"Free" shipping is not actually free - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3061686/free-shipping-is-a-lie <comment><USER3> I don't mind if shipping isn't free. I do mind if the shipping cost isn't queriable until I:

1) Add the item to the cart

2) Create an account

3) Enter all my personal info

If your business makes it that much of a hassle to find out what shipping costs (presumably in order to capture sales), I'm indisposed to patronizing it. Transparency and lack of hassle are what I'm after, not free shipping.

<comment><USER4> We're building a tool that discloses shipping prices AND delivery dates up front, as soon as you add a product to the Cart.

Here's a popular site that uses it: [http://store.hufworldwide.com/](http://store.hufworldwide.com/)

Let me know what you think...

<comment><USER5> What, no. Tell me before I add to the cart, right in the product description page.

What kind of draconian world do I live in that I would need to add to the cart to compare prices.

<comment><USER6> Shipping(A+B) is typically less than Shipping(A) + Shipping(B).

In most cases shipping is a cost that's associated with an order, not with the item. It makes sense to show it in the shopping cart.

<comment><USER7> _> Shipping(A+B) is typically less than Shipping(A) + Shipping(B).

In most cases shipping is a cost that's associated with an order, not with the item._

That's true, but they could provide the marginal shipping cost of an item before it's added to the cart:

Shipping(currentCartContents + thisItem) - Shipping(currentCartContents)

In many cases the marginal shipping cost would be 0.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's confusing too. If you show a shipping cost on the item, your average consumer would expect that they could buy just that item for that shipping price. After all, doesn't everyone hate the Amazon Add-On Program for exactly that reason? It's Prime but not really Prime.

What if you have multiple tabs open? If you add another product in the meantime then the shipping cost quoted would be totally inaccurate. Could be too high, could also be too low depending on how your order crosses the weight/size thresholds.

Also, that would mean that you have to total up the weights and hit the shipping API for every single page request. Right now you usually only get an icon that tells you "3 items in cart", sometimes not even that much. If you have multiple warehouses this gets even more complex, you essentially have an NP-complete optimization problem. That may not even be possible to do in real time, let alone on every page load.

I just disagree in general over the value of the feature here. There is a lot of potential for misinformation and confusion, and consumers are already trained that they go to the shopping cart to get the shipping price. The shopping cart (the order) is the quantum used for shipping costs and it makes sense to put it there.

Again, to echo others, I hate sites that make me log in and go through the checkout process to get a shipping cost. But there's nothing wrong with going to the shopping cart and typing in my ZIP.

<comment><USER7> _> Well, that's confusing too. If you show a shipping cost on the item, your average consumer would expect that they could buy just that item for that shipping price._

Displaying it as "If you add this item to your current order, it would increase the order's shipping cost by an estimated $0.00" ought to allay any such confusion.

 _> If you have multiple warehouses this gets even more complex, you essentially have an NP-complete optimization problem. That may not even be possible to do in real time, let alone on every page load._

The shipping cost of the items in the cart could be calculated once whenever the contents of the cart changes, and the number cached. So you'd be doing one shipping calculation per page load, for the contents in the cart plus the item being viewed. And NPC or not, I don't think that would be prohibitively computationally expensive in most cases. After all, people don't typically order thousands of different products, that might ship from any of hundreds of different warehouses, in a single online order. If it made someone more likely to click the "Add to Cart" button on a given item, it might be worth it. And you could have some threshold (number of different products on the order, for example) above which the marginal shipping cost is not calculated and displayed.

<comment><USER8> I think y'all are proving the appeal of "free shipping". Retailers provide convenience, and people expect that figuring out the nooks and crannies of shipping costs is part of the service.

If it were about cost and not convenience, Jet's algorithms would've beaten out Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't think shipping companies were just delivering packages out of the kindness of their hearts. I just expect it to be included in the purchase price. I'd much rather have one price to consider rather than a really low initial price with a bunch of additional charges.

As a customer, adding a bunch of additional fees, even if they're reasonable, just makes me feel like I'm being nickel-and-dimed. Tell me the total amount you want me to pay you to get what I want and if it's in my price range I'll happily pay it.

<comment><USER10> >adding a bunch of additional fees [...] just makes me feel like I'm being nickel-and-dimed.

On the other hand, when I know the shipping costs are included in the price, it makes me feel like I'm being gouged on larger orders where the shipping cost per item should be lower.

<comment><USER11> A company I worked for actually sort of made up their shipping prices whole cloth. They had contracts with the shipping companies to get a good deal on shipping, and rarely passed those savings on. So most cases, they charged more than they were paying to ship your product, and in a few cases they charged less. So, the majority were subsidizing shipping costs for a few, with a hefty profit bump for the company. But I don't think they had any real competition, so I guess they could just charge whatever they thought people would pay. They even operated multiple brands for the same exact products/services, just to offer different prices and advertise from a different angle.

So, back to the point, regardless of whether the price is broken out or bundled, there's really no way to tell how badly you're being gouged. Unless you can find it cheaper someplace else, the only question is whether it is worth it to you at that price.

<comment><USER12> If I recall this is largely why eBay started charging the seller fees on the shipping cost (boy was that a loophole) and then heavily pushed sellers to move to free shipping.

On the flip side, as an eBay seller it's kind of painful to know that if I sell something for $X, shipping is eating $3+ of that - on top of the 10% cut for eBay and the 2% for PayPal. It makes it not worthwhile to me to list anything below $10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ok, so it seems nobody else is mentioning one of the big things that shocked me from the article: the claim that shipping, for the company that runs Saks Fifth Avenue, is more expensive than retail.

What? How on earth is a ridiculously high end Fifth Avenue retail location staffed with models and lots of hired security cheaper than shipping? Their Fifth Avenue location in particular is literally stuffed with expensive glass chandeliers. It's an ENORMOUS property on Fifth Avenue in NYC, the most expensive street in the world; one of their stores alone is worth four billion dollars. If you think "enormous" doesn't merit all caps, its shoe department has its own zip code. [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-usa-shoes- idUSN2435...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-usa-shoes- idUSN2435153420070524)

<comment><USER14> FWIW, selling shoes online - especially to pickier clients at higher prices - requires a high return rate. When you're shipping both ways with no revenue to show for it, that adds up quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> \- I'd rather have shipping be separate (but prominently displayed), so that buying multiple items in one order would be beneficial. But obviously a site has to have consistently good prices for this to make sense. (And eventually, a meta-buy engine that optimizes sourcing from multiple suppliers, but we can dream).

\- I figure the prominence of free shipping has more to do with price fixing by the manufacturers (minimum advertised prices, etc), and perhaps rate secrecy by shipping companies as well. Since walk-in stores build logistics into the price tag, online retailers had to move to that model as well to have comparable prices.

\- I still don't believe that direct shipping is three times the cost of brick and mortar fulfillment. I'd really like to see that accounting to make sure that it is including things like the full expense of running a retail store with employees, additional distribution centers, and clearance markdowns. I can see a strong temptation for a traditional brick and mortar retailer to count much of that as necessary overhead for their entire brand rather than attributing it directly to retail sales.

<comment><USER16> Jet.com calculates that for you. Free shipping...but the more you buy, the cheaper the stuff is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Retailers complaining about how Amazon is creating a race-to-the-bottom with free shipping calls to mind horse vets complaining about how automobiles are eating into their lifestyles. It's sooooo unfair!

Amazon is changing the world the way Standard Oil changed the world. If it's going in my house and it's not groceries, it's coming from Amazon. The buying and shipping experience is unparalleled. Amazon isn't one of these bespoke SF- only investor-moneygrab services, it's real technological progress on a world scale.

<comment><USER18> > Retailers complaining about how Amazon is creating a race-to-the-bottom with > free shipping calls to mind horse vets complaining about how automobiles are > eating into their lifestyles. It's sooooo unfair!

The horse vets found other employment.

The horses, by far and large, were butchered.

The question these days is - which of us are the vets, and which of us are the horses?

<comment><USER19> The vets were labor, the horses were capital/property. I'd say none of us are the horses.

<comment><USER18> The horses had no skills that were useful in the post-automobile world - <USER2> least, no skills that justified the expense of paying^Wfeeding them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I buy a product in a physical store the price of getting the product there is included. I don't pay the product + the shipping fee. It should be the same on the web.

<comment><USER21> It's a bit tougher online because shipping costs can vary a lot depending on where the customer lives and what they're buying.

For example, the cost of shipping me two boxes of cereal is barely higher than the cost of shipping me one box of cereal. The cost of shipping it to Alaska is much higher than the cost of shipping it to New York. In a store, the cost of getting two boxes of cereal to the store is, on average, about twice the cost of getting one box, and the cost is identical whether your customer is from New York or Alaska.

<comment><USER22> Your store scenario isn't true at all! It does not cost about twice as much to get two boxes of cereal into a store as one box. The same shipping economies are in play here. It actually costs less per box to get it into a store because they will bring in a pallet at a time. The real cost is the fact that you have a building and all of its costs with employees and all of their costs, etc. Shipping anything to Alaska is more expensive that to New York whether it is one box of cereal or a pallet. The difference is that the price for a box of cereal in Alaska will have that priced in vs the box in New York. The same can be done for online retail...except people won't understand it and get pissed and try to change their location reporting to try and get a lower price based on where they are located. You see, people don't view online shopping the same way as they view physical shopping. People will need to be reconditioned about online shopping now that we have the technology to do location based pricing thanks to geolocation reporting and other factors (like getting a zip code up front) that were not available when online shopping first came about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just a note for Americans that are not aware: the rest of the world, generally, pays a lot more for the same or inferior items. Some Canadian examples:

0 Shipping - Free shipping is much less common within and to canada; it's also more expensive, in my experience.

1 Duties/import broker;s fees - Can be tens of dollars, even for items whose value is about that.

2 Taxes - Typically, bringing across items with net value more than ~150USD will have taxes levied (~15%, depending)

3 Straight-up 'gouging' \- For example, the exact same book in canada will typically be 10-30% more, even taking into account exchange rates. I'm sure the differences can be partially explained but I've never seen good reasons.

4 Product differences - Cars are a good example here. In the US often the 'base' model will have features CA versions of the same cars require upgrade packages for.

5 Product Choice - The bigger US market means more colours (or colors even), wattages etc to choose from

6 Warranties - I haven't taken a survey but whenever I've checked the US warranties are as good or better.

And that is just CA, EU countries generally have it worse if my UK friends are to be believed.

</comment><comment><USER24> I know a lot of people like the Book Depository due to their "free" shipping. They actually adjust their price using geo IP data. VPN's can save you a lot.

Someone made a website to show you the pricing discrepancies per location:

[http://www.bookdepository.cheap/Lisp-Small-Pieces- Christian-...](http://www.bookdepository.cheap/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian- Queinnec/9780521545662?a_aid=bentanweihao0)

<comment><USER25> Shouldn't the shipping costs be based on where you're shipping to rather than where you're browsing from? Or am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER26> You only give them the destination when you check out. They want to factor shipping into the price transparently from the start. GeoIP data is available from the very moment you load the webpage, your shipping address is not.

<comment><USER25> That seems odd because if I happen to be browsing from abroad I might be put off by the shipping costs, which would turn out not to even be accurate for the destination I want.

> They want to factor shipping into the price transparently from the start

I guess if they made it obvious that that's what they were doing (stating their assumption about your destination) it would be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Free shipping is a lie, but the average consumer thinks of dealing with shipping costs separately as pesky, and Amazon & eBay have configured their fees to charge you more on any extra shipping line item to encourage sellers to make shipping "free".

I don't see "free" shipping going away, nor do I see Amazon's new delivery service succeeding where DHL and other have floundered in the past, since you need a certain volume in that business to even be viable, and Amazon has stated they can't push that volume alone to make running a shipping service make sense.

What might happen, and what I hope happens is the lower end, smaller businesses get better next day and 2 day shipping prices. Currently, from one wholesaler I can order a 50lb box of hardware, and UPS charges them $21 to $23 to ship it from Chicago to Seattle in the span of about 18hrs and get it on my doorstep.

Another much smaller vendor I deal with can't get anywhere near that pricing, half that weight/size box will run me $150 easily, with ground (a week and change) being $40 usually for a 25lb box from them.

Edit: Another layer to this is USPS and China Post teamed up a while back and offer Chinese sellers dirt cheap ePacket shipping, where 1lb of goods can be moved to the US for $5, whereas USPS charges $50 to the American seller to ship something to China [1]. Essentially, it makes American online sellers uncompetitive in our own market. This is why people like Trump, since he says he'll put a 35% tariff on foreign imports and end programs like ePacket (not supporting him though, just to be clear).

[1] - [https://www.skubana.com/e-commerce-trends/the-usps- epacket-p...](https://www.skubana.com/e-commerce-trends/the-usps-epacket- program-and-how-it-affects-your-e-commerce/)

<comment><USER28> It is not unreasonable for a customer to expect the price seen on an item to be what it will cost in total.

Amazon would be unusable for comparison shopping if you needed to go through checkout to get the full price with shipping.

<comment><USER27> Definitely, you should be able to get a shipping price without going into the checkout, Amazon makes it quite difficult compared to Aliexpress & eBay when it comes to finding out shipping prices, to the point that I avoid shopping on there with a rare exception occurring every 6 months or so.

For the average shopper, pricing in shipping and sales tax will make them buy more online. Breaking out sales tax has caused a 9% sales drop in states Amazon charges sales tax in.

<comment><USER29> >Breaking out sales tax has caused a 9% sales drop in states Amazon charges sales tax in.

Note it's really "collects" sales tax in. Buyers still, in principle, owe use taxes on the purchase--which individuals often don't pay of course.

I don't think it's so much a matter of whether sales tax is bundled or not though. For big ticket electronics purchases, for example, the same item is often available for the same price with "free" shipping from other online resellers who don't collect sales tax--and is cheaper for many consumers as a result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shipping directly to consumers is more expensive and energy consuming than shipping to a single location (e.g. a brick and mortar store).

However what this article is neglecting is that brick and mortar stores are built where people go to them. The land and building cost money, which the store typically pays for through a lease.

So, yes, shipping isn't free. But having products sit on a shelf in a store in the city isn't free either. Especially if said products depreciate in value and aren't sold quickly.

Basically, look at why RadioShack went bankrupt to see how this can backfire for brick and mortar.

Also, "Free" shipping from China isn't. The cost of shipping from China is subsidized by other countries. I remember reading that the price to ship something from China to your house in the US, USPS gets paid less than it costs them to ship.

Shipping rates from China are up for review soon, and the industry is expecting their rates to be re-adjusted, after which ordering from China will get a lot more expensive...

<comment><USER31> When will they come up for review? I want to know when the cut off is for placing orders at the current rates.

<comment><USER30> Can't remember when, but here's an article on it:

[http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy- chinese...](http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese- shipping)

Edit: "As part of this reform process, China will be transitioned in 2016 into a category for more developed nations, who generally pay higher terminal dues."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > _Still, someone has to pay the cost of shipping._

Yeah, and this article managed to get an unexpected rise out of me, touching on my experience in municipal finance, leading me to want to yell:

"Right and somebody has to pay the cost of maintaining the infrastructures like ports and airports and roads and I don't see anybody lining up to fork over the cash out of effing altruism these days."

Like, I get it, we all want free stuff, but dwindling tax bases and constant bitching about taxes just avoids dealing with the more practical angles of societal function(s).

</comment><comment><USER33> With Amazon Prime I am starting to feel like I am paying for shipping twice, first for Prime then baked into the item price too.

Very often I am looking at an item that would cost £5 in a store and it costs £7 with prime. Alternatively I can buy it from a non-prime marketplace seller for £4 + 3 in shipping. Then there is an "add-on item" for £5 where I have to buy at least £30 in total. And finally a 4-pack for £21 with free shipping. Either way I am clearly paying for the shipping.

<comment><USER34> What gets me, is that frequently when the item price+shipping are added together the $.01 used books cost more than the new ones. Often by 30-50%. There were articles a few years ago about how people were making more from amazon's handling charges because the US post shipping rates on books were so inexpensive that they would have been listing the books for free if it was possible. That was even before amazon seemingly caught on and increased the shipping charges even more.

<comment><USER6> I had the opposite experience. During college I used to sell a lot of textbooks on Half.com, and shipping costs would almost always eat into the item price.

Out of the standard media-mail $3.99 hardcover shipping price, Half.com gives the seller $3.04. For combined shipping, each additional item costs $2.49 and Half.com gives the seller $1.40.

Out of the expedited $5.99 price, Half.com gives the seller $5.24. For combined shipping, each additional item costs $4.49 and Half.com gives the seller $3.49.

Good luck shipping a textbook for $3, even by media mail. I would hand-wrap each book using some bubble-wrap and kraft paper (a clean paper grocery bag) to save costs on packaging, but shipping alone costs more than the reimbursements. Some of my textbooks are essentially worthless since if I sold for the going price ($0.99) I would actually lose money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have no problem paying for shipping as a separate item. It is frustrating though when sites make it hard to figure out what the shipping will be. The good sites let you identify down to your city without having to enter other details (like email address, or even credit card details) before you even get to the check-out phase.

I will often play around with the order to try and maximise against the shipping cost. e.g., I use to order protein bars and would order the maximum number that wouldn't bump me up to the next shipping class, to get the best value per bar.

My biggest gripe, living in the Antipodes, is that many foreign companies have really expensive shipping costs to ship internationally. I suspect we're often not a big enough market to make it worthwhile for them to fine-tune the costs, but it still sucks when shipping can be 40-60% of the cost of an order.

e.g. I really want to try out some Death Wish Coffee, but ordering 2 lbs at US$38 plus US$27 to ship to Australia, vs US$6 for US shipping, sucks.

Some places feel like they are really gouging you on the shipping costs. (Not saying that's the case with the coffee above, just that it costs a lot.)

<comment><USER36> I suspect the reason is that it is just straight up expensive to ship to Australia from most places. We're actually quite a long way way. Adding to this is that most only retailers aren't shipping enough overseas to negotiate bulk rates like they can for domestic shipping.

The exception is businesses that do ship a large amount to Australia. Examples of this are online book and bicycle retailers in the UK and Amazon themsleves in the US. Their lower shipping prices are likely a combination of subsidisation and bulk discounts.

If you want confirmation Death Wish isn't trying to rip you off, compare against the USPS pricing calculator for a similar package. You can also check against what a freight forwarder (who do get bulk discounts) charge, and you'll see it's not much less. I recently got a similar package shipped to me and I remember paying pretty much bang on $27.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't care if a company makes shipping "free" and raises the price. Of course they shouldn't make themselves unprofitable by undercharging, just charge a reasonable price, and in the other direction I'd prefer seeing the whole cost up front to having a disingenuous "cheap" product that has "shipping" so gold-plated it's obvious they're pocketing it.

</comment><comment><USER6> If the item is offered at a competitive price then it effectively _is_ free.

For example many items are sold at a fixed MSRP and no retailer will undercut it, but some retailers will offer free shipping while others charge me. That's actually free shipping from my perspective.

The same logic applies retailers that offer "free shipping for orders above $X". Can you argue that the cost is rolled in anyway? Sure, but rational actors think at the margins. The _alternative_ is effectively paying twice for shipping, both the explicit shipping charge and the upcharge rolled into the price. Again, if the prices are competitive the retailer is essentially eating shipping costs for you.

</comment><comment><USER38> _> "The economics are clear... direct-to-home has a supply chain cost three times higher than a store-based model."_

That surprised me. Does anybody have more details as to why that would be?

<comment><USER39> In the store-based model, the customer handles the 'last mile' of getting the product from a distribution center (the store) to their home.

<comment><USER40> Yes, but direct-to-home doesn't need to pay urban rent or salaries for its distribution centers. There must be some other factor. Perhaps the costs of maintaining a reliable e-commerce site?

<comment><USER41> It's not clear to me that "supply chain cost" includes the cost of the storefront.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> While not "free", also realize the numbers displayed by companies displaying the number separately are often complete and total fiction, even if you consider handling/packaging/whatever cost.

IE next day air from within (let's call it a few hundred miles) does not cost them $50-75 on a 1 lb package, because the volume discount of any company that does any real amount of shipping is very high.

The shipping cost at a good volume discount is <$15 for something like priority overnight (and the cost at a great volume discount is closer to 7.50).

Even if you consider their cost to make your order slightly special, package it, whatever, it's still complete fiction.

I often see companies with separate shipping tell me something absurd, like it'll be $150 to overnight something. At which point i just tell them to charge my fedex account instead, because it costs ~10-20% of that.

So when i hear "they are having trouble keeping up with costs", maybe that's because they are trying to put too much of their margin into handling fees.

</comment><comment><USER43> pets.com went out of business trying to ship 50lb bags of dog food for example with "free" shipping

<comment><USER19> I just ordered a big bag of dog food off Amazon, with free shipping, for less than the same brand costs at Petco. I'm not sure whether they're taking a loss on that, or maybe dog food is just extremely marked up in brick & mortar stores.

<comment><USER44> __Everything __is extremely marked-up in pet stores.

Pet water fountain at PetSmart: $50 Exact same fountain at Amazon: $25

But I've noticed that pet stores (or at least Petsmart) are starting to do price-discrimination by having online-only 'sales'. Purchase online at 25% off, pickup in store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> _Direct-to-home has a supply chain cost three times higher than a store-based model... It 's because it's really expensive ... It's a very expensive model and it's not less expensive than the store-based model_

I don't doubt that's true, but you're not going to get me into the store, so if you want my business you're going to have to ship my purchase to me, so figure out how to make it sustainable. Regardless of how much more expensive mail-order is, it's going to become a larger part of retail business.

I suspect that it's much worse for merchants that have a brick and mortar presence - they are paying a lot of money for those stores, and the incremental cost of serving one more customer is virtually zero, while there's a material cost to pack and ship a package.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's easy to imagine a scene when self-driving trucks have multiple compartments and they pull up to your house, send you a notification on your phone and you run outside to pick up your package. Perhaps we're talking 10 years maximum?

<comment><USER47> Sure. I think there's actually still a lot of room for improvements in the shipping industry. I'm currently trying to ship a bike from San Francisco to Toronto, and the cheapest rate that I can find is around $200 with ground shipping, 5 days. I can fly myself from San Francisco to Toronto for $250. Is my bike getting meal service? Why is it still so expensive? What we need is better APIs from the major shipping companies so that we can more easily shop around. I think the major shipping companies could also work together to have possible a single point of access for users and the shipping companies can bid on which shipments they want to take. Shipping really is part of the infrastructure of a country. Maybe the government can help add some cost saving improvements to the industry?

<comment><USER48> [https://www.bikeflights.com](https://www.bikeflights.com) does exactly that negotiating rates for these linearly oversized packages, though it's pretty much only FedEx bidding on them

They're $40-60 domestically, and looks like San Francisco to Toronto is $125

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> There are been times where a store offers free shipping over $x.xx but offers free return shipping. So why not just add on a few things you don't want and then return them when you get them? You get free shipping on the things you want.

</comment><comment><USER50> I can't believe that anybody has not mentioned ShopRunner [0] in this "analysis"!

[0]: [https://www.shoprunner.com/](https://www.shoprunner.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Why is shipping so expensive in US? I live in China, and virtually every online stores here offer free shipping, even for for example a screwdriver which worth less than 5 dollars. I once researched into it and found that if you are a store owner and have many packages to be delivered everyday, the price can be as low as 30~50 cents per package.

And it's really efficient. Basically no shipping would take more than a week. Average time would be 3~4 days.

<comment><USER52> Your country's highest minimum wage is what the _lowest possible earner_ in the US (federal minimum) makes in about 1 week, assuming just 40 hours of work.

That's also why food delivery is cheap/free in Asia as well as cleaning. I'm an expat in Hong Kong and these people basically own modern slaves. ~$550 + food and shelter for a live in worker that works 6 days per week.

Anyone in the US that touches the delivery process is getting decent money compared to a low skilled Chinese worker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I don't understand why shipping has to deliver to EVERY address, wouldn't is save them millions to leave at secure locations spread across their territory.

In the future I think they'll merge a shop/showroom with collection center. That way people can see products for real while they collect (it'll serve as advertising) and there will be more land for housing to be built due to less stores being around.

<comment><USER54> There are parcel lockers which are very eficinet(10X producitivity increase for delivery drivers) .

But they require real-estate, and in the end the ansolute shipping cost isn't terribly far from home shipping(in urban environments) , and at that difference, people prefer home shipping, in the US.

But parcel lockers are quite popular in the UK, Poland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Speaking of Amazon - if you have Prime membership and buy something with "free" shipping from third-party seller fulfilling via Prime, seller still pays ~25% - 30% of the total to amazon to ship this product. So all sellers factor in shipping into prime price.

Where it get really bad - when you do NOT have prime - you also get charged extra for shipping, yet seller still pays same cut to amazon! :)

</comment><comment><USER56> Free shipping seemed to be a necessary evil to get people shopping online. First free shipping and then same-day delivery got people past all of their mental hangups of online shopping. Now with more small businesses entering ecomm, there will probably be more consumer flexibility on shipping costs. But to get people in the door, it was necessary.

</comment><comment><USER57> Remembers me of [http://romain.goyet.com/articles/free_shipping_from_china/](http://romain.goyet.com/articles/free_shipping_from_china/)

Where the author wonders how a single button, costing less than 5 dollars, can have free shipping from china to france.

<comment><USER31> AliExpress puts a markup on the actual item versus the price that you would pay in China. That could partially explain it.

In other posts in this discussion, kogepathic claimed that the cost of shipping is subsidized by other countries and webscaleizfun even posted a link to evidence of the US subsidizing the cost of shipping between China/HongKong and the US:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12857444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12857444) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854573)

Maybe France has a similar arrangement. That combined with the markup Aliexpress charges would explain it.

Edit: According to jeromegv's link to the Washington Post, this is by international treaty and almost every country is subject to it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12857145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12857145) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the- postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from- china/)

Consequently, France is subsidizing the shipping costs for AliExpress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> On a personal level, from ebay experiences and such (in the hundreds of items), this is what I've seen. Anecdotally and empirically, buyers largely prefer if the price of shipping is added to the item's price, and marked as "free shipping", over being marked separately.

<comment><USER31> They do not earn eBay bucks on shipping fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> "For many online shops, the cost of a free shipment is either folded into the prices for items or funded by investors."

No kidding. I'm having trouble imagining how the cost of free shipments is paid for by the remaining shops, if there are any.

(Amazon Prime is pre-paid, unmetered, not free, shipping)

</comment><comment><USER60> Have there been any deep-dives into what Amazon pays for shipping on a per- package basis? At their volume, I can imagine that the cost per item shipped has the potential to be low enough that it costs more for the worker to put the item in the box than it does to ship the item out.

<comment><USER61> I'm sure their volume drives deep discounts.

Their scale also allows them to have multiple warehouses spread across the US, avoiding high cost / long distance shipping of individual items.

They have other levers as well. For example, they cap what third-party listings on Amazon can charge for shipping...often the cap is lower than the actual shipping cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Also consider by charging shipping, the seller might refund only the item price rather than total (depends on reason of return). While if the seller offered free shipping, they may be obligated to refund the entire price, even though shipping was included somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER63> Free shipping is still valuable if you might return it, because shipping costs are not typically not refunded, but shipping costs baked into the purchase price are, unless they specifically state a restocking or return fee.

</comment><comment><USER64> In the same vein, it is a lie that ad-supported websites are free.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12810076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12810076)

</comment><comment><USER65> > Maybe this is why so many of us have so much trouble emulating Amazon's > model and making any money. It's because it's really expensive and it's also > why Amazon's had trouble making money on merchandising sales. It's a very > expensive model and it's not less expensive than the store-based model.

Amazon's savings come from it's lack of stores. Retail storefronts are expensive in terms of staff, cleaning/managing, rent, utilities, taxes. A warehouse in rural Indiana has a lower operating cost and can far more efficiently prepare items for customers on a per-worker, per-rent-dollar, per- utility-bill-dollar basis. And at scale, you only have to have a small margin to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER66> Futurama fans of course know about this: [http://m.imgur.com/BiYzbP4?r](http://m.imgur.com/BiYzbP4?r)

</comment><comment><USER67> TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. This applies to services like education and healthcare as much as it does to shipping.

If there's one word I wish we could banish from common usage, it's "free" (as in gratis, not libre).

Discussions around economics and politics would become much more transparent and honest if we used phrases like "taxpayer funded education" and "customer subsidized shipping".

</comment><comment><USER68> Someone is already working on a reverse free shipping. Like "everything a $1"

E.g. pay $15 and fill your up your cart. Choose from thousands of items. Each combo has a value, of course. Shipping free.

Have third parties pay to place produce samples inside your boxes. Like Bill messages of the past

</comment><comment><USER69> What is the truth anyway? Business news?

</comment><comment><USER70> Economy 101

</comment><comment><USER71> It's more than just free shipping. It's the two-day shipping that Amazon and Walmart are offering with Prime and Shipping Pass.

The problem with the smaller e-commerce shops is that most people aren't going to subscribe to 3,4,etc... annual service fees...especially for small places.

It took me a while to justify Walmart.com's Shipping Pass fee, but once I saw the huge discounts that I can get on bathroom and household stuff, then I got on board.

</comment><comment><USER72> Unless I know something is what I really want, I'll buy it in a store. Clothes are a good example- returning something because it doesn't fit is a hassle (because the shipping is expensive so there is an incentive to make it a hassle), so I don't do it. And so the supposed savings from buying online evaporate. (And of course stores prevent the problem in the first place because you can try it on.) I used to buy a lot of clothes online but now I basically never do. The experience really kinda sucks.

<comment><USER73> Tee shirts just fit. Polo and casual business wear just fit. Underwear is simple for guys, if the old one fit, the identically spec'd new one will fit (my wife claims that is not the case for women). For about a decade until quality fell thru the floor my default "asphalt hiking athletic shoe" for long distance urban exercise was, per my amazon list of orders, a "New Balance Men MX623 10.5 4E" and they fit like a glove every time. Not even a break-in period believe it or not, off with the old shoe on with the new. Pants just fit. Buddys jeans made in the USA just fit. For footwear if you spend enough money it fits, Thorogood / Weinbrenner products are very expensive and made in Wisconsin and fit perfectly out of the box like a glove; they also last forever. If you have to ask if you can afford them the answer is no, but they last for a decade or two so the annual cost is actually cheaper than buying cheap boots.

I would not attempt a tailored suit over the internet, your local tailor is not likely going to be amused you bought it online when you bring it in for adjustment. My wife can spend a seemingly infinite amount of time trying on different cocktail dresses. Not all stores for all clothes will go out of business. Merely almost all of them.

I'm just calling out that maybe 95% of my clothing was either a gift or purchased online and I've never had the slightest problem. Generally speaking things that involve paying a tailor probably should be purchased directly from a tailor but other than that...

<comment><USER6> Actually it's quite easy to make clothing to measure if you take proper measurements. My SO makes a lot of specialty outfits for cosplayers and theater shows, and she regularly makes outfits for people she's never measured herself. They usually fit perfectly.

Your local tailor will gladly take these measurements for you. $20 for five minutes of work is easy money. Also, why would a tailor not be amused if you brought them a product and paid them to alter it? Not all alterations are possible of course, but they'll be happy to try. In fact, AFAIK it's common advice that you can get a generic suit from Men's Wearhouse or something and get it tailored up to look nice...

Most tailors are perfectly aware they're competing with mass-produced clothing from Asia. There's some bargains especially if you are only going to wear it once or twice. But in the end you usually get what you pay for, the quality and durability is not as good as from a tailor who did it right.

The other thing is the sizing - a lot of stuff from Asia is sized for tiny Asian people, especially women's clothing is often several sizes smaller than US clothing. But on the other hand sometimes it's department-store clothing that is being sold off-label direct from the factory. I would look at it as largely the same bag in terms of quality. Not every department-store dress is made to last either.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What deep learning papers should I implement to learn? - <AUTHOR> Andrew Ng has often stated that the best approach (that he has seen) to mastering DL is to start reading papers and then to implement them.
But the question remains where to start.
Now my goal is to curate a list of papers and their difficulty to implement them so that anyone can have a roadmap of papers to learn deep learning.
If you want to help, please rank the papers you think are worth implementing in the following categories: [Beginner] [Intermediate] [Advanced] [Pro] <comment><USER2> Good lists: [https://github.com/songrotek/Deep-Learning-Papers-Reading- Ro...](https://github.com/songrotek/Deep-Learning-Papers-Reading-Roadmap) and [https://github.com/priyaank/deep-learning](https://github.com/priyaank/deep- learning)</comment>


Ask HN: Why my posts are flagged? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The best way to handle this is to contact the moderators using the contact link.

Looking through the history of your posts which is available to anyone on the profile page I see:

1\. Some posts were flagged and others were not. So the posts vary quality.

2\. Among the flagged posts, some were probably flagged as 'duplicate'. For example the post about Google Spanner. The duplicate mechanism is subtle. While the ArsTechnica story was not popular, the _news_ about Google Spanner was and there was a very substantial news discussion.

3\. Some of the flagged posts appear to be what some users would consider low quality by Hacker News standards. In those situations, users often flag the content.

4\. It is possible but not certain, that some of the posts came from sites that have such a high probability of containing low quality content that any link from those sites is killed just for the sake of reducing noise. Turning on 'Show Dead' in your profile and going to the |new| page will allow you to see that this is not uncommon.

Finally, it can often take some time to gain intuition about what does and does not make a good story on Hacker News. It usually takes even longer to gain a feeling for what makes a good HN comment.

My advice is simply to find better stories because that's what _everyone_ has to do.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the detailed feedback.</comment></comment>


I supported App.net with $50/year, here's why - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.co/2012/07/18/i-supported-app-net-with-50month-heres-why/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AndrewChensBlog+%28Andrew+Chen+%28%40andrewchen%29%29

<comment><USER2> After watching the video, from a consumer's perspective I have literally no idea what the service is going to do. Is it sharing things with my friends? Is it a clone of twitter that is more developer friendly but that costs money to use? Is it a new HTTP? Apologies if I'm being dense but I really don't understand.

<comment><USER3> Me too. What is it?

Is it kind of facebook or twitter? >he mentioned it is paid? So how you acquire customers?

Is it kind of streamed timeline as a servers?

If he can't tell me what it does in 1 min, I never ever gonna pre-order or back it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "App.net has the potential to be something more fundamental, like the web (HTTP) or email (SMTP)."

Unfortunately, I have my reservations about this ... both of those protocols are, by definition, decentralized. They don't depend on a specific 3rd party provider as is the case with app.net (unless I'm misunderstanding their proposal). That definitely seems like the biggest weakness with app.net, especially for people who want it to become a ubiquitous piece of infrastructure.

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for app.net, and I hope they really deliver ... I've had several ideas where a generic 'feed' would be quite useful.

<comment><USER5> It reminded me of this comic: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

Add one more private feed company to the pile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "App.net has the potential to be something more fundamental, like the web (HTTP) or email (SMTP)"

To do this, wouldn't you need to abandon the centralized server? Neither of these services are paid products (the hosting is paid).

A big reason that services like twitter, Facebook, and linkedin work at all is that they are centralized. Value is derived from all the accounts and data being in one place. Arguably THE reason that HTTP and SMTP work is that they are decentralized. Anyone can implement the protocol on any server.

I don't really see how app.net can straddle this divide. From what I can tell, the current aim is to be a centralized service that has an api. That still sounds to me like a paid twitter with a less restrictive api. Seems to me the focus needs to actually be on an open protocol. One that any server can implement to display a feed[1].

[1] RSS? Maybe with some more bells and whistle.

<comment><USER6> Another thought:

Seems like what App.net should be doing is designing and promoting an open protocol for feeds and then become global indexer of those feeds. Of course, Google might give them some trouble. I am sure Google is chomping at the bit to index the next evolution of the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I correct that App.net is to Twitter what Vimeo is to Youtube? That is, a paid service with no ads. If so, why not just launch the service like any other web company? They can bootstrap with paying first customers. As a web developer myself I know how expensive a project like this can be, but I don't see why I should pledge before the service is even launched. How do I know I'll even like what they build?

<comment><USER8> It's always hard to find a market for your product. This is one way to make sure there is a market before building a product.

<comment><USER7> True, but it's not a competitive advantage in this age of countless social networks to ask for $50 before launch. And to overcome the bias towards non- paid services there will have to be some serious advantages. If it's just Twitter with a better API I can only conceive paying $5 a year for personal use.

<comment><USER8> I am not so sure that is the case. Kevin Kelly wrote about having 1000 true fans. I think his argument works here too.

[http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fan...](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php)

If you think about how Twitter needs to reach 100 of millions if not billions of users to possibly become sustainable, or figure out how to squeeze more money out of the users they have. Then compare that to the App.net proposal. Especially the part about making the user the customer. Then you can see how having a small set of faithful users might be more sustainable.

Dalton wrote more about this in his post: <http://daltoncaldwell.com/an- audacious-proposal>

disclaimer: I work for App.net, but this post represents my own views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I watched the video 5 times yesterday and 2 times today, I still have no idea what the product is, only thing I know is that it is a paid service with no ads, I feel like idiot.

<comment><USER8> Have you read this <http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal>

<comment><USER10> Even after that it's still not clear. So it's a messaging service without ads? Uhh... So what? How is this audacious or fundamental to the web in any way, shape or form? It just sounds like a Twitter rip off with a different business model. I'm not even sure what the business model is supposed to be except that it's 'not ads'. What a confusing pile of confusion this project is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi, OP here. I failed on the title, it's $50/year not month. I fixed it on my blog but now it's too late :(

</comment><comment><USER12> Looking at how much they raised until now, I'd say that if they don't have some powerful communication relays planned for the next 2 weeks they won't make it to $500k.

I don't know whether this is due to the fact that they're not on Kickstarter or that the project is just not viral/exciting/relevant enough.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this kinda the goal of Status.net?

<comment><USER14> This is what I don't understand. Status.net is a great, open, decentralized/federated platform but we still have developers reinventing the wheel. I see why I should support App.net when they haven't said anything about how open their platform will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At first I was skeptical, but look at how successful Facebook's Open Graph is for a range of "social" platforms. Facebook is a pain to develop for, so if app.net is significantly easier it would make me think twice about integrating into Facebook first.

<comment><USER16> The reason why you develop for FB first is because they have the users. Are you going to develop for app.net first if the users are not using app.net? I think it is really risky to build ontop of an API that has few users. What if you dedicate the time integrating app.net and then 10 months later they decide to fold. I integrated picplzs API and a few months later they decided to fold the service. Complete waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope they really do an awesome job on implementing this. Nobody wants another OpenID or Diaspora (not that they were bad projects, but it just shows how disconnected hackers can be from masses). I would hate this thing to end up as a hacker's toy.

</comment><comment><USER18> If we're talking real-time feed... I think app.net's idea is a step in the right direction. However decentralized architecture will take time. The first step is to create a generic feed experience.

We are actually starting to roll out <http://friendbox.io> \- A real-time social platform for apps. Ultimately aiming to create an instant feed for any mobile game or app. Will be open source so you could design and share UI's, flows etc.

Don't back us, just join us :) <https://developer.friendbox.io/signup>

</comment><comment><USER19> > (Note that I don't actually know what it's going to be, I'm just writing > about what I hope it will be!)

I wonder how many other people are kvelling about what they hope it will be.

> Today, feeds are owned by companies, but what if they don't have to be?

Well, wouldn't App.net _be_ the big company?

</comment><comment><USER20> So what is bad in advertising! do you think they are harm! or you dont' like! do you advertise! or you dont advertise at all for your site! without advertising how you get s ome traction!

<comment><USER10> Your communication style! is very unusual! even questions end with an exclamation! am I the only one who's confused!

<comment><USER21> ! misunderstood!

<comment><USER20> :) surprising?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> $50? With all the cake he's making? Maybe there really is a depression out there.</comment>


The World's Biggest Wealth Manager Won't Touch Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-17/ubs-shuns-bitcoin-allocations-due-to-threat-of-crypto-crackdown <comment><USER2> >"All it would take would be one terrorist incident in the U.S. funded by bitcoin for the U.S. regulator to much more seriously step in and take action, he said. "That's a risk, an unquantifiable risk, bitcoin has that another currency doesn't."

You can't make this up... or maybe I'm not understanding something. So, what's currently funding terrorist attacks?

<comment><USER3> I don't understand the comment either.

It's not like terrorist groups are currently un-funded. Cash is still king around illegal activities of all kinds. Why is using bitcoin for illegal activity any different than untraceable cash?

<comment><USER4> Your points are valid, but I think you're misunderstanding his point. If a terrorist attack happened that was funded via Bitcoin, and could've _only_ been funded via Bitcoin (including a false-flag) the governments would throw the book at it. This could be terrorist groups sending BTC to legit US citizens who purchase things (like weapons) legally and then use them in an attack, &c.

<comment><USER5> The "could've only been funded via Bitcoin" part isn't even necessary. The US government is kind of crazy when it comes to terrorism. Any connection between Bitcoin and terrorism that gets a lot of public attention is likely to result in major legal problems. It doesn't matter whether or not the fear is well founded or whether Bitcoin's role was incidental. Look at how much pressure there is to crack down on encryption in general, and that would have far wider-reaching consequences than regulating a cryptocurrency only a tiny percentage of people actually use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad to see this, but I don't think the content is particularly on point (or compelling really).

A large amount of Bitcoin reporting at the moment is grossly irresponsible. This "Bitcoin will be $1M each" is fueling bad decision making on the part of the ordinary punter.

Right now there is a major civil war in the Bitcoin camp (BTC vs BCH). It's playing out as we speak. Whatever your horse in that race, it's extremely volatile. Not only that, there are other tokens, shady ICOs, exchanges with suspect resilience.

It's also impossible that your on-the-street investor can be informed enough to make a good choice. This is really concerning.

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes sense - government could instantly prevent BTC from gaining mainstream adoption as a currency. Unclear how price would move if BTC was only used for store-of-value only.

In Venezuela, people go to jail under treason laws if they get caught mining. [1]

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/venezuela-is-one-of-the- worl...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/venezuela-is-one-of-the-worlds-most- dangerous-places-to-mine-bitcoin.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> > Bitcoin has also not reached the critical mass to be considered a viable > currency to invest in, UBS's Mark Haefele said in an interview. The total > sum of all cryptocurrencies is "not even the size of some of the smaller > currencies" that UBS would allocate to, he said.

> "All it would take would be one terrorist incident in the U.S. funded by > bitcoin for the U.S. regulator to much more seriously step in and take > action, he said. "That's a risk, an unquantifiable risk, bitcoin has that > another currency doesn't."

These two taken together seem to paint two very different pictures for bitcoin.

1) Bitcoin makes it past the point where a couple singular bad acts pushes governments to crush it. Bitcoin sheds almost all of the value that was there as speculation. Value potentially crashes all the way down to ~1USD, prices before mtgox trading really started. Bitcoin continues to run, more and more over encrypted channels or TOR. Mining is prosecuted and only done in some states, or clandestinely (see mining in Venezuela). Bitcoin continues to be used on the dark markets of the internet.

2) Bitcoin is adopted by wallstreet, action against bitcoin is prevented and tempered by lobbyists with deep pockets. Price increases dramatically.

Either future is amazing to me. Either gritty cyberpunk or vanilla sci-fi. Glad to see this happen in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want some sort of idea about how little UBS understands modern banking and wealth management, take a look at UBS Smart Wealth.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is a fair point but you can't buy bitcoin these days without kyc, not to say the IP trace, if they can break tor/proxies and access exchanges records they can "follow the bitcoins", but then again how much funding you need, in EU recently there were quite a few attacks where they just rented a big truck and ran over people, also the bomb in the airport, they made it from some cheap chemicals, and then took a cab.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Still, CME Group Inc., the world's largest exchange owner, has said it plans > to introduce bitcoin futures by the end of the year, citing pent-up demand > from clients. That pushes bitcoin closer to the mainstream by making it > easier to trade without the hassles of owning the currency directly.

What's the difference between that and CFDs on eToro?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _> How do you know when to get out of a bitcoin investment?_

That's the thing. When Bitcoin succeeds, you won't have to get out of the investment.

<comment><USER12> If the best case scenario is Bitcoin hits $1,000,000 per coin and never moves again, why would anyone ever put more money into it?

The only value Bitcoin has is appreciation. If it ever becomes stable it will necessarily be worthless.

<comment><USER13> this isnt true, when countries have massive instability and currency manipulation (see Zimbabwe), people can buy bitcoin as an alternative store of value.

<comment><USER14> To some extent, even stable currencies suffer from significant manipulation by governments. This is not a tinfoil hat idea, it's generally why non-corrupt central banking helps achieve social stability.

But central banking is a large hammer, and so even in the US there are many uses of currency where Bitcoin shines. Also, over time no central bank has managed to avoid some form of corruption (this is concerning both for fiat and centralization-prone cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin).

But the factors that lead to corrupt central banks are not primarily monetary, they are social/societal, causing those banks to bend to the whims of some interests while ignoring others.

The interesting thing to observe will be how/whether Bitcoin can adapt its broader organizational structure to make it less vulnerable to these forces of "bad" centralization. Also, if trends continue, the risk-takers of today who own Bitcoin may well be the wealthy influencers of tomorrow and may not take kindly to some of the sensible changes.

There are many, many ways in which Bitcoin is far superior to the typical fiat + central bank system, though, most notably its international nature. Even if Bitcoin's ability to avoid problems is only 90% as effective as the most effective fiat systems, that is a tremendous improvement for most of the people living on Earth.

<comment><USER15> One of the things the better fiat currencies have is stability of value. Bitcoin (at least so far) has failed rather dramatically at that. It's been mostly up so far, which makes many people willing (even eager) to accept the lack of stability, but it definitely hasn't been stable.

<comment><USER14> Very true. It's interesting to think of what you describe as a side-effect of the design decision (by Satoshi) to "bootstrap" the currency by strongly incentivizing speculative mining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The key aspect of Bitcoin is that buyers/sellers can operate anonymously. Once governments regulate Bitcoin and makes the anonymous nature illegal, Bitcoin will crash and be essentially useless.

<comment><USER15> No, it will just be illegal. It will still be useful for those who are willing to be illegal.

The trick for the government will not be creating regulations or prohibitions. The trick will be enforcement.</comment></comment>


The Talent Crunch: Not where you expect(or: more coders won't solve the crunch) - <AUTHOR> http://rwilcox.tumblr.com/post/15433814955/the-talent-crunch-not-where-you-expect-it

<comment><USER2> In my experience, the bottleneck skillset for the tech industry (and probably many others) is _initiative_ : the ability to take an actual user need and then figure out what needs to happen for that user need to be met, then go make it happen. This doesn't have to be a manager: you put together a group of 3-4 engineers with strong initiative and a worthwhile goal, and it'll happen regardless of whether they have an official manager.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to teach this. The best thing a manager can do is get out of the way and see who steps up to the plate, possibly giving some helpful hints if people seem stuck. It's very easy to _kill_ initiative, though, and most conventional approaches to management do exactly that. Heck, for most people the public school system is 13 years of training in how not to anything other than what you're explicitly told to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Incredibly good article, thank you! The part of sustainable management really struck a chord...</comment>


Possible explosives at Harvard - <AUTHOR> http://www.harvard.edu/emergency

<comment><USER2> It should be noted that this is happening in the middle of finals. I would lean heavily towards this being false threat by a student who didn't study.

<comment><USER3> You'd think a Harvard student would be smart enough to realize that the criminal consequences of such an act far outweigh the negatives of failing a test...

<comment><USER4> Common sense experiences a severe decline at most schools during finals.

<comment><USER5> That starts to happen, when you are halfway through your fifth red bull in an hour ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This just says that someone called in a bomb threat, aren't those common? It's a school during finals. And I just realised I'm wasting far too much precious time reading the internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> There are two big final exams today, and the buildings targeted are where they are held. It seems very likely that someone didn't want to take their tests.

</comment><comment><USER8> How does this have any relevance to HN? Practically every university gets bomb threats during exams...

</comment><comment><USER9> Bomb threats happened quite regularly where I went to school, probably 3 or 4 in my 4 years there. None of them were real, but they always got a huge response and shut down buildings. Professors just started giving out exams in a different building instead of rescheduling.

It's almost strange how my little city of Chattanooga is so well-equipped to handle bomb threats. We just had a mysterious package reported on a street corner a month ago, and there was a whole bomb squad there within an hour. A major intersection closed down. It was just an old briefcase next to a lamp post in an uncrowded business area. It's sad.

</comment><comment><USER10> but but they have all our cell phone and internet records. How can terrorism still happen?

<comment><USER11> And purchasing history, credit records, driving patterns and others. Clearly this isn't enough. I sense a new patriotic start-up opportunity.

PatriotNow - check in with your fingerprint and we'll automatically log your location, browser history and 10 most recent phone calls and SMS messages.

Get our complete corporate or government package, PatriotSense, to issue check-in requests to all employees, students or members of your organization. Members will have 5 minutes to check in or be logged for follow-on questioning.

PatriotNow and PatriotSense - Show your patriotism, foil terrorism and do your part for total information awareness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Harvard Crimson has some more detail in realtime: [https://twitter.com/thecrimson](https://twitter.com/thecrimson)</comment>


5 Minutes of Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://nubyonrails.com/articles/emacs-emacs

<comment><USER2> as someone already commented get aquamacs! I started out programming using emacs because all the cool kids on slashdot did as time moved on I starting using vi/vim as "its everywhere" but I have started used aquamacs at home and I love it! It's like meeting up with an old friend after a few years apart and everything just clicking again (it probably helps I've learned lisp in the interim)

</comment><comment><USER3> re: crashing on change of color themes. he's probably using the new-ish cocoa- fied emacs in the 24 branch. It's still a bit buggy. Use the carbon build from 23 or just look for a diff if you really want to use 24.

<comment><USER4> I'm more interested in why people insist on GUI Emacs.

Way back when I decided to first try out Linux (and then ended up using it for most of this millennium before taking a job which provided me with a Mac laptop), it took me a bit to get accustomed to doing most things from a terminal window (and I was fortunate in that the all-singing, all-dancing GUI automation stuff of modern Linux distros didn't exist yet), but once I was comfortable with it I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.

But then I also laughed when I saw the fad for "full-screen" text editing on the Mac a while back; when I want to hack or write I don't have to tune out, say, IRC or email because Emacs is running in one window of my screen session and IRC and email are running in others where I don't see them unless I'm actually using them :)

<comment><USER5> I like GUI Emacs because keys like C-/ work, even if they have no ASCII code, and I don't have to wonder if I'm going to get random backslashes if I try to copy and paste into another window. There really isn't that much difference between switching between Emacs and, say, IRC, by using Alt-Tab or ^A ^A.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ruby gets more and more hard core every day... this is awesome.</comment>


Burning Man Seeks to Change 'Convenience Culture,' Boots Camp for Wealthy (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/business/burning-man-tickets.html <comment><AUTHOR> 2020 gathering cancelled:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22839503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22839503)</comment>


Cybersyn and Allende's Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism - <AUTHOR> https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/cybersyn-and-allendes-semi-automated-luxury-socialism/ <comment><USER2> Cybersyn is great. It highlights the problem of applying cybernetics (systems theory) into a system with many unknowns. Economics as a whole is not a controlled environment like factory where systems theory can be successfully.

More modern approach with more success is mechanism design (reverse game theory). Design games that yield results even when you know very little about the players.

The Nobel Prize: What is mechanism design and why does it matter for policy- making? [https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism- design-...](https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-design-and- why-does-it-matter)

>Mechanism design theory is a major breakthrough in the modern economic analysis of institutions and markets. It revolutionalised the way economists think about optimal institutions and regulation when governments don't "know it all." It has had a major impact on current policy-making and will continue to do so in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> _SAGE also didn't have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your liquor_

No, but the Weapons Director Console incorporated an ashtray and cigarette lighter on the left side.

<comment><USER4> I would hope the Weapons Director Console would have had a fake liquor panel with a dual custody lock as a final provision for the doomsday scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can get a PDF copy of Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" from this site: [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html) I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the subject.

<comment><USER6> DNS doesn't seem to resolve. Wayback to the rescue.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author is missing the point pretty hard AFAICT.

> In fact, factory managers ended up routing around the central command center > and teletype process by calling up other factory managers and working out > potential supply issues.

That's by design. The idea was to run the whole economy like what we'd call agile now. Horizontal communication was a huge part in contrast to the Soviet socialist experiments and the central control was more about figuring out cross unit issues sort of like a Scrum of Scrums.

It was exactly that embracing of horizontal communication in a socialist economy that had the CIA scared. Their own communications talked about not being able to tolerate a "successful socialist experiment".

</comment><comment><USER8> I always thought ERP is basically applied "cybernetics"

Also a big problem with a system like this, in the 20th century socialist states, is that the input data would have been complete bullshit. That was one of the issues the soviet gosplan ran up against during the final days. Everyone was lying about their production numbers so the data was useless, whether in a fancy computer system or not.

<comment><USER9> That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do a fascist coup and kill everyone.

<comment><USER10> Well, not _everyone_. Some people were allowed to live so that an unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin America could be ushered in.

<comment><USER11> So prosperous that raising the price of public transit by a few dollars has led to widespread protests.

<comment><USER10> Are we comparing it to Canada or something? Then you're right, it's not that close. Or are we comparing it to the lands of triumphant Salvador Allendes, like Venezuela? No successful coup took place there, and I hear the transit is downright free in Caracas these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A sad trod through a common delusion of grandeur I see on the internet these days. If the Chilean control room was really ripped off of Star Trek, that's a little absurd and hilarious but moreover sad.

On the flip side, I'm not sure how much I agree with its premise and conclusion. Sure, it's easy to mock technocommunism historically if you ignore the elephant in the room that is China. While not in the same category as old Soviet and LatAm attempts, all of the quaintly endearing anachronism fades away. What is to be made of China with respect to such a perspective?

<comment><USER13> >What's fun about this piece is that it puts into perspective how absurd, unworkable, and thoroughly ripped off of Star Trek the Chilean control room was, which is thoroughly entertaining.

Pretty presumptuous, considering how it was never really put into practice before Allende was murdered and Pinochet's brutal regime was installed by the CIA.

Reminds me of a quote:

"The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century – without exception – has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement – from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador – not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly:

 _Man shall never fly._ " – William Blum

<comment><USER14> You give the CIA too much credit.

Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his policies. Pinochet was an opportunist who jumped on the bandwagon when it was already in motion. The CIA had it easy. In South Vietnam, under more adverse conditions, the CIA failed miserably.

<comment><USER13> >Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his policies.

No, actually, he was quite popular[1]:

>Between 1970 and 1973, the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity)—the coalition of parties backing Allende—actually increased its vote, a growing popularity which in itself casts some doubt on the widely spread tales of economic disaster wrought by the government. In the last significant election, a fierce electoral battle for Congress in March 1973, the Unidad Popular increased its share of the vote to 44 percent. The rest of the vote was split among the several other parties, which at that time functioned freely and openly in the Chilean tradition. The 800,000 who greeted the President on September 4 constituted nearly one-tenth of the national population, the largest political rally ever held in Chile.

It was the upper classes that hated him, the people who had been getting fat off the people for the past several decades and stood the most to lose from his presidency.

[1]: [https://www.thenation.com/article/true-verdict- allende/](https://www.thenation.com/article/true-verdict-allende/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you want a fun read that you won't know quite what to make of, I highly recommend Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer - little bit hard to find a PDF from a non-spammy site, but they are out there!

</comment><comment><USER16> > _Mind you the Chilean government was being starved of dollars at the time as > a form of colonial pressure, just as the Venezuelan government is now in > 2019. The results were hilarious._

Yes, a coup, a dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured and executed, haha.

The whole TFA screams of facile dismissal and cheap comic shots (people smoked on airplanes at the times and well into the 80s even in the US, so there is nothing to strike as funny about having ashtrays on the chairs in everybody that wasn't born yesterday and only remembers a world after the smoking ban/decline).

Yes, it was just a fancy control room inspired by sci-fi and wanting to look futuristic, no, they didn't think they were running the Enterprise.

And their failures were more largely attributed to foreign influence, blatant sabotage and sponsored subversion, and diplomatic pressure, than their economics approach or the design of the room. They might have failed economically too, but not for being communist. They were just more socialist than it was acceptable / allowed for a Banana Republic in Latin America at the time (or now). Similar measures in sovereign countries in Europe wouldn't bat an eye...

<comment><USER17> I felt bad when I read that too. I think foreigners don't know about Latin America, they where all indoctrinated to hate "socialist" or "populist" Latin America states. All propaganda, they never think why people put them there first. Just look what happened in Bolivia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's funny in a way, that a modern person believes that through technology we can very well reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle", and so on, but successfully modelling an economy is impossible...

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's the precise way people feel. Socialism/etc HAS "failed", and capitalism HAS "succeeded", for certain definitions of failed and succeeded. What people assume is that socialism today would fail (and I agree). But if presented with new facts, e.g. here is a robot that can produce food, gather solar power, and manufacture goods for you, and there is one per household, suddenly the literal definition of socialism can become much more pallatable.

<comment><USER16> Well, modern capitalism is socialism (the US for example or EU are hardly "free markets", there are all sorts of protections, interventions, tarrifs - hardly a Trump novelty -, things like copyright (another artificial government given restriction on trade and manufacturing, central monetary policy, huge armies and postcolonial negotiations to secure favorable deals, mass surveillance, and so on.

And modern socialism (whether what the US calls as such in the nordic countries or France, or what they have in China) is also a whole lotta of capitalism, so there's that too.

<comment><USER19> Many believe those protections you describe is the cause of inequality.

For example,when only 300k/yr physicians can give you access to medicine, it's not capitalism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was your "Why didn't I stop doing this sooner?" moment? - <AUTHOR> We are hearing a lot of good habits to take, but I think the reverse - things to stop doing - should be actually a lot more interesting! <comment><USER2> Kind of a metaphor, but: hiding under the sheets because I was afraid of the dark. One day someone helped me realize that if something were to happen because of the dark, it would serve me better to know about it (and see it coming) rather than live in denial and wait for something to suddenly snatch me out of bed without warning because I was hiding with my eyes closed.

This has helped set the tone for my life. If something bad is going to happen, I'd rather know about it and see it coming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Playing video games. Even reading HN/Twitter is more productive than playing video games.

<comment><USER4> This is a constant struggle of mine. I hate seeing myself as "the guy who plays video games on his free time", but I just can't think of anything else. This is usually during the weekends. I start playing an online game, and even before the game ends I just want it to end and unninstall because I feel bad about it. Repeat this for two or three times a day. It's a toxic mindset that I can't get rid of and it's killing me.

I used to be very into personal development, but ever since I got my first, real 9-5 job in the industry, I just feel mentally exausted to follow planners, journal or writing and I end up mindlessly playing video games...

<comment><USER5> There's nothing wrong with gaming, but from your other post I gather you spend _a lot_ of time with computers(like everyone else here), so try to find something that's low tech and involves other people. Gaming is like drugs, it's fine if you occasionally partake, but no-one likes an addict.

<comment><USER4> Yep, you are correct. I do spend a lot of time around computers. Right now is partially because I'm working on my thesis, and sometimes it's depressing the amount of time I spend in front the screen.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A forgotten theory of dreams that inspired Vladimir Nabokov - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/146906/night-vision <comment><USER2> This is fascinating.

Unmentioned, after commenting that Borges reviewed Dunne's work in 1940, however, is that the permanence of objects in time relates thematically to Jorge Luis Borges' own writing, recalling in particular The Garden of Forking Paths [1941]. I couldn't prove a causal connection, but it seems to cast a a commentary on Borges' post-1940 short stories.

Nabokov also played with the idea of reverie or dream-like states of consciousness. I've only had the pleasure to have read Pale Fire this far, but there is a careful blending of rational thought, creative (meta-)fiction, "dream logic" and actual insanity. In it, untangling what's real and and what's not left me with much the same sensation as trying to figure out whether something once happened to me years before or I just had a vivid dream.

<comment><USER3> > the permanence of objects in time relates thematically to Jorge Luis Borges' > own writing

Also very strongly to "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis_Tertius" (1940), which explicitly mentions that topic, but maybe it's anachronistic (!) for your purposes here.

<comment><USER2> Literally, not literarily, anachronistic, to be precise. ;)

You're entirely right.

I think that Borges and Hofstadter are writers whose work uniquely appeals to computer scientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing this. I'll never forget reading Speak Memory. (!) The opening sentences or somewhere near the opening ones concerned Nabokov's meditation on death and birth and how alike they are. He talked about how strange it is that before we are born, we aren't missed because we aren't yet there. He goes into the feeling of thinking about this in a dreamlike manner and there are several dreamy passages throughout the book. I agree it was his best one. Thinking about him reading a corny dream book and being taken in by it a bit humanizes him. Great article.

<comment><USER5> "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse order of events, his very bones had disintegrated."

<comment><USER4> Yes! yes! It's been over twenty years since I read this and it still calls to me. Thank you for reminding me how beautiful and true that passage is. His rhythm in this part is like a swing. Dream-like. Another lovely spot in the book was when he called to a loved dog on a beach "Floss!". It was a great way to end a section by letting it slip into memory like shouted words on a beach fade after a loved dog, especially its name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the other hand:

In an interview (maybe reproduced in _Strong Opinions_?), Nabokov explains his theory that the origins of dreams are the visual patterns produced by the eye in darkness and interpreted by the sleeping brain.

<comment><USER7> I feel this is almost certainly right. Often when I fall asleep I literally see my dreams forming out of the brown noise you see with closed eyes.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, it's always been black with hints of red (probably the blood in the skin) to me, rather than blending together into a brown.

<comment><USER9> i see black with drifting blue and green static.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Dunne's _Experiment_ seems to have become one of the secret wellsprings, or > wormholes, of twentieth-century literature.

H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Yeats, Joyce, and Agatha Christie were fans. The Kindle version is available for $1.40.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reading the sample of Dunne's temporal geometry, I was reminded of the film Donnie Darko, in which the protagonist repeatedly attempts to figure out a similarly complicated early 20th century theory of time travel.

There's also a (possibly apocryphal) quote by Nabokov ('All the Russia I need is with me, always with me. Literature, language and my own Russian childhood. I will never return.') that would be burnished by the inclusion of dreams of his long-lost homeland.</comment>


A Survey of NP-Complete Puzzles (2008) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cs.wmich.edu/~elise/courses/cs431/icga2008.pdf

<comment><USER2> I am a big fan of Pathery ( [http://www.pathery.com/](http://www.pathery.com/) ) - based on the K most vital node problem : [https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/11375/generatin...](https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/11375/generating- a-tower-defense-maze-aka-finding-the-k-most-vital-nodes-nodewise-i)

</comment><comment><USER3> related: [http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.890/fall14/](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.890/fall14/)

<comment><USER4> It sounds fun, but this course covers some really heavy material. In particular, the work on PCPs and the unique games conjecture has won multiple of the world's top computer science prizes.</comment></comment>