I dare you to read this and still feel good about tipping - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dare-you-to-read-this-and-still-feel-ok-about-tipping-in-the-united-states/ <comment><USER2> Some of the points raised are good, but there are arguments to be made the other way as well.

For example, the article is very concerned that the current tipping system is unfair to the poor. But since tipping is optional, it lets people adjust it to their income. In other words, if tips are a fixed 18% mandatory thing - as the article suggests - then it prevents poor people from tipping less (and rich people from tipping more). In other words, it creates a new unavoidable cost for poor people.

And some of the arguments are not compelling. For example, it seems that mentioning slavery is used primarily to elicit an emotional response. While perhaps slavery factored into things in the past, tipping seems similar in other countries that do not have a history of slavery. Compare the US and the UK, for example.

<comment><USER3> The article _does not_ suggest an 18% mandatory tipping. It reports the results of a high-end restaurant which put 18% mandatory tipping into place.

Nor was that the only suggestion in the piece. In the interview with Saru Jayaraman, Jayaraman says:

> What I have been advocating for is what already exists in seven states, > including California, which is that every employer be required to pay the > full minimum wage to all workers, and people get tipped on top of that.

This still means that someone who does not wish to tip, perhaps from poverty, does not need to do so.

You say "While perhaps slavery factored into things in the past, tipping seems similar in other countries that do not have a history of slavery." But that's irrelevant. The context is:

> Among the many things she uncovered is that the federal tipped-minimum wage, > which allows restaurants to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 per hour > in the United States, is rooted in a regrettable period in this country's > past: slavery.

Different countries can have different routes to the same end-point. Note the commentary about how:

> When rich Americans traveled to Europe in the 1850s and 1860s, they stayed > at hotels and dined at restaurants. When they came back, they tried to show > off that they knew the rules of Europe and how to tip, and those were the > environments in which they tried to tip first.

The argument is the European practices came to the US, and were used in situations like restaurant workers and train porters which were the servant class in Europe and primarily done by poor blacks in the US.

Then the professionalization movement of the late 1800s - 'we are professionals, and we shouldn't have to live on tips, because we should be paid by our employers.' - spread from the US to Europe and killed off tipping in most of Europe, but didn't take root in the US for the ex-slaves working in the lowest paying jobs in the US.

So I find it hard to accept your objection that there should be a comparison of the US with other countries, when the article makes that comparison.

The UK and US tipping situations are not so similar. According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity#United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity#United_Kingdom) , 10% is common in the UK, while it's 15% in the US. In addition, all staff in the UK must be paid the national minimum wage, while in the US, tipped restaurant staff have a lower minimum wage. Much of the article concerns why there is a difference in those two minimum wages in the US.

<comment><USER2> > This still means that someone who does not wish to tip, perhaps from > poverty, does not need to do so.

No, they still do - the cost is moved from the tip to the base salary.

The total money received will be the same, on average. But when tipping, there is more flexibility and variability, and that benefits poorer people.

It's similar to coupons - they take a little time to use, and they save a little money. The poor benefit from them, while the rich ignore them. If instead prices were lowered uniformly to the same average, the poor would lose and the rich would gain.

Also similar is the "pay what you want" model used by Humble etc. Given the choice to pay less, the poor can use that opportunity. More payment flexibility is good for the poor, and removing tips removes that flexibility.

I'm not saying tips are good. Just that there are valid arguments going both ways.

<comment><USER3> > the cost is moved from the tip to the base salary.

But that's an argument against minimum wage, not an argument against tipping.

And no, it isn't simply that shift of payment. It also aligns the goals of the wait staff with that of the restaurant. Because when the wait staff has two employers - the restaurant and the customer - there will be conflicts about putting personal profit through tipping ahead of the restaurant's.

> and that benefits poorer people

Citation please?

Because the article quotes Jayaraman as saying:

> "even in places like New York and D.C., seventy percent of tipped workers > are actually women, largely working at casual restaurants, like Applebees, > IHOP , and Olive Garden, earning a median wage of $9 an hour when you > include tips. These people suffer three times the poverty rate of the rest > of the U.S. workforce, use food stamps at double the rate, and, the worst > part, suffer from the absolute worst sexual harassment of any industry in > the United States. When you're a woman living on tips—even if you're making > a lot of money on tips, which most women aren't—you're subject to the whims > of the customer, and really encouraged by management to objectify yourself > or subject yourself to objectification to make money in tips."

and quotes Porter as saying:

> Studies have shown that tipping is not an effective incentive for > performance in servers. It also creates an environment in which people of > color, young people, old people, women, and foreigners tend to get worse > service than white males. In a tip-based system, nonwhite servers make less > than their white peers for equal work. Consider also the power imbalance > between tippers, who are typically male, and servers, 70 percent of whom are > female, and consider that the restaurant industry generates five times the > average number of sexual harassment claims per worker. And that in many > instances employers have allegedly misused tip credits, which let owners pay > servers less than minimum wage if tipping makes up the difference.

It sounds very much like having the same minimum wage for tipped and non- tipped staff would directly and clearly benefit poor people, for the multiple reasons given.

While your argument is, well, hand-wavy.

When I had little money, I simply didn't go places which had tipping. It was either cheap fast food where no tipping was required, or I made my own. So I'm also struggling to understand how many poor people - as in, on food stamps, like the above mentioned restaurant workers - go places where tipping is expected, and don't tip.

Furthermore, there are plenty of stories about how black people are stereotyped as poor tippers. Eg, [http://www.ebony.com/news-views/are-black- people-really-bad-...](http://www.ebony.com/news-views/are-black-people- really-bad-tippers-981) and [http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2008/10/do-black- cu...](http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2008/10/do-black-custom.html) . There's even wait staff who will give bad service to black customers. Quoting from a comment in the second link:

> It got to a point even the black waiters did not want to wait on fellow > blacks because they knew they'd get stiffed. I got to a point I was so tired > of being stiffed and putting up with their demands, I would put ciggerette > ashes in their food or mix in food from the garbage cans with their food.

What you suggest - that poor people simply don't tip because they don't have money - means that obviously poor people (which are also disproportionately minorities) will get bad service just because the wait staff will believe they are going to "get stiffed."

Thus, I still find it hard to believe that a significant number of poor people are going to restaurants with tipping, and not tipping; because if they did so they would get this sort of horrible treatment by some of the waiters.

So, why not pay everyone a decent wage, and completely get rid of the social obligation to tip? Then poor people, and minorities, will be treated the same as middle class and rich customers.

<comment><USER3> I'll add to that - by your logic shouldn't medical doctors and car mechanics also switched to being tipped positions? That way rich people can voluntarily pay more through tips, while the poor people don't need to tip.

Since that doesn't happen, and likely won't happen, that strongly suggests that your argument isn't valid.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Vista even the mouse is dangerous (pic) - <AUTHOR> http://images.wikia.com/uncyclopedia/images/9/96/Vistaohlord.png <comment><USER2> First of all, this picture is doctored; there should be a company name under "Mouse", or else it would show an "Unidentified Publisher" warning instead. Also notice how 'Mouse' text isn't rendered with cleartype, while all other text is. Plus, it's from 'Uncyclopedia'.

Secondly, is Windows bashing what "Hacker News" is going to become? Might as well rename this site "Digg" and start upvoting "Top ten tips for using Ubuntu"-type stories.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I should add a way to undo votes. I bet a few people would like to.

Or maybe I should just not accept submissions ending in .jpg or .png. Images are the Nile Perch of social news.

<comment><USER4> Consider this a vote for "no image submissions allowed".

<comment><USER5> I don't think the "no images" solution makes sense. Images are just one of countless kinds of lame submissions; why single them out? I thought the whole idea of voting and oracles was to be able to avoid that sort of hand-to-hand combat. Why use a heuristic spam filter when you have a Bayesian one that works better?

<comment><USER6> Because if a 10-year-old could have come up with the media being submitted, then it probably shouldn't be submitted here. Having no newsworthiness, pictures contain boring, rehashed messages, and are dangerious because they stroke the group's ego with simplistic messages, and dangerious because they become the preferred submission over time, since they tend to falsely increase a user's confidence though no knowledge has been transferred, while original, analytical thought has been stimied.

<comment><USER5> I completely agree with you, but I don't see how that addresses my point. Picture submissions suck, but it's a waste of effort to ban them when we already have a more effective way of dealing with the broader problem of lame submissions.

<comment><USER7> Its a hard and fast rule that kicks in before the submission goes onto the site. Ways of modifying the effects of voting happen later and are more subtle.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Because the "New" page is useful and should stay that way.

<comment><USER5> The new page as it stands will continue to be useful up to at least one more order of magnitude in volume, and I don't think PG intends to let the site grow any more than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So how do you click cancel if you don't trust the mouse? That's why I always carry two mice around in my laptop bag, so each one can vouch for the other.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is obviously a joke, people shouldn't take it so seriously. It's great because it makes a good point. I have a security background so I generally like it when OS's try to become more secure but annoying the user with constant warnings doesn't accomplish much in terms of security.</comment>


Zuckerberg isn't accountable to anyone so it's time Congress to take his power - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-should-ban-facebooks-dual-class-stock-structure-2018-11 <comment><USER2> If investors don't like the dual stock structure, they don't have to invest. What am I missing? Why should congress step in to ban something that by virtue of these existing investors, some people are fine with?

<comment><USER3> Why have laws in business at all? You don't like it don't do business. Perhaps because we don't like the idea that the strongest should always get his way? Although I totally take your point that it is utterly fatuous to suggest shareholders are going to hold management to account on the general theme of being ethical.

Total deregulation is every bit the same silly extreme as a command economy and should be treated with the same withering contempt. The question should always be "Is this regulation effective in making things better for more people over the long term." If that answer is now, we have a regulation that should go. Deregulation extremists somehow take the exact opposite point of view when it comes to property rights, regulations that protect them. And of course every single large company shouting de-regulation is really engaged in a massive amount of regulatory capture. Those regulations need to go and we need to fight back in a big way on that. Variations on that theme are why Bernie and Donald are so much more popular than Hilary and Jeb. Still no progress.

Anyway are these tech billionaires able to command super-voting rights with their stakes because they're so great and wise and wonderful? Or is it because they've secured a beachhead that commands a lot of economic rent and that beachhead gives them the power and strength to get their way. I don't find Zuck super impressive as a person, strategist or engineer. But hey he fought off google trying to muscle into his beach head so he must be amazing unless he, um, "has the high ground" OB1 stye.

Did Rupert Murdoch push the super voting rights regulations through so he could keep total family control of news ltd & fox?

<comment><USER4> > The question should always be "Is this regulation effective in making things > better for more people over the long term."

That's the Communist worldview. Complete utilitarian totalitarian morality.

<comment><USER3> Property rights are a regulation justified on this basis. Property rights are not usually associated with communism and totalitarianism. But hey, without a utilitarian justification for regulation we do still have two choices. Theocracy is one, anarchy is the other. I'm as against both of those as i am against communism & fascism. It's wonderfully radical to be so extreme as to be against property rights or claim that Jesus had teachings on the principle.

<comment><USER4> You can justify property rights and all sorts of business regulations with concepts of fairness and justice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Estimating Sheep Pain with Facial Recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2017/estimating-sheep-pain-with-facial-recognition <comment><AUTHOR> It is a podcast Episode, but also a blog post, so I do not know if I have to prepend [Audio] to the title. What should I do?</comment>


Ask HN: Learning Rust - ____Sash---701_ Hi! Looking into learning Rust as a full stack javascript/node developer with some c++ knowledge. Looking for learning materials, books, videos etc. What would you recommend?
:) <comment><AUTHOR> rust-lang/book [https://github.com/rust-lang/book](https://github.com/rust- lang/book)

An excellent resource, being a newbie myself with a slightly different background, I find it really handy. Joining a community is also advisable, I use an unofficial one on telegram for this purpose.

<comment> ____Sash---701_ Thanks</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Weird property of x^2+1=0 in modular rings - <AUTHOR> In a modular ring (the integers modulo p), there can be real (not imaginary) solutions to x^2+1=0.  If p is a prime greater than two, then x^2+1=0 has two solutions if p=4n+1 (for some integer n), and zero solutions if p=4n+3.
I can prove that x^2+1=0 has solutions in pairs.  (If x^2+1 = 0, mod p, then (p-x)^2+1 = p^2-2px+x^2+1 = x^2+1 = 0, mod p.)
I can even prove that x^2+1=0 has either zero or two solutions.  (x and y can't both solve it for y != p-x, if p is prime, because if y=x+k, then (x+k)^2+1 = x^2+2kx+k^2+1 = 0 mod p.  But x^2+1=0, so 2kx+k^2 = 0 mod p.  That is, k(k+2x) = 0 mod p.  But p is prime, so either k = 0 mod p, or k+2x = 0 mod p.  If k = 0, then y = x (because y=x+k).  If k+2x = 0 mod p, then k+2x = p, so x+(x+k) = p, so x+y=p, so y = p-x.  Therefore there are never more than two solutions.)
Can anyone explain why there are always two solutions if p=4n+1, and always zero if p=4n+3? <comment><USER2> If p is congruent to 3 mod 4 then it can't be the sum of two squares. To see that, consider x^2+y^2 mod 4. Each term is either 0 or 1 mod 4, so the sum can't be 3.

If p is congruent to 1 mod 4 then it is the sum of two squares in exactly one way. That's an old theorem and has a gazillion proofs. You can easily find them online.

See if you can leverage that into what you need.

<comment><USER2> No reply, and it does feel a little like this was a homework question. Even so, if you contact me I can give you more information ... details in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's not a homework problem. I'm really long in the tooth to be a student. It's just something I'm curious about. Actually, what I'm really curious about is that, if you take the complex numbers a+bi modulo p, then that forms a ring. It is a quotient ring if p is prime and of the form 4n+3, and not if p is of the form 4n+1. And I am curious as to why.

It turns out that it can be reduced to the question I asked. But now I want to know why _that_ is.

I didn't answer right away, because I didn't know what to do with your answer. It's interesting, and plausibly relevant, but I must confess that I don't see how at the moment. I mean, x^2+1 has the same form, but...

Take 13, for instance. 13 = 4 + 9 = 2^2 + 3^2. But I don't see how that connects to 5^2 + 1 = 26 = 0 mod 13. I'm not saying it's not there. It's very suggestive that what you said splits exactly on 4n+1 vs. 4n+3, but... I don't see the connection yet.

Where I'm ultimately kind of trying to head is cryptography. Because of the real and complex components, you could get 2n bits of "hard to crack" out of n bits of "prime number". At least for something like a proof protocol: I generate a and b, and publish a and (a * b). Only I know b, and nobody else can generate it, because (a * b) / b is really hard. But when I publish b, everyone can easily verify that it's the right number.

<comment><USER2> Well, since you say this isn't a homework problem ...

Wilson's theorem says that for (p-1)! == -1 (p) iff p is prime. Easily proved by pairing each non-unit with its multiplicative inverse, noting that a^{-1} != a (mod p), and so 1x2x3x4x...x(p-2)x(p-1) can have everything paired off and leave just the (p-1) term, hence if p is prime, (p-1)! == -1 (mod p).

I suggest you take some time to work through that and convince yourself.

Now consider p an odd prime with p==1 (mod 4). Consider (p-1)!. Pair every a with (p-a) and hence note that 1x2x3x4x...x(p-1)/2 equals (p+1)/2 x ...x(p-1) up to a multiple of -1. But since p==1 (mod 4), (p-1)/2 is even, and so we have 1x2x3x4x...x(p-1)/2 == (p+1)/2 x ...x(p-1) (mod p).

But that's (p-1)!, which by Wilson's theorem is -1, and so {((p-1)/2)!}^2 == -1 (mod p).

As an example, consider p=13. Then (p-1)/2 is 6, 6! = 720, which is 5 (mod 13), and 5^2 = 25 == -1 (mod 13).

You'll need to work through the details to convince yourself.

FWIW, I don't understand any of your last paragraph, because (a * b) / b doesn't seem at all hard to me ... unless you're working in a group you haven't told me about.

<comment><AUTHOR> So {((p-1)/2)!}^2 == -1 (mod p), which means that {((p-1)/2)!} is a solution to x^2 +1 = 0 mod p, and therefore there is always a solution (for p = 1 mod 4). I see.

And this breaks down for p=4n+3, because then (p-1)/2 is odd, and we can't pair the terms that way. But... maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see a way to extend this to prove the other side: that if p = 3 mod 4, there are _no_ solutions. (We've proven that this way doesn't work to construct a solution, but that's not the same as proving that no solution exists.)

Thank you _very much_ for the help this far. This is one of the absolutely cool things about HN - some random guy asks a question, just because it interests him, and a Cambridge PhD gives him time, for free, to help him learn a bit more.

<comment><USER2> > _And this breaks down for p=4n+3, because then (p-1) /2 is odd, and we can't > pair the terms that way._

Right.

> _... I don 't see a way to extend this to prove the other side: that if p = > 3 mod 4, there are no solutions. (We've proven that this way doesn't work to > construct a solution, but that's not the same as proving that no solution > exists.)_

Correct.

So you are considering x^2+1=0 (mod p) when p=3 (mod 4), and you want to show that no solution exists.

If x^2 = -1 (mod p) then x^4 = 1 (mod p). But powers of an element in a group form a subgroup, so the set {1, x, x^2, x^3} is a subgroup of Z_p. By Lagrange's Theorem the size of a subgroup must divide the size of the group, and so we have that 4 must divide p-1.

But if p=3 (mod 4) then that's not true, and so x^2 cannot be -1 (mod p).

Does that help? I've omitted some details, but it's largely right.

> _Thank you very much for the help this far._

You're welcome, it's been an interesting diversion from some mundane work, and has served as a useful reminder of some fun stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Does that help?

Yes. You've been able to pitch your explanations at a level that my only-a-BS- in-math brain could grasp.

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure interacting with you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is cloud storage so cheep? - <AUTHOR> Today Dropbox dropped prices. They now offer 1 TB for $10/month. Other providers like Google Drive have similar offers for quite some time.
I wonder how they do this. Dropbox uses Amazon S3 to save files. The lowest possible price on S3 is $0.0275/GB/month. If a Dropbox user utilizes all available space it would cost Dropbox $27.50/month. In addition most users are not paying for Dropbox but use there free offering adding files (=costs) to Dropbox. Running the company, development of the application, application server, download traffic etc. will come on top.
I see the following reasons why Dropbox might be able to make profit in the end:
- Most people are using much less space than the maximum of 1 TB. - Dropbox is doing deduplication. If two users have the same file Dropbox only needs to save it once.
- Dropbox might have a better deal with Amazon and is not paying $0.0275/GB/month.
Do I overlook something? What is most important reason why Dropbox and others are able to make this prices? <comment><USER2> Dropbox used to say they use Amazon S3 [1], but now they just say "storage servers are provided by a managed service provider" [2] which could mean they found someone cheaper than S3, or that another company is managing the infrastructure for Dropbox. I always imagined Dropbox would move on from S3, and Drew even said back in 2010 that "We may not be on s3 forever, and will build our own store in addition, but for now this lets us focus on both the client software and the performance of the layer we've developed on top of s3." [3]

1\. [https://web.archive.org/web/20140101095459/https://www.dropb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140101095459/https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en)

2\. [https://www.dropbox.com/help/7](https://www.dropbox.com/help/7)

3\. [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dropbox-review-invites- and-7-qu...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dropbox-review-invites- and-7-questions-with-the-founder/)

</comment><comment><USER3> A huge part of it is the practice of overselling. The basic idea is that you have n customers who all want k gigabytes of space, but on average they each use only j gigabytes of the space. If that holds, then rather than having n _k gigabytes available, you just need n_ (k/j) gigabytes to satsify their needs. After amortizing usage, the people who overbuy and barely use their space more than makes up for the users that max out their space. I don't know for sure if Dropbox does this, but most hosting companies do, and its a sensible practice (especially when your backbone is scalable).

Pairing with that, nobody actually uses all of their space. If you see yourself getting within some percentage of your usage, one generally will buy more to keep from hitting that upper bound. Nobody likes being in the dangerous red zone.

I believe dropbox also compresses your data serverside, so you really use up n*p gigabytes (where n is your local usage, and p is the compression ratio), but don't quote me on that.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much nails it on the head. Overselling is a large part of online services overall, like web hosting.

You think HostGator can actually give you unlimited disk space for a few dollars a month? People don't use anywhere even remotely near their quotas, but it's a compelling marketing/sales tactic for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The cost of the space is quickly approaching meaningless [1] and people are streaming more and more which reduces the need for space in some heavy areas - you don't need to store local copies of music, movies, tv shows etc anymore when you have on demand unlimited access to them.

Expenses also get eroded by constant progress towards automation. As one example it was only a few years ago that Heroku pioneered a way of deploying apps that removed a shitload of manual labor maintaining and scaling apps, which has now become widespread with competition and freely available through open source.

[1] [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2599484/seagates- monstrous-8t...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2599484/seagates- monstrous-8tb-hard-drive-is-the-most-spacious-storage-yet.html)

Also in that article - "Right now on Amazon you can get a 4TB desktop drive for just under $200, with 5 and 6 TB drives edging closer to $300." Dropbox's $100/year for 1 TB is just closer to what it should be.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you have it there.

A terabyte is a nice round number, but I think getting a TB into cloud storage would be challenging, since most people have lower upload than download allowances.

At 1 Mbit/sec upload, for instance, it would take 8000 sec to upload a GB or 8 million sec to upload a TB, which amounts to a few months of continuous uploading.

That's a serious project for most people.

As for the other factors you'd better believe that they use compression, deduplication, special deals and every other trick in the book to bring down costs.

On top of all that, Dropbox has received over $1B in funding so it is very possible that they are losing money to build market share.

So far as cost analysis, I'd also look at the networking costs with AWS, since those are going to be significant. AWS doesn't charge for ingress, but it does charge about 5 cents to move a GB out at high volumes, and that can add up if a lot of stuff is being moved out.

</comment><comment><USER7> So there's a couple things going on that would make this feasible.

1) People are unlikely to use that much actual storage in the first place. The tipping point, assuming their on S3 and haven't moved to a cheaper option like some other comments have suggested, for the $10/mon is ~363 GB. That's a lot of data for a single person to upload especially considering the poor state of US internet speeds.

2) There are technologies to push that break even point even higher from the customers perspective. Deduplication and compression will shrink many of a users files while still increasing their used count. It's really hard to estimate the effects of dedup and compression though because of the number of unknowns.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you've covered most of the reasons. Compression probably also reduces the actual storage size of files. They are probably also using some of their own storage outside of Amazon. Rarely accessed files could be moved to slower, cheaper storage facilities. But you wouldn't get the full answer without access to internal Dropbox documents.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dropbox uses file deduplication, also I suspect the distribution of disk space used is nowhere near the maximum offered (this is, they offer 1TB but most users will take up only a small fraction of it)

</comment><comment> dem-nuts I'm sure owning a large market share of a service storing consumer data is worth something, as unethical as that sounds... Abuse is fairly common as we've seen in recent years. When google scans a file into it's own format, or when OCR's run on your images to index information, who else can access these indexes?

</comment><comment><USER10> *cheap

</comment><comment><USER11> It's all the birds. Up in the clouds. Cheep cheep cheep.</comment>


Fight for $15 swells into largest protest by low-wage workers in US history - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/fight-for-15-minimum-wage-protests-new-york-los-angeles-atlanta-boston <comment><USER2> Despite the debate over short-term effects, I think many forget that this is a rebellion over a general and widespread shift of income and wealth toward higher-paid executives and knowledge workers, and away from lower-paid service and production workers.

There are a ton of possible reasons for this (less powerful unions, automation, globalization, etc. etc.) but my favorite is that it happened simply because it could happen; because wages concentrate power and therefore self-reinforce. The power vacuum (and therefore value vacuum) that emerged out of that shift was filled, because it was available.

This is an effort to break that self-reinforcing cycle and say, hey, we as a society do not support the idea that corporations exist solely for the benefit of shareholders; we demand that they start existing a little more for the benefit of their employees too.

We can debate about what effects it will have or not til the cows come home, but the large scale effort is sensible and commendable to create a better economic balance. So far, there's very little evidence to show that it will make the sky fall.

<comment><USER3> The minimum wage is just really inefficient way to help people. I'd much rather see a large increase in the earned income tax credit (which directly helps those who need it most, without the distorting effects of a minimum wage) or an introduction of a basic income system.

<comment><USER4> How is the Earned Income Tax Credit not an economic distortion? One could easily argue that it's a form of welfare to business as much as to people, with the government picking up the slack for employers who won't pay adequate wages. Minimum wage laws can indeed a challenge for small businesses and filter through to consumer prices, but wages are not the biggest or only expense most businesses face, and the pleas of poverty from many business owners do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

<comment><USER5> It may not be the biggest, or only expense, but it is the largest controllable expense for most retail and restaurants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People who browse HN should be some of the biggest advocates for this wage increase, as it's our efforts in automation that is creating such huge profit centers for these corporations. Yet instead of these profits being redistributed throughout the business they're being funneled into financial schemes to inflate stock prices.

The entire point of automation is to give the average person less work, yet the capture of the benefits has already begun by those at the top. Make no mistake, this fight will eventually end up on our doorstep as well, minimum wage increases are merely the first salvo. If we back down now we are only harming our future selves when this inane startup culture of "dedicate your every waking hour to making the VC's rich" becomes the defacto MO of tech. If neccessarily be completely selfish and realize that an increase in the minimum wage will directly cause an increase in your very own salary... if for the only reason that automating these more expensive jobs will become that much more valuable.

But even if that doesn't convince you, the economic argument is pretty simple. Minimum wage hasn't even kept up with inflation, much less cost of living in this country. You don't have to give a flying crap about someone's "lifestyle" to understand that creating a class of workers that will forever be trapped by poverty is inherently bad for anyone without enough capital squirreled away to live off the interest. If you want a healthy economy you can't have insane gaps between just the middle class and those earning the lowest wage (not even going into the gaps between higher earners).

At the very least you have to realize that your responsibility as a citizen of the US (sorry non-US people, we still like you!) is to other citizens, not the corporations.

Edit: I'll quickly address those arguing that the increase in wage will put certain businesses out of profitability: In startup land we have no sympathy for those who cannot raise/earn enough money to pay the costs for quality engineers, why should we have any sympathy for a business that cannot continue it's business model in the face of increasing it's _lowest paid workers ' wage_? I've not infrequently seen blatant scorn towards those startups with terrible business models... let's not become advocates for MBAs who exhibit the same kind of ineptitude.

</comment><comment><USER7> Remember what happened when the big financials got bailouts? One under Bush and another under Obama? The banks said, please help us, if we fail we'll take the economy with us. If you help us, we promise to make more loans and stimulate housing growth.

What actually happened was they tightened up their standards and gave out very few new loans, while dumping billions into board room bonuses. This is exactly what happens when there's a tax cut: we used to call that voodoo economics or trickle down. Sounds good in practice but it depends on the good will of executives, which has been proven largely absent time and time again.

Now, take that behavior into the board room at Walmart or Target, and instead of a windfall, it's a new expense (just flip the sign bit :-). Of course they're going to raise prices; where else will it come from? Touching share price is verbotten, as is anything in the executive suite.

<comment><USER8> When I saw companies like Walmart raising their wages:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why- walm...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-walmart- raised-its-wages/385670/)

And closing stores in response:

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-28/walmarts- mysterious...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-28/walmarts-mysterious- store-closure-devastates-california-city)

I realized that of course they would close the stores that are no longer profitable. It's simple economics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had an idea a while back that a job doesn't provide _wages_ per-se, but a level of lifestyle.

E.g. as a software developer in Silicon Valley, my salary is somewhat large compared to the rest of the world, but my lifestyle is fairly unremarkable for a working professional (2 used cars, a house that needs updates, weekends off, vacation time, etc).

I could move somewhere with a lower cost of living, and my compensation would decrease, and if I did the same job I would probably live approximately the same lifestyle (perhaps with marginal improvements to the house considering SV's real estate situation).

If I moved up the career ladder my lifestyle would improve a bit; if I moved down my lifestyle would get a bit worse.

Using this rubric of job type = lifestyle, what kind of lifestyle is a minimum-wage job meant to support? There will always be a bottom-rung lifestyle, and those that support themselves on minimum-wage jobs will always occupy the next rung up from the bottom. The ladder itself may move up or down, but compared to fellow workers in other jobs, they will always feel the delta. And that's what this is really about, the unhappiness caused by seeing that delta.

We were never meant to support entire families on minimum wage jobs.

<comment><USER10> Some of us are interested in providing every human being with dignity and comfort, if at all possible.

<comment><USER11> > Some of us are interested in providing every human being with dignity and > comfort, if at all possible.

Providing? Or Enabling?

How about you empower every human being to achieve dignity and comfort?

Education and high-skilled job training.

The solution isn't to just "provide", it's to empower. Providing is a short term solution... one that must be re-visited every few years. Empowering people to build themselves a future lasts forever.

<comment><USER12> Providing dignity _is_ enabling. And we could provide it long-term to everyone if we wanted.

<comment><USER11> > Providing dignity is enabling. And we could provide it long-term to everyone > if we wanted.

We have 77 years of history proving raising minimum wage is absurdly ineffective at enabling individuals to climb out of minimum wage jobs.

Yes, one can indefinitely raise minimum wage every few years (as we have been since 1938), but that doesn't provide long term growth for the individuals trying to live on it.

Providing better and cheaper/easier access to higher education and high- skilled job training has proven time and time again to be the only permanent solution which lifts individuals out of minimum wage jobs.

<comment><USER12> People should have a place to call home and not starve whether they have a good job, a minimum wage job, or no job at all.

Education and training are a great way to help people move up, but we need a ground floor too, rather than a basement full of jagged rebar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Make low-skill labor more expensive and you'll make it more attractive to find ways to eliminate low-skill jobs, such as the hamburger machine: [http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger- machine/25159/](http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/)

McDonald's is already testing ordering machines. I'm sure most of us have been to a grocery store with self checkouts.

The minimum wage doesn't necessarily cause unemployment, but it does increase unemployment amongst those with the least skills.

<comment><USER14> Your examples are instances of technology affecting employment, not effects of the minimum wage. And continuing to depress the cost of wages will not stop development of labor automation.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't stop the development of labor automation, but instead increases it, much against the interest of those that fought against the maintenance of current wages. It's like when oil producers increase prices, as a side effect, they also increase the likelihood of a competing technology replacing them. It makes sense in the short term, but speeds up the long term effect. Of course, this is neither here nor there to the "aught/naught" debate.

<comment><USER4> A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; I think most people in low-wage jobs would rather get paid a decent amount today and have some meaningful financial options than be offered an alternative of longer tenure on slim wages, which is only attractive if you don't think there's any prospect of getting any other kind of job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish someone would stop some of them and ask them:

"What do you think will happen if you actually GET $15/hr?"

"Do you expect your employer to keep his same prices and same amount of work force and just eat the labor cost?"

"What happens if you make $9 now, make $15 tomorrow, but tomorrow the prices of everything you buy suddenly doubled?"

<comment><USER17> > Do you expect your employer to keep his same prices and same amount of work > force and just eat the labor cost?

Many will simply eat the cost, actually. The minimum-wage debate is more about politics than economics. There's not as many minimum wage workers as people think, so for very little economic cost, you can increase the quality of life for the lowest paid workers in our society.

A few businesses may be forced to change, but those are the ones that run razor-thin margins.

> What happens if you make $9 now, make $15 tomorrow, but tomorrow the prices > of everything you buy suddenly doubled?"

Nothing will double in price. Given the amount of minimum wage workers that actually exist in the US, prices shouldn't increase by more than 5%. Anything more would just be opportunistic gouging.

<comment><USER5> That's incredibly naive. Most business owners won't eat the cost. They'll cut hours. How do I know? Because I used to work in the fast food industry as a GM. Whenever CA increased the min wage, the first thing our owner would do is ask us how much more this was going to cost us, then he'd instruct us to cut the number of hours scheduled. Because in fast food, it's not like it only affects the workers making minimum wage, it bumps the entire pay scale. So if min wage is raised by $1, everyone working hourly gets a $1 bump. For a restaurant that has say 100 man hours of labor a day, that means $100 extra cost per day right out of the owner's pocket. Multiply that by 365 and you have a pissed off owner. He can't always raise prices, and labor costs are the largest controllable expense. So what happens is that each store manager is told that they need to make everyone work harder, and they have to cut $100 worth of labor each day. So the survivors get more money, but they get worked harder; the losers get their hours cut, or they don't get hired as the positions/hours are not replaced when attrition occurs. TANSTAAFL!

<comment><USER18> I don't understand why the restaurant waited until there was a wage hike to do that. If they were able to cut hours and make the remaining people work harder in order to make up for the extra costs due to minimum wage, couldn't they have cut hours and made the remaining people work harder long before that, when instead of the savings going to offset a new expense, they would have gone into profit?

<comment><USER19> Well, first off, maybe the restaurant doesn't run on greed? Hopefully there's room in your philosophy for that to be a possibility.

Outside of that though, raising prices immediately hurts sales, but worse customer service due to the restaurant being chronically short-staffed takes longer to hurt sales. Being chronically short-staffed also makes for a worse working environment which leads to employee turnover, which is more costly in the long run, but when you're struggling to make rent _this month_ , the long term costs may not be as apparent.

Finally, if it's a small restaurant where the owner also helps with the day- to-day operations of restaurant (maybe they're even the chef), it mean's _they 'll_ have to work even harder. The owner may just find it worth the cost to have an extra employee and be able to work just a little bit less.

<comment><USER5> Another issue is the misperception of franchisees as fat cats. Our owner had five franchises; each cost over $2M back in the 80's. The average annual sales were around 1-2 million, and he would net around 10%. So he invests $10M to make $750K a year before taxes. That's 7.5% return. Not exactly AAPLesque.

So if you increase his labor costs from 20% to 30%, you just wiped out his return. If you double it to 40% like a $15 increase would do, then he's got to either automate or cut to the bone.

And yes I realize I'm conflating figures from the 80s to today, but the percentages still hold.

<comment><USER17> Sounds like he overpaid for the franchises themselves. That's just called a bad investment.

I'd generally expect a restaurant to do twice as much in sales (or more) in a year compared to the initial cost, and be able to recuperate the initial investment in 5-10 years (one of the more recent restaurateurs I worked for paid back his investors in 3 years, and has a second location 5 years in).

But even using his sub-par numbers, $750K a year since the 80's means he's already recuperated his costs and made some serious profits since. What more does he expect? He could close them all tomorrow and be ahead. If anything, this anecdote does show just how greedy some people are.

<comment><USER5> The franchise business is just wacky really. The parent corporation owns the land you use, so they become real estate tycoons, and they can cause huge headaches to franchisees who don't play ball with their latest initiatives. It's really hard to compare them to regular restaurants though. I'm not sure if it's much different in Canada, as I've lost touch with a cousin who owned some White Spots in BC when I was a kid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Give them more money. Then they'll be able to pay more taxes to fund unemployment benefits for all the people who will be laid off.</comment>


Inventor of Aerobie also invented the Aeropress - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/first-alan-adler-invented-the-aerobie-now-he-s-created-the-perfect-cup-of-coffee-c5e94ccc538e

<comment><USER2> This is an especially bad HN title because the Aeropress has been coffee- famous for years and years now. There are Aeropress competitions, an Aeropress aftermarket, and cafes that use the Aeropress.

The right title --- even though I don't like it either --- is the article's: "The Invention of the Perfect Cup of Coffee".

<comment><USER3> "Inventor of Aerobie flying ring created innovative coffee maker in 1994"

<comment><USER3> BTW, I think that the author (or Alan Adler) has the invention date of the AeroPress wrong. I copied the date 1994 from the article, but I think it should be 2004 of 2005. (And the Aerobie ring was invented around 1984.)

Otherwise the period between invention and mass production and sales is over a decade. I remembered that I ordered a box directly at Aerobie in the USA in 2006 because the AeroPress was not yet for sale in The Netherlands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Alan Adler is an amazing human being. I had the great pleasure of interviewing him last year. If anyone is interested, this covers his life's work:

[http://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the- aeropress/](http://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-aeropress/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sorry, but if you are after optimal extraction, as nice a cup as the AeroPress can make, it cannot compare to a proper, temperature-controlled pour-over using a system designed for proper extraction (Hario V60, Kalita Wave, or even Chemex if made in sufficient volume).

The reason is simple: It can't handle the temperature because it's made of plastic. _Anyone_ could make a cup of coffee in a pour-over that tastes the same as the AeroPress. However, those who put the time into making a proper pourover know better.

The best cup of coffee, for most of us, is _supposed_ to have a certain amount of those bitter elements that the AeroPress is too cool to extract. Optimal extraction occurs between 92 and 96 degrees C. 74-80C is just too cool for optimal extraction. I've tested the SCAA findings in countless experiments. Their research, based on double-blind taste tests, is well done, and in my experience, quite accurate.

The information on the AeroPress FAQ, which talks about the grounds on the bottom of the bed brewed using traditional methods being much cooler, is just plain wrong. Ridiculously wrong, in fact. Just measure the temperature of the finished product. If proper preheating is done, it's going to be closer to 90C, probably higher.

To each his own, but the "Perfect Cup of Coffee" it is not.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure where you get the idea that the aeropress can't handle the temperature. The plastic has low heat capacity (it takes little energy to heat, compared to eg water). I usually pour water from my water boiler directly in -- and while I haven't used a thermometer, it must surely be close to 100 degrees. And if you're so worried, just prehat the acrylics, and use the "reverse method"[1].

That said, I'm not going to claim any one method makes the "best" coffee -- I've not tasted them all, and I don't use a thermometer or other extreme quality (in the industrial sense of reproducible brew) measures.

I much prefer a proper espresso, and I've also tried "cold brew" method -- and while I can see why some people would prefer that -- that's not for me.

Anyway, for something used to prepare food for oneself, I'm not sure how relevant blind tests on other people are. I really don't care if 9 out of 10 people disagree with me on how they like their coffee. Why should you? I could see the value in doing blind tests on oneself (with help, obviously) -- but if the differences are so minor that you can't tell without blind testing -- do you really care?

[1] [http://ineedcoffee.com/upside-aeropress-coffee-brewing- tutor...](http://ineedcoffee.com/upside-aeropress-coffee-brewing-tutorial/)

<comment><USER5> Did you read the part where I said: "To each his own"? If you love your Aeropress, then fine. But when people make claims like, "The perfect cup of coffee" or put BS in their FAQs, as Aeropress does, then I'm calling them out on it.

I have the creds to do so. I _have_ tried every brewing technique you care to name. I do quantitative measurements, right down to the composition of the water, TDS, and pH. I have lab-grade equipment. I also am developing a cheap solution for making an ideal coffee brewing water to SCAA specifications. This is not my first rodeo.

Now to your "where did you get the idea": This is a known issue with the Aeropress (google for Aeropress crazing). Because it is plastic, it cannot handle the higher brewing temperatures required for proper extraction. The plastic starts to warp and crack.

The recommended "solution" is to use a lower temperature. This produces a different cup of coffee than higher temperatures would. You may like this cup. I prefer a cup that is properly extracted. To each his own.

But when people are publishing BS, I'm gonna call it out.

<comment><USER6> I've cracked my aeoropress, pushing a plunger through a cold ... holder? That other thing that's not a plunger. It was by accident, and not related to making coffee.

I regularly use boiling water, and I see no issue from that.

As for claims of a "perfect cup of coffee" \-- I agree :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a nice device, but it doesn't make enough. It's only perfect if you're alone and you want ~8oz of coffee (They recommend you to water down the Aeropress's output, but I don't know why. It's not strong enough, like espresso, to water down.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good timing of this article: recent research suggested that there is a health benefit tied to drinking as much as five cups of coffee each day: a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Article in The Washington Post: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/21/i...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/21/its- official-americans-should-drink-more-coffee/) , now on the HN front page.

<comment><USER8> and, sadly (at least in my case) a greatly increased chance of gastric reflux :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who does the PR for these people? It's astounding! This keeps showing up on news sites all the time. The Aeropress has been around for years, and while I use one, I definitely wouldn't use any superlative to describe it. Please, PR agency, how can keep pawning this off as news? And how can I hire you?

As for everyone else: if it looks like and ad and smells like an ad, for the love of all that is holy, don't post it.

<comment><USER7> It's cheap, you're not really buying into much more than a $20 tube of plastic. If this is about making a quick buck off suckers falling for good PR, they should charge more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Eventually I developed a little ridge on the perimeter, [like an airfoil].

I think he's referring to the little lip around the outer edge?

Anyway, nice interview. Stories like Mr. Adler's are inspiring, it's hardly an accident that he comes up with two paradigm-shifting inventions in two completely different fields.

</comment><comment><USER11> The office coffee geeks had a discussion of coffee-making devices (hardly a panel of experts, so take it for what it's worth) and the consensus is that the best way to make coffee is an espresso machine. This is a pretty neat device, but it's fiddly and slow and has lots of failure modes. Some of the better espresso machines (such as mine) are almost foolproof, and you can go from beans to coffee in less than two minutes (using a separate grinder).

<comment><USER12> Oof, no. It's fairly the opposite: A high-quality espresso machine is a fiddly little beast. You have to backflush it daily; you have to cafiza it weekly; and it's going to lose a temperature or pressure regulator every few years. An aeropress is trivially cleanable, and mine's been functional for years now with no problems. After about five years, the plastic might start getting a little crack-y and the rubber plunger bit gets loose, and then you spend another $30 and you're good to go.

A good espresso machine makes substantially better coffee, though, assuming you like espresso.

(I have an aeropress + very nice grinder for home, and an assortment of espresso machines at work. I prefer the espresso machines, but I don't want to deal with the hassles and expense of one at home. The grinder, on the other hand, lasts almost forever and saves a ton of pain.)

<comment><USER11> My espresso machine (which is about five years old) makes good coffee despite not having any of the maintenance you describe. I imagine it would be better if it did, but I'm lazy. When it finally gives up the ghost, I will buy a new one.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump Caught Google Off Guard with a Bogus Coronavirus Site Announcement - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-donald-trump-google-website/ <comment><USER2> >What he did say was also almost entirely wrong. There will be a coronavirus testing site, not from Google but from Alphabet sister company Verily. "We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing," Google tweeted in a statement.

Calling what he said completely bogus is really pushing it. No one from the general public knows who the heck Verily is, so it makes sense to just say Google for shorthand. I'm sure his advisors explained it that way and he repeated it.

<comment><USER3> He also mentioned 1700 engineers working on it. Honestly I don't know why the website was mentioned at all but since it was it seems wrong to make it appear like Google, with thousands of its engineers, are working to build a site (for everyone) when, in reality, a company with 235 employees that happens to be a subsidiary of Alphabet is building it for the Bay Area.</comment></comment>


DIA Study: Invisibility Cloaking Theory and Experiments - <AUTHOR> https://publicintelligence.net/dia-invisibility-cloaking/ <comment><USER2> Summary:

"Such optical cloaking devices do not yet exist, but one can gauge the progress in the required technology by considering the progress in negatively refracting optical materials."

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks a lot DyslexicAtheist for sharing this. Valuable indeed!

Of worth is checking their "Related materials from the archive" at the end. Very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone want to share a tl;dr?</comment>


Ask YC: What Do you Want out of Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

In another thread I made the comment that I saw absolutely no value in Facebook.  I should clarify that statement before the floor is opened for comments:
I see no monetary value in Facebook because Helxis made a very true statement: I don't want my friendships monetized, someone else profiting because I interact with people I care about is a sickeningly greedy idea to me (read: to me, if you disagree share with us).
From where I stand (somewhat of a purist when it comes to how business affects people), Facebook is changing for the worst.  Partnering up with tons of ad providers, and most notably Microsoft, I have a very hard time believing Facebook can't raise a dime for it's own end.  More and more features are coming along that almost seem to separate people:
Biggest example of this was the redesign.  Some were for it, many more were against it and while I remain on the side of "pro redesign", I think this proves that Facebook is growing more detached from it's users.  Over a million people petitioned to bring back the old design; sure it was probably difficult to maintain but those are things you fix, things you work on.  How can we keep the old design, or at least build it from the ground up and make it more user friendly and developmentally efficient?
I'm of the opinion that Facebook is growing detached from it's users and is just looking for a buck right now before they become irrelevant entirely.  While it's expected that the entire purpose of business is to make money, this is coming entirely too much at the expense of user satisfaction.
I'll wrap it up to ask you: What do you want out of Facebook?  Me?  I want more user-centric integrity. <comment><USER2> Your stance is quite interesting, by my understanding you shouldn't like sending mail, making phone calls, sending text messages, or using the Internet either for the cost of postage, bandwidth, SMS fees, etc as that is the government or corporation profiting from your relationships.

I use Facebook for the relationships. It allows me to remain in touch with friends from highschool, college, past jobs, and other social groups I am a part of.

Could I do this outside of Facebook? Yes but it would require a lot more work on my part to keep in tangential contact with my hundreds of friends.

<comment><AUTHOR> "sending mail, making phone calls, sending text messages, or using the Internet"

The difference between these things and Facebook is that the latter is a tool of convenience. The others (with the exception of texting) are matters of necessity to contact people. Could a person go completely without post mail, cell phones or email? Sure if they choose to live completely off the grid and live off the fat of the land (like my father does). Could they go without if they plan on keeping in touch with people? Not without a couple hundred homing pigeons.

But Facebook is just a convenient tool that centralizes a lot of those services; and like I said I understand the point of business (make a buck) but I think Facebook can find a way that doesn't destroy user satisfaction.

<comment><USER2> Phones used to be an item of convenience too. So did post. Social networks are too new to be considered a staple but for many of my generation they're a major tool of life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I see no monetary value in Facebook because Helxis made a very true statement: I don't want my friendships monetized, someone else profiting because I interact with people I care about is a sickeningly greedy idea to me (read: to me, if you disagree share with us)."

I disagree with this. Facebook provides you with the functionality to interact with your friends that you wouldn't get elsewhere (unless you s/Facebook/OtherSocialNetwork/), and it's ridiculous to expect them to do it for nothing. As long as the monetization is not detrimental to you, doesn't invade your privacy, and is actually perhaps useful to you (read: well targeted advertising), you shouldn't care. You don't get all angry at TV for showing you ads between shows; you may find a means to avoid looking at them, but it doesn't outrage you.

Facebook has a 120 million _active_ users. A million of them petitioned. That isn't even 1%. No effort of that size can afford to attempt to please everyone.

<comment><USER2> As the adage says, the quickest way to fail is to attempt to please everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to own and access my data any way I feel like without FaceBook getting in the way.

</comment><comment><USER5> it's a service. it either has to be paid for, or it has to generate revenue through other channels (read: selling ads).

as it stands now with it being free, it has no obligation to cater to its community in any way. i say, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.</comment>


Show HN: Affililink - An automated way to monetise your site - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
This past month I have been working on Affililink, a way for blog and forum owners to monetise their site without the need to display adverts.
With a small javascript snippet, Affililink will scan all outbound links and where possible, add your affiliate code, effectively automating your affiliate scheme.
The idea came to me when I noticed a number of users post ebay links on a forum I manage. As ebay runs an affiliate scheme, I soon realised these links could help cover the running costs of the site.
I'd love to hear your feedback on this as it's my first serious project launch.
Thanks,
Dean
http://affililink.com <comment><USER2> So, how would you compare your site with <http://www.viglink.com/> or <http://skimlinks.com/>?

Edit: Never mind. I posted this before checking out your site. I see that you provide the Javascript to perform the URL rewriting but require webmasters to register separately with affiliate programs. A very different model than Viglink or Skimlinks ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, I haven't seen these two yet. I might have to have a rethink. For now though, the MVP will require the user to sign up to individual schemes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Which affiliate schemes does it work with?

<http://affililink.com/how-it-works> gives a 404 error.

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed the page to <http://affililink.com/getting-started>, must have missed that link! For now, it will work with Amazon and Ebay, I plan to add more but it's just a MVP at the moment.

<comment><USER3> "Step One: Create Your Campaign"

What? Why? What's a campaign? Why does it need a name and a description? Why can't I just tell you my affiliate ids and get the linking script code?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's so you can manage multiple campaigns, for example, you may manage multiple forums/blogs and would like a campaign for each one.

I guess it would make sense to go straight into a default campaign, giving you the option to rename it afterwards. I'll implement this for the next update.

<comment><USER4> You might try renaming 'campaign' to be just 'website'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll bear it in mind, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I clicked the big "View Tour" button and the site returned a 404 error...might want to look into that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, I also missed that one, changed to 'getting started' for now. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clicky: <http://affililink.com></comment>


Is Silicon Valley seeing an economic turnaround? - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/13/is-silicon-valley-seeing-an-economic-turnaround/ <comment><USER2> Scoble may be bringing it to more people's attention, but it is the Michael Malone post (<http://pajamasmedia.com/edgelings/2009/02/13/turnaround-time>) that really documents some hopeful statisitical and behavioral evidence...

Maybe Tech will be the core of the turnaround? None too soon for me.</comment>


Docker container usage growing - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/docker-container-usage-growing.html <comment><USER2> Notably 76% of respondents are using Docker in production.</comment>


What does a hen do with her unfertilized eggs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/what-does-a-hen-do-with-her-unfertilised-eggs-10100975.html <comment><USER2> We currently have 26 five day old chicks in a cardboard box in our mud room. We are raising them to lay and, eventually, brood so hopefully I'll be able to answer this question in about 9-12 months or so.

This is the first time I've ever raised layers though 20 years ago as a teenager, my brother and I raised 100 birds every spring for the family freezer.

An interesting thing about the young chicks, even at 3 days old they were acting exactly like adult birds- making dust baths, establishing a pecking order and even attempting to roost though the only thing elevated in their box is their feeder.

<comment><USER3> We've done this a few times - both incubating from eggs and receiving chicks mail order. Incubating and seeing the eggs hatch is awesome, but it's also pretty fun to pick up a cheeping box at the post office!

However, it won't be very long until you want them OUT of the mudroom ASAP. The dust and smell from poo and feathers and whatever else gets bad quickly. Not a nice addition to breakfast.

Note that I do seem to be more irritated by it than other family members who like pets more.

<comment><USER4> > ... but it's also pretty fun to pick up a cheeping box at the post office!

One of the highlights of the years we lived in an extremely rural county in the midwest was the yearly call from our rural post office. This is exactly what was said when we picked up the phone:

"Diederich? Postmaster here. Your birds are at the post office. Thanks, bye."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >This is an edited answer from What does a hen do with her unfertilised eggs? which originally appeared on Quora

Is the Independent sourcing editorial from Quora now? I assume when you answer a question on Quora you give up all rights to the content. I wonder what sort of arrangement they have.

<comment><USER6> The Independent had an ownership change recently and dramatically shifted from journalism to click bait.

<comment><USER7> There also isn't a print version of the Independent any more, just the tabloid "I" newspaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They get off them and then a crow swoops in and steals them. It was never a sure thing as to whether we would get our backyard chickens daily eggs or if the crow would.

</comment><comment><USER9> looks like the story stopped just before answering the question in the title

<comment><USER10> Actually they have it right at the beginning. Hens don't know if an egg is fertilized or not. Most will just lay and leave. Some go broody and will sit on the eggs until they hatch. Some hens will sit on the eggs (and collect any nearby eggs and sit on a pile of them) until they die if they don't hatch.

We have about 100 birds and at any given time two or three will be broody. We collect the eggs everyday so sometimes the broody hen will just sit there on nothing or on one of our "fake" eggs (we put fake eggs in the places we want the hens to lay their eggs). We'll remove the broody hens from the coop several times a day until we break them of the habit. That usually works.

Occasionally we'll have snakes get into the coop and eat eggs. If the snake gets a porcelain fake egg that pretty much the end of that snake eventually. Rattlesnakes are more difficult, but we've gotten pretty good had removing those, too.

Our big problem this year is hawks (our chickens free range). We've lost about 20 birds this year just to hawks. Just this last weekend hawks killed three (flew away with two and mostly maimed a third I had to cull) and one hen got away missing her tail feathers and received some deep cuts our vet stitched up. She got away because our dominate rooster attacked and killed the hawk after her.

<comment><USER7> In the UK, the big problem is foxes. We have an electric fence and automated coop door closer now. We also have a guy that enjoys shooting and roams the fields round our house shooting them.

<comment><USER11> I've been thinking of building an automated coop door closer. Can you link me to some more info on yours?

<comment><USER10> We're been using this one the past few years:

[https://www.amazon.com/Automatic-Chicken-Coop-Door- Standard/...](https://www.amazon.com/Automatic-Chicken-Coop-Door- Standard/dp/B01EN3O4MY)

It has a solar panel and rechargeable battery and you program in your lat/long and optional + or - times for the door to remain open or close around sunrise and sunset.

It works well. Of course, you could hack something up with a micro-controller to do the same thing rather easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at our 20 hens, they typically ignore them once they have been laid.

The only exception to this is if the hen has become broody, then they will sit on them virtually 24 hours a day trying to hatch them. The chickens become very docile when they're broody.

<comment><USER12> that's interesting, I always got the feeling that hens were more aggressive when broody. When one of my family's chickens was broody, I made chirping noises after forcing her out of her nesting box, and she made a loud clucking noise and charged at me (I assume because she thought I had her chicks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And for a bit more detail on what actually happens inside a chicken while it's forming the egg:

[https://vimeo.com/86122048](https://vimeo.com/86122048)

Birds are surprisingly complex biological factories - especially the bits of their internal 'production line' which rotate the egg-to-be to twist membranes into shock-absorber-like suspension structures for the yolk.

</comment><comment><USER14> They eat them.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, you don't want that. We cull the hens that start to eat eggs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> //Offtopic - we've just started to raise 8 goslings, and they are completely different temperament to geese. Much friendlier and less flighty.

<comment><USER7> I meant different to chickens, of course. Bloody work interrupting my posting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would cross the street not to have to say 'a hen' or 'an hen'. Both make my tongue trip.

[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/629/when- should-...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/629/when-should-i-use- a-versus-an-in-front-of-a-word-beginning-with-the-letter-h)</comment>


Building an Enterprise Mobile Stack - <AUTHOR> http://openmobster.blogspot.com/2013/02/building-enterprise-mobile-backend-as.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This article covers an analysis of various mobile services that go into building an Enterprise-oriented Mobile stack. Your valuable feedback is most welcome!!!!</comment>


TTIP Secret trade deal can only be read in secure 'reading room' in Brussels - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ttip-controversy-secret-trade-deal-can-only-be-read-secure-in-reading-room-in-brussels-10456206.html <comment><USER2> Why secret?

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear in a democracy.

Turns out people have to be transparent to Governments, but Governments what to be opaque. This is not a democracy.

<comment><USER3> The treaties themselves are public, and are voted on.

The interim negotiating documents are closely-guarded secrets, because trade negotiations will require give-to-get concessions from some industries, who would lobby aggressively to avoid being singled out.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The treaties themselves are public

Really? Only you claim that. Can you post the link please?

<comment><USER4> He is not the only person that claims that. In order to become law, the TTIP would have to be ratified by the Senate in the US and the EU Council of Ministers and EU Parliament in the EU. At the time it comes up for ratification it becomes public and is debated.

While it's being negotiated it's not public. I have no problem with that, any more than I have a problem with the authors of legislation drafting a bill in private before submitting it to the legislature for consideration, or the cabinet discussions of a government being private until a policy is settled upon and presented to the public.

<comment><USER5> The problem comes into play when treaties and laws are negotiated in private committees and then foisted upon the general legislative bodies with very little time for debate or review.

Creating opposition takes time and by not allowing that time, the whole process becomes distinctly less democratic.

<comment><USER3> What's "very little time"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> That's a good background for

[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-08/12/wikileaks- tti...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-08/12/wikileaks-ttip-reward- crowdfund-assange)

"Wikileaks crowdfunding €100,000 reward for TTIP secrets"

As as the background on TTIP, they write:

"Together with the TTIP, these treaties (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)) represent the "Three Big T's", affecting 53 countries, 1.6 billion people and covering two thirds of the global economy. They aim to create a new international legal regime allowing transnational corporations to bypass domestic courts, evade environmental protections, police the internet on behalf of the content industry, limit the availability of affordable generic medicines, and drastically curtail each country's legislative sovereignty. Of the "Three Big T's", the TTIP remains the least exposed to public scrutiny, and the most significant to the interests of the European public."

And Wikipedia:

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

"The Corporate Europe Observatory (cited in the original Guardian article) had pointed out, based on a Freedom of Information request, that "more than 93% of the Commission's meetings with stakeholders during the preparations of the negotiations were with big business"."

Also:

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/transat...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/transatlantic- free-trade-deal-regulation-by-lawyers-eu-us)

"In an interview last week, Stuart Eizenstat, co-chair of the Transatlantic Business Council – instrumental in driving the process – was asked if companies whose products had been banned by regulators would be able to sue [see footnote]. Yes. "If a suit like that was brought and was successful, it would mean that the country banning the product would have to pay compensation to the industry involved or let the product in." Would that apply to the European ban on chicken carcasses washed with chlorine, a controversial practice permitted in the US? "That's one example where it might.""

<comment><USER6> How are these agreements anything less than the end of national sovereignty?

<comment><USER3> To begin with: because the secret agreements that are only available in "reading rooms" are _not binding_.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't appear that the user api is discussing the "non binding" variant of the agreements. Once these agreements are secretly made and they exit the "look from my hand only, no photographs, no copies allowed" "reading rooms" they _are_ binding but then it's too late to react (by the definition of them being binding). The problem is that the interested parties weren't even allowed to have their own copy of them, even less to discuss the _exact_ texts with others, as there are no copies.

The last time I've read about such a "secure room" and the computer setup, it was the way how CIA falsified to the congressmen their data related to the torture:

[http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press- relea...](http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press- releases?ID=db84e844-01bb-4eb6-b318-31486374a895)

"Now, after noting the disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study and the Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee's secure room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the Hart Senate Office Building."

<comment><USER3> I think I understand your argument, but I think it's just excuse-making by legislators.

The agreements must be voted into law to become binding.

The agreements are typically published, for public review, for many months prior to that vote.

There is nothing in these trade agreements so prohibitively complex that a legislator's office --- reasonably well funded in the US --- can't read and generate an opinion on it.

The reality, I think, is that most US legislators want to vote "yes" on these treaties. They're jobs bills, and the US has an overwhelming advantage in trade negotiations due to our market power, so the odds of them being slanted against our interests are very low.

There are very good reasons not to vote for the bills --- for instance, in the case of the TPP, you might be worried about stricter IP laws preventing people from obtaining the best possible medical care. But those issues primarily affect people who will never vote.

So instead, the legislators wave their hands and shout "ONOZ SECRET LAWS" and pretend that the treaties are a fait accompli, which saves them the trouble of actually making a stand on the merits.

The situation might be very different for smaller countries (I don't know really anything about how treaties are ratified in Europe). But for countries with the market and political clout of, say, Germany or France, it seems unlikely that the dynamics are that much different.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The agreements are typically published, for public review,

Typically but obviously not for TTIP, as we see in the articles.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a non-sequitur, as T-TIP is still being negotiated. There's no treaty to publish yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> And the topic of the articles linked is that the negotiation process as it is performed is against the interests of those from whom it is being hidden.

<comment><USER3> Your comments on this thread are right there for everyone to read. Just a few comments up, you're asserting that the T-TIP process is hiding binding treaties. Now you appear to be pretending that was never your argument.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Just a few comments up, you're asserting that the T-TIP process is hiding > binding treaties.

I don't agree. Please quote where I wrote that with these words. If you mean "agreements" I refer to the current state of the "agreements" which was all the time the topic of the articles linked, not the "final all-or-nothing state of them" that you want to introduce, and that for TTIP don't exist at the moment, so nobody can write about them at all or comment them. I'm fascinated that you introduced to the discussion something that doesn't exist and try to sell that once that exists, in whichever form, it will magically negate the problems currently written about. But I won't discuss more as the article went away from the first page.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mike Rowe to Bernie Sanders: Stop Telling Everyone College Is the Only Thing - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/blog/2015/12/15/mike-rowe-to-bernie-sanders-stop-telling <comment><USER2> I quote:

Bernie Sanders tweets, "At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail."

I wonder sometimes, if the best way to question the increasingly dangerous idea that a college education is the best path for the most people, is to stop fighting the sentiment directly, and simply shine a light on the knuckleheads who continue to perpetuate this nonsense. This latest tweet from Bernie Sanders is a prime example. In less than 140 characters, he's managed to imply that a path to prison is the most likely alternative to a path to college. Pardon my acronym, but...WTF!?...

It's a cautionary tale as predictable as it is false. But now, as people are slowly starting to understand the obscenity of 1.3 trillion dollars in student loans, along with the abundance of opportunity for those with the proper training, it seems the proponents of "college for all" need something even more frightening than the prospect of a career in the trades to frighten the next class into signing on the dotted line. According to Senator Sanders, that "something," is a path to jail.

I try not to be political on this page, because the truth is, arrogance and elitism are alive and well in every corner of every party—especially with respect to this topic. But I have to admit, this is the first time I've seen an elected official support the hyper-inflated cost of a diploma by juxtaposing it with the hyper-inflated cost of incarceration. Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of it.

<comment><USER3> I took the comment differnetly. If we as a society are going to spend 30k+ a year on an individual, wouldn't it be better for that to be spent on educating a citizen than imprisoning them (especially for things like marijuana)? One is an investment, one is a money pit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was the first generation of my family to attend college. Throughout high school (graduated high school in 2006), the idea that college was the answer to everything was everywhere. Go to college, get a degree, you'll end up with a job. After seven years of paying high college tuition for a sub par education, I graduated in 2012 with a BA degree that was not in any demand, provided no real skills, and spent several years during and after college working in dead end retail/customer service jobs.

I ended up teaching myself how to code and landed a very well paying career as an engineer with a huge passion for what I'm doing.

Here are the takeaways I have from having gone down this route:

\+ Don't go to college just to go to college. If you don't know why you're going, don't go.

\+ If you do go to college, don't expect your major of choice to land you a job. If you know what you want to do in life, you should probably just go and do it on your own. College is not synonymous with landing a career.

\+ If you go to college and don't end up landing a job, more college is not the answer. A master's/graduate program is not the answer.

<comment><USER5> I have no idea why people still make this mistake. Clearly, way too many "adults" are telling high school kids that "college is the answer!" without providing more detail.

It's more like getting a profession is the answer. That can mean going to college (necessary for things like medicine, law, accounting), going to vo tech school, apprenticing (e.g. electricians, carpenters) or teaching yourself and gaining experience (e.g. coding).

The last route is a little problematic because there's no real barrier to entry (other than intelligence). We're in the midst of a demand boom for developers now, but eventually companies will start recouping their investments in code and start laying off developers or cutting pay simply because there's so many bright people who figured they can just teach themselves code.

Of course, if you really enjoy and are good at software engineering then you're going to have a career regardless. But the people who are doing it just because it's what pays well now will be washed out in the next recession.

<comment><USER4> The idea of developers that aren't passionate about the craft who just do it for the money makes me cringe. Writing software isn't just another job you do for your employer or client, it's about creativity and empowerment.

I definitely think I'm in the minority when it comes to people who taught themselves to code and ended up legitimately loving it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Les Swanson from Wisconsin cleaned septic tanks. I asked him one day-we were literally standing up to our nipples in the most indescribable bouillabaisse-"Les, what'd you do before this?" It's like 110 degrees, the sweat is running off his face, and he looks and me and he says-I swear-"I was a guidance counselor." He was a psychologist. I said, "Why'd you leave that?" And without missing a beat he said, "I got tired of dealing with other people's shit."_</comment>


How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.longreads.com/2013/09/18/on-muppets-merchandise-how-jim-henson-turned-his-art/ <comment><USER2> Rewatching Farscape now and pleasantly surprised. It was a little better than I remembered. The puppet characters are as good as human actors. No idea how producers did, but it is very fun and original.

<comment><USER3> I gave it a go on Netflix and enjoyed it, as far as I got.

I just wish Netflix would fix the audio. It gets hinkey approximately in the second season. Very faint, and -- worse -- out of balance. Particularly noticeable on headphones.

It's been that way for months. Which is why I'm to the point of making public comments about such. The Netflix "report a problem" feature, in my experience, never causes problems such as these to be fixed.

<comment><USER4> I am curious how much control Netflix has over issues like this. i.e. Do they have carte blanche to alter the content that their providers give them, or are they contractually (or otherwise) obligated to rely on their content providers to correct issues with the content.

<comment><USER3> I would hope they would have some level of quality control written into their contracts, if they are not doing the conversion themselves. (And, given the multiple bit depths and whatnot, I have to wonder whether they are not doing the conversions.)

Worst case, they should ping the owners and request a corrected copy. Although... such production companies probably die back, technically, after the products (DVD, BluRay, stream, etc.) ship (as a wild guess).

P.S. In another case, I actually managed to communicate the problem directly to the content's original author. Still waiting to see whether that produces a fix (video and audio out of sync, sometimes over a second so).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Next time you want to write a poem, just poegle it - <AUTHOR> http://www.poegles.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting.

Composing a decent poem becomes natural after composing a thousand and throwing all of them to /dev/null. Past that stage, the problem isn't of inspiration, but of distilling the output. Mortals tends to begin attain maturity after 10K.

The cognitive benefit outweighs poegling, since the patterns of neurons firing in your brain aren't restricted to the computer UI calisthenics.</comment>


Want to Understand Mortality? Look to the Chimps - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/want-to-understand-mortality-look-to-the-chimps.html?hpw&pagewanted=all&_r=1& <comment> loup-vaillant Reading the poignant description of Pansy's death, I recalled a quote that captures my feelings quite accurately:

 _This shouldn 't ought to exist._

</comment><comment><USER2> Chimps commit brutal murders of their own kind (is murder only murder when it's a killing of your own species?) and are very violent. Completely irrelevant to this story but thought I'd throw it in there.

<comment><USER3> > Chimps commit brutal murders of their own kind

As opposed to human beings?

<comment><USER4> No, exactly like human beings. That's the point.

They use tools, make wars, and create words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is interesting that the ancient Hebrews believed that certain animal species possessed "soulish" qualities or qualities that expressed emotion, will, mind, and the ability to form relationships with each other. The word nephesh is applied in this way to both humans and certain animals.</comment>


6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong - <AUTHOR> http://www.wakeuplater.com/website-building/places-that-flash-does-not-belong.aspx <comment><USER2> This list should be a lot longer than 6.

Sites you would like to load test or functional test with standard tools.

Sites you would like the vision-impaired to use.

Sites you would like to have a fully functional back button.

Sites you would like to open source, as the tools to write flash cost significant $.

Sites users might like to copy and paste from.

Sites where users might not have flash installed for security or other reasons.

Most websites not involving video or games.

Note: if the flash is just a "garnish" some of the above do not apply.

</comment><comment><USER3> A list of the few places where Flash _does_ belong would likely be more effective and exhaustive.

</comment><comment><USER4> This was a great article, from someone who clearly cares about usability and customer satisfaction. Although many of his points are arguable, it really comes down to one thing: choosing the platform.

Choosing a platform always has trade-offs, and the flash vs. html is no exception. When you decide on a platform for your application, it almost always means your going to exclude users from accessing it. I.E Windows software is generally not usable in OSX or Linux, and Mozilla extensions are not available from other web browsers.

Another thing - people develop levels of comfort with platforms, and switching can be a daunting experience. It's hard for the average Windows user to switch to Linux, because so many basic features of Windows are missing, and the user experience is so different. Same with flash vs. html - things like ctl+f don't work, text highlighting is different, the presentation is not as familiar.

Any smart person will consider these platform trade-offs when developing an application. You might lose some users, but I think people appreciate high- quality applications with good UIs. I don't mind waiting a few seconds to see a beautiful flash site to load (www.schematic.com, for instance).

</comment><comment><USER5> Let's add 'a public website' to the list. The Flash runtime is proprietary and simply isn't available for many environments.

Opera on the Wii ships with Flash 8, but many new Flash video players use Flash 9. There is also no decent Flash build for many unix varieties, including 64-bit linux. (Yes you can install 32-bit libraries to get the 32-bit version running, but come on ..)

</comment><comment><USER6> The "E-commerce" entry left me flabbergasted.

Do some developers really think that people want to drag-and-drop stuff into their shopping carts?

Maybe I am too used to sensible on-line shops...

<comment><USER7> In any case, that can easily be done in JS.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Historical tick-level cryptocurrency market data replay API - <AUTHOR> https://tardis.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I'm a founder of [https://tardis.dev/](https://tardis.dev/) which I've built to scratch my own itch as couldn't find anything on the web that would give me historical high resolution data for crypto markets (futures, swaps, options included) with affordable pricing for individuals hence created my own - <USER2> some of you will find it as useful as I do.

It's raw non aggregated historical data API including full order book snapshots & delta updates, really useful for algo backtesting, designing quantitative models, market microstructure, order book dynamics research etc.

There is a RunKit playground on the homepage so you can play around with the API and client libs that are available on GitHub ([https://github.com/tardis- dev](https://github.com/tardis-dev)) without API key - first day of each month.

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have.

Thanks! Thadeus</comment>


Google, Mozilla Team Up to Create a Smarter, Action-Based Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/08/google-mozilla-team-up-to-create-a-smarter-action-based-web/

<comment><USER2> I love intents on android, its a really method of inter app communication.

I havent spent a lot of time thinking about security implications, but would this work as an ultra easy mechanism for integrating payment solutions?, just send off a "payme" intent and get back a confirmation of payment

</comment><comment><USER3> That browsers will mediate the cross-app communications is a great step towards capabilities-based security and a safer web.

Also, it seems like a natural feature for jmiller's Locker Project.

</comment><comment><USER4> Open Web Apps is great for a number of reasons:

\- enables sites to push a set of apps, either built inhouse or by third parties

\- users don't have to focus on an acquisition point such as the chrome web store

\- built straight into the browser as a launch point unlike the JVM or Adobe Air, and should benefit performance and compatibility

\- user can have a set of bookmarks as usual, and then a set of appmarks

\- will apps and APIs be neglected over time versus how an underlying site evolves? Will apps auto-update?

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks like a cool geek thing but sounds like it has the potential to be a user-interface nightmare.

"You have no application configured for removing red-eye. Please select a photo editor for removing red eye from these 1000 choices."

For everything I might want to do?

Eventually they'll have to pick sane defaults from the most popular choices and at that point it seems like we're back to where we are now.

Either that, or it's a security/privacy nightmare. I don't want any site sending photos (for example) anywhere I haven't explicitly given access to, every time. I don't consider myself overly paranoid, either.

I do assume that Facebook does have some level of privacy controls in place; it would seem to make this desirable for a user you'd have to defeat those controls without asking.

<comment><USER6> Seems pretty easy to solve extrapolating current trends:

 _You have no app installed for action X. Would you like to go to the [Mozilla|Chrome] action app store for options?_

In the Action App Store:

 _Below are the top N action apps supporting X, ranked by [popularity|featured|rating|price]. All apps in the [Mozilla|Chrome] app store come from verified providers who follow the XYZ privacy policy._

Most common packages of functionality would quickly be covered by roll-up apps, but around the fringes – where new capabilities emerge – there'd be openings for new entrants.

(In fact, the implied functionality/market model reminds me a bit of two old dreams of the software future:

• the 'Superdistribution' concept of Objective-C-creator Brad Cox

• the composite-document approach of Apple's early-90s OpenDoc initiative

Each saw future software being an assemblage of capabilities from many sources, enabling a richer provider ecosystem.)

<comment><USER7> That is not extrapolating. Mac OS X Lion already implements it for applications.

If you double-click a file named "test.hn", the Finder gives you the option to cancel opening, to choose an application, or to search the Mac App Store.

It turns out you can do searches like "extension:hn" or "uti:com.adobe.pdf" in the app store application.

(and yes, when reading about is, I thought of OpenDoc, too. I guess this scheme may fail for the same reason OpenDoc failed, that is: because engrained parties have no interest in making it easier for their customers to move elsewhere)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a small developer, this sounds really cool, but I wonder how much incentive they can create for large sites, especially walled-garden types like facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on which side. Walled gardens will still want to be in the game, so they'll be motivated to provide actions.

They might balk at pointing users to external actions, but even walled gardens can only provide a limited set of services. e.g. Facebook and Twitter don't provide services to edit/enhance photos, they could palm that off to services like Picnik in a Web Intents universe.

<comment><USER8> A walled-garden like Facebook may eventually expose actions themselves, after it's clear that web intents are prevalent enough that they finally acquiesce in lieu of their own proprietary embed scripts, but I can't see them integrating willingly with a lot of external services.

Sites like that tend to try to provide seamless experiences, and keep you on their web properties. I would bet Facebook would rather acquire or build a photo editor than to simply plug in a web intent and let you choose. Will be interesting to see how this plays out either way, since the idea is something developers have long wanted and this seems like a good implementation of it.

Google+ is another story, and Web Intents comes from inside the giant too, so all the more reason to support it.

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure. The Open ID versus Facebook Connect experience shows the risks ahead for Web Intents - any new layer of abstraction will add extra complexity. The architects need to be sure there are enough benefits to justify it, and as little extra complexity as possible.

Fortunately, there's a lot of attention being paid early on to both user experience and developer experience of web intents. And there are definitely visible benefits to users if it's presented in the right way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> there goes the big secret plan of locking Chrome, Mozilla, Safari, and IE dev teams in a small room until they start making our web developer lives easier...

</comment><comment><USER10> Wasn't this what SOAP was supposed to provide?

<comment><AUTHOR> Aside from the gratuitous complexity of SOAP, it was a pure message protocol. This is a web standard involving user-interface components.</comment></comment>