Ask HN: What would America look like if there was less government? - <AUTHOR> When I think of the public sector, I think of:
education - student debt crisis; uneducated people stuck in poverty
gas/oil/electricity - global warming/climate crisis
healthcare - obesity crisis, diabetes crisis, people dying in the streets due to unmanageable healthcare costs
law enforcement - police brutality/abuse of power; mass shooting epidemics
What would the country look like if some of these responsibilities were shifted to the private sector? Famously, UPS/FedEx are better than USPS. What are some other examples of the private sector being more efficient the the public sector? <comment><USER2> What you're seeing is the result of decades of efforts on the part of post- Eisenhower Republicans to discredit the very notion of government of the people, by the people, and for the people -- and you're falling for it. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER3> "Rabbi Chanina, deputy to the kohanim, would say: Pray for the integrity of the government; for were it not for the fear of its authority, a man would swallow his neighbor alive."

It's important to remember that Rabbi Chanina saw the destruction of the Second Temple and still made his statement that has come down to us in the Pirke Avot.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well. we wouldn't have TESLA. or SolarCity. or SpaceX. Modern genomics may still be a decade out. There would be no Silicon Valley. We would probably have something sort of like the internet, but it would be a pay per packet and net neutrality wouldn't even be discussed; we would probably just be kvetching about how expensive it is to email stuff between PRODIGY and COMPUSERV.

There would be no interstate highway system, only a collection of toll roads that went between los angeles and new york. There would be no rural phone service; heck, there probably wouldn't be an electrical grid in rural areas.

There would be no enforcement of labor laws, so there would be no weekends (not that there are weekends now...)

Each bank would be issuing it's own currency, but it probably wouldn't be TOO horrible, cause it's in each of the bank's best interest to publish exchange rates between east coast and west coast banks (probably on PRODIGY.) And yes, the federal reserve is not perfect, but manipulating monetary policy to avoid credit crises and to at least try to encourage full employment and low (or at least stable) inflation is sort of cool.

We could all use bitcoin, of course, but deflationary currency is even worse than fiat currency.

There would be no affordable medical insurance for the poor, sick or old.

No national parks, but maybe there would be land trusts. Hard to say if private land trusts would be better or worse, but they would certainly be more expensive to consumers.

And sure, Xe/Blackwater are great, but if I'm going to have someone fight a war, I'm putting my money on the Marines (and begrudgingly, I have to admit the Air Force is pretty ossm as well.)

There 'aint no way anyone on wall street is going to police themselves, a "privatized" SEC is sort of laughable.

<comment><USER5> That's a lot of speculation with little or nothing to support it.

<comment><USER6> "Little or nothing"?

SpaceX, and all of the private space companies, are built using the results of government research, primarily during the space race. Potentially better systems, like the aerospike engine, are too expensive for a commercial company to develop (eg, [https://youtu.be/K4zFefh5T-8?t=567](https://youtu.be/K4zFefh5T-8?t=567) )

"Modern genomics" because human genome project started in the 1980s as a DOE project, then switched over to NIH. Celera had a private venture which finished at about the same time as the public one, but that was in part because it depended on public data. The publicly funded genomic effort really pushed the development of the genome sequencing field.

Silicon Valley started because of the government funding for aerospace and microwaves and electronics through military/industry contracting in the Bay Area. Eg, Lockheed Missiles Division in Sunnyvale in the 1960s was the largest employer in what became Silicon Valley. - [https://steveblank.com/secret- history/](https://steveblank.com/secret-history/) .

The interstate highway started because of Eisenhower. As [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System) points out, "Some large sections of Interstate Highways that were planned or constructed before [the Federal Aid Highway Act of] 1956 are still operated as toll roads".

"Rural phone service" and "electrical grid" is because of legislation like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act) and its later amendments (eg, "1949 - extended the act to allow loans to telephone companies wishing to extend their connections to unconnected rural areas"), and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934) . See [https://www.ntca.org/ruraliscool/history-rural- telecommunica...](https://www.ntca.org/ruraliscool/history-rural- telecommunications) for more details.

"enforcement of labor laws" is because of the NLRB.

"Each bank would be issuing it's own currency" \- that's certainly true. Look at the "free banking era" of the mid-1800s ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking_in_the_United_States#1837%E2%80%931863:_%22Free_Banking%22_Era) ) when banks could and did print their own money.

Now, you could certainly argue that there are other ways to get to where we are, but claiming retrocryptid's comments have little or no support seems more a statement of ignorance about history than a solid position.

<comment><USER5> The thing is, for every thing you said that includes "was because of" or some variant, the reality is that we don't have access to the counter-factual cases. We don't have any way of knowing, for example, if we would have Interstate Highways or not, had the federal government not been involved.

The same can be said for electrification, the Internet, etc.

 _statement of ignorance about history than a solid position._

I'm very familiar with the history. My point is that that is irrelevant, because, again, we don't know - and can't know - anything about the counter- factuals. To say, for example "we wouldn't have the Internet today without the USG" is speculation.

<comment><USER6> Your view appears to reject the study of history as a valid means of inquiry.

I may assert that the US Civil War was due to slavery, and point to, for example, documents at the time which say that slavery was the reason for succession. Eg, [https://portside.org/2013-11-04/absolute-proof-civil-war- was...](https://portside.org/2013-11-04/absolute-proof-civil-war-was-about- slavery) .

But then you reply with "we don't know - and can't know - anything about counter-factuals." Who knows - perhaps the South would have succeeded anyway even if there hadn't been slavery.

I may assert that the Manhattan Project was a result of Einstein and Szilárd's letter to Roosevelt. You can reply with the same quote. Maybe someone else besides the most famous physicist in the world would have written a similar letter, and started the effort. You might be right, but the existing causal chain is pretty clear.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Is there any description of likely historical causation which you cannot respond to with a claim that it's "a lot of speculation with little or nothing to support it"?

<comment><USER5> _Your view appears to reject the study of history as a valid means of inquiry._

I certainly agree that a lot of the apparent causal chains that we take for granted are very suspect. But it's deeper than that. One can say "The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the cause of WWI" and maybe that's true in a sense. But if Ferdinand had not been assassinated, would there still have been a great war in Europe? I think there are a lot of reasons to suspect so.. maybe it would have started a few months or years later, and maybe the details would have worked out different... who knows? That's the problem with history: by definition we only get access to one view of things.

Now, IF the universe truly is strictly deterministic and things can happen only one way, then I guess it's all a moot point. But I'm not sure I accept that.

<comment><USER6> You'll note though that Wikipedia's entry starts "The causes of World War I remain controversial." and says:

> The immediate causes lay in decisions made by statesmen and generals during > the July Crisis of 1914. This crisis was triggered by the assassination of > Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by the Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo > Princip who had been supported by a nationalist organization in Serbia.

While in the example I gave, it's certain that defense of slavery was the primary reason for the US Civil War. Or, are you really not willing to accept even that?

Go back to retrocryptid's statement "There would be no interstate highway system, only a collection of toll roads that went between los angeles and new york"

We can look at the interstate system and see that "Some large sections of Interstate Highways that were planned or constructed before [the Federal Aid Highway Act of] 1956 are still operated as toll roads".

This lends support retrocryptid's statement, while you said there was little to no support for any of those statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Famously, UPS/FedEx are better than USPS."

This a red herring. First off, USPS is nearly as good as those, and those others don't have nearly the geographical breadth requirements of the USPS.

</comment><comment><USER8> >education

One of the Libertarian propositions to public schooling is giving a check to all children to redeem at any private school that passes some bar set by the government. I love this solution, since it removes the requirement for residency for admittance to quality education, and strongarms the schooling system to be more efficient and competitive in how they produce students (assuming that the primary reason to choose one over another is test scores). Primary efficiency would come from reducing the amount of faculty required to hire.

>gas/oil/electricity

I don't see how this is tied to the public sector directly, unless you're talking about the military and Pentagon specifically.

>healthcare

It's complicated, not going to flesh that out. In general, we have a fairly privatized health care sector compared to a lot of other countries.

>law enforcement

Mass shootings have a lot more to do with the overuse of social media and the underuse of meaningful in person relationships than it has to do with law enforcement.

<comment><USER6> While I hate the solution. There are many problems with it.

1) Why do parents have the sole privilege in deciding where the money goes? It's my tax dollars. In the current system, I can go to school board meetings and try to change policy, even if I don't have kids going to school right now.

(Of the many possible scenarios, I might want to change things because I know my kids will be going to school in a few years, or based on experiences from having kids who just graduated.)

2) You write "some bar set by the government." Who sets that bar? Is it the local area, in which case how does it differ from a school board? Is it the entire state, in which case, how do local people affect what's going on in their school?

Or are their multiple organizations which can be authorized to provide oversight, in which case, can't the private schools pick the one with the least oversight? We see that already with some charter school systems.

3) Since these are private schools, can they decide to not accept someone? If so, based on which criteria? Can a private school decide that it's too expensive to school someone with emotional problems (a "disruption"), and expel that student?

Public schools are required to accept everyone, with a high bar for expulsion. What happens if private schools only accept the children which are cheapest and easiest to educate, leaving the more difficult children to the public school system?

What happens if _no_ private schools are willing to accept a student, and there no more public school system which is required to accept everyone?

4) You mention that it's "competitive in how they produce students".

In many districts there is only one school. There may have been more schools before, but they merged in order to save costs, because it's cheaper to have one large building (and bus kids in) than many small building, each with its own staff.

Surely having several private school systems has its own overhead.

How do you know there there really enough economic savings in this competition to be able to overcome the economy-of-scale savings? Especially in districts where right now there is only one school?

Plus, the large public high school I went to offered a wide selection of courses. There was enough interest in Latin, for example, to have a Latin teacher. Break the school population into three, and no one school will be able to afford a Latin teacher. Sure, one might, but then that school might not have a jazz band class. A student who wants both Latin and jazz is unlikely to get that if there are many small schools instead of one large one.

This suggests there may be a natural monopoly, rather that competition, for many districts.

5) You assumed "that the primary reason to choose one over another is test scores".

Test scores are highly correlated with family income. If we choose schools based on test scores, then we send students to schools in rich neighborhoods.

Test scores are pretty worthless in the first place. Test prep is effective, but takes time away from all of the other topics (art, P.E., home economics, music, foreign language, shop) which are also important - if your goal is to produce educated citizens - but aren't tested.

6) Most good private schools are more expensive than good public schools. That check will end up subsidizing rich people to send their kids to expensive private schools. It won't poor people send their kids to good private schools.

7) How much of the school budget will be spent on marketing in the system you envision? In a public school system, there is very little marketing overhead.

<comment><USER8> Remember, this is in comparison to public schools, which are regional gerrymandered monopolies. This system isn't perfect, but sets incentives in place to make it better. I grew up near some sketchy neighborhoods, and although I went to an average school, I know a lot of people who fared worse.

I'm not going to write a response to everything you said, but the tl;dr falls into a few categories

1\. Privatization does not mean deregulation. Imagine Obamacare style regulations to a private marketplace for schooling (price caps, cannot turn away certain sets of people, etc).

2\. If we can't agree on some measure for effective education, then there's no way to improve this, since we have no bar to go by. Everything is empirical and mileage may vary from person to person. You can create a seperate class of high school education (will flesh out in next point).

3\. Property values are strongly correlated with the quality of the public schools (since all states help pay for public school with property taxes[1], and you are locked into a public school depending on where you live). My main motivation for supporting this is to help poor people have access to the same quality education as everybody else, and maybe even allowing specialized tracks that bias towards vocational schooling that funnels into direct employment after school (universities can boast about employment post graduation, why not high schools?)

4\. There is nuance with the specific numbers here, and if it is systemically impossible for reasonable competition, then this price will go up.

[1]: [http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches- th...](http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches-the-property- tax-and-public-ed.aspx)

<comment><USER6> It's precisely because they are monopolies that they can be forced to accept a wide range of students. Otherwise there will be schools which pick the best/easily taught students, and leave the others behind.

Those who fared worse in the current system may fare far worse in an all- private system.

1\. In the current charter school system, privatization often does mean deregulation. So while I can imagine it, I assert that it's a dream.

2\. If we pick wrong measures - and standardized tests are wrong measures - then we end up trying to improve the wrong thing. Eg, we end up with two weeks dedicated to test prep, instead of teaching; we end up dropping art, music, and foreign language classes in order to focus only on those topics which are tested.

The regional gerrymandering is in part so that the local communities get to decide what the right measures are. Mileage absolutely varies from person to person .. people and communities vary too.

It's not like we didn't have a decent sense of what a good education meant back in the 1970s, before high-stakes testing.

3\. Again, how do private schools get to decide which students to accept? Can they make policies which end up rejecting most poor people? If the private school education costs $10,000 and the state's check is for $5,000 then poor students aren't going to afford it. While the parents of middle class students can, subsidized by the state.

Which means poor people _won 't_ have access to the same quality education as everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Student debt is due in part to the government getting out of funding public schools. There is little student debt in those countries where the government pays for a college education.

Student debt is also affected by poor supervision of lenders. Among other things, student debt cannot be discharged (usually) during bankruptcy. This is a special law that does not affect most other types of debt. As a result, loan institution don't need to do as much diligence.

Student debt is also because of the rapidly rising costs of education. I think part of it is the belief that one must go to college to have a good career. Colleges look at the delta in earning potentials and say "I gotta have more of that." The argument is that if going to college is expected to net you $2 million in additional income, then it's worthwhile to spend an extra $100K on it.

"Uneducated people stuck in poverty" is a combination of factors. One is the dependency of most school system on local taxes. Poor neighborhoods don't have the tax base for their schools as rich ones do. Rich parents want their kids to go to well-funded schools, and will move to do so. Poor parents rarely have that option. This is also coupled with the long-lasting effects of racism, eg, red-lining and the white urban exodus to the suburbs during the 1900s, which segregated school systems among racial and economic lines. The modern charter school movements have also resulted in increased segregation.

"global warming/climate crisis" \- widely accepted by the relevant scientists, including those at oil companies. Oil companies spent massive amounts of money on disinformation campaigns, and in buying the government. I don't see how "less government" would have improved the situation. More government - government which could reign in the imbalance of power by having $billions of oil money on hand - might have made a difference. Look now where other governments in the world are far ahead of the US on this topic.

"obesity crisis" \- there are many reasons for the crisis. I don't see how less government would help. Certainly the government has many roles in the matter.

"diabetes crisis" \- how would less government help?

"unmanageable healthcare costs" \- most wealthy countries address this with national health care, either run by or overseen by the government. The US healthcare system is royally screwed up, but I think can be explained by the explanations including 1) most sick people can't shop around for the best care, 2) hospitals have little reason to publish their full costs, and 3) there's little competition because it's expensive to maintain duplicate medical support infrastructure for a given region. Further, since medical coverage is employer based, employers are the customer, not the employee, and since there are so many coverage options (in the name of 'customer choice'), it leads to a paradox of choice issue where people don't want to spend the time to figure out the right choice, much less as those plans change every year.

I don't see how less government would help the US system.

"police brutality/abuse of power" \- Yes, US police are brutal and abusive. How does less government help change that? Allow non-police like private guards to take over more law enforcement? Won't that just shift the brutality and power abuse to those with even less oversight?

"mass shooting epidemics" \- you'll again note that mass shooting epidemics don't really happen in countries with significantly more government. What is the mechanism by which less government would reduce the number of mass shootings in the US?

You write "UPS/FedEx are better than USPS". This is outright not true. USPS's mandate is to be able to deliver anywhere in the US. FedEx, for example, will use USPS for rural delivery. Quoting [https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail- does-the-trick-for-fed...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the- trick-for-fedex-ups-1407182247?mod=WSJ_LatestHeadlines) from 2014:

> For FedEx alone, the post office delivers an average of 2.2 million packages > a day, or about 30% of the express-mail company's total U.S. ground segment.

So UPS/FedEx are sometimes better than USPS, and other times worse.</comment>


Live list of instances (with user counts) on the Mastodon social media network - <AUTHOR> https://instances.mastodon.xyz/ <comment><USER2> I was going to suggest to sort the list by the number of users, but then I noticed that if you click in the header of the table it will get sorted automatically.</comment>


Hawaii may keep track of all Web sites visited - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57366443-281/hawaii-may-keep-track-of-all-web-sites-visited/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if Mizonu has actually ever spoken to anyone in the tech field abou this. I haven't read the text of the bill itself, but judging from the article it sounds like a first draft of something a high school freshman would write on the bus 10 minutes before it was due.

<comment><USER3> If only the bill had a Hawaii themed name, like SURF'S UP: Subjecting Users to Required Fusking of Sans-UDP Packets

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope this gets more attention and doesn't slip under the radar. It's this type of thing that can be used to set precedence and allow other states to take the same measures.

One by one, state by state, the entire country will be sewed up unless we are vigilant.

<comment><USER5> _I hope this gets more attention and doesn't slip under the radar._

On the contrary.

It seems (from the article; I haven't looked at the bill) that this is so poorly thought out and constructed that, if passed, it provides ample opportunity for a real demonstration of exactly why it's awful.

With a complete lack of specified privacy protections, how long do you think it will take for Mizuno and the other State legislators' records to be outed? Once their own dirty laundry is exposed for all to see, they'll try the usual gambits about staffers' unauthorized usage, etc., but it will be crystal clear to all just what happens when all that information is agglomerated.

<comment><USER6> They'll just make an exception for legislators, as is the case amongst so many other laws that don't apply to those who wrote them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I reckon that if such a ridiculous law were to come to pass, you could create a script that uses your browser to visit random sites and deep follow links found on those sites at constant pace all the time. This would generate so much noise in such a list that it would be prohibitively expensive to determine what sites you actually visited.

On top of generating noise to obfuscate signal, this approach generates reasonable doubt.

Needle meet haystack. Haystack meet needle.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully this is a plot to let civil liberties lawyers and other activists take tax-deductible trips to Hawaii this season (ostensibly to work against the bill, but, Hawaii in February).

(I already had a trip planned for Monday; I'll see about getting a meeting with some representatives while there...)

</comment><comment><USER9> In the not so distant future, people will pick the state they choose to live in based on Internet freedom.</comment>


Reddit uses Adzerk API to improve native ad system - <AUTHOR> http://adzerk.com/blog/2014/04/why-reddit-built-their-advertising-system-on-the-adzerk-platform

<comment><USER2> We've been using Adzerk on 4chan for the past year and it's been a Godsend. We'd previously been using our own in-house rotation that had minimal reporting because every third-party we'd used in the past either a) fell over under load, b) was extremely expensive, or c) had a restrictive ToS.

<comment><USER3> Well shit, if Adzerk can handle the traffic loads from 4chan (out of curiosity, how many users use adblock?) then it would be perfect for some of the projects I'm working on :)

<comment><USER4> Adzerk also serves reddit's ads.

Edit: Well this is embarrassing, I was linked here through a user profile and didn't see that this thread was about reddit & adzerk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmmm, I just tried to login to Adzerk using my account that I registered back in March 2013. It doesn't work anymore. I can still enter my username/password, but nothing happens. I can even reset the password.

Perhaps it's because when I signed up, ad serving was claimed to be free for up to 100 million impressions per month. That changed: [http://adzerk.com/blog/2014/01/an-update-about-new-free- adze...](http://adzerk.com/blog/2014/01/an-update-about-new-free-adzerk- accounts)

"Certainly! If you signed up for an account before January 6th 2014 and were actively serving ads, you can still serve as many impressions as you want for free up to 100 million impressions per month. However, to contact Adzerk support after your 30-day trial ends, you must purchase a support app in the Marketplace."

So I guess they disabled my account because I wasn't actively serving ads? It would have been nice if I had received some kind of notification at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct - we disabled all the accounts that weren't active when we made the decision to focus on larger customers. We didn't notify accounts because we didn't want people trying to game the system by artificially creating impressions to keep their account open.

<comment><USER5> Is that how you think of your customer base? Gaming you? Aren't artificial impressions against the terms anyhow?

<comment><USER6> Seriously, drop it. Your faux outrage is pretty transparent given you didn't even actually use their service.

<comment><USER7> Not that he can use the service in the first place, or is able to even know what is going on without finding them on a third party message board...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Was the previous reddit ad system opensource like their site is ?

<comment><USER9> Reddit is only partially open-source. Parts of the site code are kept confidential.

<comment><USER10> Unless things have changed since I worked there, pretty much the only part that's not open source is the anticheating system.</comment></comment></comment>


Android: The Platform for Prototypes - <AUTHOR> http://robsandhu.tumblr.com/post/15537100360/android-the-platform-for-prototypes

<comment><USER2> Don't forget on iOS that you can't easily push out new revisions. That 10+ day wait not only applies to your first release, but to every change you want to make.

Aside from slowing down iterations a lot, it means you want to REALLY test well before you push an iteration to them. Just heard about a top grossing iOS game that pushed out a new revision with a bug that affects 1% of their users ... causing THOUSANDS of tech support emails. And it's still another week or so before the fix will be published.

To say this causes a chilling effect on experimentation on iOS is an understatement.

<comment><USER3> Not totally true: for such case if you have a nasty bug and you are quite sure to have fix the problem, then you can ask Apple review team for an expedite review. There is an online form to fill up, and you are good to go. I know at least 2 developers that had to use it and their update was approved in less than 4 hours. Obviously it is not for abuse and only for critical issue but the idea that it will take a standard full review time for Apple to approve an emergency bug fix is totall untrue.

<comment><USER4> Got a link for that form? I need to file it away for future reference :-)

(and could have used it at least once before! :-\ )

<comment><USER5> <http://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/>

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is the correct link/form the devs I know have been using in the past. Obviously it is a case by case basis but for the folks I know their apps were not anywhere close to a top 100 position, and the review team did for them the "right" thing and got their updates approved ASAP. Their apps was not a first version but they had done multiple releases, and never had to ask for the expedite review. So I think that the review team took that in consideration, and on top of that the fix was required because one of the web service outside their control changed their API without notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Android - immediate distribution"

Another important metric is how quickly users start using the update. When you measure using this metric Android is anything but instant.

Web apps "check for updates and install" every time you use them. Users are forced to update and depending on the site within a matter of minutes nearly everybody will be using the new version.

Android apps don't go through a review process, but it still takes a few minutes for the servers to get the update. It will take an hour or two for every phone to get notified of the update (it's not pushed) and give the user a notification. It will then be even longer for the user to push the button and receive your beautiful new code. There are a few users with "automatic updating" but it's not enabled by default. The majority of your user base will take a while to finish migrating over. I would love if anybody here had real numbers on this, our app only just started reporting version numbers so we haven't been able to collect the data yet.

There are exceptions. The Facebook app renders webpages so most updates happen instantly, but when they update one of the native sections there's still a long wait before everyone has it.</comment>


Defamation by domain name - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/can-a-mere-domain-name-be-defamation-glenn-beck-says-yes.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> As an aside: In a rather shocking moment of self-discovery, I realised I agreed that a domain name like <http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/> can be defamation, but once I read a bit further and found out Glenn Beck is a conservative Fox News talking head, I decided to change my stance, internally citing 'satire' as justification.

I appall myself.

</comment><comment><USER2> Any public figure should have a skin thick enough to deal with stuff like this.

Fox News, CNN or the BBC it shouldn't make any difference.

The fact that the guy is a conservative talk show host is entirely his problem, if you want to live a quiet life then you shouldn't have your head on TV all the time.

Don't feed the trolls. And he should read up on the 'streisand' effect, I'm pretty sure that this whole thing will attract 10x the viewers it would have otherwise.

But then again, both parties benefit from that so I guess this will continue for a while.</comment>


Heat map of homophobic and racist tweets - <AUTHOR> http://users.humboldt.edu/mstephens/hate/hate_map.html#

<comment><USER2> Nearly all questions answered in the "about map" link:

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 - April 2013 containing one of the 'hate words'. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To produce the map all tweets containing each 'hate word' were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county. Counties were reduced to their centroids and assigned a weight derived from this normalization process. This was used to generate a heat map that demonstrates the variability in the frequency of hateful tweets relative to all tweets over space. Where there is a larger proportion of negative tweets referencing a particular 'hate word' the region appears red on the map, where the proportion is moderate, the word was used less (although still more than the national average) and appears a pale blue on the map. Areas without shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets relative to the national average.

The numbers that appear in the map during a mouse hover indicate the total number of hateful tweets and number of unique users sending them in each county.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

EDIT: The mouse overs don't appear to work very well in Chrome or Firefox, but from the one or two times I was able to see some numbers it appears that each red circle may be a dozen or less tweets. Also, the hot zones dissipate significantly the further you zoom in, so without any statistics or numbers it's difficult to draw conclusions.

A very interesting experiment, but given that the data is only normalized by Twitter traffic (non-response bias) this is in no way indicative of the actual distribution of racism.

<comment><USER3> > Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any > tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the > HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, > neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that > were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

I wonder how well a Bayesian classifier would work if the this was used as a training set. If it worked relatively well, there's no reason why you couldn't create a live version of the map.

Something like <http://aworldoftweets.frogdesign.com/> maybe?

<comment><USER4> Not very well. Twitter sentiment is a difficult problem.

Consider using millions of training examples (vs. thousands). This was done as part of the "distant supervision" Twitter sentiment technique. What this means is that tweets with positive emoticons were labeled as positive sentiment, and negative emoticons were labeled as having negative sentiment. Emoticons were stripped before training. This system got 80% accuracy.

[http://cs.wmich.edu/~tllake/fileshare/TwitterDistantSupervis...](http://cs.wmich.edu/~tllake/fileshare/TwitterDistantSupervision09.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a xkcd for that: <http://xkcd.com/1138/>

"Pet Peeve #208: Geographic profile maps which are basically just population maps."

<comment><USER6> None of the major population centres are well-represented in that map.

<comment><USER7> Come again? It looks to me like the map tags almost every one of the major population centers. Southern California seems abnormally low, but that's just about it.

<comment><USER8> Chicago?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would like to see per-capita, or age profile. One hot spot is centered on eastern Iowa/western Illinois. I live there, and am utterly surprised by this. That coincides on a cluster of college campuses; perhaps its careless language by college students?

<comment><USER3> Total wild ass guess, but I'd bet the total number of tweets for a region is roughly proportional to its total population. If that's true, the normalized results you see here will be very similar to the per-capita results. It'd be interesting to verify this, however. It would tell you "this region's twitter users are X% [more|less] 'hateful' than the region's general population."

<comment><USER10> There's no way Montanans tweet just as often as Californians.

<comment><USER3> It'd be interesting to find out. There are a lot of very diverse populations in California.

[Edit: I should place extra emphasis on the word "roughly," in my OP as well.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A fundamental problem with this strategy is that is may bias the results towards prolific haters—i.e. people who are frequently hateful on Twitter. These people may live in places where social norms permit online hateful speech without repercussions. This strategy will miss people who are haters, but must be more subdued in their expressions of hatred online.

It would be interesting to identify people who have posted just a few hateful messages—perhaps few enough that they can get away with it in their local social context. This may more sensitive to occult haters.

Something like this: 1\. Identify individual twitter users as being hateful in a particular category. For instance, user A uses the word "chink" 3x and "fag" 5x in 100 tweets, so he gets added to the "chink" and "fag" categories. Play with these threshold to see what makes sense. 2\. Divide the # of hateful users in each category by the total # of users in that location. Allocation of users to location can be done proportional to the # of tweets they make from each location.

Cool project :).

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't see a scale anywhere; am I just missing it?

It makes a big difference if red is 4-5 tweets (per what time period), or 4-5 thousand.

<comment><USER3> The data is normalized by number of tweets for a particular region (county, I believe). So what you're looking at is a comparison between the portion of total tweets for a region which is racist/homophobic/disabled-biased.

Put differently: If county A has 100 tweets over the time period and 1 of them are racist it will appear identical to county B which has 1000 tweets of which 10 are racist over the same time period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can't zoom in very far without the heat map degenerating into points for individual counties. I suspect in many areas they represent individual tweets or tweeters, but I'm not seeing any hover-over data, so I'm not sure. I'm surprised -- 150k tweets sounds like a lot, but there isn't enough data for a heat map effect unless you're zoomed out to the national level.

<comment><USER14> There are 3000+ counties and county equivalents in the US, so that makes about 50 tweets per county. That could easily be output by one or two people per county. Seeing as a lot of southern cities seem clean but with one or two really bright points nearby, I suspect that your thesis is correct and that most of these points are caused by particularly vociferous individual racists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's funny (or annoying) how charts invite criticism and feature creep.

Thanks for an interesting chart.

What did you do to cut down on lying human classifiers? Do you give them an incentive? Did you have them vote as a group on the classification of a sentiment?

Whites aren't allowed to say the N word, and Anita can say the S word [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6wo2wpT2k&t=0m45s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6wo2wpT2k&t=0m45s). But maybe your human classifiers can handle this problem too? I hope they got a good grade.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have always disliked the term "homophobic". "Phobic" means that someone has a fear of something. Given that the people using these words in tweets are doing so in a very public fashion, they are not very likely to be afraid of gay people. They are perhaps hateful and/or prejudiced, but phobic is just an entirely inaccurate term in this and most other instances where that term is used.

<comment><USER17> Bullies are only brave when targeting a minority. They're scared of things they don't understand but will only make a noise about it if they feel in a strong position.

A better complaint about the word homophobic is that its meaning is dependant on one understanding "homo" to mean homosexual. Otherwise it means one who fears same-ness. Most homophobes actually, obviously, fear difference.

<comment><USER16> But again, that makes a tremendous number of assumptions as to why the person is saying those words. I get that it is a term meant to degrade and shame those who use these terms, but I just don't think it's an accurate description in the majority of cases.

<comment><USER18> Words don't have to mean the same as their etymology though. This one has clearly moved away from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In Idaho, New Mexico, and Wyoming, the counties that look really hot are very, very low population counties. For example, I'm assuming the giant red spot in New Mexico is Sierra County, population 11,988. The southern most county in Idaho is Oneida county, population 2900 (My high school was nearly that big).

</comment><comment><USER20> Another reason why it may seem off to the viewer, (Mississippi is less racist than other areas may have to do with the populations in particular areas.)

If you have 50% people of the racial group you are sampling racist tweets from living in a particular state, you should see less racist tweets by %.

</comment><comment><USER21> Some of these words can also have other meanings. For example "fag" is english slang for cigarette and "chink" obviously has other meanings. I also know gay people who prefer the term 'queer' in describing themselves. I guess you could get a lot of "nigger" too by retweeting hip hop lyrics..

<comment><USER22> From the 'Details about this map' popup:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> interesting idea but this map needs work: you really have to zoom in to see what's really happening. when zoomed out it looks like practically the entire USofA is full of hate.

</comment><comment><USER24> Should also include, at minimum, the percentage of Tweets that were racist / sexist / whatever. We need to know the total volume of tweets before we can tell if it's higher or lower than just "average" racism.

<comment><USER25> "To produce the map all tweets containing each 'hate word' were aggregated to the county level and _normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county_."

Emphasis mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Holy map fails batman. Zoom out and feel the hate.</comment>


Ask HN: What services are available for sending/receiving SMS/MMS messages? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for a reliable low-cost service. <comment><USER2> www.clickatell.com

This is the service we decided on at my old job. Our only difficulties were that we're based in Australia. The messages were sometimes slightly delayed (not by more than 30 seconds or so though)

</comment><comment><USER3> www.textmarks.com/

I believe they are free and make their money for advertising. They share the short code though, so you signup for a specific keyword at first.</comment>


In Defense of Fahrenheit - <AUTHOR> http://lethalletham.com/posts/fahrenheit.html <comment><USER2> The author argues against Celsius because it 'feels' wrong? Well, I've grown up with Celsius all my life, and Farenheit just 'feels' wrong to me.

Everything is relative. The author deems 35 deg C as being "grossly hot", but that is just the average temperature to me where I live. He calls 0 degrees not even cold, but for me, that is almost unbearably cold.

Having a datum of 0 for freezing makes sense, especially for professions like flying (I used to be a pilot). Knowing that you are close to a point when water will turn from liquid to solid can be life saving, and I have no problems with using negatives to determine HOW solid.

<comment><USER3> It's not so much 0 that's the problem with Centigrade for weather purposes, it's the 100. 100 F is rather warm. 100 C is DEAD.

I don't have a problem with Centigrade for other stuff, but I think Fahrenheit captures the human ambient environment range better.

Disclaimer: American, where I remember the vain national attempt at metrication as a young child and still have to convert everything mentally when visiting my Australian in-laws

<comment><USER4> But surely Americans use temperature for cooking too and not just for weather, and then 100°C is boiling which is also at least somewhat useful to know.

<comment><USER5> When cooking I have never needed to know what temperature boiling water is. The fact that it's boiling is enough. Never mind that water only boils at 100°C at sea level and most Americans don't live at sea level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The argument that 0-100 being an intuitive and useful daily use scale is actually a good one.

However, everything else falls flat.

Nobody actually uses decimals with celcius, because nobody can tell the difference between 8.2 degrees and 8.7 degrees. It's just 8 and 9.

Zero being freezing is a critical number to know, because that's when you can get black ice (+/\- wind-chill) and snow.

Knowing that 35 is grossly hot is no more difficult than knowing -32 is freezing.

Celcius has simple ranges: Below 0: it's freezing, bundle up 0-10: it's cold outside, wear a jacket 10-20: good for physical activity, sweater and light jacket required 20-30: it's comfortable outside 30+: stay in the shade

That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

<comment><USER7> > That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no > idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

It surprised me when we recruited a developer from Canada, and on his second day at work he asked what temperature he should have set the oven to. I learned that Canada has appliances labelled in "American".

180°C is the most common oven temperature required, outside 160-200°C is unusual for normal cooking.

<comment><USER8> Ive always thought ovens could do fine with a five setting control.

Warming (180-200F)/90C

Low 300F/150C

Med 350F/180C

High 400F/200C

Broil

<comment><USER9> A High of 400/200 seems quite low. I'd definitely want a Very High of ~230-250 as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author lists the importance of a global temperature scale, then shows a map of North America overlaid with some dots.

> For many people that's Celsius, but for many others it's Fahrenheit.

That second 'many' is disingenuous. For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10% it's Fahrenheit.

Author also has some pretty arbitrary and bewildering requirements, including wanting a scale of 0 to 100, yet also avoiding any 3-digit numbers.

Any claims about 'intuition' are misguided -- Celsius makes more sense because a) most people use it, and b) it maps onto the rest of the SI units.

That I happen to feel comfortable at a somewhat arbitrary 21 (c) is not a sufficient or satisfactory reason for other people to let go of deprecated temperature scales.

<comment><USER11> > For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10% > it's Fahrenheit.

I thought only the US and a few very small countries use Fahrenheit, which is not more than 5% of the world population?

<comment><USER12> A quick glance at the numbers on Wikipedia puts it a bit under 5%, the bulk of which is inhabitants of the US, but I did leave out the Bahamas for convenience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Celsius is much more useful than stipulated here. For example, it takes 1J (Joule) to heat 1g (which is also 1ml) of pure water 1 degree Celsius.

The metric system is all weighted and related from temperature to mass to distance. This is what makes it so useful for Science, and frankly, every day use.

<comment><USER14> Please provide an example where you need to convert between Joules, grams, and Celsius in "every day use"

<comment><USER15> Estimating how long it will take the kettle to boil :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don't care that much about the > freezing and boiling points of water

What? Freezing point of water is one of the most important things with temperature outside. Will it snow or rain? Will the lake freeze or melt? Will the road be slippery or not. That is like... the most important thing about temperature and outside.

However, I agree that the boiling temperature of water is not much used outside in a daily life.

</comment><comment><USER17> Or we could just stop this Freedom Units bullshit and be like normal people. It feels wrong is not a reason to keep doing the stupid thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> There is a desperate attempt by some news papers in the UK to bring back Fahrenheit, The problem being only those over 40 really knows what it means to have a 85f "scorcher"

its only being done as a symbol of "freedom" from the EU loving french.

</comment><comment><USER19> >The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don't care that much about the freezing and boiling points of water

Even in a chemistry lab, Celsius isn't that great, it's Kelvin that actually has an advantage. And Rankine would be about as good.

<comment><USER20> I care very much about the freezing point of water outside. It means ice on the roads.

<comment><USER19> My point was about in the chemistry lab, not outside.

<comment><USER20> I don't work in a chemistry lab. But why is the boiling point of water not important there?

<comment><USER19> It is important, but more important is having absolute 0, which Celsius doesn't have.

The other problem with Celsius and the boiling point is that the boiling point changes depending on air pressure, which changes depending on elevation. So it's not always 100°C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Celsius is pretty easy to wrap my head around, even though I think in Fahrenheit. I think my main argument against Fahrenheit is when I'm cooking and look up food safety information I usually convert to Celsius in my head because I have a pretty intuitive sense of temperatures as a percentage of the boiling point of water but Fahrenheit I really don't. I also don't imagine anyone using Celsius as their "native language" routinely converts to Fahrenheit in their head just to get a better understanding of what a temperature means.

</comment><comment><USER20> In practice a difference of 1 degree celsius is slightly noticeable. But given that 1 degree Fahrenheit is only 5/9 degree celsius, do you really care if it's 74 or 75F outside?

<comment><USER14> I can definitely feel the difference between when I set my car to 72F vs 73F (or any pairing of consecutive degrees F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For everyday use the unit does not matter at all. We could drop numbers completely and just say it's freezing, cold, chilly, ok, warm and hot and be done with it. For cooking we could just use simmer, boil, stew and bake.

But Celsius interacts with other units nicely. So when you actually need some precision, Celsius works nicely. Kelvin is of course the one to choose when talking about scientific matters, but Celsius works well enough for everyday things and when precision is needed.

</comment><comment><USER23> So why is the metric system based on water, instead of liquid hydrogen? Why not use the most common essential element, instead of some arbitrary compound?

Metric seems pretty anthropocentrist to me, since humans are 50-60% water, while the universe is 75% hydrogen.

In the Universal Hydrogen Metric system, 0 °H would be -259.2 °C, and 100 °H would be −252.87 °C.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think there are a lot of similarities between F and C as there are with the use of military time. In the US we use AM/PM for civilian use but in England you see them use military time for things like TV show times, and train/bus times. It all seems very regimental.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think a lot of people here are missing the most important point, which is that Fahrenheit roughly maps 0-100 to the most common temperature ranges experienced in daily weather, which is by far the most frequent use of temperature for most people.

</comment><comment><USER26> Rankine is even better. (like Fahrenheit plus 459.67°)

You get the same step size as Fahrenheit, so you can adjust your house temperature without a decimal. (some of us care) It is also good enough for industrial food processing without that decimal, for example in canneries.

You get a correct zero. Fahrenheit and Celsius are just wrong. Think about the meaning of something like "twice as hot", which is a thing people say. With a correct zero, there is no need for negatives unless you are doing quantum physics research. If you aren't convinced, imagine we had a weight scale that used 0 for a very small adult and 100 for a very large adult.

All the normal temperatures people deal with, including oven temperatures, are exactly 3 digits. The 3-digit numbers 100 to 999 are like Fahrenheit from -359.67° to 539.33°.

</comment><comment> jim-jim-jim I think alternative measurements are cute and I encourage their usage simply because they make epic reddit science guys so irrationally mad.

The year is Reiwa 1, it's 51° F out, and I weigh 9.92 stone. Deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER27> LOL. Do people really still use fahrenheit over there?

<comment><USER28> More imperial entanglements than you can possibly imagine.

<comment><USER15> American customary units are not the same as imperial units. The British imperial reform in the early 1800s altered the volume measures, whereas the US continued using the Queen Anne wine gallon and the Winchester grain bushel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> tldr; Fahrenheit maps the subjective feeling of very cold to very hot to a scale from 0 to 100.

Celsius on the other hand gives you additional information about the state of water at this temperature (0C frozen, 100C boiling).

The author didnt talk about the correct physical unit, Kelvin, which tells you about the possibitiy of the temperature (no Kelvin values below 0).

</comment><comment><USER30> Fahrenheit seems to be a good scale for weather. It would be a pretty simple matter to make a human friendly scale based on Celsius - halve the unit. Freezing is zero degrees, and boiling is 200 degrees. I call this unit Celinheit:

Here's how that looks when compared with Fahrenheit:

      0F == -35 Ch
     10F == -24 Ch
     20F == -13 Ch
     32F ==   0 Ch
     40F ==   9 Ch
     50F ==  20 Ch
     60F ==  32 Ch
     70F ==  42 Ch
     80F ==  53 Ch
     90F ==  64 Ch

100F == 76 Ch 110F == 86 Ch

The advantages of this system:

* 40-60 would be considered about ideal.

* Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.

* Converting to metric would be really easy.

Disadvantages:

* [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER31> > The advantages of this system: > > * 40-60 would be considered about ideal.

Why would that be an advantage? I consider about 20–25°C ideal. Why is it worse than some other range?

> * Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.

As a user of the celsius scale, each 10 degree "band" already has a feeling to me.</comment></comment>


Loyalty is when someone refuses a better option - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/loyalty.html

<comment><USER2> The hard part is: how do you get it? Customer service, quality products, an extrinsically motivated vision? Its probably something not able to be determined in a forum.</comment>


San Francisco's guerrilla protest at Google buses swells into revolt - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/25/google-bus-protest-swells-to-revolt-san-francisco?CMP=twt_gu <comment><USER2> The real problem is not Google (or Apple, FB, etc) but the limits on development of new housing and rent control. I live in London, and outside of my window I can see now 5 new huge developments. Because of massive influx of people prices are increasing, but at much slower rate.

I lived for 4 months in SF last year, and my crappy flat was more expensive then in London. What is worse, I rented it in a sketchy deal from a woman, who wasn't even an owner. She rented a flat for a long time, and due to rent control she was paying probably a fraction of what she should be. So she lived in Oakland and sublet flat in Mission.

I understand that people don't want 'character of city' to change, but with gentrification it is changing anyway. Best cities in the world are always growing, but SF seems to be very stubborn and want's to be a kid forever.

<comment><USER3> People need to stop with this. Higher urban density is "not" the answer. It puts an incredible amount of strain on every other service around it from roads, education, sewage, water, police, hospitals etc. It never ends (or doesn't end well) It's the _velocity_ of change, not change itself, that's the problem for SF. Not sure about your dodgy rent controlled landlord but sounds like without here you can't afford to have experienced 4 months of SF.

<comment><USER4> Gumby already said it but it's worth repeating: there is economics research out there that shows that as density increases, a bunch of things you mention (roads, sewage, water) actually become more efficient, and that the gain in efficiency outpaces the growth in density.

<comment><USER3> So if you triple the population of SF without any updates things will work more smoothly? I use an extreme example to highlight the fact that those studies talk about incremental gains not hyper growth that SF is or will experience (if all this new housing was approved)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems kind of silly to me, yes this means that many people have to leave the city, but there really is not much that they can do about it. San Francisco's city government is not going to be able to either (a) kick out the tech people nor (b) figure out a way to lower rent (and in turn tax revenue). It's in the cities interest to keep the rent/cost per home as high as possible and in turn keep the tech people around.

I really don't understand why this bothers the others in the city. If they do not own where they live (and chose to rent) then they don't OWN their home and in turn have no right to live there. Rather, it makes much more sense that they should live somewhere within their means. If they are angry about that, it seems to me that they are just throwing a fit.

I personally am from Chicago, and I know there is a similar situation there. Most of the city (even for high paying jobs) commute in because there is a fairly decent train system, but also the prices are 10 times higher per square foot in the city. The people who do live in the city are wealthy or homeless. Though San Francisco's rent is twice as high as Chicago's on average, no one near Chicago wants to waste their money living in the city unless they want to be in the heart of the city and enjoy the scene. If you can't afford that, then perhaps you didn't make very good choices in your life (aka didn't make enough money to obtain what you want) and you should try and find a way to achieve that goal without inflicting pain (stress, wasted time, etc.) on others.

<comment><USER6> That is probably the most condescending thing I've seen on hacker news (and I've seen a lot of that).

The protesters may be wrong in their methods and they are probably fighting for a losing cause. But to say people made bad decisions in their life because they are not earning twice or thrice the national median income is just ignorant.

You compare SFO wit Chicago. But I am guessing the high earners living in the city also work there, unlike SFO where they commute _OUT_ to work.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. But please do not straight up dismiss it.

Disclaimer: I do not live in the region so I have no idea about the specifics. I just felt the parent comment was wrong.

<comment><USER7> I think the reason why people don't live in Silicon Valley is that it's _even more_ expensive to live there.

I'm also kind of skeptical toward the protestors, mostly because it's confusing to me that people actually expect living in the city to be cheap. Big cities have lots of people and very little space. Therefore, space is in high demand and is really expensive. If you don't want to live in a shoebox, don't live in the city.

California is even more expensive because it's in even higher demand. It has a burgeoning culture scene, a large tech scene, and is a desirable retirement spot. All of these things are pretty much beyond the protestors' control.

Not only that, let's look at their endgame. There are two ways for rent to be lowered:

1\. Subsidized housing.

2\. Make fewer people want to live in San Francisco.

The first will work in the short term, but it will also drive up taxes in the area. Businesses will then raise their prices. The rich guys will be unaffected - what do they care if eggs now cost $3.00 instead of $2.00? The poor guys will, again, be unable to make ends meet. But at least their housing is affordable!

The second makes me think of cities where no one wants to live like Flint and Camden. I'm sure there's very cheap real estate there, but I wouldn't want my city to turn into it.

<comment><USER8> 3\. Allow for the construction of many more housing units.

This allows supply to help satisfy the demand, and is preferable to #1 or #2 by miles. The main objection, it seems, is that people fear that the character of the city will change (at least, so I hear--but is that true?).

<comment><USER7> Oh, it will definitely change, and I think that a lot of people will view the changes as negative. It means that more lower-class people will live there.

I think that these same people who are conducting protests toward Google would throw a fit if it was suggested. They want affordable housing _and_ the exclusivity that comes with living in an affluent city. They don't want to live in Oakland; they want to live in San Francisco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who's on the other side of the world - is this real? I mean, seriously?

How many of these "protestors" are there? I haven't seen any pictures of huge crowds. The only photo I have seen showed about 4 or 5 cranky looking people standing in front of a bus.

The whole thing smells like news media being a) lazy and b) hungry for a "conflict" story and so playing right into the protestors' hands. From what I can see, this shouldn't be a story at all.

<comment><USER3> It's the Guardian. They tend to the sensationalist. These events are small but they are most likely the canary in the mine.

<comment><USER10> > They tend to the sensationalist.

Really? Any arguments/examples to back that up?

<comment><USER3> Well I can think of one fairly recent example....... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a lot of misdirected anger in this world and attacks upon symptoms of problems instead of their underlying causes.

<comment><USER3> Actually "symptoms" become "symbols" that people rally around. Sitting at the front of the bus instead of the back was a symptom of racism not the cause. You can't "attack" an underlying cause but you can attack a physical manifestation/symptom of the problem.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but when attacking a symptom becomes directing your hatred at a group of people, you have a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The thing I find interesting about attacking the Google buses is that South Bay/Peninsula companies aren't really the problem. What's changed in the last 5 - 7 years is how many startups are _in_ San Francisco. So it's the abundance of well paid jobs in the City (along a little with the ability to work remotely) that's dramatically changed the situation. That's why there wasn't this sort of intense dynamic in the 90's up to the dot com bust. The Google buses are more just salt on the wounds. Even if they stopped it wouldn't change the dynamics very much. However, I understand the source of the frustration. Of course, like all markets, the problem may solve itself over time. After all, many of the unique aspects of SF that draws tech workers there or stay there will get priced out of the market making it much less appealing.

<comment><USER13> What'll happen is that it'll just be a bland yuppie city. The damage will have been done, and with no real reason to ever return to the way it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Googlers, what is your opinion on relaxing the remote work rules? Seems like a very direct way to ease this tension, but I have no perspective on how detrimental it would be to Google's culture.

<comment><USER15> There's that as well.

As I understand, Googlers "work remotely" already, meaning, no development is done in their desktop machine, but on remote servers, maybe someone can confirm.

EDIT: I am apparently wrong as some mentioned, so I would expect a more detailed explanation.

<comment><USER16> [I do not work at google.]

When I work remotely, I work on my desktop machine, via my laptop. SSH works just fine on desktop machines; desktop vs server really has nothing to do with working remotely.

<comment><USER15> I mean the machine sitting at their desks, regardless of it being a "desktop" machine or a laptop, it should have been clear from the context

<comment><USER16> I... what?

I mean that my work is done on a tower pc sitting under my desk in the office, whether I am in the office, or at home. When at home, I just log into my desktop.

 _" no development is done in their desktop machine, but on remote servers"_ has nothing to do with working remotely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I didn't get the protests until I realized that the higher rent is dramatically changing the character of the city. You won't find cheap ethnic food or eclectic family run businesses much longer if The valley keeps exporting its housing problem.

<comment><USER18> People have been saying that for decades, and yet the cheap ethnic food and eclectic family-run businesses still remain.

<comment><USER17> At rent increases like the city is seeing, I don't see how the primary customers of those establishments can remain in the city.

<comment><USER18> And yet they do, year after year. Try getting a parking space anywhere near 5th and Clement on a Saturday night if you don't believe me. The neighborhood is packed with people going out to eat at cheap ethnic restaurants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hating techies (and the target of hate, make no mistake, is all tech workers) is easy, convenient, misguided and counterproductive. it is easy, because hatred is a simple, attractive emotion. It is convenient, because it requires no thought about policy changes, urban planning, zoning, transportation, density, parking or anything else that makes a city. It is misguided because it fails to take into account the lack of development in this city that lead to this crisis -- essentially, SF's residents forced SF to be an exclusive enclave, and are now surprised it's becoming an exclusive enclave for someone else. Finally, it is counterproductive because the tech population is not going to leave the city, and the more hate you lob in their direction, the less willing they will be to cooperate in making the city affordable -- why collaborate with the people who actively vilify us?

</comment><comment><USER6> Are they specifically targeting Google and not other big companies ? Or is it just the article baiting for clicks ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, those darn buses keeping so many cars off our roads! They can't have buses! How terrible of them.

</comment><comment><USER20> meanwhile, in Ukraine...

<comment><USER21> I don't understand what this comment has to do with the article.

<comment><USER22> Priorities, apparently. Of course, Ukraine being on fire right now doesn't make all other news disappear, but perhaps we should be paying more attention to the _actual_ revolt.

<comment><USER23> Priorities, and making fun of San Francisco's "revolt" for not actually being a revolt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> WorldwarP.pl

s/Z/P/g; # P(p) = poverty, wealth disparity

" ...This goes way, way beyond a cheap bus ride - although the public transport scene in Brazil's big cities would star in Dante's ninth circle of hell. A manual worker, a student, a maid usually spend up to four hours a day back-and-forth in appalling conditions. And these are private transport rackets controlled by a small group of businessmen embedded with local politicians, who they obviously own."

[http://rt.com/op-edge/brazil-protests-world-cup-014/](http://rt.com/op- edge/brazil-protests-world-cup-014/)

</comment><comment><USER25> If the city really wanted to stop the rising rent they could just implement rent-control, and do it on a block by block basis, so you don't have the same issues that exist in NY.

<comment><USER26> Gosh what a great idea: rent control in San Francisco. You should send this new and brilliant idea to the board of supervisors immediately.

<comment><USER12> I wonder if they're ever tried that one before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> you had better believe that this 'grass roots' protest is funded by people with fat fat wallets. They are making tech workers into the New Jew using propaganda. Propaganda is the hidden force behind all of modern politics.

If you go back and look at the rise of hitler and the nazis, it becomes clear that the upper class needed a scapegoat to preserve their wealth from the inevitable oncoming swell of populist-leftist politics coming up from the working class. The upper class knew what was coming, so they found a scapegoat and subverted the working class populist sentiment, diverting working class anger onto the scapegoat, the jews. If you want references for this idea, see the article "I was Hitler's Boss" by Karl Mayr and also the new book _Hitler's_ _First_ _War_.

Anyway, the same thing is happening now--the elite are pushing the idea that tech workers are to blame for rising prices.

They are demonizing tech workers so that populist anger is directed away from themselves. It is also possible that this anger in SF against tech workers is actually in fact anger against cheap import H1b labor scabs from overseas, but the media is altering and changing the actual tenor and content of the protest to make it looks as if it is a protest against tech workers in general.

Also, as a side effect of demonizing tech workers, they can get more cheap labor H1Bs into america because the tech worker will then be an unsympathetic figure.

<comment><USER28> You are out of your mind.

<comment><USER27> and i went right into yours, sweetie!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I agree - the protesters are revolting.

<comment><USER30> Hear Hear - let them ride public buses (and eat cake).

Hate it when the great unwashed get uppity.

<comment><USER31> If only Google was actually oppressing them, then this comment might make sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good resources to learn Java EE - <AUTHOR> In my new workplace, we have several web projects built with Java EE. I had not done any Java programming before starting here. Two months in, I am able to contribute to maintenance of said projects and develop new features based on the existing code, but I lack knowledge to meaningfully improve the design of the application (meaning architecture / code patterns). There is only one other person who knows more than I do about Java EE (he built the things), but he does not have too much knowledge about the more advanced aspects of Java EE application design either. So could you recommend any good resources for learning Java EE? Especially about: - load balancing / HA,
- multithreading,
- developing an API for external consumption (not entirely Java EE related).
We are not using the Spring framework.
Any recommendation about good design patterns in Java EE is also very appreciated. <comment><USER2> This might be a hard pill to swallow...but it's going to be highly dependent on your app server.

Java EE is just a set of annotations with several different vendors implementing the standard in an app container.

I would look at the docs for whatever your employer is using.

A lot of it comes down to knowing some basic fundamentals about web development. For example: Load balancing/HA can be done in several different ways not tied to Java EE, the same is true of any of the things you're mentioning.

Largely, HA can be done with your app server. An API is just REST which means the jaxrs implementation.

Multi threading dynamics are typically app server specific. Generally "let your container do it" is the right answer though.

Source: Been doing java since spring 2.0 as well as dealing with app servers ranging from glassfish to jboss (now wildfly).

<comment><AUTHOR> Not hard at all, I already suspected that this might be the case. Can you recommend any generally good resources about these topics? I am looking first and foremost to acquire enough knowledge to think about them the right way. Technical implementation is important as well, but perhaps secondary in the context. We are using Wildfly as app server.

<comment><USER2> Then use their docs. In general, I would follow a few tutorials specific to red hat. For now, decompose it focusing on using jaxrs for now. The only other thing might be JNDI for accessing data sources. The rest will come from that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I haven't used it myself because I'm mostly dealing with Spring applications but from a cursory look this seems like good place to start: [https://javaee.github.io/tutorial/](https://javaee.github.io/tutorial/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Despite all my googling, I had missed this one. Regarding Spring, I have heard an opinion that the "new features" in latest Java EE versions make it somewhat obsolete, but I lack knowledge to evaluate the statement. What do you think? What are the advantages / disadvantages of Spring vs "pure"(?) Java EE.

<comment><USER3> Java EE is no less or more pure than Spring. It's just an alternative set of libraries and frameworks for roughly the same purposes. Everything else is just marketing by Oracle. The statement that Spring is obsolete is plainly wrong. Java EE neither provides the exact same feature set nor is it included in default Java environments.

Spring runs in any servlet container and on every cloud platform that supports Java. Spring Boot applications can even run as a stand-alone JAR. Java EE requires an application server such as Glassfish or JBoss to run. This incurs additional cost and complexity.

The Spring ecosystem is somewhat larger, too. You'll find a wide range of additional libraries by both Pivotal and third parties that draw upon Spring features like annotations and the Spring way of doing dependency injection.

If I were to decide whether to use Spring or Java EE for a new application regardless of the environment I'd clearly opt for Spring. If on the other hand for one reason or another you're running a Java EE environment anyway you might just as well use those capabilities. Depending on your scalability requirements and the number of applications a Java EE application can perform better than a Spring one in terms of memory usage because Java EE libraries typically are provided by the server whereas Spring libraries often come with each application individually.</comment></comment></comment>