Show HN: Opp.io – Meeting Minutes Made Useful - <AUTHOR> http://www.opp.io/ <comment><USER2> I think the demo on the landing page should be in the form of meeting minutes, rather than someone messaging a load of tasks to their (I assume) direct reports.

Why? Because the feeling the demo evoked for me was: "Uh oh. This looks like a micro-managers wet dream".

So rather than just have "@John please !phone client" perhaps the demo would itemise the meeting minutes with: "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements".

Perhaps this is simply because I have had the unpleasant experience of working for panic-driven micromanagers before. But I think you really want to make sure your landing page is resonating with "Awesome - this is going to make my life easier" vs. "What pandora's box of hell will this tool unleash in my organization and work life".

Product definitely looks useful though, and the above comments are about making sure you present it in its best light. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Agrees, I would definitely change the examples on the site so that they do not use the imperative form.

It kind of distracts, I have never seen meeting minutes written like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi rurounijones, you're right in pointing out the important difference between imperative vs. descriptive form. In our application we intend to accommodate both - hence the inline syntax within the free text.

So you could write in a very succinct way "@John please !phone client" like when you drop over a quick note on Post-It to your colleague-friend sitting next table. But you could also send as a more polite request, something like "@john, can you be so kind to !phone the client". Or what you just wrote "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements". These all refer to the same action: John should phone the client.

P.S. In the video we were of course limited by keeping the text as short as possible so it remains legible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The landing page is fantastic. I know exactly what this product does, and I can see where it would fit into our organizational needs, all without any effort on my part (I didn't even need to scroll, although there is more detail when I did).

<comment><USER5> The product is sure awesome, but since you're discussing the design of the homepage, I think the typography might need some more work. And if you look on [this page]([http://www.opp.io/About](http://www.opp.io/About)), the color palette as well :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Humpt, thanks for the comment. We will definitely iterate on the design including typography, colours in the mockup, color/whitespace balance etc. For now, most important to us is that people get the concept of the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I get the feeling that this product would be really good for people who are moving about quite a bit - delivery folks, plumbers, surveyors, etc. Are you going to call out specific types of people who would be best served by this?

Also, minor grammatical nitpick: "LESS MESSAGES" should probably be "FEWER MESSAGES".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey taprun, thanks for spotting the typo. We tried to adapt the popular quote "LESS IS MORE", popularized by Mies van der Rohe, to the given context. Any idea how to say this? "LESS MESSAGING IS MORE" (sorry for the capitals)

Regarding your question about our target user segment. Currently we target coordinators, project managers and workteams but haven't identified yet a more narrow segment within that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry to be that guy, but this clearly doesn't follow the Show HN guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't put "Show HN" in the title. Once it's ready, come back and share it then.

For example, blog posts, _email signups_ , and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs."

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi mbesto, I have to admit you are right. I was simply too excited to share the landing page.

Actually you can try it out [http://opp.io/app](http://opp.io/app) but there is no direct link to it from the front page. (It is less functional than in the demo video.)

<comment><USER7> No worries - looks really cool nevertheless. Looking forward to see how it progresses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I am one of the guys behind this. Would love to hear your feedback on the landing page of our upcoming beta.

<comment><USER8> I am really excited that you are working on this. I began working on an app extremely similar to this (down to the Twitter/IRC like notation) due to my own frustration with the inefficiency of taking meeting notes. I never finished the prototype, but I'll share my ideas that I felt were important:

* Make integration with outside parties easy (i.e. Don't force everyone in the meeting to use the app to get the benefits.) Allow me to add aliases to meeting member's e-mail addresses (i.e. @joe = firstname.lastname@example.com) Allow me to e-mail a link to the minutes when the meeting is over to all parties.

* Scheduling

I should be able to send calendar invites to participants of previous meetings / define recurring meetings. If I open up the app it should know what meeting I am in by my schedule.

* Continuity

Many of my meetings are recurring meetings. At today's meeting, I want to review the open/closed items from the previous meeting. Though I still want a way to delineate what happened in today's meeting.

* Self-hostable option

For legal / contractual / paranoia reasons, I may need to keep my data in- house. For several of the groups in my company, a cloud-hosted app is a deal breaker.

* Plugins

I should be able to integrate the user directory with my company's LDAP server. I should be able to promote tasks to real tickets in my project management software. I should be able to reference items from other meetings.

Anyway, good luck with your app!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks sharing your ideas, FlyingAvatar.

I comment on some of them: \- Emailing will be automatic, people receive the memo via email and also access the full document via a link. \- We thought on importing last week's items, and have options to bulk hide the items done etc. \- Data privacy is definitely a concern of organizations, especially larger ones. That's a hard nut to crack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You say meeting minutes made useful but the header on the website is "Succinct Team Messaging." I actually didn't see anything that looked like meeting minutes presented anywhere.

Was hoping this would take minutes from Word as 95% of secretaries will use, somehow extract action items, and then help communicate/track them.

Everything shown here I would just use email to manange. It's not outdated, it works and it's an LCD. I run a small nonprofit organization and was hoping this might be helpful because action item followup is a pain point. But I wouldn't use this.

<comment> pi-err Agreed. The demo is a top-down management wet dream. A meeting where people get instructed in details to do specific tasks? No deadline, no ambiguity? Those guys never attended a meeting.

UX wise, I'm not ok with the "red/orange/green" codes and "fail/done" tags. Even for a small startup, communication is not that blunt, for a reason. Red in the demo seems to stand for postponed, canceled, rejected or badly executed. Yet "red" means bad in most cultural contexts. The color code implies too much and would really harm any group using such a basic code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi pi-err, you make really good points.

Also, if every team member could assign tasks, send requests and questions using this syntax, would that change your perception of this being a top-down management tool? Because our intention is to build a tool that allows a more horizontal communication among team members - but that's more difficult to visualize in a single video.

We are also aware of the cultural-contextual association of colours. This is one thing we are actually struggling with. While colors are a very easy and effective way to communicate status of tasks, especially to give a quick overview of many tasks - they have severe limitations, just like you say, red evoking associations with something as being "bad".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If the mini demo on the home page is accurate, be careful with those colors - light red & green specifically. Full protanopia is present in approximately 1-2% of males. Deuteranopia (less severe than protanopia) is present in some form in up to 5% of males of certain European descent.

For a reference, this is an approximation of what light red & light green look like for someone with protanopia: [http://i.imgur.com/EGSlsmB.png](http://i.imgur.com/EGSlsmB.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks Eric, this was new to me!

<comment><USER11> What about using icons instead of colors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Might work but as icons doesn't offer the kind of visual effect that allows you to oversee 10+ tasks with a glimpse, I would suggest using them both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting idea. Speaking as someone who manages a bunch of folks I don't find assigning action items w/o due dates very helpful. Is there a facility to specify a date?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there will definitely be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a good idea and I'd like to use it, but it needs presentational work for adoption, I suspect.

In particular, I don't think that people without a software background are going to be comfortable with the abundance of syntactic sigils. Even in the twitter-native world, I think it will makes the product seem intimidating and un-natural (at least at first).

This is especially a concern because the value of using them is not immediately clear (excepting @person).

</comment><comment><USER14> I see that Sarah says that "As you may know ... " so presumably everybody is on the same page to start, but going forward it seems that only Sarah has a holistic view of the situation. Is this not the case? And are dependencies handled? For example, in a more complicated case, should Task A be done before Task B, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> The free text editor allows you to enter any information to bring the team to the same page. Deadlines and dependencies are obviously on our roadmap. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is it different from the old "The Deadline"? (a startup from the now defunct [http://hackfwd.com/](http://hackfwd.com/) which has been trying this for a few years). They changed their name to:

[https://www.telety.pe/](https://www.telety.pe/)

<comment><AUTHOR> alphydan, good point.

Teletype and Twoodo are most similar to our app.

Our approach is somewhat different, more focusing on email compatibility, on the free text editor experience and more systemic. (We'll post about that later.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a non native speaker, I had to look up the definition of succinct, which was the very first thing I saw on the page. And I consider myself a very good English speaker.

So you might want to change that word to something a broader audience would understand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi CWIZO, you are not the first one. Actually this is the most common feedback we receive. We are iterating on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks awesome! I've been wanting something similar to this for a while now.

I wish there weren't 69,772 people ahead of me... (first world problems) :( or at least some way to gauge what that means.

</comment><comment><USER18> This product looks pretty cool. I think i'd want a way to then take this an export the todos into an already existing workflow. Say into Trello or Outlook etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJTbRw4ri8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJTbRw4ri8)

</comment><comment><USER20> Oh wow. I was in the early stages of creating something exactly like this this myself - looks good guys!

</comment><comment><USER21> We surely need this at my large government bureaucracy of an organization. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> It should be "Fewer messages are more."

You use "less" when the item in question is not measured in discrete units - "there is less rain today than yesterday."

You use "fewer" when the item in question is measured in discrete units - "there are fewer raindrops today than yesterday."

Messages are discrete units.

<comment><USER23> You're welcome to believe that nonsense if you like but please don't perpetuate it.

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less)

<comment><USER24> I'd recommend they find different wording.

There are _plenty_ of people out there who "know" the less/fewer grammar rule, and those people are going to find this landing page a bit unprofessional.

And I'm not a grammar prescriptivist, but "Less messages are more" still sounds wrong to my ear -- it's based on the phrase "Less is more", but putting "messages" in there forces the "is" to "are", and that clashes unpleasantly. My brain wants to fix it to "Less messages _is_ more", which is then also bad.

"Fewer messages are more" isn't any better -- we lose the "less is more" echo (which was the whole point!), and it has a whiff of "my English teacher told me it should be 'fewer'." :)

Alternatives (none perfect, but better):

\- Just use "Less is more" as the heading (and possibly tweak the copy below to start with the word "messages").

\- Change "messages" to some non-plural word so you can preserve the "is" \-- there may not be a good option here, though ("communication"? ugh).

\- Just toss it, and capture the idea in some other phrase. "Don't drown in messages", "No message flood", or whatever, then you can even put *"Less is more" when it comes to messages" in the copy below.

[edit: dumb errors in a post about grammar and word choice tend to backfire]

<comment><AUTHOR> We just changed it for the simpler: "LESS IS MORE".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That demo video gets the concept across very neatly and succinctly.

</comment><comment><USER26> You have hit the pain point ..Very useful app ..great job

</comment><comment><USER27> typo in your meta

appears during social shares:

"Welcome to opp.io, the actionable messaging platform. Stop waisting time on emails"

</comment><comment><USER28> Hello, Oppio is the italian word for Opium, one of the most dangerous drugs out there.

Just thought you'd wanted to know.

<comment><USER29> Is opium that dangerous? I would have thought that tobacco or alcohol were far worse.

edit: Wow, that was an extremely quick down vote. Didn't even get round to posting my follow up with a bit of evidence.

Drugs are bad, m'kay.

<comment><USER30> I didn't mod you down, but it is bad. Opium is probably single-handedly responsible for the harsh penalties for drug use in East Asia.

This article comes to mind:

[http://www.thefix.com/content/confessions-opium-addict- drug-...](http://www.thefix.com/content/confessions-opium-addict-drug- paraphernalia00098?page=all)

And this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Opium-Fiend-Century-Slave- Addiction/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Opium-Fiend-Century-Slave- Addiction/dp/0345517830)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> still loving it!</comment>


BVP Anti-Portfolio - <AUTHOR> http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio.aspx

<comment><USER2> That's some incredibly refreshing brutal honesty, makes me incalculably more tempted to invest with them than the usual 30 pages of financial-marketing bumph about said firms unblemished perfection, mathematically perfect risk system and strangely graphed double-digit alpha.

<comment><USER3> But, they know that it will increase their cred. for some of their audience. So ... it's just smart marketing. Don't let it skew your perspective.

I thought it was cool, too, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, who we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains."

Besides showing a fantastic human side of their firm, a post like this should be raw encouragement to entrepreneurs who, despite their bottomless well of optimism, once in a while get "no" fatigue.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this. Might be interesting to see the YC anti-portfolio. Anyone have any stories?

</comment><comment><USER6> eBay: "Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding. No-brainer pass."

Not saying that I would have made the right call on eBay, but I've learned to override myself whenever my gut reaction about a startup idea is a no-brainer either + or -. That kind of strong reaction often calls for a contrarian second opinion.

</comment><comment><USER7> love those comments next to each company...

Cowan's college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to "these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine". Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer's anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, "How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies -- our "anti- portfolio" -- whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. ___Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working._ __

</comment><comment><USER9> "Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies -- our anti- portfolio -- whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working."

Awesome honesty.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder about the companies that a VC rejects that end-up going under. How much is a firm's failure due to lack of funding vs. actual competitive forces or management inability.

Not saying that I'd be a shinning beacon since I would have turned down Twitter and Zynga.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cowan appears quite a few times in these, and in his profile it says he's on the Forbes Midas touch list.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only difference between Cowan and the other top VCs is that he is honest about his mistakes and approaches them with a sense of humor - while others attempt to uphold an image of being perfect (eg. by removing failed portfolio companies from their websites, not speaking of deals they passed on etc.)

All the top vc's have their bad deals or deals they missed. Cowan is just very transparent about it.

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of a friend who passed on both Yahoo and Google in the 90s :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Potential_ is missing from the article.

</comment><comment><USER14> dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10815>

<comment><USER15> and 915 days ago ...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=170154></comment></comment>


Court Says Remastered Old Songs Get a Brand New Copyright - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160602/07371934600/this-is-bad-court-says-remastered-old-songs-get-brand-new-copyright.shtml <comment><USER2> if pandora et al remaster the songs they stream, do they only have to pay the song writers and not a cent to the publishers?

that is awesome. (if it weren't just a law backdoor for the exact opposite)</comment>


Microsoft silently launches So.cl, its attempt at a social networking sit - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/20/microsoft-socl-launches/

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3999671>

</comment><comment><USER3> Stop calling research products "Microsoft's new X." If it was a serious social network, you'd be hearing much more about it than this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I will start taking Microsoft seriously again when they stop using childish non-standard punctuation, and restart doing innovative work. ".Net"? "So.cl"? Are you serious?</comment>


More people being forced out of Angular team - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ThomasBurleson/status/1283902169226280960 <comment><USER2> This just confirms the sentiment shared in the article by Jeff Cross in March. It's very, very disconcerting. Especially for people who've been working with Angular(JS) for years, like me. A fish rots from the head.

At a certain point, if Google can't get its leadership together, the community should probably just do a fork

</comment><comment><USER3> One comment that stood out to me in that thread was the accusation of casteism in connection with Sundars leadership style - an extreme (but pecurliarly specific) claim for sure. I hope that accusation is groundless. If you feel it is, please refute it in the thread as it's currently uncontested.

<comment><USER4> > as it's currently uncontested

What indication is there for it being true?

<comment><USER3> I'm asking as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> em-bee there are two articles mentiond in the thread, which are worth reading.

[https://medium.com/@devinlijkw/why-angular- sucks-c90f4e73423...](https://medium.com/@devinlijkw/why-angular- sucks-c90f4e734231)

[https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the- angular-t...](https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-team- and-community-5367934a16c9)

jeff also mentions rob eisenbergs earlier departure

[http://bluespire.com/eisenbergeffect/blog/2014/11/17/leaving...](http://bluespire.com/eisenbergeffect/blog/2014/11/17/leaving- angular/)

which i find interesting because one of the reasons i like aurelia is because rob tried to work with angular before going his own way.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I worked at Google, Rob came and gave a talk to our team about NgRx.

Based on my experience at Google and having worked extensively with front end technologies there I am not surprised that someone as talented as Rob was forced to quit. The Angular project and how it relates to other front end technologies within Google is unbelievably political and it almost seems as though the Angular team takes pleasure in suppressing superior technologies and solutions.

An example of this is that the Angular team also owns support for Typescript within Google (not organizationally, but it's the same people). They turned off support for .tsx despite many protests from many, many different teams within Google and the motive was very clearly to dissuade the use of React.

<comment><USER6> Ugh. Thanks for the kind words :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Cockpit – create tmux panes and windows with ease - <AUTHOR> http://cockpit.27ae60.com/ <comment><USER2> It's quite an indictment of the current state of our tooling (not just tmux) that such an application as this is necessary. Why isn't it easy to configure this in tmux itself, and persist the resulting configuration?

<comment><USER3> This doesn't let you persist ad hoc setups, but I have a `~/lib/tmux-code` file that I source from `~/.bash_profile` with entries like this:

        function ins-code {

          env_name=code
          long_name=insurance
          short_name=ins
          tmux_session=${short_name}-${env_name}

          if tmux list-sessions | grep ${tmux_session}; then
            tmux attach-session -t ${tmux_session}

          else
            cd ~/src/${long_name}/backend/app/models && \
            tmux new-session -d -s ${tmux_session} && \
            tmux rename-window -t ${tmux_session}:1 models

            cd ~/src/${long_name}/backend/app/controllers && \
            tmux new-window -t ${tmux_session}:2 -n controllers

            cd ~/src/${long_name}/backend/app/views && \
            tmux new-window -t ${tmux_session}:3 -n views

            cd ~/src/${long_name}/backend/app/assets/stylesheets && \
            tmux new-window -t ${tmux_session}:4 -n css

            tmux select-window -t ${tmux_session}:1 && \
            tmux -2 attach-session -t ${tmux_session}
          fi
        }

Then I can just say `ins-code` and it will either launch a new session or attach if it already exists.

<comment><USER4> I highly recommend [https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator](https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator) if you haven't tried it, I've actually used it to run whole microservice environments locally and works without a hitch

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks really nice!

It's not for me, though. Maybe I'm not a very good systems engineer, but I've got a decent .tmux.conf. Between writing automation and trying to make sense of the mess I've inherited, I'm constantly splitting, resizing, and re- adjusting my work space to suit the task at hand.

<comment><USER6> what are the pros and cons to using tmux as opposed to say multiple instances of a terminal emulator split up using ratpoison?

<comment><USER7> pro: use anywhere, including while ssh'd, and share sessions with others. con: not that easy to use -- kind of like vim or emacs.

I personally use tmux because it's "one window" and it is supported on every environment I can think of.

<comment><USER8> Big con for me: scrolling sucks. Even o latest 2.x, which is indeed better, but still light years away from native.

<comment><USER5> When you say scrolling, do you mean with something other than a keyboard?

I thought this is something I wanted, but when I finally got around to getting mouse inputs working the way I thought they should, I realized that mousing around a terminal is kind of weird. Granted, I still use my mouse for copy/pasta operations, but I hope to eventually break that habit in time.

What's your workflow with tmux like?

<comment><USER8> Nowadays, it's basically a simple way to let process running after existing the shell and reattaching later, for me.

But I had much greater ambitions in the past which I've given up mostly due to scrolling, clearing scrollback inserting a bunch of whitespace instead of actually clearing, etc.

I scroll with the mouse a lot, it's more tolerable with the keyboard, but it's still not as good as native interaction.

It also messes with the colors sometimes. For some reason, screen doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Neat. I personally use [https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator](https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator) for this.

<comment><USER10> I really like [https://github.com/oxidane/tmuxomatic](https://github.com/oxidane/tmuxomatic) No easier way to configure tmux layouts. Sadly it is not actively developed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice tool. I suggest showing the script beside the window so it can easily be cut-and-pasted. Browser downloading is a hassle especially with tmux on a remote server.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. Your point to show the script is duly noted. It is actually a great idea. Let me incorporate the suggestion in upcoming updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was using tmuxinator for this, but found that all of my sessions were essentially the same thing except for the name and the working directory.

So I just wrote a shell script that takes a directory, using basename for the session name, starting up what ever windows and panes it needs to. I have two variants, one for generic dev stuff (shell and an editor) and the other is for rails work (shell, editor, logs, rails db and a rails c in the last window).

[https://github.com/vhodges/dotfiles/blob/master/utils/bin/tm...](https://github.com/vhodges/dotfiles/blob/master/utils/bin/tmux- dev) or [https://github.com/vhodges/dotfiles/blob/master/utils/bin/tm...](https://github.com/vhodges/dotfiles/blob/master/utils/bin/tmux- rails)

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice work. I've been using teamocil ([https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil](https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil)) so far (which is doubly nice because its configs can be used with plain iterm via itermocil) but will take a look at this too!

</comment><comment><USER15> Please try to use a different name this clashes quite with [http://cockpit- project.org/](http://cockpit-project.org/)

But otherwise it's a nice tool

<comment><USER12> Thank you. I have a small attachment to the name 'Cockpit'. Three years ago, me and my friends, we used to spend quite some time in hacking projects or automating our workflow. It was at that time, we created a a tool called 'Cockpit' ([https://github.com/27AE60/cockpit](https://github.com/27AE60/cockpit)) for configuring Terminal workspace in Linux. Over the years, I started concentrating on one terminal. And when I shifted to iTerm2 along with Tmux, I wanted to spend less time in configuring workspace and more on my code. Then, I realized, I end up with similar Tmux layouts for most of my prototypes and I wanted to reduce my time in re-loading the projects. I wanted a visual representation of Tmux and flexibility in terms of scripts instead of installing applications. This tool reminded me of my old project and so, I couldn't think a better name than Cockpit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How do you create 3 equal sized horizontal windows with Cockpit?

<comment><USER12> It is not possible to create 3 equal sized horizontal panes with Cockpit. What I normally do is, create three horizontal splits in Cockpit and in tmux, I use `leader-key space` which makes tmux cycle through available layouts, and in one of them is equal sized horizontal windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great job, this is something that I'd definitely use - especially when I can't be bothered with installing extra gems.

</comment><comment><USER18> I use tmuxomatic, which is very simple to use with it's visual layout. Works really well.

[https://github.com/oxidane/tmuxomatic](https://github.com/oxidane/tmuxomatic)

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice application!

I found a small bug: When you have an edit field open and try to open another one (command/session name/window name), the second one will just be cleared to blank.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. Good find! I will fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome. Side note, you may want to rename your project to avoid a clash with kubernetes' cockpit UI for kubernetes cluster monitoring.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. I've received a similar comment in this thread regarding 'Cockpit' name conflict. I have explained my reasons in reply to the comment by @recentdarkness

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is a bug when you close windows (the round yellow thing remains). Also can you name the windows?

<comment><USER12> Here is an image which details all the icons in Tmux. [http://cockpit.27ae60.com/img/demo-configure- ii.png](http://cockpit.27ae60.com/img/demo-configure-ii.png)

Also updated in [http://cockpit.27ae60.com/help.html](http://cockpit.27ae60.com/help.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The layout seems to be broken on Firefox for Android. The pane with the demo fully covers the text

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the feedback. I have not thought about this tool being used in mobiles as my primary focus was for desktop users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought about building something like this every time I messed with tmuxinator layouts. Nice!

<comment><USER12> Thanks.I wanted an easy script creator from my dynamic yet simple layouts, so I thought of building Cockpit. Now, all I do is re-run the script generated from the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What I want is iTerm2 hotkeys for tmux so I don't have to remember both.

<comment><USER25> First result on Google: [http://tangledhelix.com/blog/2012/04/28/iterm2-keymaps- for-t...](http://tangledhelix.com/blog/2012/04/28/iterm2-keymaps-for-tmux/)

<comment><USER24> After reading that, the Tmux integration for iterm2 (tmux -CC) seems to work a lot better. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Has Blocked Ad Targeting by Sexual Orientation - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/facebook-has-blocked-ad-targeting-by-sexual-orientation <comment><USER2> "The move has left organizations offering services to the LGBT community unable to directly target their audiences."

Some of the benefits of ad targeting that some want to restrict and regulate into oblivion.</comment>


This Is How You Deal With Design Ripoffs - <AUTHOR> http://fireballed.org/linked/2010/12/22/reeder-rip// <comment><USER2> What is "how you deal with design ripoffs"? That page? I understand that it is a good comparison, so you can notice the lagiarism(?) but I do not see any action taken.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a comparison. So what? I was expecting comeuppance.</comment>


If You're Attempting Hybrid Cloud, Get Out of My Industry - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/if-youre-attempting-hybrid-cloud-get-out-of-my-industry-c478abca5767#.ig0a1s20q <comment><USER2> So, basically, loud proclamation to "don't do X", followed by a bunch of semi- related ranting, and barely a word about _why_ to not do X.

All I could mine from that was something like "don't do it because it's a lot of work." But, most things in life worth doing are hard work.

Very convincing...

<comment><USER3> I happen to agree with the author simply based on the tight IAM integration between all AWS products. Working with GCP and manually processing OAuth2.0 tokens (three legged oauth, 2 legged oath, JSON web tokens, callbacks, etc.) with callbacks, signing/storing/expiring certificates is such a nightmare from an integrations perspective. IAM solves all of these problems. IAM alone is reason to go all in with AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's the type of writing that get excited about hybrid cloud

<comment><AUTHOR> Best of luck to you, then. :)

TBH, it was really just a rant based on recent statements I'd overheard.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what's up with New Mogul? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.newmogul.com/ (nickb's business version of Hacker news) has been down the last few days.  Anyone know why? <comment><USER2> I don't know -- but my guess is that Nickb is out of town and away from the internet and news.arc (particularly the older version that newmogul is running) is known to crash periodically and require a reboot.</comment>


Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-us-nukes-was-00000000-for-20-years/

<comment><USER2> Posted 4 days ago:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819969](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819969)

</comment><comment><USER3> Never fear. I have it on good authority that new security codes are reasonably secure alphanumeric combinations: "123456qwerty". It would be interesting to find out how it is really done though. I suspect we will not know until new more secure system is in place.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's the kind of combination an idiot puts on his luggage.</comment>


Ask YC: Saving Inspiration - <AUTHOR>

This idea is to save not just auto industry, but other industries too.  I submitted this to change.gov, no I did not vote for Obama, but if the government is really going to listen to US NOW IS OUR SHOT!
A while back I did some research on prize economics, and in general there is a 100x advantage to using a prize economic model on BIG PROBLEMS.
Right now the auto industry is facing a crisis because cars are expensive to manufacture, there are delays in manufacture and credit approval, and gas really put the pinch on us this summer.
My recommendation is that the car manufactures put out MASSIVE prizes for improvements that we value as a country.  Heck we could even vote for what we as a country want to give prizes away for.
One example might be a prize of $1 billion dollars to the 1st car company that can travel cross country in 40 hours  on 40 gallons of gas.  The prize money would be dolled out over time, and at each stage require the car company to pass certain mile stones.
When Netflix started the Netflix prize they were unsure of who would participate, the goal was to get 10% better recommendations than Netflix did in house and the prize was 1 million dollars or 8 full time software engineers for 1 year.  The result is that there are thousands of people competing for the prize and glory of wining.  WIthin the 1st month they were 5.5% better than Netflix, but today people are only 8.8% better than Netflix's algorithm 3 years ago.  With thousands of people working on it across the globe, we have all learned a few interesting things.
Darpa did the same for self driving robotic cars.  They put up $1 million in the 1st year and had about 20 teams compete each spending about $100k-$1.5 million to win, no one one, but in the second year, Darpa vowed to add $1 million to the prize each year until someone won.  In year two 12 companies completed the course and 1 group from Stanford took home the prize and a government contract.  When the head of Darpa was questioned, he thought it was a bargain, because a government contract would have cost over $200 million dollars to accomplish the same thing.
Today we are faced with big problems that need to be solved in the auto industry.
Accident and death rates are so high, that for people in their 20's and 30's car accidents put people at the greatest change for injury.
US cars have low MPG ratings when the technology exists to have cars in the 50+ MPG range and getting to 100+ MPG should be viable in 1 or two years.
We have other industries that could use a boost from prizes, like health care with cancer, aids, heart disease, and diabetes.
These problems are so big that capitol markets have had problems solving them because engineering teams need to 1st think about budgets and business models before they think about solutions.  Prize economics makes it noble and profitable to give the technology away to win the prize.
Instead of giving away charity, lets inspire people with a prize worth awarding, and lets get a gift worth sharing.
Justin
please pass this on. <comment><USER2> The auto industry is fine, it's doing quite good. It's the American auto industry that has a problem - and this is a business problem, not really a technology problem.

If there were some dude making some way advanced beepers right now, what he has is not a technology problem, it's a business problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think prize economics is really interesting... though practically speaking, there's probably a limited class of problems that could be better solved by using prizes. (I think "the auto industry" will do just fine without any kind of prize.)

Check out these articles:

"The Bogus $1 Million Meat Prize" <http://www.slate.com/id/2189693/>

"Should the government start handing out prizes for science breakthroughs?"

<http://www.slate.com/id/2182663/pagenum/2>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think someone (Milton maybe?) proposed a solution to do this for pharmaceutical drugs. The companies are then computing for the drug discovery and as soon it's discovered it becomes open to anyone to manufacture.

This avoids pharmaceutical companies preventing the poorer people/countries from getting needed drugs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another example would be Google's Lunar X prize, and, of course, the X-Prize.

I have to admit that I never fully understood how the economics work out for the teams competing for a prize. Money for the R&D efforts of each team still has to come from somewhere, and only one team wins the prize to cover the costs. If the technology is so valuable, it makes more sense to me to attempt to take it to market rather than compete for a prize: there can be more than one winner in the market, and the potential payoff can be higher than the prize money.

Obviously, this doesn't work if there is no accessible market for the tech, or if the team is motivated by recognition rather than money.

<comment><USER6> Nothing is stopping a losing team from taking their product to the market, Think of it as an added incentive to do it now rather than later.

Speaking in terms of time-value... We have a cost now, and a benefit in the future. If C> B/((1+r)^n) then a team will not try to design and create this product /* C = Cost, B = Expected Benefit, r is discount rate, n is number of years*/ Now, if we add a prize = P, it is possible that C<= (B+P)/((1+r)^n). Over the spread of many teams, this means that we are subsidizing additional competition to enter into the market by making available this prize.

Speaking less pedantically, if we make the prize high enough in addition to whatever rewards a team will get in the open market, then we give the team an incentive to take the gamble. Who knows, maybe you'll just win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate to break it to you but the current record for hydrogen powered cars is over 5000km/litre and for combustion engines it's over 1200km/litre.

The auto industry has some of the best engineers in the world and are more than capable of offering high efficiency vehicles but it's not in their best interests to do so. Frequent vehicle replacements and high energy consumption are in the industies favour.

[http://www.canadiandriver.com/thenews/2008/04/13/fuel- econom...](http://www.canadiandriver.com/thenews/2008/04/13/fuel-economy- record-broken-at-shell-eco-marathon.htm)

<http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/102185/>

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a very good idea. One of us should put together a charity like this. People donate and get to vote on the prizes held.

<comment><USER6> Crowdsourcing innovation?

Neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A friend of mine runs innocentive.com, which is a smaller-scale instance of this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Justin - fascinating idea mate. I'm a huge fan of original resource, seeing pretty raw stuff before it gets "popularized" and... well, you know how it goes.

If you'd be so kind, could you point me to a couple places to start learning about prize economics? I'll check here, and my email is contactsebastian -at- gmail.com. Anyone else from HN is welcome to shoot me a line too, I feel like I'm with people I like in my living room when I'm on this site.</comment>


IoT Emergency Alert Button with RPi and Notify17 (who launched on HN last year) - <AUTHOR> https://miscdotgeek.com/iot-emergency-alert-with-rpi-and-notify17/ <comment><AUTHOR> Notify17 launched on HN last year:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936420](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936420)

and I immediately signed up for it, but hadn't used it until this project. And now that I fully understand it, I'll be using it a _lot_ more.

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat stuff. I did the same thing for my father living alone, but with the Amazon IoT Button.

</comment><comment><USER3> Notify17 looks great, and I plan on giving it a go.

However, since their example is a curl with plaintext body, I question their assertion that "Whatever your content is, we will never know about it".

It sounds to me more like the content is encrypted at rest, which is important but I still have to trust that N17 isn't squirreling away a plaintext copy or accidentally leaking it via logs or something similar.

<comment><USER4> One similar self-hosted solution is [https://gotify.net/](https://gotify.net/) , which also has Android and web apps and a similarly simple way to push messages using curl/http.

<comment><USER5> This looks great, but this is similarly not encrypted, right? Google/Apple will be able to read all my notifications, no?

The only way I've found to do encrypted notifications is using Signal and signald, through a library I wrote:

[https://gitlab.com/stavros/pysignald](https://gitlab.com/stavros/pysignald)

signald isn't as reliable as I'd like, but it works well enough. Still, if there were a simpler alternative, I'd switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Notify17 seems really expensive for just proxying push notifications. You only get 75 free per month?

<comment><USER7> That's 2.5 alerts a day...something is wrong with your setup if you're getting that many alerts/day

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is cool. I do the same thing with a webhook to a self-hosted Mattermost, and then use their mobile app to sign in to my own instance to get the notifications (via the free public mattermost notification proxy).

I might switch to Notify17 for some stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool. I did something similar with an ESP8266, and an iftt web hook configured to flash the hue lights in my house and SMS me. I think texting is no longer offered by iftt.

<comment><USER10> you can still email a phone number. there are common email extensions for various carriers like email@example.com for Verizon for example. you can get the carrier email extension by sending a text message to an email address. it will be in the reply line of your email client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering: is pushing notifications using a PWA viable? (on Android & iOS)</comment>


Things that are more inequitable than road pricing - <AUTHOR> http://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that-road-pricing/ <comment><USER3> I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context.

Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Manhattan or they'd rather take commuter rail than sit in traffic. To the extent the latter take ubers or similar such services already pay congestion charges and there isn't too much fuss (except from the drives who don't have much political muscle).

The bulk of car commuters into Manhattan are instead those with de jure or de facto free parking. That's largely government workers (e.g. teachers, cops, firefighters) and members of the trades (i.e. construction workers).

For those with de jure free parking congestion pricing isn't a big deal, whatever authority is setting aside parking will either pay the congestion charge or get it waived. It's the beneficiaries of police and traffic control refusal to enforce the law with respect to certain favored populations that are up in arms about congestion charges. Because a congestion charge is likely to be enforced by an automated mechanism which, unlike parking control, will not engage in public corruption on their behalf. And these groups, unlike the uber drivers, do have a great deal of political muscle.

+At least the ordinary rich, hecto-millionaires and billionaires might be a different story

<comment><USER4> I live in lower Manhattan. My feeling is that every vehicle other than delivery trucks should be banned from the city. There is no compelling reason for anyone to drive in Manhattan. If people are commuting into Manhattan, they should take public transit to and from parking lots in Brooklyn/Queens/New Jersey. You will never convince me that there are low income workers who need to drive in the city as an essential part of their livelihood. That's just not a real thing here.

<comment><USER5> My compelling reason is that I live in Manhattan and frequently make trips to visit family that are not well served by public transportation. And when I'm there, I prefer using a vehicle to get around.

I often return to New York with a carful of groceries, luggage, etc. I've tried this via public transit -- it's a miserable affair. The utility of a personal vehicle for me is very high -- perhaps substantially higher than it would be for you.

There's no need to justify vehicles based on economic classes and livelihood. Why does the car debate need to be made into some kind of class conflict? It's just more convenient and pleasant, and that's how some choose to spend their money.

I'm sorry it inconveniences you, but our society exists because we're willing to be slightly inconvenienced by our neighbors (especially those with different preferences than us) in exchange for certain benefits.

<comment><USER6> The argument against here that I find most compelling is that the externalities of you driving your car are so insanely huge that it should be priced into the range of ridiculousness.

Things that you have to consider (The numbers attached are _completely_ made up and probably off by multiple orders of magnitude in most cases, but are to make the point that you should be assigning costs to these things. Then you should multiply by them by reasonable estimates of the quantities that make up the denominator on the unit and see what you come up with. Also note that as there are less cars on the road the externalities per car probably go up):

\- Air quality (say, 0.1c per person you drive past?)

\- Noise polution (say, 0.1c per person you drive past?)

\- Road size - realestate cost (say, 0.000001c/trip per per person who pays taxes?)

\- Road size - increased walking (and other travel) time (say, 0.0000001c/trip per person who crosses a road you drove on?)

\- Congestion (say, 1c for everyone on a bus behind you?)

\- Road maintenance (probably negligible compared to the other costs)

\- Pedestrian safety (...)

\- Climate change (...)

Our society exists not just because we're willing to be slightly inconvenienced by our neighbors, but because we are willing to go to reasonable lengths to avoid inconveniencing our neighbors. Perhaps, reasonable lengths includes not driving into the city.

<comment> pseudonom- There are serious attempts to estimate the externalities that arise from automobile use in general: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.661...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.661.7936&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Adjusting those estimates (only) for inflation, they work out to about $2.14 per gallon in driving externalities.

<comment><USER7> So.....even if you add it to the price of US fuel, it's still cheaper than fuel in the UK? And British cities have just as much trouble with congestion as American cities do. I guess what I mean is that if this extra money is meant to be a deterrent to driving it's just not enough. I'm not sure what the price would need to be to be honest. I've been to Portugal recently and the price of petrol is just insane - in the order of $8-9/US gallon. And yet people sitll drive, larger cities still have loads of congestion. And Portugal is very poor by European standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In Northern Virginia outside DC, I-66 had been subject to directional rush hour restrictions on single occupancy vehicles. It was illegal to drive a car with just yourself for a few hours every weekday and you risked a ticket if you were caught. People put blow up dolls in their passenger seats.

Last year they rolled out automatic congestion pricing for SOVs. All the news stories were about how the toll could hit a ridiculous-seeming price of $40+, but that was usually only for a few minutes in the morning rush. Buried in the articles several paragraphs in would be a note that, oh yeah, it had been illegal to drive alone. Now a year later, peoples' habits have changed and the toll has done its job. Commuters have effectively time-shifted, alleviating and smoothing congestion. It has been so effective that the length of I-66 subject to this treatment will be extended.

I'm a smalltime neighborhood elected official in DC and I really hope I can convince DDOT to roll out bus lanes faster.

<comment><USER9> > Commuters have effectively time-shifted, alleviating and smoothing > congestion. It has been so effective that the length of I-66 subject to this > treatment will be extended.

Also, has anyone computed the cost of the economic externalities here? Time shifting ones commute either has severe financial repercussions for the employer (lost productivity) or the employees (a decrease in effective wages).

I suspect those numbers will dwarf the cost of investing in a light rail system or widening the road after a few years.

Similarly, if traffic is below about 45mph, then further slowing traffic increases CO2 emissions by lowering fuel efficiency, and the congestion on the road distorts property values, lowering prices in more places than it helps them, which hurts school funding (especially in minority areas), etc, etc.

As I said in the other comment, consider raising peak commute throughput instead of devising ways to suppress peak demand.

<comment><USER10> > Also, has anyone computed the cost of the economic externalities here? Time > shifting ones commute either has severe financial repercussions for the > employer (lost productivity) or the employees (a decrease in effective > wages).

That, or companies implement flexible working hours, which allow time shifting without penalty.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't work if you have kids. You miss seeing them in either the morning or evening, and the schools don't time shift to match your schedule.

<comment><USER11> If you have kids and work either the kids can get to school without you needing to drive them and pick them up, or you need to have some sort of childcare.

<comment><USER12> I bring my kids to school, my wife picks them up from child care. She barely sees them in the morning (they get out of bed shortly before she leaves the house), I still see them in the evening. It's a nice balance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think most of the comments here are misunderstanding the article. It seems to be saying "Don't say congestion pricing is inequitable without also saying that these are things that we already have are inequitable." It's meant as a counter-argument to people saying "but congestion pricing is regressive against poor people therefore we shouldn't have it." So if you think that gas pricing should not have to be based on one's income, you aren't refuting the article since you presumably also don't think equitability concerns apply to congestion pricing either.

<comment><USER14> The main flaw with this article is that it's reasonable to think that since car transportation is already expensive for the poor that there shouldn't be even more costs for the poor. In "realpolitik" one can't really vote for "congestion charges but only if we remove tax A from the poor".

So yes, people can acknowledge that many things about transportation are inequitable while still believing that congestion charges are inequitable.

<comment><USER15> The main flaw of this article is if we add congestion pricing to manhattan to help pay for upgrading the MTA, Cuomo will just take that money when he next raids the MTA funds for some new upstate pork-barrel measure.

<comment><USER16> Hopefully the law would prevent such a thing :/. People in power have proposed such restrictions, but yes we'll see what we get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The way I conceptually see it is that people with lower income pay less once a year, during tax time, and save a lot of money then. All other times it's just much simpler if prices/fees/whatnot are based on actual usage. Can you imagine owning a gas station or running a parking lot and having to deal with income verification from all your clients, and then dealing with the government to get reimbursed because Joe Schmo is low income and got a 25% discount? That would be a recipe for wasteful bureaucracy, black market activities like low income people using their gas cards to fill up others' cars, and generally just tons of inefficiencies.

<comment><USER18> I was approached twice on the same day at a cub foods once by people offering to buy my groceries with their food stamps in exchange for a lesser amount of cash.

I still think the program is valuable, but damn it hurts to see it be abused (especially since one of the guys had his little kid with him). A discount card or whatever that works on the spot is practically guaranteed to be abused as an easy money maker for people, and the net effect ends up being counter to the purpose od the program and many others.

<comment><USER19> If the majority of people are acting responsibly within the program does abuse warrant changing policies for everyone else, ie optimizing around the frauds, or should abuse be handled separately?

When GOG.com optimized around the frauds they came up with a refund policy for their ethicals that's driven by preventing the frauds, now their real customers wanting refunds must work within a hostile framework designed to deny their refund because it assumes they're an adversary.

<comment><USER18> This is all rather off-topic from what I was originally replying to (a purely hypothetical means of subsidizing a hypothetical tax), but what do you imagine could be done to change the food stamp policies?

The scam was simple enough- he'd buy $100 of groceries for me, and I'd hand him $80 in cash. The one guy was practically taking food out of his kid's mouth (almost literally, in fact) to try to get that cash. Maybe it was a legit need, maybe it was for crack (fairly popular in that area of town).

Either way, if he found someone to do it, he and his family would continue living off of the cheapest foods and charity, while he'd have some unreported money.

Food stamps themselves are already a compromise; the reason we have them rather than handing out cold hard cash (like he wanted) was because we wanted some assurance that it would go towards a legitimate need, rather than fueling an addiction or luxury goods.

Short of getting family members to turn fraudsters in or having grocery store employees act as police informants, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to improve the system at all, without even considering the burden of new policies on good actors.

<comment><USER19> I think the solution is to treat their pursuit of cash, as it pertains to the food stamp program, as just a red herring, a distraction. Some food stamp funding probably ends up in exploitative mobile game IAPs, unhealthy food etc, can't police it without massively impeding everyone's privacy and independence but 0.9% fraud means the program's overwhelmingly working as intended so why bother?

If something is to be done to help the addicts, the ill, the obese etc so they spend food stamp funding more effectively it should address their addictions and illnesses and problems. Those are health and education and social services issues.

Address that and you could actually start asking why there needs to be restrictions at all on what people can buy with food stamps... they're supposed to be help people below poverty live at normal standards, which includes spending money irresponsibly or at their own discretion!

People on that program can't buy necessities like toilet paper, laundry detergent, soap, diapers, tampons, deodorant, lip balm, I think that is a bigger problem than 0.9% fund misuse especially when such conditions might contribute to the 'misuse'.

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-kerr/10-things-you- cant-b...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-kerr/10-things-you-cant-buy- with-food-stamps_b_5079780.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > parking meters don't charge different rates to users based on their income; > you have to pay the same amount to park your used Jetta as you do your new > Mercedes [...] That's inequitable.

I guess it depends on which end of the political spectrum you are, but this sounds absolutely obscene to me.

<comment><USER21> It sounds obscene to me too.

A car uses a parking spot. The spot is no longer available for someone else- regardless of your income. Incomes is orthogonal to the problem.

Flat taxes are the fairest taxes.

Take trash taxes for example: you produce 100 lbs of trash, you pay for 100 lbs of trash because disposing of 100 lbs of trash in a landfill or a recycling facility won't be affected by the income of the person having produced said trash.

Want to pay less taxes? Produce less trash.

<comment><USER22> The argument isn't about whether the quantum of taxes is appropriate. It is how a fixed quantum turns a disincentive for some into an irrelevancy to others. If the purpose of the cost is to discourage use (peak period congestion charges), then it should vary with income so as to be a equally discouraging to all to whom it applies. For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production, whereas the rich aren't affected and can produce far more before they feel the incentive to reduce waste.

I think the parking spot item is more like a meal at a fine restaurant - <USER2> is no incentive or disincentive from a social standpoint that should justify variable pricing on income. But to the extend there is, say via congestion, pollution, etc, it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive.

<comment><USER21> > it is reasonable to vary pricing in order to equally apply the disincentive.

No, it's not reasonable. The goal is not to discourage use, but to price in the negative externality.

> For your example of trash collection, by having a fixed fee the state > creates a greater incentive among the poor to reduce their trash production,

And that's good, even if we suppose your argument is right. Bear with me: what's the percentage of the population in your country that you would call "rich"? Let's say 20%.

Do you think that 20% of the population can create more bags of trash than 80% of the population? I don't think so.

In the parking example, do you think 20% of the population can park more cars than 80% of the population? I don't think so either.

Someone rich may have more than one car, but I strongly doubt they are able to drive 2 cars at once.

<comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure 5% of the population can create more of whatever negative externality you'd like to tax than the lower 95%. Someone rich might not drive a car at all and instead take a private jet. An average person from the US produces fifty times as much CO2 as an average person from Kenya.

<comment><USER21> If we were talking about CO2, I'd agree with you.

But we are talking about parking spaces, and production of trash within a country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems rather US-centric, but perhaps there are some universal things in there? In The Netherlands, we usually split off some of the issues; for example there is the tax that covers road usage paid per active registered vehicle. This depends on the vehicle, so depending on how expensive/big/powerful etc your new car would be, you'd pay more or less tax. For public transportation, more and more networks are getting dedicated lanes or even dedicated roads, so buses for example are not affected by what the cars happen to be doing at that time.

<comment><USER25> Yeah much of it doesn't transfer, but on the subject of the taxes in The Netherlands a lot of it is nonsensical:

1\. You pay tax per weight of the vehicle, and that's a (mostly?) linear relationship. Whereas a 10 ton vehicle causes _much_ more than 10x the wear & tear to roadways than a 1 ton vehicle.

2\. Even if it were adjusted for the wear it shouldn't be a fixed fee, but based on actual usage. Paying it for a combination of the weight and mileage/yr would still not reflect reality, but would be closer.

3\. There's no tax for vehicle size, just weight (the two don't always closely follow each other), which produces an externality on small Dutch roadways.

<comment><USER24> That tax is not the only one paying for the roads; the normal tax on fuel and the fuel-specific tax on top of that (which also differs per type of fuel) offsets the heavier engines or heavier users.

At the same time, a project people abandoned a few times (mostly because or scare tactics) is in the works to see if we can lower or abandon some of the taxes in favour of usage-based taxes measured by vehicle kilometers on-road. So if you drive more, you pay more.

At the same time, I don't think it makes sense to make all tax super dependant on what you drive, where you drive it, and what money you make. We already have some specific systems in place to deal with the discrepancy between high income and low income (and the gradient in the middle), so instead of making the tax system more complex by adding yet more variables to existing rules, a rule with a highly specific target is simpler and reaches more of the people it applies to.

Basically, if you are poor, or simply don't make enough money to save or invest, a lot of the taxes no longer apply. At the same time, if your income is so low you are getting towards the edge of not surviving (depending on where you are I guess) you get money for rent and healthcare. And on top of that: if you don't have a lot of money, it makes no sense to own a car anyway.

I don't think a true per-use system that only relies on what the current usage of _anything_ is will work, simply because we cannot predict what we will need or use in the future and it disables all paths to investments or building infrastructure because it is a lifeline to certain areas. After all, it's not a for-profit corporate system we're talking about, it's a country or a government. While sensible decisions are of course needed, and adjustments to how some things are paid for can be very sensible, making a very tight integration between what is available and what it currently used is a very bad idea for humans.

<comment><USER25> Fuel taxes are just another version of taxing the wrong thing. People using gasoline for e.g. yard equipment aren't using the roads, but they're effectively paying road tax to trim their hedge. Someone who owns a Tesla also isn't paying their road tax.

Taxes and tolls should be based on what/where/when you drive. Someone driving in circles in downtown Amsterdam in the middle of the day is causing a lot more externalities than someone doing the same thing in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

Nothing about saying fees shouldn't be externalized is an argument that there shouldn't be investment in infrastructure. Although I think you'll find that once car infrastructure would have to pay real property tax and pay for its externalities (including pollution etc.) we'd need less road infrastructure. You'd get more density, more things shipped by train instead of trucks etc.

<comment><USER26> _People using gasoline for e.g. yard equipment aren 't using the roads, but they're effectively paying road tax to trim their hedge_

It's legal to use untaxed (undyed) fuel for off-road uses, but the quantities are so low that it's not worth the distribution system for it. So usually it's only used by large consumers (i.e. farmers and other consumers with large off- road fuel usage)

 _Someone who owns a Tesla also isn 't paying their road tax._

That will change next year when California will start charging a $100 EV fee for car registrations. It's still less than the $176 a 10,000 mile/year 30mpg driver will pay in gas tax, but it's not "nothing". Though since EV's are typically more expensive than the equivalent conventional car, they'll pay a higher VLF fee. So for example, $10,000 in extra value means $65/year more VLF tax so that EV will be paying around $165/year.

I'd rather see a milage + weight based tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really take exception with their point on insurance. They try to insidiously suggest that the poor and urban population pays more for insurance than other populations due to... Well they don't say, but I do take their inference. The fact of the matter is that the auto insurance industry is highly regulated and cannot discriminate on many factors. Their rate books are reviewed by regulators. The fact that poor and urban residents pay more has to do with the risk to the vehicle. The chance of damage, theft, the type of car, the experience and record of the driver, etc. all factor in. It may be unfortunate, but it is it not some grand conspiracy or inherent bias to hold these people down. I wish other types of insurance (like health) were as easy to shop for as auto insurance. You can easily shop multiple insurers and compare prices from the comfort of your home and pick what works best for you. It's really incredible when you think about it.

<comment><USER28> > Well they don't say, but I do take their inference.

So you're criticizing them for something they, as you admit, do not actually say. How is it their fault if the undisputed facts they state make you think of something that you consider wrong?

<comment><USER27> I am not criticizing or disputing their point that, for example, a person living in a low income area will pay a higher rate than a similar person living in a high income area. I do dispute that it is an inequity that needs to be "fixed", which is the main thesis of the article. While I do consider it unfortunate, it's not discriminatory or inequitable and should not be on the list.

<comment><USER28> I believe they may really be trying to show that the complaint about congestion pricing being unfair is silly by giving some other, equally silly, examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Author uses a really backwards definition of equitable. Equability is not about making every price defined as percentage of income. Equability is about making things so cheap that everyone can easily afford them, regardless of income. In perfect equitably, everything would be free.

Public Schools are equitable, because every child can attend public school, there are no barriers to attendance. Public Water utility systems are equitable, because every resident gets an identical cheapest possible rate for drinking water, so that the barrier to access to water is as low as possible. Public Libraries are equitable, because every resident gets identical access to the contents of the library, as cheap (or usually free) a price as possible.

\---

Urbanists attack the roads from the opposite angle. They are trying to invent as many barriers as possible to their use. (i.e., additional taxes, additional congestion charges, etc). Congestion prices can never be equitable, because the idea itself is intentionally inequal -- it's an attempt to punish people for using a public good (and more accurately, an attempt to maximally-punish each person as equally as possible).

This is the exact opposite of true equability, which is all about delivering as much public good as possible, as cheaply as possible.

<comment><USER30> I think one of the main sub-texts of this type of articles is that roads are not "public goods", or at least that they shouldn't be reguarded as "public goods" anymore, but that instead road-users should be made aware that using those roads is a "privilege" (for lack of a better word) which they should pay dearly for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The three major themes of the article seem to be: micro transactions, variable pricing, and unbundling. I think that one of the unintended consequences of the first two is that doing them well requires a lot of information about the consumer at the transaction point. I can see some risks in that and I'm sure more devious minds than my own can think of more.

<comment><USER32> Alas license plate tracking is already pretty widespread, adding a toll gate with contactless payment doesn't make much of a difference now.

In car transponders of course would make the privacy problem worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> it seems to me that the right way to solve the regressive nature of pigovian taxes like congestion fees or gas taxes is to implement them with subsidies so that they are largely revenue neutral.

The idea being to give everyone a tax credit equivalent to what they are probably going to spend on usage fees. The incentive structure remains, as they get to keep the money if you aren't contributing to the negative externality, and on average nobody is any worse off than before.

<comment><USER31> _"A Pigovian (Pigouvian) tax is a liquid waste, or effluent, fee which is assessed against private individuals or businesses for engaging in activities that create adverse side effects. Adverse side effects are those costs which are not included as a part of the product 's market price."_

Source: [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pigoviantax.asp)

<comment><USER33> my understanding is that it's any tax used to price in an externality. An effluent fee would be just one example.

wikipedia supports my usage: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax)

"A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of such externalities are environmental pollution, and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For the people who believe this is fair and just-

Should engineers and programmers pay more money for the same laptop as an art student?

I'm unsure if this pricing should only exist in the public sector or should extend to private services. Looking to hear your rationale.

I'm one of those, treat everyone equal, types. Would like to hear your reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the US, the idea of fairness is basically divided on political lines. On the "right", people think fairness is equality. On the "left", people think fairness is equity.

Helpful graphic: [http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp- content/uploads...](http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png)

<comment><USER35> I always liked this one about the school system: [https://imgur.com/a/aikYqxg](https://imgur.com/a/aikYqxg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Gasoline and gas taxes

This seems like a legacy problem that will soon go away. Gas taxes were done because they were a good proxy for both miles driven, when most cars got roughly the same milage. But now you have cars that get a few miles to the gallon while another car that might be heavier is getting 35mpg. And of course electric cars.

I suspect gas taxes will switch to milage taxes in the next few years as more and more electric cars are adopted. In California they've already started charging electric cars an extra fee on the annual registration to make up for the lack of gas taxes.

<comment><USER37> In Georgia there's an Alternative Fuel Vehicle fee charged on any vehicle that doesn't pay a fuel tax, or any AFV that does but chooses the AFV vanity plate.

The AFV vanity plate entitles you to drive for free in all Toll lanes.

All zero emissions vehicles are also allowed in HOV lanes regardless of occupancy since the HOV lanes were introduced to curb emissions in Metro Atlanta.

<comment><USER38> Not directly related but Georgia also has a pay to carpool/alternative commute program. [http://gacommuteoptions.com/](http://gacommuteoptions.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> _let's ask what it takes to create an overall system that is fair to all, considering all aspects of how the system is paid for, who benefits, and who bears the external costs_

Here's a crazy idea: instead of _pricing_ congestion, let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge point deduction.

Puts a hard limit on the number of cars that enter the zone and applies both to the rich and poor equally.

Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy additional cars just so they can drive more - although I don't think many would be willing to go to such lenghts.

<comment><USER40> > let's introduce a point system with quotas tied to license plates and surge > point deduction. [...] Unless of course some of the rich decide to buy > additional cars just so they can drive more - although I don't think many > would be willing to go to such lengths.

During pollution spikes in Paris, the city occasionally alternates each day between forbidding odd or even ending car plates from circulating downtown. The rich do precisely what you say: buy an extra car and make sure the license plates are so they can drive any day regardless of restrictions.

<comment><USER39> Does it make financial sense comparing to taxis, or do they just buy some kind of barely-allowed shitbox as a substitute?

<comment><USER30> I'd guess that from a certain point on you don't look at the financial incentives only, but that you want to maintain your "status" (for different definitions of that word depending on different social environments).

For example I know of people close to my age (late 30s) and from my social circles (middle-class people) who pride themselves for almost never using the metro, even though in the city where I'm living (Eastern Europe) the metro does a pretty good job at transporting most of the city's population. As such, if a system that would forbid car circulation based on their license plates were to be introduced I'm pretty much sure that those same people would buy a second car especially in order to circumvent the new rules, and I'm also pretty much sure that that second car would be almost as "good" as their first car. Doing otherwise would be seen as a diminishing of those people's social standing.

<comment><USER39> _Doing otherwise would be seen as a diminishing of those people's social standing._

That's what I'm getting at. Say they already drive the best car they can(or even cannot at times) afford. Do they switch to two 3 years older cars(assuming that's how long it takes for a car to lose half of its value)?

<comment><USER40> That would presumably depend on the financial situation. Anecdotally I've run into 2nd or 3rd car plans moving forward (e.g. a kid mobile to cart the family around, or a small car for use by the older children) and outright buying a 2nd Mercedes as a matter of making a point. I can't recollect anyone in my circle of acquaintances that did this for who money would have been much of a consideration.

Intuitively I do not think anyone is buying an old clunker as a supplemental vehicle to dodge such policies. The regulations during pollution spike control efforts could ban their use anyway, so it would need to be a recent car. And if cheap is a decision factor, you're probably using a combination of public transportation and the occasional cab anyway. (Public transportation is good enough in most major European cities that you can live without a car.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Decrying everything that doesn't have a low-income subsidy as "inequity" is disingenuous and undermines your better justified claims. It's OK if poor people pay the same price as rich people _for the same service_ and it's OK to have broad income subsidies or progressive income/wealth tax to help poor people. It's not reasonable to claim that every fee for service is "inequitable".

</comment><comment><USER42> Why does this political subject get posted every week on HN, why does it always result in ideological discussions sprinkled with personal anecdotes and why is everyone asking for the defeatist solution of taxation (to reduce the appeal of individual transport) instead of at least treating the underlying technical problems (logistics, pollution) as an engineering challenge? It's disheartening...

</comment><comment><USER43> > 5\. Gasoline and gas taxes.

Are they suggesting progressive gas tax? The price of gas you pay at the pump would depend on your salary?

<comment><USER44> I think they're suggesting that if you oppose decry congestion pricing because it's a not progressive, you should also oppose gasoline cost and gas taxes because they're not progressive.

Their thesis is that congestion pricing _shouldn 't_ be dismissed on grounds X, not that all these other things _should_ be dismissed on grounds X. It's pointing out the inconsistency of supporting a bunch of inequitable policies while rejecting another simply because "it's inequitable".

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The electric vehicles item here is disingenuous without including how massively subsidized their oil-based competitors are. I understand why urban transit people target electric cars to counter the "electric cars will save the world!" narrative but it falls flat to me in an otherwise compelling list.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can I just mention how mind-bogglingly stupid a milage tax on car registration would be? No matter how efficient your new car is, it's less polluting to repair the old one and keep it on the road, than to manufacture a new car.

<comment><USER37> I think you're missing the point. The tax goes towards infrastructure maintenance. All vehicles damage infrastructure and the amount of damage a single car imposes is a function of their weight and miles driven.

From an environmental view, the tax would be for cleaning storm water run off which contains contamination from the vehicle itself (e.g. oil, brake dust). From that perspective an older car is more likely to polute storm water than a new car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I agree with TFA's premise, but some of the specific arguments present are faulty.

 _Flat vehicle registration fees_

Excise tax is not flat, and sometimes a luxury tax on top even makes it progressive. These are registration fees paid to the town instead of the state.

 _The storm sewer subsidy_

The complaint here is that pollution is contributed by commuters / travelers but cleanup is paid by locals. The travelers polluting city storm water sewers are paying taxes in the city when they do business in the city, which is why they are using the roads. If there was no reason to come to the city, there would be a lot less stormwater pollution but also a lot less commerce and the city would be worse off.

 _Insurance rates_

The fact that everyone pays for their own insurance means that is it _not_ a tax. If we subsidized insurance based on income, then insurance _would_ effectively be an income tax. Which, by the way, is true for health insurance.

 _Gasoline and gas taxes_

Are meant to cover (part of) the externalities of driving. The same as the congestion tax the article is supporting. By covering the externality we discourage the polluting activity, which is equitable to be done for everyone who is polluting, regardless of income.

 _EV tax credits_

If we want these (cheaper, more economical, cleaner, safer) cars to become available in the mass market, there is a multi-billion dollar R&D hill to climb. Economies of scale for li-ion and electric drivetrains do not materialize overnight. Getting rich people to spend $60-$100k on a new toy to fund this endeavor, by providing a $7500 carrot, benefits the poor and middle class in the long run. Hell, it benefits the whole _planet_ in the long run. The rich people are putting up a lot more capital than the Federal government in this equation to make mass scale EV a reality. This is a huge win and to say it is inequitable totally misses the point of the subsidy.

<comment><USER48> I disagree with this point:

>The travelers polluting city storm water sewers are paying taxes in the city when they do business in the city, which is why they are using the roads. If there was no reason to come to the city, there would be a lot less stormwater pollution but also a lot less commerce and the city would be worse off.

This is in effect a cross subsidy, making it hard to rationally price pollution. Usage based pricing / taxes are more efficient here. It would be better to lower city taxes and raise road taxes to reflect the cost of pollution. Then, people would either a) drive less or b) drive less polluting vehicles or c) pay the full price of cleanup.

The argument that there is 'more commerce' doesn't hold. If city business (and residents) are subsidizing consumers (e.g. paying for their pollution), the cost of doing business goes up in the city and thus producers have to charge higher prices, reducing consumption. There is no free lunch here unless you steal it from a 3rd party, and in the case of city budgets there is little in the way to prevent that.

<comment><USER47> People come to your city to do business there. If a lot of people do business in your city, a lot of people will be coming in and out of town every day.

Complaining that the people who come to your city to do business (spend their money) are poluting a bit with their cars while they are there, and the cost of that pollution is unfairly borne by city dwellers I think is bizarre, because the benefits of those people coming into the city and spending all that money (which generates jobs and tax revenue, etc.) accrues to the city.

The city is already being paid a very hefty return on the cost of cleaning up the pollution of people traveling into the city every day. The city would not want to discourage people from making the trip!

Maybe more succinctly, the polluter is already paying the city more than enough to cover the cost of cleaning up the car pollution, by nature of the money they are spending while they are in the city.

<comment><USER32> it's not about rentability, it's about fairness. this is a subsidy in favor of those, who pollute by car, while usually those are the people who could pay for it easily.

of course, it's possible that if a city is at the same time both relies heavily on car based tourism/shoppers and its demography is dominantly carless poor people, then in this case probably they would get more poorer by introducing a car usage fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> And then how about those can't even afford a car?

<comment><USER24> They shouldn't live in the US I guess, because that place is designed for cars and nothing else.

<comment><USER43> There are places with lower car ownership in the US. Most notably New York City, where 45% of households own a car.

<comment><USER24> I suppose that makes sense, there would be areas where the amount of cars, buildings and people per square meter is so high its usability implodes on itself. I imagine there must be areas with higher usage of public transportation, higher usage of bicycles or simply having everything for day- to-day life in walking distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I "love" those kind of articles, though this one is a bit different.

But it boils down to "let's make car owners pay a lot of money - (and this article) except if they're poor, then they can't afford being fleeced for wanting to drive" (really Capt. Obvious? so maybe fleecing drivers is not the way to go)

There's a balance between preferring other types of transportation and hating cars. Not to mention this article is US centric and seems to ignore how it's done elsewhere.

"Not pricing roads, which results in slower bus speeds. " there's an answer for that: bus lanes. Exists in several countries.

"Poor people pay more for parking than the rich" Really? (Oh by the way, they don't because of convenience and you might prefer the parking that's further and doesn't have a cover for your old car while the rich might favour the valet parking one next to their office)

I don't think there's much secret to it. Gas taxes are, in the end, a carbon tax. Use more gas pay more for it.</comment>


Ask HN: Should Startups Form as an LLC or C-Corp? - <AUTHOR> My "company" (which is currently not legally formed) is ready to begin sales, however I don't know what form of legal entity I should form.
I will eventually need outside investment, and definitely would like some liability protections. This leads me to consider a C-Corp (which would help with outside investment).
However, is it easier to just start with an LLC and just later convert to a C-Corp, or is it easier to start as a C-Corp?
Also, I was considering applying to Y Combinator, so do they have a preference? <comment><USER2> Having done both, my opinion is that you should incorporate as an LLC. There's little to no regulatory headache compared to a C-Corp and it's much easier to deal with taxes. If you do need to convert to a C-corp in order to take on outside investment, it can be done easily and quickly (although there can be tax repercussions).

<comment><USER3> What about in-state vs Delaware LLC? Is it any easier to convert to a Delaware C-Corp if you started as a Delaware LLC?

<comment><USER4> If you're starting with the expectation of raising VC, filing in Delaware is a good option. Investors prefer Delaware for its pro-business Chancery court and its established history of corporate law. However, if you're not expecting to raise VC, it's almost always easier to file in your home state. By doing this you can avoid paying foreign corporation fees and filing additional paperwork.

If you need outside investment, forming a C-Corp is the way to go. There is more paperwork involved but it's well-suited for investment. LLCs on the other hand offer more flexibility but are more complicated to invest in.

Delaware has a procedure known as "statutory conversion" for converting an LLC to a C-Corp but there may be tax consequences.</comment></comment></comment>


Pragmatic Releasing - <AUTHOR> https://blog.algolia.com/pragmatic-releasing/ <comment><USER2> Meh. This works when you're algolia and co and your "users" are developers. When your users are real users and you're not dealing with web resources that can be live updated, a release _is_ a big deal and shouldn't be treated so blithely.

When we release a new version of a native desktop software, we are "owning" that release and taking responsibility for it. Our customers pay money for our products, and if someone (especially a new customer) we're to download a broken build in that time, it will cause a much bigger headache than having to wait a bit for a release to go out.

There are two extremes, and this article switches between them: release early and break often, and release rarely but break nothing. For algolia to have shipped a broken release _and_ have only one person that can release is the problem. Either a release is no big deal and everyone can release and it's ok if a release is and, or a release is a really big deal and only select people can release _to ensure the quality of releases_.

The answer isn't globally "make releasing easier," it's to decide which model best suits your company product, and embrace that. Either test your releases like crazy to make sure you don't ship broken code, or make it easy and fast to fix a bad release.

<comment><USER3> Companies like Instagram/Quora have written about having multiple releases per hour. Basically, every 'git push' is a release if the tests pass. So, the model works for consumer companies to some extent (at least on the backend side).

Would be interesting to hear about the deployment practice of more mission critical products like AWS/GCP.

<comment><USER4> The Instagram android app was last updated 4 days ago, Facebook 5 days ago.

They could do similar automated updates to the apps, including publishing them, but they've clearly chosen the path of test thoroughly first, then release.

<comment><USER5> You're referring to a mobile application that inherently has a slower release cadence - certainly for Apple with their verification process.

A web app can be released multiple times an hour if the business has confidence in its automated tests and release plan.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Co-working spaces in Bolivia (santa cruz)? - <AUTHOR> I will be in santa cruz, bolivia for a month and need a place to work with decent internet.  Anyone know cafes or office space I can rent? <comment><USER2> I don't have their name at hand, but there is a day/week/month office space for rent here: [https://www.google.com.bo/maps/place/17%C2%B046'30.8%22S+63%...](https://www.google.com.bo/maps/place/17%C2%B046'30.8%22S+63%C2%B011'01.6%22W/@-17.7752317,-63.1843382,19z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=es-419)

If you find something, please let me know ! :)

If I can I will update this thread. There are few places to rent offices in day/week terms, but they exists.

About internet just accept that you will get 2MB top.</comment>