Why are people modding Thomas the Tank Engine into video games? - <AUTHOR> https://theface.com/culture/why-are-people-modding-thomas-the-tank-engine-into-video-games <comment><USER2> It's nothing more than an on going meme. However the Thomas the Tank Engine meme has survived and been thriving for many years now, much longer than most others of the same type do. Look back at the days of left for dead, people modded all types of characters like the telletubbies and even Hank from King of the Hill into the game. Thomas has a lot of lore and history surrounding it. Notably the "It was time for him to leave, for Thomas had now seen everything" meme. There really isn't a one sentence explanation for it, it's just a part of the meme culture surrounding these types of shows that is very tedious to explain. It's something you grow into, it would be very difficult to understand this if you had no idea or understanding of why these cultures exist.

<comment><USER3> Barney being modded into Doom was the earliest joke mod I remember.

<comment><USER4> That was an extremely satisfying mod for someone who got dragged into subbing at a early childhood center when they ran out of staff. That damn purple thing singing is still burned into my memory.

<comment><USER5> I don't remember that particular mod. I do remember playing Barneysplat![1] on one of the local BBS's I frequented though. It was pretty satisfying for a text-only experience.

[1]: [https://www.mobygames.com/game/barneysplat](https://www.mobygames.com/game/barneysplat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think partially because the modders don't have to animate walk cycles and limbs moving, the train is mostly static. Also it's the contrast between horror and Thomas's squeaky clean branding.

<comment><USER7> There's an undercurrent of existential horror entirely intrinsic to Thomas the Tank engine which _already_ contrasts with the superficially happy and brightly-colored children's show. Putting Thomas in incongruous or unsettling situations throws this into sharp relief. Just what _is_ Thomas?

tl;dr trains with faces are creepy

<comment><USER8> [https://youtu.be/iO6qIM2WO6k?t=185](https://youtu.be/iO6qIM2WO6k?t=185)

[https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sad_Story_of_Henry](https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sad_Story_of_Henry)

This particular episode horrifies me; I feel like kids will grow up and as adults, look back on this and wonder how they didn't realize how dark it was, much like I do with some parts of things like The Brave Little Toaster.

<comment><USER9> Wow... that's really somber

<comment><USER10> The clue is at the end

"But I think he deserved his punishment. Don't you?"

<comment><USER9> I don't, no. Solitary confinement for life is cruel and unusual punishment. Plus some public ridicule, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Touched on in the article, but some of the storylines are quite disturbing.

In Henry, Henry doesn't want to spoil his paint in the rain, so hides in a tunnel. The Fat Controller then bricks him up in the tunnel.

The Fat Controller. The big tender engines "refuse to shunt like common tank engines"[1]. So the Fat Controller locks them up whilst the tank engines break the strike.

Theres a strange plot point, maybe in The Diesel, where Daisy, one of the very few 'female' trains, 'feels something between her axels', which turns out to be an oil leak, might be reading too much into that though...

[1] Yes that's a direct quote from a Thomas the Tank Engine book, from memory, on HN. Am I 'leet' yet?

<comment><USER12> In Henry's Sneeze in one of the early books there was a line about soot covered boys running away as black as n __ __*s [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_the_Green_Engine#Racism_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_the_Green_Engine#Racism_allegation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you've been a parent, half in a daze, overtired, seeing insipid Thomas on TV and hoping - or fearing - it will amuse a toddler while you doze, you'll understand. Getting to fight him in a familiar game is a bossfight of a different sort.

</comment><comment><USER14> People are doing this because they are excited beyond themselves about the next re-skin of Call of Duty 19 or whatever. It's like a virtual graffiti made by bored hackers.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Skyrim one is amazing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNaTZV8qS1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNaTZV8qS1I)

</comment><comment><USER16> And let's not forget that Thomas the Train appeared in a marvel movie (Ant Man): [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cq8EXbY3xXk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cq8EXbY3xXk)

There's something to be said for the juxtapositioning of Thomas' face in darker settings.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not just games - the Oigawa Railway company in Japan does this in real life:

[http://oigawa-railway.co.jp/en/thomas.html](http://oigawa- railway.co.jp/en/thomas.html)

<comment><USER18> because of overwhelming prevalence of 2chan and nico nico douga(a lot of which is replicated on US/korean/russian social networks either directly or via homage), the Japanese are very clued into the popularity of media in digital culture.

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The real life Thomas the Tank Engine is keeping the model railway business alive in the UK. The hobby of model railways is only for 70+ year old retired men with money, it isn't of great appeal to anyone younger. Part of the problem is that a model railway now has to be 'photorealistic' and period accurate. It isn't just 'playing trains', it is historical recreation in miniature. A normal loco is going to cost well upwards of £100 and not be affordable to someone on pocket money, particularly if they want a rake of coaches too.

Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends make it possible to have a train set that doesn't have to be finely modelled. The track doesn't require any scenery and the railway actually can be for 'playing trains'. Costs don't have to be high and Thomas, on a basic oval with a couple of carriages can be £50 affordable and robust.

Model trains are not a global franchise except for when it comes to Thomas the Tank Engine. Nobody outside the UK wants a 'Flying Scotsman' train set as it is a British train that never made it onto the wider European network or further afield. Equally, nobody in the UK wants a Union Pacific 4014 'Big Boy' even if people in the US are going crazy for that recently refurbished 'prototype' right now.

Thomas is therefore not stuck to just the UK. Cheap plastic Thomas the Tank Engine models can be sold all around the world. He isn't even particularly gender stereotyped, a parent can buy Thomas the Tank Engine train set for a daughter, although this is unlikely. Although easy to dismiss, Thomas the Tank Engine is a vital gateway drug for keeping model railways as an option in toy shops and their online counterparts. Without him model trains would have gone the way of so many other historical toys.

What the world really needs are some scale model accessories borrowed from video game franchises for the train set.

<comment><USER21> > Nobody outside the UK wants a 'Flying Scotsman' train set as it is a British > train that never made it onto the wider European network or further afield.

Your point is broadly correct, but I think you chose the wrong example. The Flying Scotsman extensively toured the US, Canada and Australia.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A3_4472_Flying_Scot...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A3_4472_Flying_Scotsman)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for that. Seems that The Flying Scotsman locomotive was built for a life of promotional touring.

Didn't know the Flying Scotsman went on a post-retirement tour and I find it typical that the PM of the day thought this relic could be good for promoting British exports. Who would have wanted some outmoded, expensive lump of iron?

This was a time when Concorde was being built, you would have thought UK Plc would have had better goodies than The Flying Scotsman to send off to America.

Different things happen when objects get to be in museum world. If anything there is to learn from the story is the importance of getting stuff into 'museum world', then there are the collaborations, tours and opportunities to shift the merchandise.

I wonder how well the marketing and tour would have gone had 4477 'Gay Crusader' been the one to be spared of its fate on Barry Island (where all trains went to die).

What is also interesting is that the service was called 'The Flying Scotsman'. Yet most people would be quite insistent that it is the locomotive, not the service that the name refers to. I wonder why this is not something done a bit more extensively today. There is no single loco that is synonymous with the channel tunnel service. They could have one 'poster child' loco and make it sound special, to market channel tunnel trips a bit more 'romantically' than how it is done currently with faceless no-name locos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm partial to Macho Mod Randy Savage, myself.

<comment><USER23> I came here to say the same. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omT0PaXYpIE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omT0PaXYpIE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very appropriate domain name to answer the question.

Thomas' face, particularly his expression, is what makes these mods amusing.

</comment><comment><USER25> I suspect some of these mods are used to create fan versions of Thomas videos. My son watches them on YouTube and while I suppose they aren't considered commercial usage, they can generate millions of views, which could be resulting in substantial YT partner income.

</comment><comment><USER26> Related. It's the similar juxtaposition you see with Thomas in horror. But it's the other way around.

[https://youtu.be/IjfwNwyhzXQ](https://youtu.be/IjfwNwyhzXQ)

</comment><comment><USER27> Tldr: it's funny and started with a random happenstance

<comment><USER28> Yeah but the third video is simultaneously hilarious and genuinely terrifying in a kind of weird way - it definitely captures the fear of unstoppable inevitability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can't tell if this article is a joke or not

</comment><comment><USER30> Hey look, Normies found are memes and are analyzing them.</comment>


Kestrel: Twitter's new message queue, written in 1500 lines of Scala - <AUTHOR> http://robey.lag.net/2008/11/27/scarling-to-kestrel.html <comment><USER2> This sounds great. Right now I'm just using Amazon SQS, which lacks the "blocking fetches" like Starling did. It's probably not feasible to have something similar in SQS due to the distributed nature, but it would be nice, especially for low traffic queues. The vast majority of our SQS requests don't return a message.

They use 0.25 seconds as an example timeout, but I wonder if there's any reason it couldn't be something much higher?

<comment><USER3> well, it's holding on to an active connection during that timeout, right? if it were much higher, you could quickly eat up all your available connections. on the flip side, for something low traffic that may not be an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I have being using starling for a private project on my own and it is quite a good piece of software. Somewhere, I think perphaps in the project page it was repported to be able to cope with >=4000 msg/sec.

It seems Twitter has gone over 4000msg/s now :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> this is awesome... i'm switching over from Starling sometime this week I think.</comment>


Ask HN: what are some software technologies which have come and gone away? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to list various web/software technologies which have gone extinct over the years (think Microsoft's Clippy, Swatch's .beat time, abusing imagemaps in web design, etc.).
What do you think were the most interesting technologies or concepts which didn't survive the test of time?
Note: I'm not really interested in hardware related things, so please don't diverge on the topic of typewriters, alarm clocks or pay phones. <comment><USER2> The peer to peer internet didn't survive. NAT ruined it, and now nobody has an expectation of connecting directly to another machine thats not set up for the sole purpose of hosting services.

Based on what people say in the IPv6 threads, I don't think people realize what we've lost.

</comment><comment><USER3> VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML>

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has a page listing all HTML elements. The non-standard, obsolete, or deprecated ones are dimmed:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element>

</comment><comment><USER4> S-HTTP was pitched as an alternative to SSL but died very quickly as neither MSIE nor Netscape Navigator supported it. My memory is fuzzy about it now but I recall one of the "advantages" being that you could selectively encrypt portions of a page. I also recall it being very convoluted to set up and maintain vs. encrypt everything over port 443.

</comment><comment><USER5> Applets.

Shockwave.

jQuery made low-level DOM manipulation more or less obsolete.

So much of server side Java has been abandon for more lightweight alternatives that don't suffer from XMLitis and layers and layers of abstraction.

<comment><USER6> Sadly, very sadly, there is more server side Java code written each day than Ruby, Django, Node combined (I know, citation needed, don't have one, call it a hunch). Think of all the enterprise businesses, banks, corporations, insurance companies, wall street, healthcare IT, RCM, ERP etc - all the enterprise world still runs Spring, Hibernate, JSF, etc. So it might not be popular in Silicon Valley, but open the jobs at indeed / linked in, you'll be pretty much shocked how small is the RoR/Django/Node SV world compared to all the other poor fellas doing jar hell. But even if you look at the startup world, JVM shops are not completely gone, Google is doing lot's of Java, so do VMWare, Twitter, Foursquare etc. So as opposed to Applets , server side EJBs, ESBs, AbstractFactorySingletonBeanFilters have not gone away (yet) and will stay for longer than COBOL code probably (that runs your ATM)

But to your question, I would add to the list:

XML Data Islands [1]

JavaFX [2]

Silverlight (in 2020) [3]

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms76...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms766512\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[2] [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index.html)

[3] [http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on- silverli...](http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-giving-up-on-silverlight- joining-html5-party/)

<comment><USER7> JVM shops don't only do Java. They also do Clojure and Scala and Groovy. Grails is a Rails-like framework for Groovy on the JVM. And there is also a lot of Ruby running on the JVM in addition to Python and even PHP.

In fact, if you need to integrate legacy Java applications with newer non-Java stuff, it is easiest to do it with Scala or Clojure so that you can continue using the same libraries. And if you want to get completely away from old- school Java and use the newest and most innovative languages, chances are that you will be using Scala with Akka on the JVM, or Clojure on the JVM.

There is still good stuff that is outside the JVM or .NET worlds, such as Python, but the idea of an ecosystem built around a bytecode vm is very powerful and has a long life ahead of it, particularly the JVM and .NET.

<comment><USER8> But the above point still stands. In silicon valley, sure, some people are writing on top of the JVM using Scala, Clojure, Jython and every other cool JVM based language around, but in the real world you'll find a lot of people are still using straight-up Java, and they're happy with it!

Java will always dominate, mainly because every single year the workforce is flooded with graduates that have been taught CS using Java, mostly because they want to keep their employment stats up and Java is where the jobs are. Some universities in the UK also use C# on occasion because .NET is quite strong in agencies.

Your point is absolutely correct, but I cannot see companies in the real world switching from Java to another language on the JVM without a genuine business benefit for doing so. I also think it will be a while until people stop writing new projects in Java, because so many people graduate knowing mostly (sometimes only) Java.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Whole Foods is tracking and scoring stores it deems at risk of unionizing - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com.au/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1 <comment><USER2> _" We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship"_ [lengthy justification] _" is best."_

OK so if it's not the employees, I'd like to know, in the universe of this quote, what people or entities are promoting a union and creating this "risk" of uninionization? Out of this whole story this is the most disingenuous bit that annoys me the most. If the majority of employees were against the union, they would stop it themselves without company help, wouldn't they? Still, it's very generous of them to look out for employee interests like that, large eyeroll.

<comment><USER3> That seems to be the crux of the issue. If management was great, and everyone loved their wages a union wouldn't be alluring. Since corporate management is the default union.

<comment><USER4> > corporate management is the default union

Such a great way of saying it. Also the quote from the original comment:

> "We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct > relationship" [lengthy justification] "is best."

With 'direct relationship', they mean: unmoderated control over employees through corporate management

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strange that companies would rather invest in fighting unionization than actually raise the work standards, and treatment of their employees.

<comment><USER6> Not strange. It's cheaper to bust the union and fire those involved, and pay out for the ensuing lawsuits (whether just to lawyers or lawyers + settlement) than to pay higher wages and provide better benefits. Or at least, that's what they think, and I'm sure someone has done some sort of math to validate this course of action (whether or not it's correct).

And companies rarely care about their employees or anything other than profit / bonuses they get from that profit.

<comment><USER7> The big advantage of not having to deal with unions is being able to quickly make changes in reaction to changing market conditions.

<comment><USER8> > The big advantage of not having to deal with unions is being able to quickly > make changes in reaction to changing market conditions.

You could say similar things about authoritarian governmental forms. Like democracy, unions give a bigger seat at the decision-making table to stakeholders outside of privileged leadership classes.

<comment><USER9> >>>Like democracy,

Well that is 100% not true. Democracy in no way gives the people a voice, many many studies have proven this.

>>unions give a bigger seat at the decision-making table to stakeholders outside of privileged leadership classes.

In theory that is true, but that largely depends on the size of the union, and the size of the company the union is negotiating with. I have seen more than a few companies put completely under by unions that believed the economic health of the company was better than it really was and those "privileged leadership classes. " that you clearly have a disdain for was just out to "get the workers". The conflict lead to an economically unsustainable business

<comment><USER8> > Well that is 100% not true. Democracy in no way gives the people a voice, > many many studies have proven this.

Citation most certainly needed. While democracy is admittedly imperfect, it sounds like you're claiming that citizens of democracies have no more political voice than those of authoritarian countries like the PRC or North Korea, which is obviously false.

The only plausible theory that supports your claim is that all decisions in democracies are made to benefit some corporate/financial elite, but the election of Trump rather than Clinton (which _none_ of these elite groups wanted) is pretty strong and straightforward evidence against that.

> I have seen more than a few companies put completely under by unions that > believed the economic health of the company was better than it really was > and those "privileged leadership classes. " that you clearly have a disdain > for was just out to "get the workers". The conflict lead to an economically > unsustainable business

Maybe it was true _that_ union was wrong in _that_ case (your story is _far_ too vague to verify), however it's plausible other unions were right in other, similar cases. Typically, management's priority is to be as generous as possible to the shareholders, not the workers.

> "privileged leadership classes. " that you clearly have a disdain for

My comment was a pretty straightforward observation that people with power tend to make decisions that benefit themselves, tend put far less weight on the interests of those without the political power to influence them, and a solution is to spread political power more widely. How exactly did you jump to that conclusion that I have "disdain" for "leadership classes"? You're reading in emotions that aren't there, and if you're going to to that, you're not worth talking to.

<comment><USER9> >Citation most certainly needed.

One of the More Recent and referenced ones I am aware of

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- poli...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups- and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B)

They basically show that public desire over a given law has almost no impact on the probability of that issue being passed, and inversely public dissent on a given law has almost not impact on the probability of that law failing to pass.

>it sounds like you're claiming that citizens of democracies have no more political voice than those of authoritarian countries like the PRC or North Korea, which is obviously false.

Is it obviously false? The current situation shows that democratic governments are more than capable of exerting Authoritarian control over society, sure you will argue that it is a "good reason" right now due to pandemic, but the fact this control is even possible shows where the power is, and how little freedom people really have. If people in a democracy were really free what control we see today would not even be possible. It is but with the grace and consent of the government do people have freedom. That is inverse of how it is suppose to be, where by the government is formed on the consent of the governed.

When we have teenagers in Wisconsin being threaten with arrest for disorderly conduct for an Instagram post I think we can safely say we have transitioned into an Authoritarian form of governance, that is just one of 1000's of examples I can cite

> How exactly did you jump to that conclusion that I have "disdain" for > "leadership classes"? You're reading in emotions that aren't there

I did jump to an assumption based on past experiences here on HN and the context around your comments.

<comment><USER8> > They basically show that public desire over a given law has almost no impact > on the probability of that issue being passed, and inversely public dissent > on a given law has almost not impact on the probability of that law failing > to pass.

I read the abstract, and that doesn't seem to contradict what I said, which was "...democracy, ...give[s] a bigger seat at the decision-making table to stakeholders outside of privileged leadership classes." I didn't say it'd _always_ give the people the biggest seat, just a _bigger_ one than they'd have otherwise. Furthermore, even if that study is correct, it would have a big blind-spot, since I can't imagine that it covers policy that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests" would want but was never pursued by the government because it would be so contrary to public desire (and thus would never show up in any empirical data set). It's quite plausible that elite/business interests dominate certain areas of policy most of the time (probably the smaller and more technical types), but are overridden occasionally but in a big way by the public when it comes to certain large policy changes.

>> it sounds like you're claiming that citizens of democracies have no more political voice than those of authoritarian countries like the PRC or North Korea, which is obviously false.

> Is it obviously false? The current situation shows that democratic > governments are more than capable of exerting Authoritarian control over > society, sure you will argue that it is a "good reason" right now due to > pandemic, but the fact this control is even possible shows where the power > is, and how little freedom people really have.

Yes. I, a member of the public, along with many others fully support stay-at- home orders, etc. Democracy doesn't mean every citizen gets to do whatever dumb thing they get it in their head to do because "freedom."

> I did jump to an assumption based on past experiences here on HN and the > context around your comments.

Don't do that, please.

<comment><USER9> >>Yes. I, a member of the public, along with many others fully support stay- at-home orders, etc. Democracy doesn't mean every citizen gets to do whatever dumb thing they get it in their head to do because "freedom."

so do you support 100% of every measure, every state government has taken, or is that just a board support over closing the entire economy and putting millions out of work?

Do believe there are any limits on government in a time or crisis, or more to the topic at hand do you believe in any limits on democracy or just pure 50.1% can tell the 49.9% what to do?

I will admit I am not a strong supporter of pure democracy, I do prefer Constitutional Republics with strong protections for the minority from the excesses of the majority, the minority being the individual.

History has shown the majority can not be trusted to rule over others any more than dictators can

>Democracy doesn't mean every citizen gets to do whatever dumb thing they get it in their head to do because "freedom."

In a free society you can as that "dumb thing" is not directly, and provably a danger to others, and there is some libertarian arguments for for some of the stay at home orders. However many of them have gone well beyond public protection and are a clear power grab and should be unconstitutional and are a clear violation of natural human rights

But the prevailing opinion by the "majority" in this democracy is that your rights end when the crisis begins, meaning you have no rights at all, because in times of crisis is when you need your rights more than ever, right scan not and should not be "suspended" because of crisis, if they can they are not rights at all but privileges

Of-course a democracy does not have to be a free society, most people associate democracy with freedom though

<comment><USER8> > so do you support 100% of every measure, every state government has taken, > or is that just a board support over closing the entire economy and putting > millions out of work?

Who knows? That's a pretty overbroad corpus of material you're citing. That said, I'm pretty comfortable with the state-level responses so far, given the federal government response has been so inept that it required such drastic corrective measures from the states. It would be insane to knowingly choose to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands on the altar of the economy.

> Do [you] believe there are any limits on government in a time or crisis, or > more to the topic at hand do you believe in any limits on democracy or just > pure 50.1% can tell the 49.9% what to do?

There are, but those limits also cannot be understood to require a dysfunctional response to a crisis. Ultimately, the government has to be able to do the _reasonable_ thing. And yes, "reasonable" is something that requires judgement and often cannot be mechanically predefined.

> I will admit I am not a strong supporter of pure democracy, I do prefer > Constitutional Republics with strong protections for the minority from the > excesses of the majority, the minority being the individual.

It's pretty clear that we haven't been talking about some fantasy unchecked majoritarian direct democracy, so it's a bit of a straw man to start injecting that in.

> In a free society you can as that "dumb thing" is not directly, and provably > a danger to others, and there is some libertarian arguments for for some of > the stay at home orders. However many of them have gone well beyond public > protection and are a clear power grab and should be unconstitutional and are > a clear violation of natural human rights

Eh, I disagree. Also those arguments that the government should only be able to order confirmed cases to stay home are pretty unreasonable, given the fact of asymptomatic carriers and woefully inadequate testing capability.

> But the prevailing opinion by the "majority" in this democracy is that your > rights end when the crisis begins, meaning you have no rights at all, > because in times of crisis is when you need your rights more than ever, > right scan not and should not be "suspended" because of crisis, if they can > they are not rights at all but privileges

See that's where you're misunderstanding things. Those rights are meaningless if the system that secures them is so rigid that it invites total rejection. You're right that a crisis can be a risky time, but fundamentalism is not necessarily the safest response.

<comment><USER9> >>on the altar of the economy.

Well that tells me some of my earlier assumption are infact going to end up being correct in that your political and economic positions lean pretty close to Authoritarian Socialism vs my Libertarian Free Market views

I completely reject this idea that the economy should be ignored in a time of crisis, and I also believe that if the lock down extends beyond the 2nd week of may the actual death rate due to economic loss will be higher than that of the virus. Unemployment does direct cause death, both due to increase rates of suscide, property crime, homelessness and other conditions.

This idea that the economy is some religion that we want to " sacrifice people lives on" is a completely disingenuous comment and appears you are the one making assumptions now about my beliefs

I think there was and is a better way to handle pandemics. Better than simply shutting down the entire economy, locking people in their homes, putting millions out for work, shutting permanently thousands of business, destroying Families, etc all the while expecting fiat currency printing and debt to get us through.

The economy does matter, livelihoods do matter, that is not a alter for people to be sacrifice on, it is reality. Ignore it at your own peril. I suspect given the general user base on HN, that your job (like mine) is insulated from the economic effects of this, I may see a 4-8% reduction in income this year over last. Where we differ is I recognize that not everyone is as lucky as I am, I am not about to scream "let me eat cake" and ignore their economic hardship like you seem to be able to do easily

<comment><USER8> > Well that tells me some of my earlier assumption are infact going to end up > being correct in that your political and economic positions lean pretty > close to Authoritarian Socialism vs my Libertarian Free Market views

LOL! You're funny!

> I think there was and is a better way to handle pandemics. Better than > simply shutting down the entire economy, locking people in their homes, > putting millions out for work, shutting permanently thousands of business, > destroying Families, etc all the while expecting fiat currency printing and > debt to get us through.

There could have been, but many groups without foresight worked to fuck it up. You can thank them for your stay at home order, which is now necessary and reasonable:

How Tea Party Budget Battles Left the National Emergency Medical Stockpile Unprepared for Coronavirus ([https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency- medical-stoc...](https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency-medical- stockpile-funding-unprepared-coronavirus))

The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed. ([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus- us-v...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us- ventilator-shortage.html))

> Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they > suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a > cheaper product that would undermine Covidien's profits from its existing > ventilator business.... In 2014 ... Covidien executives told officials at > the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, > according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that > it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.

Before Trump's inauguration, a warning: 'The worst influenza pandemic since 1918' ([https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/trump- inauguration-...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/trump-inauguration- warning-scenario-pandemic-132797))

'It's Just Everywhere Already': How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response ([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus- testing-de...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing- delays.html))

Not to mention the inept response and denialism at the federal level that wasted the lead time the US could have used to prepare for this pandemic, and that have continued to the present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a friend who worked for a union supermarket chain. It went bankrupt as it had trouble competing with non-union chains like Whole Foods who pay their staff half of the old chains but somehow get a reputation for treating employees well. It would be good to know which stores are union and which ones aren't because it isn't obvious.

<comment><USER11> Meanwhile Safeway and Kroger are both unionized and seem to be doing just fine. Unions alone aren't the issue, though it can definitely be a cost. I wish everything in the US wasn't a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER12> Keep in mind that Amazon pays their blue collar workers far more than Kroger/Safeway

<comment><USER13> Amazon: $12.71 avg. [https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Cashier/Hourly_Rate...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Cashier/Hourly_Rate/f872cd2e/Whole- Foods-Market-Inc).

Kroger: $8.93 avg. [https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Cashier/Hourly_Rate...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Cashier/Hourly_Rate/9b7eed77/The- Kroger-Company)

<comment><USER14> Looks like they are being paid roughly 42% more hourly.

I had no idea until now, but with this in mind, I imagine unionization at Amazon will be an incredibly hard sell that is unlikely to happen unless that 42% gap shrinks significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sometimes I wonder if we will ever reach the point at which the people that Amazon would never employ combined with the people who would never agree to be employed by Amazon leaves them with fewer people than they need.

<comment><USER16> Amazon makes the front page because of a variety of reasons, but there are thousands of large employers that are worse in every way. We have a loooong way to go before Amazon's policies are an actual disqualifier for people who work these jobs. Walmart is still training employees on how to file for public assistance. Many large chains still won't employ you based on your sexual orientation. So many small and large employers steal wages, deny benefits, pay under the table and more. All of that and unemployment is hitting record numbers right now.

<comment><USER17> > Walmart is still training employees on how to file for public assistance.

Out of curiosity what is wrong with this? It seems akin to e.g. my employer providing Deloitte tax consultation as a benefit.

<comment><USER18> Imagine my business is feeding wood into chipping machines, and I train every employee in how to apply a tourniquet if they chop their own hand off.

For an employer with a great safety record, that would be slightly unusual, but safety training covers the unlikely all the time. Nothing wrong with that!

On the other hand if three of the hundred guys I employ have lost a hand, the same training takes on a completely different tone: It would evince an acceptance the same accidents will happen again, and an unwillingness to improve safety.

<comment><USER17> Presumably, prospective Walmart employees are well aware that they aren't well off people, and that getting public assistance would be of substantial benefit to them. I don't think they'd find it an issue in the same way that they would for example an employer where a bunch of people lose their hands in accidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Clickbait title. They aren't tracking employees, just stores.

As to what they're actually doing, it seems like a good thing if they proactively find stores with potentially larger employee resentment and find ways to make conditions there better, but it's rather unseemly that they would only do that with the purpose of preventing unionization efforts.

<comment><USER19> Ok, we've replaced the title with the heading below it. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If unionization is a significant risk to a business's share price, it is malpractice to fail to assess it and plan accordingly. This sophisticated approach seems like a positive signal to investors. It's like tax avoidance, financially and ethically.

<comment><USER21> I'd have more patience for "hey these are the laws, corporations just live by them" if corporations stayed out of lobbying for anti-worker laws.

So yeah, I agree it's like tax avoidance. Legal, but still a sign of a corrupt system.

<comment><USER22> You call them "anti-worker laws", but they are just lobbying for laws which they believe will further their interests, which is exactly what unions do on the other side. Perhaps Whole Foods should not be permitted to lobby for favorable legislation and regulation, but the same restriction should be applied to their counter-parties (the unions).

<comment> bjelkeman-again Union represent people, a company represents invested capital. It is not a given that these should be treated equally.

<comment><USER22> The company represents people too; those people just happen to be shareholders, and not employees. There is also a spectrum of companies, from mom-and-pop corporations and sole proprietorships and worker-owner co- operatives through member-owned co-operatives, all the way to publicly-traded corporations.

<comment><USER21> Worth noting that there's not some Law of the Universe that says corporations SHOULDN'T represent the workers. In the United States, we've made political decisions that they shouldn't, and should instead only represent shareholders.

But other countries have decided differently. And there are calls, for example, to have workers represent 40% of many corporate boards.

[https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/10/18/warren-workers- co...](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/10/18/warren-workers-corporate- board-members-germany)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder why they suggest that racial diversity has an inverse relationship with union formation. Is this because of a broader range of employee perspectives on work? Are employees in diverse environments less comfortable talking to one another? Both? Something else?

<comment><USER24> If I've learned anything from growing up in the South, it's that having both poor white people and poor black people makes it much easier for those in power to convince both groups that the other is the source of all of their problems instead of it being the rich and powerful.

Classic divide and conquer.

<comment><USER25> "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." — Lyndon B. Johnson

<comment><USER26> This is still 100% true today, especially in the US south.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Me living in Sweden, reading this article: W.T.F.?!?!?

<comment><USER28> Unions don't have the same reputation in all countries. They're viewed very differently by much of the general population in the UK and US than they are in continental Europe.

<comment><USER29> There is an Anglo-American consensual on a lot of things but I don't think Trade Unions are one of them.

<comment><USER28> I didn't say the US and UK viewed them in the same way - I said that both the US and the UK viewed them differently to continental Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "If you put Amazon in the headline, they will come." Interesting call that the story isn't compelling enough if it "just" involves Whole Foods.

<comment><USER31> Amazon has a recent history of union-busting, it's very relevant if their subsidiaries are also union-busting.

<comment><USER32> Whole Foods had a history of union busting even before Amazon, too.

[https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/whole- foods-...](https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/whole-foods-market- john-mackey-interview-conscious-capitalism/)

I can't imagine how much worse it's gotten since an even less "conscious capitalist" took over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The article directly contradicts its title. They aren't "heat mapping employees" they came up with a scoring system to estimate the most likely stores to unionize.

"The scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee loyalty, "tipline" calls, and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."

Whatever they are doing to avoid employees unionizing, it isn't "heat mapping" them. It isn't even heat mapping stores. That would imply some sort of density+value combination. This is a ranking based on weighting various data points into a single score.

<comment><USER34> Personally, I consider this heat-mapping, since I think of heat-mapping as any value over area, regardless of how the value is derived. What specifically makes you feel this case doesn't qualify? Also, do you think there is something nefarious about the term "heat-mapping"?

<comment><USER14> While I agree that "heatmapping" can be interpreted the way the article used it, I don't think that this is what comes to people's minds when they hear that phrase, so I would call it misleading at best.

But saying that they are "heatmapping employees" is blatantly wrong. They aren't heatmapping individual employees, they are scoring/heatmapping stores.

<comment><USER35> yeah, but what are they measuring? The building? The profit-loss statements? No. They're measuring the attitudes of the employees in the store. If you're measuring the employees in a store, it is perfectly reasonable to say you're measuring the employees. Sure you could change policies and affect P(union), but you'd still be measuring the effect on employee attitudes.

<comment><USER14> >but what are they measuring?

>They're measuring the attitudes of the employees in the store.

You answered your own question here. This is the exact same thing all corporate surveys and evaluations are measuring.

When a company does performance reviews, annual surveys to get employees feedback on things, re-evaluates what kind of candidates they need to attract and how to adjust their recruiting efforts appropriately (e.g., "we hire too many people from target schools, we need to start reaching out more to the talent pool outside of those"), etc. It is all the same thing, and every single company over a certain size does it.

You don't think McDonalds or Home Depot or Kroger do a similar kind of "heatmapping" to evaluate the state of their branches and the employee feedback? Even at tech companies, it is a thing. My employer does an annual company-wide (anonymized) survey, asking all employees for their opinions on their work engagement, fairness of compensation, etc. And from what I heard from my friends working at other tech companies, they all have something similar.

<comment><USER35> I'm really confused now. Is it "blatantly wrong" to say they're measuring employees or not? Because it sounds like you're trying to split a hair, but there's no hair to split.

<comment><USER14> >Is it "blatantly wrong" to say they're measuring employees or not?

Yes, because they are not measuring each employee individually. At no point in the decision-making process individual employee data is used. They are obtaining and using the data as an anonymized aggregate and then draw conclusions based on it.

Which is very different from what "heatmapping employees" would imply. If it was "heatmapping stores" in the original post title (which was changed since I posted my first comment in this thread), then I would have no issue with it whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazon is getting to the point that anti-trust scrutiny should be invoked.</comment>


Elon Musk's sleight of hand - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gavinsblog/elon-musk-s-sleight-of-hand-ea2b078ed8e6 <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that thinks a self driving car needs far more than a 'software update'? I would imagine it would need multiple redundant 360 degree sensor packages.

Supposedly the Google self driving cars analyze a gig of data per second so more processing power would likely be needed too. That is not to say the platform may not be a self driving car at some future date... Also one good software bug that loses lives might be enough to destroy Tesla financially as well as their reputation at this stage.

<comment><USER3> ... Tesla added a big sensor package to Model S over a year ago. It doesn't have LIDAR like Google's cars, but it is similar to sensor packages from other car companies that do lane-following and adaptive cruise control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He completely misread these features. Most self-driving taxis will be very small because most trips have few passengers. In a vehicle that will see as much use as a self-driving taxi, the fewer moving parts there are, the better -- you would rather have an extra door to get to the rear seats than seats moved by motors.

These are all natural evolutions of luxury car features.

<comment><USER5> Right. And if you want to see into the future of any 'luxury' that becomes available to the well off middle classes look to what the really rich are doing now. They are driving cars that are too big for every day needs. They have people who open the doors for them. They have people who make sure there will be enough room to get in. And so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the creative thinking in the post. However what we see at play here is confirmation bias. Once the author has convinced himself that Model X is a step towards self-driving future, everything demoed is viewed with that lense. This happens completely unintentionally.

<comment><USER7> What makes the author wrong? It all sounds very likely to me.

<comment><USER6> It does not make the author wrong at all. Just that as humans we tend to rationalize things, often by reading between the lines.</comment></comment></comment>


Content Analysis of How Courts Use and Misuse Rap Lyrics in Criminal Cases - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3369175 <comment> toper-centage This almost sounds like something out of The Onion. How can lyrics of a song, something - by definition - made up, be useful or acceptable as evidence?

<comment><USER2> In no US jurisdiction are you allowed to cut out someone's heart and store it under your floor. You're also not allowed to threaten someone that you'll do this to them, or incite others to do the same. You're not allowed to get on a street corner and say "The time has come to find Bob Jones, drag him out of his house, and cut his heart out of his chest."

You are, however, allowed in all jurisdictions to write a story like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" where the narrator does the same.

The question that arises in rap music is, when the rapper says, "Imma kill Bob Jones and cut his heart out his chest," is it more like the former or the latter? Is the "I" the rapper, or like Poe's narrator? It's a hard question for the law, because yes, the distinction between a novelist and a rapper is deeply tied into structural discrimination along lines of race and class, but also there are many more rappers than novelists who become the perpetrators and victims of violent deaths.

<comment><USER3> Where are all the free-speech zealots from the "CloudFlare shuts down 8chan" thread?

<comment><USER4> hacker news is a bubble of mostly middle class white male libertarians. what would you expect?

<comment><USER5> Liberals, yes. Libertarians, haha no.

<comment><USER4> there's too many "choose to leave your job" posts that get upvoted for there not to be a libertarian majority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> so basically prosecutors are using rap lyrics as evidence when convenient to obtain a conviction (which the judge allows), and actively fighting in not allowing use of rap lyrics when the defendant offers it as exculpatory evidence as it might hurt the prosecutor's ability to obtain a conviction (which the judge allows)

these incentives are all messed up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Key & Peele made a very entertaining song about this at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs)

I always found it funny yet somewhat disturbing, and the paper makes it more real than I can comfortably handle.

<comment><USER8> Another song related to this is "Rap Snitch Knishes" by MF DOOM.</comment></comment>


US Marshals arresting people for not paying their federal student loans - <AUTHOR> http://www.fox26houston.com/news/local-news/92232732-story <comment><USER2> "those attorneys and debt collectors are getting judgements in federal court and asking judges to use the US Marshals Service to arrest those who have failed to pay their federal student loans"

The US Marshals enforce (federal) court orders. He was subject to a court order mandating the payment of a debt. It's not like he fell into arrears and they "just showed up". If it was a mortgage debt, or an eviction proceeding, typically it'd be the local sheriff.

No story.

<comment><USER3> > No story.

And in particular $1500 owed since 1987, almost 30 years ago. Now of course we don't know when the last payment was but it makes sense that they would pull an enforcement list based on age of debt and also perhaps smaller amounts where it was clear that the debtor was making no attempt to pay off the debt.

<comment><USER4> Why didn't they take it from his tax returns?

<comment><USER5> He might not have had much or anything in the way of tax returns. For example if he was working under the table a lot, in construction or dozens of other trades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really suspiciously light on details. This sounds like a judge issued a bench warrant and he ignored it (didn't go to court on the date he was supposed to go to court). A bench warrant us essentially an order to appear before a court under pain of arrest. If you ignore it, the law enforcement agency with the appropriate jurisdiction (in this case, U.S Marshals) will go "encourage" you to show up.

A student loan debt may be the initial reason for the bench warrant (somebody may have tried to collect and the court issued a summons to get him to show up at court and explain why he isn't paying) --- but all he had to do to avoid the problem was to show up... not necessarily pay.

<comment><USER7> A more accurate title would be "US Marshals arresting people with warrants for not appearing in federal court".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >He says seven deputy US Marshals showed up at his home with guns

Would I be wrong in thinking all US Marshals would be armed at all times, and the article is trying to make this sound like a SWAT raid?

Not that I condone this method of debt collecting - the article seems very light on details. I want to assume that they wrote letters etc before they sent in federal police in order to collect debts.

(UK resident)

<comment><USER9> You are correct, a US Marshal would almost certainly be armed while on duty.

<comment><USER2> Not only are they armed, they have a reputation for unusually thuggish behavior, since they know it's unlikely a federal court will discipline their own enforcement body.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article suggests "contempt of court" for not paying civil judgements. Sounds like this will be tested before the Supreme Court some day.

[http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-new-bill- collecto...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-new-bill-collector- tactic-jail-time.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Call me a right-wing loony ... but why aren't we questioning why the government is giving out loans in the first place. Since the proliferation of government student loans in the last 30 years the cost of higher education has gone up significantly. The loans aren't working and enforcing them is a no-win situation.

<comment><USER12> Because the alternative is to offer the poor no opportunity to improve their financial situation through education. Permanent hopeless underclasses do not make for a stable society.

<comment><USER5> No the alternative was to have properly capped student loans to restrain the cost growth, instead of feeding an extreme inflation cycle by enabling an out- of-proportion growth of those loans.

The solution was trivially easy: lock student loan growth to the CPI. Instead the US Government drastically inflated the cost of college by funding student loans _far_ beyond the rate of inflation and with zero concern for the potential to be paid back (perfect setup for a bubble and crash). Universities proceeded to go on an epic and unnecessary building and administration expansion spree, vaporizing hundreds of billions of dollars. All courtesy of the US Government's access to practically unlimited free money (the loaned out sum of which it's now yielding a higher profit on than the combined profit of JP Morgan and Wells Fargo; one of the greatest slush funds in world history).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the difference between debtors prison and a court system that will rule on a debt, create a court order to pay, and then arrest you for not paying? It sounds like the same thing by another name.

<comment><USER2> He was "arrested" in the sense that he was brought into court and forced to show compliance with the court's order (in this case, by signing a payment plan). He was not "imprisoned for a debt". There are legal mechanisms to show inability to pay & the court order is supposed to reflect that, even for non- dischargable debts.

<comment><USER14> This man absolutely was imprisoned for debt. Being compelled by the court to either pay your debt or go to prison is, by very definition, being imprisoned for failure to pay a debt.

The court should have ordered the seizure of bank assets to cover the debt. In no way should owning money ever result in jail time, fines, judgements or otherwise.

<comment><USER15> From the fine article, emphasis mine:

> He says seven deputy US Marshals showed up at his home with guns and _took > him to federal court_ where he had to sign a payment plan for the 29-year- > old school loan.

He was not taken to prison, he was arrested. These are wildly different actions. Nowhere in the article do the strings "prison", "jail", "gaol", "cell", "penitentiary" or any other synonym for prison appear.

There is plenty of discussion elsewhere in the HN comments on what may have led to this arrest.

<comment><USER14> A more thorough article: [http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/u-s- marshals-arrest...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/u-s-marshals- arresting-people-not-paying-student-loans-article-1.2533153)

> Aker said he was put in the back of a truck and placed in a cell at the > federal building in downtown Houston.

> Aker told The News that he was ordered to pay $5,700 for the loan, including > interest. However, Aker was also ordered to pay for the cost of the morning > arrest — nearly $1,300.

> If he didn't pay that amount by March 1, he said, he was told he would be > arrested again.

Wonder what will happen when he's arrested again when he can't come up with $7000 in two weeks.

<comment><USER15> So, a courthouse cell is a very different thing than being imprisoned. It's reasonable to assume that someone brought to court against their will would not be so willing to stay there.

I have made no statement about the propriety of the actions described in either article, merely observed that this is not a case of sending someone to prison over a debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Per peter303[1] and Google, a Judgment Debtor Examination in federal court is pursuant to Rule 69 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and local rules authorizing magistrates (non-judge judges) to conduct examinations of judgment debtors.

Also see JUDGMENT CREDITOR: MOTION TO COMPEL- SAMPLE OF AUTHORITIES[2] from the US DOJ:

In United States v. Teeple, 286 F.3d 1047 (8th Cir. 2002), the IRS served a summons on an individual taxpayer, because he had failed to file tax returns. When the taxpayer failed to comply with the summons, the United States filed suit to enforce. The district court ordered the summons enforced over the taxpayer's Fifth Amendment objection under the act of production doctrine. The taxpayer was held in contempt for not complying with the enforcement order and was incarcerated.

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-new-bill- collecto...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-new-bill-collector- tactic-jail-time.html) [2] [http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/tax/legacy/2006/0...](http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/tax/legacy/2006/03/02/exh13.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> And meanwhile, the banks commit outright fraud and are rewarded with bailouts.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is that so shocking? About 15% of prisoners are there for debt.

<comment><USER19> Calling nonpayment of fines "debt" is disingenuous to the point of propaganda.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't the US have an issue with certain edge cases of fines becoming recursive without terminating?

[http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/sentenced- debt...](http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/sentenced-debt-some- tossed-prison-over-unpaid-fines-v18380470)

Whilst this case may not be like that, it's still quite worrisome that these kinds of things happen to people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm guessing the cost of collections -- the attorneys, the marshals, etc -- far exceded $1500.

</comment><comment><USER22> When you take out a loan, you should pay it back. But I'm a conservative, so my views differ from most liberals.

<comment><USER23> I'm a conservative and I'd adamantly disagree that "most liberals" don't think you should pay back loans. But I could be wrong - it's totally possible that most liberals buy cars in cash, only rent instead of purchasing property, etc. That's totally plausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Invoking the blunt hammer of armed enforcers is an unnecessary act. Any of the debtor's current and future wages can just as easily be garnished with the same stroke of a pen.</comment>


Retreat of Norwegian ice patch reveals lost Viking-era artifacts - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-04-retreat-norwegian-ice-patch-reveals.html <comment><USER2> related discussion from yesterday >> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22889496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22889496)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do when 50%+ of your time is fighting your will to quit - <AUTHOR> I've been struggling lately, I suppose this is what many would term 'burn out', with spending half of my work day resisting the urge to just get up and walk out or submit my two week notice. It makes it extremely difficult to focus and get things done and acts like a distraction multiplier. I'm starting to think maybe I should see a psychologist.
Any feedback, blunt or brutal, sympathetic or encouraging, is greatly appreciated.
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Just to add, I've felt this same way for a while now. Not with work, but just life in general.

It's hard enough fighting the world to survive when you're fighting against yourself too. There's a very strong pull to just "giving up" to resist. Luckily I guess I just have too strong of a self-preservation instinct.

I've been considering the same thing as you though. Just giving my notice, moving away somewhere new and starting fresh. Maybe go back to school for something, start my own business, make new friends. I've even been considering just going on a short vacation somewhere by myself to just "clan out" my cache and temporary files. (IT joke there I guess.)

Seeing a psychologist sounds like a good idea. Sadly there aren't any good ones where I live, which is just another reason to move.

So that's at least my take on this. For me it seems that just up and going, and starting somewhat over feels like my best option.

<comment><USER2> Man, I hate noticing spelling mistakes hours after posting.

I meant pull to just "give up" and "clean out"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It all depends upon whether the issue is outside or inside yourself. Moving to a new job only leaves one of them behind.

That said, I quit a bad situation once. Dropped a resignation letter in the boss' box, walked to my car, rolled the windows down and drove slowly around town with the radio on. Serendipitously the song was "Takin care of business" which put a perfect cap on it.

Found a new startup in less than a month, and felt much, much better. So it _can_ work!

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. How long has it been since you had a vacation? Working a long time (especially, long hours) without a break can lead to burnout.

2\. You didn't mention anything about what your job is actually like. For example, if your job is boring and your manager is an asshole, you don't need to see a psychologist - you need to look for a better job.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. A vacation like a real vacation (not just time off)? A long time.

2\. My job isn't horribly by any means. I have a lot of say in what I do and oversee it and development. A lot of responsibility rests on my shoulders and at times it stresses me.

I've lost the passion for what I'm working on and the "direction" of the company. Maybe I'm just being a stereotypical millennial.

I should add that I have a wife and children so my actions and decisions to quit don't just affect me.</comment></comment>


Know Your Tools – Terminal and Bash - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacecowboyrocketcompany.com/2015/02/know-your-tools/ <comment><USER2> The first thing I do on any bash terminal is `set -o vi`. This changes the default keybindings from emacs-like to vi-like. I find it to be a huge booster to my speed in navigating the command line.

edit: Actually, something cool I learned recently is that if you put the line "set editing-mode vi" in your ~/.inputrc then vi-like editing keys are available in any program that uses readline. This includes bash and the python repl. Presumably, a bunch of other repls and interactive command lines too.

<comment><USER3> How do you typically go to e.g. beginning/end of line; via insert or normal mode and which key combinations do you prefer? Always been using ctrl+a and ctrl+e in emacs mode myself . . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very true. I have difficulties in training new recruits with UNIX. For some reason, beginners have developed an aversion to UNIX/shell scripting. I myself have started more and more of Ruby/AWK/Python, but it is always SHELL that blows me off with the sort of impact it has on the daily work.

I ended up highly optimizing my work environment to replace long ssh connections with `conn prod` (will use my RSA key and connect). File tranfers with `go get prod filename` or `go send prod filename`. Another script that can remember directory paths (I have to go over lot of them every day, and typing long lengthy ones does not help).

To me, UNIX shell scripting is a lazy men's most effective tool, only if you know how to use that rightly.

Loved the post. And thanks much.

<comment><USER5> I'm a relative newbie in the field, but I really love using terminal (I do all my C work for grad school in ViM), it's really essential at work, there's no faster way to do batch file processing a lot of times (especially with ffmpeg, awesome).

I'm surprised people don't like terminal, I love using it. It makes me feel old school, sort of like one of those hackers in the movies. That's probably just a personal thing.

I was familiar with most of the concepts but the links section made things click in that regard. Enjoyed the post as well.

<comment><USER6> It just takes a while to be faster in the terminal than with the gui, and most people won't switch from the thing they're used to until they see significant advantages.

I remember when I first started using the terminal, it was slow and confusing. You had to read the man pages for every little thing. Discovering the command you want is tough, I'd be screwed without the internet.

Now I hate when I need to take my hands of the keyboard to use the mouse. What a waste of time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://xkcd.com/1168/](http://xkcd.com/1168/) ^_^

<comment><USER8> I forget where I got this from, but this is how I remember it:

        tar -xzf # eXtract Ze Files!

EDIT: I missed chadzawistowski's similar comment below

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why you need options at all... If you point it at a file/directory it should automatically compress and if you point it at an archive it should automatically decompress. The options should be there for advanced tasks not 90% of the tasks you need the app for. It's really poor ui design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My most used bash command is probably "sudo !!", which runs the previous command with "sudo" prepended.

The book "Unix Power Tools" showed me that higher-level programming languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) are not needed to accomplish most administrative tasks. Awk is incredibly useful (but also very confusing, imo).

<comment><USER6> I really like '!$' and '!:1' in bash. '!$' holds the last argument of the last command and '!:n' holds the nth argument.

$ cd /big/long/path/to/this.txt Oops $ vim !$

<comment><USER11> It should be noted for onlookers that this is the abbreviated form; !-3:4 goes back to the third-to-last command and refers to its fourth argument, and similarly !-3:$ is its last argument.

It's also apparently not universally known that bash has csh-style (similar to sed) editing, so "s^foo^bar" will repeat the previous command with "bar" substituted at for bar. So "ls foo" becomes "ls bar".

Similarly with !-3:s^foo^bar

I freely mix these things with readline-editing, depending on what needs to be done.

Since csh gets a lot of disrespect these days, to give credit where due: these are all Bill Joy features from the original csh -- it's a good thing that bash borrowed innovations from various shells beyond Bourne shell and ksh.

Historical footnote: We donated code to him to do readline-style editing circa 1978, but he said raw mode was bogging down the pdp 11 too much. Systems were a bit slower back then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Two very basic tips for vi:

You can use slash(/) and question mark(?) to search for text (forward and backward) in vi. It's useful to know these, because they also work with less(1).

If you are Windows user and used to press Ctrl+S to save the file and you accidentally do that in Vi, your terminal would get stuck. But you can use Ctrl+Q to unfreeze it.

<comment><USER13> vi move commands works a lot of places in the UNIX world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" Fact of life is, as you spend time in the terminal, you're probably going to launch Vim at some point, whether willingly or not..._ _For all other intents and purposes, just friggin use nano. Or sublime. "_

Words to live by.

</comment><comment><USER15> Tip: I recently looked up the man page for "which" and found out about the -a flag which will list all instances of the executable found (instead of just the first one). Incredibly useful when you have multiple installations of the same software and it's causing problems. e.g.:

        $ which -a ruby
        /Users/olalonde/.rbenv/shims/ruby
        /usr/local/bin/ruby
        /usr/bin/ruby

</comment><comment><USER16> To exit vim use <ESC> :wq, not just :wq - most of the problem is it getting stuck in insert mode, and not knowing how to escape into normal mode.

<comment><USER17> My first experience of vim was trying to fix my xorg.conf from a tty. I figured out how to save the file, but couldn't exit. In the end I hard- rebooted :$

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys, I'll collect these thoughts and add them to the blogpost. After all, I want this to be available to all and every one of us!

</comment><comment><USER18> I love playing around in bash. Most of the scripts I have right now are just for setting up project templates, adding common packages etc.

Actually, I think most people who use computers at work, be they writers, designers, whatever, not just programmers, would benefit from learning some bash (or batch). You can automate a lot of useful processes with a few simple scripts.

</comment><comment><USER19> don't type `cd ~` just type `cd`

<comment><USER20> Also: Accidentally ran `cd`? Run `cd -` to return

I think there are some pop/push mechanics for working directory too, but I can't find them right now.

<comment><USER21> The commands are pushd and popd, and they're bash (and zsh, and most sane shell) builtins. Pushd to get to a new directory, popd to go back to the last one on the stack.

<comment><USER22> Tip : Setting cd as an alias for pushd make the whole thing much more intuitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1\. I like tab-completion, but I can't personally stand bash's completion feature. Be aware of differences.

2\. If you want to save your command without running it... comment it out with a '#'. Bang, it's in your history.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is probably misunderstanding the demographic, but why does he suggest using nano over vim?

<comment><USER2> Maybe they just prefer nano?

More likely, if this is meant to be a gentle introduction to the command line, vim is a pretty scary place. Nano works much more like a "normal" text editor.

<comment><USER6> Until you want to undo something! Nano is definitely more user-friendly though. Some of the engineers I work with still don't know basic vim shortcuts, like 'w' and 'b'

<comment><USER25> I use a lot of "yw", "d4w", or "dd" ..

are there others life-saving useful as these?

<comment><USER26> How about find and replace?

:%s/foo/bar/gc

The "gc" will apply the find and replace globally, and ask for confirmation before changing an occurrence of "foo".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia Wales says Apple's App Store is a threat to openness online - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/1/15/wikipedia-wales-apple-could-ruin-internet/

<comment><USER2> There might be something to this if Apple had a monopoly on the "Mobile Internet" (the portion that Wales is referring to) AND forced everyone to interact with the "Mobile Internet" through applications acquired through the AppStore - two problems with this thesis:

      o Apple does not have a monopoly on the Mobile Internet.

      o Apple's support for open HTML 5 protocols is stronger
        than any previous generation of Mobile Platforms that
        connected to the internet.

We can critique Apple in a lot of places with regards to their AppStore (though, it's gotten much better lately) - but, ruining the Mobile Internet is not one of them.

I seem to recall that the iPhone was actually the _first_ really decent phone browser that you could use to connect to the internet - if anything, Apple spawned the "Open" Mobile Internet.

<comment><USER3> Also, compare Apple's impact through the app store with the potential of:

        - Mobile providers throttling particular apps
        - Mobile providers and bandwidth caps
        - The balkanization of networking (Facebook)
        - Pushing a patent-encumbered standard for video
          (Apple is involved here, but is only one player of several.)

EDIT: Technically h.264 is "open"

<comment><USER4> It can't be "technically" open because there's no technical definition of open. Under one side's definition, just having a lot of industry players collaborate on it in public makes it open (the definition you're using) whereas the other side says if its freedom is encumbered by patents then it's not open.

Open is a horribly diluted word and there's no way imaginable you can say anything is "technically" or "not technically" open.

<comment><USER3> This is the reason for the scare quotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Compare Apple's impact to openness online to Microsoft's back in early 2000. There were a lot of banking and corporate websites that only worked with IE and Active-X. As a result, every corporate machine (and many users of these banking sites) - had to have a copy of IE floating around to fully access the Internet - and good portions of the internet just weren't usable for many Linux/BSD users.

Now - how much of the Mobile Internet requires that you use an Apple product? Apple just doesn't have enough market dominance to result in more than a trivial portion of the Mobile Internet to be written _specifically_ for Safari/IOS Browers.

Wales is completely off his rocker here. As long as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and yes, IE, continue to have a strong presence as browsers (and I don't see that changing anytime soon), and as long as Anddroid, WP7, and others start rolling out first class smart phones, Apple will not be a threat to the Mobile Internet.

This is one of those cases where lack of a market leader actually results in a better adherence to standards. As long as the focus is "Build an ACID3 Compliance Browser" for the vendors, and developers write "ACID3 Compliant Websites" - we'll be in fine shape (modulo the recent Video controversy)

</comment><comment><USER5> Title is linkbait.

He doesn't like that Apple is the gatekeeper on their App Stores, as if the consumer doesn't have any other hardware options out there...

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Sorry about that. Didn't see it until it was too late. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If Wales had his way, the Apple Inc Wikipedia entry would read:

> Founders: Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne and DEFINITELY NOT Larry Sanger</comment>


Ask HN: Firing up the ole RSS reader. What are some good feeds out there? - <AUTHOR> It's been a minute since RSS and frankly, the stuff I've been using (google news, HN, Reddit, NewsHound) are not really sufficient for RSS as they'd just blast the reader with tons of irrelevant or value-less content.<p>So, I humbly request some of the community's favorites; Content that isn't flash news. Post em up. :) <comment><USER2>
      https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss
      https://aeon.co/philosophy
      http://www.jwz.org/blog/feed/
      http://longreads.com/rss
      https://a16z.com/feed/
      https://balkaninsight.com/feed/
      https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml
      https://www.straitstimes.com/news/asia/rss.xml
      https://feeds.feedburner.com/TheParisReviewBlog

</comment><comment><USER3>
       http://aphyr.com/posts.atom
       http://backreaction.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
       http://bgpmon.net
       http://blog.acolyer.org/feed/
       http://blog.cloudflare.com/rss.xml
       http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/feeds/posts/default
       http://blog.filippo.io/rss/
       http://blog.golang.org/feeds/posts/default
       http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/feed/
       http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm.rss
       http://feeds.cognitect.com/blog/feed.rss
       http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror
       http://feeds.feedburner.com/KrebsOnSecurity
       http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/feeds/posts/default
       http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/
       http://jvns.ca/atom.xml
       http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/rss.xml
       http://lucumr.pocoo.org/feed.atom
       http://matt.might.net/articles/feed.rss
       http://origin.whatif.xkcd.com/feed.atom
       http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?feed=rss2
       http://woodgears.ca/rss.xml
       http://www.bgpmon.net/feed/
       http://www.norvig.com/rss-feed.xml
       http://www.phdcomics.com/gradfeed.php
       http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf
       http://www.smbc-comics.com/rss.php
       http://www.technologyreview.com/rss/rss.aspx
       http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

In case anybody else wants to process their .opml for easier submission here on HN:

        cat ~/Downloads/subscriptions.opml| grep -P 'http://.*?"' -o  | sed 's/.$//' | xargs -I % echo "   %" | sort

<comment><USER4> why not just summit with your best opml.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't have the links handy, but here are some of the ones I find handy:

* Kinja Deals * Blog Hackaday * Krebs on Security * TechCrunch * The Verge * Wired News

I'm boring I know

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. It's like we got older. What happened?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just curious which rss reader are you using?

<comment><AUTHOR> NetNewsWire</comment></comment>


Splitterbug (YC S11) private beta: track expenses with friends from your phone - <AUTHOR> http://splitterbug.com

<comment><USER2> I wish you all the best, but I'm skeptical that this could become a viable business. Is this a problem that people struggle with enough that they'd pay for a service to help them with it?

What would differentiate Splitterbug from, say, BillMonk? Or just an e-mail? What are you planning on for revenue? One-off App Store purchases, or something more?

<comment><USER3> We're both very big Billmonk fans, but unfortunately the application hasn't seen very much improvement since it was acquired a few years ago. Splitterbug helps you solve the same problem using some very cool tech that Billmonk didn't have access to (native iPhone apps/Android/Facebook graph/etc).

Our primary focus right now is building an app solves the problem of splitting bills and tracking debts. We've got a few ideas about monetization, but if we can't build a useful app first, that discussion is moot.

<comment><USER4> What's the very cool tech? Why does an app like this require particularly new or innovative technology?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess any entrepreneur already thought about building that application once in their life. I myself thought of it a lot of time.. but always dismissed it thinking that it wasn't a monetizable business and only a fun hack project over a weedkend.

However, these guys seemed to have proved me wrong as they're in YC while my "serious business ideas" were rejected. Or, maybe YC decided to invest mainly for the team (Both founder were "Product manager at Google") ? Still, I'll follow their path and I hope they'll be successful :)

<comment><USER6> Same here. They seem to solve a problem I personally have.

Currently, I use emails (sent from my phone) to "remember" what I owe people and what they owe me, but it's kind of annoying. I also thought about building an Android app, but I think I'll just use this instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting - it looks really similar to my app Splitsies which launched late last year: <http://splitsies.net/> \- it'll be interesting to see how their dependence on Facebook connect works out for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> One note about your website: I recommend enabling the controls on that jQuery scroll widget for the iPhone. Having the screen scroll away while i'm checking out the UI is a little annoying (and then having to wait a full cycle to see the screen again).

Other than that, I certainly remember keeping tabs on my roommate debts and loans during college, but it was never much of a chore and didn't bother writing it down. I guess some people may need this more than others, for example people with lots of outstanding buddy debt, but I can't see it being a huge number.

What are your plans for expanding this? Simply keeping it as is and doing one thing well? It may serve to function better if it helped those key users manage their debt, using burn down charts for a game effect, or something. Maybe tying it into a mint account (is there an API?) so it can show up on top of their personal finances? Maybe just adding a tip calculator/bill splitter typical app functionality, so people can get rid of their old one and encourage them to download this?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but at a glance it seems far too niche and not much room to grow.

</comment><comment><USER9> This could enable a group of friends to build up fairly long-running tabs with no effort, then pay whenever the tab hits a convenient amount. Less friction, more fun. I hope you guys succeed.

Currently, even in a group of friends where we basically always split everything down the middle to keep it simple, not even having to do a split at all until a later, convenient time would be fantastic.

<comment><USER10> Idea! Take a photo of the receipt, each friend sees it, can mark each item as his own.

<comment><USER9> Maybe this would be good in some circles, but for my friends overkill. Just need X/N, with a simple option to pre-assign a portion of the bill to the one guy at the table who drinks 2x everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've just released an iPhone app, called You Owe Me, which syncs purchases and repayments between people, using FB connect and/or normal email/password login. I think it's a pretty exciting space really, with a lot of potential. Signed up for their private beta - will see how it develops.

</comment><comment><USER12> I already talked to you guys about this on twitter, but I'll put some of it here anyway.

Love the concept for the app, as a college student I can see how it would be really helpful.

Criticisms: Wish you could use phone contacts along with the facebook connect. That way you aren't dependent on internet and the app doesn't look like it is made for facebook. Also when you go to the people tab it just shows a white screen, which is discouraging and makes me think that there is nothing there. It would be much better if you could populate the list and make it searchable in the same way the facebook app does.

</comment><comment><USER13> You can start using the web version of their app right away by going to <http://splitterbug.com> on your mobile (at least it worked on my iPhone) and signing in with Facebook.

<comment><USER3> Good eye :) The web version lacks a lot of optimizations we were able to add on the client though. If you're excited to start using the thing now, shoot me an email at support [at] splitterbug.com and let me know what device flavor you prefer (iPhone/Android). I'll get you set up.

<comment><USER13> Thanks -- I got in on the iPhone beta and it looks good so far. I'm excited to see this service become public -- I think it could be super useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are you guys iPhone only, or do you have an Android client?

<comment><USER3> We have both iPhone and Android clients and we're looking for beta testers for both.

<comment><USER15> I'm also happy to beta test the iPhone app.

I currently use something called Share-a-Bill quite heavily, but it has some shortcomings. I've also just moved into an apartment with 2 friends, so we're looking for a better application for sharing bills.

Email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You seem to have exceeded your Google App Engine service quota. Even it if still loads after a few F5!

</comment><comment><USER17> Really great idea. This is perfect for roomates, especially college aged. Also very good for ADHD types like myself! Can't wait to start using it.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's a great idea for an app! The only problem is that I don't have a cell phone. :P Is there an Android version too, or is it just for iPhone?

<comment><USER3> Both an Android and an iPhone versions are looking for beta testers :)

<comment><USER18> Well I won't have a phone for another few months, but if you're still looking for testers then, I would be happy to help out.

And if you're already done testing, then I'll download the app anyways!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks similar to Buxfer and Billmonk...

</comment><comment><USER20> YC S11?? This is a feature.

</comment><comment><USER21> Should call this app ArgumentCauser!

<comment><USER17> You mean ArgumentSolver</comment></comment>