Stanford lab envisions delivery drones that save energy by taking the bus - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/03/stanford-lab-envisions-delivery-drones-that-save-energy-by-taking-the-bus/ <comment><USER2> A commercial delivery drone carrying a six pound package landing on top of a bus between tall buildings is going to make a ridiculous discordant growl. Six of them coming and going within a quarter mile at any given time are going to sound like an auto-tuned pack of hounds from hell.

(This of course is ignoring what happens if something fucks up and suddenly it has 1/8th of a second to decide to fly out of it or brake those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh. It's like a trolley problem on a trolley.).

No way. (IMHO of course)

(e.g

Video of a Matrice 600 with a payload of ~8lbs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA)

Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM)

)

<comment><USER3> Is anyone working on solving the noise problem with drones? Is it even really solvable in any realistic way? What would it take to have a "silent" drone?

<comment><USER4> Our drones need a blimp mode : ) :)

<comment><USER5> Kids with airsoft guns will have a field day

<comment><USER6> Blimps aren't normally brought down by a few bullet holes. The pressure inside is close to atmospheric pressure, so helium leaks out very slowly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps we could load all the packages into some sort of specialized "package bus", and the driver could drive it around town all day on an optimized route and carry the packages to the customer's door himself.

Joking aside, that does raise the idea of using a delivery truck as sort of a carrier for rechargable drones; truck drives around, packages are automatically distributed to a pool of drones who handle the last hundred yards of delivery and return to the truck to reload/recharge.

<comment><USER8> I thought that was one of Amazon's proposed delivery drone schemes before it got a sad but sensibly justifiable veto over concerns of the air space being filled with a high volume of drones whom would constitute a real falling hazard from the base failure rate and an attractive nuisance by being small non-human "faceless" targets with goods.

Technically anybody right now could just shoot a poor Amazon delivery drivers with a shotgun now to rob them but it would be murder as opposed to destruction of property. Very few would do so vs snaring or shooting a drone. It is one hell of a bizzare systemic perverse incentive - putting a human body to be at risk reduces the robbery incentive and frequency. Reminds me of one account of Italian medieval cities of merchants plastering their walls with the Virgin Mary so people wouldn't dare to blasphemously piss on her image.

<comment><USER9> > It is one hell of a bizzare systemic perverse incentive

Not to worry... Drones are corporate property and corporations are people, therefore destroying the drone is murder. Don't agree? Take it up with these heavily armed protection drones we built for the delivery drones.

<comment><USER10> We already escalate the privilege of police dogs, so this isn't farfetched. Shooting a dog is punished the same as shooting its handler.

<comment><USER11> And yet, the handler stops biting me when I stop resisting.

I love dogs, but think their time in LE are fading. Both as an affront to the rights of the people and of the dogs. The 'beast of burden' ethic is quickly becoming outdated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why does the leisure class get funding for this nonsense? An y new "invention" either seems to spy on people or annoy the hell out of them.

 _Drones are a visual nuisance and produce noise._ Do you want to disturb bus riders and residential areas.

The Silicon Valley episode where a Stanford lab produced a robotic deer that is completely useless but caused a road accident is reality.

I hope people will react like Erlich Bachman when these drones become a thing.

<comment><USER13> Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise? Is this a complaint about delivery drones or delivery? Tracking technology will always be at our fingertips. I don't think you'd want a world where that wasn't true. It's governmental regulation that's the answer to large scale abuse.

<comment><USER14> Non-electric scooters should be banned. Or especially the dirt bikes in the city.

<comment><USER15> I tend to agree. Those little two-cycle scooters howling down the road at like 110dB are just terrible. Way beyond any reasonable definition of acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been joking for awhile now that UPS/FedEx trucks could become 'aircraft carriers', carrying a set of drones along with the packages, using the drones for the 'last mile' of delivery.

<comment><USER17> That's how the Protoss Postal Service does it!

Joking aside when Amazon's drone program first made news I thought they were going to make a deal with USPS to use the gazillion post office offices as drone bases. Guess it never went anywhere.

<comment><USER18> USPS is legally blocked from offering any services besides postal services, one of the reasons they're doing so bad among many, and this seems vaguely delivery but outside the bounds.

<comment><USER19> That's not true at all. USPS offers notary services, passport services, money orders, and many other services besides.

The reason USPS is having financial troubles is because conservative extremists in the American government have put huge financial burdens on them like fully funding their medical plan 10 years in advance in a blatant attempt at bankrupting one of the few Federal agencies specifically enumerated in the Constitution so they can then sell this services to FedEx and UPS and make huge gains for shareholders.

<comment><USER20> It's actually a requirement to fund 75 years of retirement costs in 10 years ($75 billion).

And it was passed with broad bipartisan support. I wish people would stop repeating the canard about "conservative extremists" with respect to this law.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal- se...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-service- bailout-congress/)

<comment><USER21> > But the 2006 law also shifted the burden of paying for worker and retiree > benefits entirely to the Postal Service. That came at the insistence of the > Bush administration, Davis said.

Davis being the congressman who introduced the bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient; passengers and cargo are pooled into compartments; compartments pooled and unpooled mid-trip as needed to maximize total efficiency; where traffic runs underground and on a rail where that makes sense; where stations can be very large or very small based on traffic; where the economics of laying out the tunnels is such that it makes sense to build small stations; where car roads are a rarity; where safety is not relient on human judgment, skill or reaction time; where transportation is not dependent on fossil fuels. Aah, those things are pleasant to imagine.

<comment><USER22> Or, Imagine where we toll everyone daily who get's on a highway in a car, and instead provide sheltered lanes for bicycles. And those bikes are simple sturdy steel bikes with wire cage panniers and can hold a ton. And in this utopian world a lot of health related issues are reduced because of the incidental exercise that people get on commuting around.

<comment><USER23> That world is called Europe :) Taxation is indirect, gasoline is taxed.

<comment><USER24> Which is great for all those people who fill up on electricity. Mostly rich people.

<comment><USER25> I mean, it is cheaper but it's not that cheap. There was recently a post here showing very clearly that for example in Germany electricity is so expensive that a good diesel car beats it in terms of cost easily. Even here in the UK if I were to charge at public points it would again be cheaper to just drive a diesel. It only becomes cheaper when I charge at home with a good tariff.

Besides, seeing as our roads are exclusively maintained from fuel taxes, I cannot see this going on forever - the government will have to find a way to tax the electricity going into electric cars somehow.

<comment><USER26> I imagine an odometer reading would do the trick. Like a gas meter, but on electric cars.

<comment><USER25> I mean the car I have(volvo phev) currently has a deal where Volvo pays me back for the 1st year of electricity used by the car, they do it by having the car automatically upload the number of kWh used to Volvo servers, then they will pay me back based on the number of kWh I've used during that year.

I don't see why something similar couldn't be done for taxes - the car keeps track of kWh used and you just pay tax based on how much you used. Obviously, that runs into certain immediate problems - like, what if you drive abroad? Normally you'd simply buy fuel while abroad, so therefore contribute to taxes there - but with this system this wouldn't work anymore.

<comment><USER13> Maybe a GPS and pay-per-km-driven scheme would be more tamper proof. You can spoof a GPS as well, but it can be double-checked automatically by state traffic cams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A drone utilizing current infrastructure like cars or busses would make sense (last-mile delivery would be slower, but you could go long distances).

</comment><comment><USER28> Just imaging, every car has a landing platform on the roof. A centralized traffic system knows the destination of each car. Drones can just jump cars, and if there is no car going in the right direction, lift off and finish the rest of route themselves.

<comment><USER29> The first stepping stone is probably drones based on UPS and FedEx trucks helping by making small package deliveries while the driver is dropping off packages in each neighborhood.

This was from a few years ago. [https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/ups-tests- show-delivery-dr...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/ups-tests-show- delivery-drones-still-need-work/)

<comment><USER30> just using drones do deliver from the truck to the door without the driver having to get out would probably double delivery capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm still holding out hope for ballistic delivery from UP/Ex launchers, as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.

<comment><USER32> >as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.

No need to go that high at least initially or even use parachutes. Just mount your system that lobs packages on a truck. It just drives a route and some software lobs everything where/when needed. Use a special sticker that's reflective in a particular spectrum for the truck to target and give the stickers out for free. Have the truck scan for the stickers, record gps coordinates (so you know which addresses are deliverable with your new system) and scan for obstacles so you can compute potential firing angle (too low and you're in the shrubs, too high and you're in the power lines or tree branches) as it drives around. Once you know the potential firing arcs for a supported address you can calculate what packages can be delivered without going too high/low or over/under shooting. Even if the truck has to stop to shoot it's still a labor saving improvement over traditional delivery and the sound of a low pressure pneumatic cannon isn't any louder than a truck door. You could use existing warehouse infrastructure to make sure that packages that are not of the right density (or are market in your system as too fragile)to safely toss don't wind up getting tossed.

You're basically just using software and data input to replace the judgement of the paper boy (hard) and some powered rollers and actuators to replace his arm hard (easy).

Disclaimer: I spend 3min thinking about this, this is by no means a serious pitch.

<comment><USER33> So basically a giant t-shirt cannon for compatible deliveries.

I can definitely agree with the theory behind it. Pair autonomous systems with delivery trucks and let them deliver easy packages (light weight, non-fragile) and let them deliver from the truck to harder addresses (long driveway, up a flight up steps in a breezeway) or deliver ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a terrible idea. Taxpayers pay for the fuel in that bus, the maintenance of that bus, and the roads it rides on. We're not funding that so Jeff Bezos can add another hundred million to his pocket tax free. This is bullshit. If delivery companies want to profit off the public transportation system, they should be paying into said system. Especially if their new plan to deliver their goods is designed to undermine and circumvent the US Postal Service, another taxpayer funded delivery system.

<comment><USER34> Bike couriers already can jump on buses with their packages to save on time and energy. Not a new concept.

<comment><USER35> Bike couriers will be paying when they hop on bus. Drone operators also have to consider how to pay, of course after evaluating if this approach is legal in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't understand why the default assumption is that delivery drones need to fly. It seems like you could have a bus-ful of small wheeled drones that could achieve many of the benefits with much fewer safety concerns.

Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars, but I think in this day and age of frequent package theft, many would go along with it.

<comment><USER37> >Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars

at this point, you can almost get rid of the whole last-mile problem that you're trying to solve with the drones, and the delivery truck can just drop off pre-filled lockboxes roadside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I do wonder if drone delivery will take off (heh). A lot has been said about the disadvantages, but one also has to also wonder about the advantages.

There's a point at which things are "good enough", and small improvements aren't really worth the costs. How much time would using drones for the last couple kilometers save? A few hours? Local delivery trucks tend to make rounds every day, so it really does seem like the maximum amount of time drone delivery could save is one day.

Will the cost of operating this (not only monetary, but also organizational, and in terms of noise pollution, drone repair, the occasional package/drone lost, etc) be worth the whole one day faster delivery to customers?

This, especially considering drones can't deliver everything, so trucks would have to keep operating. Truck's are large— economically what makes sense is to have them full of packages and with a whole-day schedule. Would drone usage offset enough deliveries to cut a few truck routes? Would they be enough to make it all worth?

A lot of questions in the air (heh).

</comment><comment><USER39> A new age of humans and machines having to share public infrastructure. Animatrix, here we come!

</comment><comment><USER40> There is a youtube video at the start of the article with a presentation of the system. A simulation is shown on the map of SF.

[https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk](https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk)

<comment><USER41> This is more about route finding than anything else. One hour of CPU time to calculate routes for 5000 packages and 30 distribution centers. That's pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Or, run special carts up and down main drags for drones to hitch rides (and perhaps charge while riding?). Instead of combining them with human transport, to the detriment of both humans and drones.

</comment><comment><USER42> Here's the actual paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf)

Here's the code: [https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl](https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl)

Much more interesting that some sensationalist "Wow, AI drones are taking the bus" piece

</comment><comment><USER43> When I saw the title, I thought this was brilliant! But I thought they meant a "drone" more like these: [https://www.starship.xyz/](https://www.starship.xyz/). (Turns out google responds better to searching for robots when looking those up). A ground robot would alleviate a lot of the concerns about noise and other problems with urban air travel.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ok,this is sort of brilliant in it's simplicity and ability to use existing resources. A while back i read an article that theorized that there would be cars all over carrying drones and cars would do most of the transportation while the drones did the last mile or so. Here is a practical example.

</comment><comment><USER45> so, I'm a rock climber, and I'd never go into the mountains without a helmet. because falling objects to the head _kill_.

What are people even thinking, mixing spaces for humans with our fragile little egg heads and corporate swarms of falling death blocks?

hmm...

</comment><comment><USER46> Any such solution, while environmentally-friendly and laudible, must take into account possible attack by humans on the way (including in the bus).

<comment><USER37> but remember that "taking into account" does not necessarily mean "make impossible".

yes, humans can attack drones. but humans can also attack postal carriers, or steal packages off porches. neither of those facts seem to be disqualifiers for continuing with the current system. Some level of theft will always happen, and the cost of that theft needs to be factored into the overall cost of the system. if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable, but eliminating the possibility of theft is not a realistic goal for any delivery system.

<comment><USER46> > _if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable_

That's what I mean. If postal service workers and their trucks get abducted / stolen once every 10-20 deliveries then that would make the postal delivery system untenable as well. :D

It's a little bit apples to oranges here. While in the classic systems you can only get the good stolen, here we're talking stealing the good _and_ the delivery system with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> And periodically the bus will swish its trolley pole and all the drones will lift off in a cloud and buzz around and then resettle.

</comment><comment><USER48> Cool idea. Maybe Uber et al can also take part in this - rent out roof space on their fleet heading in same direction as the drone...

</comment><comment><USER49> What a stupid idea.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is actually quite genius

</comment><comment><USER51> Why stop at buses? Why not have drones land on self-driving cars that integrate with Bluetooth?

Never mind the noise; we'll design the cars such they output the inverse frequencies being output by the drones, canceling out their sound.

Even better, the drones can be designed to look like pies.</comment>


EFF explains why Righthaven's copyright assignment is a sham - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/why-righthaven-s-copyright-assignment-sham-and-why

<comment><USER2> If only the following can be applied to patent trolls.

      Righthaven has continued to assert that it is
      entitled to a presumption of harm to
      its market for the work, which makes no sense
      given that it is contractually prohibited from
      exploiting the work financially.

How about a scheme where people who hold patent portfolios but do nothing with it would be classified as an absentee landlord and temporarily lose their right to block other parties from exploiting it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Clearly Righthaven should have provided some stickers in exchange for the copyrights. Then it would have been all good.

(When the FSF sends you a copyright assignment form, they send you some GNU stickers. The document says something like, "in exchange for these stickers valued at $1, I provide FSF a non-exclusive copyright assignment." You get stickers, they get software, and it's apparently all good.)

<comment><USER4> Funny, but not quite right. :) In this case, I think it can be reasonably argued that Stevens Media and others aren't actually assigning copyright, although their verbal maneuvering would like you to think that they are:

        7.2 Despite any such Copyright Assignment, Stephens
        Media shall retain (and is hereby granted by Righthaven)
        an exclusive license to Exploit the Stephens Media
        Assigned Copyrights for any lawful purpose whatsoever
        and Righthaven shall have no right or license to Exploit
        or participate in the receipt of royalties from the
        Exploitation of the Stephens Media Assigned Copyrights
        other than the right to proceeds in association with a
        Recovery.

They're basically saying that Stevens Media is assigning copyright to Righthaven, but retains a license to do whatever they want with the content. So far, so good. The part that's tricky is: they're trying to constrain what Righthaven can do as the new copyright holder, ie. you own this, but you can't do anything that someone who would normally own a thing can do.

In other words, it's a sham assignment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great for current defendants I guess, for now. Perhaps I'm confused and this is a bigger deal than I thought, but won't Stephens Media and Righthaven just modify their agreement and then get right back into the copyright-trolling 'business'?

<comment><USER6> Modify their agreement how, by signing over their copyrights? I highly doubt that would happen, especially when working with a company like Righthaven who now has documented shadiness. Would you trust RH not to skip off with your family jewels?

Having the actual copyrights is required for standing to sue for damages, that's why they got smacked down.</comment></comment>


SPIDR – News aggregator - <AUTHOR> http://spidr.today <comment><USER2> Love the implementation and the UI - excellent job on using screen estate and best practices like small sticky header. Such information density while still looking modern is rare!

However I can't help but notice how much this shows just how meaningless and toxic news have become (or always have been).

About every single tile seems to be either

* boxed emotions, mostly in form of a dramatic two digit body count without even hinting at the underlying causes or why this should interest me other than because "oh my good poor people".

* statements of opinion by people who are highly paid to write such pieces, which may have _some_ value as a Litmus test for the general-general relationship of entities X and Y, again while completely failing to convey relevance or context.

What do I gain from this, besides a faux warm feeling in the chest that I'm now an "informed voter" or something?

</comment><comment><USER3> It may be too late but it would be nice to replace the URL with the [https://spidr.today/](https://spidr.today/) variant.

</comment><comment><USER4> Been wishing for something like this for a long time One day we'll hopefully have the AI synthesize a précis that takes all its sources into account.</comment>


Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2020/07/inside-8086-processor-tiny-charge-pumps.html <comment><USER2> Not only is the "back bias" "helpful", it is _necessary_ to prevent the transistors from conducting when they shouldn't, which could lead to a latch- up and catastrophic failure; hence the power sequencing requirements of these ICs.

(If you search online you'll find discussions such as [https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/455745/why-w...](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/455745/why- would-a-intel-8080-chip-be-destroyed-if-12-v-is-connected-before-5-v) where the accepted answer is close but not quite correct; -5 is substrate bias, 5 is the main supply, and 12 is applied to all the gates of the enhancement load transistors to open them. On the 8080, 12V was also used to drive the clocking circuitry, and this explains why the absolute maximum rating on all the pins --- and thus the gate oxide withstand voltage --- is 20V instead of the 6-7V typically seen for 5V devices.)

</comment><comment><USER3> >"You might wonder how a charge pump can turn a positive voltage into a negative voltage. The trick is a "flying" capacitor, as shown below. On the left, the capacitor is charged to 5 volts.

 _Now, disconnect the capacitor and connect the positive side to ground. The capacitor still has its 5-volt charge, so now the low side must be at -5 volts._

By rapidly switching the capacitor between the two states, the charge pump produces a negative voltage."

That is a strange and weird effect of capacitors!

I never knew this, before this post!

 _I 'll have to experiment with this weird but interesting effect in the future!_

<comment><USER4> Most all modern rs232 ports use a similar approach to generate the negative voltages needed as well. The ubiquitous max232 and its copies/clones all use charge pumps to convert a +5v rail to +/-12v rails for the line drivers.

<comment><USER5> Take a look at the max233 cross-sections by @TubeTimeUS. It looks like a normal DIP integrated circuit, but it has four discrete capacitors in the IC package for the charge pumps.

[https://twunroll.com/article/1286136812658806785#](https://twunroll.com/article/1286136812658806785#)

<comment><USER4> Very cool -- I always wondered how they integrated those caps into the package

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kens, I love the series on the 8086. For the next article can you go over how Intel did clock distribution?

<comment><USER5> I was actually thinking about a short blog post on the 8086's clock circuit. The short answer is that the clock signal into the 8086 goes through a bunch of inverters to strengthen and shape the signal, and then two-phase clock signals (i.e. clock and clock') wind around the chip.

Many processors of that era used pass transistors for temporary latches between circuits. The 8086 also used dynamic logic for gates, where instead of a pull-up resistor, the output would be precharged during one clock phase and then the gate would pull it down (or not) during the other clock phase.

<comment><USER6> How interesting. I didn't think differential clocks where a thing back then.

Or maybe they're not differential and they're just routed together because it's convenient. Since they store with coupled inverters I can see why having both phases could be useful in some flip flop implementations.

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_latch#Master–slave_edge-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_latch#Master–slave_edge- triggered_D_flip-flop)

The two clock phases don't overlap, and act to "pump" the signals through the circuits on each half-cycle. Circuits from that era effectively use both edges of the clock, and the use of simple pass transistors instead of full flip- flops simplifies the implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Charge pumps are still found in many places, including the high-side of an h-bridge (or half h-bridge) driver, as that allows for using only NMOS for switching.

</comment><comment><USER8> > 3\. Prototype designs always work.

Looked jolly awesome on the whiteboard, though.

<comment><USER9> I assume this isn't a joke, but rather refers to handfitted prototypes working, where a massproduced item would not without significant engineering: if you tweak it until it works, it works.

<comment><USER8> I interpreted it to mean that the on-paper design can hang together nicely, until it's instantiated in some hardware, followed by the "Oh, yeah. . ." moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Again, the number filter mangled the title. The full title from the article is "Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage". In the interest of brevity, "processor" could be omitted or replaced with "chip."

<comment><USER11> "Chip" is actually a term of art in the industry, used to describe 'single passives' (such as resistors and capacitors) in small SMD packages. There are machines called "chip shooters" which are designed to place those 'chips'.

Using the term "chip" to describe integrated circuits is amateurish.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps so in the context of PCB assembly. In the semiconductor industry we still call them chips. So do Micron Semiconductor [1], TSMC [2] and Intel [3]

[1] [https://www.micron.com/foundation/semiconductors](https://www.micron.com/foundation/semiconductors)

[2] [https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/SoI...](https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/SoIC.htm)

[3] (pdf) [http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/chipmaking/Making_o...](http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/chipmaking/Making_of_a_Chip.pdf)

<comment><USER13> And the usage goes back to at least August 1975 (likely earlier):

[http://archive.6502.org/datasheets/mos_6501-6505_mpu_prelimi...](http://archive.6502.org/datasheets/mos_6501-6505_mpu_preliminary_aug_1975.pdf)

"but including an _on-chip_ clock ... in addition to the _on-chip_ clock"

<comment><USER14> Two unrelated papers in _AFIPS '65_ use 'chip' in their abstracts, in the integrated circuit sense, and neither draws attention to the term.

[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1463891.1464005](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1463891.1464005) [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1463891.1463961](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1463891.1463961)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice article</comment>


Parallel Query in PostgreSQL:  How not to (mis)use it? - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ibCP2S0uFjW58MouC_nLT_gsHITv7sHZ/view <comment><USER2> Very nice write up on how PG gained parallel query, and cool to see the comparison to how other DB engines do it.</comment>


2016 JavaScript Rising Stars - <AUTHOR> https://risingstars2016.js.org/ <comment><USER2> Since they didn't publish their data source, let me add a useful note: How to count the number of stars using GitHub Archive and BigQuery.

Naive query:

      #standardSQL
      SELECT repo.id, ANY_VALUE(repo.name) name, COUNT(*) as num_stars
      FROM `githubarchive.month.2016*`
      WHERE type = "WatchEvent"
      GROUP BY repo.id
      ORDER BY num_stars DESC
      LIMIT 1000

But let's fight "star fraud". There is an easy way to register "fake" stars - if you star and unstar a project repeatedly, each time this will register as a WatchEvent on the GitHub Archive log.

Better query, removes duplicates:

      #standardSQL
      SELECT repo_id, ANY_VALUE(name) name, COUNT(*) as num_stars
      FROM (
        SELECT repo.id repo_id, ANY_VALUE(repo.name) name, actor.id
        FROM `githubarchive.month.2016*`
        WHERE type = "WatchEvent"
        GROUP BY repo.id, actor.id
      )
      GROUP BY repo_id
      ORDER BY num_stars DESC
      LIMIT 1000

If we put all together, these are the real results:

* [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDlXrk3U1z5s0-1Is8KH...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDlXrk3U1z5s0-1Is8KHOowJ_oSw79mzwAOPmK5LmeI/edit)

Projects like 'fivethirtyeight/data' lose -864 stars (23%), going down 230 places in the ranking, while projects like 'FormidableLabs/nodejs-dashboard' lose less than 1% of their stars, going up 49 places.

When I said 'stars fraud' I'm not presuming malice, but with these star rankings we do create an incentive :).

Disclaimer: I'm Felipe Hoffa, and I work for Google Cloud [http://twitter.com/felipehoffa](http://twitter.com/felipehoffa)

<comment><USER3> Nice work! You should create a web app to allow anyone to run this query so I don't have to setup a SQL DB with the archive data :)

(Naturally I want to check how my own project faired against star fraud)

<comment><USER2> You can try it in the next 5 minutes!

[https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3dg9le/analyzing_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3dg9le/analyzing_50_billion_wikipedia_pageviews_in_5/)

BigQuery is always ready for your queries. One free terabyte of analysis each month. No credit card needed :)

<comment><USER3> Nice sales pitch :)

I might take a look a little later. Good info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I think counting github stars probably only reflects visibility but not actual usage. To give you an example, cf-ui is counted as one of the "best" React UI component out there in bestof.js.org, but this project is not currently meant for general consumption. This fact is reflected in npm stats.

I think we as a community should be very vary about these "scorecard" websites and their methodologies. These things tend to be a self-fulfilled prophecy. I'm not sure I want to see a couple of brand name companies start monopolizing our eyeballs and technical conversation. I'm also very vary about people making decisions based on these sites. While not everyone is completely different from others, I'd like people to make their own decisions based on their only thinking process rather than just jumping on the new and shiny from the big names all the time. Not that this appears to be an issue right now, just a few words of caution.

<comment><USER5> Why did you believe your very reasonable comment would probably be downvoted???

<comment><USER4> My general pessimistic feeling for how human not learning from the past, but I'm glad I'm wrong now :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating to see Vue.js and Inferno both doing so well last year. Vue is definitely lot easier to learn than React, for new Developers, but I could be wrong since I haven't tried it a lot. Don't know how it scales up for large applications.

Preact is also another dark horse. This year we are going to see a few more "react-like" UI libraries.

In node, really happy to see Feathers catching up with other more popular frameworks like Express. First time I reached to feathers was by literally searching "Firebase Alternative".

AVA the Test runner, really never heard of it at all. May be I am too behind in the "Test Runners" category. I only use Mocha.

Also, they should have added a category for graphics libraries like Three.js, Fabric.js, Paper.js etc.

<comment><USER7> > Vue is definitely lot easier to learn than React

How so? Vue actually has a lot to it -- lots of template directives, computed properties, directives, etc.

<comment><USER8> The perceived upfront cost is lower with Vue. You can just put it on the page and voila, you have observables, computed properties, templates, everything. No webpack, no transpiling, no modules, no npm.

This is also how angular got popular. The tutorial said: Just add this one JS to the page and start making SPAs! Here is a 10 line example with everything in it explained, and it works!

Same with mongodb - their 10 step interactive tutorial website was extremely convincing

Not many people know you can get started the same with react by putting react, mobx and mobx-react on the page [https://jsfiddle.net/ugh2xhfg/](https://jsfiddle.net/ugh2xhfg/). Thats because its not advertised. You will still need babel / compilation though. JSX is still a major barrier to entry.

There is no easier way to make a project become popular than to offer an unrealistic-for-production getting started page that will get you rolling by doing almost nothing!

<comment><USER7> > You can just put it on the page and voila, you have observables, computed > properties, templates, everything. No webpack, no transpiling, no modules, > no npm.

This is a false dichotomy. React is a fully-featured, standalone library and functionally equivalent to Vue if all you include is react.min.js. You don't need webpack or npm, you don't need Redux or MobX. This attitude stems from people learning React from create-react-app (which is geared towards a fully- featured, multi-developer, production-ready application) without doing FB's TodoMVC or even reading the React docs.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you can ignore the relative less amount of pain associated with Vue.js over React.js.

It's just easier to get started with Vue.js and I'm just tired of the constant marketing campaign from Facebook...guess what 99.9% of companies out there _aren 't facebook or google_.

The relative ease to get into Vue.js and it's fast growing popularity are signs that it's hitting the right pain points with developers who don't work at Facebook.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, in any real project where you need a front-end framework, you will need modules very soon. And once you need modules, you need a bundler, which means you need a build process. While you are building, you might as well take advantage of neat ES.next / TypeScript features such as decorators, as well as maybe type-checking for JSX templates, and so on.

This is the reason why I always choose React.

(Well, that, and the huge existing ecosystem, and fact that components are first class in the template language e.g. you can pass a component as a parameter to a template and you can bring components into scope by importing them. But those are fairly advanced features)

<comment><USER10> > The thing is, in any real project where you need a front-end framework, you > will need modules very soon.

Sure, and modules are good even if you didn't need data binding at all. But the data binding and the module system you use are orthogonal and CommonJS/npm is still larger than any other module system by 10x, maybe 100x, maybe more.

<comment><USER8> Right. CommonJS is great, I actually like it more than ES6 modules. But even with CommonJS you still need the bundler and the build step.

You can get data binding in React with MobX, which pretty much gets you on par with Vue: [https://mobx.js.org/getting- started.html](https://mobx.js.org/getting-started.html) . If you don't like how anemic setState is, and don't like the boilerplate / straightjacket of Redux, MobX is the way to go.

Admittedly, React's simpler options are harder to find :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It isn't a good indication for the framework value itself. A star in github its like "meh I heard a lot about react-thing, that look complicated but can't be that bad, I should take a look one day" Its a self-persuading buzz

</comment><comment><USER12> Where are the star counts from?

Create React App was created in 2016 and has more than 18k stars but is shown as having gained 5.6k stars in 2016 (I think it got more than that in its first week!)

<comment><USER13> I contacted the author and those numbers have been fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excited to see Vue doing so well on this list. I have been using it for the last few months at my day job, and I have been pleasantly surprised by it. I have tinkered with React & Angular in the past and I can second that the fact that compared to the other frameworks, getting started with Vue is a lot easier.

The ecosystem around it also quite mature - VueRouter & Vuex are well-tested solutions in case you have a use for it.

Another advantage that it has is its documentation & guides. It is quite exhaustive and easy to follow. My only gripe was that it doesn't go into the details of building a complete "single-page-app" that uses the accompanying tools (vue-cli, vuerouter, vuex etc).

Based on my learnings over the past few months, I have started writing a small ebook that goes over the process of building a full-fledged app.

I have created a small subscription form - [http://eepurl.com/cvUk5D](http://eepurl.com/cvUk5D). You can add your email here to get notified when I launch this book and also get access to the early release.

<comment><USER15> check out nuxt, it does exactly that. a full fledged vue cli starter. its eloquently made, just like vue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really Sad to me that Ember.js gets so little love. It is hands above Angular 1 or 2 in my mind and the only JS front end framework that I feel productive in.

<comment><USER17> I run a JavaScript focused Twitter account with 235K followers and on analyzing our 2016 stats this week, we found most of the Ember things we linked ended up in the bottom quarter of tweets ranked by engagement :-( I know Ember, know the (great) people involved, and try to promote it when I can, but for some reason my audiences aren't keen on it in large numbers. Yet whenever I do encounter an Ember user, they are always so full of praise, and ThoughtWorks gave it a strong recommendation recently too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, Create React App is listed as "+5.6k stars", but it was launched in 2016 and has over 18,000 stars right now. Perhaps an error in the data processing?

<comment><USER3> Like fhoffa's example they may be attempting to account for star fraud (though that's a pretty huge amount if that's the reason for the difference).

<comment><USER2> Numbers on the post are weird.

'facebookincubator/create-react-app' got 18187 stars in 2016 (17857 when removing duplicates).

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDlXrk3U1z5s0-1Is8KH...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDlXrk3U1z5s0-1Is8KHOowJ_oSw79mzwAOPmK5LmeI/edit#gid=1674844484)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hello there, this is Michael Rambeau, the writer of JavaScript Rising Stars. Thank you, everyone, for your comments. It's very nice to see people talking about things related to my project. As some people mentioned, after the initial release, there was an issue about the count of stars, for some projects. I'm sorry about that, it has been fixed during the following releases. I will try to take into account the ideas discussed there, when things calm down. Thank you a lot!

</comment><comment><USER20> Who says that github "stars" are a quality indicator?

I use stars to mark projects I am interesting in but haven't tried yet. I am sure many people do the same.

</comment><comment><USER21> Honestly, I was surprised to see Vue at #1 and not React.

<comment><USER22> Stars per year is always going to favor newer technologies. Which is why I believe this metric encourages framework churn.

<comment><USER23> True, but there are other frameworks that came around the same time and have not reached the momentum of Vue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting that Angular 2 doesn't seem to be very popular - yet?

<comment><USER25> I think there's a difference between usage and github stars. I generally don't really star many Big projects like angular2 or react, since there's so much notification spam on it. I star smaller things which are likely to have less- frequent updates, but each update could well be a big deal (relative to the size of the project).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Somewhat off-topic, though it may be relevant.

Is it that much more difficult/complicated to have a server side rendered app with pure JavaScript sprinkled in versus SPA vs. no JavaScript?

The situation I'm thinking about is the following:

firstApp.domain.com

secondApp.domain.com

If you have an SPA then you literally can just have separate SPAs for each sub domain served statically. You could also have everything rendered server side using whatever back-end you're using. Finally, you can have server-side rendering and add JavaScript when necessary, but this seems to add complexity as your team would now need to know whatever templating language your server- side framework uses plus the front-end framework. Am I missing anything?

<comment><USER27> > but this seems to add complexity as your team would now need to know > whatever templating language your server-side framework uses plus the front- > end framework.

If you use server-rendered templates, the people responsible for your front- end will have to know a few things about the backend and vice-versa, because everything is a bit more integrated.

Using an SPA allows your front-end guys to just say "we need an API that delivers this" and your backend guys can just publish a doc on that API. Neither team really has to know that much about how the other makes their part work, and both teams can create their own ideal environment without having it dirtied by the other team's needs or constraints.

That being said, I wouldn't advocate for building an SPA purely for developer convenience.

<comment><USER26> Do you have any war stories to share? Given that ultimately producing value to the business is the only thing that matters, wouldn't doing it, if it conveniences them be the right thing to do?

I'm not super knowledgeable about this (<2 years experience), but I see little downside. Of course, I don't know what I don't know.

<comment><USER27> I think the choice to adopt an SPA or not should be driven primarily by the project requirements. Are you mostly going to be serving up long-form documents or presenting users with tradition forms, or are you building something that needs to feel more like an "app" that is highly responsive to user interaction. I would choose an SPA only if the latter were true.

You essentially have two problems: 1) how to make common code available for reuse across what is essentially two separate websites/apps and 2) how to make it so that front-end focused developers and backend focused developers can work effectively together.

I don't think that either problem is best solved by adopting an SPA if you would not otherwise be driven to do so. Problem 1 can be solved in a lot of ways. You can build a set of common services into a library used by both apps, for example. This allows you to isolate and reuse common functionality without the overhead of an HTTP service layer if you don't really need it.

Problem 2 I would say winds up being more about both teams getting things "the way they want to do it" rather than strictly about difficulty learning. I've yet to see a server template system that would present much of a problem to a front-end focused person. The real problem is how can their toolchain, which may include things like transpilation, sass compilation, and a separate test runner, be integrated into the backend build process and framework. A lot of backend frameworks are somewhat opinionated about how these things happen, but there are ways to integrate just about anything with anything else.

Anyway, it really just boils down to understanding how your app would be best served based on how it needs to work, and doing it that way. There is a good bit on the trade-offs between the two linked below [1], although its author is biased towards "shared" front-end/back-end frameworks like meteor, and I don't agree with some of the conclusions.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-tradeoffs-of-client- side-...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-tradeoffs-of-client-side- rendering-vs-server-side-rendering)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [deleted]

<comment><USER29> The numbers in the article and the numbers in your spreadsheet differ. The article contains analysis and categorization that your spreadsheet lacks. The data in your spreadsheet come from a public dataset, as I'm sure the data from the article do. Github stars are not a novel metric. I don't see why the author would need to cite you.

<comment><USER28> Huh, the numbers do differ, sometimes by thousands, which doesn't make any sense at all, even if they are using internal metrics.

The reason I was suspicious is that the methodology for determining GitHub stars by year is not trivial, and it is not described in the post, and other comments in this thread questioned it. I removed the OP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand why Hapi doesn't get much love these days. It's a monolithic framework, which means it's extremely opinionated in how things are done, but also it means you don't need to go hunt down 3rd party packages to cover features that every server dev needs out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks similar to [http://stateofjs.com/](http://stateofjs.com/)

<comment><USER32> State of JS was a survey with questions and answers, this page counts "...stars added on Github, over the last 12 months".

State of JS would better reflect the popularity of tools within the audience(s) that the survey was distributed in, this page really just shows what has had buzz in the last 12 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love that this made it to the report in the "React Boilerplates": [https://github.com/tj/frontend-boilerplate](https://github.com/tj/frontend- boilerplate)

> A boilerplate of things that mostly shouldn't exist.

<comment><USER34> I never understood the boilerplate hype.

My co worker used one four our app and it was horrible, it used Flummox and which was discontinued and we had to rewire everything for Redux later, since we didn't write the Flummox wiring in the first place, this was madness.

<comment><USER35> boilerplates are nice when you want to test out a quick Hello World while having access to a full toolchain.

No one in their right mind would use that for production though (but unfortunately they do...so many people pushing huge, complex webpack configs that they don't need or understand)

<comment><USER34> totally.

It let's you show something fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Meteor should be on the list of Node.js frameworks (absent a more appropriate category).

</comment><comment><USER37> #4 in TOC is _React Boilerplates_.

Perhaps Javascript is catching up to its big brother.

<comment><USER34> At least FB tries to work against this with create-react-app

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The React part is especially intersting, since Inferno, Preact and React share the React-API, which basically means React blew every other framework away.

<comment><USER38> Mithril components are also in the same family. JSX works with Mithril out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is awesome, somebody please make one for Python!

</comment><comment><USER40> Happy to see Aurelia in that list. It's my discovery of the year. I have a lot of fun with it!

</comment><comment><USER41> Sublime Text not on the list of notable IDEs?

<comment><USER25> It's github stars, right? ST isn't open source, so it's not hosted on github. But it is notable. That said, where's vim?

<comment><USER42> I think the list is about IDEs built with JavaScript, ie Node.js/Electron.

<comment><USER25> ah, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> On the front end, intercooler.js[1] actually gained more stars in 2016 (~3000)[2] than Mithril (which I like, this is not to take anything away from the Mithril guys!) This was in large part due to a big HN bump in November.

I know it's too contrarian and idiosyncratic to get a mention on a JS survey, but I have to get he word out somehow...

[1] - [https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler- js](https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler-js)

[2] - [http://www.timqian.com/star-history/#LeadDyno/intercooler- js...](http://www.timqian.com/star-history/#LeadDyno/intercooler- js&lhorie/mithril.js)</comment>


Posterous.com (YC summer 08) launches Video support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.posterous.com/now-supporting-more-audio-form

<comment><USER2> Great idea, but the quality is awful--not at all surprising, given that you're using a video format dating from the late 90s (Flash Video 1, a slightly modified version of the decade-old H.263 format). "Looking like Youtube" is not a compliment in 2008.

High quality at reasonable bitrates in Flash isn't difficult; you just need to use x264. ( 280kbps example: <http://norp.ath.cx/h264.html> ) Quality has improved quite a bit since that sample was made, too: <http://i35.tinypic.com/rk33wx.png> (screenshot from 400kbps encode). There's a reason a huge number of sites, both small startups to companies as large as Facebook, are switching to x264.

Drop by #x264 if you need more information; we're there to help. And if you need something more in-depth, I do contracts, too...

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip! I just switched our codec to x264 and we saw a quality improvement. I'm also playing around with higher bitrates, we definitely want the video on Posterous to look good.

<comment><USER2> Note that if you're using ffmpeg (which seems to be popular for Flash video encoding), you have to be very very careful with encoding settings because it uses rather bizarre defaults for x264, forcing you to re-specify all the existing ones to get it to work ideally. Fortunately, there's useful guides on that too:

<http://ffmpeg.x264.googlepages.com/mapping> [http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful- stuff/ffmpeg-x264-enc...](http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful- stuff/ffmpeg-x264-encoding-guide/)

The first link is useful even if you're not using ffmpeg, since it has a relatively good explanation for what most of the options do. And if you still need more quality, drop by our IRC.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is fantastic. Thanks for the link and the advice. Talk about being helpful... I'd like to +10 karma on DarkShikari's account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Next episode: Posterous now delivers babies, too!

Jeezus H, Gary and Sachin, take a break or something. You're making us the rest of us look bad. And I even know some of the other stuff you're working on, too, so it's almost depressing.

Ha nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Luke, you guys at Startuply has been working insanely fast too!

They recently rolled out an awesome resume tracking system for employers, which we definitely hope to be using in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool update. Now I'm waiting for my phone to support video capture (GUESS WHICH PHONE!).

Once you guys roll out customizable themes and domains, I'll definitely be using Posterous to host my blog (vs. tumblr). That multiple posting feature is really winning me over.

Great job pumping out the features.

<comment><USER3> There are some unofficial video recording apps for the iPhone, and they have email support built right in. Hopefully one of these will make it to the app store, and we'll have a direct video to blog flow. Brings a whole new meaning to live blogging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll take a drop-dead easy solution over a theme any day.

Don't get me wrong, themes will be awesome, but simplicity and ease of use are the game changers with Posterous. Keep up the good work guys!

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the concept of email to blog, but I have no wish to move my blog to maxklein.posterous.com. Why can't I just use my existing blog and you integrate into that?

<comment><USER3> We have a feature called autopost which will post to twitter, flickr, and all the existing blogging systems out there. Just sign in to Posterous and you'll see where you set that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> as i can recall the founders of YouTube said it was impossible to share videos with email because of the large size... except .3gp how are you going to avoid the file size limitation of most mail services?

<comment><AUTHOR> For short videos of around 20 to 25 meg, it's quite viable. It's actually ideal for camera phone and small digital camera videos, because it's long enough to see something interesting but short enough to not bore people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Posterous keeps getting cooler and cooler. Nice work guys!

</comment><comment><USER10> Excellent job, guys. I'm still not a fan of the email-to-posting system, but the rate at which you've added features is stunning.

<comment><USER11> Why?

<comment><USER10> Because it lacks a sense of community, and that's why I would use a communal blogging site like Posterous. It's why the only system I use outside my main site is Tumblr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm still waiting to post blog posts over the phone. I would like voice to text so that i can make posts from anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you set Jott.com up to send email to firstname.lastname@example.com, we automatically clean up the email they send us and just post the Jott.com transcribed content.

That's one fast way to get voice to text to posterous. =)</comment></comment>


The Death of a Once Great City - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/ <comment><USER2> This reads like an example of the classic genre of writing "nostalgia for how a place used to be which is really nostalgia for the life the author used to have"

You grow up; you stop going out to bars; you stop bouncing between different groups of friends who introduce you to interesting new experiences and start hanging around with parents; you spend your life in nicer restaurants and nicer neighborhoods and you wonder 'how did the city get so boring?'

The only way you can reach a conclusion like "Boston ... which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors ... is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper" is if the last time you visited Boston you visited a college friend who lived in Allston, but now whenever you visit the city it's to stop in at a client's office in the seaport.

<comment><USER3> On a similar note, this amazing thread from 1993 about how "Silicon Valley is dead" \-- written not by a bunch of schmucks, but, e.g., the co-creator of Altavista:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/bvE0Ka5nCnM/NAIOQnrEyCAJ)

"From what I understand, the shine is rubbing off. The cost of housing is ludicrous, and companies are fleeing to places like Arizona."

If you hid the dates and reformatted it as a reddit thread, everyone would believe it was written today.

"The place has a much different, more ossified feel to it than it did seven years ago."

<comment><USER4> > If you hid the dates and reformatted it as a reddit thread, everyone would > believe it was written today.

Maybe cut out the bits about Sun, PARC, NeXT, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its > remarkable diversity"

I really hate this attack angle but its important to see because this is what serious local political candidates actually believe. If we would only build housing this would not be the case.

<comment><USER6> I am not going to attack tech or the prosperity that it has brought.. but as someone born in San Francisco a long time ago I have to stress that the city has changed and lost a lot of the creativity that used to make it interesting. SF used to be a place where starving artists and musicians could live. Now they live somewhere else: Oakland, Austin, etc. The same thing happened to Manhattan.

I don't think there is anything you can do about it. I don't think it is bad. But it makes SF a boring scene relative to other places in the same way Manhattan became culturally boring relative to Brooklyn. Or maybe London is becoming boring relative to Berlin. The wealth will stick with these established cities, but new culture will happen somewhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its > remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially > chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley

Swarm?

According to this SF Examiner article in 2017, there are 9,800 commuters every day from the shuttle program. That's barely over 1% of the city's population.

[http://www.sfexaminer.com/tech-workers-voice-support- commute...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/tech-workers-voice-support-commuter- shuttles-ahead-programs-approval-sf/)

<comment><USER8> That's still a lot of people, even statistically, and a weird, weird, phenomenon.

<comment><USER9> What weird, weird phenomenon - employers providing buses because existing public transit sucks?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that's weird, in my opinion, as a New Yorker.

<comment><USER11> I lived/worked in New York when financial service companies handed out car service vouchers to those who had to work late (and to everyone at any official event involving alcohol). That was equally weird and more wasteful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great_

These are the consequences of the confluence of money and the intervention of power. Idiosyncrasy, complexity, and opportunity arise from "The Bazaar." The combination of concentrated money and authoritarian government strive for "The Cathedral." This is factor #1.

Factor #2: You can only have "The Power of the Marginal" when you have a substrate which lets marginalized groups carve out their own communities. Social media and the democratized organizational power of networks paradoxically work against this by enabling the most virulent and toxic elements of society to engage in campaigns of "soft terror" through moralistic name-calling and infiltration of subcultures.

"The Power of the Marginal" has been replaced with "The Power to Marginalize."

[http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html)

(EDIT: If you want a society where you have "The Power of the Marginal," you want a "Live and Let Live" society. That is how you foster diversity. Back in my grad school days in a southern backwater in the mid 90's, the Hard Rock crew, Heavy Metal folks, Punks, Rude Boys/Rude Girls, Trad music folks, World music people, people into eastern religions, Orthodox Christians, "College Alternative," people with pimped-out Harley bikes, bible thumping "local- missionaries," atheists, art school types -- we hung out with each other, sometimes went to the same cafes and clubs, and even had healthy arguments. If you want diversity, you need a "live and let live" attitude. It was easy then and there, because we were all marginalized together, united against the mainstream, and if we didn't coexist, there would be no place at all for us to hang out.

Today, things have changed so that certain factions of the formerly marginalized now have access to tremendous power. As always, power corrupts. As everyone's reach has been extended, the reach of the most toxic has also been extended. We no longer live in a "Live and Let Live" society. Some of this has been positive. I'm not so sure about the overall cost/benefit, however. Short term security isn't worth the price of long term freedom.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Even if they have a point, this type of strident editorializing makes Harper's impossible for me to read. "mausoleums for trump supporters"? WTF? (Ignoring the dominance of progressive politics in Seattle as well...)

I think this kind of crap is on the same level as Fox News hate mongering. Embarrassing.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's impossible to read this piece without the context of _Harpers doesn 't pay their interns._

</comment><comment><USER15> I mean the shortest and simplest explanation is that the lower-earning people who made these cities interesting in the first place are getting priced out of their homes. The only people who can afford to live in New York, San Francisco, etc. are white collar workers, who's other big feature is also white.

I get the supply and demand laws but there comes a point where we have to decide of continuous and infinite growth at the cost of literally every other metric of importance to a city is worth burning it down for.

<comment><USER16> > I get the supply and demand laws but there comes a point where we have to > decide of continuous and infinite growth at the cost of literally every > other metric of importance to a city is worth burning it down for.

People keep saying this, and my response is: what is your solution? Rents aren't going up (solely) because of sinister plutocratic plots; it's because _people want to move to New York_. Big cities are where the jobs are, and Millenials hate suburbs, so that's where white-collar workers are going. Is your plan to forbid people from moving to New York so you can freeze time in the 70's?

People complaining about gentrification hem and haw when you ask them this forthright, and then try to dodge the question and pretend there's a simple solution involving rent control or millionaire taxes. But at some point you have to face facts and understand that, as long as the dynamics of the modern economy keeps favoring big cities, you can't stop gentrification without forbidding people from moving in.

<comment><USER17> _Is your plan to forbid people from moving to New York so you can freeze time in the 70 's?_

I don't see why people outside NYC wanting to move in means people already in NYC must accommodate them. SF for example prevents buildings over 4 stories in the downtown area. I live in a much smaller city that mandated brick fronts on all buildings on the main street. And from one perspective it's petty and limiting but my point is, yes NYC residents get to choose what about their city is important to them and protect it. That includes preventing people from moving in if it comes to that.

<comment><USER16> > SF for example prevents buildings over 4 stories in the downtown area.

The thing to understand in my comment is that I meant it very literally: the only way to halt these trends if you won't build tons of new housing is to _literally_ forbid people from moving in; i.e. passing a law that blocks outsiders from becoming residents. What San Francisco is doing by preventing high-rise apartments is a lousy proxy for that which is making the situation worse: they _think_ they're keeping people from moving to SF, but the people just move in anyway and price out the existing residents.

Anyway, my question was mostly rhetorical. Even the most strident anti- gentrification advocates usually stop short of claiming that people shouldn't be allowed to move in - hence why I asked it, to try and force people to confront the real issue. And if you did pass such a law, I'm almost positive it would be thrown out in court. This is not China; you shouldn't need the government's permission to move to a new house.

<comment><USER17> Well not in so many words. But since prices are going up, you could provide some kind of subsidy for people who are contributing to the kind of city you want. It could even be as crude as a seniority system. It's not that different from an income-based housing benefit system.

<comment><USER18> If you don't constrain the prices or increase as well then the prices will go up forever and your subsidies will get higher and higher. Student loans work like this currently.

There is not enough housing for everyone who wants to live in SF to live in SF. Some people are going to lose. If it's left to market forces then the losers are going to be the people with the least money. If you do it randomly it's going to be arbitrary. If you let the government pick and choose who gets in your going to get discrimination as people's biases sneak in.

Every approach has advantages and disadvantages so SF is going to have to pick which trade-off it wants unless it builds more housing

<comment><USER17> Well, instead of companies paying employees money which goes to rent, the city could tax those companies to subsidize the housing instead. That would make similar amounts of money available but the city would have more control over who gets the rent money. Unforeseen consequences abound, I'm just pointing out that rent doesn't have to go up forever.

<comment><USER18> I don't see how that will prevent rent from going up forever unless you put a cap on prices. Salaries in SF keep going up because rent is going up. The subsidy would have to continue to grow forever. If you are looking to just have certain groups of people to live there without concern for rising rents, just mandate rent control instead of the layers of indirection

<comment><USER17> Yeah just speaking mathematically, that rent has to come out of a new employee's paycheck. And if the companies are being taxed to pay the subsidy to a different employee, that puts a cap on how high rent can be. Assuming people are coming to the city to work and not buying a 10th home as a "pied-a- terre" using money earned elsewhere.

<comment><USER18> Theoretically there is a cap on rent through the forces you are describing, but we have no idea where that cap is and have yet to see it in reality. If its arbitrarily high it may as well be infinite for how it affects budgeting. Rent control will achieve the same pros and cons as your system but with a known value that people can plan around instead of seeing just how much money is going to be passed around in tax

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _" But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a place of schoolteachers and garbagemen and janitors, or people who wear buttons reading is it fascism yet? [..] A city of people who sell books on the street [..] street photographers [..] immigrant vendors [..] bus drivers [..] driven businessmen [..] hedge fund operators. All helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they do to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable."_

It occurs to me that this is pale nostalgic romanticism, and we don't really need cities at all except for commerce & trade. Most of our country's population was rural about a century ago. No reason we couldn't go back to that and still benefit from modern convenience.

I think mega-cities should probably evolve into massive business parks with no residential housing, and that collective mega-business-park can then pay for the services their employees need to access it (transportation, sanitation, etc).

It sure seems like a modern transportation system might make living in rural or suburban land more feasible for lower-income people.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have mixed feelings about this piece, it is a little heavy handed and does come across as the rant of an old person who is disoriented by change. So I sympathize with those who are leveling that criticism.

But with that said, as someone who's been in NYC for 20 years or so, I have to agree that there's definitely something to his underlying point. It's just a fact that New York feels like it's rapidly becoming a place that literally just has no place for anyone that doesn't have significant economic resources.

It hasn't actually happened yet, the city is still incredibly diverse in nearly every dimension. And so some extent some of the change is just the poor/hip neighborhoods moving around, as they always have, as the artists go from Tribeca, to Williamsburg, to Bushwick, to Ridgewood, or wherever is next.

But like I said this era really does feel different. The author's central premise here is that NYC soon will have no place for anyone that's not economically elite. I'm not sure he's wrong about that.

<comment><USER21> >But with that said, as someone who's been in NYC for 20 years or so, I have to agree that there's definitely something to his underlying point. It's just a fact that New York feels like it's rapidly becoming a place that literally just has no place for anyone that doesn't have significant economic resources.

Of course the era feels different, it's a different era. We have new architectural styles now, arguable better building and safety standards, and different relationships in terms of how we get around, socialize, and use and navigate public spaces.

What bugs me about these pieces is they have a gauzy, nostalgic view of the past and a pessimistic view of the future, but spend no time actually grappling with what the actual problems are that we need to solve. We don't need a return to rat infested slums and burnt out husks of cars lining the streets for people to smoke rocks in. What we need is for rents to be about $500/mo cheaper across the board. Manage that and the rest will take care of itself, but instead we get a lot of complaining about how we're not in Reagan's America anymore and we've lost the crucial gritty aesthetic that the authors grew up in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nostalgia is dangerous and the past isn't better simply because we remember the good parts from it. We pretend memory is crystal, but we tend to stitch together the best memories and even fill-in the gaps of what we forgot with lies. It isn't comfortable to think about the past and remember all of the things that sucked when you've got plenty to complain about today. When you yield to nostalgia you forfeit your agency to make today and tomorrow better. Suppose the past was better, what are you going to do so you can look back at today with the same fondness?

This theme was explored quite a lot by David Lynch in "Twin Peaks: The Return;" where he annihilated fans' desire to feel nostalgic over the original show.

</comment><comment><USER23> Meh. I live in the core area the author describes. The retail situation is frustrating but at least as much a function of Amazon as rapacious landlords. And eventually the vacancies will force a reset of retail rent expectations and things will normalize. NYC is a lovely exciting place. I'm in my 21st year here. Sure I'm nostalgic for the NYC of my recent college grad days but really that's mostly being nostalgic of being 21 again.

</comment><comment><USER24> As strongly as I advocate measures to combat real estate hyperinflation, I've come to think that building more real estate is only a small part of the solution.

Why does everyone have to be in New York? San Francisco? LA? Boston? Seattle? Why does everything upwardly mobile, creative, interesting, or otherwise productive need to super-concentrate in a small list of super-dense cities?

The US has dozens of medium sized cities with affordable rents, affordable housing, and interesting history, and hundreds to thousands of smaller cities and towns depending on where you stop looking. Why can't interesting stuff happen in these places?

Indeed it did once. The Altair, widely regarded as the first quasi-PC, came from Albaquerque, New Mexico. The IBM PC was designed in Boca Raton, Florida. Commodore, one of the best selling PC lines in the 80s, came from Philadelphia by way of Toronto. Texas Instruments in Dallas was once a leader in the semiconductor industry (they still lead in some ares like DSPs but have fallen quite a bit.) Apple came from the Bay Area, so that's one out of quite a few. The rest of the early PC industry came from elsewhere.

Today that list of cities would be San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, and maybe Seattle.

What happened? It's very paradoxical. The Internet was supposed to make it easier to compete from geographically diverse locales by making access to information easier and breaking gatekeepers, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Either that or the decentralizing effect of the net has been swamped by some other much more powerful centralizing effect that has simultaneously been in operation.

<comment><USER25> Its the self reinforcing ecosystem/market. For companies, you can find people if all the people are concentrated in a single place. For people, you can choose between companies if the companies are concentrated in one place. You get faster exchange of informal information from people jumping between companies. You have people striking out on their own.

There are the same sorts of hubs in other parts of the world for other sectors: finance, manufacturing, auto, aerospace, entertainment. London, Shenzen, Detroit, Munich, LA.

<comment><USER25> As to why the Internet didn't "solve" this. Not all things are virtual. Your physical self isn't virtual. Nor are other people. Physical goods are not virtual. You need to invent and continue to nurture equivalent virtual places for formal and informal, accidental and deliberate interactions. Its hard to take a heart to heart walk with someone who isn't there with you.

<comment><USER25> Is there any industry that wasn't and isn't like this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a rambling bunch of "Get Off My Lawnism". NYC is still the most immigrant-heavy city in the country. We still have all the museums, zoos, parks. In fact, more than ever. We're still overflowing with artists and musicians. We've lost some things, we've gained others. Yes, cost of living is rising rapidly and it's displacing some communities. The median level of coffee quality has vastly increased and homicide rate has plummeted. We also have LCD screens telling you when the train is coming. And it's more prevalent than ever for families to really want to raise their kids here and we're as choked with tourists as ever.

This place is never the same from one generation to the next and that will never change.

<comment><USER27> Totally agree.

As an aside, I too have noticed our coffee improve over the last ten years.

I'd bet money that has to do with the Aussie work visa program that went into effect sometime around 2009. Quid pro quo for Howard supporting the Iraq War.

Our subways are fucked and something needs to be done about the empty storefronts in high rent neighborhoods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This idiot decries the building boom in Seattle while blaming high rents for the problems in New York. Get on one side of the "build more housing" argument or the other.

</comment><comment><USER28> > In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years, > smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for > the Trump crowd to revel in.

I'm struggling to understand what Trump supporters would have to do with city construction, considering the vast majority of US cities are very left- leaning.

<comment><USER29> Nothing. I stopped reading when I got to that statement. It's sad that that the author felt compelled to insert his personal feelings about an administration that hasn't yet reached its second anniversary into an article about long-term economic trends.</comment></comment>


Magic Leap is experimenting with light-bending nanomaterials - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/05/magic-leap-is-experimenting-with-light-bending-nanomaterials/ <comment><USER2> If we're seeing articles like this I'm guessing they are preparing to do another round of funding?

The only time these guys ever make the news is just before they raise a massive heap of capital, and this news looks just as vacuous as all the other news they release.

Just based on the HoloLens having a product out already (even if only a dev version) it seems to me like Magic Leap is way behind.

<comment><USER3> Magic Leap seems to have mastered the idea of "Look investors, this next thing, it'll be the best trust me."

Meanwhile you can buy a Vive today or in a couple weeks a Windows Mixed Reality set (VR might be 'good enough' for most use cases ML would target). On top of the hololens, which is a closer product. Hololens fov leaves a lot to desire, but it actually works and anyone with the cash or willingness to go to the Kennedy Space Center can try it.

Not sure where Magic Leap is going right now, hopefully they'll release a revolutionary product, but the fact they never release a beta or devkit on the chip and projection system they've been talking up for half a decade is very worrisome.

<comment><USER4> Whatever they do, I hope they rehearse their song and dance routine better this time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY&t=4m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY&t=4m30s)

<comment><USER5> _[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY&t=4m30s*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY&t=4m30s*)

What the actual fuck did I just watch?

<comment><USER4> The gist of it was: "We just fooled the fuck out of google, so fuck you, I got mine and I want you to know it, so now that I have your attention, I'm going to waste your time, and make you smell my farts, because I have absolutely no respect for you. Fudge! Fudge! Fudge!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If Magic Leap wins, which I doubt, it will be because of their deep thinking about what AR means at the OS interactions level. Microsoft and Google completely failed to marshal any deep thinking about post-mouse AR interaction paradigms beyond "give the user a Bluetooth clicker" and "maybe voice?".

If Magic Leap fails, which I expect, it will be because they are approaching this deep thinking as a never-ending Xerox Parc style research project, not something that needs to be rapidly racing towards a set of standards and conventions and API's to be used by 3rd party devs in order to deliver the intended consistent user experience to end users across huge numbers of applications.

In Apple terms, Magic Leap desperately needs both their Andy Hertzfeld and their Guy Kawasaki, and shows no signs of having either one.

<comment><USER7> Deep thinking is beat by a company that ships accessible products. Apple shipped AR that is inferior to Tango but is now the thing to beat. Tango is better but expensive and not accessible.

My prediction, Magic Leap eventually fails and is bought for cents on the VC $ by Samsung, Apple, Huawei or similar. Even an acquisition in the $100M means everyone but a few VCs were wiped out completely.

<comment><USER4> They won't pass due diligence.

I hope Oracle buys them! It would serve them right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Magic Leap: Started in 2011. 1.39 Billion $ funding. 6 years, No product / service delivered. With Apple getting serious with ARKit and Android trying to jump on board, when phones can rule AR, what Magic Leap could/would do? Sell to Jeff Bezos?

<comment><USER9> Magic Leaps stuff is trying to be the next step beyond phone AR and is a big step up if they can get their immersive AR right. It's similar to the difference between early VR headsets that could only track orientation vs the Vive's room scale position tracking. They're both VR but the difference in utility and enjoyment is massive. I think we'll see the same thing with phone AR vs headset/goggle AR.

Though personally I'm not pinning many hopes on Magic Leap specifically given how little we've seen of their actual device and how vague they are about actual progress.

<comment><USER10> > Though personally I'm not pinning many hopes on Magic Leap specifically > given how little we've seen of their actual device and how vague they are > about actual progress.

I like it that they are trying something other than the traditional goggle based VR/AR that nobody wants.

<comment><USER8> Ironically their recent patent was just a goggle (as supposed to the Mixed reality/retina lens hype) [https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/08/30/magic-leap- rumored-a...](https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/08/30/magic-leap-rumored-ar- glasses-revealed-in-patent/)

<comment><USER4> "There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them."

"The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else."

[http://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui- co...](http://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui- concepts-1682716916)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As far as I can tell Magic Leap is working on light field technology. Essentially the big problem with AR right now is that it only fools half of the human visual system.

Parallax is one way your eyes estimate distance. All the AR headsets have this down.

The other is focal length. Your eyes need to set focus distance properly for the object you're trying to look at. This is where existing AR falls flat. And why it doesn't quite look real.

The way to fool the focal system is through bending light. Much harder than two offset displays. Not sure exactly how they're doing it but it sounds like they're doing something with optical fibre to project images on the retina itself.

The second hard part about faking focal length is that unless you can manage to bend all the light coming from the scene properly all the time you need to have really good eye tracking. Not sure how they're solving this either...

Whoever solves the focal distance part of tricking the human brain will rapidly develop AR/VR that is indistinguishable from reality. I just wish magic leap would focus on regular headsets to make some money instead of betting all their billions on light fields.

<comment><USER12> > will rapidly develop AR/VR that is indistinguishable from reality

Wow you sound like me from the 90s. You severely overestimate GPUs and underestimate the human eye.

<comment><USER11> I'm not talking about real time though. Pre-recorded light field videos would already be high enough resolution. It might not be perfect but like the CGI nowadays close enough where there's moments you can't tell

<comment><USER12> Perhaps, but realistic scenes are bounded by the number of lights and triangles more than resolution. There are heuristics and approximations to get around this, but I think we will only be able to fake a subset of the human visual experience. Lots of smooth surfaces and simple lighting setups: think car shows and apartment renders, not nature.

Realism can be extremely complex!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Have these guys actually delivered anything yet?

<comment><USER14> No, but I suspect the reason for that is that they don't need to. There are two reasons to release a product. The first is because it's perfect and there's no more work to be done on it, and the second is because you want/need to start recouping the money you've spent developing it. Magic Leap are not in either position. They've not built the product they want to build yet, and they're not especially short on cash. The fact they've not released anything means very little at this stage.

I'm mildly skeptical about what they're making, but at the same time the videos _are_ impressive, and if someone told me Apple had spent $1.5bn and 6 years on a top secret project I'd be hugely excited about what it might look like.

<comment><USER15> > I'm mildly skeptical about what they're making

I gave up hope on them after Wired did a piece on them and reported almost nothing. I think if they had something to show, they would have shown it. Today I don't think they have anything except a bunch of receipts for R&D expenditures.

> if someone told me Apple had spent $1.5bn and 6 years on a top secret > project I'd be hugely excited about what it might look like

Me too. The difference is Apple has shown that they can build and ship things.

<comment><USER16> They have a portable prototype since at least February. There are rumours of a presentation by the end of this year.

<comment><USER15> The rumors around this company are crazy.

My gut tells me there is a very small chance they are going to blow everybody away and come out with mixed-reality device that is truly revolutionary.

There's a very big chance that they are going to launch something underwhelming and get ridiculed by the press. Their promo videos (like the whale jumping out of a gymnasium floor in front of kids) were probably a big mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would anybody stick with such a investment? Either sunken cost fallacy- or they just have the potential to be this good. In that case, some sunken millions are actually quite peanuts - to have the foot in the door on the next layer of devices, who is going to wrap around our daily lives, making the older layers obsolete or dependent upon you for access to the the customers.

This is the long breath it takes, to sail through the enthusiasm and failure of a near-similar tech (VR!) and reach a goal. It is not portable yet? Who cares. The first cellphones where bricks. We shrunk them down two a chocolate- bar.

One leap for mankind.

<comment><USER15> > It is not portable yet? Who cares.

Investors should. Even though the first cell phones were from Motorola, Motorola ended up being pretty much irrelevant.

Regardless of what Magic Leap eventually releases, I'm excited to see what developers can do with AR (or MR). Somebody will eventually come up with a killer app, right?

<comment><USER17> He who controls the patents, controls the revenue-streams of the universe. There is only one place where the true, durable spice can be harvested, in the past, researching it- creating tons of original IP, to milk future generations for all the tech is worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> HN loves to deride ML for not releasing a product but I have been severely underwhelmed by AR/VR technology over the past few years. I believe only Snapchat has truly hit the lotto. I don't mind them taking their time to deliver the product, especially if it seems they have plenty of cash on hand.

<comment><USER19> Don't compare actual products with hypothetical products. Who's to say ML won't also severely underwhelm when/if they release, especially given all they have promised

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ah the snake oil merchants want another round of dim investor money I see.

</comment><comment><USER21> Moller Flying Car folks?

</comment><comment><USER5> Everytime I read something about Magic Leap it is "they may or may not use this tech for this product they may or may not be working on".

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems if there's a tech investing bubble it definitely has not started bursting yet - investors are breathlessly funding vapor-ware.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am reminded of "nuclear fusion is always 30 years away."

</comment><comment><USER24> Real artists ship</comment>


Show HN: BASIC Interpreter in under 500 LOC of Swift - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jdmoreira/foobarbas <comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

If you read through the code and have comments/suggestions, please let me know.</comment>


Equinox will not be making invoice payments until further notice - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/erinvandermeer/status/1247213743844573184 <comment><USER2> I'm amazed that they're bold enough to announce that they won't be paying their bills. Is the culture of entitlement really that strong?

You call up each person/company you owe and you beg, hat in hand, for an extension. Or you get an emergency loan or line of credit or file for bankruptcy and stop paying bills that way.

But you can't just say, "the government made it so we are struggling so we've decided to stop paying our bills."

<comment><USER3> No, the reality has long been exactly what Equinox is doing (or just not paying and saying nothing), if people don't like it, they can sue you knowing that the likely result is bankruptcy and them taking their chances with bankruptcy court.

> But you can't just say, "the government made it so we are struggling so > we've decided to stop paying our bills."

Yes, you manifestly can. If people don't like it, they have remedies, but as it turns out, those remefies mostly suck if the rat get is actually insolvent, especially if you are pretty far down the priority list of creditors. And they suck even moreso when the courts aren't open.

<comment><USER4> You're right, you can declare bankruptcy and go into administration. That's your way out.

You don't get to arbitrarily stop paying, and also keep doing business as usual.

<comment><USER3> > You don't get to arbitrarily stop paying

Yes, as has been demonstrated.by lots of companies lots of times, you _do_ get to do that.

If other people don't like it, they have a variety of options of how to respond, of course. But those options kind of suck, because they cost money and, ultimately, you can't get blood from a turnip.

The biggest problem facing trying to do this is getting people to extend new credit, which tends to place a hard wall for most efforts to do it, as not being able to pay your old bills might not shut you down, but being unable to get new goods and services will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And the real estate company that owns a large portion of Equinox said companies are obligated to pay their rents. But they're not obligated to pay for services rendered? Scumbags.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/related-companies-ceo- those-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/related-companies-ceo-those-who- can-should-pay-their-rent.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Are they declaring bankruptcy? If not I don't see how it's legal. Failure to put aside savings for hardship is a failure in planning - we have been told this repeatedly by economists, MBAs, and politicians.

</comment><comment><USER6> The email they posted seems like an automated generated message. It doesn't refer specifically to the work she has rendered. This leads me to believe that it might have been just to the general members? Are they sending this to the rental/mortgages as well? I wouldn't except such an email, except if they are going out of business soon... are they going to foreclose? Fitness is notoriously a fickle business.</comment>


What your text editor says about you - <AUTHOR> http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/08/14/what-does-your-favorite-text-editor-say-about-you/

<comment><USER2> I love it, vim is pretty accurate.</comment>


Using DTrace to debug a Node Knockout winner - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/09/26/observing-observer-a-cloud-analytics-case-study/

<comment><USER2> DTrace is a powerfull tool, no question. And the easy to use web interface makes SmartOS pretty compelling to try out.

However all this debugging could have been avoided if the webserver logged in its error log that the socket limit has been reached...

<comment><USER3> In retrospect it's obvious. Unfortunately, most software is not so thoroughly logged; there isn't enough time, and people make mistakes.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely. You can't avoid people making mistakes - it's human.

But software that does not do propper logging exactly leads to spending time on debugging that could have been avoided. It's saving time by not adding logging that causes wasted time in the end :)

Usually tools like DTrace are used to find hot-spots, points of contention, places which block other stuff and so on.

Not to pull a Cpt. Hindsight but this one could have been avoided if the software was crafted a bit more carefully. I'm not sure if the proxy needed to be written using NodeJS, there are plenty of existing proxies that work just fine and give you exactly the errors in the log that you need for 99% of cases.

Just saying there is a lesson to be learned here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am looking forward to the "Observations of Observing Observer" article which is sure to follow, as it appears that images in this blog post have been 503'd due to downtime or capacity problems!</comment>