SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the 'nice guy' of e-scooters? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/SF-wants-startups-to-behave-so-why-did-it-reject-14903323.php <comment><USER2> Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying.

But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.

That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb and Uber proved this point long ago.

<comment><USER3> > But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight > on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.

This has been my experience with pretty much _any_ bureaucracy, regardless of locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had minor, pointless really, mistakes in the application, a box I didn't realize had to be ticked, name in the date field and date in the name field, that sort of thing. The data entry people at the government agency could have easily resolved any mistakes with a phone call, but instead I get a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later, saying there's an error but not what the error is. So I have to call and ask, and of course they had no record of what the error was so we had to go over the application on the phone and find them. You'd think they'd tell me about the other errors then, but no, I had to do this _four_ times. It took almost two months to get a simple form approved.

I wish that was my only story of wasting time on bureaucracy, but there are plenty more where that came from.

<comment><USER4> _This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale._

It doesn't have to be this way.

I incorporated my first company in Chicago, and was stunned with how helpful the bureaucrats were.

Yes, it was a little complex, especially in the years before "startups" were a thing, and you could do stuff online. But each department I had to work with had people who would sit me down at their desk and explain what they did, why I should care, and how to fill out the forms properly.

Maybe the difference is that back then, you were _expected_ to form a company in person, and not do everything online all by yourself and be an expert from day one.

A massive thanks to the Illinois Department of Revenue people in the basement of the Thompson Center for all their openness and hand-holding.

(In spite of all this, I still moved the company to another state a few years later because of Chicago + Illinois taxes and corruption.)

<comment><USER5> Echo this sentiment from another Midwesterner, ex-pat former New York State resident. I moved to Indiana and have not had the experience of incorporating a business entity, but the experience I had at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles has been one to make me question whether bureaucracies are really necessarily horrible all of the time.

Starting with the experience of moving to the state, to contrast (Upstate) Western New York vs Indiana:

My New York insurance provider determined that I was no longer residing in the state, so mailed me a letter of notice that my vehicle insurance was being cancelled. In truth this was the best thing that could have happened, because Indiana insurance is so much cheaper, and I got a deal through my new employer. I was dragging my feet on this because I did not know better about it, and knew it would be painful. So I went to get new insurance, and learned I would need to re-register my car...

Visiting the Indiana BMV was like no other auto vehicle registration experience. They were able to take care of me same day, and with no long wait – I waited up to at most 15 minutes to the desk. I was not shuffled from one desk to another, we completed the process in a single desk visit. On the other hand...

New York requires you to surrender your plates when you leave the state. If you fail to surrender in a timely fashion, you will be fined punitively. Indiana has no such requirement, they trust you to destroy the plates when you drop a registration for a vehicle. In fact, when I brought plates for my second vehicle to the BMV to surrender them, as the lease was being grounded, not only did they let me know that they actually don't do that at all, I don't need to do that, but also that I was entitled to a credit for the portion of my registration that I had not used (which is fairly substantial, as it is based on the worth of the vehicle and paid annually, like a use tax.)

The desk attendant was able to help me fill that form out before I left, and about 45 days later, two checks came in the mail. Being from New York, I found this kind of experience at a bureaucracy to be quite pleasant and seemingly impossible, (and from what I hear asking people who are born and raised here, it has only just become this way recently because of many reforms that have been applied in the past 20 years.)

<comment><USER6> Isn't this simply a population problem ? One state is ~5x more populated than the other.

<comment><USER5> If it was simply a population problem, then why do long-time residents tell me that it wasn't always this way?

Specific reforms intentionally undertaken to solve known problems with the system, made the system work better.

As a life-long New York resident until about 4 years ago, I can also tell you that I probably wouldn't disagree if you told me you thought this was "not possible in New York."

(And intuitively I'd say, it's not because of population numbers, but I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. There is a different mindset, whatever causes it I can't say, but I noticed immediately when I moved here, I still tell folks this place really just isn't like New York.)

To elaborate a bit more, I felt like part of the New York mindset was basically psychologically planning oneself around not getting robbed. There were plenty of ways to get robbed that people just don't worry about around here (and some of this can surely be attributed to population issues.) I'm not just talking about general common-sense things like making sure that valuables are not left visible in your unlocked, parked car. I mean up to and everything including neighborhoods which don't have enough driveway space for everyone in large duplex houses to park their cars, where the streets are marked for opposite-side alternate day parking.

So I don't have a private place to park my car at my rented house, and I have to park on the street, but I can't park my car on the street and leave it for 48 hours time without getting a ticket. This makes sense in Upstate New York as a condition required for Winter road maintenance, so that plows can get in and clear the snow off of the road. Only it's not just a condition required at Winter time, and when you point this out, people just accept it and say something like "yeah, well, they gotta make their money somehow..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To add more context, Skip wouldn't have been chosen even if its application were formatted perfectly, you can see the scores here: [https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and- docume...](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and- documents/2019/10/final_revised_summary_table.pdf)

And the completed rubrics of each of the applications here: [https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and- docume...](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and- documents/2019/10/final_revised_permit_application_evaluation_- _all_applications.pdf)

With other related documents here: [https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application- evalu...](https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-evaluation)

While the rubric grading might have seemed overly strict and bureaucratic, keep in mind that at the end of the day it's intended to stand up in court because the SFMTA could get sued given how high the stakes are and would have to demonstrate that it was a fair and transparent process.

As well, the priorities are very different now compared to 2018. The initial pilot accepted open-ended proposals and had the goal of determining whether scooters were in the public interest at all - Scoot and Skip won because their applications addressed concerns that none of the other applicants did ([https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share- permit-...](https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-and- pilot-program)).

This process was essentially an RFP where the SFMTA was clear on what they wanted, meaning that the firms with more operating experience, better equipment, and a stronger financial position had an advantage.

<comment><USER8> Looking at the application, Skip appears to have been screwed over on other categories too. They got a low score on "sustainability" even though they rebuild/repair broken scooters instead of throwing in the trash (like many of the other applicants). And they have actual employees instead of contractors, yet they scored low on the employment metric.

The broader issue is why even have an artificial limit for scooters? Imagine if SFMTA limited roads to just 2 car manufacturers and a set number of vehicles...

<comment><USER9> You need to limit scooter players because otherwise it because a game of funding and attrition, multiple companies dumping city full fo scooters in a competition for availability. All other qualities will be overlooked.

<comment><USER10> Just legalize the scrapping of scooters that have been in one place on public property for more than 24 hours. Let the general public hunt these things down tear them apart and sell them as scrap and spare parts.

The problem would sort itself out real damn quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn't label it as A3. That's the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there's an ongoing appeal right now.

The founder's take-away from this should have been "double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy" instead of "optimize for the short term". This was an unfortunate but entirely preventable outcome.

<comment><USER12> Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make _trivially_ fixable mistakes.

<comment><USER13> Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant.

In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials

<comment><USER14> I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.

<comment><USER15> Local governments are independent in the US and don't operate at huge scales. Further, their independently implementing laws written by a separate group so correctness is placed well above UX.

Sadly, politics only cares for people actively involved. If you want different behavior, communicate with an elected official, try to elect different people, or run for office yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved.

If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements?

Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements.

I have worked for a company where I had spent 80 hours building a demo for a potential client. We did not make it to the demo phase due to a failure of our proposal writing team to address some technicality in the written proposal. I don't hold this against the client we lost; this falls on those whose jobs are solely writing and submitting technical proposals.

<comment><USER17> I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters "A3" not being above a certain safety paragraph.

If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you're a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.

I think the sort of person that would reject Skip's application is someone that society would be better off without them in their current position. Hopefully one day they realize how their incompetence is hurting both people and progress, and either work towards using those reasoning skills or find a position better suited towards them.

<comment><USER18> >But if you're a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.

Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example.

Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.

<comment><USER17> I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn't really a political connotation here.

If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don't need them anyways. If the content doesn't matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause that would actually benefit society.

<comment><USER11> I would not be surprised if they had a safety specialist assigned to evaluate paragraph A3 of each proposal, in isolation from everything else. For fairness, that specialist may not have even been given access to the other parts of the applications.

In this case, the employee tasked with separating out the application pieces and sending them to the relevant specialists is likely not highly-trained, and there may be no-one in the organization competent to do this: the people that process the application as a whole aren't qualified, and the people that are qualified can't look at the whole application for fear of introducing bias.

> If the content doesn't matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated...

I saw no indication that the contents of properly-formatted applications were being ignored. I believe it's more likely that they set up a complicated review process that relied on applications being formatted as requested, so Skip's application couldn't be put through the pre-planned approval process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A lesson for entrepreneurs, it really is better to go around the bureaucracy.

Uber and Lyft would not exist if they had "played nice". We can imagine a world where certain regulation would have improved their service for riders and drivers. But in the real world, if they had complied with every ask, cities would have crippled them with requirements when they first started. (Ok, you can do your Lyft thing, but let's start with 100 cars, for say, the first 3 years).

A lesson for regulators, regulation creates environments where the people who succeed are the ones who work the refs and skirt intent. These are probably less likely to be the best companies or the nicest people.

So a quick call, like "hey, put A3 in here or we can't count it" could make the world a little better. And if you would prefer to regulate people who follow the intent and not the letter of the law, you need to govern that way.

<comment><USER20> Eh. To me the whole VC e-scooter industry is a "stupid game, stupid prize" sector that won't be around in a few years anyway.

I hardly ever see anyone riding scooters in SF. The scooter companies keep raising their prices in lock step because they have to, but it's now gone from $.15/min to $.32-.33/min, which is more than $20/hr with tax. It's cheaper to just use an Uber.

Have no idea who they are targeting with those prices. Kids can't afford that. Adults would rather take an Uber at those prices.

<comment><USER21> What do you mean? I've always wanted to perch precariously on a machine that's statistically much more likely to leave me bruised and bleeding on the side of the road than the other "fresh air" alternatives, bicycling and walking, and be a hazard to others while I am at it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Huh I had been wondering what happened to Skip. They were the first scooter I tried and I had a great experience.

After they stopped servicing SF, I tried Uber's red scooters and they really sucked. There was not enough torque to get up 90% of the hills in SF.

I downloaded the Spin app in frustration but on one attempt wasn't able to get a scooter.

Skip indeed seemed to be doing the best out of all these companies.

</comment><comment><USER23> This article is anthropomorphising a company. The journalist has no way of knowing if everyone at Skip was a nice guy.

I had to complain to the city twice about a Skip distributor's aggressive strategy of tying their scooters in the early morning to every available bike hoop (and even trash cans) around the Twitter building.

The city has rules about how many scooters can be tied to a public bike hoop and at least one person at Skip was not nice and was ignoring that rule.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like standard bureaucracy.

They didn't submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn't mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

<comment><USER25> Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception.

For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn't how it works, like you stated "standard bureaucracy", but I'd love to see certain parts of government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old Testament god to serving the community.

<comment><USER24> > It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance

Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place.

It's silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say would have been trivial for them to review and catch.

<comment><USER17> Reviewers are human. If they can't use their human reasoning skills deal with something trivial like "Heading A3 should be above this paragraph" then frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Comments in this thread are missing the actual takeaway: when interfacing with legacy systems and bureaucracies, get help and don't DIY. Experience counts and experienced people know what to do when the form talks about "A3" which doesn't exist - or they know who to call.

</comment><comment><USER27> In lots of arenas of life --- this one included --- if you naively follow the advice that nice and well-meaning people give you, you're going to get hosed.

<comment><USER28> I'm sorry, give you what?

<comment><USER29> advice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a non-driver I've been following the adoption of e-scooters closely and SF has been full of corruption and anti-scooter behavior since the beginning. It's been hard to watch.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be nice to have a linter for government forms.

<comment><USER4> There is. It's called an attorney.

<comment><USER32> You can hire a program to review code too, but that isn't a linter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was surprised back when Segways were first sold, San Francisco was among the first cities to ban them on sidewalks.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a story about a bowl of M&M's that made up a famous rock act's rider it was a heuristic to determine the fitness of the venue if they couldn't get a bowl of brown M&M's ready how could they be trusted with the safety of an entire soundstage?

</comment><comment><USER35> It's surprising that e-scooters get more attention than the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry on Hacker News. State regulators are playing the same games with cannabis entrepreneurs all over the United States. They do it because they can.

</comment><comment><USER36> Start ups and tech companies that want to innvoate definately need a new city to go to. SF is not a good place to start something new and innovative.

Why not start a new city say, in an open spot somewhere with minimal regulations and let tech companies build and innvoate as much as they want? Sure, in the beginning you need to provide incentives for some companies to go there. but once the jobs are there, people will definately follow.

<comment><USER37> Like California City?

SF and NYC are hotspots because that's where the money is. That's where the rich people are. They like to invest locally when possible. They like to see the billboards of "their" companies on the way to the airport. It's an ego thing.

Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases. But it's true enough and that's why it's the way that it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Probably because they didn't pay off whomever in city hall was in charge of these licenses

</comment><comment><USER20> FWIW I hardly ever see people riding scooters in San Francisco anymore.

They all more than doubled their prices in the last year to $1 + .32/min + tax, which works out to more than $20/hour! At that price, it's cheaper to just use Uber.

<comment><USER39> I use them frequently and see people on them all the time, especially during commute hours.

What Ubers have you taken in the city that work out to less than $20/hour? Even for Uber Pool that's significantly less expensive than what I've experienced.

<comment><USER20> The distance you can cover in a car is obviously much greater than that with a scooter in the same amount of time.

And it kills the use case of keeping the same scooter rented for a few hours while you hop around and do errands or go around the city since it's too expensive now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Seems like these scooters ended up else where to cities which were not clever enough to say no. Sweden got Bird scooters the city could have said no to buy and throw scooter companies. Scooters litter the streets which makes it hard for people with vision disabilities. Scooters tend to ride to fast for other pedestrians safety etc.

Frankly I do not like these scooters. We have bicycles made from iron and aluminium they are fully recyclable vs this electronic plastic e-waste ie scooters.

</comment><comment><USER41> What's the end game of all of this corruption with governments picking winners and losers?

I mean there is a difference between reasonable regulations and just outright picking 1-2 cheaters who bribed you for the right to offer a service that supposedly free people are willing to pay for out of pocket.

We get stories about this in Russia and China and call it Putinism and Corruption all the time.

<comment><USER42> We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it. If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power. When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.

<comment><USER43> In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.

<comment><USER44> That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a good heuristic.

And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious (e.g. 'hurt people').

<comment><USER45> Is there an alternative that you feel works better?

The most common alternative that I can see is "you can do whatever you want as long as it follows the letter of the law". However, that doesn't seem to work well either.

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The question I was essentially answering was 'how can we tell whether an action was "good" or not?'. Rather than looking at the intentions of the author, I think you need to look at the effects, or some proxy thereof (are people I know poorer/richer? How many people died because of this action? Or whatever else is easily measurable and pertinent)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> And what a disaster Airbnb and Uber have been for the cities they have invaded. That's why people legislate against them.

<comment><USER47> Yes, what a disaster having affordable car transportation that doesn't turn you away for being a minority and having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money renting out extra rooms.

<comment><USER48> > having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money > renting out extra rooms.

Yeah, in that case, all the long term residents living in popular cities must be insane to hate Airbnb. Have lived in a city and a building infested with Airbnbs? If you did, you would how fucked up it is for a long term renter.

<comment><USER47> I've stayed in AirBnB's. The only way any other tenants would even know I was there was that I was taking up a parking spot. Someone would have been insane to be mad about my being there, yes.

<comment><USER49> The problem is that investors buy up cheap apartments and put them on AirBnB to make insane profits.

This drives up prices for locals.

The other tenants are mad because landlords prefer renting apartments to tourists for 5k a month instead of renting to locals for 1k a month.

<comment><USER47> Some price controls and restrictions on renting out whole domiciles would be nice but the aspect of renting out a portion of an already-occupied space like I used it for is great.

<comment><USER49> If that's all AirBnB was used for, nobody would complain. But at least 90% of listings on Airbnb are for whole apartments that nobody lives in.

If people just rented out their guest room, or rented their apartment out while they're on vacation, I don't think anybody would complain.

<comment><USER50> Hotels would

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> competitors felt fear = bribery - as usual...</comment>


SpaceX Super-Heavy Lift (150-200T to LEO) - <AUTHOR> http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/spacex-aims-big-with-massive-new-rocket-377687/?cmpid=SOC%7CFGFG%7Ctwitterfeed%7CFlightglobal

<comment><USER2> If this is true and if they build it, MCT will be "Mars Colony Transport" (thanks reddit). Lifting 200T to LEO would be nearly twice the capacity of the Saturn V, the largest rocket ever made.</comment>


A Botulism Outbreak Gave Rise to America's Food Safety System - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/botulism-outbreak-gave-rise-americas-food-safety-system-180969868/?no-ist <comment><USER2> We always seem to live in a world where it takes front page news like this to put into effect genuine reform, reform that slams the door in the face of entrenched interests.

This seems to be just one of those things, but it reminds me of (most/all) companies I have worked at, where action across the company is really only determined by the next pressing crisis - actual plans are laughed at as everyone know how things really are.

But it does not have to be like this. I think the concept of technocracy is most relevant when it delivers things that should be done based on scientific analysis - even if those are not the latest crisis yet.

imagine an election where we voted in the order of the governments backlog - fix these things in this order.

wonder what it might look like

<comment><USER3> I've never understood how the concept of a "technocracy" was any different from "government, but more complicated and more reliant on cool heads and intelligent decisions." That just sounds like what republic democracy would be if we elected better people. With the same people, a "technocracy" would just be a more authoritarian version of the government we have now, with way more power to plan centrally but not much more capability to do a good job at anything.

<comment><USER4> Some things can't just be put to the vote, they need to be run by career civil servants. Pension plans need to be actuarially sound, you can't contribute more or less, depending on which party is in charge. You'd also like to see architects in charge of town planning. I'm sorry if that's too technocratic.

<comment><USER5> Well who is going to choose the domain experts to run the system? And what kind of checks are going to be on the domain expert executives?

I don't think the parent is saying the don't want domain experts to make policy decisions, but rather that we would already have (in effect) a technocracy if the people of our democracies valued domain expertise. If US voters (for example) trusted and valued the opinions of climate and environmental scientists, they would elect representatives that felt the same, and the EPA would be staffed with world class environmental scientists.

But if today's US voters were mixed with technocracy government structure, it would be horrible. The elected representatives wouldn't be choosing domain experts based on their expertise, but would be trying to pack the government bureaus with ideologues from their own party.

Nothing about our current government structure prevents the creation of a de facto technocracy. The issue is that a very large portion of the US population dislikes domain experts.

> You'd also like to see architects in charge of town planning.

And on this point I strongly disagree. This would be horrible. Centrally planned cities are invariably poor: Brasilia, Washington DC, Abu Dhabi, and so on. I would take an organic city like Paris, Milan, London, New York, or Tokyo any day over a planned city.

Of course I am sure architects, are like "no but we really got it this time! We learned that all that Le Corbusier stuff is garbage, we are going to make walkable human scale cities now, with less cars, and more scooters, blah blah blah." But I am incredibly skeptical anyone can do this stuff right. Acing a planned city is like getting a hole in one in golf. Much better to just let things grow organically, as I trust citizens and businesses to better understand the local needs of the city dwellers than I do a central planning committee with a grand vision. Of course mistakes get made, but they are on a small scale and can eventually be corrected. When central planning makes a mistake...the scale is usually massive.

<comment><USER4> _Centrally planned cities are invariably poor_

On this I disagree, people think they know what they want, but it's not necessarily what they need - consider the usual over-55 development, which is car-centric, doesn't have sidewalks or supermarkets and community centers within walking distance, and not nearly enough medical facilities nearby. Good if you are a healthy 55-year-old, but there'll be much pain in the future when the owner's health is failing 25 years later. The golf course doesn't make up for the fact that you can't get anywhere from your home!

The developer has a conflict of interest, their interest is to sell, the long- term viability of the development or the well-being of the owners is not on their radar. Something needs to provide a counterweight here.

<comment><USER5> You say you disagree, but what real world planned cities do you think came out well?

I think we probably generally agree on what might make a good city, but that's just theory, and my objection to planned cities has nothing to do with theory and everything to do with their empirical track record. I've heard no shortage of fascinating ideas for how cities could be planned and arranged, but whenever someone actually does plan out a city, like the examples I listed in my previous post or those in China or New Delphi, or wherever, it totally sucks.

<comment><USER4> In Lisbon Salazar's architects did a good job. See my comment from three weeks ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17588010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17588010)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tool that lets you identify changes an app makes to the disk? - <AUTHOR>

Similar to using the time command ($ time <app>) in a shell to see duration of execution, I wondered if there's something that will be similarly executed and give you a read-out of the changes an app makes to disk. <comment><USER2> Here are some suggestions:

If you are on *nix you can list all the files that a process is using: $ lsof -p <PID>,<PID>,<PID>

Then do a diff of the listed files against older versions of the files (e.g from a backup).

On Windows you can use procmon.exe (its a free tool from Microsoft that lists all network, registry and files) and see the updates in realtime.

Hope those work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys this is a great starting point. I'll try each out and see how what works best. If I discover anything interesting I'll put a blog post up outlining in case others run into the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> strace can do it (Linux). Watch out for "open", "read","write","unlink" in the output - these are some of the filesystem operations.

inotifywatch (from inotify-tools) can show you changes made to files in a particular directory.

</comment><comment><USER4> DTrace?</comment>


Redesigning education - Brainstorm - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekybusiness.com/redesigning-education

<comment><USER2>
        Not Found

        The requested URL /redesigning-education
        was not found on this server.

EDIT: Hmm. Worked the third time of trying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sry, I don't know why this is happening but since a few hours the Blog works on and off. I'm trying to fix it and already contacted the Posterous guys...

The normal Blog URL should work: <http://www.geekybusiness.com/> there you can also see the whole post unfortunately the comments also seem not to load.

<comment><USER2> These things happen, I'm commenting not because it's a problem for me - I'll just hit reload every few minutes - but if you have customers they'll go "WTF: not working - I'm out ..."

I've experienced this first hand. Small, insignificant wobbles that you personally wouldn't normally wory about on a web site and suddenly people go - "It doesn't work!".

Deeply annoying, but true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it even possible to brainstorm education design? How would you evaluate ideas? How do we define learning objectives? How do we measure learning outcomes?

The problems with education are not solved by arbitrary discussions. Discussions will remain superficial until we have more consensus on the true nature of education, I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> So let's start there, what do you think is the nature of education?

<comment><USER3> That's a big question. Ultimately human education is nothing but an evolutionary drive. You have to learn some basics to become a functional member of society. To survive and to keep society rolling. How an individual actually ends up being able to perform and actually performs is accidental to a high degree. The overall societal effect of this mass of arbitrary performers is a very complex phenomenon. To really study that we should look to the field of systems theory. And I believe the deep answers to this question can only come from systems theory.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have a very interesting take on the topic. You start on a much lower level than I would have but I will think about it.

Thanks for the inspiration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> here in the UK the government has pledged to getting 50% of school leavers through University Education.... average student debt is now ~£23K .... Ka- Ching!

</comment><comment><USER5> i think apprenticeship followed by certification will be the next "university". extract a course catalog from your social networks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting Idea, in Switzerland we already have that but it isn't respected or appreciated as highly as a "pure" University degree.

Maybe we have to see the differing purposes the two possibilities have

1\. Apprenticship followed by certification is for people with "real world", jobs that work relatively hands-on

2\. University in the classical sense is more about furthering the scientific background, pushing the boundaries of a discipline?

What do you think?

<comment><USER3> _.. isn't respected or appreciated_

By whom? And on what premises? Ingrained cultural norms?

Trying to reshape education you are up against strong forces.

<comment><AUTHOR> The education is of a different level and people get a more practical view on the advanced topics.

It isn't as respected because of historical isues but also because of the differing levels that the education through the differing paths (wants to) achieve(s). But I think you shouldn't compare Apples with Pears. I think the purpose of the two paths is different as explained in my last comment above.

Officials in Switzerland and especially the OECD often claim that Switzerland has a too low rate of University Graduates but I don't necessarily think so, it is another angle from which the question on how to redesign education can be approached.

One thing you're definitely right is that there are quite a few string foirces out there that like the status quo.

<comment><USER3> Strong forces towards status quo equals high stability. Not necessarily a bad thing. If you want change think chaos theory. Find the trigger that makes the system jump to a new pattern of stability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it possible to apply to YCombinator with the idea of starting a university because that would be totally awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it could be difficult to do within the assigned timeframe or the ressources that ar eprovided without completely rethinking the "University".

Something in the style of Academic Earth but much more interactive and community oriented could be very interesting. The only problem is that the content is quite expensive to produce when it isn't available through existing institutions.</comment></comment>


Robots Are Us: Some Economics of Human Replacement - T-A http://www.nber.org/papers/w20941

<comment> T-A A couple of short summaries:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/robots- cou...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/robots-could-make- even-high-tech-workers-worse-off)

[http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/02/17/the-robots-are- com...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/02/17/the-robots-are-coming-for- your-paycheck/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Intriguing.

Work checking out David Autor's work on the subject as well: [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/10/david_autor_on.html](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/10/david_autor_on.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Ever launched a failed desktop app? - <AUTHOR> Question inspired by recent Ask HN thread:
Ask HN: Have you launched a failed web business?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280881 <comment><USER3> Yes, skyPlux desktop [1]. It was a Traditional Astrology application that I was developing in Python/PySide for sale. Unfortunately it didn't got anywhere as I was mostly working for my PhD thesis and never got the timing right. It was pretty ugly by my current standards..

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC7jCWm6EC4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC7jCWm6EC4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Astrology, interesting. I remember seeing astrology apps and their printed output - horoscopes, etc. - probably done in dBase, Foxpro or Clipper - <USER2> in the day. Hadn't thought about it for years. Wasn't into it myself, but my guess is that the apps or their output (operated by real human astrologers (automation!), or corner xerox shops), actually sold, maybe even well.

A non-techie friend once consulted me about making an app to predict results of horse races, applying the "rules" in some really old esoteric book he had. Didn't do it after all, forget why. Maybe I thought the "rules" were not implementable or were logically inconsistent (I mean leaving aside the fact that you cannot predict such things, and not to mention rigging either).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to share any points about your story. Edit: I mean, you do not have to just restrict yourself to only answering questions like those by the other (web business) question poster. Could share anything of interest.</comment>


Show HN: Certificate Transparency Advisor – proactive alerting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/technion/ct_advisor/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I'm running a "show hn" on what is a complete backend project - but I'm well aware interest in the project will be a lot higher when a registration interface is implemented.

Any feedback on the work thus far would be appreciated.

<comment><USER2> I had a short look at CT recently and came away with the impression that you'd need serious resources to usefully process the data - certainly doable, but more than most private persons or even organizations would be willing to invest into watching after their domains, so it is great to see a project for a watcher-service.

What kind of hardware/instance size do you actually need to run this and keep up?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this feedback. I do believe actually retaining the data in a searchable format would require significant resources. I note Comodo wrote their own PostgreSQL extension for this purpose[0], something I'd imagine would not be done lightly.

However, I've found it surprisingly efficient for the type of service I'm running. It's currently running on a single Linode instance with 2G RAM. I've got load averages on the box of 0.05, so I think it's easily handling things. I have various parts of the service running in spawned threads, and I've tested that I can configure the timing to be more aggressive than it currently is it needed.

In terms of keeping up, I had the service shutdown for over 48 hours days whilst debugging a frustrating race condition in the PostgreSQL driver[1] and it managed to catch up in a few hours.

What has held up online registration is the place where load is in fact a significant issue - in testing, I set myself up monitoring *.cloudflaressl.com, which is known to rotate regularly. I nearly hit the Amazon SES free tier limit and gave myself an Office 365 inbox I can't open without crashing IE. Obviously I need to ensure users can't do the same.

[0] [https://github.com/crtsh/libx509pq](https://github.com/crtsh/libx509pq) [1] [https://github.com/epgsql/epgsql/issues/80](https://github.com/epgsql/epgsql/issues/80)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you get your news, and why? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to replace my filter-bubble with https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page though I realize there's bias everywhere.<p>Where do HN readers get their news, outside of HN? <comment><USER2> I use feedly.com and stuff it full of english language news papers, public broadcasters and long-form blogs from all around the world.

<comment><USER2> Some highlights (unvetted) \- [https://www.rthk.hk/radio/radio3/programme/backchat](https://www.rthk.hk/radio/radio3/programme/backchat) Backchat is RTHK Radio 3's current affairs programme with expert panels and listener participation.

\- [https://wfmu.org/playlists/TD](https://wfmu.org/playlists/TD) Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.

\- [https://mainichi.jp/english/](https://mainichi.jp/english/) japan \- [https://english.kyodonews.net/](https://english.kyodonews.net/) japan

\- [https://chinai.substack.com/](https://chinai.substack.com/) Translated news about China AI companies. substack has a lot of very good highly targeted news producers.

\- [https://coconuts.co/](https://coconuts.co/) general asia news

\- [https://asia.nikkei.com/](https://asia.nikkei.com/) paywalled asia news

\- [https://www.scmp.com/](https://www.scmp.com/) HK news

\- [https://www.taipeitimes.com/](https://www.taipeitimes.com/) Taiwan news \- [https://www.straitstimes.com/global](https://www.straitstimes.com/global) Singapore

\- [https://thediplomat.com/](https://thediplomat.com/) Global security and military/ diplomatic news

\- [https://liveuamap.com/](https://liveuamap.com/) mapped live news reports of ongoing conflicts

\- [https://www.globalforestwatch.org/](https://www.globalforestwatch.org/) mapped info about forest fires, deforestation. sourced from satellite data.

\- [https://nader.org/](https://nader.org/) Ralph Nader's podcast. Consumer advocacy, and corporate crime discussions.

\- [https://jamestown.org/](https://jamestown.org/) geopolitics, terrorism.

#africa \- [https://www.theelephant.info/](https://www.theelephant.info/) \- allafrica.com \- [https://kenopalo.com/](https://kenopalo.com/)

\- [https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15475913?af=R](https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15475913?af=R) Process Safety journal

#other stuff \- [https://www.lesswrong.com/](https://www.lesswrong.com/) \- [https://longreads.com/](https://longreads.com/) \- [http://www.overcomingbias.com/](http://www.overcomingbias.com/)

\- [https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat- research.html](https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research.html) \- [https://aeon.co/](https://aeon.co/) \- [https://www.atlasobscura.com/](https://www.atlasobscura.com/) \- [https://a16z.com/](https://a16z.com/) \- [https://www.aljazeera.com/default.html](https://www.aljazeera.com/default.html) \- [https://www.axios.com/](https://www.axios.com/) \- [https://balkaninsight.com/](https://balkaninsight.com/)

\- [https://www.greanvillepost.com/](https://www.greanvillepost.com/) out there Chinese propaganda. Not really a source of news, but a data point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reminding me about lesswrong.com! Lots I want to read there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google News App on Android, you can select tons of different sources. There's a web version too.</comment>


When the Computer Takes Over the Teacher - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-deconstruction-of-the-k-12-teacher/388631/?single_page=true

<comment> dto-games And it will all be controlled by software patents.</comment>


HN Bug: Upvote own submission? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed this when looking at new item page a bit after submitting an item of my own:
http://imgur.com/xqDoN
In the past I've seen a red asterisk next to items I've posted; for this item the voting arrow is present.
Needless to say I didn't attempt to upvote the screenshotted post... <comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://imgur.com/xqDoN></comment>