Not the retiring type: people still working in their 70s, 80s and 90s - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/01/still-working-aged-in-70s-80s-90s <comment><USER2> My father-in-law retired at 75. He was hacking C for some embedded systems running silicon wafer equipment. Ten years later he's still pretty sharp.

Personally I see no reason why I should retire, as long as someone is happy to pay me for what I like to do I'll probably keep doing it.

<comment><USER3> Are you a programmer as well?

<comment><USER2> Yup, about 55 and ready to go another 20 years :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My grandfather is a 89-year-old lawyer and you can find him every morning on his office, including weekends. He uses a typewriter and is actually very fast on those.

He is incredibly lucid and and claims it's because of his work, which I agree.

Always working - or, in other words, exercising your brain - is a must to keep your memories and sanity.

<comment><USER5> > exercising your brain - is a must to keep your memories and sanity

And this is why I never plan to give up programming and learning new tech. Constant brain stimulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As long as you like what you're doing and someone will employ you, right? Those folks probably have significant experience. Experience can't always trump creativity, but this is pretty cool. I'd not mind learning from a coworker in their eighties, you know?

<blanket statement warning> Silicon Valley's emphasis on young programmers and engineers in general is silly.

<comment> white-flame SV's emphasis is about bootstrapping on the cheap.

Much of the startup culture is not about researching new involved technical solutions, or crafting something complex and intricate, but getting a simple social idea backed by stock tech out the door quickly & cheaply to effectively pull the slot machine lever.

It is stupid and self-defeating beyond the immediate short term. But you can see where they come from, and they knowingly take the risk of patching up later once they have some success.

<comment><USER7> This is accurate. The "tech" industry is 95% marketing that uses technology, not actual technology. The bad guys have won in Silicon Valley and I don't see there being any way to reverse that.

<comment><USER8> I agree with everything in your comment but the "bad guys" are sentiment. What is bad about it?

<comment><USER7> It's not that "business guys" are bad. There are a lot of good business people out there. Look at Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.

The problem in the Valley is that the dominant culture is now set by the people who moved West to take advantage of nerds and their poor negotiating skills. There's a personality type and it's not a good one.

There are oilmen and coal miners and gold miners in the world, and Silicon Valley's leadership is comprised almost entirely of people miners who turn young male quixotry into gold. It's Hollywood for Ugly People.

I don't dislike all business people. As with any other group, there are good ones who think long term and bad ones who raid companies and fail up. Technology just seems to be dominated, about 10-to-1, by the bad ones.

<comment><USER8> If "young male quixotry" can't turn themselves into gold themselves, then how are these people miners bad? And if they are, how do these people miners have any business at all?

<comment><USER7> _If "young male quixotry" can't turn themselves into gold themselves_

Underestimating the power ratio between capital and labor, they're easily tricked into believing that hard work can overcome the massive social distance between them and the investor/founder caste. The best thing for them isn't a foolhardy attempt to "turn themselves into gold" in the short term; it's to leave and then to build something better in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anecdotal alert. All people I know who went 'on pension' either started working again or died (at least 5 cases of high profile managers getting heart attacks or commit suicide within a year after their pension). Most people, including my father and grandfather, really did not like pressureless sitting at home. You do the vacations and the reading and hobbies but then, unless you are very dedicated (like a job), there is a hole. I believe this to become a society wide thing quite soon. Actually dedicating yourself to do something (be it painting, coding, building, whatever) as a discipline is very hard and very underestimated for people who never needed it.

<comment><USER10> This is a well known effect. Humans are made to strive and struggle, and if they have no purpose to get up in the morning for, they tend to die.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but the point of pension, for average people, is getting the freedom to decide what you want to work on without economic pressure, as a reward for a life of contributing to society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My father is in his mid-70s and after a short stint in retirement went back to work about 5 years ago. He claims it's because of the money, but there's not a lot preventing my parents from selling their home and moving to a cheaper part of the country and living out their retirement years.

On the plus side, he was remarkably sharp and agile for a 70 year old. But his legs are starting to fail and that's made him age very quickly.

 _Now_ I can see it being about money (and health care), he's going to need knee replacement surgery and months of rehab. Something my parents will struggle to afford.

He's lived a fascinating life, and is full of stories, but to me he's also a warning about the need to cultivate non-work interests and stash away enough money to enjoy a long retirement enjoying those interests.

</comment><comment><USER13> Kudos to those who go about it cheerfully, but I also fear it will be increasingly mandatory, as the top-heavy demographic crisis comes home to roost in many developed countries. By the time the median HN user is a "senior citizen", Social Security eligibility will start at what, 87?

</comment><comment><USER14> They'll have to pry my keyboard from my cold dead fingers.

(With apologies to John Wayne)

<comment><USER15> I think you mean Charlton Heston.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_my_cold,_dead_hands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_my_cold,_dead_hands)

<comment><USER14> Oh! So I do. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I plan to work until my brain doesn't function anymore.

<comment><USER16> I plan to play, rather than work.

<comment><USER10> I have a curious lack of interest in games - chess, sports, video games, board games, etc. I think the problem is they do not accomplish anything. There are so many fun things to do that also accomplish something, so I prefer to do them.

<comment><USER16> Ahh, not so much games for me but play as in the opposite of work. Things like play as in "play with my grandchildren" or "play with my dog" or even hacking can be seen as play "play with my arduino ....ooh BLINKENLIGHTS!"

<comment><USER10> Playing with grandchildren has a purpose other than simply pleasure, the pleasure is a nice side effect. Besides, rather than play with relatives, I prefer to join with them working on a task that accomplishes something. Like working together to fix a car, help move, lend a hand, whatever.

Many useful tasks are pleasurable, why not take advantage of that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The other night I admitted a woman in her 90s to the hospital. When I asked her how her chest pain started, she said she started feeling it while she was at work. At first I was thinking "Does she have dementia?" but she explained that she works at the downtown Safeway Deli (A US grocery chain for those who are non US). It was pretty special to me because I have never met anyone in their 90s who works, much less with that kind of job. Usually if there's an 80 year old I meet who's still working, they have a more cerebral job like being an engineer or scientist or professor. When I told her how surprised I was she told me that if I lived in Iceland I wouldn't be as surprised as people apparently work these kinds of jobs often.

<comment><USER18> If someone's working a low-paying grocery chain job past retirement age, it's usually because they're forced to (to pay medical bills, for example).

<comment><USER17> Do you mean in Iceland, or generally? I agree with your statement, although I don't think it applied to this woman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My grandfather constructed crossword puzzles for several magazines and newspapers, from 1955 until his death this year, 90 years old.

He was extremely knowledgeable, and kept a lucid mind until the very end. I don't doubt that his work was the main reason for this.

</comment><comment><USER20> Despite the one person who still works because he needs the money, this is almost mocking the younger generations who will never be able to afford a house and have a miserable pension (if one at all) and have had their retirement age increased by years.

I am scared to death about my retirement. I only have 25 more years in this industry, at most, I have no pension (no employer has ever offered one), a student loan, I'm struggling to save for a deposit for a house while prices rise at eye-watering rates and I'm supporting a parent who has no assets or job.

<comment><USER5> which industry? I assume you mean development / programming. How old are you and why do you think 25 at most? I'm 35 and plan on doing this until I'm dead. There is absolutely no reason that you ever have to give up programming (outside of dementia).

I've met blind programmers and programmers that can't use their hands. If they can do it, we can do it, even if we have arthritis and become legally blind.

Edit: also if i become unemployable due to ageism, i've alrady decided will create a persona online of a 30 year old and only take remote jobs.

<comment><USER21> How do blind and hand injured programmers cope with their work?

<comment><USER22> Screen readers and/or refreshable Braille display for the former, Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the latter.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, but isn't the economic value of a competent programmer tied up in speed and motor efficiency as well as the domain knowledge? How does that equation change with disability, I wonder?

My personal sense was that if my hands or my eyes ever became useless (e.g. RSI, worsening eyestrain issues), I'm finished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My father will be 70 next year and just went into semi-retirement (where semi- retirement = writing two books). I suspect if there hadn't been a coup in Mali, which resulted in a return to India, he would probably still be working full time. It's not about the money T this point. He's in good health, is sharp as ever, so doing something seems to make sense.

</comment><comment><USER24> To each his own. I plan to retire at 40, 42 at the latest if everything goes according to plan. I won't be a couch retiree though, I plan to spend perhaps 20 hours a week coding on various things. Or even bootstrap a company, and if it fails I can just go back to being retired.

</comment><comment><USER25> My 92 year old grandfather is still a full time practicing doctor. My father and my aunts have talked to him about retiring for a while now. Being a doctor is who he is - if he gives that up, I'm afraid of what will happen.

</comment><comment><USER26> They take a few cases of people doing what they like and present it as nobble.

What about millions of people who are the "retiring type", but have to work well into their 70s in shitty jobs (from Walmart and downwards) to make ends meet.

<comment><USER27> The more your salary is and also if you enjoy the job the less likely you have to rerite.

I see professors in their 70s and beyond still teaching. I collaborate with one.

The people that are forced to work in shitty jobs will keep on doing shitty jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If anyone hasn't watched the documentary on Miyazaki, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, I'd highly recommend it. It delves a bit into his struggle to give up or continue on with his life's work.

Edit: It's on Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER29> Any personal tips or advice for helping such people cope with onset of Parkinson's.

</comment><comment><USER30> The issue with not working is that if you have habitual activities during retirement (other than watching tv), those activities become indistinguishable from work. So you might as well just work. I'm only 28 but that's how I see it.

<comment><USER31> They're indistinguishable from work except retirement "activities" are self- directed, instead of decided by some manager. If you really like your job, sure, why replace it with other routine chores -- but I'd bet, once I'm that old, that I won't have a job I like enough to justify giving control of my days over to a company somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is not about the U.S.

<comment><USER33> Here are the guidelines for submissions if you would like to take a peek [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).</comment></comment>


The current state of "seed" investing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nchirls/the-current-state-of-seed-investing-c2929443058f#.m4ok1p1sm <comment><AUTHOR> What I've thought for a while is: maybe we need to just deprecate what might be a bunch of arcane and no longer meaningful terminology.

It's a "round." Your company's metrics are X and you are seeking $N at pre- money $M. Maybe just number them: R1, R2, etc.

Or even better drop the whole concept of a 'round' in favor of something more high-resolution. But that would require a lot of re-engineering of legal frameworks, which is hard.</comment>


Klout acquired by Lithium - <AUTHOR> http://blog.klout.com/2014/03/klout-joins-lithium/

<comment><USER2> Surprised the exit happens at the relatively low price of $200M [1]. Klout had about 500 million users from what I understand. While monetisation might have been tough with deals, Klout got so much data. So much talk of 'big data' but it does not seem to be worth so much... or was there some founder fatigue at play here after almost 6 years of existence?

[1] [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/klout](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/klout)</comment>


Some Thoughts On Public and Private Markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/some-thoughts-on-public-and-private-markets.html

<comment><USER2> a new NASDAQ... could that even be done today, or is the regulatory barrier to creating a new public trading so great that no one would undertake it? phrased another way: if this opportunity is there and no one is taking it, why?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always found it very strange that the average Joe can mortgage his home, sell all his family's belongings, and go to Vegas and lose every penny. People will talk about what a bad person he is.

But that same average Joe, if one of us were to ask him to participate in our startup? Suddenly everybody and their brother is all concerned about Joe being taken to the cleaners.

I'm not saying we need the Wild West out there, simply that, as the author says, the way things are right now are seriously out of whack. This is not especially good or bad for Joe: people with poor spending habits have a nasty tendency to lose all of their money. But it's really bad for startups who need a little cash, some of which could succeed and do all sorts of cool things.

<comment><USER4> As a class, the rich do not want Joe Average investing in startups. It creates more competition and dilutes the power of their capital. So the rich conspire with Congress to create laws that block Joe Average from these markets.

Most "progressive" regulations treat adult citizens as children and are really designed to lock-in the status quo.

<comment><USER5> _As a class, the rich do not want Joe Average investing in startups._

I've known a ton of reach people in my life, and I have never, ever heard any of them mention that they don't want Joe Average investing in startups.

In fact, I've been talking to dozens of rich people in the past two weeks, about how to make working on <http://hackersandfounders.com> financially sustatinable so I can work on it full time and help thousands of founders and hundreds of companies succeed. Every single "rich" person that I've talked to has been exceedingly helpful and encouraging.

Why? Because the thought of helping hundreds of founders build successful companies and get rich in the procees is really exciting to them.

 _It creates more competition and dilutes the power of their capital._

Your understanding of capital and markets is severely flawed.

If a rich person owns 10 shares of a startup's stock, and they are by law only able to sell that to a maximum of 500 other rich people, then there is a very limited market for that stock, and the value will remain low.

If however regulations were to change, allowing the public to have easier access to those shares, then the value of those 10 shares increases because there is greater demand, and more buyers.

So, if the public can purchase those shares, with the hopes that they will get richer by holding those shares. And, the rich person gets richer because he sold the shares at a higher price than what he would have normally.

Your comment "dilutes the power of their capital" is quite simply wrong.

* So the rich conspire with Congress to create laws that block Joe Average from these markets.*

It was actually the Enron scandal which brought about the Sarbanes-Oxley act, which profoundly changed the accounting regulations that corporations have to adhere to if they are going to go public.

As an unintended consequence of that legislation, it made it a lot harder for startups to IPO because of the increased cost and accounting burden required of a corporations before they go public.

<meta>

I'm finding it harder and harder to participate in HN discussions when comments like the above get 10 points instead of buried.

<comment><USER6> I found the relative scores on these two comments irritating too. You're clearly right. I pitched in and modded, but: wouldn't a better solution here be to just _stop showing the scores on the comments please Paul Graham_? Just show us our own scores. There is no reason for us to waste energy fretting about the kind of person who would value this comment lower than its parent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Charles Dellschau and His Extraordinary Sonora Aero Club - <AUTHOR> http://www.historicalblindness.com/blogandpodcast//4kc8kaqc6e7w5yypryouuq0k4wu23l <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I've ever seen folk art that is inspired by new technology, and that is so imaginative and visually striking. I'd love to see an exhibition of the full notebooks.</comment>


Pointers are Easy, Optimization is Complicated - <AUTHOR> https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/09/pointers-are-easy-optimization-is.html <comment><USER2> The author has a rather restrictive view of addressing modes.

The C model of pointer reflects the limited addressing modes of the PDP-7 and PDP-11. It has the advantage of being easy to reason about but provides a limited set of functions. Some syntactic sugar is provided (e.g. `x[y]`) for access to indexed addressing, but anything more complex must be written by hand.

Counterintuitively, art of the role of a programming language is to _restrict_ what you can do in the name of managing cognitive overhead (and is that not also the role of abstraction) and some of those trade offs are worth it (restricting bytes to being only 8 bits wide was, in retrospect, OK).

But there are programs that "can't" be written in C. "Can't" is in quotes because you can, but either have to escape into assembly code (e.g. there is no way to express SIMD intrinsics in C) or you have to say `resolve_ptr(foo)` rather than `*foo`).

So per pointers specifically:

Segmented memory models far predate the founding of intel corporation, and serve various purposes. One major one was indeed address space expansion, which thankfully is much less important than it used to be, but can also support valuable functionality hard or impossible to express in a language like c. For example, something like a setuid shared library. Overlapping segments can express other region smpemantics such as fast and slow memory

Even without segmentation the full value of the pointer can be used for other purposes such as type tagging; capabilities, signatures and other such security mechanisms; et al, none of which can be expressed in the C syntax.

(You can see that segmentation and pointer discrimination are really just different ways of describing the same mechanism to the hardware. However the semantics of a pointer may quite reasonably reflect other machine state, such as register state, that cannot be explicitly represented in C)

<comment><AUTHOR> > The author has a rather restrictive view of addressing modes.

Not really, no.

I thought a single prominent example would suffice to show how the industry moved towards the "flat address space" model and heaved a big sigh of relief after it had done so.

> full value of the pointer can be used for other purposes such as type > tagging [..]

And this is very much dependent on being able to treat that pointer as an integer whose bits you can process...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like the author has somewhat missed the point of the original article. Which is interesting because the author repeated the point to make it clear:

> Just because two pointers point to the same address, does not mean they are > equal and can be used interchangeably.

That is based on the C++ standard and its interpretation among mainstream compilers.

The rest of the article goes on, at some length, to discuss ideas about how to define a abstract pointer model for a programming language in which pointers can be used more easily and safely and, by doing so, allow compilers to make optimizations which don't confusingly behave differently to unoptimised code. Which, seems to me at least, kind of the opposite of the characterisation as, sort of, "a bunch of wank in which compiler designers show us how clever they are with their useless micro-optimisations at the expense of making everything more difficult for us mere mortal programmers"

</comment><comment><USER4> The discussion of real mode memory segmentation on early intel platforms brings back nightmares for me. The memory layout with overlapping segments was straight up bonkers, and maddening to deal with.</comment>


Untitled - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ <comment><AUTHOR> _let me give a brief summary of what I am trying to say:

1\. There are a lot of really nasty stereotypes perpetuated about nerds, especially regarding how they are monsters, nobody can love them, and they are too disgusting to have relationships the same way other people do.

2\. Although both men and women suffer from these stereotypes, men really do have a harder time getting relationships, and the experience is not the same.

3\. Many of the people suffering from these stereotypes are in agreement that it is often self-identified feminists who push them most ardently, and that a small but vocal contingent of feminists seem to take special delight in making nerds' lives worse.

4\. You cannot define this problem away with the word "patriarchy".

5\. You cannot define this problem away by saying that because Mark Zuckerberg is a billionnaire, nerds are privileged, so they already have it too good. The Jews are a classic example of a group that were both economically advantaged in a particular industry, but also faced unfair stereotypes.

6\. Whether women also have problems, and whether their problems are even worse, is not the point under discussion and is not relevant. Women can have a bunch of problems, but that doesn't mean it is okay for any feminists to shame and bully nerds.

7\. Nerds are not uniquely evil, they are not especially engaged in oppressing women, and they are not driving women out of Silicon Valley. Even if they were, "whenever they choose to open up about their private suffering" is not the time to talk about these things.

8\. "Entitlement" is a uniquely bizarre insult to level at nerds given that by most of the term's usual definitions nerds are some of the most untitled people there are.

9\. The feminist problem of nerds being desperate and not having any social skills (and therefore being creeps to women) is the same as the nerd problem of nerds being desperate and not having any social skills (and therefore having to live their life desperate and without social skills). Denying the problem and yelling at nerds who talk about it doesn't help either group.

10\. The nerd complaint on this issue is not "high school girls rejected us in the past when we were lonely and desperate," it is "some feminists are shaming us about our loneliness and desperation in the past and present and openly discussing how they plan to do so in the future." Nobody with principles is angry at the girls who rejected them in the past and this is a giant red herring. If you don't believe any feminists are shaming anyone, then say so; don't make it about little Caitlin in seventh-grade._

<comment><USER2> #1 is a hang up "nerds" have about themselves, not something other people spend any time thinking about.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you skim the original essay, there are plenty of links (highlighted blue, they're quite easy to find) to articles that argue exactly #1 (pretty obvious by their titles).

Also, my (admittedly anecdotal) evidence of being bullied in school confirms this as well (and is echoed by many other geeks).

<comment><USER2> You think people get bullied because others think they are disgusting monsters? People get bullied because bullies are insecure too (which is _not_ an apology for bullies, but they are acting out insecurity more than they are worried about how disgusting their targets are).

I too fit the socially awkward bullied nerd stereotype...

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't care what others _actually_ think, I care what words and stereotypes they use _when bullying_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wandle – Unique service for management of your calls and notification messages - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wandle.app&hl=en <comment><AUTHOR> We are a small team from Minsk that develops and promotes a completely new method of managing notifications. Write us! Your feedbacks and proposals are very important for us. It is you who influence further development of our service: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Fix your website - [http://www.wandle-app.com/](http://www.wandle-app.com/) is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, at the moment the site is under development, thank you for your understanding.</comment></comment></comment>


Seattle-Area Salmon Are Loaded with Anti-Depressants and Other Drugs - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/seattle-area-salmon-are-loaded-with-anti-depressants-and-other-drugs-thanks-to-human-waste <comment><USER2> Also, it's possible to drug test an entire city, perhaps to decide how to budget and prepare for intervention and treatment programs. [http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137420879/our-sewers- ourselves...](http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137420879/our-sewers-ourselves- what-waste-water-can-tell-us)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the study referenced, but I don't have access: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749116...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749116300884)

Anyone have an un-paid link?

</comment><comment><USER4> "In the past we've looked at PCP and DDT. Pharmaceuticals are the next frontier."

I wasn't aware that PCP was so prevalent in the Seattle area.

<comment><USER5> In this case PCP = post consumer plastic. Think micro plastic particles from ocean debris and trash washed off short.

<comment><USER6> And particularly worrisome are the little plastic beads that make your ex- foliating shower scrub so pretty looking. They're also made of plastic, and all of it goes down the sewer. In insane quantities.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_particle_water_polluti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_particle_water_pollution)

<comment><USER7> Fwiw those are in the process of being phased out in the U.S. (as the Wikipedia article notes). A ban on their use in rinse-off cosmetics (shampoos, toothpaste, body washes, etc.) was passed in December 2015. But the phase-out lasts through 2019. The unusually short and readable bill is here: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/1321...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/1321/text)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone clarify? When the article says "human waste" are they referring to garbage or urine/feces?

<comment><USER9> The latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just the Salmon? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> "For some reason, I F*CKIN' LOVE THIS SALMON!" I would imagine consumers.

</comment><comment><USER12> No numbers in that piece. What is the technical definition of 'loaded'? Do they mean 'detectable'?

It seems curious that Seattle folks would worry about this anyway. They are the ones taking the pills in the first place! They're just going back for seconds after all.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why the downvotes for you... "Measurable" doesn't mean "too much" and some parts-per-million vs. ambient would be really useful here for context. "XX,XXX pounds of chemicals" is alarmist and non-specific.

Maybe the snark isn't appreciated - folks are worried about consequences for the health of the _fish_ , not secondary dosing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Too many garage bands....

In seriousness, curious about comparisons related to other areas...

<comment><USER14> It's happening in every body of water we dump our waste water in. Waste water treatment systems aren't designed to remove all the drugs we excrete.

80% of male fish in the Potomac are infertile from the exposure to birth control.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your worst experience working with recruiters/agencies? - <AUTHOR> [Hiring Developers] Please share your worst experiences working with recruiters and/or agencies to hire a new developer on your team. <comment><USER2> I was once called by a new recruiter because he wanted to know what 'API' was. Apparently he could not even Google to find out himself.</comment>


Automated Machine Learning – A Paradigm Shift  Airbnb - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/automated-machine-learning-a-paradigm-shift-that-accelerates-data-scientist-productivity-airbnb-f1f8a10d61f8 <comment><USER2> Data Robot is definitely cool but you have to be careful you aren't overfitting via hyperparameter tuning.

I think where we'll really start to see the needle move is when we'll have more automated feature engineering. The 'data wrangling' involved here is by far the most expensive part of the process but also best way to improve model performance.

<comment><USER3> DataRobot also does some automated feature engineering including text mining, credibility adjustments, transformations of features, ratios and differences of numeric factors, and a bunch of other stuff, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The important thing is what they do with it:

 _At Airbnb, we use machine learning to build customer lifetime value models for guests and hosts. These models allow us to calibrate our marketing spend to expected return at very granular levels, down to the user, if we like._

That's scary.

</comment><comment><USER5> related article: [http://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/01/current-state-automated- mac...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/01/current-state-automated-machine- learning.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Dev bootcamps for experienced but mediocre developers - <AUTHOR>

Are there any Dev bootcamps targeted at experienced developers?
I'm talking about your average Joe working in the corporate world who knows how to mashup frameworks together and get a working product but lacks a solid grasp of the fundamentals. Things like: Algorithms & DS, Operating Systems, Concurrency, Functional Programming, software design and design patterns, problem solving skills, open source tools and contributing to open source projects, etc.
Basically the skills your average corporate programmer needs to join companies like Google, Amazon, etc. <comment><USER2> Consider a master's program in CS. Many programs are fine with work experience, and relatively little-to-no research experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but there's Hacker School: <https://www.hackerschool.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> a few options,

<http://www.appacademy.io/>

<http://devbootcamp.com/>

<https://www.bloc.io/>

however, if we want to become outstanding developers, the only option is to work harder, smarter, and enjoy the process

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm subscribed to Pluralsight training. Maybe only a few courses might be relevant but it's a relatively cheap entry cost for the possible ROI.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think I can help you out, it's a secret project of mine but I'd be happy to discuss it 1:1 -- roshan at bloc.io if you're interested</comment>


Make VR Games in VR inside Unity - <AUTHOR> http://uploadvr.com/tomorrow-can-make-games-within-vr-unity/ <comment><USER2> This is going to be a fun road to go down. I am sure it will be rough around the edges at first but as it matures I have good faith that Unity will knock it out of the park. Can't wait to fire of the Vive and check it out!</comment>


The IRS Has Been Using Bitcoin Tracking Software Since 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/irs-using-bitcoin-tracking-software-since-2015/ <comment><USER2> This is why ZCash was invented

<comment><USER3> A very small percentage of ZCash transactions are private at this time. 38 were relayed in the past 24 hours: [https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/usage](https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/usage)</comment></comment>


People Unsure About 'Virtual' Doctor Visits - happy-go-lucky https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/people-unsure-about-virtual-doctor-visits/4788594.html <comment><AUTHOR> It shouldn't be forced on people but I'd love to have the option, especially when I'm out of town and the doc's practice's policy forbids telemedicine even on a cash basis.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you be interested in an easier way to pay people for feedback? - <AUTHOR> I don't think I am good at finding a sweet spot for lot of things people suffering from disabilities or other problems go through whenever I design build/design something. Collecting feedback is not an easy feat. I would love to have a chat with a blind person about my designs and ideas but often have no less intrusive and easy way to do that.
There is no easy way to pay for feedback as well. Asking people for their PayPal or something similar doesn't cut it online.
For the second problem, what do you think of something that will let you give someone money by generating a small username tip.
Example - You made a post on reddit and someone with username hn-kun replied and gave you feedback, you want to give him money so what you can do is create a tip with a reddit username hn-kun and send him a link. He can transfer the money into his bank by oauth or other flows to verify himself instantly.
He doesn't need to register or you have to ask him for something like his PayPal.
I am not sure about the first problem. Any ideas or existing services? <comment><USER2> It sounds too complicated for me to use. I'd prefer to use something I know the user already has setup.

Other solutions would be Patreon, Venmo, Zelle, or the Buy me a coffee button on some OSS repositories.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah but the problem is the end user have to setup those to receive payment. I don't see how it is more complicated than existing setups.

You will just have to connect your card and generate link by putting the username and social site, amount etc. And then drop the link. That should only take a few minutes for first sign up and afterwards, a minute or so.

Patreon, buy me coffee etc are not comparable since they focus on recurring transactions and are not anonymous, require registration from both end of users.

Instead of that, the end user just needs to click on verify by reddit button and then put their bank details to receive payment instantly. They can make an account if they like during the process so they don't have to verify next time they wanna receive a payment but otherwise don't have to.

Comparable platform would be keybase I guess but that still requires you some setup on both ends.

I don't need to know your identity outside of whatever platform I am interacting on to send you a tip. I shouldn't assume you have xyz account except for the platform I am interacting with you on.

example - you wanna tip me right now but how will you do that?

<comment><USER3> Seems like a feature that Keybase could implement (this can be a way for them to gain users, too); they already allow sending cryptocurrency to other users and they have the ability to authenticate based on online identities.

This would require that the sender and receiver both have keybase.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah they could also allow temporary session like discord does. Discord lets you join and chat on a server without having to permanently make an account via invite link.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an open source SAAS framework? - <AUTHOR> If you want to build a SAAS app that has the usual components of user registration/subdomains, pricing, subscriptions etc, is there a framework out there for this ? preferably python ? <comment><USER2> Too many of those features are particular to the application. You specifically mention using subdomains as user pages, but that's not necessarily how I'd do an SaaS app (or how too many others do). How do you bundle pricing and billing into an SaaS app beyond providing making certain libraries available? What payment provider are you using? Paypal? Braintree? Stripe? That depends on the subscription model you want to implement. Is your app a 30 day bill cycle? Paid yearly? Billed on the first of every month? Does it offer a 12-month prepay discount? What happens if account isn't paid up immediately? Is there a 30 day grace period? Is the account disabled immediately?

These are all decisions that each app has to make for themselves, and while sure, some of it could perhaps be rolled into a 'framework' that sits on Django or RoR, it's going to be difficult to get anywhere close to something most people wouldn't have to change.

As the target market for this would almost certainly be developers who can take a few libraries off of GitHub, tailor them to themselves, and have all the above functionality implemented within a day, I'd be surprised to find if something existed in the way you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting points. Yes there are many parameters that could be application specific but i was wondering if some of them could potentially be provided as libraries ? for example, able to select subdomain style vs. others, set a billing cycle with certain parameters? etc. Or am I already too specific to be a framework ? Just wondered.

<comment><USER2> I mean, Django and RoR are typically (with high degrees of arguability) the types of frameworks people use for this sort of thing.

There are a variety[1] of[2] ways[3] you can implement subdomain keys in Django, but each is effectively downloadable from somewhere and installable, possibly just with pip.

Again, there are a myriad[4] of ways to implement payment processing and subscriptions using Django, easily installable, but picking the right one for your application type is up to the architect. Creating one monolithic payment library that supports every possible payment type, subscription method, payment gateway provider, etc., is just asking someone to build a bloated app. I'd much rather drop in 'payments-with-stripe' if I'm using Stripe as my payment gateway than to install 'omni-payments' and have to spend the day configuring it to work how I want, then worry about the size of the codebase and the likelihood of human error.

Like I said, most of the things you're looking for can either be dropped in or just coded in a day.

[1] - [http://thingsilearned.com/2009/01/05/using-subdomains-in- dja...](http://thingsilearned.com/2009/01/05/using-subdomains-in-django/)

[2] - <https://github.com/tkaemming/django-subdomains>

[3] - <http://code.google.com/p/django-accounts/>

[4] - <http://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/payment-processing/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ruby on Rails is a big and popular one for Ruby. For Python, you can try Django.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry you misunderstood or I did not ask clearly. I am not looking for just a framework. I am alread aware of ROR and Django. I am looking for a framework that can help build Software-as-a-service (SAAS) applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are OpenShift, and I think Joyent open-source its SmartOS too.</comment>


Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.firefox.com/proxy/v4/ <comment><USER2> It's about time somebody tried this. $5/mo. is fair; I don't need a million sites to be in the catalog, but I would like a bit more variety eventually.

People who complain about "modern journalism", take note. If this takes off, publications will be less incentivized to post those godawful clickbait articles that have soured the Internet reading experience.

I'll read the Atlantic and Vox, but Buzzfeed is a no-no, unless it's Buzzfeed News. And they should really consider changing the name as a serious news site on a subscription format shouldn't be associated with the ad hell that is the regular Bfeed.

<comment><USER3> > It's about time somebody tried this.

I mean , isn't this essentially the idea behind patreon? You batch the micropayments payments into single transactions on the credit card network to reduce the marginal cost of the fixed fees?

Didn't Google already do something similar with new subscriptions?

Didn't flattr do this a decade ago?

It's not a new idea, and as I ranted elsewhere, is only even required because of the fixed fees on credit card transactions.

<comment><USER2> I've never heard of Flattr, whereas I think most people know Mozilla or at least have heard of them through Firefox.

I'd expect Mozilla to be more invested in the "pay with $, not ads" approach compared to Google. Mozilla owns Pocket, which has been relatively good at finding longreads type material on the net and rendering it in a reader-mode view, so I think they're a better cultural/philosophical fit.

I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content providers individually. That's not what I want.

<comment><USER3> > I don't use Patreon. IIUC, you need to sign up to support different content > providers individually. That's not what I want.

Well, isn't the the same thing in the end? Both you and the person you want to pay need to have ths same platform? If someone uses chrome, won't they need to go and "find" the site using Firefox to pay.

What you want is to be able to pay for something once you've found it? I get that, and it's a slightly different model than patreon, but in the end it is the same problem: micropayments are expensive and currently require someone to batch them.

The bigger problem is that requires another shared middle man that some people may not like fot whatever reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case you are also wondering how that works and what's supported.

Based on [https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring- alternative-funding-models-for-the-web/) it looks like it's a collaboration with [https://scroll.com/](https://scroll.com/) and supports sites like:

\- Vox

\- The Atlantic

\- Buzzfeed

\- Gizmodo

\- Slate

<comment><USER5> Wow, all of those are considered far left sources according to mediabiasfactcheck.com, except for The Atlantic, which is only center left. I don't want to pay $5 a month to only hear one side of the story.

<comment><USER6> And who is this mediabiasfactcheck.com? Is it bias all the way down? It appears to be some guy called Dave Van Zandt.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check)

> "Until October 2018 MBFC rated China's Xinhua News Agency as "least > biased",[205] but the rating has since changed to the somewhat more > reasonable "left-center bias".[206] Xinhua has been criticized by Reporters > Without Borders as being the "world's biggest propaganda agency",[207][208] > and is regarded by Wikipedia as a source "to treat carefully""

Are you _sure_ that Buzzfeed is to the left of the Communist Party official outlet?

<comment><USER7> Do you prefer the study from harvard? [https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud](https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud)

They define buzzfeed as center-left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got the following when I tried the link to subscribe:

Thank you for your interest in Firefox Ad-free Internet!

This product isn't available yet, but we're working on it. Would you please click the Next button to take a short survey to tell us what you think? At the end of the survey we'll get your (optional!) e-mail address so that we can let you know when the Firefox Ad-free Internet beta launches. If you don't want to give feedback, click here to skip to the sign-up page.

Click the 'Next' button to take the survey.

<comment><USER9> If you skip the survey you end up on scroll.com:

> Thank you for participating in this survey! We would like to invite you to a > free trial of Firefox Ad-free Internet, a name we used in this survey for a > partnership with our friends at Scroll. You can sign up today at > www.scroll.com Thank you very much for helping to make the internet a better > place!

<comment><USER8> That clarifies it quite a bit for me, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is sort of unfortunate news to me, as I take this as a sign that they won't do adblocking by default. I think this is a mistake; users want ads to be blocked. Especially on mobile, where it's more important from a perf perspective. Brave has ads blocked, Opera has ads blocked. If Firefox wants to follow the lead and be a privacy focused company like they say, then they need to block ads.

<comment><USER11> Successful ad blocking would kill the advertisement revenue stream. This revenue stream is what pays for the content you enjoy, so ad blocking kills content.

I like content, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd prefer to pay with money, not via ads. Give me that option.

Further, I don't want a subscription. I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.

<comment><USER12> Ads pay a lot more than that on quality websites such as the Scroll ones. 50c per thousand page is so low I can't see how you find it fair. We're talking lets say 1000h of work, and your fair price is 50c ?

<comment><USER13> If they read 3 articles a day, they've decided that quality journalism across multiple publishers should cost 50 cents a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Note the following:

* This is yet not available.

* It's not "Ad-Free Internet" but more like "a dozen websites ad-free".

* They expect a monthly payment - which is fine, but the first thing I imagined from the title was a built-in blocker in the browser but this is quite different.

<comment><USER15> Firefox already has built-in tracking protection, which blocks trackers and by extension most ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks like it's a bundling of Scroll into Firefox, probably with different UX. It seems dishonest to me if you're gonna say "Ad-Free Internet" and "We share your payment directly with the sites you read" and really only do that for 12 domains. The internet is much bigger than that. Find a way to do this for ALL sites!

<comment><USER17> To be fair to them, they have to start somewhere. If they had to get every single site on the internet onboard as a prerequisite (as you seem to be suggesting) they'd never launch anything.

<comment><USER16> Yes I agree, it's impossible to cut a deal with every website. So a completely different solution is needed.

edit: maybe I am being too harsh... maybe this is a starting point to something bigger. Let's hope!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It looks like if you're a publisher you've partner up with Mozilla for this. Isn't this becoming a little dependent on Mozilla?

Publishers are already dependent on Google and if Google wants to screw them over, they can. How is this different from that?

<comment><USER19> It's not perfect, but I'd rather trust mozilla than google.

<comment><USER20> I'm the other way, google is probably the best company in my lifetime. Its recent Apple exploit 0day, I'm a bit skeptical of the programming.

Google has the resources to make better products.

<comment><USER21> > Google has the resources to make better products.

True but for the past 5 years or so they have been interested in making more money not better products.

<comment><USER22> And yet I've had to switch all my Lubuntu devices to using Chrome because Firefox can't seem to manage to remain open without eventually locking up the entire system.

<comment><USER23> Did you try filing a bug report?

<comment><USER22> If I had filed a bug report I would have then had to gather logs and other such things to get the developers whatever information they need to fix it, and frankly I just don't care about helping them fix it enough to bother with that. I didn't choose it for these devices it was just the default. For my purposes it was just much easier to switch to a browser that wouldn't hang the system if it was left open for a few hours.

Edit: I appreciate the downvotes, as though answering this question with honesty is undesirable behavior. Keep up the good work /r/svwebdev!

<comment><USER23> For the record I didn't downvote you, and I agree being honest doesn't deserve this response, but I would guess it's related to the high amount of devs here who are probably upset that you took the time to complain, yet don't want to take the time to at least check if a bug report exists. In some respects I agree, in that, if we want change the world and fight the "good fight" against the near-monopoly Google has on browsing, we need to band together and everyone do their part.

"All my Lubuntu devices" makes it sound like you have a lot of devices, thus increasing the likelihood of being easy to reproduce. There might even already exist a bug report which you could contribute to.

<comment><USER22> It seems so easy to reproduce, just install Lubuntu and run the Twitch dashboard for a few hours. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already a bug report, a cursory search of bugzilla shows several hundred bugs containing the words like "hang" and "freeze".

And, again being frank, I don't care enough to bother with scouring that for one that seems related enough to add to it, and then again reproducing the problem and collecting the appropriate logs and etc. And if experience is any indicator it'll just languish in their bug database for months or years anyway. I've got shit to do man, so I'll just use a product that works, thanks. It is not my responsibility to fix yours.

And I only brought it up because someone mentioned how much "better" a product Firefox is and my experience differed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I welcome this effort! Enabling alternative revenue streams for web content will be critical to make the place less abusive.

Unfortunately, the big successful players seem to make pretty good $$ by selling customer data, so they have little incentive to change this.

Mozilla/Firefox is in a unique position to launch an effort like this, since it controls a decent browsing platform with a significant user base.

I'll sign up the moment this becomes available in the EU.

<comment><USER25> Mozilla's userbase isn't really that significant, <5% is like ~2/50 people, where Chrome for example is 2/3 of all people using the internet by comparison: [https://caniuse.com/usage-table](https://caniuse.com/usage-table)

<comment><USER26> Those stats are from StatCounter. Literally the second sentence in their FAQ:

> Our tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally.

Having a low number there is a feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think this is a re-branding of Pocket that they own. Same price [https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1](https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1)

<comment><USER28> Sounds like a good idea since they never did communicate effectively about what pocket is and why I should get it. Even the website is vague, I'm not looking for an "ad-free space", not sure what that even means. I'm not interested in renting a room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why credit card networks (and banks in general) haven't stepped up their game with regards to micropayments (say, under $5). The marginal cost of any transaction is insignificant, and would be outweighed even by penny fees. Even if it required some extra steps for the vendor to become authorized to accept micropayments, and even with strict requirements around the number or total value of transactions a single card can be used with a single vendor during a time period, I think it could still work in everyone's favour.

One of the biggest fees on micropayments are the fixed transaction fees. Stripe is currently 27‰ + 5¢, which on a $1 transaction is nearly 8%! If those fixed fees could be made to go away for low-cost transactions, micropayments would work within the current system. Most people can accept 3% overhead, but most won't accept 8%.

It just seems like the entire problem is manufactured and not really an issue that can be solved until the banking systems just decided to solve it by changing their policies. I'm not even proposing a technical fix, it really seems to be a problem entirely with the current policies.

Edit: yes, I understand that Stripe is a gateway and processor, not an issuer or network, and that banks are often issures, but not the network. Yes, I understand that cards each have their own interchange rates, but many gateways like stripe have been just "averaging" them to provide low-volume retailers a fixed, predicable coat per transaction. I'm just saying that if the networks. E.g. Visa or MasterCard (or even discover or Amex despite being much smaller) could change their policies and requirements regarding fees for low volume transactions to remove fixed fees, and the vast majority of the issue with micropayments would be solved. I trust that the major payment gateways and browsers could work out a protocol to make use credit-card based micropayments very quickly and in a way that doesn't require additional third parties, beyond the payment gateway chosen by the person accepting the micropayment.

<comment><USER29> Hear.. hear.. This was one of the original features Marc wanted to add to Mosaic. We're so far past that moment and it's still not to be found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unless this is expanded to enable any site to join the system, one might argue it's creating a special web for a few choosen giant media sites which I guess it's not what mozilla wants for the web.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yeah nice and all.. But it'll be like tv: Even though you pay for the tv service, after a while they will simply put in ads again. The incentives for publishers are simply too tempting.

This is not for me.

</comment><comment><USER32> So a browser with a build in Flattr / Patreon / Liberapay option. Sounds like a good option.

</comment><comment><USER33> Personally, I don't necessarily mind ads, unless intrusive. I mind: \- tracking \- javascript being used everywhere (IMO, for pure viewing, javascript should be optional).

<comment><USER34> That's why I like Adblock Plus, even if many find their position to be highly controversial. i.e. to charge advertisers to be whitelisted as "acceptable ads" if they respect certain criteria.

When left unchecked, advertisers are to websites what kittens are to furniture.

<comment><USER35> You should review your position regarding Adblock Plus. There is nothing on Acceptable Ads that tries to cover if the ad publisher is tracking the user or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Mozilla has to do this to show they're trying. They're not just about getting everything free. It will be good if it works, but it also works for them if

a) no publishers sign up

b) no customers sign up

(as long as they try hard to make it happen).

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone remember Google Contributor back in the day? How does this compare?

</comment><comment><USER38> If you're interested in this, make sure to check out Flattr and install their extension. It tracks your browsing over the course of a month, splits your monthly contribution among participating creators you've visited, and then deletes the collected data. Works for YouTube, domains, Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, and more. You set the monthly budget. [https://flattr.com/contributors](https://flattr.com/contributors)

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a nice idea, but how do you expand it to global scale? Something automated perhaps, but the complexity is overwhelming.

I have no interest in Firefox's initial selection, but I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription to a collection of _my_ local news sites.

How do we go from 5 american "online magazines" to a global network? I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder what an average user generates in terms of ad-revenue per month. You know, the mix of your-favourite-media-provider, your-favourite-news-sites, your-favourite-social-media.

If that's more or less than $14.99, I'd be willing to pay it for an "ad-free" internet. This will never happen, I guess, but just thinking about it...

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm super into this, and I was tempted to sign up immediately. But then I realized I have privacy/tracking concerns; does anyone have a line on what Scroll/Mozilla say on this? I couldn't find anything after a (very shallow) search.

<comment><USER42> I did go to sign up immediately, only to discover this is pure vaporware!

<comment><USER41> Wow it's just a survey. That's so non obvious. Boooo, kind of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> That survey they throw at you if you try to sign up is just complete and utter garbage, and asks you questions that both contradict each other, are in the wrong order, and ask you things you can't possibly have a good answer for at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER44> Signed up.

That said, this is a practical implementation of some patterns that belongs on [https://userinyerface.com/game.html](https://userinyerface.com/game.html) ;-)

<comment><USER8> Did you sign up to be notified or were you able to subscribe to the paid service?

<comment><USER44> To be notified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Everybody is talking about journalists but what about the rest of the web? I regularly read the best opinions and tidbits on forums like hn and blogs. Who is going to fund those?

</comment><comment><USER38> This won't do much good for all the small publishers you visit every day, though. It's only for a select few large publishers.

</comment><comment><USER46> this would be great if it works as advertised! :D

<comment><USER47> It's an MVP. It doesn't have to work.

<comment><USER48> So what does viable mean?

<comment><USER49> It's conceptually viable; it's just not materially viable yet.

In all seriousness, I seem to remember that there was a practice of testing for viability using very similar means – basically, are people interested enough to click through, then collect emails.

So perhaps this is a path to demonstrate viability by questionnaire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> so Firefox will play the gatekeeper role now ?

</comment><comment><USER51> Alternative: [https://launch.blendle.com](https://launch.blendle.com)

</comment><comment><USER52> If they offer free trials so I can evaluate its worth to me personally, maybe I'd try it. Otherwise I'll keep fighting every website I visit with my massive list of ad-blockers and privacy tools. At least the latter option is free. And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I won't do it.

<comment><USER53> > At least the latter option is free.

This is _exactly_ why websites are as bad as they are right now.

> And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I > won't do it.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you want to support an alternative source of funding for content, then this appears to be a great positive step towards an internet without tracking and invasive advertisements, promoted by the only alternative to Google in the browser market.

If you want to take a philosophical stance, you should reject the tracker and leave websites that don't adhere to your strict criteria.

<comment><USER52> Ya I guess my statements were extreme. Probably written late at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> If the same service could be used for paywalled news sites as well, this could be great

<comment><USER8> 4.99 would not even cover the NY Times or WSJ alone.

<comment><USER55> That's because their prices are ridiculously high. Sure, I want access to NY Times. But maybe I'll read 1-2 articles per day. Not the whole damn paper. Same for any other site.

<comment><USER8> Blendle has been offering this service for years, though I believe they recently are backing away from it. I used it for a while several years ago, but I found using small transactions frequently to be very uncomfortable (as in off-putting, not so much inconvenient).

<comment><USER55> I vaguely recall Blendle. And checking, they want ~€2 per article, which is way too much. Consider that a digital subscription to The NY Times costs $250-$500 per year.[0] That's 365 days, with numerous articles published per day. But for argument sake, divide by 5000. That's just $0.05-$0.10 per article.

0) [https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times- subscription-3480](https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480)

<comment><USER8> It was in the range of US$0.25-0.75, when I used it, but wouldn't you expect an a la cart offering to be more expensive than a bundle? The advantage is you dont have to pay that larger full year fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Are you going to get a report each month of where the money went?

</comment><comment><USER57> > This app works best with JavaScript enabled. At least the page seems ad- > free.

</comment><comment><USER58> > This app works best with JavaScript enabled.

</comment><comment><USER59> As others stated, the submitted title of _" Ad-Free Internet by Firefox"_ overstates what this actually is: pay $4.99/month for ad-free experience on a handful of media publishers' websites[1].

(I.e. it's not a universal ad blocker that lets you avoid ads on Youtube.)

The Firefox webpage itself doesn't oversell the feature as _" ad-free internet"_ so not sure why writing a misleading title for HN was necessary.

[1] [https://scroll.com/sites](https://scroll.com/sites)

(Edit to also mention Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, etc -- probably because getting a fraction of $4.99/month is not enough money for them and it competes with their direct digital subscriptions.)

<comment><USER60> It's surely fair to use the page title as the HN link title.

<comment><USER59> Ok, fair enough. Before I wrote my comment, I did perform a "view source" to search for _" ad-free internet"_ and it wasn't found. However, if one uses F12 Developer Tools to inspect the DOM, it does have:

      "<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>"

It's interesting that that phrase is not visibly used and the big bold text people actually see just says _" Support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate"_.

EDIT to the replies: Yep got it. I can't see the title text on any tabs because they're too narrow when I have 50 tabs open.

<comment><USER36> It's the page title. It appears e.g. in the tab heading (but yours may be very small).

<comment><USER61> Mine are also very narrow, but yeah, it's weird that they only set it with JS.

      <title data-react-helmet="true"></title>

is in the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> If only they'd check their pages for typos before posting. (No ending punctuation on the last block of text.)</comment>


Dan Bunten and M.U.L.E.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2013/02/dan-bunten-and-m-u-l-e/ <comment><USER2> It's fun to compete with two or four friends. Typically everyone fights and there's little progress made by anyone. I think it's interesting to control the market and see how many collective points can be achieved by all players. Playing all four players cooperatively, I choose plot installations based on maximizing the plot of land, not out of necessity. I shared food and energy so all four players had some, every turn. Smithore was used to create mules, so I would grab mules, without installations, and drop them in the middle of no where to drive the price up. I can remember in one turn with four players, I could drop a whole pen of 15 mules. Naturally, since I owned all the Smithore and drove the price up, it payed well every turn. Crystite, however, is tricky to figure. I could never determine what drives the price fluctuations with Crystite. Seemed to be random.

Best part of the game, is the auction view. Cool UI. Buyers on the bottom and seller on the top. Moving up and down changes the price as the auction timer ticks away. Every turn, there's a lot of action in the auctions depending on the type of play going on, needs of the other players, and prices of the commodities being traded.

As +fidotron states, it is profoundly brilliant. Please check it out.

<comment><USER3> My friends and I in college had a blast playing it on the C64. One of them would occasionally buy and release mules, more to screw over the other players that wanted to deploy them for production, but I'm sure driving up the price of smithore was also a benefit. Good times.

<comment><USER4> "One of them would occasionally buy and release mules, more to screw over the other players that wanted to deploy them for production"

I believe Apple has even used this approach at various times with memory and displays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know what the protocol is, but she transitioned and was named Danielle Bunten Berry. She died in 1998.

I guess since the article considers a time when she used her male name, I believe most trans people consider their real gender to have been set at birth and would generally prefer to be referred to by their chosen name. Since she's deceased, I prefer her chosen name.

Certainly one of the early pioneers in game development.

<comment><USER6> The protocol by the series author is explained in more detail at [http://www.filfre.net/2013/08/seven-cities-of- gold/](http://www.filfre.net/2013/08/seven-cities-of-gold/) , which I copy here:

> That said, you've surely noticed that I continue to refer to Dani as "Dan" > and "he" in the article above. I understand the logic of those who would say > that Dani was always a woman, merely one who was by an accident of birth > born into a man's body. Certainly this is the argument most advocates for > transsexual rights would make. For myself, I am all for transsexual rights, > but also believe that gender and sexual identity may be more fluid than much > transsexual rhetoric would have it. In the end, I have continued to opt for > clarity and reality as all of Dani's friends and colleagues knew it in the > 1980s: of her being the man Dan Bunten. Referring to "Dani" and "she" in > these articles would be confusing to the reader and at least at some level > anachronistic, opposed to the consensus reality shared by everyone around > her. I understand that this decision may not seem ideal to everyone, and > even that it runs counter to some journalistic style guidelines. If you > disagree with it, I can only ask you to believe me when I say it was made in > good faith, with no intention to slight. For what it's worth, reports are > that post-op Dani was never offended in the least about being referred to as > a man when conversations came around to her years of living as Dan.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this is a guy who says reality is she wasn't a she, which sounds pretty much like transphobia to me.

So, he doesn't get to set protocol.

<comment><USER6> I believe you are reading the text too lightly. "Consensus reality shared by everyone around her" and "reality as all of Dani's friends and colleagues knew it" is an explicit way to say that this was not "reality" but only what people believed was reality in the early 1980s.

I thought I understood what you meant by "set protocol." Now I don't. Could you tell me what it means? Why doesn't he get to set the protocol? (You may disagree with it, but that's different, no?) If not the author, who does? The subject? If the author is correct, then "post-op Dani was never offended in the least about being referred to as a man when conversations came around to her years of living as Dan."

The blog series is a historical progression of the evolution of computer games, with an emphasis on adventure-style games. It tries to place the reader in the context of the times, and include quotes culled from various references. At that time, she was known as the man Dan Bunten.

Consider the quote "(Speakeasy's founder Brian Beninger: "Dan called out of the blue one day and spoke to Toni [Brian's wife]. She had never experienced an accent from the southern United States and had trouble understanding him…")". Should the author rewrite the quote to use "Dani"/"her" instead of "Dan"/"him"?

BTW, are you basing your response only on the first essay and the single quoted paragraph from the second essay I linked to? Because the author goes into more detail which I didn't quote but might be relevant. Based on the paragraph previous to the one I quoted, I believe the author has decided the protocol will be to include a bit of explanation of future events, before settling in on a non-anachronistic telling. For example, Bunten is not the only important trans individual in gaming. Consider [http://www.filfre.net/2014/03/10/](http://www.filfre.net/2014/03/10/) :

> According to Hales, it was he and another of Wolosenko's favorite > programmers, William Mataga, who planted the idea of doing adventure games > in Wolosenko's head in late 1983. (William Mataga had a sex change some > years ago and now lives as Cathryn Mataga. I refer to her by her previous > name and gender in this article only to avoid historical anachronisms.)

I think this is similar to, say, a history of Malcom X which covers the historical period when he was still called by his slave name of Little, or of "many young women [in the feminist movement of the 1960s who] changed their patronyms to more descriptive ones or dropped them altogether", quoting from Jo Freemen's description of her movement name Joreen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't care about Dan Bunten's sexuality any more than I care about President Obama's or a billions long list of other people.

What I do know is that M.U.L.E. Is one of the greatest games I played as a child on my Commodore 64. Unlike many other games of the era, I still have fun playing it when I fire it up in an emulator. Saw in a comment in the site about www.mulereturns.com. Will have to buy that for my kids today.

<comment><USER8> > _I don 't care about Dan Bunten's sexuality any more than I care about > President Obama's or a billions long list of other people._

Then why mention it?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps because the author of OP was flamed in the comments for using the male identity.

See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7929436](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7929436)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I need to just say M.U.L.E. is profoundly brilliant. If you have not played it leave HN now and work out how to do so, play it, then come back. It is one of those games that teaches you about things, in this case economics, brilliantly indirectly.

<comment><USER11> It's been recreated/ported recently to iOS and I think they did a great job: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mule- returns/id629126149](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mule-returns/id629126149)

<comment><USER12> It's a great port, but unfortunately multiplayer isn't yet implemented and "will be coming soon" for almost a year yet.

I haven't given up hope, though. Some of my favorite gaming memories in my family are due to M.U.L.E.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Born in the wrong era, I guess. Today we have the resurgent boardgaming industry embracing innovative designs for social gaming, and in the late '90s, the N64 made 4-player group gaming into a booming genre.

Not to mention the progress with transgendered life.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a OpenGL (3.3+) remake for Linux/OSX available here: [http://www.yousry.de/c-o-o-l-the-game/](http://www.yousry.de/c-o-o-l-the- game/).

Multiplayer mode with up-to four players. Gamepad support and almost original ruleset for auctions. The land exploration is crea

The Linux version is free.

</comment><comment><USER15> M.U.L.E is my one of my all time favourite game of the 80s. It inspired me to dive into technology. It is still impressive even by todays standards.

I am proud to say that I still own a Commodore 64 and my original floppy still works after 30 years. Shocking frankly.

Ironically, my teenage son become so good he can beat me fair and square. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> What an amazing game. I still play it from time to time with my kids. It does teach a lot of things, including a taste for gambling (and not at the pub.) When you learn to hold crystite to wait for a high price, but the pirates haven't hit yet....</comment>


Live Video AMA with Bram from Startup Stash - <AUTHOR> http://talkingnext.io/

<comment><USER2> Can't wait!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear! It just started.</comment></comment>


Show HN : Interesting Words  - <AUTHOR> http://getaninterestingword.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I like interesting words ...

Clicking on the word reveals it's meaning ... and a reload gets another word.

I'm currently working on harvesting various corpora and on different measures of "interesting".

I might add commenting on specific words and submission of words soon.

<comment><USER2> I got xanthippe = ill-tempered woman. Do you suppose she was the real reason that Socrates took the hemlock?

<comment><AUTHOR> she emptied a chamber pot over his head, according to wikipedia.

so, yes ... i don't think he listed her as one of the reasons to not take hemlock.</comment></comment></comment>


Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills <comment><USER2> I've started, to the greatest extent possible and practical, eliminating single-use plastics from my life.

If something comes in either a metal can and and a plastic pouch, even if it is more expensive I'll buy the metal can version.

A glass jar can be recycled or will break down into sand, a metal can can be recycled or turn into rust, a paper or cardboard container may be recyclable and will break down into mush.

A plastic bag or jar is unlikely to be recycled and the polymer chains that it is made up of will remain on earth for a human-scale definition of "forever" slowly breaking down into microscopic pieces that get into the water and are carried by slight breezes.

Hopefully, one day, soon, single-use plastics will be seen as a colossal mistake on par with lead in gasoline, radium clocks, asbestos tiles, and dumping industrial waste into waterways.

Small changes add up. I have a container of yogurt nearly every day. That's ~350 plastic cups into the fake "recycling" stream every year. Last year I started weaning myself off plastics and now make my own yogurt in an Instant Pot. It takes minutes of effort spread over 9 hours. The milk I get comes in a glass jar from a local CSA that reuses the jars when I return them for more milk and then I put the yogurt in mason jars.

20 years from now those mason jars will still be usable and 7,000 plastic cups will have not been consumed, "recycled", shipped to Asia, and burned in open pits.

Please just spend a couple of minutes and think of how you can lower your plastic use.

<comment><USER3> Wish I could upvote this more than once.

Been trying to do this for quite a while, especially since my city has pretty limited garbage service (one can every two weeks).

Online ordering and the plastic air-bubbles (and occasional foam peanuts) are absolutely brutal. Recently saw BetterPackaging.com which is interesting - hopefully more of that in the future.

[https://loopstore.com](https://loopstore.com) also seems to hold some promise

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Plastic recycling is like a horseshoe theory of politics thing. Most of this article could have come from an article actually advocating for landfilling plastic funded by plastics manufacturers who fear recycled plastic as conpetition, but I guess the actual target audience is people who get so angry about the unrecycled or unrecyclable plastics that they go off in the opposite direction and want plastics banned by governments entirely.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some months ago I defended the herbal beverages made with various medicinal plant extracts: Kola Nut, Coca Leaf, root extracts, etc [1]. In that post I spoke of having a 2-Liter bottle of the classic herbal beverage for when it seemed like my blood sugar was getting a little low.

In recent months I've decided that even though the 2L bottles are probably cheaper on a per-ounce basis, my waste 2L bottles were contributing to the plastic problem. I've switched to buying 12 ounce cans, which I open and pour into a glass.

My last purchase of Kola was as boxed 12-packs (no plastic in the packaging, other than possibly in the can liner [2]). I save my cans, and will be taking them to a local salvage yard to be properly recycled.

My trash company supposedly has "single stream" recycling, but I doubt they find all the aluminum cans the waste stream.

In drafting this comment I found a Wired story about the engineering that goes into can production [2]. My cans probably have BPA liners -- "hmm". Maybe I'll buy some Kola nuts and make my own herbal beverage.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670) [2] [https://www.wired.com/2015/03/secret-life-aluminum-can- true-...](https://www.wired.com/2015/03/secret-life-aluminum-can-true-modern- marvel/)</comment>


Why do women live longer than men? - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/why-do-women-live-longer-than-men <comment><USER2> This was interesting:

 _> yet paradoxically, while women have lower mortality rates throughout their life, they also often have higher rates of physical illness, more disability days, more doctor visits, and hospital stays than men do. It seems women do not live longer than men only because they age more slowly, but also because they are more robust when they get sick at any age._

Alternative hypotheses might be that either (for sociological or even physical reasons) that women are more aware when they're unwell so seek help more quickly and/or thoroughly; or that men are equally aware when they're unwell, but are less disposed to seek help?

<comment><USER3> They could also be receiving less social support to seek help and when they do are less likely to be taken serious because of gender stereotyping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article misses the elephant in the room (as if how we store fat has any bearing on it, what a joke); men work dangerous jobs.

> A large majority of occupational deaths occur among men. In one U.S. study, > 93% of deaths on the job involved men,[4] with a death rate approximately 11 > times higher than women. The industries with the highest death rates are > mining, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and construction, all of which > employ more men than women.[5] Deaths of members in the military is > currently above 90% men.[6]

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

<comment><USER5> > This article misses the elephant in the room (as if how we store fat has any > bearing on it, what a joke); men work dangerous jobs.

I doubt it's relevant. In 2011, there were ~5k fatal work injuries, i.e. 0.2% of the 2,5M deaths in the US that year.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality#/media/F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality#/media/File:Selected_occupations_with_high_fatality_rate.png)

[https://www.infoplease.com/us/mortality/deaths-united- states...](https://www.infoplease.com/us/mortality/deaths-united- states-1900-2011)

Update: I'm not saying your job has no effect on your lifespan. It does, but mostly because of the (lack of) money you get from it rather than its dangerosity. Job-related deaths are probably too low to be the cause of the men/women lifespan difference.

<comment><USER6> We're talking about life expectancy, not deaths.

Workplace injuries and stress don't kill you, but they make you die faster.

<comment><USER7> Yes, musculoskeletal injury is very common in manual jobs. But whether it's opiates today or whiskey in the past, the means to combat pain from work related injuries must have a negative effect on lifespan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oddly, I have been assuming this question could be answered by sheer size of men versus women. That is, I would expect that if you looked at the life expectancy of people normalized by height/weight, it would erase differences between men/women.

That said, I can't find any evidence on why I would think that. I'm guessing I'm just going off what we know about dogs, where larger ones don't live as long as smaller ones. And even that is probably much more nuanced than I'm allowing in that short sentence.

<comment><USER9> IIRC human height and life expectancy are negatively correlated due to rare FOXO3 gene which makes people's height shorter and life longer, and there is a Simpson Paradox here: in both groups of people with and without this gene longer height its correlated with longer life.

<comment><USER10> They are negatively correlated. Several studies showed that short people live longer.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/height_and_longevity_the_research_is_clear_being_tall_is_hazardous_to_your.html?via=gdpr- consent)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22582890](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22582890)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The whole "life expectancy" calculation which takes into account infant mortality, death by accident, death by childbirth, death by violence, etc., seems to cloud the issue that most people are more interested in, which is "death by aging".

Do women tend to get older than men? Yes they do, and talking about non-age related causes of death, such as the article does, just confuses the issue. Such a question should ignore non-aging causes of death that skew the statistics such as death in childbirth and infant mortality in earlier eras.

Women often complain that men lose weight easier than they do, and that men don't get cold as easy as women. Both of these point to generally faster metabolisms for men, which I would think would cause men to "burn out" their bodies earlier.

<comment><USER12> A man will generally have more body fat than their female counterpart hence men will not feel the "cold" as easily. I'm not sure that having more body fat than women is a good indication of a higher metabolism.

There are also more healthcare opportunities for women compared to men so I suspect that also plays a part and then there is also the fact that women tend to live less stressful lives than men (choice of occupation) which is probably the biggest contributor to ones own life expectancy.

<comment><USER13> > A man will generally have more body fat than their female counterpart hence > men will not feel the "cold" as easily.

Men have lower typical body fat than women, so you are starting from a wrong assumption.

<comment><USER12> After doing a bit research it does seem to be wrong however not entirely wrong. Body fat for women is also more concentrated in certain areas compared to men which would at least go towards explaining some of the reasons why women feel the cold more easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know I'm just one data point, but everywhere I look, family, friends, women live healthier than men. My father smokes 3 packs a day, drinks, eats at night etc.

Add this to violence, murder rates, great hesitance to go to the doctor by men, higher prison population where you cannot live healthy etc. and you have the explanation ready, no need to look for a biological reason.

Plus, comparing to the other animals doesn't have great significance. Male animals are more aggressive, have to fight for mating and die.

<comment><USER14> Men are, on the whole, also provided much less social support and education in handling negative emotions. So it would be understandable that they would perform more extreme forms of self-medication.

We know that related constructs vary more across cultures (ie - that present variance in the levels of social integration) than between the genders, which suggests that the chief causes of the difference here are more social than biological.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > while women have lower mortality rates throughout their life, they also > often have higher rates of physical illness, more disability days, more > doctor visits, and hospital stays than men do

I wonder how much is this due to the fact that women are more ill or the fact that men don't go to the doctor even if they have to.

</comment><comment><USER15> Different levels of hormones, such as more testosterone in men than in women can contribute to the differences in life expectancy.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. Castration seems to be a ticket to a long life. [http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/25/do-eunuchs-really- live...](http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/25/do-eunuchs-really-live- longer/):

 _"A recent study published in the journal Current Biology finds that Korean eunuchs — castrated men — lived 14 to 19 years longer than other men,

[…]

The authors think the men's long lives can't be chalked up solely to a privileged lifestyle"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Weird that there is no mention of reduction in mortality in childbirth.

<comment><USER17> Actually, there is? It explicitly draws from and links back to a seperate post on child mortality also [https://ourworldindata.org/child- mortality](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality)

<comment><USER6> I'm talking mothers dying in childbirth. 600/100,000 births in the early 20th century killed the mother. Now it's something like 15/100,000 in the US.

<comment><USER8> That would account for why men used to have longer lifespans than women. Doesn't seem to give any indicator for the opposite, though. Right?

That is, this would easily explain why women have had a better increase in their expected life span. It would not seem to give any reason for them to have a longer one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It will be interesting to see the differences as the various cohorts of women currently in workforce age. A lot of 25yo women are hard drinking, hard living just like particular men in similar occupations.

Workplace stress and less than optimal coping strategies will cause interesting rebalancing. It may well be that in 20-30 years women's life expectancy will decrease.

</comment><comment><USER19> Biology, suicide rates, risk seeking behaviour, women have higher health awareness and better adherence to treatment

<comment><USER7> Is that health awareness and adherence learned behaviour though? Men have precisely zero need for healthcare until something goes wrong, but women have various screening programmes as well as contraceptive and maternity/children needs, among other things. This keeps them in regular contact with the healthcare system - where they can be offered unrelated services and advice - throughout their lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How can we have a productive discussion about why women live longer than men when the most common cause of death before old age in men is suicide?

Here is a data question, how does the average life span change if you remove suicide as a factor for both women and men? All the other factors that the article hints to like hormones, biology, smoking habits, animal studying, and so on are interesting but unless one address the most common cause of early death then this seem a bit dishonest.

It also seems odd of the article to not acknowledge attributes that is correlated with long life span. A large social network, having people around you at old age, good mental health and stress treatments. Those all have sex difference in outcomes and are highly connected to life spans, but completely missing from the article.

</comment><comment><USER20> one would think men have more dangerous jobs -look how many women soldiers, firemen, policemen etc there are

also women are more responsible regarding their health and prevention than men

<comment><USER21> And the majority of homeless are men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My wife eats a lot better than I do, for one thing.

<comment><USER23> Relevant comic strip: [https://encrypted- tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTMiSMU...](https://encrypted- tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTMiSMUCFXYvysT8QHb75C1sWOOzt9rrLqtld6t5cx8RdaCz34W)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Women have easier lives than men. 99% of lower paying dangerous jobs are done by men. 99% of homeless people are men. The glass floor is just as significant as the glass ceiling for women. It's always an option for a woman to get married and live a life being supported by someone. Hence, less stress and less danger.

I'm sure there's other biological reasons but I think statistically over large populations that's probably why.

<comment><USER24> Your stats are quite simply wrong. Those 99% figures are not remotely true.

<comment><USER21> Sorry those stats were just to make point. You guys cant google?

93% of occupational deaths are men. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality)

60% of homeless are male. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States)</comment></comment></comment>


FAA Issues Boeing 737 AOA Directive After Lion Air Crash - <AUTHOR> https://www.aviationtoday.com/2018/11/07/faa-issues-boeing-737-aoa-directive-amid-lion-air-crash/ <comment><USER2> I think one of the bigger issues that isn't being addressed is the current up and coming pilots don't have the basic pilot skills to overcome the systems when they fail. Flying has become so automated, that a pilot is only required to fly on take off and landing, and even landings are optional on a lot of planes now.

When one is confronted with a lack of control caused by those systems, and having been so removed from general flying that they end up panicking and crashing.

It's such a deal that the FAA is reviewing flight training because Airline pilots are struggling with even the basics such as go arounds and stall recovery.

Below is an article about the FAA's struggles[1]. And an article about how most pilots couldn't actually pull off a Sully type landing[2].

[https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/industry- sounds-w...](https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/industry-sounds- warnings-on-airline-pilot-skills-352727/)

[https://nymag.com/news/features/53788/index1.html](https://nymag.com/news/features/53788/index1.html)

<comment><USER3> This is somewhat being compounded/driven by the pilot shortage/crunch in the aviation industry. Typical costs for becoming a pilot are high and the immediate returns are low. Sure if you become a senior Captain with a major airline like United you can make good money, but before you get there you start by flying for a regional making as low as $20k a year:

[https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2016/03/09/america-is- run...](https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2016/03/09/america-is-running-out- of-people-to-fly-its-planes)

And if you are facing student loans that is a wringer.

So now that airlines are expanding, the majors are having trouble finding experienced or qualified pilots since many people forgo pursuing it as a career.

For high growth markets, like Asia, they have resorted to lowering license requirements with things like the Multi-crew Pilot License (MPL) which is all sorts of alarming (remember when that Asiana flight crashed on landing in SFO?).

<comment><USER4> Also I understand pilots are discouraged from taking risk when flying a small private plane on their free time as it could hurt their professional license. But on the other hands that's the sort of experience that becomes handy in those catastrophic failure scenarios.

<comment><USER5> How does this work? I can see how it might look bad if they had an incident bad enough to report to the FAA. But what kind of "risky" flying is safe enough that pilots should try it, yet runs a substantial risk of having reportable incidents?

<comment><USER6> Practicing very slow landings, or power-assisted landings, would fall into this category. There's a wide range of marginally legal behavior such as low flight, back country flying, or even gliding, that might serve a stick-and- rudder pilot well yet if a concern is raised either because of an accident or because of an ATC or pedestrian concern would result in action on a pilot's license and subsequent additional explaining to airline HR.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that's a thing - PPL holders are supposed to be able to demonstrate flapless, partial power and glide (no power) approaches; plus low- level navigation. CPLs do more advanced (harder) versions of the same - it's part of most training curriculums and is tested on during exams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An earlier article called out poor maintenance at Lion. Here we have:

>... airspeed indicator had been malfunctioning on four consecutive flights prior to the crash ...

</comment><comment><USER9> As a non-pilot, I'm surprised that a malfunctioning trim system could cause a crash unless it happened close to ground. When I hear "trim", I'm imagining minor control surface adjustments that the pilot can easily override with his control stick.

Does it take significant effort to overcome trim? Or does a bad AOA sensor add to pilot confusing during recovery?

<comment><USER10> On a 737, trim adjusts the pitch of the entire horizontal stabilizer. As such, in the extreme, it actually has more control over pitch than the elevator (which is controlled by the pilot's yoke). If the trim runs out to the limit, and the pilot doesn't correct it, the elevator does not have enough authority to override the trim.

<comment><USER11> Do you have a source for this claim? Two different comments in this thread are stating opposite claims

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18409562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18409562)

<comment><USER10> This explains a bit about how the THS works: [https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Trimmable_Horizontal_Sta...](https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Trimmable_Horizontal_Stabiliser)

The Rostov-on-Don crash in 2016 appears to have been caused by downwards trimming for 12 seconds. This caused a -1g dive from which the pilots were unable to recover. It's inconceivable they wouldn't have been attempting to pull up with the elevator. You can't not notice -1g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flydubai_Flight_981](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flydubai_Flight_981)

Now the final report is not out yet, so it's not clear if the downwards trim was somehow manual (which doesn't really make any sense), or a similar problem to the Lion Air crash. Either way, it's worried Boeing and the FAA enough to issue this AD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know nothing in this space, but why can't the AoA sensors be fixed / replaced to not generate the bad data that apparently is causing the FCC to generate the Jose down conditions? It seems strange that it sounds like a hardware problem thats being addressed by changing text in a manual. To me that sounds like telling a driver with a flat tire to just steer opposite of it so the car stays straight instead of replacing the tire.

</comment><comment><USER13> An erroneous Angle Of Attack sensor would not be the cause of a crash (though stated as so in this article) - it could certainly be a contributing factor. The aircraft, from the public evidence so far, was still flyable.

<comment><USER14> If I'm reading this correctly, that sensor fed into computer which was automatically controlling trim settings. If that's the case, an erroneous reading could change how the plane flies dramatically.

IANAP ... please correct me if I'm wrong here.

<comment><USER13> The trim system on this aircraft is not stronger than the input the pilot can make via the pitch control system (the yoke and its trim override switch)

Edit: clarified about switch

<comment><USER15> Is that an and or an or? Would the yoke have avoided the crash by itself with enough applied force, or did the pilots also need to determine that the aircraft was trimming itself incorrectly and do something special to disconnect that? Seems like they didn't do that, in either case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>