Two in Three Americans Now Support Legalizing Marijuana - <AUTHOR> https://news.gallup.com/poll/243908/two-three-americans-support-legalizing-marijuana.aspx <comment><USER2> I think it's pretty transparently clear that even if you hate the drug itself, there have been no obvious disasters in the legalized states. Tax revenue plus no hugely obvious negative effects is a hard argument to deny.

On a broader level, this is exactly what federalism is about - states being able to try things to experiment, without committing the entire country irrevocably.

<comment><USER3> I can even excuse being personally disinterested in Cannabis, but you would have to be pretty entrenched in misinformation to hate cannabis itself. What societal harm is there?

The biggest complaint I ever hear that isn't based on a non-truth is "it smells bad".

<comment><USER4> Didn't downvote you but wanted to respond-

Smells bad can itself be a big deal. Some people also have migraines that result from inhaling second hand marijuana smoke. Moreover, many people don't want to smell the stuff in their daily commute- and the smell definitely lingers longer, than say, tobacco, in an open space.

I'm not opposed to legalization, but saying that there's no societal harm is pretty misinformed too. Seemingly minor things like 'smells bad' can easily make one hate cannabis.

<comment><USER5> I smell this every day in Amsterdam metro when I commute from work (the other way around not so much). I'm currently a non-smoker.

If you 'smell it' you subconsciously feel like you are forced 'smoking it' akin to involuntary second hand tobacco usage. Whether that is true or not I do not know.

As a former tobacco and former casual marihuana smoker I dislike either of these smells. I consciously quit both, both for very good personal reasons.

There are obvious health related risks to abstain smoking tobacco but for me I have autism and marihuana can make me over-sensitised and get me into a psychosis. This occurred numerous times.

Yes, there are benefits to marihuana and specifically CBD. My uncle had terminal cancer and hash oil helped him against this pain (he was AFAIK never pro-drugs or pro-marihuana before he got cancer). And there are disadvantages as well. I'm a proponent of education and regulation, just like with alcohol.

<comment><USER6> I also feel like when I smell someones body odor that I have unconsciously been forced to ingest their bacterial waste. Living amongst other people, we have to accept that there will be things we don't like about it.

<comment><USER5> There's this social norm where you don't cause discomfort such as noise or pollution for other people. Some people overdo it with way too much perfume; those are equally annoying.

The difference however is that although such might over-sensitise someone with e.g. (undiagnosed) autism your example is not proven to be harmful for the lungs, nor does it make you stoned.

<comment><USER6> What's the latest consensus on secondhand smoke and cancer/COPD issues? I thought the "I smelled cigarette smoke on the street" exposure was largely found to have negligible health effects. (I think the "my partner smokes and i live in a smokers house" exposure still causes issues)

<comment><USER7> All smoke, regardless of what tier you're on, is respiratory irritant/carcinogenic.

<comment><USER6> But they are not all equally so, right? Seems like dose response would be important to understand when evaluating for possible policy/intervention determination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Colorado Total Marijuana Sales:

      2014	$683,523,739
      2015	$995,591,255
      2016	$1,307,203,473
      2017	$1,507,702,219
      2018*	$1,022,245,511 (Through August 2018)

Source: [https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/10/20/theres-no- stopping...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/10/20/theres-no-stopping- colorados-marijuana-market.aspx)

I think it's going to be increasingly difficult for states facing budget shortfalls to ignore this as a potential new source of tax revenue.

<comment><USER8> Vermont legalized but set up no tax structure. Legal to grow and gift, but not sell. There was a lot of pressure to get it legal, a veto from the governor, and apparently no consensus on how to tax/license it.

<comment><USER9> DC is in a similar boat for slightly different reasons: possession and use were legalized by citizen initiative with the expectation that the city would create a regulatory apparatus for production and sale, and then they were forbidden from spending any of their money to do so by Congress, which has veto power over their budget. So now it's in a weird quasi-legal gray area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In Canada, nothing has really changed. Everyone who smoked pot before still does. Most people who didn't still don't.

We just aren't wasting any more effort policing something no one cares about.

<comment><USER11> Hasn't it been like 5 days? Seems a little soon to draw conclusions

<comment><USER10> There were some _very_ dire predictions.

... But you are still correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just hope we don't end up like California and keep hundreds in fines for smoking in public, open containers in cars, having more than 30 grams, etc. People should be allowed to possess any amount they want, grow as many plants as they want, etc. What's the point of legalization if a police officer can still stop you and search to make sure you have under 30 grams? What's the point of legalization if smoking weed still prevents you from buying a gun or holding down a federal job?

I like Larry Sharpe's viewpoint here - Marijuana should be regulated like onions.

<comment><USER13> > I just hope we don't end up like California and keep hundreds in fines for > smoking in public, open containers in cars, having more than 30 grams, etc.

I don't see why we should treat marijuana more leniently than we treat alcohol. Drinking in public is already illegal in most places.

> What's the point of legalization if a police officer can still stop you and > search to make sure you have under 30 grams?

Police officer cannot stop and search you without a probable cause.

> I like Larry Sharpe's viewpoint here - Marijuana should be regulated like > onions.

Maybe, but let's regulate marijuana like alcohol first, and then, when we regulate alcohol like onions, we can move on to do the same with marijuana.

<comment><USER12> 1\. Drinking in public in California is a $100 fine, smoking marijuana in public is $250.

2\. Probable cause - "our drug dog is trained to detect over 30 grams of Marijuana.", "I smelled marijuana and suspected an open container, asked to see the open container to verify it was legal, open container held over 30 grams."

3.You're right about alcohol... fun fact - it's still federally illegal to distill spirits.

<comment><USER2> > it's still federally illegal to distill spirits.

Without a distillery license. Which is not especially expensive, and is wholly reasonable considering the significantly higher technical and safety threshold of operating a distillery. Bathtub gin used to kill people.

<comment><USER14> Pretty sure you can get some kind of really cheap experimental type of license to distill as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't use it nor if it were legal tomorrow, I highly doubt that would change (I don't drink either, for that matter).

That being said, with one of the major knocks (or at least scapegoats) against it being crime, if they'd look historically at prohibition how organized crime benefited from the prohibition of alcohol and ending the prohibition was a sizable blow to crime, I don't see why they'd be so against it.

Dunno. Taxing it would be good. Regulating it should be okay. I really don't see the cons of legalizing it when you have alcohol legalized (which I'm not advocating for it not to be).

<comment><USER16> Last time this was in the up for a vote in California my memory (could be faulty) was three of the biggest opponents of marijuana legalization were pharmaceutical industry, alcohol industry and the prison industrial complex. There is not a citizen push to keep it illegal, it's businesses trying to limit competition.

</comment></comment><comment> rv-de I really hope the legalization of Cannabis is going to make some progress in Germany. If you are German and sympathizing with this - then please support Deutscher Hanfverband ([https://hanfverband.de/unterstuetzen](https://hanfverband.de/unterstuetzen)). They (and especially Georg Wurth who is heading this organization) are doing a fantastic job promoting this request.

For me Cannabis legalization is a symbol for science and reason based politics and legislation. And I am so sick of the fear mongering FUD-based reasoning of CDU and AfD.

My personal theory for why right-wing politicians (except for those of the extreme libertarian fraction) are so passionately against legalization of Cannabis is because of group formation reaching back to their youth. You identify with a group also by rituals, habits and enemies. And I guess they just developed a bias against this other group of "hippies" who used to smoke joints. And they carry this resentment with them into their adulthood and agenda.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are plenty of things to be concerned about but that fight has been lost. Here I will quote a scientist. Personally I have plenty of friends and my brother as examples what over use of pot can do to ruin lives.

> Now, as a scientist, I'm unimpressed with many of the widely used arguments > for the legalization of marijuana.

1) "It's natural!" So is arsenic.

2)"It's beneficial!" The best-documented medicinal effects of marijuana are achieved without the chemical compound that gets users high.

3) "It's not addictive!" This is false, because the brain adapts to marijuana as it does to all abused drugs, and these neural adjustments lead to tolerance, dependence and craving — the hallmarks of addiction.

Conclusion: Still, I'm not against legalization. I simply object to the astounding lack of skepticism about pot in our current debate. Whether or not to legalize weed is the wrong question. The right one is: How will growing use of delta-9-THC affect individuals and communities?

Though the evidence is far from complete, wishful thinking and widespread enthusiasm are no substitutes for careful consideration. Instead of rushing to enact new laws that are as nonsensical as the ones they replace, let's sort out the costs and benefits, using current scientific knowledge, while supporting the research needed to clarify the neural and social consequences of frequent use of THC. Perhaps then we'll avoid practices that inure future generations to what's really important.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/25/feature/legalizing- marijuana-is-fine-but-dont-ignore-the-science-on-its- dangers/?utm_term=.237f9c0773e1)

<comment><USER18> > Whether or not to legalize weed is the wrong question. The right one is: How > will growing use of delta-9-THC affect individuals and communities?

strongly disagree. the only question we should be asking about cannabis (and other drugs) is "do they harm people who haven't freely decided to consume them?". if not, there is nothing left to talk about wrt the law.

edit: unless i misunderstand your post and you are making a point outside of legality?

<comment><USER17> Well I could make the point that pot isn't harmless. Heck smartphones aren't harmless and alcohol is responsible for 6% of all deaths. I see hundreds of kids every week at work where parents are disengaged with their kids and super engaged with their phone.

I think we have an issue with the questions we ask as humans. I am just making the point that we need to look past our individual lenses but that's really never going to happen to our community as a whole.

PS I am a life long abstainer of all vices minus my addiction to sugar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To me it's not a question about whether it's good or bad that people consume marijuana. It's about whether taxpayers are currently getting anything near what they pay for from the practice of enforcing prohibition. If 2x the people start using marijuana but we get to cut the DEA's budget by a factor of 10, then let's try diverting that money into initiatives that help people out. Throwing people in jail clearly isn't working.

</comment><comment><USER20> Three in Three could support legalizing marijuana and it wouldn't make it any more likely to be be legalized.

Our legislatures are old enough to have written Reefer Madness.

</comment><comment><USER21> Seeing the rapid tipping point (look at the past 20 years) gives me hope that we me see decriminalization of all substances in more countries (even the US) during my lifetime.

I believe that prohibition just represents an emotional cognitive bias (drugs are bad! drug users are bad!) as any rational evidence based analysis comes to the conclusion that not only does prohibition not work for decreasing drug use, it actually increases both the negative person effects of that use and contributes to externalities like increasing the power/funds of violent drug cartels in various parts of the world.

Portugal was a great experiment. It worked. Let's push for full legalization or at least decriminalization across the board.

<comment><USER22> The big negatives in Portugal is the fact stuff isn't actually legalized. Walking around Lisbon at night you're constantly accosted by thuggish groups of dealers offering cocaine, hash, marijuana, and other drugs.

If you watch them from a bar or something you'll see people interact with them and suddenly there are four of them around and they demand more and more money after the person had already paid the agreed upon price.

I even saw someone get jumped by a group of these guys after he protested that they had agreed to 20 euros for some weed and then wanted however much more.

They should make that studf legal so drug users can go buy quality drugs from the pharmacist or whatever and cleanup the streets of all the semi-violent and aggressive drug gangs that roam their cities.

<comment><USER23> Are there no police in these areas to deter harassment/assault/robbery? If not, that's certainly a contributing factor.

<comment><USER22> I never saw the police do a single thing and the gangs seem to focus exclusively on foreigners which seems to be most of the people partying in Lisbon while I was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's amazing to look back and see how the public support built up for this over last 40 something years. I am not sure how many more years before this country follows Canada or Uruguay.

<comment><USER25> > I am not sure how many more years before this country follows Canada or > Uruguay.

At least two more years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I get extremely paranoid on marijuana, and if I don't it just makes me feel lazy and tired. Not sure if it's genetic or what but have never been able to enjoy it.

<comment><USER27> Try to use less. A lot less. Like a whole lot less. One puff only. MJ can intoxicate you and its effects are nasty and very non enjoyable in high doses. Try one puff and wait for 10 minutes and if you want more try another one. Once buzzed learn its effects. Don't look for more unless experienced. Also, i remember when i first started using it, it took me a month of smoking to get to enjoy it fully. Same goes with alcohol. Remember the first time you got drunk? Im sure it came with some consequences...

<comment><USER23> This is a good idea. You can easily have too much, especially with the stronger consumption methods we have today.

Also, think up some things you'd like to try while under the influence... Do you have a favorite album or movie? Many things may be found to be invigorating and enjoyable in a way you couldn't have described before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The other one was too high to answer the survey</comment>


Show HN: Sell with Postcards - <AUTHOR> http://sendwithscout.com <comment><USER2> Wrong approach. You want to give me a dead simple API so that I can send highly personalized postcards in one's, two's or ten's to specific customers I'm marketing to. Should be less complicated than the Stripe API and it should have hosted call to action that lets the recipient confirm they got the card so you can track and report value. What you have here has been done before many times.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What you're describing is lob.com (which we use and love). It may be the wrong approach, but we've sent 50k+ postcards in 2 months with a 50% margin... delivering a 5x LTV return on investment. So, it seems to be working for us. I guess maybe this is the wrong audience as it's more of a service for marketers than developers. Scout is part software part marketing service.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, we've built a way to market with postcards. We're built on top of Lob.com and we help you find list, design the best postcard, customize cards, and get a return on your postard direct mail campaign.

-Jordan founder my email is my first name at the domain I posted if you wanna reach out.</comment>


CSCI E-23a: Introduction to Game Development - <AUTHOR> https://cs50.github.io/games/ <comment><USER2> Slightly off topic: Much of the credit to my software work and career so far is mostly attributed to this course. I remember starting it around 2012/2013 when I first got internet access (third world, yeah). And David J Malan (the professor for this course), was one of the most amazing teachers I had the chance to listen to. The way he went through basically everything from C programming to algorithms, JavaScript made me fall in love with the field and pursue it. 5 years after, this gives a good feeling of nostalgia.

The importance of giving access to this kind of material for people like me from third world with much lower quality of education is a huge thing that not only changed my life but the lives of many other people I know.

<comment><USER3> So glad to hear the course proved of such help! Congratulations on such a successful pursuit. And thanks for the kind words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great. CS50 ([http://cs50.tv](http://cs50.tv)) is the best course I've taken on any topic, including all other university courses I attended physically. The course packs a ton of essential information into a very well organised learning path with clear and effective lectures and useful assignments. I'm stoked that there is another course by the same team now.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind note! Also of interest might be

Web Programming with Python and JavaScript

[https://cs50.github.io/web/2018/spring/](https://cs50.github.io/web/2018/spring/)

Introduction to Game Development

[https://cs50.github.io/games/](https://cs50.github.io/games/)

which also pick up where CS50 leaves off!

<comment><USER5> Everyone who mentions wanting to "visual stuff" and or games gets a recommendation from me to expose themselves to two things, 1) Processing 2) Lua Love. Regardless of someones platform or end goal, these two systems are great for prototyping ideas.

I will now point them to your course specifically, this is great stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone know of good resources to learn how multiplayer online games are made? I would like to learn how devs deal with scaling, lag, states, synchronization, etc..

I work in a different line of development but I've always wondered what is going on in huge online multiplayer games like GTA-V or COD.

<comment><USER7> Big book being written right now with beta chapters available:

[http://ithare.com/contents-of-development-and-deployment- of-...](http://ithare.com/contents-of-development-and-deployment-of-massively- multiplayer-games-from-social-games-to-mmofps-with-stock-exchanges-in- between/)

Also this site has a nice collection of very widely known blog posts on networking for gamedevs:

[https://gafferongames.com/](https://gafferongames.com/)

<comment><USER6> Looks like great material, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is so awesome. I always wanted to know how to start with game development.

I took CS50 in 2013 and it was the best course that built my CS foundations.

The interviewer in my first job interview had asked me to explain Binary Search to a layman. Hehe.

Thanks David

<comment><USER3> :) Very nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wondering if it's available via udemy/udacity or the likes?

<comment><USER10> If offered as a mooc, it would probably be on EdX.

Meanwhile, the lectures are available on YouTube:

[https://cs50.github.io/games/lectures](https://cs50.github.io/games/lectures)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What would be the follow-up of this course?</comment>


Ask HN: Why is it still not possible to search an S3 bucket? - <AUTHOR> For some reason S3 innovation seems to have mostly stopped years ago.  Only minor improvements have been made to the way it works - event triggers being the only one I can think of.
All I want to do is use simple wildcards for finding files.  Instead to find a file I need to list every file in the bucket to look for it.
So much more could be done to make S3 valuable and useful.  Files indexes.  Additional ways to get files in and out i.e. SMTP, FTP, SFTP.  But none of this is happening.  A pity.
S3 seems to be the neglected child of AWS. <comment><USER2> AWS services they are deliberately created as primitives around common needs. Doing things like search and other communication methods could pollute their ideals of what S3 should do or they want to encourage you to use their other offerings for other use cases. Having simple primitives allows them to focus more on reducing the costs and improving stability of the primitive rather than making them amazing for all use cases.

They have a few other storage services that may be a better fit for your use case than S3 or someone may have a library to fill the gap.</comment>


How to view-source a Chrome extension - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/paulirish/78d6c1406c901be02c2d <comment><USER2> I think it should be mentioned that just because the source code is viewable doesn't mean it's Open Source. The link doesn't claim this, but I still think it's important to note.

Learn from but don't copy unless you find a source code license.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps another reason that developers may want to use Google's Closure Compiler which in addition to minifying/compressing analyzes code, removes unused code and other mod_pagespeed-like best practice implementation magic: [http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/](http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/)

Good thread including other tools and general arguments about obfuscation: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194397/how-can-i- obfuscat...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194397/how-can-i- obfuscateprotect-javascript)</comment>


Tagmask aims to curb information overload for programmers - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/05/05/tagmask-aims-to-curb-information-overload-for-programmers/

<comment><USER2> You can already do this yourself with yahoo pipes & google reader. I'm not really seeing the value - especially for programmer types! Now, for less technical folks it might be more valuable. However, they may not realize that they need or want such filtering and aggregation.

<comment><AUTHOR> The value is that you have a feed of relevant posts and can easily discover new interesting people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems similar to coder.io - you subscribe to hashtags like #mongodb, #ruby, etc and it spits out a list of stories

<comment><AUTHOR> Tagmask provides more flexible filtering and allows users to submit different types of posts (Link, Note, Code snippet etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can see this being really cool. I'm interested to see where it goes.</comment>


Freeform - a meta language that allows defining and extending syntax inline. - <AUTHOR> http://freeformlang.sourceforge.net/

<comment><USER2> Alan Kay is leading a project that does something similar. There's an introduction here: <http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm>

The project's goal is to build an OS, GUI, programming environment, editor, and internet stack in under 20K lines of code. They've had some big wins. To implement TCP/IP, they built a grammar to directly read the block diagrams from the RFCs, and simply pasted them in.

The dynamic grammar system, called OMeta, is just one part of the project. See the "writings" section from the above link for papers, and "software" for running code. You can find more on OMeta itself here: <http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/>

<comment><USER3> Thank you for pointing out OMeta, that project looks amazingly useful. Especially since it's original implementation is in JavaScript. Which means I can (fingers crossed) easily drop it into a project I'm working on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a cool idea... but seems to have some immediate problems to me:

1) you'll never be able to learn the complete syntax to the "language".

2) all statements are ambiguous without knowledge of supporting code. Like what some say about operator overloading, but even worse.

3) what syntax do you write your own code in, if it's closely involved with two different libraries that use different syntaxes?

4) what if two different libraries use the same syntax to do different things?

Does anyone know what the philosophy on these points is for meta-languages?

<comment><USER5> author here

1) Well, in FreeForm you just look at the language sources to see the syntax, e.g.:

[http://freeformlang.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=fre...](http://freeformlang.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=freeformlang/freeformlang;a=blob;f=projects/FreeFormDemo/examples/lisp/lisp.ff;hb=HEAD)

You will be using the syntax you explicitly specified. The fact that you can use more than language, doesn't mean you have to use languages or language extensions you are not familiar with. I'm not certain, why this should be a problem. If there is a syntax package you'd like to try, there is inevitably some learning required, similarly as with the new libraries.

2)

Well, you are right, both the problems and benefits of operator overloading are present. Still, as a C++ programmer, in many cases, the benefits far outweight the price (especially with smart pointers). Also, like with C++ operators, to see how the notation operates, you can just check out the code. But I have to admit, that the ability to define & extend syntax comes with a great responsibility. I'd still see situations, where the mechanism would be useful.

3) It is possible to have generic expressions, that take parameters. E.g. let's imagine, that we have some extendable core language set (e.g. my.glang) and several extendable extensions to it (e.g. my.ipc.glang, my.sql.glang).

In current code, to glue it all together you can do

exp glued = my.sql.glang(glued)|my.ipc.glang(glued)|my.glang(glued);

Even more, you can make even that extendable:

exp gglued(ext) = ext|my.sql.glang(glued)|my.ipc.glang(glued)|my.glang(glued);

4) Well, in previous example, one automatically will set priority between languages. So, if the sql syntax uses some foobar@zap syntax, while the mt library uses the same, the sql syntax will be chosen. Still, ofc. this kind of hiding of expressions have its own problems, and I believe that the only real way to manage such issues is with careful language & extension design. Still ofc. if there are syntax packages from two different parties, syntax clashes may result. Still, as the syntax definitions tend to be highly modular, even in such cases you may be in position to create your own coherent language package by cherry picking some syntax from here and there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does this have that Common Lisp doesn't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ease of use: to make syntax changes this radical in Common Lips you'd have to write your own reader which parses the new syntax. That's a pain so most people stick with what you can do with macros (and, sometimes, simple extensions to the reader).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is really neat. I'd been fighting with writing a scanner/parser for the first time and finally gave up -- this might scratch the itch that prompted me to do so in the first place.

<comment><USER8> [http://archive.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/af...](http://archive.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/af1/)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I got paste all that. It was the compilation stage that was the real brain bender.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you should start with a language in which compilation is simple, like Forth: <http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> maude: <http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/></comment>


Choosing Who Survives in a Flu Epidemic - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/weekinreview/25fink.html

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised this comes from the NYT and not something like the Daily Post.

It seems like totally unconstructive fear-mongering to me.

 _"Health Officials may have to ration critical resources in case of catastrophe, here are some horrible scenarios to consider! But please, let's not panic folks."_</comment>


Google's Free Deep Learning Course - <AUTHOR> https://udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730 <comment><USER2> I'm going through the course right now, and the instructor is saying some strange things, clearly (to me) ignoring that what he's saying is only true in very specific contexts.

For example, in the video I just watched he said "the natural way to compute the distance between two vectors is using cross entropy." And then he goes on to describe some unnatural features of cross entropy. The truly "natural" way to compute distances between vectors is the Euclidean distance, or at least any measure that has the properties of a metric.

I can understand this is a crash course and there isn't time to cover nuances, but I'd much rather the instructor say things like "one common/popular way to do X is..." rather than making blanket and misleading statements. Or else how can I trust his claims about deep learning?

<comment><USER3> Because he wrote one of the most successful ones?

<comment><USER2> My goal is to understand it for my own purposes, not to put on blinders and replicate his work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want more than a 4 lecture course, I recommend Nando de Freitas's course. It's very high quality and free.

[https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/nando.defreitas/machinelearni...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/nando.defreitas/machinelearning/)

<comment><USER5> To be clear, the posted course is not a survey course in machine learning. It is instead a more practical course on using TensorFlow to build deep neural network architectures useful for certain tasks.

The link the OP posted is a (great) survey course dedicated to machine learning as a whole, which includes methods other than deep learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When it comes to the course itself (I've just started it) it looks nice, but the (initial) questions tend to be vague.

E.g. in the first question with code I had to reverse-engineer what they mean (including passing values in a format, which I consider non-standard (transpose!)). The first open-ended questions were entirely "ahh, you meant this aspect of the question".

Otherwise, the course (the general level, pace, overview) seems nice.

EDIT:

The IPython Notebook tasks (i.e. the core exercises) are nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think intro to machine learning [https://www.udacity.com/courses/ud120](https://www.udacity.com/courses/ud120) is the prerequisite to this course

<comment><USER8> I was just beginning to give it a try, it just requires you to type the code that is shown on video. Poor way of teaching something, it seems at first. I sense this course is just to teach me the tools of the trade, not really enabling students to fully understand what they're doing.

On the other hand, some months ago I watched the ML course by Andrew Ng, and I still did not understand how to test a simple linear regression for myself, so I did not really understand it, and stopped watching the course.

<comment><USER9> From the yc reading list 2015 [[http://themacro.com/articles/2015/12/yc-2015-reading- list/](http://themacro.com/articles/2015/12/yc-2015-reading-list/)], they recommend [for Neural Networks] this book: [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/)

It's more about understanding than "learning tools."

<comment><USER10> I really liked the NN&DL course. Another I've been meaning to check out is this book: [http://www.deeplearningbook.org](http://www.deeplearningbook.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For people interested, Stanford has an excellent online course on deep- learning with an emphasis on convolutional networks. [1]

It comes with video, notes, all the math, cool ipython notebooks and will let you implement a deepish network from scratch. That includes doing backprop through the svn, softmax, max-pool, conv and ReLU layers.

After that you should be more than capable to build a 'real' net using your favourite lib (Tensorflow, theano etc).

[1]: [http://cs231n.stanford.edu/](http://cs231n.stanford.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER6> While TensorFlow may be not yet as mature as Theano or Torch, I love their tutorial: [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/master/tutorials/](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/master/tutorials/). It's clean, concrete, and more general than introduction to their API. (Before I couldn't find anything comparable in Theano or Torch.)

In any case, I regret waiting so long for learning deep learning. (I thought that I needed to have many years of CUDA/C++ knowledge (I have none); but in fact, what I need to to know the chain rule, convolutions etc - things I've learnt long time ago.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes! Andrew Ng's coursera + kaggle.com + this deep learning course by Google is a very nice -and free- foundation.

</comment><comment><USER13> How accessible is a course like this with no prior knowledge of linear algebra? I know it's listed in the pre-reqs, but with a good head for math and lots of calc, is it something that could be picked up along the way? I'm normally pretty bold about stuff like that, but I know it's a core part of deep learning / ML. If it's really necessary, if anyone has any resources for linear algebra run-throughs it would be greatly appreciated!!

<comment><USER14> I would start with the nano degree program if you don't have any prior knowledge of ML.

Udacity has a Linear Algebra review course, but I don't believe it is public for now. I had taken a linear algebra course before I took the GT ML class, but I wasn't a expert by any means. I don't believe you will need a deep understanding of linear algebra before taking this class. Singular value decomposition might come up. I think if you are familiar with everything in the following pdf you should be fine.

[http://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in_...](http://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in_4_pages.pdf)

If you are motivated, you will do fine. Good luck!

<comment><USER10> Udacity has a couple free linear algebra courses.

One here: [https://www.udacity.com/course/linear-algebra-refresher- cour...](https://www.udacity.com/course/linear-algebra-refresher-course-- ud953)

And another here: [https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-algebra-review-- ma004](https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-algebra-review--ma004)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi guys one question sorry if it's answered somewhere but why does the title say "Free" course? is it free cause of the trial period or the whole course is free as of now?

If the whole course is free are there more free courses on this site?

Thanks for the reply.

<comment><USER16> I believe all the courses on udacity are free. They make money through offering nanodegrees, partnering with companies, and a partnership with Georgia Tech to offer an online master's degree in computer science.

So free to take, money if you want degrees.

<comment><USER15> Great thanks for the reply!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alok-g Will the projects/assignments be workable on Windows, or would I need Linux et al for these?

And if not natively (using docker/VMs), would they be able to use NVidia CUDA card on my system? And how much disk space would be needed.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does this use tensor flow?

<comment><USER18> From the site: "Complete learning systems in TensorFlow will be introduced via projects and assignments."

<comment><USER19> Purely video-based though, no materials at all, no transcript. That's a no-go for me.

<comment><USER20> Videos are also really short. If you don't already know how neural networks work, you won't learn it here.

This, I think, is more of a library demonstration than anything.

<comment><USER21> It does start really basic, with a single logistic classifier. I think you'd have to be pretty motivated to learn how neural networks work from this course, but it seems possible. If you don't know any machine learning at all, then you probably wouldn't be able to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yeap, it's dead :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Would it be beneficial for me as a developer to take these machine learning courses? I took a course in the uni a while back and know the general techniques, but I'm not sure how it would help me in my career unless I'm doing some cutting edge work in the field or focusing on a machine learning career, in which case wouldn't I need to be pursuing a postdoc or something in it?

<comment><USER6> Likely. Data analysis (of which ML is an important part) is needed in many places, from entry-level to top-level.

I am a data science freelancer and I mostly do projects for IT-dominated companies. First, I was surprised that such companies need some external help with relatively simple tasks; only later I discovered that top-notch performance in webdev (or even: algorithms) does not mean that someone is able to do simplest data analysis.

For data science / ML - I know a lot of openings in which they are looking for "data scientists", but what they mean is software engineers with at least a slight idea what is data analysis.

When it comes to deep learning in particular - I don't know.

<comment><USER24> >" _For data science / ML - I know a lot of openings in which they are looking for "data scientists", but what they mean is software engineers with at least a slight idea what is data analysis._"

I've been wanting to get into this field recently. Do you have more info about these openings, perhaps?

<comment><USER6> Now I don't track offers (I get contracts through recommendations/networking), so I may be not up-to date. My background is different (PhD in quantum physics), so for me stats/data/ML is simple, but software architecture, algorithms - not as much.

When 3 years ago I was looking for data science internships, most of interview were strictly in software engineering. (I got into a more data-analysis oriented.) Even when I applied to Google a year ago (and failed), all non- trivial questions where in software engineering (some with data-oriented paradigms, tough).

Look at [https://medium.com/@rchang/my-two-year-journey-as-a-data- sci...](https://medium.com/@rchang/my-two-year-journey-as-a-data-scientist-at- twitter-f0c13298aee6#.kx5dz2iud) \- the taxonomy of "Type A Data Scientist" vs "Type B Data Scientist" is useful. You want to apply for the "B" or even - software engineer in a company which deals with data and is open to shifting roles.

Going back to the interviews: I see that the set of questions is entirely different. E.g. if the first question is "how to invert a binary table" or "how to test if a black-box number generator is fair". But sometimes it is not clear from the job opening.

EDIT:

If you are interested in my background: [http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to- data-sci.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I fucking love Google, it's the greatest company there is. Thank you for this free course, incredibly high quality and very enjoyable to watch.

</comment><comment><USER26> Udacity is kinda ridiculous, making us answer some stupid questions every 5 minutes. I'm not in school anymore (by the way: no one ever learns anything in school).</comment>


Understanding Virtual Memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/

<comment><USER2> I had no idea that redhat had a magazine, thank you for that

</comment><comment><USER3> The article is a lil dated, but I presume the principles still hold true?

<comment><USER4> I'm not familiar with the VM implementation on Linux, so I don't know if it has changed significantly. I expect it has.

However, a lot of the article seems to be around swapping to disk. We have enough physical memory now that swapping to disk shouldn't regularly happen.

Other things which affect VM design and/or performance on modern systems, but were not much of a concern in 2004: ubiquity of multi-core CPUs, virtualization, use of large pages, 64 bit machines. However, I'm more familiar with academic research than with the state of the mainline kernel.

Edit: Linux is regularly used on lots of non-x86 architectures nowadays, so the VM design might not be so x86-centric anymore.</comment></comment>


$153M in Bill and Hillary Clinton speaking fees, documented - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-speeches/ <comment><USER2> There are prevailing market rates for high profile appearances. There is an associated economic rationale: celebrities who show up at the club, earn those places more money.

Spending this kind of cash on public servants serves an economic purpose too: it buys access, influence, and favour by association. You can't really prove it, but you can reason that this is to the detriment of the public at large.

<comment><USER3> > There are prevailing market rates for high profile appearances.

The problem isn't that they charged for the speeches, which is standard. The problem is that they kept the money for themselves, which is a huge ethics issue.

<comment><USER4> Both of them are currently private citizens. They have no ethical obligation to do anything with their income.

<comment><USER5> Right now not. But it's definitely a warning sign if somebody who is running for president is indebted to banks.

They are also greedy. After the first 100 million they have made they should be rich enough to give their wisdom to non profits who have less money than banks.

<comment><USER6>
        > indebted to banks

So the money was a loan? Are you implying the banks can withdraw the money if they're unhappy with performance?

        > They are also greedy. After the first 100 million

You know, I think you should be giving everything over your first $15,000 to charity too. It's cool for me to tell you how to spend your money, right?

<comment><USER5> The bankers are not stupid. They don't give a lot of money for nothing. They expect that the Clintons will open doors for them. The Clintons know that too so if they want to keep the money rolling they better be useful for the banks.

I am not telling them what to do with their money but it should be clear to everybody who their paymasters are.

<comment><USER6>
        > They don't give a lot of money for nothing

Your explicit assumption there is that having the former president of the US give a speech at your Xmas dinner doesn't carry the speaking fee in terms of:

\- Impressing your clients: "Of course we're large, powerful, and trustworthy - Bill came to talk us last week"

\- Hospitality to your clients; offering important clients a chance to come and watch the speaker

\- Making the partners feel like Very Important Peoples

\- Morale boosting for current and future employees

As a random example, I note that CareerBuilder had Condoleeza Rice speak at their Empower 2015 sales conference. Do you think there was a political / regulatory angle there?

<comment><USER5> I think the bankers hope for some more direct benefits but I really don't know. It certainly would be interesting to find out if they pay the same money for other celebrities. One theory could be that by paying lots of money to former politicians they send a signal to active politicians that there is a lot of money to be made later if they play nice now. This seems to work for a lot of regulatory agencies where people switch to highly paid jobs in industry later (see SEC for example or Eric Holder could be an example too).

I don't know about CareerBuilder's motivations and I don't know how much they paid.

<comment><USER6>
        > It certainly would be interesting to find out if they
        > pay the same money for other celebrities.

This is an interesting article, and I've no particular reason to doubt City AM (a well-known but very localized UK publication) as a source:

[http://www.cityam.com/221317/forget-politicians-salaries- its...](http://www.cityam.com/221317/forget-politicians-salaries-its- afterwards-they-make-big-bucks)

Blair is an interesting one - USD $600,000 (converted from GBP) for a speech. I'm really not sure what political influence the Filipino company that paid him that could have hoped to get, but I can certainly understand the PR benefits from their perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have read that they also get paid around 300k for college commencement speeches. I think a lot of people think those speeches are made for free to support young people. So the speaker gets a boatload of money and a lot of credit for doing something good for youth. A double win.

<comment><USER7> Is this funded by tuitions?

<comment><USER8> It's typically funded by university budgets, so in part by tuition. Sometimes universities will claim it's funded out of non-tuition money, but money is fungible so it's hard to really say that credibly, unless you can demonstrate that it's funded by entirely separate money that wouldn't have existed had it not been for the commencement speaker. For example claiming it's funded entirely by a major donor is misleading if it's money the major donor would have donated anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It truly astounds me that people just shrug and say "That's politics" when you point this sort of thing out.

It was not always this way. There is a clear conflict of interest.

<comment><USER6>
        > It was not always this way

Citation?

<comment><USER10> Citation:

[1] The good ol' days.

<comment><USER11> The good ol' days being approximately 95 years ago.

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

<comment><USER12> Wow, if that happened today, it wouldn't even be in the news, much less result in a scandal and someone going to prison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's say I'm a VP at Google and I'm moonlighting as a consultant for startups. If you were Google and you found out that I earned $153M from this, how would you feel about this?

<comment><USER14> The VP is likely required by employment contract to submit all such relationships (contracting, consulting, advisor boards, board of directors, and maybe even angel investments) to Google beforehand so that Google can run a conflict if interest check and give their blessing or prohibit the activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's no secret that Bill Clinton has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $250k per speech since he was president.

This number doesn't surprise me.

I'm surprised people want to hear what he has to say that much but I say if he can get that much, he should keep giving talks.

<comment><USER16> It is not content. It is about buying contacts. Bill makes some phone call that enables a meeting with someone somewhere which leaves you rich and you pay some kickback. This is blatant corruption by people who are supposedly fighting for poor.

<comment><USER17> Kate Couric got $110,000 for a speech and she's a newscaster/anchor. I think you need to look at the broader market for paid speeches before you throw out such accusations.

The Clintons were not born with silver spoons in their mouth, and they grew from modest origins to where they are today. I don't hold it against them that they're able to command such high speaking fees anymore than some musicians can command high prices for concerts, or actors can command high salaries for movie parts.

The whole campaign to argue Hillary is corrupt hasn't really worked, and that's essentially what these kinds of articles are, an extension of the Sanders campaign argument. But her voting record is among the most liberal in Congress, more than her husband, more than Obama, it's more liberal than 82% of all congressional votes. (Susan Sarandon was on Bill Maher the other day and simply didn't want to hear the facts he raised about her voting record.)

Clinton has a penchant for policy wonkishness that doesn't sit well with young impatient progressives who want to make a quantum leap from here to there. So for example, if one is for a $12 minimum wage first, instead of forcing the entire nation to $15 instantly, because one is worried about the effect of a 200% increase to say, Bob's coffee-shop in Nebraska, one get's raked over the coals. Why is it so hard to understand there's a huge cost of living difference in SF/NYC vs other states and a federal minimum wage quantum jump like that should be done cautiously?

If one is for fracking as a temporary bridge, because natural gas is cleaner than coal and releases less CO2 _if your regulate methane leakage and protect ground water_ , as well as sending less money to regimes which spread Wahhabism with the money, then of course, you're really just a neo-liberal owned by the Kochs. But is it realistic to ban fracking and coal and switch totally to renewables without a transition? You can't just be against something without a viable alternative.

I agree with pretty much everything Sanders wants to do, but I want a realistic vision of how to accomplish it and a reasonable time span. I don't like the way anyone who wants to advocate an iterative, incremental approach is shouted down as an establishment sell out. There's too much guilt-by- association going on, and not enough realistic discussion of the nuanced policy choices we face.

<comment><USER16> You are mistaking political propaganda for economic arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really have to question why this article is on HN; this site seems to normally highly discourage political discussion, and I really don't see what this has to do with tech. If you mods want to have political discussions, go ahead, but don't be surprised if they turn nasty, as they usually do in online forums.

</comment><comment><USER18> In most EU countries they would be jailed.

<comment><USER19> why? It's not illegal to speak for a fee in any country of the EU as far as I know.

<comment><USER20> Payments they're receiving are not really for their speeches. It's just a way to legally funnel money into their organization so they can sell access and influence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only reason this is an issue during this election is that nobody would pay Sanders anything significant to speak.

A former POTUS and the woman who has come closest to the office in history? That's a draw. It's worth paying for.

<comment><USER22> You must be confusing these speeches with concerts. The groups who pay for these speeches are not selling tickets to them and pocketing the difference.

edit: I worked for a sometimes controversial lobbying organization who hired H. Clinton to speak, and they 1) knew exactly what they were buying, and 2) weren't interested at all in the content of the actual speech.

<comment><USER23> Your second paragraph is a valid criticism, but the first is illogical.

> The groups who pay for these speeches are not selling tickets to them and > pocketing the difference.

It seems that in some cases they are doing exactly that, if you count private fundraisers (not Clinton's own campaign fundraisers):

[http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton- what-225000-and-p...](http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton- what-225000-and-pair-nikes-buys-you)

In other cases, attending the speech is presumably a perk of being in a high position at the companies in question, and like any other perk it can be priced despite individuals not directly paying for it.

(I suspect that a significant part of the demand is neither bribery nor related to the content of the speeches, but based on the attendee's desire to feel prestigious by being at an exclusive event. To this extent, it makes sense to hide the cost for the individual attendees behind indirections such as perks or fundraising for charity, because a more direct quid pro quo would cheapen the prestige by assigning it explicit monetary value. This is not to say that influence is not also a factor, which it surely is.)</comment></comment></comment>


UK Court Order Served Via Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8285954.stm

<comment><USER2> Smart lawyer, use the popularity of twitter and some inane posts that nobody would ever read to promote himself in the national (and now global) media.</comment>


Anyone suggest a team project management tool? - <AUTHOR>

My team is looking for a collaborative project management tool.  We've used MS Project and Trello, but are looking for something that has the power of Project, the flexibility of Trello but with the ability to do instant updates that the team can see/be notified about.  We'd also like rollups of sub-projects into larger projects in a dynamic manner; I know that's something we could get if we had MS Project Server.<p>We have our eye on Feng Office (http://www.fengoffice.com/web/).  Any other suggestions? <comment><USER2> I'd recommend you to try Wrike! (<http://www.wrike.com>) It's really powerful project management software with real-time newsfeed, Gantt chart, Workload view, email integration and many other great features – actually all you need for efficient project management. The app is online, so all team members get notified about all task updates in real time both in Wrike's Activity Stream and via email. As for the sub-projects, in Wrike all tasks are organized into folders (it can be projects, departments, clients etc), so subfolders may be used as subprojects.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend you to try KanbanTool <http://kanbantool.com> . This application will help you to gain at-a-glance visibility of your workflow and to efficiently manage tasks (using card colors, priorities, due-dates, file attachments, comments and to-do-lists). KanbanTool provides also useful features that empower team collaboration (advanced account access privileges and sharing options, adding tasks or comments via email as well as email notifications for task assignments and comments).

</comment><comment><USER4> Try BrightWork! Sync's with Microsoft Project to provide a powerful tool! <http://www.brightwork.com/case_studies/index.htm>

</comment><comment><USER5> Try Breeze (<http://letsbreeze.com>), Trello and Basecamp hybrid.

</comment><comment><USER6> Try Asana</comment>


What (else) can men do? Grow the f*** up - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/77a37fd43530

<comment><USER2> The biggest reason why you don't "deserve" sexual attention is because you are competing with lots of other males. If you were the only guy on Earth, then you would have endless amounts of it. So you need to be extra personable and nice to compensate for the lack of scarcity.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Boys who like computers are taught that we DESERVE sexual attention from women. We need to get over it." \- what bizarro-world did this guy grow up in? Being unattractive to to members of the opposite sex is pretty much the sine qua non of the nerd stereotype.

<comment><USER4> Thank you. Came here to say exactly that myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excerpt:

 _So why do I overreact more egregiously to criticism from women, when all of my childhood bullies were boys? The answer, I think, has less to do with the boys who bullied me, and more to do with the well-intentioned adults who tried to "help" me through that bullying: When I was a nerdy kid, adults regularly assured me that the abuse I suffered was acceptable because one day I would be entitled to constant positive sexual attention from women._

I don't think this is remotely unique to nerds, tech people, people who were bullied, etc and I am not sure having such expectations is very dependent upon explicitly getting such messages. I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I am female and I read as very feminine and even women wind up having abusive expectations that I should be motherly towards them and not expect a fucking thing in return for being helpful, empathetic, etc. I am 48. I have spent a lifetime working on finding a way out of being everyone's doormat and bitch. If I were male and "nice" to other professional men, it would be a professional bonding experience -- ie Networking. But I am female so it's just something sexual or emotional and no reason to take me seriously. In fact, it often seems like a reason to avoid me because they feel too much and it's a problem. Or some such.

I think it's a lot more complicated than this guy makes it. Sorry about his yelly anger management issues. I don't think this is a great piece. I also don't agree with his assertion that _... your experience of being bullied or picked on or excluded entitles you to absolutely nothing from anyone ever. It is yours and yours alone to deal with._

It's a fact that one person's pain and problems impacts other people, whether they know of them or not. The fact that so many men are not very realistic, egalitarian, etc certainly impacts women and others. We need to work together to solve this. United we stand. Divided we fall. This blame game and ugliness does not help.</comment>


This Thing for Which We Have No Name (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/conversation/rory_sutherland-this-thing-for-which-we-have-no-name <comment><USER2> I found the beginning of this perplexing:

> The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they > believe they're completely immune to status considerations and consider > themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are > the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space > from an academic and see how long he stays.

One, even monks worried about status (though perhaps in different terms). Two, I think academics are generally perfectly self-aware about their relationship with status, and I don't think they are significantly different from other professions. I don't think it usually hinges on parking spaces though.

<comment><USER3> One should not underestimate the importance of parking spaces to an academic at a suburban school.

When an academic loses free or convenient parking, they are suddenly hit with either financial costs or a losses of time. The howling can be tremendous, and the memory of an academic can be very long.

Academics tend to operate in a resource-constrained environment, and on timescales of a few years, can be effectively zero-sum. If a resource is taken away, it may never return, and no compensation may be offered.

TL;DR: Hold wages constant if necessary, but don't go after the parking.

<comment><USER4> Most suburban campuses could have plenty of parking, but they avoid building enough so that supply is constrained, so that they can reward professors by handing out designated parking spaces.

The number of different levels of parking preference at Stanford boggles the mind.

<comment><USER5> As my father rose from lowly lecturer to top professor, at the University of Queensland his parking privileges slowly got worse (though it never got very bad). This in spite of the fact that a lot more parking was built.

So it seems that parking was redistributed away from academic staff during that period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a lot interesting in here, but a few real howlers. In particular:

> Homo economicus, not only has it never existed, my contention is that if > homo economicus evolved for some peculiar reason, it would die out very, > very quickly or we would club it to death with sticks. It's not in our > evolutionary interest to be rational optimizers, by the way. Any species > that's rational also becomes highly predictable, and anybody who's highly > predictable is rapidly dead because you can anticipate his behavior and game > it. Sometimes being unpredictable is the best approach.

There is no reason that rational behavior necessitates predicatability. The author mentions game theory but based on this paragraph you'd imagine he'd never studied it. Has he never heard of a mixed strategy?

> In the commercial world it's not in the interests of consumers to be > rational. If you imagine a world of rational consumers where they all bought > cars based on some formula, which was fuel economy multiplied by > acceleration divided by depreciation or whatever it may be, what they would > end up with would be really, really terrible cars. Car manufacturers would > immediately game their predictable and easily understanding preferences and > produce cars, which met all the metrics laid down for a desirable car, but > the cars would be ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly, and no > pleasure to own.

Apparently "rational" to this author means "taking one's actual preferences, and then throwing them out and replacing them by an easier-to-specify set of preferences that aren't your real preferences". Either the formula is their real preferences or it is not. If it is indeed their real preferences, then there is no problem; to say that this is their real preferences means they are truly indifferent to the fact that the cars are "ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly", and so the conclusion that they would be "no pleasure to own" would be incorrect. If it's not, then there's your problem right there -- the problem isn't that they attempted to be "rational", it's that they attempted to make explicit their own preferences and got it wrong. You can't "game" someone's real preferences! Now it's true that _any_ attempt to explicitly write down your real preferences is almost certainly going to go wrong, and it's probably a bad idea to attempt it, but the problem here isn't "rationality", it's making the mistake of deciding to act according to preferences you've written down rather than by your real preferences.

More generally: If you find yourself saying "it is not in your interest to be rational", something has gone wrong.

<comment><USER7> A large part of the issue here is that behavioral economics has no idea what "actual preferences" _are_ , so it defines them tautologically as "that which can have its expectation taken and be mapped to the real number line." Without constraints on the notion of preferences, you can always take any behavior and map it back to a class of scalar functions over outcomes for which it was perfect behavior.

<comment><USER6> I mean, assuming the behavior satisfies appropriate coherence conditions... (which actual human behavior doesn't as Misdicorl points out, but that's another matter).

<comment><USER8> No, _any_ behavior can be mapped to "I prefer world-histories where I do A at time 1, B at time 2, C at time 3, ...". Your coherence conditions _are_ the constraints on the notion of preferences without which trivial-behaviorist preferences can be constructed.

Edit: but yes, human behavior (often) doesn't satisfy von Neumann-Morgenstern utility axioms (the coherence conditions for scale-free origin-free utility functions as prefered by behavioral economics).

<comment><USER7> >Edit: but yes, human behavior (often) doesn't satisfy von Neumann-Morgenstern utility axioms (the coherence conditions for scale-free origin-free utility functions as prefered by behavioral economics).

In specific, the VNM axioms assume that preferences aren't over _histories_ at all, but instead over _states_ , which severely constrains the kind of outcome-generating process they allow an agent to care about. They effectively state, "only the end-point matters, not the trajectory". This doesn't really make sense for humans in the first place, since we're made of meat and need to do things like eat and sleep cyclically.

What it _does_ make sense for is _bank accounts_ , which is why economists think it makes sense.

<comment><USER8> > the VNM axioms assume that preferences aren't over histories at all, but > instead over states

That depends on how you formulate the axioms; or, equivalently, how you formulate the state.

Eg, you can construct a vNM agent that strongly avoids "outcomes" where it spend a week awake, even if the end state of the world the agent is operating in retains no information about that. The "outcomes" A_i of the vNM axioms are (potentially) the entire observable history of the agent's universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the point? After reading a few paragraphs, the guy talks about promoting new research... About what? The article is so meta I stopped reading because I had no idea what he was talking about.

<comment><USER10> He talks a lot about psychology. I found it an interesting read.

<comment><USER11> Read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" if you want to delve into this.

<comment><USER12> Except entire chapters of that book are completely unscientific garbage, most notably the one on priming. See this: [https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction- of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/)

<comment><USER11> Thank you for the unsurprising reference asserting that much of psychology is garbage. I submit that not reading the book based only on that reference would be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Totally agree that the contents of the bathtub by weight are mostly dirty water. It's worth getting your hands wet for the baby though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He lost me when he started disparaging math. How is it science without falsifiability, and how useful would such a science be without inference and extrapolation? He cites Khaneman and Thaler, who are both intensely focused on statistical reasoning. Sunstein is a legal scholar. Nassim Taleb is a hedge fund manager with a chair at NYU's school of engineering.

This guy is a advertizing executive. His job is literally conning people into giving him publicity cheap. Edge bit, hook, line, and sinker.

</comment><comment><USER13> He undermines his message at the end, talking about airport security lines. They are irritating because they are BS, meaningless security theater, from beginning to end. They are stressful because they create uncertainty about whether we will miss our flight, and whether we will have our property confiscated, or be incarcerated for things we have no control over, or our pants will slip down when we take our belts off.

Security theater is there to create the impression that something is being done when nothing can be. The stressful experience is the entire purpose of the operation.

</comment><comment><USER14> The video in the article is a wealth of knowledge that the article itself doesnt scratch the surface of doing justice

<comment><USER15> Isn't the article basically a summarized transcript of the video?

EDIT: Also, I imagine anyone who spends lunch with this guy just gets to listen. He is a bloviating pontificator if I've ever seen one.

<comment> loa-in-backup Could you elaborate more?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find the statement "Markets actually work because they're adaptive. Bad things get killed, good new things sometimes get promoted" to be incredibly naive. Markets don't kill "bad things" – tobacco and other addictive drugs are multibillion dollar markets, and ineffective medicines like homeopathy and bogus folk medicine have been doing just fine for centuries.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _" Why don't you [the astrophysicist] just bugger off to a bank for three > years, make a stack of money, and then return with the freedom to do what > you like?" And he said, "Disappearing off to work in a bank for three years > is career suicide."_

Although the IQ of the average astrophysicist is probably higher than the average banker, quant, or whatever, it seems _far_ from certain that the astrophysicist will make a stack of money and become financially independent in 3 years.

<comment><USER18> > _Although the IQ of the average astrophysicist is probably higher than the > average banker, quant, or whatever, it seems far from certain that the > astrophysicist will make a stack of money and become financially independent > in 3 years._

I think this is dismissive of the intellectual capacity of quants (which are not at all your average banker), and too flattering of the intellectual capacity of academics.

More importantly, I think you haven't met many quants. Most of them WERE astrophysicists (and mathematicians and statisticians and from other computation-heavy academic backgrounds). If you have a PhD in physics, you can battle for one of the few slots in academia and deal with politics and favoritism and backstabbing and insultingly-low pay, or you can go to Wall Street and make a fortune.

<comment><USER19> Oh, it's that easy? Just walk on over to wall street and make a fortune? Are they just handing them out or something?

<comment><USER18> Well, yes. They're handing out large six-figure starting salaries to computational mathematicians. Relative to adjunct professor or junior researcher salaries, it's a fortune. And that's before you've proven yourself successful. I was being hyperbolic, but not completely.

I lament that finance and tech slurp up all the scientists, as I love science. It doesn't pay off for nearly as many people as the alternatives, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Just tried SC2 and I love it: any other gaming fans here - <AUTHOR>

Damn, it has been 10+ years but the new game looks like it will rock (despite many issues that are present in the beta). Can't wait for my pre-ordered copy!<p>Any other devoted SC fans here? <comment><USER2> I am also in the beta, but I am not as impressed as you are. Yes, its a good game and I will play it, but it is definitely not 10 years in the making good. The latest command and conquer's ( kanes wrath, etc. ) feel just as polished on the graphics and gameplay.

Another part that bugs me is that so much of the essence of the original starcraft is gone. Only a fraction of the original units remain and it just feels like I might as well be playing cc3.

</comment><comment><USER3> Right topic, wrong forum.

 _Points to reddit.com/r/gaming_

Also, it's already been mentioned on HN several times. searchyc.com</comment>


Modern "Hackintoshes" show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/05/hackintoshes-keep-giving-apples-frustrated-pros-a-place-to-go/?mbid=synd_digg <comment><AUTHOR> As mentioned in the article for Apple to have a successful desktop, they need to make it boring. A simple tower that allows the users to upgrade a couple components like the RAM, hard drive and full-sized graphics card. I think the starting price should be around $1600 which was the entry price of the PowerMac G4 back in the day. At that price it should be on par with the 27" iMac or better since you don't have to include a retina display. I'm not sure how big the market is for desktop macs anymore, but I'd really like to buy a mac like that.

</comment><comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14237346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14237346)</comment>


Israeli-designed instant coronavirus breathalyser could be rolled out globally - <AUTHOR> https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/israeli-designed-instant-coronavirus-breathalyser-could-be-rolled-out-globally/ <comment><USER2> Better, quicker, cheaper testing is the most robust way to fight Covid19, even if the tests are not perfect. If a combination of testing technology and isolation protocols is good enough to get the "R" number below 1, then job done.

Having some false negatives is OK. Too many false positives is not so good, because then you are isolating people who don't have any disease.

Vaccines can have bad side-effects, especially if you try to develop them in a hurry. The same with medicines.

Anything you have to put inside your body has the potential to cause a problem worse than the disease.</comment>


AlphaGo, first AI to be awarded 9-dan title - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mbcnews/status/709557327616024576 <comment><USER2> Mhm, but i can't read chinese though!</comment>


Show HN: Hapibelly, Rotten Tomatoes for Restaurants - <AUTHOR> http://www.hapibelly.com/ <comment><USER2> Take this as user feedback.

I downloaded the app and it asked me for a forced login using Facebook, with no other choices.

I was expecting to at least be able to bypass the login screen, browse the app a little, and login once I have something to contribute to it or do something with it, but I never found the option.

I don't mind creating an account, but I do mind sharing my Facebook profile even if it's as little as the name and email. An additional option to just register using email would be welcome.

I just uninstalled it and moved along.

<comment><USER3> it's almost worth making a fake facebook / google for so many logins like these - to try new apps / websites / products

<comment><USER4> I did that, but facebook tends to remove those accounts after a while if they show no activity and i lost access to some accounts, because people who forget to have alternative login methods also usually dont have ways to login when your facebook is lost.

Facebook only sucks and has to avoided.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an unfortunate name choice.

It's very, very awkward to share with word of mouth. "Check out [hap * E] belly.com, friend." Friend goes to "happybelly.com." Friend is confused. Webmaster of happybelly.com is happy, yet confused. "With an I." Happibelly.com doesn't work, nor does "happybelli." Friend gives up and checks yelp.

See Blackblaze's article about how they wish their name was better for word of mouth: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a- porn-s...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/) .

<comment><USER6> Still better than email@example.com:

[https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it- woul...](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-would-be- really-annoying-to-give-out-over-the-phone)

<comment><USER7> "What's your wifi password?"

"fourwordsalluppercase one word all lowercase."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rotten tomatoes tells me if a movie is worth seeing, not if its worthy of a place in afis top 100. Yelp and others push answers to decor, service, lighting and mood above the most important question of "should I eat here?". I've seen restaurants with the shameful 3 star rating on Yelp with the top reviews complaining about a party of xx's experience in splitting a check while mentioning that the food is good. It turns out there are "3 star" restaurants that are just fine for one or two diners. I'm excited to see a binary opinion to my decision of where to eat.

<comment><USER9> The idea I had for a restaurant review site when I lived in SF was to allow only positive reviews, and it's basically a binary "did you enjoy yourself?" > "yes"/"yes, very much". And require a photo of receipt within X days of posting the review to guard against businesses buying votes. I figured the restaurants with consistent bad service/food would just not bubble up as much as ones with real fans.

<comment><USER10> While I can see your point in only capturing the positive reviews I wonder about something. Obviously consistently horrible shops just wouldn't show up but much of whats bad is much less consistently bad and this isn't just true of restaurants.

Bad reviews don't just help me find the contractors that would light my house on fire, rob me and piss on the ashes they help me find the ones who only deliver without difficulties 90% of the time so I can avoid being part of the 10%.

Also people would still be able to write negative things while giving what amounts to a 4 or 5 star review on your site. People after all love to complain. Being able to filter or sort for the bad reviews helps me obtain that information whereas it would be harder to do. In effect all the same negativity would likely be there just without the extra metadata.

<comment><USER9> My issue with places like Yelp is that people could post a negative review for the silliest of reasons and it can be hard to tell if the restaurant actually messed up or the person had different tastes than me, crazy expectations, or caused the problems themselves. I just don't trust them. If I had, I would never have discovered and repeatedly enjoyed some of my favourite restaurants.

For something like a contractor working on your house, yea it's important to see those reviews. For a meal? I'd rather just take a chance based on a lot of people saying they had a good time. It's what you do anyway when you check out a new restaurant based on a friend's recommendation or just on a whim.

And the whole point is not to have any star system, you either liked it or loved it and that's it. No opportunity for commentary so if you want to complain, go elsewhere. The tagline I dreamed up was "Haters gonna hate, eaters gonna eat."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It was a lot of work gathering review info for over 500K restaurants in the US but I hope some people will use this app and find it useful. Cheers.

<comment><USER11> Are you following the Terms of Use for each service? Yelp definitely doesn't allow you to redistribute rating data without serious restrictions.

<comment><USER12> Zomato also claims copyright/IP of any reviews/content on their site.

Though I am not a 100% sure if just the out of 5 or % number usage counts or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually posted a question to quora, "Is it legal to use review information from websites to calculate an average score?"

Replied: "In the US, so long as you have the legal right to access the data to begin with (i.e., you didn't crack into someone's system to get it), yes. Simple facts, and things like mathematical analysis of those facts, cannot be copyrighted.

Calculating an average is just a mathematical process. It doesn't require the type of creativity that would allow for copyright."

Link:[https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-use-review- information-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-use-review-information- from-websites-to-calculate-an-average-score/answer/Todd- Allen-9?__snid3__=290497742&__nsrc__=4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I looked into this a while back, but bailed on the idea because it violates the TOS of a bunch of APIs. For example, the Google API terms specifically notes that you cannot aggregate their content[1]. There were a number of issues with other API terms as well, such as completely disallowing any caching or storing of data, I can't recall which ones, but if you read the terms, you'll find they're quite restrictive.

Ultimately I decided not to pursue the idea since there's no real opportunity for growth, since all your content comes from your competitors, who can easily shut you down.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/maps/terms](https://developers.google.com/maps/terms), section 10.5 (d).

<comment><AUTHOR> If you ask me, it's hypocritical coming from a company that scrapes the entire web, runs it through an algorithm (PageRank) and puts the data thats in a form that easier to understand. They make 10s of billions per year scraping other websites. Isn't Google the king of aggregators?

But you can't scrape google when aggregating info? What ever happened to "Don't be evil?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you plan to compete with or differentiate from any of the sites you are aggregating? My usual flow for seeing if restaurants are good generally goes like this:

1\. google places near me 2\. see google reviews for place 3\. maybe read 1 review from whichever review company is highest on google's results 4\. go back to step 1

Aside from the fact that this is iOS only (I have Android), requires Facebook, and violates the ToS of the services you are aggregating, I just don't see any compelling reason to change my habits from what they already are.

<comment><AUTHOR> From my habits, I've found you really don't get the full picture using one platform. Google Users will review a restaurant in a completely different way than Yelp users. Zomato users are looking for different things than say a facebook user. That's why they all have different average scores.

1\. I have a friend cloning the app right now for android. Many of the things brought up in this post (like requiring facebook ) will be changed

2\. Copying review results does not violate the terms of services. [https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-use-review- information-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-use-review-information- from-websites-to-calculate-an-average-score/answer/Todd- Allen-9?__snid3__=290497742&__nsrc__=4)

"In the US, so long as you have the legal right to access the data to begin with (i.e., you didn't crack into someone's system to get it), yes. Simple facts, and things like mathematical analysis of those facts, cannot be copyrighted."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Out of interest, why did you decide to build this as an app rather than a (mobile-friendly) website? I would expect the latter to be quicker to build and easier to distribute.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there is RT-like distinction between All Critics / Top Critics / Audience Score?

I would love to see a site which gathered reviews from professional food reviewers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Automation is necessary when you're talking about finding reviews for over 500K restaurants.

The best solution I can think of right now is 1) collecting valid professional review links from around the web 2) associating them with specific restaurants and 3) performing sentiment analysis to determine a rotten or fresh type rating.

These steps are straightforward and would not yield 100% accuracy. Even a 95% accuracy would be unfair to the few restaurants who's rating somehow gets messed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you don't mind me asking, how many weeks/months did it take to build out this app, including both dev and design?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a hard question to answer since 1) it's been off and on for about a year and 2) I didn't start out with this idea.

The original idea for Hapibelly was to crowdsource popular menu items, using your mobile device as an interactive media-rich menu, voting on the menu items you like. It was done with just me as the designer. I created an entire backend that let's restaurants manage their menu, specials, and basic info.

My friend Sara helped me out with the updated look ([https://www.behance.net/itssaramarshall](https://www.behance.net/itssaramarshall)). I have to give her a ton of credit for telling me letting me pick her brain and drafting a logo for me. I have another friend working on an Android clone.

The goal of this update was to keep all that in place and add more reason for people to download the app giving an aggregate score. The Hapibelly score became the main value add of this update. I spent more time gathering the data than on the app itself.

This update took me about 3-4 weeks. The first version about 3-4 months. Of course I have ideas for updates to make it more kick ass. With any luck I can pursue those ideas with a bit of funding!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why don't you add a chart of the individuals rankings that go into your score for each restaurant, similar to the image you advertise on hapibelly.com? similar to here: [http://www.cinesift.com/#/](http://www.cinesift.com/#/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have legal concerns about displaying other platforms review information in my app. I link to review websites and their info is used in the calculation. Agreed that it'd be great visually for app.

I hadn't heard of Cinesoft. I like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The image background looks grainy on my mbp (it's stretched and the quality is a bit low anyways).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Will fix in the next release!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Facebook only auth === immediate uninstall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would an email signup alternative be a more friendly option? Google Plus, Twitter, or none at all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's the fifth time this month that I just want to try a simple app but can't as iOS 9 is required. Why?

<comment><USER21> Because ~80% of iOS devices are >9 and spending development time on outdated OSs is a waste for startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22>
        Rotten Tomatoes for Restaurants

Took me a while to parse that one. "why would any restaurant need rotten tomatoes?"

<comment><USER23> Indeed. "Rotten Tomatoes" next to "Restaurants" is an unfortunate combination of words.

Unless you like Icelandic-Italian fusion cuisine, maybe.</comment></comment>


Modern language wars infographic - <AUTHOR> https://www.udemy.com/blog/modern-language-wars/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interested to hear some opinions on the numbers in this infographic. I for one found them pretty shocking. Didn't realize Python was so popular.</comment>


Show HN: Beholder, asset management and analytics for your AR app - <AUTHOR> http://www.beholder.icu/ <comment><USER2> is thing ready? if no, can you give ETA? might be very helpful</comment>


Welcome to Uberville - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12735666/uber-altamonte-springs-fl-public-transportation-taxi-system <comment><USER2> Welcome to a solved problem: trains.

You know what, in some parts of the world, they're automated! Driver-less trains, arriving every 3 minutes, running 24 hours with no union strikes or bad software that accidentally runs them into a kid or semi truck (if they walk out onto the rails it's really their own damn fault).

Individual personal transport is really a waste. I mean there's nothing wrong with having a car, but you shouldn't need it. It should be there in case you need to haul something or go way off the beaten path. All these single capacity cars taking people to and from work every morning is insane.

<comment><USER3> i read stories about Uber/Lyft and i'm convinced that the authors just don't even consider bicycles - is this a US-Valley blind spot or something? i mean seriously - the problem of getting 3-4 km without a car? quelle horror... i'll grant you until recently it was annoying and having a train do the heavy lifting was a great combo but e-bikes are changing the way this stuff works. even in Auckland we're seeing them and the hills in this city are everywhere (we built it on a volcano field...) but e-bikes and some bikepath friendly investments are changing the 5-km radius of the isthmus. Uber in NZ will probably do just as well as Starbucks - I think there's one at the airport...

<comment><USER4> Er...have you tried biking around America's cities? Some are decent. New York and Chicago have a couple of dedicated paths along their respective bodies of water, and biking can be faster than taking the train. And both cities are big enough to support well-paved/painted cross-town roads.

But going off of those designated streets can be dicey. In New York I feel relatively safe because traffic is such a crawl anyway that, aside from getting doored by a inattentive taxi passenger, you probably won't get run over at a high speed.

And then you have many of the other cities in America. Dallas in particularly strikes me as a city especially un-optimized for bicyclists despite the huge amount of land there. I mean, there's plenty of lanes for cars, and just about nothing for bikes.

An initiative to change America's non-car culture would probably take as long as it would take to make self-driving electric vehicles mainstream. And automated vehicles are probably more viable when thinking of the future, as America's population continues to age and fewer people can physically bike (or even walk).

<comment><USER3> yeah agree - and i'd have said the same about Auckland until about 2-3 years ago. i guess the wider point is that it is weird that so much time/effort/treasure is being devoted to eliminating an entry level job and not investing in some pretty basic infrastructure. Auckland has just about had a heart attack trying to push through some planning rules that allow 3 story apartments and bike paths/PT in the city... i think that's the blind spot. check out the US civil engineers report card on infrastructure - seems to be a thing around the world. maybe if fewer deciders flew on private jets we'd have bridges that stay up? still disagree on future viability - sounds like tech for tech sake.

<comment><USER5> Small or midsize towns don't generally have the political will - or budget - to massively rework lots of basic infrastructure. Larger ones definitely don't, and the political history of ramming through such projects is often pretty ugly.

So time, effort, and treasure is spent on changes that can be politically accomplished instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For people who may not be familiar with car centric areas like Southern California, the situation is completely different in terms of public transit from a place such as new york city , for example. Everything is completely spread out and there are relatively few public transit routes. So for example to travel sixteen point five miles from an inland area to an area closer to the coast my option is to spend an hour and forty minutes on public transit or twenty minutes in an Uber. Also to compare that with a cab ride it would be at least fifty dollars for a cab where as the uber will cost eleven dollars or twenty two dollars depending on the time and day. Public transit would only cost two dollars and fifty cents, but again that's a minimum of an hour and forty minutes and it could be closer to an hour and fifty five minutes.

<comment><USER7> LA was built on trains [http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/49819/Metro- Transpor...](http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/49819/Metro- Transportation-Library-and-Archive-History-of-Transit-in-Los- Angeles/#vars!date=1942-11-09_18:55:16)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >During my time in Altamonte, the government-backed Ubers worked just as intended. The two-mile ride to city hall came out to around $4 — two dollars more than the local bus system, but taking a fraction of the time.

You can see how this sort of system could result in the richest transit customers being skimmed off to uber. Public transit is left with less customers, and with only the poorest and most marginalized ones. In such a state it is easy for public transit to be increasingly discredited and defunded, which continues the downward spiral further.

<comment><USER5> This is an odd argument to me. Small towns like Altamonte don't have many affluent commuters with real political influence taking the buses and trains to begin with. There are plenty of big cities that are similar, like San Antonio. In most of America, your standard-issue middle-class-or-wealthier commuter doesn't touch public transit and already isn't interested in funding it to any significant level. I grew up in a town like that.

San Francisco, of course, is different - public transit is so terrible that many those who can afford other choices are already pursuing other options after multiple failed reform attempts. Further changes run into political backlashes. So the worry seems wrongheaded here, too.

The idea is that if you make better-off people take public transit then they will help fix it. This only works if everyone else also wants it fixed (often untrue) and the same people cannot opt out in another way (also often untrue).

<comment><USER8> You attract better-off consumers to transit just like any other thing, by making it more attractive than the alternatives. You do this by making it a good experience, making it convenient and making it affordable. You accomplish all these things primarily by funding it really well.

With that last point in mind, diverting funding to some other parallel but not equal system simply muddles things. It decreases the amount of available funding for public transit and makes it harder to accomplish the main task of making public transit really good.

<comment><USER5> In most American towns and cities, public transit lost the competition for better-off consumers decades ago. It isn't a good experience, it isn't convenient, it isn't fast. The only advantage is that it costs less than owning a car... if you consider your time to be worth nothing.

The majority of people in middle America whose lives are organized without any regard whatsoever for public transit are not interested in funding it "really well". They're accustomed to zipping across town in their car, directly to their destination. They pay, at most, $300-$400 out-of-pocket a month for a high degree of personal autonomy and a guarantee of never being panhandled or sexually assaulted as they transit to work and back, knowing that no matter how late they are out they can get home in a reasonable amount of time.

Those are the people to whom public transit advocates must appeal. These are the affluent consumers that need to be attracted. These are the people to whom, in most of middle America, public transit sounds like hell.

Once upon a time I lived in San Antonio, Texas. I figured I could get by without a car. There was a bus system. There was a stop right next to my place. It was reasonable, right? After a month of spending a minimum of three hours a day on the buses for twenty minutes of driving, I gave up and got a car so I could have all those hours of my life back.

That's what results look like when things are "really well" funded. The city is too geographically sprawling for any remotely cost-effective public transit system to be competitive. In smaller towns, it's so much worse. It's difficult to conceive of any public transit system that can offer cost-effective and offer competitive service at a population density of 40 per square km.

For most of these people, a parallel system can hardly be less useful than the buses they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a good piece.

On the one hand there does seem to be an opportunity for more efficient shared transportation in (somewhat) spread-out areas. I know that near where I live, there's a "regional" small bus service but I assume pretty much no one uses it besides the infirm and poor. (Because anyone who can owns a car.) In general, I've seen more casual and lower overhead small busses in places like Russia than in the US.

That said, I also appreciate the concerns raised in the article that if you create something better for the top 50% case, you may make the bottom 50% case totally untenable--however marginally usable it is today.

<comment><USER10> i read the article, but i don't think they raised what to me is the most important point.

ok, so small municipality runs a bus service for the elderly, disabled and indigent. as one might expect given the need and tax base, its pretty threadbare.

so instead we have a ridesharing service whose drivers are local, whose customers are local, and whose costs are partially paid for out of the limited local tax base.

now I'm sure that the municipality would do a lousy job of running that service on their own. it doesn't seem completely corrupt, but it also doesn't sound quite right to be underwriting uber's business with local tax income either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a good article, and I have become persuaded that the future of public transit in the United States is probably going to be very Uber-like (if not actually operated by Uber, as these pilot projects are). And I think a lot of other places will follow suit, because trains are great where and when there are large volumes of people, but on-demand cars or small buses are much cheaper to operate in places and times where demand is more spread out.

The article brings up a serious shortcoming with the Uber approach, however, and that's access for people lacking the technological means to hail an Uber or with physical disabilities that make traveling in a regular passenger car difficult. The smartphone issue can be addressed in a pretty low-tech way: a phone number that someone can call and an operator can arrange for the pickup. As for folks with disabilities, I'm afraid that the best solution would be to have at least one van or small bus with a wheelchair lift that can be dispatched.

I think that the future of municipal mass transit will probably include traditional buses in most places, that don't follow a set route but instead pick up and drop people off as necessary, supplemented by cars with private drivers that provide extra capacity in peak times and possibly provide 24 hour service.

<comment><USER12> In boston there is a startup that does adaptive pickup and dropoff in certain areas with short bus sized vehicles. Boston has some areas that are tricky to get to via public transit. When they rolled back the late night public transit, they talked about using "Bridj" to replace its service.

Not sure how well it works, though I see a lot of their vehicles from my Bike. Apparently they operate in Washington and Kansas City.

[http://www.bridj.com](http://www.bridj.com)

There is also in Boston public transport (The Ride) for those with disabilites that does something similar point to point transit

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ride_(MBTA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ride_\(MBTA\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll be your hostess, Tess...</comment>