2) and (l2.lng between y1 and y2)) and e.user = u.id order by e.id desc limit 0,10

Where's the join condition for the Location table in the outer query ? Furthermore, what the heck does this mean:

select l2.from location

It looks like it's missing a column name, or a * wildcard.

I was pretty surprised by the results, though. Even our lowly product ElevateDB can handle optimizing correlated sub-queries like this pretty easily, and effectively treating them just like an inner join. I suspect that the query was specified incorrectly, although I guess it's certainly possible that MySQL is very bad at optimizing correlated sub-queries.

</comment><comment><USER4> Getting rid of the 'IN' clause.

<comment><USER5> exactly. Using an IN statement with a subquery is textbook "how to make a query slow" - it forces a sequential scan. No-one who understands SQL would write a query like that.

<comment><USER2> It's certainly a cardinal sin on MySQL but commercial platforms have optimizations that make these correlated subqueries performant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> MySQL supports spatial indexes exactly for circumstances like this:

[http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/spatial- extensions.ht...](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/spatial- extensions.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe the first query was so slow because when using _WHERE_ / _IN_ \- mysql will execute the subquery for each and every row, not do the subquery first as some might expect.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm reading the first query and maybe it's just early but why isn't that subquery just a join? It seems to be acting that way.

<comment><USER9> By definition all queries using JOINs can be re-written as sub-queries and vice versa. However, in some cases one is more intuitive, convenient or faster than the other. With MySQL you are better off with JOINs in most cases, and use subqueries only when there is a clear benefit and you understand why that would be faster. One exception to this is using a subquery with EXISTS, which is often way faster. While MySQL will tell you that it will look at all matching rows (when looking at EXPLAIN), it will only look at the first one it finds, so practically it ends up being faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Articles like this make me cry. Use a real database for god's sake (hint: it's free and the logo is an elephant).

Spoon-feeding trivial queries to MySQL is just wrong on so many levels.

<comment><USER11> it's not an elephant, it's a dolphin...</comment></comment>


Maine families face elder boom, worker shortage in preview of nation's future - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-will-be-catastrophic-maine-families-face-elder-boom-worker-shortage-in-preview-of-nations-future/2019/08/14/7cecafc6-bec1-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html <comment><USER2> No jobs except nursing jobs. Austere climate.

Only people who want to live there are those who bought houses long ago for cheap and can now refinance enough cash out of the home to live an American Dream style of retirement.

Compare to Colorado or Washington which have more established jobs for younger individuals.</comment>


BendDesk - <AUTHOR> http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/BendDesk

<comment><USER2> The attention to ergonomics is a good point :) indeed. @51cards you are abosolutely right.

In fact actual light mobile devices with touch screen can do the job pretty well, just with some sizes' variation of output screens, displays or powerful projections devices for larger sizes. A synched Kinect with those devices, and it can enhanced a full room (even a meeting room) and there happens a revolution with a whole new real time social collaborative experience (domestic or office)

In fact, to synch "tablets" (from small like iphone, to larger devices) will bring an real simple immersive experience with data interactions. What i seriously believe in, is the incredibly intuitive interaction with the data with some real collaborative display that is "touched" or more exactly "sensed" (kinect like) by more than just a single user at once, a finally real simple whole shared social experience. just Imagine the power of the educative, creative outputs from such collaborative tools. :) Just looking forward.

</comment><comment><USER3> Related to this? <http://www.curve-project.org/>

Honestly if these touch surface interfaces ever take off (and I have some reservations about long term ergonomics of holding your arms up) then I think this blended approach looks quite promising.

edit: just noticed the link to Curve Project at the very bottom of their site.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957424></comment>


Ask HN: What are the fastest-growing startups, right now? - <AUTHOR> Hey hackers,
I'm looking to join a startup and I want to see what are the fastest-growing, yet still young (<=18months) companies out there.
Your help is much appreciated!
Best, Nikolay <comment><USER2> Sunsama.com - Oakland - Task/Project mgmt tool - they just scored $2.4mil

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Ron. I will check them out.</comment></comment>


A CEO's passionate defense of stack ranking - <AUTHOR> http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/19/stack-ranking-employees/?iid=HP_River <comment><USER2> _At GE there was only one objective, and that was to force honesty_

I thought the purpose was to fire thousands of GE employees? Most of the articles I've read on this make it should like whatever problems/frustration it caused at Microsoft stemmed from the fact they were using stack rank without the goal of reducing headcount across the board.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe he's not being honest with himself? :-)

But I have heard elsewhere that a big reason behind doing this is it forces managers to not be wishy washy telling everyone how great they are. It's very hard to enforce the discipline of tough conversations in organizations where there are long lines of people waiting to be promoted. GE is a prime example of this. People aren't there to invent great technology, or make a financial killing. Therefore the senior engineer doesn't have status. It's the senior manager that does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: He believes everyone performs on a single measurable dimension and teamwork is irrelevant. He thinks that forcing a ranking is the only way to get honest feedback from a manager, and believes that a contributor's manager is the one person suited to judge that contributor.

That's not actually a TL;DR, that's all he said in his "passionate" defense.

<comment><USER4> > _That 's not actually a TL;DR_

Agreed. It's stuff you made up. He didn't say everyone performs on a single measurable dimension, nor that teamwork is irrelevant (nor does stack ranking imply either of these).

He also didn't say that forced ranking is the only way to get honest feedback. He said it's the only way he knows of, which is a considerably different statement.

To be clear, I'm not defending stack ranking here. Muddying the facts with blatant mischaracterizations does not help the discussion, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess I don't understand something. Everywhere I have worked has had a ranking of employees such that when finances become difficult they knew who they would make redundant first. To me this is also stacked ranking.

The problem with some implementations is that it awards people for individual contributions and only if you are above average. This drives people to avoid contributions to a team so they can focus on their own personal contribution and to not want to help colleagues because that would drive the mean up eroding the value of personal contributions.

Couldnt you have stacked ranking with a criteria that rewards all involved for collaboration?

<comment><USER6> The biggest problem with stack ranking, as I have read about it being practiced, is that it is implemented on a team-by-team basis rather than across an entire engineering department. The consequence is that differences in strength _between_ teams are not taken into account -- the members of each team are ranked only relative to the other members of that team. This leads to people trying to game the system in various ways to make sure they're not seen as the weakest on their team.

Ranking all engineers in the department together would be more difficult. Managers have a hard enough time getting a read on the strength of their own people; getting them to agree on how their people rank against the other managers' people would take quite a bit of work, I imagine. But it would give a much better answer to the question of whom to let go first, and it wouldn't provide as much incentive to game the system.

And I agree with you that the ranking should explicitly emphasize how well each employee works with their teammates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What he's saying is that he's willing to have crappy managers around who are unable to give honest feedback. Rather than improving management, just use some mechanical system to "force" them to make choices.

Good people will "choose" to see work elsewhere.

In case this isn't clear to anyone, a manager could have a team of the 10 best people in the company, but given forced stacking and how teams are set, 1 of those people would be a candidate for termination in layoffs, even if there are 99 other people less capable and less critical to the company. No manager will be allowed to keep everyone -- they're all told to rank them and the decision to layoff the "bottom" 10% is done by HR.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hmmm, I have a personal data point on their IT sophistication, they had to hire the firm I was working for in 1997 to start tracking banner ads.

And their 2007 IT outsourcing deal is pretty infamous.

I never got the impression it was a company I'd want to work for.

<comment><AUTHOR> GE or Nielsen?

<comment><USER8> Nielsen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you share more on why it's a bad place to work?

They seem to be in a hot area now - consumer products data.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's more of an impression than an informed opinion, but if you're interested use your favorite search engine with, say, Nielsen india outsourcing to start with.

I should also emphasize from hard, personal experience that how "hot" the area(s) a company is working in is pretty much orthogonal to whether you really want to work for them. Especially a company with such an established brand name and cash cows, which can allow a whole lot of awfulness without killing the company, at least for a while.

I mean, for about half their IT staff it was a _terrible_ place to be in 2007-8 when they were laid off, but not before training their non-resident Indian replacements. Or to put it another way, IT isn't a respected part of the company, obviously viewed as a cost center. _Really_ try to avoid those sorts of outfits if you can afford it.

And their CEO loves stack ranking ... surely that's enough to cool enthusiasm prior to carefully examining the company (e.g. check out the Ask The Headhunter approach).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feds trying to regulate smartphone mapping apps - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/business/agency-aims-to-regulate-map-aids-in-vehicles.html

<comment><USER2> I'm really torn on this; on the one hand I think it will greatly hamper innovation if these apps are highly regulated; on the other hand if these apps were regulated maybe Google wouldn't have been able to fuck up Maps on Android so much in the transition from 6.x to 7.x.

The previous version was much safer to use in a car setting; requiring single clicks where the new one requires many clicks (and thus much more user attention), the new version also has a tendency to constantly ask you dumb questions at bad times (sometimes in modal dialogs that must be addressed) about whether you want it to dim the screen or not, whether or not you want to switch to a faster route mid-nav, etc.

Fucking Google Maps, man. You used to be so good.</comment>


Electromechanical Lunar Lander - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisfenton.com/electromechanical-lunar-lander/ <comment><USER2> There was an electro-mechanical landing simulator for the Space Shuttle, which "flew" a video camera over a miniature landscape. Unfortunately, it's very hard to search for, because of all of the Space Shuttle simulator products.

EDIT: The lack of references to those electro-mechanical video landing simulators is pretty dramatic. They came at the brief period of time when computers were powerful enough to enable very sophisticated motion control, but too weak for real time 3D simulation. For a brief period of time, they were rare and valuable equipment, then quickly became obsolete junk. There are simply no references to them which show that mechanism!

For an example of that period's motion control as used in VFX: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPA6nIBs5g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPA6nIBs5g)

Can anyone help find a reference?

<comment><USER3> The technology was originally developed in the Apollo project for the lunar landing simulator and even spawned an optics company called Televue. The scale of Apollo was mind boggling.

Astronauts inside a lander mockup and the scenery projected on screens.

<comment><USER2> NASA Vertical Motion Simulator: [https://www.cnet.com/news/a-wild-ride-on- nasas-massive-fligh...](https://www.cnet.com/news/a-wild-ride-on-nasas- massive-flight-simulator/)

Not what we were just talking about, but tangentially related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This project was both super fun to build and surprisingly fun to play. It had been on my project "to-do" list for a really long time, and it was one of those rare projects that turned out better than expected. It even held up to a night of drunken party-goers playing it!

<comment><USER2> There's a certain visceral sense when a media device involves any kind of substantial mechanism. This even extends to video games. There is something special about the vector graphics produced by electron guns. The original Lunar Lander video game, glowing in the dark arcade room with its substantial throttle lever was a memorable experience, especially when your cold hard cash is on the line and your game can be cut short by a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also: Bally Space Flight from 1969: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVdonoSadcA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVdonoSadcA)

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a fairly strong memory of an electromechanical space docking game (Apollo command module and lander IIRC). My favourite of that type was a "sit- in" fighter aircraft simulator where you had to shoot aircraft images projected on a wide screen - the chair would turn to point at your targets on the screen.</comment>


Ask HN: codecademy, or LPTHW? - <AUTHOR>

I've been asked for help learning Python. Should I recommend they start with codecademy, or with Learn Python the Hard Way? I know and would lean towards LPtHW, but others swear by codecademy.<p>What does HN recommend? <comment><USER2> LPTHW, without a doubt. I've tried everything out there - codecademy, udacity, coursera, codeschool, khan, etc. Nothing has taught me as well as LPTHW -- probably from just repetition of exercises alone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Both. I was able to complete the Codecademy Python exercises in a matter of hours, it's just getting your feet wet. LPtHW is more like work, but it will burn it into your brain. Also, start your own project immediately - even if it's just a simple command line program, it will make learning more fun.

</comment><comment><USER4> If it's someone who already knows how to program (3+ years experience), they can probably get through LPTHW in about a day, and start writing Python without too much issue.

I still put semicolons at the ends of lines once in a while, though.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you explain Turing completeness? - <AUTHOR>

As I understand Turing completeness can imply that somebody can "translate" one Turing complete programming language to any other TC language. What are the conditions for TC? Rigorous definitions can be of help, but I am asking the simplest possible explanation(not necessarily the shortest) that a non-mathematician programmer can understand.<p>Are there any languages that are not TC? Beyond TC everything else is just libraries? <comment><USER2> Alright, I'll give it a shot. A couple of definitions will be helpful here:

A turing machine is a theoretical device invented by Alan Turing. It consists of a tape (data) and a fixed table of rules (the program). The machine has a head which reads or writes one piece of data at a time. The logic in the table tells the head what to do next (move, read, write etc).

That's great, but it only gives you one (fixed) program at a time. So what if you encode the program _and_ the data on the tape, and set up your table of rules such that it can execute any program. Then you have what's called a Universal Turing Machine.

That idea is basically the theory behind iterative programming languages. The equivalent theory for functional programming languages is the Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. The two worked together to create the Church-Turing thesis, which states that anything computable can be computed by a turing machine (or expressed using lambda calculus).

So you can essentially translate "Turing complete" as meaning "able to compute anything". Since there is nothing that can compute more than a Turing machine, that means all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. (Well, the Church- Turing thesis isn't actually provable, since "computable" is a bit hand-wavy, but it's generally considered to be true).

A non-rigourous litmus test is that something is turing complete if it has conditions, looping and memory access, or recursive functions. You can also prove something is Turing-complete by using it to write an interpreter for a Turing-complete language.

Examples of things that aren't turing complete: regular expressions, (standard) SQL, markup languages (HTML, XML, etc), some templating languages.

Interesting things that are turing complete: basically every iterative or functional programming language, Conway's Game of Life, Minecraft.

<comment><USER3> You may add TeX to the latter list :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A (Universal) Turing Machine is a computation machine that can simulate (virtualize) the operations of any other computation machine, including itself, given enough memory and time.

A Turing-complete language is capable of functionally expressing a Turing machine. That is, given the theoretical construct, can the language encode it? An equivalent framework is _lambda calculus_. Any Turing machine can be expressed as lambda-expressions and vice-versa.

The physical world analog to the Turing machine is the Universal Constructor, a machine that can construct a duplicate of itself or a functional analog of any other machine that can duplicate itself, given enough time and raw materials.

These concepts are relevant because it's not clear if there is a class of problems not solvable by Turing machines (but solvable by another class of machines). As far as we know, human beings themselves are Turing machines (and constructors) and nothing more.

<comment><USER5> Please note that there is no system in existence which is a Universal Turing machine. All possible physical systems are finite state machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would argue that no analog or analog/hybrid computer can be TC, almost by definition. If you accept this (arguable) statement, then one can argue further that there is a class of problem solvable by analog machines but not TC machines. True random numbers is one example.

(Disclaimer: I am no computer scientist - this is just a personal musing)

</comment><comment><USER4> Non-TC languages in current use are largely representational data formats (like HTML, CSS etc), or Excel spreadsheets (using only formulas, without macros) or languages with a closed topological memory space (like Befunge).</comment>


Understanding ASP.NET Performance for Reading Incoming Data – Stackify - <AUTHOR> http://stackify.com/understanding-asp-net-performance-for-reading-incoming-data/ <comment><USER2> Please people... stop using uppercase and (not here but its still way too common) underscores in URLs.</comment>


outerz0ne - two weeks - <AUTHOR> http://outerz0ne.org/

<comment><USER2> I took a look at the schedule of events, but that didn't really tell me what outerzone is. Is it some kind of hackerfest or what, exactly?</comment>


Watching Evolution Happen in Two Lifetimes - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160922-evolution-peter-rosemary-grant-interview/ <comment><AUTHOR> I don't know about anyone else, but I found this especially interesting (and blessedly unrelated to semantic arguments):

 _" Our work has shown that this model of speciation does hold. But in addition, we have shown there are other routes to speciation, such as gene flow from one species to another. We see this in the Big Bird lineage but also in cichlid fishes and butterflies. There are multiple routes to speciation."_

It's one thing to have a hypothesis, another to spend the decades it takes to modify it with observations.

</comment><comment><USER2> Overstated? They witnessed natural selection in action. No genes were created/destroyed. Just a change in average beak size, presumably because the species already had genes to vary beak size.

<comment><USER3> The characteristics/causes they describe are attributes of microevolution, which would have been a more accurate term to use.

<comment><USER4> "microevolution" and "macroevolution" are words that have been invented by creationists to try to reconcile the fact that evolution is directly observable. Despite the fact that both have the same underlying mechanics (natural selection) and the only difference is time.

<comment><USER5> I assumed this was the case, but maybe not:

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

They say it's the technical term for change in allele frequency, which is what OP was talking about.

<comment><USER4> I stand partially corrected.. from now on I will have to remember to say "co- opted" by creationists rather than "invented" by.

However, they are still identical things with the only difference being the amount of time. From your link:

"The main difference between the two processes is that one occurs within a few generations, whilst the other takes place over thousands of years (i.e. a quantitative difference)."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There has been some debate about the modern coywolf [1] being a new species that has evolved in recent, observable time [2].

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

[2] [http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/a-new-species-is-evolving- ri...](http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/a-new-species-is-evolving-right-before- our-eyes-an-ultra-successful-mix-of-wolves-coyotes-and-dogs/)</comment>


Fall 2011 Physics conference: quantum mechanics isn't fundamental - <AUTHOR> http://www.nonlinearstudies.at/images/HVF11announce.jpg

<comment><USER2> This isn't really a new idea. Einstein had always been unsatisfied with the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics that became accepted by the scientific community.

A very good, non-technical read on the topic that I would highly recommend is Quantum by Manjit Kumar: [http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Einstein-Debate- Nature-Reality...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Einstein-Debate-Nature- Reality/dp/0393339882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303008523&sr=8-1)</comment>


Jeffrey Epstein's Death, Critical Thinking, and the Decline of Reporting - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/jeffrey-epsteins-death-critical-thinking-and-the-decline-of-reporting.html <comment><USER2> "And then there's the bizarre show of the raid on Epstein's island. Was that displacement activity? If it was an important target, why after he was dead and not earlier?"

This was easily apparent to me. No objections to a search warrant.</comment>


Bouncing bomb - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb <comment><USER3> They came up with an ingeniously simple way to tell if the plane was at the correct altitude over the water

[http://www.thedambusters.org.uk/height.html](http://www.thedambusters.org.uk/height.html)

<comment><USER4> This is what surprised me about the Wikipedia article - you would think they would have mentioned the simple yet clever way that the crew could ensure that they were at the correct release height over the water using spotlight beams.

<comment><USER5> From the article: "Height was checked by a pair of intersecting spotlight beams, which, when converging on the surface of the water, indicated the correct height for the aircraft - a method devised for the raid by Benjamin Lockspeiser of MAP," I didn't look to see when this was added.

<comment><USER4> I searched for the phrase 'light' on the article when I looked at it, but didn't see this. Someone may have seen this thread and added it perhaps? Useful addition in any case, and I hope it stays.

EDIT: Actually I may have searched for 'lights', which would have returned no results, so perhaps my bad after all.

<comment><USER6> If you look at the page history, [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bouncing_bomb&act...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bouncing_bomb&action=history), the last edit was on November 6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> German Wikipedia has a long, quite dramatic page about the bombing of the Möhnetalsperre using these bombs in May 1943 at [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6hnekatastrophe](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6hnekatastrophe)

According to the page, the attack did not achieve its goal of interrupting the arms production in the Ruhrgebiet area, however a lot of people were killed, including many female forced laborers.

<comment><USER8> Well, killing the workers is also a way of disrupting arms production. In my hometown the allies didn't so much bomb the shipyard or airplane factories, but rather the part of the city where workers lived. Not sure how effective it was, though.

<comment><USER4> The same happened where my parents grew up in WWII. When the Japanese forces came in, they mainly took out strategic points such as railway bridges, command centres etc. When the allied forces counter attacked later, they mainly bombed the railway yards killing almost all of the civilian labourers living there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the coolest unit patches of all time: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:617sqn-600.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:617sqn-600.jpg)

'Apres moi le deluge'

<comment><USER4> Which is all very gung-ho and all that, until you consider the thousands [edited - hundreds] of German civilian men, women and children who drowned in the valley after the dam breach. [0]

[0] - [http://www.abroadintheyard.com/german-survivors-of- dambuster...](http://www.abroadintheyard.com/german-survivors-of-dambusters- raid-remember-human-cost/)

<comment><USER10> It's one of those moments in war where technology leaps ahead of international law. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions in 1977 outlawed the attack of "works or installations containing dangerous forces" to the civilian population [1]. You'd be very hard-pressed to argue it was illegal at the time. Whether it was immoral is, of course, up for debate!

[1] [https://ihl- databases.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/470-750071?OpenDoc...](https://ihl- databases.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/470-750071?OpenDocument)

<comment><USER4> Oh I agree with you. It is just that the dam busters raid was such a powerful propaganda piece - "English ingenuity over the Evil Empire" type thing, and I truly do admire the technical skills and bravery involved in the whole raid.

But the downvotes that my comment above (and no doubt this one) gets just exacerbates the whitewashing of Allied atrocities during WWII. Case in point:

"Bomber command lost nearly 50% of their crew during WWII" \- "Oh dear that is terrible tragedy - upvotes for you, my friend for pointing out this invaluable fact."

"Lots of German civilians were killed in the floods after the Dambuster raid" \- "Meh, who cares? Cost of war. Downvoted. NEXT!"

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting to compare Germany with Japan in that case. Japanese cultural memory and historiography intensely remembers the suffering of civilians from famine, firebombing, and nuclear weapons [1] (but rarely from the military itself [2]), but even suggesting that German civilians suffered unnecessarily from strategic bombing in Der Brand (2002) earned Jörg Friedrich, a German historian of Nazi war crimes, widespread censure.

[1] Grave of the Fireflies is a gorgeous, heartbreaking film. Highly recommended!

[2] See the discussion of Okinawa in [http://apjjf.org/-Mark- Selden/3173/article.html](http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/3173/article.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Barnes Wallace had previously designed the R100 [1] airship for Vickers - <USER2> one that _didn 't_ crash. The one that did crash was an RAF project. The govt. was having a competition to see which design would be best.

The R100 flew to Canada and back without incident, setting various records on the way.

The fatal R101 flight to India was insisted on by the Air Ministry in response. A deadly effect of "ship it when we say" rather than "ship it when it's ready"

One interesting fact from the R100 story : the stress calculations of their airframe were obviously done by hand and took 3 months to complete, something one could do in Excel nowadays, even without CAD.

The figures are almost unimaginable :

Wallis finally settled on the use of six reconditioned Rolls-Royce Condor petrol engines for propulsion. [2] Each of which generated 500 hp (373 Kw) and weighed 1,504 lbs (682 kg).

From wikipedia :

Nevil Shute later suggested in Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer that the success of R100's Canadian flight indirectly led to the R101 disaster. Prior to the transatlantic flight, the Cardington team could suggest that neither airship was ready for a performance of such duration. However, when R100 returned in triumph they had to either make the flight to India or admit defeat – which would have meant discredit with the consequent danger of losing their jobs.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R100)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls- Royce_Condor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Condor)

</comment><comment><USER12> I really enjoyed watching _The Dam Busters_ [0] as a kid. Pretty amazing technical feat, given the circumstances.

[0]: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/)

<comment><USER13> Lucas used a lot of footage from The Dam Busters for storyboarding the Death Star trench run in Star Wars. Some of the dialogue is lifted as well.

<comment><USER14> Do you mean 633 Squadron, rather than the Dam Busters? The fjord attack seems like a more obvious parallel to the trench run.

<comment><USER13> Nope.

[http://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars- the...](http://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars-the-dam- busters)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M)

<comment><USER14> Your first link is to one of a series of articles linking Star Wars to: Lawrence of Arabia; E.T.; the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad; The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; Empire of the Sun; and possibly others. They can't all be major influences!

The start of the YouTube video puts the exposition of the attack from one film next to the exposition of the attack from the other. Is that really such a strong similarity? I'd guess a lot of war/action movies have a here's-how- it's-going-to-go-down scene. Some of the other pairings are closer - I think I buy the one with the line about the number of guns.

So, I see a Dam Busters reference, and that's interesting! But I'd need more convincing that it's used for storyboarding.

<comment><USER13> Did you read the first article? It's pretty clear in spelling out the heritage:

"As the British pilots approach the superstructure, one asks, "How many guns do you think, Trevor?"

To which Trevor replies, "I'd say there's about ten guns. Some in the field, some on the tower!"

The similarities go even further… A tense countdown leads to the first bombing of the German dam, just like the trench run. After the first bomb attack against the German dam is away, one of the pilots exclaims, "It's gone! We've done it!"

To which he's told, "We haven't! It's still there!"

That bomber tells his other pilots to set up for their attack run, eventually taking three bomb runs to destroy the target."

That's almost verbatim what Lucas used for dialogue (something he always admitted he struggled with writing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a fantastic video showing a bouncing bomb in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik9vCg- xRr4#t=0m47s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik9vCg-xRr4#t=0m47s)

<comment><USER4> That's a great video. Extremely low release. The splash from the drop actually smacked into the rear fuselage. I bet in the actual mission the tail gunner would have had wet feet, but a great view of the bomb skipping across the water...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a Channel 4 documentary a few years ago where they made and tested one of these. I didn't see it, but there are clips online:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IeGYkwVIWw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IeGYkwVIWw)

</comment><comment><USER17> Growing up, Barnes Wallis was my hero. Paul Brickhill's book describes how he had to battle unimaginative Whitehall bureaucrats one day, and cutting edge engineering problems the next, to get the thing built.

</comment><comment><USER18> Similar technique using regular bombs

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

</comment><comment><USER19> The PBS show Nova attempted to recreate this bomb on an episode called Bombing Hitler's Dams: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/bombing-hitler- dams.ht...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/bombing-hitler-dams.html)

They dug a giant hole to build a test dam for this project. Fun to watch.

</comment><comment><USER20> Apparently these were the inspiration for the Death Star trench run (because why else would you fly into that trench?)

</comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of an old russian anecdote of the cold war period.

USA dropped a nuclear bomb on the USSR. 5 million people died, panic in the media, outcry from the whole world community, etc.

Couple days later another sensation: USSR dropped a rubber bomb on the USA. 50 million people died, counting: the bomb continues to bounce!

</comment><comment><USER22> There's a decent video by Veritasium about the Magnus Effect, where the bomb is essentially given lift by its backspin:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSrvzNW9FE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSrvzNW9FE)

</comment><comment><USER23> We are going to have such great bouncing bombs. The best.</comment>


Scientific journal subscription costs in Finland 2010-2015: preliminary analysis - <AUTHOR> http://ropengov.github.io/r/2016/06/10/FOI/ <comment><AUTHOR> Data was released as a response to FOI request. Finland might be the first country where annual subscription fees for all individual publishers and all major research institutions have been made available, spanning the years 2010-2015 (link to the data can be found through the first link and the last link of the following pages).

Release notes: [http://openscience.fi/-/transparency-and-openness-to- scienti...](http://openscience.fi/-/transparency-and-openness-to-scientific- publishing-the-finnish-research-organisations-pay-millions-of-euros-annually- to-the-large-publishers)

And data: [https://avointiede.fi/web/openscience/publisher_costs](https://avointiede.fi/web/openscience/publisher_costs)

For example, publisher Taylor & Francis has costs have increased more than 20% per year in 2014 and 2015.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is SUPER back of the napkin-y, so I hope I haven't done some crazy wrong math somewhere or used inaccurate stats, but I was trying to get a sense of context for how journals fit into overall university funding (which in Finland is almost all public funding).

All numbers are for 2011

Finland GDP: $273.7B USD (1)

public expenditure on education: 6.8% (2)

calculated expenditure on education: $18.6B USD

total cost for academic journals: $21.5M USD ($19M EUR) (3)

journal cost as % of yearly university funding: 0.12%

enrolled university students: 168,983 (4)

yearly cost per student for academic journals: $112 USD

(1) [https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...](https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:FIN&hl=en&dl=en) (2) [http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a- Glance-2014.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf) (3) [http://openscience.fi/publishercosts](http://openscience.fi/publishercosts) (4) [http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__kou__y...](http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__kou__yop/010_yop_tau_101.px/table/tableViewLayout1/?rxid=052c6f7e-9bbd-4fc6-9e28-1d504813c4e2)

</comment><comment><USER3> Former Academic System's Librarian:

The BIGGEST Scam running over a decade now. The digital subscriptions are for back ordered journals. These journals sat in boxes behind the current issue and you had to look up an index to find what you needed.

So instead of making 100% of their money on current issues they have now made it where they make 90% of their money on old content that was making them nothing but they get to charge 10 times more and obscure journals get a larger paid audience.

Research issues are mostly paid with tax payer money or non-profits and the profits go to delivery companies. This reminds me of Apple Apps and Google Play's 30% profits.

LOCKED OUT are the paying public. I no longer am in academic work anymore (Gladly) and I no longer can look up research. Really sucked when my son had cancer.

</comment><comment><USER4> This confirms Elsevier's status as the most avaricious publisher, accounting for more than one-third of Finland's overall subscription costs. Wiley comes in a distance second at 10%. Many academics, particularly in mathematics, have come to boycott Elsevier's journals due to it's extraordinarily high prices and "all-or-nothing" subscription model. However, due to NDAs that Elsevier forces libraries to sign, confirmed numbers were previously very rare.

Some more information on the boycott appears in [1] and at Tim Gower's blog [2].

[1] [http://thecostofknowledge.com/](http://thecostofknowledge.com/) [2] [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals- so...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/)

</comment><comment><USER2> If you're going to look at this and figure out which companies get what share of the money, one thing to note is that there are some large subscription agents in here. Ebsco is the third largest receiver of funds, but they're just a subscription agent that processes subscriptions for the publishers, so that money really just represents various journals from other publishers. I think there are others within the top 20 list there too, but Ebsco is the most obvious. That probably doesn't change the overall distribution among the top publishers (which in this case is Elsevier, Wiley, Springer as the top 3), but it does obscure some of the data.

<comment><USER2> It's also worth pointing out another aspect of subscription agents. The second largest subscription agent, SWETS, went bankrupt in 2014. If you look at the graph for the top publishers you'll see some big changes in 2014. Ebsco (another subscription agent) revenue starts dropping and Taylor and Francis revenue shoots up dramatically. I don't know this for sure, but I'd bet that those trends are 100% related to the SWETS bankruptcy. Publishers started trying to more direct deals without subscription agents. For some reason the data only has SWETS numbers for 2010, which doesn't seem right, I'd expect numbers until 2014. But for the big changes in 2014 (like the T&F jump) I'd guess that it's just about shifting from using agents to dealing with publishers directly.

So all this to say that there are a lot of intricacies in this data, and without the context a lot of it is misleading. Taylor and Francis didn't increased their prices by 20x in 2014.

Another example is where the post cites differences among publishers when looking at "cost per citation" (which alone is a dubious metric). This is going to be entirely dependent on field of study. Certain fields, like bio and physics have massively higher citation rates per paper than fields like humanities and social sciences. Publishers (like SAGE) who focus on social sciences are going to have vastly fewer citations per article than publishers with an STM focus. But the value of a journal (either defined as the actual cost or in more theoretical ways) isn't simply directly tied to citation counts. I'd argue that's a good thing, but I suppose you could debate it. But I raise the issue only to point out that "revenue per citation" types of metrics are almost entirely related to the fields of research and not publishers over or under charging for the same content relative to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was a spreadsheet floating around on r/libraries from 2007 about the subscription costs in Tennessee: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/4jodic/found_an_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/4jodic/found_an_old_price_list_of_scholary_databases/)</comment>


Are we there yet by Rich Hickey - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey <comment><USER2> Fantastic talk. (Should say 2007 in the title.)

This was in August, with the first announcement of Clojure in October of the same year, so Rich was just preparing the world for Clojure concepts?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the famous 2009 JVM Languages Summit keynote.</comment>


OverEncrypt: going beyond LetsEncrypt's HTTPS security defaults - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/mapmeld/a9bcac46d1f486f81664814a799e5897 <comment><USER2> These HPKP instructions are rather dangerous (as in: more dangerous than they have to be).

The hash is for the ISRG root certificate, which is not widely trusted yet. While an ISRG-signed intermediate certificate is available, all clients currently default to the IdenTrust-signed intermediate, and even if you decide to use the other intermediate instead (or both, which most browsers can handle), that doesn't guarantee that browser build a trust path through that intermediate - it might have the other one cached from a different site. In other words, the second pin would almost never be satisfied, which means you're screwed once your private key is compromised or changes. Screwed as in your domain is bricked for up to 30 days with this max-age setting.

A slightly better approach would be to pin to both the ISRG and the IdenTrust root[1], plus your private key and a couple of backup keys that you keep offline. One or two backup pins to other CAs couldn't hurt either. Oh, and best run with Report-Only for a while.

[1]: [https://www.identrust.com/certificates/trustid/root- download...](https://www.identrust.com/certificates/trustid/root- download-x3.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is rather overly complicated and should only be used for test domains you do not care about.

Much easier and very effective is to use the apache2 or nginx config file options to manually disable sslv3, tls1.0 and tls 1.1. Permit only TLS 1.2. If you want to, manually specify the preferred order or crypto.

Any modern browser supports TLS 1.2 just fine. I've done this for every httpd I admin and it has had no effect on reachability.

<comment><USER4> How are you measuring the effect on reachability? My companies network filter can't seem to understand cloudflare certs with their 50+ other domain names in there, and so clients can't connect. If you have HSTS on you can't even fall back to http. So without a phone call to IT to our provider, people just aren't going to that site.

That kind of thing seems impossible to measure.

<comment><USER3> 99.5%+ of browser user agents are something released in 2010 and later that understand TLS 1.2 just fine.

<comment><USER5> But what if it's not enabled? We see traffic from newish IE browsers that have TLS 1.1 and 1.2 turned off. We actually got user complaints that one of our sites stopped working when we turned off TLS 1.0.

I have no idea why they would be set up that way, but it's clearly out there.

<comment><USER6> Windows 7 does not default to TLS 1.1 and 1.2 enabled.

While this can enabled via GPO, I really wish MS would release a patch that forces these to be on. There is no reason not to at this point.

<comment><USER3> Maybe when it initially shipped, but unless somebody has been absolutely ignoring all the last 6 years of updates, the version of IE that comes with Win7 is very much TLS1.2 compatible.

<comment><USER6> Read my post again.

TLS 1.1 & 1.2 are not enabled by default therefore will _not_ work regardless of compatibility. Try it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> l-p Your best option is probably to read, understand, and use the configs at [https://cipherli.st](https://cipherli.st)

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone else notice the SysV subtlety on the bottom?

<comment><USER8> The "service" command is _not_ SysV specific; it's general, and will work under any init system, including systemd.

<comment><USER9> How do I get it working on my arch setup? I think ubuntu provides something that still works with systemd, but is that true of all distros?

<comment><USER10> According to `pacman -Fys service`, Arch does not ship the service(8) forwarder script, so you can only use systemctl(8). I've seen service(8) on at least RHEL and SLES, though.

However, emulating it should be as easy as

      $ cat >> ~/.bashrc
      service() { systemctl $2 $1 }</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hand reading app with deep learning? - <AUTHOR> Is it really possible to correlated future of people based on scanning, deep learning their hand?
I am thinking about an app where people can take a pic of their hand and upload it to a remote database.
The deep learning algorithm infers and correlates, future of the audience. <comment><USER2> I know of no long-term studies of palm reading. In my view, this would be a gimmick.

However, you could machine learning to take a hand and output the following characteristics:

\- whether it is a hand

\- relative length, curvature, and forks of "head line"

\- relative length, curvature, and forks of "heart line"

\- relative length, curvature, and forks of "life line"

These factors can influence the selection from a finite set of traits that have a corresponding paragraph that the user can read. These would be written by a copywriter or taken from a palm reading guide.</comment>


The oil industry is going "ethical". - <AUTHOR>

Now this ad from "EthicalOil.Org" is something special.
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/buy-canadian-tar-sands.html
You have to know, that for the industrial isolation of oil from sand a lot of energy is needed. So much, that they (Energy Alberta) want to build a nuclear power plant near the tar sand fields.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf49a_Alberta_Tar_Sands.html
Do they realy care? I don`t think so. <comment><USER2> You have to appreciate their sense of humor. The only way canadian tar sands could even approach ethical is if they build reactors there.</comment>


Should you make a potential lawyer sign an NDA before revealing your idea? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are talking to a lawyer, trying to get a feel for whether or not you would like to retain them, should you be worried about them potentially stealing your business idea? If so, is an NDA necessary, and will a lawyer even consider signing, or is this whole issue taken care of by professional legal ethics?

[Of course, if a lawyer/firm started taking ideas they would quickly get a bad rep and it would probably damage their business more than they would gain from the idea. But just wondering anyways.]

<comment><USER2> There are probably 1000 more important things to worry about.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just read you blog entry about classifying things by their rank of importance. Top 10, 100, 1000. An effective way to look at things. Although in asking this question I wasn't giving in to a worry, merely curiousity. I think it is much harder to rank things by how fruitful the curiosity about them will be. For instance, because of my question, and your response, I read an interesting post and learned a little about an interesting, successful guy (you).

<comment><USER2> Yeah, random curiosity is definitely a good thing, or at least some amount of it is (like spending 20% of your time on completely random things). But during the other 80% of the time, we just need to move forward without getting blocked by unimportant details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would wish them good luck if they wanted to take it! The hard part is the execution.

Everyone has great ideas that _they can't implement_. That's why I learned to program in the first place.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone develop/hack while working in a completely separate field? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on developing a project for the last 6 months while working full time as a mechanical engineer. I'm interested to hear about anyone else's experience with something similar.<p>I've considered taking one day a week to dedicate to development, has anyone else tried this? <comment><USER2> Not me, but one of the Linux kernel hackers Con Kolivas is an anaesthetist.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Jesus, he's either good or crazy. But given anaesthetists salary in Australia he can probably work part time quite easily.</comment></comment>


For Years, Alcohol Was My Only Comfort. Then It Nearly Killed Me - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/magazine/alcohol-sobriety-military.html <comment><USER2> I enjoy a good beer as much as the next guy, but I am still bothered by how alcohol is ingrained in our culture. Binge drinking seems to be regarded as an important part of social life, for example. Some UK-themed subreddits also have a tendency to celebrate sometimes irresponsible drinking, without considering the consequences.

Another pet peeve of mine is how many people use 'buy you a beer' or similar expressions to mean 'meet you up'. You are aware that not everyone drinks, no?

</comment><comment><USER3> Really powerful article, and speaks to the toll alcohol takes on lives over the course of decades. Whether it's family separation, bodily injury, near death, destruction of trust.... It runs the gambit until it kills you.

As I always say on threads regarding alcoholism. If you're an alcoholic, today is a great day to get sober! There's a meeting happening near you today! It's never too late.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminder that according to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, moderate drinking is 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men.

Binge drinking is 4 or more drinks in a session for women, 5 for men.

Heavy alcohol consumption is binge drinking for at least 5 days a month.

[https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol- co...](https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol- consumption/moderate-binge-drinking)

If you have a problem, please reach out.

<comment><USER5> I used to drink 1 / day to relax thinking I was alright, because I followed the guidelines, but I saw the effects of drinking even just that little had on both my mental and physical health.

It's the consistency that's no bueno; the quantity just determines the amplitude of the negative effects. Drinking alcohol daily in any quantity is just outright bad for anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I drank a lot in my earlier years. (To excess, really.) I honestly believe it made me more social.

I stopped when my first son was born, 20 years ago. (I've since had half a glass of champagne.)

I don't miss it a bit. I feel healthier, I saved a ton of money, and I've forgotten what a hangover feels like.

I truly recommend abstinence. It's a good thing!

</comment><comment><USER7> Cannot read it, have to pay for it WTF.</comment>


A collection of resources to learn from and become an awesome programmer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dhilipsiva/awesome-programmer <comment><USER2> Would love to see some more details language specific.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes - I will definitely be adding adding more Language specific files as soon as I find time.</comment></comment>


On fonts and dyslexia - <AUTHOR> https://atrophiedmind.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/on-fonts-and-dyslexia/ <comment><USER2> I know that the current trend among academics (in the US, less so elsewhere) is to insist that dyslexia has no visual component, and that it is purely phonological. This leads people to draw the seemingly-obvious conclusion that special fonts cannot make reading easier for dyslexia, since they are visual.

This is an unfortunate oversimplification. Even if dyslexia is not primarily visual (a question that is not settled in the international research community), reading itself is indisputably visual. So changing visual aspects of reading can have an impact on the overall ease of reading for dyslexic readers, even if it's not directly easing the "dyslexic part" of the reader's struggles.

Approaching this from another angle, researchers have indicated that visual tweaks such as alternative fonts may disproportionately impact readers with dyslexia because of second-order effects. That is, a reader who has dyslexia likely reads less than his or her peers, since it is more difficult/unenjoyable. As a result, the reader is not as practiced at reading in general, and can benefit—sometimes significantly—from visual tweaks that are helpful for readers who are not as highly skilled.

Lastly, in my experience (as founder of a startup whose browser plugin integrates OpenDyslexic and has thousands of users with dyslexia), I have heard from many readers with dyslexia that the OpenDyslexic font is incredibly helpful for them. While it is true that "the plural of anecdote is not data", it is also true that if a large number of people who don't know each other all report the same phenomenon, there's a good chance it's happening. (This is subject to the regular caveats of placebo effects, self-deception, etc.)

I congratulate the author on recognizing that folks have different experiences and that dyslexia fonts are not a panacea—this sort of thinking is strangely lacking in many parts of the dyslexia world. Also, I agree that things tend to get out of hand on social media when people post "this is what it's like to be dyslexic" graphics, which are generally pretty flimsy. Despite this, some of these fonts are, for some people, very very useful.

<comment><USER3> > So changing visual aspects of reading can have an impact on the overall ease > of reading for dyslexic readers, even if it's not directly easing the > "dyslexic part" of the reader's struggles.

So... making fonts easier to read for everyone makes them easier to read for dyslexics? Who'd a thought...

> it is also true that if a large number of people who don't know each other > all report the same phenomenon, there's a good chance it's happening.

True, but with no control case, you can only support your first premise: that making a font more readable is helpful for dyslexics. You can say that OpenDyslexic is more readable, but you haven't proven that it's more readable for dyslexics.

<comment><USER2> The thing is, OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie don't make reading easier for all people. Most non-dyslexic folks find them to be annoying/ugly/distracting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Notably the study PDF linked is broken, but the link provided to adrianroselli.com provides a good short list for accessibility for dyslexic users which mirror general good rules for typography.

The most important take away comes from one from a presentation linked on adrianroselli.com's page. Some users do prefer the dyslexia fonts and they use a simple font stack overwrite methodology, which makes a global CSS rule. This works fine except when it doesn't. Icon fonts break thus this creates an accessibility issue as suddenly pages can become somewhat vague as all the font icons appear as the missing box icon.

Best thing you can do as web dev is allow users to font replace and not use icon fonts.

<comment><USER5> Isn't this the sort of thing the CSS descriptor unicode-range is supposed to solve?

In icon fonts I've used, the icons are always in the Private Use code block (eg: font awesome uses U+F000-F2B4), so if the unicode-range in the replacement font is set correctly (say U+0000-DFFF), it will not clobber the icon fonts, letting the designers have their spiffy icons without having to do the annoying large image file/sprites pattern.

The best part of using unicode-range is that it does not impact accessibility and most sites should use unicode-range correctly anyways, as it can save download time for the users by not forcing them to download the parts of the font for different languages (dev must split languages into different files though as the browser can't only download the code-points covered by unicode range). Even if a site does not use unicode-range, you can still use it to only overlay the part of the font you care about (the readable characters).

See [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font- face/...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/unicode- range) for details and an example of what unicode-range can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm dyslexic, as are a couple of my kids. None of us are overly fond of the dyslexic font (I first started looking at it years ago as well), it makes a lot of subtle horizontal lines in the text because of the uneven weights in the lines. This is a problem because I am VERY shape sensitive. I end up looking at those lines between the letters and can't focus on the letters themselves -- and then I can't read the text because the shapes of the words are all wrong.

But I REALLY like that new transport font.

</comment><comment><USER7> Like anything potentially helpful, fonts that claim to be useful for this purpose should be determined empirically using some double-blind test.

I originally clicked on the link because my girlfriend is dyslexic (so much for me being a grammar stickler...)

</comment><comment><USER8> depending on the extremity of the dyslexia, OpenDyslexic is a godsend. I've personally installed it on at least 10 linux conversions (mostly musicians wanting KXStudio[0]), and I've only had one dyslexic that didn't feel the font helped.

I understand this is anecdotal, and a small sample size, but my mileage definitely varies from this guy.

0\. [http://kxstudio.net/](http://kxstudio.net/)

<comment><USER9> I have sexdaily too.

Can you share your font settings? I've Ubuntu 14.4 and installed OpenDyslexic and like it. (helpful) But in some places the font seems large and it doesn't show everywhere.

<comment><USER8> There was a sexdaily for cure found, I was told.

I'm a KDE zealot (ditched Ubuntu when Unity became the default UI), and Qt tends to handle most of the issues, especially if you use a theme like breeze- gtk or oxygen-gtk to force GTK to use Qt's settings. I'll bet most of your issues are GTK forcing Qt to play by it's rules.

Other than that, you're encouraged to install the infinality patches to make fonts gorgeous.

[https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Anti- aliasing.2C_hin...](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Anti- aliasing.2C_hinting.2C_and_sub-pixel_rendering)

<comment><USER10> You can run KDE on Ubuntu, you know.

<comment><USER8> You can also make a toilet out of peanut butter. it'll likely work, but it'll be a little gross.

<comment><USER10> It works just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is from April, 2015</comment>