Pure Genius: Southwest Airlines Baggage Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://www.freightdawg.com/2010/03/pure-genius-southwest-airlines-baggage-strategy.html <comment><USER2> This article is pretty interesting. One point he makes is one that I have long wondered about: why on earth do airlines not treat baggage the same way UPS and FedEx treat packages?

Going one step further, I'm not sure what the logistics would be, but I wonder if the airlines could sub-contract baggage to people like UPS and FedEx. One of my big fears traveling is that my bag is going to disappear for days on end in the system. If UPS was willing to guarantee hotel delivery for my stuff by 8PM on my arrival day, I might take it, even if I had to pay.

<comment><USER3> FedEx and UPS have a vastly simpler model for package distribution compared to airline baggage distribution. Everything goes to a central hub and is consolidated and sent out directly to the regional distrbution center.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoke-hub_distribution_paradigm>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldport_(UPS_air_hub)>

<comment><USER4> So do passengers, except on Southwest. If you fly American, you will become very familiar with ORD or DFW. If you fly Delta, you will become very familiar with ATL. If you fly USAir, you will become very familiar with PHX or CLT. Etc.

Even Southwest tends to try to funnel passengers through focus cities like MDW, but their network is largely point-to-point.

If hub-and-spoke is what would make baggage distribution efficient, WN should be the least efficient.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I was fascinated when I learned that they have to fly all the planes back at the end of the day to the ORD hub so they can be ready for the next day of flights. Which means when planes are delayed and they can't make it back to the mother hub - it puts strain on their system.

<comment><USER4> American? I know for a fact that they don't do this; I often fly the 6:10am flight out of PHX, and the plane for that flight sits at PHX overnight.

<comment><USER3> You're right. A better answer (types of planes, types of routes, lions, tigers, bears, oh my!)

<http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/607944>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sound like how Ryanair (a Europe airline) work. They are one of the largest airlines in the world. They charge €20 per checked in bag. And since you can't check in online with a bag, you need to pay €20 to use a check in desk. When a flight is advertised for €15, all these extra charges all add up.

Of course most people think it's just Ryanair being mean and will complain about how they "were stung for extra charges". However, despite people's complaints, they are by far the lowest prices, and people fly with them.

I think Ryanair based a lot of their idea on southwest airlines in the USA.

<comment><USER6> Almost, easyjet and then Ryanair copied the single type, low prices and short routes idea of SouthWestern.

What they forgot to copy was the honest price, no fees policy and the extremely helpful and friendly staff of SWA and the Canadian equivalent Westjet.

What Ryan did was take the SWA idea of being profitable and added the fee structure scams of every major airline and the customer management skills of a Soviet era railway.

<comment><USER7> Actually I would say that Ryanair is the opposite model. They want to _discourage_ people from checking in baggage, hence the fees. Staffing check- in desks and paying for baggage handling is a cost to the airline and increases turn around times as bags have to me moved on and off the aircraft. The difference is that Ryanair passengers are not, generally, making connecting flights at their destination at least not with Ryanair. They are flying straight to their destination, removing the advantages of checked baggage that exist for Southwest.

As for the fees, that is a feature not a bug. It means that people who want to fly as cheaply as possible can (no frills) and those who want the extras such as checked baggage pay. With a no fee structure, essentially the people who don't check baggage, check in online instead of at a desk, don't care where they sit (and speed up boarding times) etc are subsidising those that use those extras.

<comment><USER6> The point of the SWA article though, is that airlines don't seem to realise that people carrying masses of carry-on onto the plane slow down the boarding/exiting so much they delay the flight and cost far more money than handling bags would.

Also it isn't the baggage fees with Ryanair so much as the price you pay is completely unrelated to the advertised $1 price for the flight. You can only find all the taxes and fees once you have completed the booking - they have even sued external price compare sites which show you the full price. They are constantly being investigated for this under various Eu consumer laws.

<comment><USER8> I've flown Ryanair several times and they routinely stop people from boarding with masses of carry-on. Really, if have a lot of stuff they'll tell you to go back to check-in and handle it there.

This truly seems to cost both aggravation and time - but perhaps only for the first time. I'd hazard a guess that only a few people, of each Ryanair flight, are rookies. Most people, when faced with harsh measures, really do learn quickly. Perhaps this is, overall and long-term, a cost efficient way to do business.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Ryanair are _very_ strict with size and number of items. You are only allowed one bag. That includes handbag. Many times I've seen women not allowed on until they get their handbag in their normal bag and both have to fit within the size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Transferring bags between identical planes will decrease risk but it won't eliminate it. Unless the same people are transferring (and hence the same bags) then the number and size of bags is going to change.

Presumably people are transferring to the new plane from many different flights, flights have varying numbers of people, people have varying numbers of bags, and bags vary in size.

For example, a few flights into Miami may be only 1/4 full of people but they are 1/2 full of bags because the Miami flyers tend to carry large gear such as golf clubs and scuba gear. If you transfer those people onto a flight to the Bahamas, along with a few folks from other flights, then you might run into a problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe it's marketing genius, but I don't understand some of his reasoning.

Obviously all the airlines don't want anyone carrying bags on the plane. Why is having a consistent load factor an enabler for Southwest to fly checked bags for free? Why does it matter that the bags are being moved between the same types of aircraft?

You could equally well imagine the argument that it makes sense to use an "agile" strategy in which aircraft with different load factors are deployed based on the type of travel expected.

I'm sure having only one aircraft and picking routes for which that aircraft is suitable has tons of benefits for Southwest, but his blog doesn't explain why that is an enabler for the free checked bag policy (other than creating efficiencies which generate enough profit to offer any perks). Would it be "marketing genius" to offer free meals on planes?

<comment><USER11> He explained it in the paragraph that starts with "Other airlines either don't get it, or can't" - different-sized planes accomodate different amounts of luggage per passenger, so there's a risk that they'll run out of room for all the baggage when passengers transfer to smaller planes. Identical planes eliminate this risk.

I didn't realize that when your luggage is 'lost' on a multi-stop flight, it could actually be a deliberate decision on the part of the airline due to lack of capacity. I'd actually rather they told me that.

<comment><USER12> Right.

Plus many carriers store luggage in 'cartons' - metal containers with the bags stacked inside. These are put on with a special forklift thing. Essentially offloading all of these can happen fast. If you are being super smart, you can stick connecting flight backs in these cartons, and literally just drive over to the next flight and load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand the point on hedging. Both turning an aircraft around faster and a successful hedge on jet fuel result in higher profit. But not sure how the two are related?

Regarding hedging, Southwest gets too much publicity for being so slick to hedge fuel before oil prices shot through the roof years ago. Hedging is not part of its core competency, or at least it isn't unless they are pioneering a new business model of providing a service and then leveraging for profit on the futures markets. As in, they could have lost money on the hedge as well. Unless Southwest could use their understanding of the airline industry to predict a huge rise in oil demand, hedges should only be used as a tool to smooth out expense lines.

Here's an oversimplified example to illustrate: A gas station owner hedges oil futures. Might be smart because he isn't going to change his prices every day to reflect the spot price and customers appreciate it. He has a better forecast on his profitability because his expenditures are smoother. But it isn't really his core competency to predict oil prices.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_hedging>

TL;DR: Hedging can really help your profits but you don't read about the companies that lost money on hedges. Maybe Southwest was able to build a team of brilliant market researchers but I'm not sure it's a good idea for every company to buy futures.

<comment><USER10> The hedging point is just another of the unsubstantiated assertions he makes. As you say, there's not even any reason to mention hedging. If they use less fuel they make more money independent of their mechanism for better knowledge of their future price of fuel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> More consumers are using kayak, bing/travel, and other flight aggregators. Airlines are competing on the price of tickets so they tack on extra charges at checkout. Southwest doesn't play in the aggregation game so they can factor the price of storing luggage into the price of the ticket. Southwest doesn't want to commoditize their product by making their flights available to aggregators and part of that is offering a differentiated consumer experience.

This isn't the point that the author makes but could explain Southwest's strategy with luggage....

</comment><comment><USER4> It's my understanding that the majors make a ton of revenue off the checked- bag fees. That's why they do it; even though it encourages people to carry-on, and that decreases plane utilization (longer turn times), it still makes them money.

(It also encourages airline loyalty. Fly 25k miles on one of the legacies, and now checked bags are free. I stick with the legacies because of the great loyalty programs and the ability to use the same airline domestically and internationally. It is also nice to have an assigned seat.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder for a long time now what Southwest is going to do when they will have to replace 737s finally. At some time at the future they will have depart from old and uneconomical (by future standards) design and at this instant they would have second incompatible plane operating in parallel and dramatic cost increase.

</comment><comment> jim-greer Interesting, but does he really check baggage when flying for business? Waiting for the bags takes a lot longer than waiting for people to get their bags off the plane. Checking might speed turnaround for Southwest, but it slows things down for passengers.

The only time I check bags is when flying with my wife and daughter...

</comment><comment><USER16> So passengers spend between 30-40 minutes loading and unloading their carry on luggage. By checking in those bags the airline saves time, but what about the resources (employees) it would take to check those bags and to load/unload them from the airplane.

<comment><USER17> 30-40 _minutes_? What kind of passengers have you been travelling next to? I travel exclusively with carry-ons--I haven't checked baggage in over 5 years-- and it has never taken me more than 90 seconds total to get one carry-on into the overhead compartment, stuff my backpack under the seat in front of me, and sit down.

<comment><USER18> The 30-40 minutes is not per passenger, but how much time is wasted overall in the loading/unloading process with carry-on baggage. The theory is that if no passengers had carry-on baggage the load/unload times would be reduced to near zero and turnaround times on the ground would be minimal thus reducing cost. For each person with a carry-on that turnaround time increases thus costing the airline money.

Next time you fly time how long it takes for the first person to get on the plane until the last person boards and vice-versa. That time should total to around 30-40 minutes.

<comment><USER17> Ah, I see! That makes much more sense. Thank you for the explanation.

I'm very reluctant to consider checking baggage again, even seeing the increased level of concern a company might give my bags. I hear so many horror stories, and as an individual traveler, checking baggage is extremely time- consuming.

A few months ago, I waited with my mother at baggage claim for 3 hours before they finally determined that her bags were in a different state. Even when things are running as expected, it takes an order of magnitude more time to get in and out with your bags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've always wondered why Southwest or some Airline startup couldn't take a 737, add second deck of passenger seating in the lower half of plane, where luggage goes, add HVAC, exits, etc. then make everyone carry on 1 luggage for commuter / weekend flights.

<comment><USER20> I take it you've never been in the lower "half" of a 737.

Passengers actually sit with their bellies about at the midpoint of the jet. The area below the floor is about the same size as the overhead bins. It's really not suitable for anything other than bags.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the aerospace insight. I'm sure there are other issues with the half-baked idea as well.

<comment><USER6> There are a couple of larger models where the crew rest area is in the cargo hold. It's a removable unit the full width of the plane - equal to two of those 5sided luggage pods and is very comfortable.

Airlines looked at using them as sleeping berths for first class passengers but it's difficult to meet the escape time requirements.

Although you chances of exiting the aircraft in 90secs if it crashed in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night are pretty small - the FAA has to pretend it's possible.

<comment><USER4> _Although you chances of exiting the aircraft in 90secs if it crashed in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night are pretty small - the FAA has to pretend it's possible._

What? This requirement is actually quite important. Take a look at:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_358>

I followed a few links and skimmed the full report, but couldn't find the time it took to evacuate. But it was under 90 seconds, even with several exits not usable. Since the aircraft was already burning before it came to a stop, any time savings was critical to ensuring survival. And everyone did survive.

So I think this regulation is important. If there was just one exit, and it was blocked, there would have been 300 people dead in a fire instead of 0.

<comment><USER6> Yes evacuation on take off and landing is very important.

However the regs don't differentiate about the stage of the flight, even if you were only allowed to use the bed during cruise, at 30,000 over the ocean - the same time applies.

<comment><USER4> Dunno, this has also been useful. Imagine a scenario like UAL811:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811>

You are downstairs in your bed, when the cabin depressurizes and you can't move around. The depressurization also damages the flight controls, making a clean landing unlikely. The unclean landing occurs, the plane catches on fire, and you burn to death in your bed because "regulations are silly".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting - yes. Informative - yes. "Genius" though?</comment>


Jeff Bezos' wealth tops 105B dollars, now officially the richest man in history - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2018/jeff-bezos-net-worth-tops-105-billion-amazon-founder-declared-richest-person-history/ <comment><USER2> It seems unlikely he is actually the richest. Historically many individuals have amassed pretty fabulous amounts of wealth. From some of the history I have read, Marcus Licinius Crassus or Lorenzo de' Medici seem to have had substantially more purchasing power, at least relative to the times they lived in.

For example, I do not see Bezos building anything I would compare to cathedrals.

<comment><USER3> >For example, I do not see Bezos building anything I would compare to cathedrals

No, I'd say the majority of the things the wealthy build now are less self- aggrandizing and more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a chart if anyone wants a graphical version: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/cw6vs4v4h4woxpt/richest.png?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cw6vs4v4h4woxpt/richest.png?dl=0)

(Not sure what's standard practice for sharing images on HN.. or is that not done?)

<comment><USER5> Wikipedia disagrees with many of those estimates.

<comment><USER4> They're taken from this clickbaity thing: [https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment- art...](https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment- articles/25-richest-people-lived-inflation-adjusted/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Only if you don't take inflation into account.

</comment><comment><USER7> What about the Saudi King?

It's interesting to see how much Amazon can keep going. Bezos seems like the kind of person who can delegate responsibility extremely effectively -- is there a limit to this or will Amazon start being hobbled by it's own weight.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd wager Amazon could keep growing for a long while. The worldwide market for e-commerce is nowhere near saturation point and the business model is by definition a recurring one. In addition, there are many adjacent markets to conquer.

<comment><USER7> But on e-commerce you have large regional players already. Japan, Korea?, India?, China, and probably Indonesia too. I find it hard to believe that Amazon will be able to conquer all or any of these. Saturation in what way? Total amount of goods purchased online increasing gradually over the years? As for for adjacent markets, ok fair enough -- but will they win in everything they try? I don't really think so -- and the more they take on the more Amazon as a whole will be strained.

<comment><USER8> Who leads Japan? Rakuten? They were first movers but Amazon has made huge share gains there in the last 10 years and they're in the common vernacular now. They outmaneuvered the publisher coalition and are now the only real e reader player in town. If there's a factor blocking Amazon from dominance there, it's the continued strength of brick and mortar powered by the high standard of service and support provided by those stores as well as strong infrastructure that prevents Amazon from developing competitive advantages with.

<comment><USER7> Yes I was referring to Rakuten -- there are a few more minor players. I'm working off limited data here -- so forgive me for using heuristic estimates. But yes, what are the odds of overcoming that advantage in your opinion? Japan is a odd case and _extremely_ difficult to penetrate for outsiders, that level of insulation doesn't weight the odds in Amazon's favor or anybody else's coming in from the outside.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python SortedContainers at Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.grantjenks.com/docs/sortedcontainers/performance-scale.html <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Longish article but I wanted to make a fairly comprehensive reply to those who have doubted SortedContainers' ability to scale. If you jump down to the benchmarks section, you'll see the performance at 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) elements. I ended up paying $40 to rent a highmem instance on GCE for 1,011 minutes to run the benchmarks. For those curious, the memory high-water mark was ~128GB using PyPy. These results would be a lot more expensive to replicate with any other sorted collections library today.</comment>


ImageNet Roulette: See How AI Stereotypes You - <AUTHOR> https://lifehacker.com/see-how-ai-stereotypes-you-1838157127 <comment><USER2> I got "divorced man" and "grass widower", which is apparently just a term for a divorced man. Kind of sad.</comment>


Trump Sends Pharma Stocks Down with New Tweet on Drug Prices - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-07/trump-sends-pharma-stocks-down-with-new-tweet-on-drug-prices <comment><USER2> It costs a quarter to manufacture each pill but the manufacturers charge several dollars for that pill.

But they don't just price gouge. Drug companies need to file patents on their drug almost as soon as they sketch they come up with drug. From there they need at least 8 years to get through the FDAs approval process, so the manufacturers don't get nearly as much exclusive time with their IP as other industries. (They started getting around that by slightly tweaking the formula to last longer and calling it XL.) Plus they have to recoup the money they sank into other drugs that never made it to market. Sure, they can write down those losses, but a write-down ain't a refund.

If the government wants to start lowering drug prices, they can start by creating a special patent for the drug industry—call it a research patent—that can get converted to a regular patent when it gets FDA approval, and then give the drug companies the patent for the standard 20 years plus a renewal if they work the patent.

The next step: they can shorten time to market. We have evidence that the FDA errs too conservatively and doesn't approve (or delays) drugs that would have turned out totally safe and helped people. I remember they granted special approval to bring in a meningitis vaccine that Europe had for a while when an east coast school saw an outbreak. The vaccine still hadn't cleared the FDA, but I guess FDA special clearance is better than doing nothing. If it's safe enough for Western Europe, it's probably safe enough for Americans.

<comment><USER3> >It costs a quarter to manufacture each pill but the >manufacturers charge several dollars for that pill.

What are the manufacturing costs for software?

<comment><USER4> Shhh!

Our whole racket is based on pricing our services on value while pricing our cost of goods on production inputs.

It's not "fair" to let other industries do that right?

<comment><USER5> Pricing based on value provided to the customer makes a lot of sense for phones and web apps and cheetos.

But how much do you value being alive? The "value" of a lifesaving drug is essentially unbounded, most people will pay anything to stay alive. That's one of the reasons healthcare is an edge case where the typical rules of capitalism don't work.

So yes, it is unfair to have some industries price their products based on "value".

<comment><USER6> Go talk to the NHS. They value a year of healthy human life at 30,000 GBPs.

And if you take your idea to the extreme, then every person should have access to every type of medical care regardless of the value offered?

<comment><USER7> Most people won't know what you're referencing.

[https://www.channel4.com/news/drugs-life-breast-cancer- nice-...](https://www.channel4.com/news/drugs-life-breast-cancer- nice-20-000-a-year-of-life-nhs)

[https://www.nice.org.uk/news/article/kadcyla-too- expensive-f...](https://www.nice.org.uk/news/article/kadcyla-too-expensive- for-routine-funding-on-nhs)

NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) sets the guidance on the QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Year) at between 20000-50000GBP for a year's worth of a single drug treatment.

Of the drugs that they approve for coverage the annual regimen has to be under a threshold of 50000GBP or it may not be covered by the NHS.

But that 20000-50000GBP is per drug per person, someone could be on multiple drugs and treatments simultaneously for much more than that and they'll be covered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having lived in both the UK and US I find the cost of medicines very hard to understand here. For example in the UK I can buy a ventolin inhaler for £10 over the counter (if I went to the Doctor it would be free). But in the US, an inhaler costs me $60 (with insurance).

Why is it _that_ much more expensive here?

<comment><USER9> In UK government has almost a monopoly for buying drugs, so they have a leverage in negotiation and there is a lower overhead with paper work.

Americans subsidize drugs for the rest of the world.

<comment><USER10> Yeah. That's not so accurate.

Top 10 pharma companies, 5/10 are US (2 UK, 2 Swiss, 1 French).

4 of the top 6 for profit margins (from 43%(!) to 19%) are US (Merck is the only outlier, 9th, at 10%).

4 of the top 5 for Sales and Marketing Spend (both on raw dollars and as a percentage of revenue) are US.

3 of the bottom 5 for R&D spend (as a percentage of revenue) are US.

I think I see a little fat that can be trimmed in the name of our so-called subsidization...

Source: [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223)

<comment><USER11> For all those companies the largest and more profitable market is the US, the country of domicile doesn't have much relevance for this discussion.

<comment><USER12> It's not the case for Sanofi if I understand the table on page 5 of this document correctly:

[http://www.eucope.org/lib/downloads/basic_facts_about_the_eu...](http://www.eucope.org/lib/downloads/basic_facts_about_the_eu_pharma_market.pdf)

<comment><USER11> These figures are pretty old. See for example: [http://en.sanofi.com/Images/40647_GlobalGBUs_NewGeo_2015.xls](http://en.sanofi.com/Images/40647_GlobalGBUs_NewGeo_2015.xls)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Step 1: Ask friend to short a bunch of stocks

Step 2: Tweet up a storm

Step 3: Profit

<comment><USER14> This is what scares me the most. Anyone of his family or friends could do the shorting. No one will ever catch them as the President will ensure the SEC is kept in the dark or suppressed. He might not even know they are doing it. Imagine knowing we are about to drop a nuke somewhere (like NK), you could make a fortune.

<comment><USER15> And even better, he's the damn president - he can pardon whoever he wants for whatever he wants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ending the ban on importing (often the same) drugs from abroad would go a long way to achieving this goal - no fancy system needed.

Also: "Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. have taken steps to increase transparency about their prices." \- let me know when they disclose how much they spend on development of non-generic drugs to treat serious medical conditions, vs. their other expenses (such as advertising). According to [1], the numbers aren't pretty. And that's lumping all of 'research' together - subtract generics and cures for baldness and similar, and how much money is being wasted in medicine becomes even more apparent.

[1]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big- pharmaceutical-companies-are-spending-far-more-on-marketing-than-research/)

<comment><USER6> Do you really think reimportation would work? It hasn't worked in the past.

A decade or so ago there was a big push to import cheaper drugs from Canada. What did drug companies do? Put a cap on how much drug would be sold in Canada. Canadians ended up restricting exports so that they had enough drug for their own citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If the government really wanted to lower the price of drugs it would pay for the FDA clinical trials[1] and lengthen the amount of time a drug company can collect royalties. I remember when I was at a place that did clinical trials the cost of one protocol was $50,000 a day because of all the test kits that needed to have lab work done each day and the drug company only really had 3 years to get back its investment (plus pay for new research and have some profit) before the generics could happen. Cost of manufacture and distribution (just like software) is not the problem.

With the extends royalty period have a required pricing structure that has a set price to prevent gouging.

<comment><USER18> I understand the idea of the government paying for clinical trials, but then doesn't that incentivize pharma companies throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks, and basically wasting money on trials that they know are long shots? I think the trial costs belonging to the company is right.

Anyway, regardless, what if pharma was only slightly or moderately profitable instead of insanely profitable? I don't want to be snarky, but the "we're not doing it unless it makes us a very big bag of cash" model of business just seems counter to the idea that having access to good healthcare is a basic human right. This is what makes me want to just create a whole DARPA + universities + national labs sort of system that takes on a lot of that responsibility of developing and testing drugs that is driven by more than just profit.

<comment><USER17> Well, frankly, having a big bag of cash is what got us a lot of the specialist doctors in tough areas requiring a lot of years of work. There is nothing wrong with making money if you provide a service worth it. We get nowhere when we deamonize money.

Don't pay for failure if you care about that, but maybe we need a whole heck of a lot more throwing it at the wall than we have now. I can see some startups wanting to play where they cannot now.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I'm absolutely not against researchers and specialists and people who /work on/ this stuff being well paid, it just seems like the bulk of the profits goes to shareholders (I'm guessing mostly large institutional investors) rather than getting reinvested back into other efforts for the greater good. I'm questioning whether we _really_ need that component of it all.

<comment><USER17> So do the bulk of the risks. Those profits power retirement accounts among other investors. Given on what forum we are discussing this, investors are important too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pharma stock prices should go down. That is a good thing. Drugs should be first a service and second a source of profit and that should always be the order of it, or we will continue to have drugs that bankrupt people till they cannot afford it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Awesome. Have to give at least one thing to Trump. He's addressing exactly what he said in his campaign.

<comment><USER21> All he's done so far is send down pharma stock prices.

<comment><USER22> In case one is blinded by partisan bias, remember than Hillary Clinton made a similar statement[0] against the pharmaceutical industry during her campaign, and likewise sent stocks temporarily falling.

[0]: [https://www.thestreet.com/story/13684503/1/hillary-blasts- dr...](https://www.thestreet.com/story/13684503/1/hillary-blasts-drug-prices- biotech-stocks-plunge-yes-it-could-be-happening-again.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Pharma stocks are never a good buy anyway, they have high liabilities

</comment><comment><USER24> It's probably just a smokescreen to divide the attention of people concerned about healthcare between this distraction and the bill repealing the ACA, Medicaid, etc.</comment>


Interactive Guide to Tetris in ClojureScript - <AUTHOR> http://shaunlebron.github.io/t3tr0s-slides/ <comment><USER2> Thanks mate! This is amazing, I'm going to use this to turn people into Clojurists.

</comment><comment><USER3> i'm adding three more slides to flesh out the trickier stuff soon

<comment><USER4> This is awesome! I'm wondering what you used to lay out the code, while keeping track of which part of it has the mouse over the top? For instance, pprint will just give you a string back.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I actually don't have a general solution for doing this. The code in the slide is specified with markup, so the usual events apply for detecting mouseover.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does one browse the slides on mobile?

</comment><comment><USER6> Probably the first tutorial that makes me want a tutorial to create that kind of tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome! What graphics library are you using?</comment>


A better shell for Android devices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/fb-adb

<comment><USER2> That's quite the desirable feature list! Some of those bugs are really old. I'll be interested to try it out and see whether this is stabler than the official adb version.

I know this is an Android project from Facebook, but are there plans to contribute this code to AOSP and get it merged upstream?

<comment><USER2> Oh, never mind.. having tried it out and looking briefly at the code, it seems it really only implements the adb shell command — it doesn't implement an adb server, and all other commands are delegated to the official adb binary. So there's very little if anything in common with the upstream code.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Edit Google Docs in the Shower via Amazon Echo - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/acucciniello/alexa-open-doc <comment><USER2> Will it work if I am not in the shower?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it will as long as you have an Amazon Echo. Stay tuned for the skill to be published. I submitted it last week for certification last week. In the meantime if you want to see videos of it working checkout out the project site here:[https://acucciniello.github.io/alexa-open- doc/](https://acucciniello.github.io/alexa-open-doc/)</comment></comment>


Toronto Hacker Looking for a Job - <AUTHOR>

Anyone looking for someone with mad skills in Toronto? <comment><USER2> Contact me thecaptcrunch[at}gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on your skills ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly PHP/Mysql, but I've built an photo blogging Android app and a iphone app with login, xml parse, form submission.</comment></comment>


Voynich Manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns - <AUTHOR> http://blog.christianperone.com/2016/01/voynich-manuscript-word-vectors-and-t-sne-visualization-of-some-patterns/?a=b <comment><USER2> I implemented the new t-SNE in sklearn, so I've got some experience in reading these diagrams. Unfortunately, as wonderful as the algorithm is, it's extremely hard to interpret what it means rigorously. I've seen many diagrams that look like this one -- and they were generated from actual noise. So take the plots with a big grain of salt :)

I'd be interested in seeing more direct evidence, like SVD factorizing the PMI matrix (which is what similar to what word2vec is doing) and seeing how much of the variance is explained by the first components. If you want to do this, check out: [https://minhlab.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/a-new-proof-for- the...](https://minhlab.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/a-new-proof-for-the- equivalence-of-word2vec-skip-gram-and-shifted-ppmi/)

<comment><USER3> i once read that high perplexity can generate embeddings that are very tightly bound on a unit circle...not sure if this is what is going on

<comment><USER4> The diagram shown is only a visualization. The actual word vectors have many dimensions. To reduce them to 2 dimensions, they use a method which tries to keep vectors that are similar as close to each other as possible, but also unsimilar words apart. This creates the shape seen on the scatter plot. Just looking at the scatter plot by itself doesn't tell you anything about the underlying data.

<comment><USER3> I did not claim anything about the underlying data.. The 2 dimensional embeddings were forced into the unit circle because the 'perplexity' hyper parameter for the t-sne was set too high.

From the guy who helped make t-sne:

When I run t-SNE, I get a strange 'ball' with uniformly distributed points?

This usually indicates you set your perplexity way too high. All points now want to be equidistant. The result you got is the closest you can get to equidistant points as is possible in two dimensions. If lowering the perplexity doesn't help, you might have run into the problem described in the next question. Similar effects may also occur when you use highly non-metric similarities as input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this approach has a lot of potential, and I wonder what a statistical comparison of character co-occurrences between the Voynich manuscript and other writing systems would reveal. For anyone curious, here is Stephen Bax's video on his 2014 findings.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?index=1&v=fpZD_3D8_WQ&list=LLATc...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?index=1&v=fpZD_3D8_WQ&list=LLATcCtXq6Eg7iFjmWQ1CNkA)

He believes he has translated about 10 words in the manuscript, which is huge, and he thinks the script may have been invented to express a language once spoken between the near east and the Himalayas, maybe Turkic or Caucasian...

<comment><USER6> It blows me away how many conflicting but semi-convincing theories there are about this manuscript (I read one fairly recently that argued for a New World origin of many of the plants, for instance). Which gets me thinking, has anyone analyzed the actual paper it's made out of to get any clues about where it originated? I know that spectroscopy can sometimes be used to make a guess at geographic origins of biological material but I haven't heard anything about it being used on the Voynich MS.

<comment><USER7> I've seen nothing that persuades me even a little bit away from the most common theory, which is that it's basically a hoax. It's a pseudo-occult book produced by some creative individual for fun and/or profit.

There are some contemporary alchemical manuscripts which are written at least partly in code, for example, but the illustrations strongly suggest that Voynich is pure fantasy.

<comment><USER8> It obeys statistical models of natural language that "fake text" would not at all. This sort of statistical modelling of language would almost certainly be unknown at the time it was produced. I find the hoax theory to be pretty unsatisfactory.

Even if the overall goal was some kind of hoax, the text itself almost certainly carries semantic meaning, and that in itself is fascinating due to its apparent indecipherability.

<comment><USER9> Any links to the "statistical" proof the that the text is not fake? I've seen just the opposite, that the statistics are really too weird, compared to anything we know. Which, to me, is a bit too much.

<comment><USER10> [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0066344)

<comment><USER9> Thanks.

Still, for me, if the text produced with the Cardan grille wouldn't have such statistics, that would be a proof for me that the "language" is real. That's what I hoped to find. If the Cardan grille generated text would pass the statistics too, I'd still more believe the text to be a kind of hoax.

The game isn't "lets find which statistics Voynich passes" but "let's disprove the hypothesis it is a hoax" by finding a test which all claimed hoaxes schemes obviously fail.

<comment><USER10> 1\. Cardan grille was invented in 1550. Voynish manuscript is almost 100 year older by carbon dating

3\. Why do you give hoax higher prior probability?

EDIT: I was wrong about the possible distributions so there's no point 2.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Technically, the velum seems to be older, we don't know when the manuscript is written.

3\. Because nothing else "fits" with anything else we know of. When we find first text in an unknown language, typically it's some religious thing. The illustrations are at best "dream" constructs when not intentional attempt to make an "original" hoax. Otherwise, it's obvious that it's not something out of some non-western culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You know, I really like this, because it's an example of the kind of structure machine learning finds without my own understanding of the training set clouding my understanding of the machine's understanding.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting approach, but I would say this is just a scratch. There are several factors that might really limit statistical analysis of this manuscript [1].

[1] [http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2013/03/09/this-week-a- talk-a...](http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2013/03/09/this-week-a-talk-at- stanford-on-the-voynich-manuscript)

<comment><USER4> That blog post is assuming that the manuscript is a cipher. If so then it is unlikely that statistical tools will help much. But I don't think that's been proven. Many seem to believe that it's a real lost language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >>> model.most_similar("queen")

[(u'princess', 0.519856333732605), (u'latifah', 0.47644317150115967),

</comment><comment><USER14> First time I hear about the cultural extinction theory. If that were the case, shouldn't there be more documents using the same script? But assuming the theory is right. Is there any way to decipher it without finding a Rosetta stone?

<comment><USER15> If there were more documents with the same script, then it would have been decoded a long time ago, and you probably would never have even heard about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do we get any new insight with this?

<comment><USER4> The author didn't give any novel insights about the text itself. It's just a proof of concept. If someone could translate a few words, it could give strong hints to what the translation should be of the other words.</comment></comment>


Focal Length and Angle - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/09/17/Focal-Angle <comment><USER2> ironically, 35mm equivalent focal length is what author wants.</comment>


Students protest US universities' use of facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/facial-recognition-us-colleges-ucla-ban <comment><USER2> Hopefully universities will remove in person attendance requirements and make it possible to get degrees online / from home. Classes with 200 people sitting together can't be good with communicable diseases around.

<comment><USER3> the university lecture is a very antiquated tradition of dissemination

i was told some time ago that it originates from the rarity of specialized books so the lecturer may have the only copy, if not one of very few copies, so lectures were used to make the contents available.

<comment><USER4> You were told wrong. A great book is not the same thing as an interactive lecture with a competent and engaging instructor. They are complimentary, but in no way does one obviate the need for the other.

<comment><USER5> A lecture is almost by definition not "interactive", and certainly if you have so many students that you are using facial recognition and iClickers to handle attendance the entire premise that you would react to individuals is infeasible.

<comment><USER6> Only if you assume you react to all individuals at the same time constantly. In our lectures we try to make them interactive, but the degree of interactiveness varies based on the level and number of attendants.

Questions are asked and answered in the 200 people lectures as well, and they improve the lectures for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another perspective would be - [https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/students- pr...](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/students-protest-over- lack-of-security-on-cuk-campus/article25031964.ece)

and: [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education- news/...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/free- speech-university-guidance-student-protests-equality-human-rights- commission-a8758541.html)

[edit add second url about how and why Universities urged to increase security]</comment>


I Built Myself a 16x20-Inch Camera in 10 Hours - <AUTHOR> http://petapixel.com/2016/01/19/i-built-myself-a-16x20-inch-camera-in-10-hours/ <comment><USER2> There was a retired physicist that refurbished an old aerial reconnaissance camera and painstakingly built a hybird film/digital workflow that resulted in claimed resolution equivalent to several gigapixels. I can't find his original site anywhere, but here's a _Popular Mechanics_ write up of it:

[http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-10/sharpest- image](http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-10/sharpest-image)

It's too bad because the original site had lots of technical detail and was a good lesson in understanding resolution limiting factors at each step of the image chain (e.g. effect of air density changes on sharpness of distant objects when shooting landscapes).

Update: hooray for archive.org. Check it out here:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060218113103/http://www.gigapx...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060218113103/http://www.gigapxl.org/)

<comment><USER3> Didn't realize that gigapxl was down.

One can purchase a Gigapan device to try to capture something similar though. [http://gigapan.com](http://gigapan.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the DSLR folks, the 16x20 Ambrotypes he's making are like a ~100+ MP image. If he had the lens quality and precision focal plane / standard mounting, he could project this onto a billboard at an unheard-of resolution.

<comment><USER5> I shoot large (4x5) and medium format film. I think that the 'resolution' is complicated by the entire workflow. He's using a very old lens with a very imprecise camera and imprecise film. The images should probably described as 'smooth' rather than necessarily high resolution. The old lens provides extraordinary sharpness in the center, but is soft on the edges.

That said, even with 6cmx6cm film negatives I feel like I often cannot really use the detail available. That is, unless I'm printing very large photos in a film-only workflow I don't really see all the detail. My scanner seems to be limited by the ability to keep the film flat rather than the actual scanning sensor. I don't usually bother scanning higher than 50MP.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I think you need to do wet scanning to really get the detail beyond ~40 MP.

<comment><USER6> Wet mounting will only help if the scanner focus can be optimized. I've got a Epson V750, and _if_ everything is just right, you can get a very good scan, but still noticeably short of what a drum scan will give you.

When I print my MF or 4x5 images, I don't really worry about 'all the detail', since as you say, you'd need a pretty big print to really see them. I'm just happy if they look nice and sharp on the wall.

I have to give mad props to the guys still doing collodion--that is way above my pay grade, as they say. And I don't want to carry glass plates on my bike. I try to limit the toxicness of the chemistry I have in the house as much as can, but I still like doing the lab work--it is satisfying to me in a way that no digital process is ever going to be.

<comment><USER7> You might be amazed; printing above the industry-standard 300ppi can give you a picture you can never get close enough too, but even at more reasonable viewing distances you can tell the difference in acutance. 480 ppi is a good value for the current crop of Epsons (you'd need a RIP and a lot of farting around to do better, but you _can_ get up to 720). It's sort of like the difference between a contact print and an optical print at the same size; there's no more detail as such at a typical viewing distance, but the edges of the details you can see are sharper.

As for the scanner, if you don't really need a car, you can always get a Flextight. (They really are that good, but they really are too expensive nonetheless.)

<comment><USER6> I'm aware of the affect of dpi on the print. Sure, I suppose I could also get a second-hand drum scanner, too; sometimes you can get them for cheap. A Flextight is nice but it still a CCD scanner, it is not going to match a PMT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Large format photography delivers amazing detail. Normally you'll see folks making their own plates past a certain point, but this DIY 14x32-inch camera on the Make Magazine site uses large format X-ray film, which you can get for cheap, since hospitals have been converting to digital equipment: [http://makezine.com/2011/05/17/gigantic-diy-ultra-large- form...](http://makezine.com/2011/05/17/gigantic-diy-ultra-large-format-film- camera/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Inspiring me to dust off the darkroom equipment. I even got to love the smell of Fixer!

</comment><comment><USER10> Use gloves, If I remember correctly part of the substrate is cadmium bromide.

<comment><USER11> There are a few less-toxic bromides that also work. But definitively something to keep in mind, some processes use nasty stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> related: Here is a video showing how a tintype is prepared (Basically the same process as his Ambrotypes, but on a metal plate instead of glass)

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

</comment><comment><USER12> Video about a guy who took this to the extreme and made a truck sized camera: [https://vimeo.com/39578584](https://vimeo.com/39578584) (thumbnail is slightly nsfw)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've always wanted to do that, but with a flatbed scanner in the back.</comment>


Trade a tweet for a product or service - <AUTHOR>

I am curious how would you feel if you could trade one tweet for a real product or service? Would you be willing to do it? Or would you consider it as spaming your social network? Thanks for your answers. <comment><USER2> Its the classic case of how you ask the question. Can you smoke while you pray?, probably not. Can you pray while you smoke?, hell yeah!!

Why not turn this around and say you provide a tool to the service providers that when a customer visits them and they see (using your tool) that the customer tweeted a positive sentiment about them. Hence, they give him discount.

Authenticity of the account and tweets is handled/verified by you.

This could be useful. I guess so. And I get the feel that there must be something out there like this already.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate this sort of thing, and if I really want to get something I use an alternate Twitter account with no real followers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Both. I would consider it spamming, but might do it if it was worth it to me.</comment>


Happy SysAdmin Appreciation Day - <AUTHOR> http://sysadminday.com/

<comment><USER2> Somehow I think a lot of the HN crowd (and particularly startups) will not understand the point here.

Saying you have dedicated sysadmin/ops staff is practically punishable by death in some tech circles, because DevOps means a junior dev can just write a few lines of ruby to setup, manage, monitor and maintain your entire tech stack, right?

</comment><comment><USER3> Obligatory:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTtlwJKXXU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTtlwJKXXU)</comment>


Show HN: Codevid-19, a Global and Distributed Covid-19 Hackathon - <AUTHOR> https://codevid19.com <comment><AUTHOR> With the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, many people are looking at a lot of free time stuck indoors. Avoid cabin fever and use that time to make a difference in your community and the fight against COVID-19 by joining CODEVID-19, a worldwide collaborative pandemic hackathon!

Our objective is to improve the quality of life of people during the pandemic! We believe faster, more effective and more available solutions/ideas/projects are preferred to slower, less useful and limited ones.

The hackathon has already been launched and teams are working, with many more coming online and exponential growth in global collaboration.

We are actively seeking global teams of developers, designers and passionate creators in collaboration with others in the domain of public health and emergency management. We also need judges, sponsors, and volunteers behind the scenes so reach out to email@example.com if you're interested.

While prizes and submission rules are being finalized, our goal is to have teams submit their final submissions at the end of April.

Join or create a project and get started at:

[https://findcollabs.com/hackathon/codevid-19-isp21fkqtjupchx...](https://findcollabs.com/hackathon/codevid-19-isp21fkqtjupchx7kjed)

You can also submit ideas, and collaborate with team mates and the community in real-time on our Slack.

[https://join.slack.com/t/codevid-19/shared_invite/zt- cs8aman...](https://join.slack.com/t/codevid-19/shared_invite/zt-cs8amank- jg7vUQeSUgX7K9cM9WZMfQ)

Contact: Mark Bennett firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW this is my first ever HN post. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know! Cheers, and stay safe out there!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a great intiative,over 800 devs now participating</comment>


Ask HN: How to approach writing a web crawler that can handle JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> Greetings,
I am interested in writing a web crawler that can handle JavaScript, i.e. that can access the DOM after any JavaScript has run.
I recognize that this could get arbitrarily complicated; however, I wanted to know whether anyone had any obvious pointers.  There do seem to be some nice Java--my preferred language--crawlers out there, i.e. https://github.com/yasserg/crawler4j.  However, they of course do not handle JS.
Is the standard approach to handling JS to use something like Selenium?  i.e. load the page in a browser and then pull the DOM into the crawler for processing?
Thanks. <comment> T-A I would probably use node-horseman [1], but then what do I know?

[1] [https://github.com/johntitus/node- horseman](https://github.com/johntitus/node-horseman)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll check it out. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> You want something like phantom.js

[http://phantomjs.org/](http://phantomjs.org/)

There are other ones that do well also, but phantom will likely do anything you need to do.</comment>