I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/i-went-to-see-a-movie-and-instead-i-saw-the-future/ <comment><USER2> From the OP: "This is the future, I'm afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don't make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work. A future where people are so far removed from the process that they stand around powerless, unable to take the reigns. A future where people don't remember how to help one another in person. A future where corporations are so obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn't make sense to staff a theater with technical help because things only go wrong sometimes. A future with a friendlier past."

This reads eerily like the world depicted by the classic film, "Brazil," by Terry Gillian -- a world run by impersonal machines and processes beyond the control of most human beings. The plot starts with a fly getting jammed in a printer, creating a typographical error, which results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of an innocent man; and that's just the beginning. People in this world are _powerless_ , unable to take the reigns, unable to help other human beings. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

Let's hope humanity finds a way to build a different kind of future.

<comment><USER3> This has kind of been true in some sections of society for a while now, hasn't it? In the places where corporations have gutted and displaced the humanity that you used to be able to find. I've certainly seen and experienced the lack of humanity (a lack of empathy is probably the way that I'd describe it) explained away as, "Well, that's store policy, sir." for decades. I don't see that going anywhere in the future. I agree with the OP that we can just expect to deal with more and more of this in our lives.

As an anecdote, just this past week, at our local Target, my wife dealt with a similar situation around getting an exceedingly minor situation resolved. As part of a larger online order, we needed to get some lotion for our (< 1 years old) twins. We received the right brand and type of lotion but not the child version of the product that we ordered. My wife realized the error at the car, before driving home, thankfully, and so she went back inside to get it resolved. "I can't do that. The system requires 24 hours to pass from such and such arbitrary moment in your transaction." or whatever. My wife had to stand her ground, arguing with the employee about the issue, about how she needs it _today_, because one of our girls has eczema, it's being exacerbated by the dry winter weather, and we ran out of the same lotion this morning. That she doesn't have time to run through the store to find it, wait in line to buy it, and then for one of us to have to come back tomorrow still to process a return for an incorrect item through no fault of our own.

She did get it resolved, but it took corralling a small set of managers and then the store manager to do an override of some sort. Over 20 minutes of my wife's time on a work day, after work hours, and when we have these very young twins at home. We were trying to save time and instead it cost us. Because of "the system.", etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this view could be abstracted as "tech is helping automate customer service into oblivion."

I had a very similar experience this past week:

I wanted a new dryer for the apartment. The goal was to have the installation process be as hands-off as possible, so I googled, ordered online from Home Depot, and signed up for their "free installation" service. Click click click done.

Every part of the process stunk. The delivery company rescheduled (they didn't care - no connection to Home Depot itself), the guys who showed up came up with some excuse as to why they couldn't actually do the installation, and not only did they not care when I told them to cancel the delivery, they seemed happy that they didn't have to do the work ("no problem! we're outta here!").

Home Depot customer service didn't care when I asked for a refund. Nobody cared they lost a sale over something trivial and solvable. Nobody wanted to solve the issue (it would be more work to do that), nobody had a stake in the game, everyone got paid regardless. No humanity, just automatons dutifully processing the commands given to them.

In the end? Ordered from the local appliance shop that's been in business for 100+ years. Single phone call. They cared. Perfect process, no Internet (or, frankly, any tech other than an email confirmation) required.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't describe my experience with Home Depot at all. After I complained about their contacted installer, the manager of the store called to apologize and they had a new installer stop by at my convenience to redo the installation for free.

Appliance delivery and installation companies absolutely depend on their connections to big box stores to stay alive.

<comment><USER6> It would be much easier for people to disregard the customer and not complete sales in a big company like that though. It's not only more likely, it _ONLY_ happens with them. A small business would never have a company that delivers be that disappointing and lazy, especially after complaints to their customer service. Or even lack any sort of concern they lost a sale... Disappointing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My opinion is exactly the reverse. This is not the future. This is a story about a company whose time is highly limited.

I have a company - not a start-up, just a regular ol business- - that will do just under 7 figures of revenue in this, our very first year. 100% bootstrapped from savings.

In an industry which normally requires a high level of trust (think $4000+ upfront spend), we've signed up dozens of customers with ZERO reviews or prior reputation.

How?

We treat other people like humans - we talk to them like they're adults, treat them like they're adults, and have created a very special product that meets their needs as human beings.

Everything is designed from the ground up to be HUMAN FIRST, systems, policies and software be damned.

As long as human beings are the ones spending the money, companies like _mine_ will own the future.

<comment><USER8> Companies like yours get acquired and inevitably are corrupted in the process.

<comment><USER9> Companies like GP's get acquired _only if GP sells their share_. If GP refuses, competition only has the alternative of either lowering their prices so far down and cross-financing this with more profitable other stuff that OP goes out of business or to provide actual human support.

In both cases the consumers win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What did you expect?

This isn't the future - this is how it's been for decade(s) and it's just you only notice it when it "goes wrong" (for whatever reason)

When your cinema ran film, there needed to be somebody who could "deal with film"... I believe there used to be a profession called "A Projectionist"

Pretty much from the moment films were digitally distributed, the multiplex became a giant automated jukebox - only staff there are to sell you food and to clean up the mess you left from your food.

First time I hit this (easily over a decade ago) was when somebody had left the polarizing filter on the projector lens and we were trying to watch a 2D film. Eventually we got somebody to "take the filter off" and we could actually see the film properly - but then restarting the film descended into a cluster-fuck of trying to convince the DRM system that they weren't trying to show a bootleg showing and how even if they did restart, it was going to through the centrally-planned multiplex schedule into chaos.

</comment><comment><USER11> This has been true since platter systems took over in the 80s and 90s.

Back in that era, I saw so many movies that had completely broken projection and the staff had no idea what to do. Like now, it was so automated that all they knew was how to click the button to start the movie. Today's cinema systems are so much more reliable in comparison.

So maybe it's best to just acknowledge that there's a lost art here: film projection. The best looking 35mm film projection I ever saw in a regular theater was "The Man Who Wasn't There" at the Catlow. That theater had a projectionist who had worked there since WWII[1].

But, thanks to technology like digital projectors with autofocus, almost every movie I see today has better projection than that standout experience. It looks beautiful even weeks after release, since there's no physical film that gets scratched, starts to weave, etc.

[1] - [https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- xpm-2003-08-31-030831...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- xpm-2003-08-31-0308310194-story.html)

<comment><USER12> That was the way I was taught to think about print vs digital in the bio box --- print degrades gracefully, slowly, while digital fails catastrophically, abruptly.

I'm sure this is true of a wider scope of things than just cinema projection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At first this article seemed like some sort of new "interactive movie" thing, but I was mildly disappointed in the end to read that it was actually just about a technical problem at the movie theater. (don't get me wrong, it's a good article)

>"This is the future, I'm afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don't make mistakes . . . A future where corporations are so obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn't make sense to staff a theater with technical help because things only go wrong sometimes. A future with a friendlier past."

It doesn't make sense for a theater to have a high-paid techie on staff to handle the small percentage of the time some major technical glitch happens. Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money towards a better overall movie-going experience (those times when glitches don't happen anyways).

I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing.

<comment><USER14> >I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing.

The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this bugs can repeat. What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a movie? It could be some DRM protected computer that plays the movie and you need special keys to do anything more then plug it out and back in.

<comment><USER15> > The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this > bugs can repeat.

They probably have a technician on call which can answer before the next day, but not instantly during an issue.

The most likely issue is a part that broke, you really expect movie theaters to stock parts for everything and always having someone able to replace them? Your ideal movie theater would bankrupt quite fast. Instead the chain may have a stock for many theaters (or a contract to get replacement quick) and a technician able to go from one to another quickly (or again, a contract for this).

> What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a > movie?

It's not clear from the article whether he did wait enough or just abandonned once they got the movie back on.

I frequently go see movies, so I have seen many technical issues and they always were able to fast foward. No technical issues are alike and them figuring it out is clearly always a struggle, so it's rarely quick to fix.

<comment><USER14> >The most likely issue is a part that broke, you really expect movie theaters to stock parts for everything and always having someone able to replace them?

>I frequently go see movies, so I have seen many technical issues

That sucks that this happens frequently.

<comment><USER15> > That sucks that this happens frequently.

Never said it happens frequently, I see in average 50 movies a year and I have been doing this for the past 6 years. It's just the good old Murphy's law. There's so much software engineer here, it's weird that it's not a concept that we are aware of.

In my whole life I probably got 5 issues in a movie, they weren't able to fix it only once, and the manager told me there was a burnt smell in the projection room, so I guess it was the good old magic smoke that escaped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's nuts how similar this story is to the numerous HN comments I've read about people running into trouble with their Google accounts.

<comment><USER17> Someone replied on one of those threads that with (made up number) 2 billion users, of which 0.5 billion probably lack basic computer literacy x $15 per hour x 1 ticket per year... Etc etc ....it works out to be like 50% of Google's profit or something. And they end up employing 20,000 FTEs in call center.

Or you know....they don't.

Not really sure what the right answer is here but I don't feel it's my right to tell google to spend $X billion a year in service.

Maybe a competitor comes up with service, and google gets beat.

<comment><USER18> Support could be paid. If it ends up being Google's fault the fee is refunded, otherwise the fee is kept. This will deal and scale no matter how many idiots are calling as they're the ones paying the people answering the calls.

<comment><USER19> Charging for support, even if it's contingent as you described, would definitely be more of a drag on brand than having no support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most of us in tech have not only seen this future, we have coded and design it. Systems with little or no human interaction so when things go terribly wrong, there is no course of action that people can take to solve their problems. It's probably going to get worse with mediocre AI working on huge data sets, "don't blame our product issues on us, it was the AI that caused it... and we have no idea what the hell is was thinking.".

</comment><comment><USER21> "A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don't make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work."

Sounds like a good plot line for a movie...

<comment><USER22> This is already a big theme in Brazil. When you have an air conditioning malfunction, there's no one to fix it. An underground system of guerilla technicians develops, outside the bounds of the law, because they're not supposed to exist.

<comment> Anthony-G When I read the first sentence, I thought of the country. For those not familiar with the Terry Gilliam science fiction film from the, it's worth clarifying that _Brazil_ is the name of a film: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Digital and analog movies fail in different ways, but when a movie exhibited on film fails, normally there's not much the theater staff can do about it in time to keep on schedule anyway. I really don't see what most of this story has to do with "the future" \-- going to the movies 15 years ago on a gift certificate when there's a projector problem probably has about the same outcome.

<comment><USER9> The biggest issue that the author seems to have had was the lack of trust in humans and the lack of information at that cinema.

The staff had no one who had any knowledge about the technology, the cashiers had no power (=they were not trusted to not abuse) to issue refunds, and no one including the manager had any idea of _telling the people what 's going on_.

It's similar to public transport issues: passengers are way more likely to not be frustrated when you tell them "so, someone threw themselves in front of a train, we're sorry but there won't be any service for hours, please take these cab vouchers", compared to leaving them in the station with "train delayed by 10min", followed by "delayed by 20min", "delayed by 60min" and so on. If I know there won't be a train for 2 hours, I can hail a cab and get out of the mess vs losing time in waiting for a train that's not gonna come and be frustrated as hell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Will consumers reward businesses that correct for this?

Alamo Drafthouse has always seemed humanity-first to me from movie programming, to community-based events, to viewing experience. Their patrons seem to appreciate it.

<comment><USER25> The best part of the Alamo Drafthouse is that they don't show ads before movies (besides trailers). Instead they do a fun, in-house series of videos specific to the movie.

Ads at other theaters have gotten so bad that I'm willing to drive out my way to go to Alamo instead. The last movie I saw at AMC didn't actually start until 30 minutes after its scheduled time because of ads. (Less than half of that was for trailers.)

</comment></comment><comment> m-i-l If you're going all in on automation, at least try and do it well. In this case I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't have automated monitoring of the screenings, automated raising of alerts if there are issues, remote debugging from some central service desk, centrally controlled announcements to keep customers informed, etc.

And if you're not going the automation route, make personal service a differentiator. In the UK we have the Everyman Cinemas doing this for example, offering sofas with tables, a table service for food and drink, knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff, etc.

<comment><USER26> > I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't have automated monitoring > of the screenings

Well, I suppose the first question is whether or not your automated monitor contains a Mysterious Hum Detector, and whether or not the case of a Mysterious Hum happens frequently enough to be worth rolling out the Mysterious Hum Detector to every screen in every one of your cinemas.

Also: The Audio Has Accidentally Been Set To French detector, and the Dammit Something Has Fallen In Front Of The Projector detector are equally hard to implement.

Automating uncommon real-world events is significantly harder than you might think.

<comment><USER27> I bet you could make a Mysterious Hum detector that worked by having a camera and microphone installed in the theater that compared what it was seeing and hearing to what it was supposed to be seeing and hearing.

But I agree with you that it would be relatively pointless - any resolution to a problem like that probably needs physical intervention to resolve.

And anyways that theater was full of mysterious Hum detectors. The article was written by one!

<comment><USER26> You're right: They could implement some kind of autonomous general intelligence to assist in resolving issues.

Probably take about 9 months to build an MVP, but about 16 years worth of training data until it's able to handle most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of yesterday trying to collect a hire car in central Stockholm from a Hertz "intelligent locker":

1\. Texted PIN to get into garage didn't work. After 5 minutes just tailed someone else through the door.

2\. Locker rejected non-Euro drivers license. Call to contact centre overcame it.

3\. "Prefilled" customer details were all wrong and didn't match confirmation email. So 10 minutes to retype them.

4\. Exit boom gate wouldn't open. Garage said to call hire company. Hire company said they cannot open it. 3-way call resulted in garage employee begrudgingly pressing a button to remotely open it.

Not to single out Hertz, last week we returned an Avis car to the reservation specified location at the correct time (10 pm), but a sign there stated the key drop was "permanently closed" and to deliver it 5 km away. We had an overnight train to catch so were forced to urgently do so and incur the return taxi fare.

I'm unsure how far society can keep shoving incompetent automation down peoples' throats. I understand that people generally want to save money, but I think many want high-impact experiences (like 3 kids + 2 adults + transport mode changes) to go smoothly enough they will happily a little pay more to derisk it.

</comment><comment><USER29> My Dad was extremely good at talking to people. Too good sometimes, when it called for a short interaction it would become a longer one (still usually benefited him).

He had a saying I never liked about low wage workers who didn't understand what they were doing or have any power outside of their task:

 _" A system designed by geniuses, to be run by idiots"_

... Might be a little harsh, but I think he was on to something. The workers in this article had no power to correct anything, they had no responsibly or opportunity to learn, the turnover is probably very high and coincides with semester starts/ends. They're allowed to be worthless when something goes wrong, maybe the author is right and some are even encouraged to be.

How many people have seen code that is written for " _things only go wrong sometimes_ "? Yep, but when they do!

<comment> c-smile Another one:

"Design a [programming] language that even idiots can use it and only idiots will use it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Twenty-First Century corporations either don't offer any public access at all a la FAANG, or build a wall of useless people to interact with the public, to mask the reality that they are just like FAANG.

<comment><USER31> Don't include Amazon - they have empowered customer support who solve your problems. Which is why they have loyalty despite devolving into an eBay-like dropshipper marketplace.

Apple, Google, Facebook - yes, don't expect help if you do business with them and don't have a million Twitter followers to make a stink...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The problem was that there existed humans to complain to. Imagine if there were no people at all. No ushers to track down. No staff. The box office an automated kiosk. Nobody to actually complain to. The only option available to submit a ticket online, where it could be properly triaged and a technical fix dispatched according to optimal scheduling. The author would have requested a refund from Fandango, and may or may not have received it, but we would have saved the time of at least five people who otherwise would have worked at a movie theatre.

<comment><USER23> Saved it for what, though? If they didn't have jobs, they wouldn't have incomes (yes, yes, UBI, good luck with that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'll take the small chance of this any day of the week so I can get $15 movie tickets. I know I will because I go to the Metreon AMC and the Century Westfield way more than I go to Alamo Drafthouse.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have recently started using Office 365 at work, and it seems like a similar setup. Our in-house tech support are fine when stuff works, but if something's wrong they have no idea. No word from Microsoft. Maybe if there's a major outage, they'll know something. A file disappears from OneDrive, there's no help.

Overall, it's a net positive, I think. But I feel bad for the humans in these non-jobs. Once roombas can clean movie theaters and show people how to set up Word on their phone, then it's game over.

</comment><comment><USER35> The very definition of an anecdote.

The cinema in my town in Ede, the Netherlands is fantastic.

Hmm, who would have thought it that 2 businesses could operate... differently?

This has nothing to do with computers or the future...

</comment><comment><USER36> Reminds me of Foundation

<comment><USER37> Good call. There's a point where the sheer number of different systems, largely created by automation, make it difficult to troubleshoot and fix devices.

This puts an interesting angle on the "right to repair" issue. No-one has a clue how to actually repair stuff - just replace it, and dump the broken crap into landfill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how different this story would be if the "manager" wasn't ensconced in the office? The mechanism works something like this:

* The "manager", mostly not giving a shit.

* Employees, under no meaningful oversight, goof-off.

* Problem occurs, nobody notices. Customers can't find staff...

It's all downhill, from the top-down.

<comment><USER18> The problem is that the manager has no incentive to actually care. The job is boring, low-paid, you have very limited power to do anything, and profits to the theatre don't actually reflect on their paycheck. Given these conditions, from their perspective it makes total sense to put in as little amount of work as possible.

This story would be much different at a small family-owned business (or as some call "lifestyle business"); chances are the problem wouldn't happen to begin with, but if it did the manager would care much more because their wallet's contents are directly proportional to customer satisfaction.

<comment><USER39> The "manager" is just an hourly-rate employee with a slightly different set of permissions and duties. They have no greater investment in the outcome than anyone else on the staff.

But the same thing almost certainly applies to everyone at the remote "headquarters": why should they care either? They have no incentive to care: they're paid to show up and be there for their shift.

It's just a stage of the process that's been ongoing for decades. Companies treat staff as resources, and finally (at least 40 years later), staff at all levels are behaving the way they're treated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This isn't tomorrow. This is today. This is what I live daily when talking to others as a DevOps engineer. Everyone thinks everything just works, and doesn't under why you still need SSH access to things for debugging.

</comment><comment><USER41> Excuse me, how can people be so concerned about this while we have a major climate crisis going on that affects 7 billion people? It blows my mind.

<comment><USER42> Because life has to be worth living to want to fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> No, your one bad experience probably doesn't mean that everyone's experience will always be bad forever now.

I'm sure people have occasionally had bad experiences at the movies for as long as there have been movies.

</comment><comment><USER44> this has some elements of cultural difference. in America, we want to be coddled with empty sorries and emphatic statements. the reality is seeing a movie is a transaction, and in many other countries, they don't get as excited about seriously apologising over and over.

how much extra money per ticket would you pay for those sorries in exceptional circumstances? when i was growing up, i went to a 'mom and pop' theater. people knew each other, you got to know the owner and talk to him about what he was booking.

he was priced out. most people prefer saving a few bucks per ticket, and will give up sorries to get it. that's capitalism for you, giving people what they actually want, not what they ask for it think they want. capitalism follows the money.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've never had an experience remotely like this. It makes me wonder where the author is from that their standards of customer service are so low.

</comment><comment><USER46> > I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future

When I read this title I was sure the author had gone to see Idiocracy.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is not specially the future. This is the low cost. When you pay a minimal price for a service, you have a minimal service.

</comment><comment><USER48> Movie theaters are run by teenagers and young adults. It is no surprise that they cannot handle hiccups.

</comment><comment><USER49> > This is the future, I'm afraid. A future that plans on everything going > right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong.

Many organizations have one of two perspectives on customer service:

A) It's an opportunity to ensure customer happiness and repeat customers.

B) It's a cost to be externalized to the customer as much as possible.

The organizations in group A are often like the local appliance shop nih mentions in another comment: small, with an interest in repeat business, and relying on word-of-mouth as the primary customer acquisition channel. They may be in a competitive marketplace nominally (i.e., there are big chains around) and so they know they can't compete on price, so they compete on convenience, attitude, help-when-things-go-wrong, advice, etc. Customers are often not so price-sensitive that they'll always go with the cheapest option. This used to be many businesses, but technology grants advantages to those in group B --

The organizations in group B compete on price, or exist in a local environment in which they don't really to compete for customers. Movie theaters, insurance companies, FAANGs, etc. -- they know that most customers are not _really_ there by choice (at least anymore, perhaps they used to be) -- they're there because that's where their friends (F), the best stuff (A, A), their favorite movies (N), or the quickest results (G) are. They're there because their employer has a contract (insurance companies), they're there because it's the only theater in town, they're there because it's the strictly cheapest flight from SFO to YYZ.

For group B organizations, a dollar spent on customer service is a dollar lost; when things go wrong, it's up to the customer to resolve it, and the customer incurs basically the entire cost of this "fixing" it, even if the organization nominally issues a refund. The OP here was not reimbursed for any of the costs incurred by the theater's screw-up. When insurers deny claims spuriously and force their customers to do the leg work to show they're in the right, and the insurer doesn't reimburse the customer for the cost of time, energy, missed work, etc -- and would almost certainly laugh at an invoice for work the insurer _should have_ done, but didn't.

After all, what's the customer going to do about it? They probably can't or don't want to switch to another vendor. If there even is an industry regulator, it's almost certainly not going to be worth it for an individual customer to even file a grievance.

> no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong

I think it's less that "no one has to think about what happens" when things go wrong, it's that the _cost_ of things going wrong has simply been passed along to the customer.

One way to think about the extra cost of customer service for a company is as a mandated "insurance" plan for the customer when something goes wrong. The cost is spread across all customers, but the benefit only accrues to those who have something go wrong, or who want smiles -- except of course it also accrues to the customers who value the knowledge that _if_ something goes wrong, there's an insurance policy for it.

Few people pay for insurance when they don't have to, so perhaps it's no surprise we see a trend towards group B.

</comment><comment><USER50> typo: reins not reigns

</comment><comment><USER51> So the author had a poor customer service experience, and blames it on "the future".

This is the sort of rant I expect from my grandpa, not the blog of a tech company.

<comment><USER52> The future point the author makes is that all skill has been taken out of most jobs, and almost all power to boot. In the future, no one will be able to handle exceptions not caught by the software.

<comment><USER29> Right. Systems are only getting more complex. What happens when a wildly complex AI decides that you should not be sold a ticket to this movie or train, and there are no attendants around because why would there be? They haven't been needed for years, "the system does not make mistakes". What if it's an AI that has lethal measures to protect an area (etc etc)?

<comment><USER20> This is already a thing in China and their social credit system. Lose enough points and you can be prevented from buying a train ticket or booking a flight [0]. You can probably imagine that rectifying errors in this system is... troublesome.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china- bans-23m...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china- bans-23m-discredited-citizens-from-buying-travel-tickets-social-credit-system)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> When all of you damn people eventually move to a small town, please drive slow, turn down your damn car audio system. And finally, don't make life about money. The race doesn't need to exist. Cook at home, and don't beg New Seasons, Natural Grocers or Whole Foods to move to your new home.

Everything that happened at that movie theatre and almost everything around you in life is due to population scale.

<comment><USER54> I can relate and would completely agree with you if I haven't lived in Europe. But it is not just a matter of population scale, it is also a matter of urban design and the scale of the communities.

Take Berlin for example, a city of ~4 million people, and you can still find on every neighborhood smaller businesses, shops, bars and cafés where the owner actually knows most of the patrons for years, etc. You can find the big- box movie theater, but these are the absolute exceptions.

In a way, in the resulting story from OP the consumers are to blame just as much as the managers/business people: people want maximum convenience, minimum price and minimum person-to-person interaction? It should be no surprise that this is what they are getting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is what being completely out of touch and rich looks like when you didn't grow up rich.

Now imagine what thoughts go through the heads of second and third generation rich kids.

Now imagine that politicians are mostly those rich kids.

That's the present, and the future. Jason, you're part of the problem you're complaining about and you don't even know it. So it goes.

<comment><USER29> >Jason, you're part of the problem you're complaining about and you don't even know it. So it goes.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Do you think you can clarify this a little bit for me?</comment></comment>


Through the looking glass: Security and the SRE - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/18/3/through-looking-glass-security-sre <comment><USER2> "Security + chaos engineering = security experimentation"

I liked this equation the authors added and their explanation.</comment>


Making Userinterfaces FEEL responsive - <AUTHOR> http://tantek.com/log/2007/02.html#d19t1813
<comment><USER2> #2 is pretty helpful for me in terms of thinking about the problem. It seems really obvious now, but I tended to think of performance and usability as different buckets each to be optimized on their own. I just thought of better performance of an end to its own (faster stuff is JUST better, right?). Of course the reason performance is important is because it makes things more usable.</comment>


Facebook Photo Ruins Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20267989

<comment><USER2> mafro, stop adding your own spin to the post title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I'll agree that perhaps I needlessly sensationalised the title, this came from said ladies own mouth:

"I was so distressed and afraid. I simply couldn't believe a photo could ruin my whole life."

Even the title on the Beeb is "Neda Soltani: 'The media mix-up that ruined my life'" !!</comment></comment>


Top Income Tax Rate: How's 83% Sound? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/archives/2011/12/top_income_tax_rate_hows_80_sound.html

<comment><USER2> Actually when the top income tax rate was in the 60's in US the capital gain tax was around 25%, so the effective tax rate for the super rich was only 30%.

If this authors suggest the capital gain tax should be raised to 83% for the rich then it will simply result in zero tax revenue from the rich. If my capital gain tax rate is 83% i will simply pledge my stocks to the bank and get a loan on it and spend it instead of selling the stocks and pay the tax!

</comment><comment><USER3> I have read a number of papers and heard various opinions on this. The way I think about this is as follows:

A person with $300mm in the bank gets only a small gain in utility for every additional dollar they get to possess. (This is also the assumption the paper must make.

Assuming that is true (I don't know if it is for sure) 1) the wealthy individual will continue with ambitious persuit of more wealth without any concern for utility. 2) the tax rate wont matter until they feel like the government is spitting them.

Assuming those 2 things are true also (again I don't know for sure) the answer that needs to be answered is:

Who is more efficient at allocating capital for the good of all society?

My opinion: some individuals will be terrible at this, but on average they will be better than elected officials who's skill set is having maximum influence rather than maximum ability to allocate capital.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, during WWII in the UK it was 99%.</comment>


Ask HN: What merchant account and payment processor do you recommend? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking at using Chargify for automated billing and am beginning to explore different merchant accounts and payment processors. We will be offering a subscription software product across a wide variety of geographies including the US. Thanks for your input <comment><USER2> I got my own merchant account because I needed to do some more sophisticated monetization work than Clickbank, Paypal, or Amazon allowed.

Now I use Authorize.net + Powerpay.biz + 1shoppingcart. Works pretty well together.</comment>


How Rock Climbing Saved My Life, and Made Me a Better Software Developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.benjamincoe.com/post/27210244020/how-rock-climbing-saved-my-life-and-made-me-a-better

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone who knows me knows that rock climbing is a big part of my life. I hope this post gives some insight into why it's such a passion of mine.</comment>


First quantum safe internet browser launched on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cybxsecurity/quantum-browser-quantum-safe-isolated-browsing <comment><USER2> All my data goes through some random server? No thanks.

Why should I trust a middleman to be in charge of delivering my data to sites, and their data to me? Sure, running a browser in a VM while using a VPN probably is a good idea if you're worried about getting fingerprinted, but I don't see how this is stopping quantum key disruption.

If anything I'd be more concerned about however this company is handling my data than the quantum criminals hackin' me...

Going from 1 point to 10+ in less than the 60 seconds it took to write this comment? Hmmm...</comment>


Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/artists-sensitive-creative_567f02dee4b0b958f6598764 <comment><USER2> Answering a personality questionnaire is always a great opportunity for me to appreciate my talents. Take the question "Do you have a rich, complex inner life?" Well, I certainly do, and thanks for reminding me to dwell on this fact.

<comment><USER3> What a vapid and narcissistic comment. Only on hacker news.

<comment><USER4> The PuffHo article is vapic & narcissistic the same way.

<comment><USER5> Not really. It's just a crappy / flashy exposition of some very routine psychological research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A more interesting line of inquiry is why so many of those blessed with the highest instincts for creativity have so little empathy towards those around them. As if they are so in thrall with their own genius they have little capacity for the smallest kindnesses. Or are so focused on manifesting the perfect visions contained in their minds, any quotidian concerns seem far beneath them and an utter waste of time. Consider Tolstoy and his wife Sofya, or Picasso and his muses. Einstein even referred to a "glass pane" separating himself from the norms of society.

<comment><USER7> They're unique in their local environment. They have a sensibility that annoys people. When their environment fails to _immediately_ satisfy them it gets tired of feeling their negative emotions. They're expected to be happy or shut up. The more they develop this component of themselves the more they're denied empathy. They get tired of giving and not receiving. What we call empathy nowadays is actually just sympathy. These people know that but you apparently don't... We collectively _suck_ at empathy. As you have just demonstrated.

Try giving them some real empathy sometime instead of just pandering to their "genius". You'll see a human emerge before you. We like to call them _narcissists_ at this point. "See!", we say. They can do it if they want to. They're just self-centered. This is a defense of our own egos and an instance of fundamental attribution error. Empathy costs _much_ more than sympathy. Imagine if empathy were all you could give. Imagine being that alone.

<comment><USER8> I think much of what you've said can be applied to other types of social outcasts e.g. drunks, gamblers, etc.

<comment><USER9> What was said applies to the labelers, not the labeled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it just because it's an excerpt, or do these researchers have serious blinders on? How about other hypotheses like:

\- Michael Jackson's father beat him for mistakes.

\- Performers try to connect with their audience. "Sensitivity" is a bundle of things which helps chances of success, at least if you don't have a big professional team creating your songs.

\- People with some experience of unalienated labor ("imagining things and then bringing them into being" and a balance of imaginatively creating both people and artifacts [1]) don't have to deaden themselves as more alienated laborers must.

[1] From David Graeber's "Direct Action: an Ethnography" and "Dead zones of the imagination".

<comment><USER11> This was research? I saw a romanticizing of celebrity musicians as cute little kittens, where it went on and on about, "Aww, look how adorably sensitive they are."

For one thing, anyone who trains in music develops a heightened awareness to subtleties in sound. It is not surprising at all for a musician to report an awareness of richness in sound that others don't bother with. Just like a carpenter probably would report a deep awareness of grain in wood and how it affects the structural integrity or something similar.

Performance art is where people put their emotional extremes on showcase. Obviously the ones with the most extremeness are going to get the most attention from people who want to see that sort of thing. People who are "highly sensitive" are an extreme, and their display of emotions are going to appear more intense, and thus more exciting for performance art consumers.

How about doing research on the types of people who would be so obsessive about watching other people's pain and joy? Why do they get so wrapped up in the "charisma" of a performer, and needing to see something private put on display in an artificial way?

<comment><USER5> Um, yes, it's certainly research.

The "heightened sensitivity" of musicians isn't just about being more aware of the richness of sound. The musician will likely score as more sensitive on _every item of that test._

The third paragraph you write seems to be in perfect alignment with what the article is saying. I don't know what you are trying to get at in the fourth paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The described sensitivity is easily related to by software engineers. It's often difficult to receive an annual review or feedback from code commits. It's a feeling of wanting feedback to continue growth, and fearing it due to sensitivity.

One book I've enjoyed which equips confidence is " _Thanks for the Feedback._ " It's a book by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Prepare to read one chapter every few days. It's a heavy read. Well written, it's an abundance of information: you may need to take time for brain rewiring as I did.

Amazon link:

 _Thanks for the Feedback_ \- [http://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science- Receiving-Well...](http://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-Receiving- Well/dp/0670014664)

<comment><USER13> Sorry, but engineers are not artists. People need to stop elevating their profession and job titles to something they're not and take pride in what you actually are; which is pretty great in itself.

<comment><USER5> I agree that it's very unlikely engineers are more sensitive than the average person, but engineers can also be highly sensitive and perhaps it's useful to provide some advice for handling career-specific situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, artists have a rich inner life? Yo-Yo Ma feels happy, but also sometimes he feels sad? Isn't this just describing a human being?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the emotional life is part and parcel of human experience. But this article is talking about a heightened sensitivity, take all of the above and multiply it a few times over. Not everyone needs to sleep for a week after going on vacation, cries during movies, or spends the rest of the weekend alone after going to a party Friday evening. Those are the sorts of personality traits the article is talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> According to this article, a creative person experiences heightened sensitivity to stimuli and exhibits paradoxical behavior. Then he/she chooses a medium for expression to channel the chaotic sensory and emotional experiences into one that is controlled more so by themselves, else how can we deem someone as creative until they create. Seems like we need to understand creativity a bit more, because as many users are commenting, some descriptions and questions from this article are vague and highly applicable the basic human experience (we're all creative! :))

_

I looked for some resources by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MC) who was referenced for studying creativity.

Here is what appears to be chapters 2 and 5 of his book _Creativity_ (hosted by CS7601: Computational Creativity, host by Georgia Tech):

1\. Ch. 2. - "Where Is Creativity?": [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers/csikszentmihalyi- whereiscreativity.pdf)

2\. Ch. 5 - "The Flow of Creativity": [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers/csikszentmihalyi- flowofcreativity.pdf)

3\. Class Website: [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/)

_

Csikszentmihalyi also wrote _Flow_ , which is about the psychology of optimal experience.

1\. TED talk by MC: [https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?la...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en)

2\. Flow - coined by MC: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

</comment><comment><USER16> Because they are expected to behave that way. I have know several artists who played back and forth on the highly sensitive spectrum over time. A few stooped behaving this way when they gave up on being artists.

The thing is stereotypes attract people to behave like X, and they promote X in borderline peope. Programmers often get to behave introverted and you can see shits when someone moves from say sales into programming.

</comment><comment><USER17> Who said that openness and sensitivity are contradictory? Is the article building a straw man?

<comment><USER18> From the article:

> Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified openness and sensitivity as > oppositional personality elements that not only coexist in creative > performers, but form the core of their personalities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was hoping for a scale on the "temperamental sensitivity" and "rich inner life" quiz at the end.

I found myself at 18/24 and anecdotally, I'm highly sensitive to abrupt noise changes and lighting in physical spaces. Presumably I'm not the only here that keeps their home office only dimly lit with consistent white noise from the central air fan.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you rephrase this quoestion as: "What benefit do acute senses give an artist?" you already have your answer.

</comment><comment><USER21> Better title would be "Why so many sensitive people are artists" imo. Small change on the first glance but important one.

<comment><USER22> But, there's quite a big difference between 'sensitive' and 'highly sensitive'. The latter being someone who most would perceive to be _too_ sensitive.

Otherwise your suggested change definitely makes the title less click-baitish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This helps to underscore that the field of mathematics is also an art form, since the behavior symptoms high-level math researchers are indistinguishable from "artist types"; Goedel, Riemann, Turing, and others come to mind. The "sensitivity" and "complexity" suggested in this article are not isolated to artists.

<comment><USER24> No I don't think this is quite right. The romantic artistic image of the mathematician is a prevalent one now, and we choose to see examples to fit the type. But it hasn't always been this way. Before the early 1800s the mathematician was scene as a pragmatic, man of the world sort. Or so Amir Alexander argues in his book Dual at Dawn: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn- Mathematics-Histories-Tech...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn-Mathematics- Histories- Technology/dp/0674061748/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451831347&sr=1-3&keywords=amir+alexander)

I agree with you that sensitivity and complexity are not isolated to artists, and a agree to some extent that mathematics is an art form, just wanted to point out that 'mathematician as tortured artist' is a relatively modern trope.

<comment><USER25> It's hard for a "man of the world" to make time in the 21st century to learn enough about mathematics to make meaningful contributions to the field which still doing the other things being a "man of the world" requires, except perhaps in a few isolated places that happen to overlap something practical. Or, in other words, we programmers probably overestimate the ability for non- mathematicians to contribute to the field because we happen to be sitting in the very best such place already.

Same reason we don't get true renaissance people anymore; one can not even know everything about genetics, to say nothing of biology, let alone half-a- dozen other disciplines.

Are these traits truly associated with "artistry" and "creativity", or are we simply in a place where we've done so much than moving things forward requires monomania?

<comment><USER24> Yes, no one is a renaissance person any more. But I don't think that there were as many renaissance people in the past as we think. Admittedly I don't have much evidence for this. In the case of maths, I think our idea that many more mathematicians used to be polymaths in the past is slightly skewed dues to the fact that until about 2 centuries ago, 'mathematician' and 'physicist' were not distinct categories. We think of Gauss and Euler as polymaths, but Euler was by all accounts a terrible philosopher.

EDIT: I just remembered that Gauss was an extremely competent philologist, so maybe the above is no longer valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like how the whole piece is just one big ad for their upcoming book.

"Read more from the upcoming book here: This Science-Backed Trick Can Unlock Your Creativity In Just 5 Minutes"

</comment><comment><USER27> Sometimes I tell myself I am not crazy enough to be a really good coder.

But then I see other really good coders who seem perfectly sane.

</comment><comment><USER28> What you are asking is not what the article is saying. So...?

</comment><comment><USER29> "If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud"

― Émile Zola

A true artist is one who never calls him/herself an artist is my stance. It is usually when society sees a person's works and starts to give positive reviews that the inner artist is unleashed on the world. Sensitivity plays a part, but only insofar as the artist can channel art through the correct medium. If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then computers are probably the best medium. Someone with an ear for sound would likewise choose musical instruments to mirror back the sound of nature..

<comment><USER11> > If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then > computers are probably the best medium.

This statement appears as mystical as tarot cards. What connection is there to getting electric shocks and using a computer other than some vague mystical correlation not founded on anything logical?

<comment><USER30> This reads like the wrong combination of shoes and floor, resulting in huge ESD problems. Highly individual, too.

<comment><USER29> Nope..Cork sandals will produce the same effect. It's not highly individual, it is highly reported many times by many people, but usually cast off as irrelevant or unimportant to people's daily life...

<comment><USER31> Dude, you really need to make sure your gear is grounded properly. You should not be getting electrical shocks from touching stuff. I can't begin to tell you how many times we've had screwball problems with equipment that had floating voltages due to poor earthing---problems that went away the minute we fixed the wiring. (The guys maintaining said equipment though nothing wrong of the fact that they were getting shocked and said nothing about it for months!)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License - <AUTHOR> http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

<comment><USER2> There's a metric ton of stuff in there that tells me how good it's going to be for everybody but I see very little that tells me how good it will be for me, the creator of my software. I spent 7 years building an app [1]. The current version comes in at just under 100KLOC. That thing is almost ready to ship so I need to start thinking about a licensing model. I have yet to see a compelling reason to make me just give my work away. After all the work I've put into this thing I'm selfish. I want to benefit from what I created so honest question - what's in it for ME if I open source?

[https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=0a505400-5bf6-4a6...](https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=0a505400-5bf6-4a6d-b107-6b4b797f33ae)

<comment><USER3> Your app looks great, but I won't even consider using it unless it's open source. I need to know I can modify it (for my own use), see what it does, and recompile it if I need to when I upgrade my operating system if you've stopped supporting it. I would have no problem paying you for software like this if I decide to use it, but I wouldn't use it without the source even if it were free. Yes, commercial open source software is a thing; a thing people often forget about. You might be worried that people will steal your program if it's open source. Some people will, just as they steal books, which are the most familiar commercial open source thing. But authors and publishers make a living anyway.

EDIT: Apparently the concept of commercial open source software is so confusing to some people that, bizarrely enough, they describe this comment as supporting the "free software" movement.

<comment><USER4> Why is that bizarre? The fact that you concentrate on your rights as the end user to modify the software is exactly what the Free Software movement defends, unlike Open Source which focuses on the superiority of the development process.

And the Free Software movement also supports selling your software. In the words of rms, "redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it."[1]

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html)

<comment><USER3> (1) I said nothing about any imaginary "rights" to modify software; I said that I would choose to avoid software that I couldn't modify, for practical reasons.

(2) I made an analogy to books to explain what I meant by commercial open source software. The author or publisher would retain the copyright, and I would have no rights to redistribute sources or compiled versions. This, of course, is directly contrary to what the free software movement advocates.

<comment><USER4> I thought even Microsoft had given in to OSI's definition of "open source". So you mean open source as in source available, like PGP was. Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> CC-NC is still really useful for music. Nobody wants to release their music for free, and then hear it in the soundtrack of a multi-million dollar blockbuster. Or maybe they would, but then they'd sure as heck still be kicking themselves that they didn't get paid.

CC-NC prevents large-scale exploitation. I'm not sure the drawbacks of confusion over trivial use, or small-scale exploitation, outweigh the benefits of not having a large corporation save money by using your stuff and not paying you.

<comment><USER6> > Or maybe they would, but then they'd sure as heck still be kicking > themselves that they didn't get paid.

I see this argument frequently in the photography world, but it doesn't make sense to me.

As an amateur making art for enjoyment, as a hobby, with no expectation of financial return, does it matter if some corporation makes money from my work? I'm no worse off than I was beforehand, in fact I might be in a better position because my name will be out there.

I have no love of corporations, but if they want to use my photograph to sell a product then go for it. Trying to prevent that sounds to me like muddled principles.

<comment><USER2> That I think its the elephant in the room. Many artist have an expectation of financial return. In fact many do it to make a living. And open source doesn't support that.</comment></comment></comment>


US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap - <AUTHOR> http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa <comment><USER3> Not quite sure yet how this influences my recent urge to start riding motorcycles.

There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. I already knew motorcycle riders were 5 times more likely to get in accidents, and those accidents were 35 times more likely to result in very serious injury. In my life so far I've been in one small fender bender.

This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. No car commercial road joyriding. Lots of yellow in the hills. Highway driving seems to be relatively safe, which is comforting. Extreme caution at intersections (look at the bay bridge on-ramp). No riding at night.

<comment><USER4> Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on mostly highway riding, without a significant filtering component, I wouldn't bother with a bike.

So yes, you'll want to spend some time in the hills and curves. Don't start on an all-out superbike with torque that kicks in suddenly at high revs; start with something with a flatter torque curve, like a midrange twin (e.g. SV650 or Ninja 650r) or detuned 600. An unfaired bike, if you don't mind the looks, will feel faster from the wind blast. Most of the fun in a bike is from acceleration and corners, and on the street rather than on a track you'll want to have that fun at perhaps surprisingly low speeds. Taking a tight corner at 30mph is harder than it looks, takes more skill than a long curve at 90, and is a lot less dangerous if you crash. I've had a low-sider on my scooter (it was new to me and I didn't know its lean angle limits well enough) at about 25mph in a t-shirt and jeans (but full-face helmet, as always), and walked away with nothing more than a scratch on my arm and a few more scratches on the fairing.

You'll remember the first time a corner surprises you by tightening up half- way through. But the real warning signs come earlier than that IMO: if you find yourself letting off the throttle half-way through a turn rather than smoothly accelerating through it, or changing gear half-way through, that's a sign of poor technique and / or poor reading of the road. Even more dangerously, you can end up learning these mid-course correction habits and think you're doing well, building false confidence.

Bikes are fantastic fun and don't let the raw statistics dissuade you too much. You'll see a lot of idiots on the road doing stupid things, and get a better idea of where the stats come from. Filtering, where legal, can be intoxicatingly enjoyable. And you'll appreciate differences in road geography to a huge degree.

I've ridden in Belgium, Netherlands, northern CA, northwest France, Luxembourg, UK and Germany, in approximately increasing order of fun, though for different reasons. Belgium has terrible (back) roads and is mostly flat; northern CA has some very curvy roads, but they are often very narrow, poorly surfaced and have double-yellow no-overtaking lines to an extreme; though it does have filtering. UK also has many fairly poor country roads - a lot of hedges blocking views - but makes up for it with filtering. Germany is strictly anti-filtering, but has very high standards even for curvy minor roads, which are wide and have high speed limits (depending on state).

(I own a scooter and a big bike and live in London. Scooters are better for filtering in the city, and a lot more practical. I don't own a car, and only ever take public transport if I'll be consuming alcohol.)

<comment><USER5> Friends don't let friends ride Kawasakis, especially Ninjas.

My pet theory is that each motorcycle has a use or personality, and after riding it for a while your behaviour ends up matching the personality of the bike.

BMW tourers make you want to ride the curves from coast to coast, but do so safely. They don't mind a bit of speed, but are also content to cruise at legal limits.

Harleys want you to cruise the straight desolate highways, without a helmet (dumb, but if you are going to ride without a helmet, the a straight desolate highway is the place to do it). They also like being polished and sitting in front of cafes.

A trail bike wants you to turn left up that hill, and go explore, while a top end enduro bike wants you to do that a bit too quickly. A KTM adventure (I have one) wants you to load it up and blast across a desert, and does so remarkably well.

Sports bikes, and the Ninja is the worst no matter what the size, want you to crouch down and go as fast as possible. They eat away at your soul, and you just have to go faster and faster. There's a bad ending waiting for you, especially for early career riders.

So buy a bike that matches your use case.

The upright road/trail bike with a top box is an excellent all-round choice for commuting, adventure and a bit of safe speed. (Triumph Tiger, BMW F800GS/F65GS, BMWR1200GS, Yamaha XT etc). A sport bike is great if you are able to use it on a track, or for the occasional blast in the desolate hills. A laid back cruiser needs wide open spaces and lots of cafes - they are not about safe speed or twisties.

But the ultimate use for a bike is travel, and the further the better. Get something you are comfortable on for hours, and which has the ability to go on anywhere.

<comment><USER4> A Ninja 650r is not a Ninja like a ZX-R. It has the Ninja name in the US, but it is not a supersport bike; it's a sport tourer. It's a parallel twin, and is actually less aggressive to ride than the Suzuki SV650 - it doesn't even have clip-on handlebars. It has an upright seating position, not crouched over. At 70bhp it's got lower power than most of the detuned 600cc inline-4 standards.

Personally, I don't like dual-purpose bikes. I think they're too tall, and I never have need nor desire to go off-road in the least; for me, sport-touring is optimal. I think dual-purpose bikes are a bit like urban 4x4s: most never go off-road, and when they do, they're not actually very good at it. But of course this is a personal preference.

<comment><USER5> Great - the Ninja 650r sounds like a good commuter bike then, and 60-70HP is a good range for a road bike. (I'm based in NZ - not the US market)

Dual purpose bikes are indeed harder to approach - the 1200GS Adventure I own is a huge tall and bulky machine. It took me a long time to get into them, and I started out with the smaller 650 GS series. They are however remarkably easy to ride, and to do so in almost any condition. They make great commuter bikes as you are much higher and generally have great luggage capacity and robustness for the occasional spill. However you are essentially right - <USER2> are not as good as a pure-purpose bike for a particular application. You can dial in your degree of off and on roadability. KTM does the best hard core adventure series, while take your pick for the soft roaders of dubious merit. If you do get into it then BMW run excellent (though rare) off road courses. We all had our bikes, mine a 1200GS, fully airborne on several occasion on my course. And there's a really scary photo from that same course on my eponymous blog header.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a per-person version of this chart would be interesting as well, dividing the map into regions, counting the number of accidents, and dividing it by the number of people in the region. Placement of accidents is less interesting than chance you will have an accident if you live there IMO. Still cool though :)

<comment><USER7> East coast: death, west coast: not so death

<comment><USER8> Exactly, and the safest place to go drive your car through is the Grand Canyon.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely, especially in the river.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a benchmark for comparison, the design firm Fathom made a map consisting of only the roads of the US and no other geographical features. It's also an awesome poster I have up in my room. It's interesting to overlay these two maps with each other.

<http://fathom.info/allstreets/>

<comment><USER10> That is an awesome poster. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very well done. It would be interesting to have the ability to click on one of the reports and get details--something I'm sure you would have done if it was available or possible.

<comment><USER12> Toggling each type on/off might be interesting as well.

I was immediately curious if there is a cluster of bicyclist fatalities anywhere. I clicked on the icons in the key expecting to change the visibility of each category, but that did nothing.

<comment><USER7> I too was disappointed by that oversight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Found my friend that died in 2002, though it only reported his death and not his fiancee's as well.

What a sad nitpick! :(

<comment><USER7> Maybe the fiancee's icon is placed under their icon?

<comment><USER14> I saw some bicycle icons barely visible peeking around from behind car icons at certain intersections. No way to see the bike icon. Weak UI design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is an interesting dataset -- too bad it's such a boring map.

Two ways it could be improved:

1\. Allow filtering by year, by type of death.

2\. Allow data to be compared (deaths by state, by type, by year) in a non-map based form.

I'm sure there are more...

<comment><USER16> some sort of heatmap where number of deaths are normalized with respect to vehicle density (or I guess just population). That would give an idea of which states/regions/roads are more treacherous or have more dangerous drivers.

<comment><USER17> Vehicle density is itself a cause of increased accidents. If you normalized by it you would lose accuracy. To make it more clear, 10 cars on the same road would increase the chance of an accident non-linearly. It would be more than 10x more likely to have an accident occur there simply because there is more chaos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really wish maps like these would display their data on cartograms related to population - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram>. The open west always makes my eye come up with false conclusions at first glance.

<comment><USER19> Cartograms plus zoomable web maps tend to be fail city. And, on top of that, cartograms tend to be rather unreadable. For the critique, [http://www.cartogrammar.com/blog/i-hate-your-favorite- electi...](http://www.cartogrammar.com/blog/i-hate-your-favorite-election- map/)

That said, it's always useful to have data be relative to population rather than absolute, if it is a relative number. I don't think that's valid in this case, because these aren't accidents 'of the population' - they're accidents of people traveling on roads, which is entirely different.

If the coloring were relative to traffic density or throughput, that'd be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I saw the death of a motorist. We were on the mountains, he was at more than 120mph in the straight part of the road(he passed over us), and as he took a curve super fast, a van appeared on the other side of the road. Instant dead, looking at him was the most horrible vision in my life. His friends(also riders) will came later and cry.

It is strange, three people I knew from my college died on a very small motorcycle with a very small curb on the road(two young girls and one boy, no helmet). I could not believe it, it made no sense for three people to die on such a small danger(I have seen MBT riders so much times do things x10000 more dangerous).

Four young men and women from my village also died as they return from a Spanish fiesta on the night.

In the North of Spain and Portugal non official "rallies" are the first cause of dead on young people.

What is strange is that until looking at this map, I strangely believed those accidents were "special", but it seems there are not.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was involved in an accident where I caused a fatality in 1999 (guy sleeping in my lane on a rural highway at 3am), so it's not on here. Otherwise I would be able to say something about its accuracy and completeness.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting, looks like the previous owner neglected to tell me that someone was killed in my driveway back in '07.

</comment><comment><USER23> I find this a little... disquieting... I know the story behind a dozen or so of these little icons. Like any traumatic event, they'll come to mind from time to time (some are more memorable than others, for some reason). Being reminded of all of them at once is actually a little overwhelming.

It's also a bit of a disconnect seeing the chaos and trauma of some of those scenes reduced to a tiny graphic.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very awkward to see the number of deaths that I drive past daily... Even more awkward to think I could have been a statistic on this site a few years ago!

The searching functionality could use some work. I was unable to input the actual address of my accident and had to guess-timate. Like others said, filtering would be highly appreciated as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great chart and SF downtown has a denser deep blue color; always suspected that is a more risky place for pedestrian.

<comment><USER26> If you think SF is bad, look at Manhattan.

What's with all the 99 year old deaths in NYC? Bad data?

<comment><USER7> I dunno, Manhattan is sloooooooow-moving, I'm not sure how you can fatally injure somebody at 5MPH gridlock!

<comment><USER27> A car can kill a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist at surprisingly low speeds. It's almost impossible to kill someone in a car at under 25 MPH or so (unless they drive off a cliff or something), but pedestrians can be killed by cars going as slowly as 10 MPH (they get knocked off their feet and hit their heads, usually). I read a very interesting paper by the NTSB or IIHS about that, but can't find it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Something very similar has been done years ago: <http://www.city- data.com/accidents/acc-Chicago-Illinois.html>. Per-city mapping using Google Maps with additional info and Google street map when clicking on each marker.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a link to the NHTSA pick-a-checkbox data finder, but here's the link to the FTP site for the raw data:

ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/fars/

Maps like these are visually interesting, but I think a stats analysis of the many characteristics the data include, such as previous DUI offenses and weather conditions, could be even more fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here is a similar map of UK - <http://map.itoworld.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER31> The age of pedestrians killed in accidents was surprising to me. Of course I didn't do an exhaustive scan, but everywhere I looked they were much older than I imagined they'd be. Many seniors.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would love to see this map annotated with fatalities involving blood alcohol content > 0.08. Not sure if that information is made available though...

</comment><comment><USER33> Far more fatalities in the CA Central Valley than in the SF Bay Area, even though the respective population densities are the other way round.

<comment><USER7> I can tell you, having lived my whole life in Modesto, the drivers here are IDIOTS. I once saw a car that careened off a perfectly straight road, 90 degrees, over the sidewalk and into a fence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd love to see a similar map of airplane fatalities for those that are scared of flying for a reassuring comparison...

</comment><comment><USER35> Seems driving in Barrow Alaska is much safer than I thought!

I wish I could switch on and off things. I want to see motorcycles only.

</comment><comment><USER36> A lot of loved ones on this map.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems that walking is more dangerous than driving in San Francisco.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is not very interesting without any ability to add a filter.

</comment><comment><USER7> This has just reaffirmed my fear of east-coasters.

<comment><USER39> You probably said this in jest, but if you look at a map of US population density, it is nearly identical.

<comment><USER7> Well, it was mostly in jest, yes, but I think it's more than just that, I think it's also that here on the west coast we tend to drive a lot better than people in New York ;)

<comment><USER40> Something I've noticed in Canada - is each province despises the drivers of the province to their east. So BC complains about Alberta, Alberta about Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan about Manitoba... and so on. Seems the same thing happens west to east down there too.

<comment><USER41> What does Newfoundland complain about?

<comment><USER42> Saskatchewan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is there anything like this for the UK?

<comment><USER44> Yes, exactly like this: <http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-uk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I am never driving again.</comment>


Bay Area Rental Price Heatmap by ZIP Code - <AUTHOR> http://kwelia.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> This is fairly off topic, but as someone who has dabbled with GIS before, zip codes mapped as geographic areas bother me.

"ZIP codes designate only delivery points within the United States and its dependencies, as well as locations of its armed forces."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code>

So a zip code is more properly represented as an ordered point string or point cloud, rather than an area. There exist zip codes with up to 11 non-contiguous areas, zip codes which are valid only for the north half of an east-west street, and other oddities. You can fudge this a little by just drawing bounding boxes, but then you have up to 5 zip codes overlapping in some places.

That bit of trivia aside, they do make sense from a real estate point of view because a) all domiciles will have a zip code and b) it is usually freely available on listings.

Generally though, it's better to translate any given address to a census tract or census block group, since those divisions are actually defined as "a geographic region defined for the purpose of taking a census" - they can be properly mapped without ambiguity, crossovers, discontinuities, and other boggling features of zip codes, (though not of course with _perfect_ regularity) and they also coordinate well with demographic data like median income - I'd be very interested to see a graph of percent of median income per square foot - I suspect you'd find some very 'hot' areas that don't seem like it.

<comment><USER3> My dad always enthused about the Canadian system which is based on a six- character string that is closer to Battleship-style coordinates:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada#Componen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada#Components_of_a_postal_code)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, wonder where they got that from…

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom>

<comment><USER5> Aaah, fond memories.

The first hard algorithmic coding task I worked on was to generate isoclines of UK Postcodes from point cloud address data. Fortunately I didn't have to do the entire country, only a couple of million addresses, unfortunately it had to work on a machine running Windows 3.1 with only 4MiB of RAM....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quick mash up adding plots for population density, % renter property and % owners (this took about 2 minutes - I was just intrigued how they all compared, which seemed especially relevant given the most recent XKCD).

<http://www.holehouse.org/other_content/sanfran.jpeg>

Source of maps: <http://maps.webfoot.com/demos/demographics/>

<comment><USER7> It took me a while to remember that the Northwest side of Alameda is the naval base, and that's why it shows as white on both "occupied by renter" and "occupied by owner" maps.

The "occupied by renter" map confirms a lot about what I think about SF real estate, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So Santa Clara and most of San Jose don't exist?

You can even see where it cuts off. See that little burnt orange stub at bottom center which sticks out into a sea of white? That's Central at Lawrence, where the SV/SC border goes nutty due to some annexing wars back in the '60s.

To answer the question posted in the post, no, I cannot find my zip or those of my friends, either.

<comment><USER9> I can't believe this didn't at least include cupertino, let alone the rest of the san jose suburbs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice data, but nearly impossible to understand. It would be nice to put at least a couple of big cities (Palo Alto, Fremont, etc) on the map, so that you could understand where's what.

<comment><USER11> Download the raw data and query to your liking.

Under Debian, US Census TIGER files are available as dictionary files. You can use this to identify specific areas as you wish.

My analysis showed that the most expensive top several ZIP codes were SF Financial district, Stanford, SOMA, Marina, and Pacific Heights neighborhoods, as well as Atherton. I suspect the data may skew high, though it would help to have a distribution within each ZIP code as well (SD, median, quartiles, 5th/95th percentiles).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if any of the big real estate sites do this as a feature? It seems like zillow used to have this feature but they switched to a different map provider and could no longer offer it. I recently read a book about making money in real estate and the author suggested that you produce a heat map like this (by hand) for the area that you are interested in investing in.

I can't understand why this sort of thing isn't more commonplace. I would like to be able to create animated maps that show the prices over time. Or add in height to show the crime rate over time etc.

It seems like real estate is one of those industries with a strong lobby that has been able to resist having its information become a commodity. When I bought my condo I thought the MLS was such a joke.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great post. Very interesting.

One suggestion: please further improve your startup's domain expertise w/r/t Manhattan (I don't know enough about the Bay Area).

Nobody I know in Manhattan - and I lived there over 15 years - thinks of South Street Seaport the way you describe it:

"The cobblestone streets combined with the low-density feel of the area give it a historical vibe that is second-to-none in the borough."

There are cobble-stone streets with low density and a historical feel in Tribeca, which - price aside - virtually all Manhattanites would consider significantly more desirable to live in than South Street Seaport.

South Street Seaport is a weird area to live. Very touristy. Far walk to most jobs on Wall St. Far from subways. Not that residential and very windy, since it is on the edge of the city.

I had one friend who lived in that area, on Cliff Street.

Everyone else was everywhere else.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like typical real estate "enhanced truths" to me:

cobblestone streets: technically true

low density: nobody else wants to live here

historical vibe: the cobblestone streets make it look old

"It's a shithole for tourists in the middle of nowhere whose streets have been neglected by maintenance crews for decades," just doesn't sell apartments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Permalink: [http://kwelia.tumblr.com/post/36569269722/bay-area-rental- pr...](http://kwelia.tumblr.com/post/36569269722/bay-area-rental-price- heatmap-by-zip-code)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish the heatmap scale went beyond $3 per square foot.

</comment><comment><USER17> Price is only part of the story. Because of rent control laws in SF, prices aren't the signals of demand/scarcity they normally are. Showings for average apartments (in older buildings) in SF often have dozens of qualified applicants showing up, making them crapshoots.

<comment><USER18> I thought rent control only applied to existing tenants, and landlords could charge whatever they like for new tenants?

<comment><USER19> That's correct. Not sure what Grandparent is referring to; prices are only artificially lowered for sublets.

(Rent control obviously causes artificial scarcity, but the pricing info is correct for what a place is likely to cost you in a given area)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's surprising that Orinda/Lafayette are comparatively cheap now. They've been historically expensive places to live, they've each got good Bart stations, easy access, safety, and access to good food. But, people seem to ignore Lamorinda when looking for a place.

<comment><USER21> I thought they were cheap per square foot because the houses are so huge.

<comment><USER11> There is that.

$/sqft factored by apartment size results in a greater uniformity of rental pricing than would be immediately apparent. With few exceptions, the higher- cost areas will have smaller apartments generally catering to singles / childless couples, while families are driven to more to the periphery. Atherton and Stanford would be notable exceptions, as both include sizeable parcels (though how many of these are available as rentals is another question).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember someone telling me that certain areas around/near Palo Alto were considerably cheaper, yet all I see is red/dark-red.

Was that BS or is this map wrong?

<comment><USER18> Parts of East Palo Alto are cheaper (but not necessarily somewhere you'd want to live...) but this is broken down by zip code, which isn't granular enough to show major differences (though you can see the Palo Alto area is very dark red compared to everything around it.

<comment><USER22> Is it that bad? I remember someone that lived there said the place had changed a lot.

Still if it's that bad then it should be cheaper too, weird how it doesn't shows on that map.

<comment><USER18> I haven't lived there, but people I know who do seem to report hearing gunshots somewhat regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can you normalize this by sqft? Size of rentals available likely skews this data, as rdl points out, bigger houses are typically cheaper per sqft.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice data, thanks for putting it together. Would be really cool if there was a link to an enlarged version of the table as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> done.

<comment><USER25> It would be even cooler if the enlarged version of the table was readable without squinting!

<comment><AUTHOR> added downloadable .xls link

<comment><USER26> Do you have Philly data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Any idea on where this data is from?</comment>


Ask HN: How to survive Silicon Valley as a middle aged professional - <AUTHOR>

Looking to understand what does one need to do to thrive in Silicon Valley after entering thier thirties and being a parent. I view the valley to be dominated by 20 year olds who will out work and perform you in a coding job for multiple reasons specially when you are a parent. How does one survive? Do you have to change roles and go into non development jobs like management or technical services or are there some alternative solutions. What's the best way to approach such aging issue <comment> Am-hehu After reading this I wonder why a job in SV is still desired. Treated like a throw away item without any future perspective must be horribly depressing. If someone cannot start a family without loosing her/his livelihood is slavery not a fulfilling live.</comment>


Ask HN: Why just don't charge for Google Reader? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering why Google wouldn't just charge a small fee for the usage of Google Reader. I guess loads of users are willing to pay. What do you guys think? <comment><USER2> Or how about spinning it off into a new company? Wouldn't that provide more value to shareholders than throwing the whole thing away?

<comment><USER3> Supposedly it's too tightly integrated into their internal infrastructure to spin it off.</comment></comment>