How comprehensive is Zipcar's insurance? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/06/15/how-comprehensive-is-zipcars-insurance/

<comment><USER2> <imaginary bq>it seems they're still interested in putting liability onto their members when there's an accident, like the time when Zipcar member Dale Douglas rear-ended Leslie Minto. Minto took Zipcar to court, but Zipcar won, saying that it was not liable "for harm to persons or property that results or arises out of the use, operation, or possession of [their vehicles] during the period of the rental or lease".</end bq>

Isn't this precisely why drivers/owners are compelled to purchase insurance? Dude is lucky he didn't kill someone.

<comment><USER3> _Isn't this precisely why drivers/owners are compelled to purchase insurance?_

The contentious issue is that the zipcar marketing implies that "comprehensive" insurance is included. They don't require you to have outside insurance, and they don't even offer you an opportunity to (through them) get more (specifically liability) insurance at an additional cost. I don't know about you, but when I see the word "comprehensive", I tend to think it covers everything.

The concept of the car sharing service is that it's something you use rarely. Paying to be insured 24/7/365 for something that you use once or twice a month seems wasteful. I'm not even sure it's possible to get insurance for car sharing services through traditional insurers. In any case, it seems like far more of a hassle than checking a checkbox to pay more to get some additional insurance through zipcar directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow - I didn't realize they had such poor insurance:

 _Beginning November 1, 2007, for Zipcar members 21 years of age or older, our insurance coverage consists of a combined single limit of $300,000 per accident, meaning that all third party bodily injuries, or property damage costs relating to the accident covered in the aggregate up to $300,000. For drivers under 21, we provide coverage up to state-mandated levels, which vary by the state in which the accident occurs. Zipcars are covered under a vehicle collision policy._

 _If the total amount of the injuries and/or property damage exceeds our coverage limits, Zipcar members are responsible for this excess_ and will be contacted by either Zipcar, our insurance provider – Liberty Mutual – or the insurance company representing another driver involved in the accident.

You think they'd charge a little more to give you better insurance, or at least give you the option of securing better insurance.

</comment><comment><USER5> "It seems they're still interested in putting liability onto their members when there's an accident"? Of course -- they should be! Insuring someone is totally different from assuming liability, is it not? The article totally lost me at this point.

<comment><USER6> Agreed (and upvoted), although I come to a different conclusion. When potential Zipcar customers see the marketing materials that mention comprehensive insurance, are they being mislead by that marketing? I suspect so. They don't have an obligation to cover liability or provide insurance that covers liability, but they do have a responsibility to be clear on the marketing side.

<comment><USER7> Zipcar is not liable for the actions of its customers, insofar as the insurance coverage is concerned.

Insurance (n) - [...] D. Coverage by a contract binding a party to indemnify another against specified loss in return for premiums paid.

Indemnity (n) - [...] [P]rotection, as by insurance, from liabilities or penalties incurred by one's actions.

The person who was rear-ended by the Zipcar member is entitled solely to recover from the member. Zipcar, as a corporate entity, is not responsible for their member's actions unless they caused the actions or (in the ever-popular) "should have known" the actions would take place.

In the linked article [1] from the Reuters blog, the court ruled that Zipcar is a car rental company. All car rental companies are not responsible for the actions of the people who pay to rent the cars. The insurer that provides coverage that people buy through Zipcar is responsible for fulfilling the terms of the policy, but that is a contract between the insurer and the insured. Zipcar bears no corporate liability, which is where the person whose car was rear-ended erred. If she had sued the driver and Liberty Mutual, or just the driver, she would have prevailed if the driver had been found at fault and could have recovered from the driver's insurance company. I can't tell, from either article, why she didn't go this route, since it's what thousands of people who are involved in wrecks do every year.

1 - [http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202462707131&CarS...](http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202462707131&CarSharing_Company_Entitled_to_Same_Liability_Shield_as_Rental_Firms_Court_Rules)

(I used to do auto insurance-related work in a former career and find the entire process needlessly complex.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My Mom, who doesn't have a car and otherwise was interested in Zipcar, won't rent from them for this reason.

Too bad.

</comment><comment><USER9> xcn

</comment><comment><USER9> b,

</comment><comment><USER10> What insurance do you want them to provide? They can't be held liable for every jackass with a drivers license that rents on of their vehicles.

<comment><USER7> They're not. According to "How it Works" [1], "[c]omprehensive insurance is included as a part of the low hourly and daily rate." However, Zipcar does not let "every jackass with a driver's license" rent one of their vehicles. You have to apply [2] and be accepted for membership in the service. Meeting their requirements means, among other things, you must:

"* Have had no more than two 'incidents' (moving violations PLUS accidents) in the past three years and no more than one incident in the past 18 months

* Have had no major violations in the past three years

* Have had no alcohol violations in the past seven years" [3]

They're only insuring the customers they choose to insure, and should be doing so according to the "comprehensive coverage" their advertising states. Their insurance does not seem to require anyone to carry other insurance, and doesn't seem to be subordinate to any existing insurance, beyond the subscriber paying a $500 deductible[4], therefore Zipcar needs to pay up

1 - <http://www.zipcar.com/how/whatsincluded>

2 - [http://www.zipcar.com/seattle/apply/?account_id=&group_i...](http://www.zipcar.com/seattle/apply/?account_id=&group_id=)

3 - <http://www.zipcar.com/how/faqs/one-faq?faq_number=1>

4 - <http://www.zipcar.com/how/faqs/one-faq?faq_number=28></comment></comment>


Ask YC: What are some good example of microrewards on websites? - <AUTHOR> http://www.trendpreneur.com/online/reinvigoration-and-microrewards/

<comment><USER2> One good implementation that has not been mentioned is <http://www.kongregate.com>. More good examples are <http://www.Yelp.com> and <http://www.Mahalo.com>.

I almost feel like <http://www.thewhuffiebank.com> is also a good example of an attempt at microreward and reputation system on a grander scale.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Karma and SO's badges being the obvious examples...

</comment><comment><USER3> thesixtyone has a pretty good microreward system with their quests and user levels. I ended up micro-manging my next songs and listening longer on that site than I should have...

<http://www.thesixtyone.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Make an OKCupid account: <http://www.okcupid.com/>

<comment><USER5> Can't upvote this hard enough. Those guys are pro's.

<comment><USER6> As much as I'm sure you're correct, I'm not sure my wife's discovery of said account would go over too well... It was for research into online reward systems, I swear!

<comment><USER7> There's no shortage of married folks on the site who aren't looking for any kind of relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> -Yelp "Elite Users" get the little title next to their name if they post enough useful reviews. Likewise Amazon has their whole 'Top Reviewer' thing.

-Messageboards where members can give each other validation points, and then the amount of "rep points" someone has is displayed next to their name.

-Foursquare has the reward of making a user the "Mayor" if they post enough reviews about a certain area, and gives users 'badges' for completing different tasks. (I've never actually used it, but its something to that effect.)

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.stackoverflow.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how hard or useful it would be to create a generic micro reward currency.

\-- edit: there'd have to be exchange rates and an inter-site micro reward exchange market. Also a way to cash out, and buy in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! Then, it might make sense to put an actual price so I can cash out on all of this karma I've been working on ;)

<comment><USER10> Well you could list your karma along with their associated comments, someone might want to buy your output!

-edit: also, karma here isn't transferable, that's the problem, but people would like to have increased karma for status value, but that status value would disappear if it became transferable.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you name Markdown files .md or .markdown? Why? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> .md in github because it's shorter. .markdown when using jekyll because it doesn't recognise .md.

<comment><USER3> Jekyll can handle either (and some other obscure ones): [https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/23ad7fa4bde350e24a5bd...](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/23ad7fa4bde350e24a5bdbb7574d6027a0955fb7/lib/jekyll/configuration.rb#L39)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> .md for me, no idea why just saves keyboard taps i suppose :)</comment>


How we made GitHub fast (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/530-how-we-made-github-fast <comment><USER2> Anybody else think GitHub was more responsive to users and used to create more useful new features before they had $350 million in fun money?

I'm so happy they have a full replica of the oval office to play around inside, but some days it feels like they've abandoned the public interface in exchange for... nobody knows.

How many hundreds of millions of dollars will it take to finally improve the issue tracking system? Can it even be fixed with a hundred million dollars? Maybe it's more of a billion dollar funding problem. Nobody knows anymore.

GitHub makes it easy to drop approved licenses in any project, but what about dropping approved governance models in projects too? These days the governance of a project (roadmap, participation, core committers, sub-committers, issue- resolvers, moderators, time to resolve issues, formal how-to-become-committer processes) is a first-order component of projects too, but everybody is making it up as they go along. It's as if people were hand-writing licenses for each project. Imagine if GitHub had "select your governance model" multi-choice system like they do for licenses? Maybe that requires two billion dollars in funding to get pushed through. Nobody knows anymore.

<comment><USER3> > full replica of the oval office to play around inside

This made me stop and Google, yep:

[http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/07/githubs-new- offi...](http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/07/githubs-new-office- includes-a-replica-of-the-oval-office/)

<comment><USER2> Imagine how extravagant they would get if founded by pretentious designers combined with unlimited bubble cash: [http://curbed.com/archives/2013/12/04/find-the-war-room- from...](http://curbed.com/archives/2013/12/04/find-the-war-room-from-dr- strangelove-in-airbnbs-new-hq.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to know what this looks like in 2015.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whatever happened to BERT and BERT-RPC?

<comment><USER6> [https://github.com/mojombo/bert](https://github.com/mojombo/bert)

and

[http://bert-rpc.org](http://bert-rpc.org)</comment></comment>


Palo Alto considers banning new software companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/08/31/no-coding-palo-alto-city-takes-silicon-valley-growth/ <comment><USER2> What the mayor actually said about Palo Alto:

      - "It's become a monoculture," Burt says.
      - the city's role as a tech incubator is in danger.
      - Large employers like Palantir Technologies, the secretive private software firm, and Amazon, have taken over

He wants to force tech companies to move out when they get too big. It's hard for startups to get office space when large corporations can easily out-bid them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Talking about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If you think about it, companies coming to Palo Alto increase housing value, which increases property taxes, which leads to Palo Alto being a nice place.

Plenty of cities would love this "problem".

<comment><USER2> They come to Palo Alto because of the startup culture, which is diminishing. As the Merc article says, not everything is about maximizing profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This headline and story is misleading. The talk is about limiting company size so startups can return/thrive again. Here is a more balanced article: [http://www.mercurynews.com/michelle- quinn/ci_30313704/palo-a...](http://www.mercurynews.com/michelle- quinn/ci_30313704/palo-alto-considers-saying-no-tech-growth-this)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe Palo Alto wants to change the side of the road you should drive on at the same time.</comment>


Major C++ revision, approved. - g-garron http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/15/c_plus_plus_11_approved/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was going to be C++0x, so is it now C++11, C++0B, or C++011?</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone interested in forming a community of blog post reviewers? - <AUTHOR>

The problem:
I like to have blog posts I write to be reviewed by someone else. A co-worker, wife, etc.
It's definitely made my blog posts clearer, more effective and less dangerous (for those posts that sometimes contained something I shouldn't have said)
But sometimes it would be nice to bounce the post off more people with varied interests and writing skills than my small network.  I don't seem to be alone as Paul Graham seems to use his network of friends and colleagues to review his essays.  (for example, the bottom of http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html)
A possible solution:
What do you guys think of me and the guys at Inkling putting together a community to get blog posts reviewed.  Maybe it's something as simple as setting up a private discussion board like http://tenderapp.com.  Where folks can submit drafts of their blog posts and have a group of people review them and offer comments before they get posted to the rest of the general public.
The community could take at least a couple forms:
1) There's a group of moderators who do the reviewing.  They might nominate themselves, but are voted on by the community.  The rest of the community then submits their blog posts to this body of reviewers.
Maybe for compensation, the reviewer doesn't get paid, but their name and link to their blog/project is added at the end of the blog posts they review.  Maybe so that the quality of posts being reviewed starts much better than lots of junk, people that want to join the community of reviewees "applies" to be accepted into this community by submitting their current blog and a little about themselves.  This way reviewers aren't going to get bogged down with reviewing total blog spam and those "reviewed by:" footnotes will be more worthwhile.
2) Or the community could just all be "better than most" blog writers that band together.  Everyone is a reviewer and reviewee and the community is a bit more tight knit and challenging to get into.
Thoughts or ideas about this and making this idea better? <comment><AUTHOR> This seems to have at least a positive reaction from a few folks who'd like to see something accomplished. So to get the ball rolling:

<http://draftreview.tenderapp.com>

It's a private site. If you want to join, email me at nate at inklingmarkets.com

Tell me if you want to be a reviewer as well.

Sound like a good place to start?

</comment><comment><USER2> Why not do this via email? I don't think a lot of people need to be involved. Once or twice a day, a moderator circulates draft articles to the list. Each author can list a publishing deadline, so a reviewer can choose whether or not to start reading the piece based on the time available, and so nobody contributes thought to a piece that has already been published.

Granted, this doesn't scale, but I don't think this is something that is meant to scale: it should be a small group of eloquent, thoughtful writers who can provide meaningful feedback prior to publishing to a broader audience.

The problem with web-based solutions is that they're not pushed to reviewers, so many of the busier people whose insights may be most valuable to an author will not remember to check the site. For example, I doubt Paul posts an essay draft to a private site and waits for his colleagues to check it for drafts to review.

Although I wouldn't be able to provide feedback on every entry, I would enjoy contributing thoughts to authors in a format like this, and I think it would help create special relationships between people in a different way than the HN community boards (less anonymous, more thoughtful, etc).

Edit: I see a lot of suggestions here about how to fix this problem with technology using crypto, etc.; I don't think this is a technology problem as much as a social organization problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> All good points. And I'm going to sound like a pitchman for Tender (<http://tenderapp.com>) :) But that's kind of why I liked using this to create a minimum viable version of this community. Tender is very friendly with email. So new things submitted to be reviewed will get blasted to submitters who have their email alerts turned on. They can reply via email. There's also queues if someone wants to put something in their queue so the duplication factor might go away some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you are looking to foster real collaboration (as opposed to copy editing and spell checking) I would use a private wiki to let all parties edit the post (or leave comments). I think a discussion board serves a different purpose, preserving authorship of each contributor and allowing you to have a discussion instead of reaching working consensus on a common narrative. Both are useful but serve different purposes.

<comment><USER4> Committee editing of blog posts is not a way to go. Blogs are good because they have a distinct point of view and voice. Group editing would have the effect of homogenizing the distinctive voices into something more bland like you find in wikipedia articles.

<comment><USER5> I think the intent of the post was to have people review the post at an idea level, not to collaboratively write something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I wasn't imagining this as some kind of lets all get together and write a blog post kind of thing. Really just to get some comments on "does this make sense", "am i dangerously offending anyone here", etc.

Just like Paul Graham's essays. Those are still very much his voice, even if his friends and colleagues submit their opinions to him on earlier drafts of it.

<comment><USER3> I think the forum approach is also a good one for the purposes that you envision. I was also trying to suggest that collaborating more deeply also has benefits. It's also good practice for teamwork in startups where you often need to reach a working agreement on document content against a deadline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a blend of the two you could do something like:

* A draft can only be viewed by reviewers approved by the writer * When a post is published, it also turns world-readable on the reviewer site, _including the reviewers' comments_ * Let the writers add any reviewer they want to their list of approved reviewers

This lets new writers see which reviewers provide the best feedback, and they can add them to their pool of reviewers. The number of approved writers and feedback quality could be used as the base of some sort of karma system.

Each reviewer sees a "Most recent" or "HN frontpage"-like list of articles available for review. No action should be required to decline reviewing a article, to prevent popular reviewers from getting swamped.

For a business spin and to provide an incentive for reviewers, you could also add a fee to post a draft and distribute (part of?) the money to the reviewers based on their karmic score. Make the size of the fee based on the size of the article to review.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a really intriguing idea (I too noticed how pg gets people to read drafts - I started doing the same here and there with varying results).

The issue would be it would have to be fairly private, right. In some way at least. Because if the idea is to _preview_ and make suggestions for improvements / revisions _prior_ to posting you wouldn't want it public at any stage :P At the same time you'd want to keep it vibrant and full of content.

(by which I mean #1 sounds the better way)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, it would definitely be "private". Meaning, in #1 the reviewers would be a group of moderators who the community trusts through a "Friend DA". Not sure we are going to get some legal document drawn up, but basically the community knows the moderators aren't going to be sharing the early draft of a blog post with anyone.

The blog post only exists in the system for the submitter (reviewee) and the group of reviewers.

That's why <http://tenderapp.com/> stood out to me, because it it's a support tool, so has this idea of moderators (support staff) who are the people allowed to view a private post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW, the community at the newish ProBlogger.com does stuff like this. (I have no connection with it other than being one of the first to sign up and a prolific poster over there :))

But, actually, I'd see value in something like you're suggesting where the "reviewers" _aren't_ professional bloggers or even "better than most" blog writers. Most blog readers are not better-than-most writers and might raise comments that are ultimately more useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, that's interesting. I'll dive into this community maybe a bit more. My initial reaction is the community here seems to be catering to very beginners and up. And maybe what I'm purposing is a bit more for people who already have some skills at blogging and some established readership, who just want reviews and not tips on adsense, etc. Also I think what I'm purposing keeps the draft a bit more private since the post would only be shared with a smallish body of reviewers.

<comment><USER8> From my experience, I've seen about a 50/50 split in "pro" bloggers versus newer people who want to become pro bloggers. That split might have changed a little because Darren opened it up to his wider audience - though early on it was nearly all "pros". There's a very active "critique" board on there though - I've done perhaps 10-15 critiques so far - they range from overall designs/strategies to posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You may want to also check out kuro5hin.org. They've been doing a form of what you are talking about via the "edit queue" for quite some time, where members can comment and suggest changes using a different class of comments that reset prior to the article being published.

It's a shadow of what the community was at it's peak, but it still may offer some insight.

</comment><comment><USER10> No suggestions other than I think it's a great idea.</comment>


Mr. Darcy's Ten Thousand a Year - <AUTHOR> https://notesonliberty.com/2019/04/16/mr-darcys-ten-thousand-a-year/ <comment><USER4> _Consols schmonsols!_ The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year _Pride and Prejudice_ was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m. Pathetic! Not even a one-percenter. I would not walk three dirt miles and muddy the hem of my dress and suffer a terrible cold for half that.

I have a stupid fascination for historical finance tidbits like this. I once wrote a price comparison paper for _Les Misérables_ , Thénardier accused Valjean: "You eat forty-franc bunches of asparagus in January!" I have lost all my sources (it was likely wildly inaccurate and didn't take into account GDP, cost of living, relative wealth) but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2 (correct me please) - so a bunch of winter asparagus was £88? Sounds excessive. Cosette was purchased for a mere £3300, and her inheritance from Valjean was £1.32m.

<comment><USER5> Inflation figures over 200 years are pretty dodgy. How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far wealthier than Darcy.

Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.

<comment><USER6> Your examples have an interesting pattern.

> How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in > 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far > wealthier than Darcy.

One's wealthiness is always relative to others. The items listed here are goods that are broadly available today across wealth bands, and are therefore not markers of wealthiness.

> Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net > worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the > local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the > local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.

Power is a great (the ultimate ?) example of a resource whose access and distribution can be compared over time.

Power over others has never been quantified like monetary wealth has, yet it is intrinsic to humans given we are a highly social species. For people like Darcy, such power over others was a hereditary birthright. You couldn't buy a share of that power as an investment. Therefore, there was no market that could estimate the monetary value of that power.

<comment><USER7> > One's wealthiness is always relative to others.

That isn't the case, wealth is an absolute measure. _Inequality_ , _power_ and to some degree _satisfaction_ are relative to others, but wealth can be created and destroyed independently. Which is the major argument against socialism, incidentally. If wealthiness were a relative measure, full blown communism would be great for wealth. Which it most certainly is not.

Modern inhabitants of the first world are insanely wealthy.

<comment><USER6> > That isn't the case, wealth is an absolute measure

That's why I used the adjective "wealthiness", as in "He is wealthy" vs the noun "wealth" as in "His wealth is X".

The adjective is relative, and implies more wealth relative to a population. The noun is not relative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?"

"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley."

Elizabeth already knew Mr. Darcy's income and despised him. It was upon learning of his wealth that her love bloomed. A practical woman, Miss Bennet.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but Elizabeth is still being sarcastic here, as is very much in her character, despite Jane's request to the contrary.

<comment><USER10> It's not simple sarcasm. There's plenty of truth in it, so there's an element of knowing self-deprecation - not just on Elizabeth's part, but also Austen's, because the sentiment that would have been recognised by many of her readers.

Austen herself was in the same position as Elizabeth, with a tiny inheritance that provided no financial security. So P&P is as much a fantasy about finding financial safety as it is about finding a man.

For all the landscaped country houses and bonnets, it was a very brutal period for many women - and for men too, in other ways.

<comment><USER11> It's also because she sees how Darcy's servants and tenants view him. He is a popular man and treats the people who depend on him well which speaks positively to his character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's really interesting about this Napoleonic Time Period is not so much how much the wealthy earned, but how little they paid their servants.

Much like modern fading businesses they had an addiction to cheap labour to prop up dated capital. Then when the mills and the mines and the factories turned up paying better wages, most of them failed to adapt. If they were lucky they sold out to the National Trust.

</comment><comment><USER13> In the same respect as this post, the Golden Age made some insanely wealthy people. If you have ever visited the mansions in Newport, RI, the Breakers is something to marvel at.

But what fascinated me more was how Cornelius "the Commodore" Vanderbilt actually built his wealth. If you visit the mansions, they only talk about the social life and everything about the mansions.

But Commodore amassed some like 200 million in that day and age. There was very little regulation, and he fits the mold of someone who with very little education, excelled at business.

<comment><USER14> At The Breakers, all the bathrooms had hot and cold running fresh _and salt_ water. I believe many of the fancy mansions in that area had.

I remember visiting on a field trip from nerd sleepaway camp in Massachusetts.

As an adult, I could see myself splurging to get running salt water in my seaside mansion. I've always loved salt water.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious what is the reason for having running salt water? For taking baths?

<comment><USER14> Originally, probably the combination of supposed health effects of bathing in salt water and to flex on the less wealthy.

Later, to keep up with the Joneses aka Vanderbilts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think perhaps french novels have more fascination with money than English novels. The monetary calculation than brings Madam Bovary to ruin is worked out to exact detail by Flaubert. Also Stendhal, in Charterhouse of Parma, almost all characters are expressed in terms of so many francs and sous per year.

Amongst the English, I think Trollope did have a particular engagement with wealth and money matters in his novels.

<comment><USER17> Dickens?

<comment><USER18> Dickens had a fascination with poverty and its effects, but he did not have a fascination with wealth and its technical details. For him a wealthy person was someone who could, on a whim, help out a poor child or go on a merry adventure.

<comment><USER19> Is this really true? Mr. Pickwick is a not-poor man who ends up in debtors prison for alleged "breach of promise" to marry his landlady. Wealthy Steerforth is a central character in _David Copperfield_ and so on.

<comment><USER18> I would say yes it's true, other than I didn't talk about the villains where their wealth is generally seen as a constrictor of their moral nature.

But essentially the wealthy characters have no focus on the mechanics of their wealth, other authors might say how much a character makes per year, what they are primarily invested in, how much of the wealth came from what things, what the coming war means for their investments. For Pickwick it is enough that they are wealthy and can do what wealthy people do. Pickwick in debtor's prison is a chance for him to focus on how the poor are generally treated from the viewpoint of a sympathetic rich character, as well as having an amusing situation "rich man in debtor's prison".

Even Scrooge, he lends money at exorbitant rates, underpays his employee, and does not use any money for his own enjoyment. No focus really on how the business works.

<comment><USER19> Pickwick is not a villain. But yeah, I suppose we can reasonably hairsplit over 'mechanics of wealth'; to me 'did not have a fascination with wealth' seems almost axiomatically impossible for a Victorian writer.

<comment><USER18> I did not say Pickwick was a villain, I said that my original statement was true except I did not talk about the villains. I wrote "did not have a fascination with wealth and its technical details." the AND in the sentence is meant to combine the two as I thought was clear, sure he had a fascination with being wealthy in the same way that I do about having enough money to never work again, travel the world, and have heaps of fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing I don't see pondered upon as much as Mr Darcy's wealth is what did their expenses look like (other than Lydia's dresses). How much was the upkeep of Pemberley? How much did the housekeeper earn? Bingley is generous and a spender. Every re-read (and there have been many) I wish I had more detail on their budgets.

<comment><USER21> I looked into buying a small estate in the midlands about 6 years ago and the price was around £1.5mm and upkeep was something like 500k/yr.

I passed.

<comment><USER22> Why was upkeep that expensive? Would you be maintaining the entire estate as a perfectly manicured garden?

<comment><USER23> What would be the point in buying one and letting the gardens go, not maintaining a stable and all your neighbors laughing behind your back.

<comment><USER24> "He doesn't have even a single thoroughbred stallion...pffft"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One striking thing about Mr. Darcy's income is you could still survive on it (not inflation-adjusted) in a developed country today. It's right around the individual poverty line. It's also close the median household income worldwide.

<comment><USER25> Assuming, at a minimum, health care and other social social safety net services. But, yes, Mr. Darcy was very wealthy by the standards of the time and would be today. (Although, as others have pointed out, comparing wealth across such a long time period is difficult in many ways.)

<comment><USER19> _comparing wealth across such a long time period is difficult in many ways._

If it can be done for dance⁷, it can surely be done for wealth.

⁷ _Ibid._ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTchxR4suto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTchxR4suto)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Never sell consols." \- The Forsyte Saga.

The British government finally redeemed its last consols in 2015.

<comment><USER27> I had thought about buying some consols for my ISA (tax free investment account) the year or so before - my ISA was/is a bit stock heavy.

They where at around £80-85 and where redeemed at par £100 so would have been a nice little earner.

<comment><USER28> Interesting. Do you know why the government didn't simply buy them on the open market when they came up and retire them? A 20% premium seems like quite a lot.

<comment><USER27> Yes did seem odd - it might have been they wanted to get rid of consols - <USER2> are perpetuals so they never expired BTW

Though as it would have been old money and savvy investors who had them and would benefit does make you think eh

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice article but I don't think this part of the conclusion is correct:

'Wealth, in Piketty's view, perpetuates itself, and effortlessly earns its return (never mind the work, risk and selection issues involved). By continually paying the interest on its debt, the governments of Austen's Britain financed the leisurly lifestyles of the rich, just as the "natural" return of the modern-day rich contribute and maintain today's inequality.'

This completely disregards inflation. E.g., if government bonds guarantee a 3% payout but inflation is at 3.5%, your wealth is not perpetuating but leaking away.

<comment><USER30> I think I have read somewhere that inflation in the end of the 17th - <USER3> half of 18th century was almost zero or there was even a deflation. I may be wrong. Maybe someone has a good source?

<comment><USER31> The book mentioned in the article, Capital in the 21st Century, shows this in really interesting detail. I can't remember the details myself, but the idea we have of inflation being normal is actually highly abnormal in the history of humanity. Can't recommend the book enough, really interesting to see how unique the last 100 years of high growth is compared to history due to the world wars and how we may be returning to "normal" levels of inequality.

<comment><USER30> Yes, it was from this book I believe. Also found this [http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP03-...](http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP03-82/RP03-82.pdf) where it seems like retail prices where relatively stable at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I want to understand the fascination with Jane Austen's works, especially by hackers and designers (and an economist in this article). Paul Graham (founder of Hacker News) mentions Jane Austen in at least 5 essays, see below. I haven't read any of Austen's books, but I think I'll need to.

(1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually happened." \-- [http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html](http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html)

(2) "One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy's there, but it's woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average 'literary' novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader." \-- [http://paulgraham.com/desres.html](http://paulgraham.com/desres.html)

(3) "What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel." \-- [http://paulgraham.com/hp.html](http://paulgraham.com/hp.html)

(4) "Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. [...] Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." \-- [http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html](http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html)

(5) "Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself." \-- [http://paulgraham.com/taste.html](http://paulgraham.com/taste.html)

<comment><USER33> Point (4) strikes me as a bit off because Jane Austen is generally among the easiest classical authors to read. _Pride and Prejudice_ in particular is a simple romance story that can easily be read and appreciated by almost anyone with little to no preparation. Compare this to, say, William Faulkner or James Joyce and calling Austen an example of difficult literature seems almost absurd.

<comment><USER10> She's very easy to read, but she's not so easy to understand. There are multiple levels of irony and character insight in all of the books.

You can take them at face value as superficial and nostalgic proto-Harlequins, and a lot of readers do. She practically invented the surly and arrogant romantic hero who actually loves his mother and is kind to children, small animals, and feudal tenants.

But the books are actually blisteringly insightful and perceptive social and psychological commentary, written by a fiercely modern spirit trapped rather unhappily in a superficially elegant but oppressively limiting social scene she both loved and hated.

Most contemporary authors wrote as if they were outside the scene and looking in, so you don't get the same sense of ironic but intimate self-disclosure.

Austen wrote as someone inside and looking out, describing her own perceptions and reactions - many of which are contradictory and complex. So as a writer, she's both sympathetic and uniquely fascinating.

<comment><USER33> I still think her work is at most middling in terms of difficulty and likely not even that. Multiple levels of character insight is nothing compared to _Ulysses_ parodying in sequence the entire development of the English language in stream of consciousness mirroring the gestation of a baby in a woman's womb, or the first chapter of _The Sound and the Fury_ which tries to represent the internal experience of a severely mentally handicapped nonverbal 33-year-old man for whom past and present cannot be distinguished and who cannot understand simple phenomena like the movement of a horse-drawn carriage through space, or the second section of that same book which follows Quentin's turbulent and troubled mind through his final moments leading to his suicide. These sections are not just difficult to read, but also look outward from inside a character.

Jane Austen is a great author, and her works can often be appreciated and analyzed on multiple levels. But I just don't think she's a reasonable example of a difficult author when one considers the full spectrum of literature available today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In addition to money, there are a lot of things that are unclear in the Jane Austen's novels for the modern reader. One such thing is time: when Mrs. Bennet asks Mr. Bingley "to dine with then", at what specific time Mr. Bingley is supposed to show up (he seems to know implied time without asking)?

<comment><USER35> Is there a chance you know an article that covers timing aspects of the novel?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So £10000/yr is equivalent to $22.35 million a year. [0] That's quite a bit of money.

[0] [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10000+1792+british+pou...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10000+1792+british+pounds)

<comment><USER37> Wolfram Alpha is interpreting that as £10000/yr * 1,792.

As the top comment notes, according to BoE's inflation calculator [1], that's £680K/yr, or $850K/yr.

[1] [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary- policy/inflation/in...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary- policy/inflation/inflation-calculator)

<comment><USER36> Ahhh thanks. I didn't notice that because if you do searches like "100 1950 dollars" it does the inflation calculation for you. Guess it doesn't do well with pounds. I trusted the engine too much. Thanks for the catch.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I just struck out on my own as a consultant. What do I need to know? - <AUTHOR> As the title says, I just took the big leap of working on my own as a self-employed freelance developer. It has been one of my dreams for a long time, and I finally got the urge by accepting a 1 year contract engagement.
Fiduciary and legal considerations have already been considered (C-Corps/LLCs, health insurance via my wife, quarterly taxes via accountant).
I just want to know all the more subtle things they don't tell you about going freelance when you start out. Like for example, my first job on my own is a relatively safe subcontractor role, but most engagements are much shorter and riskier. How soon before my contract ends should I begin lining up other work?
What about marketing myself? I know consulting firms generally only work 4 out of 5 days a week for their clients , how should I spend that 5th day?
Any other suggestions would be great. This is both an exciting and terrifying time for me, and even though the contract is signed, I am freaking out a little bit. <comment><USER2> Are you working from home or from an office? If working from home, here's a humorous take on some issues: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk)

Seriously though, one of the key things is to maintain focus and working standards, but get out of the house at least once a day (take a walk), talk to somebody in person, and be mindful of the clock. One of the biggest problems I faced was just working too much.

</comment><comment><USER3> 5th day - business development.

This is where most freelancers go wrong, they just expect clients to come to them. This will come over time with referrals but as you're just starting you need to spend a decent amount of times finding customers.

</comment><comment><USER4> > What about marketing myself?

Alan Weiss has some brilliant advice on this subject. See Chapter 6: If you don't blow your own horn, there is no music. > [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/260218.Million_Dollar_Co...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/260218.Million_Dollar_Consulting)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in a search cycle currently myself. I got involved with a startup that would periodically get funding, charged decent rates, but when one funding round didn't go through, I had to kick off a sales and marketing cycle.

How'd you line up the first gig yourself? I had a referral from someone else.

</comment><comment><USER6> Invest time into building relationships. Even if you have a steady stream of work already, you'll want to have connections in the pipeline for when things dry up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations!

Now please get a second contract with a different client. Avoid working on a single client's work at any given time.</comment>


Ask HN: Best scifi of 2017? (Vernor Vinge/Larry Niven style) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Although I very much like hard sci-fi, my favorite this year was the "Broken Earth" trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky) from N.K. Jemisin.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't agree more. Wandering earth (short stories) again by Liu Cixin is also amazing.

Blindsight is also worth a shot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Aeon 14 novels following Tanis Richards[1] have been a consistently good read. The Intrepid Saga and The Orion War series. Haven't ventured into the other offshoots as yet.

The Dome Trilogy[2] was also pretty good, as are the Rho Agenda series[3][4][5].

The Bobiverse trilogy[6] (We Are Legion (We Are Bob)) I was a bit dubious about when I started, but ended up enjoying immensly.

The Wrong Unit[7] wasn't a bad little humorous tale.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6426890.M_D_Cooper](https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6426890.M_D_Cooper)

[2] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25501349-unexpected- rain](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25501349-unexpected-rain)

[3] [https://www.goodreads.com/series/61746-the-rho- agenda](https://www.goodreads.com/series/61746-the-rho-agenda)

[4] [https://www.goodreads.com/series/142618-the-rho-agenda- incep...](https://www.goodreads.com/series/142618-the-rho-agenda-inception)

[5] [https://www.goodreads.com/series/175066-rho-agenda- assimilat...](https://www.goodreads.com/series/175066-rho-agenda-assimilation)

[6] [https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse](https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse)

[7] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30959279-the-wrong- unit](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30959279-the-wrong-unit)

<comment><AUTHOR> The premise of "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)" is strikingly similar to Larry Niven's short story "Rammer" \- down to the somewhat unusual terms "corpsicle" and "State". Revived, no rights (though in a wiped body; and intersteller terraforming).

Hopefully, a homage, flagging some inspiration/similarity with Niven?

Bob: [http://dennisetaylor.org/legion/](http://dennisetaylor.org/legion/)

Rammer: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/452990.Rammer](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/452990.Rammer)

EDIT: he does seem to be a fan: _first Bobiverse book. Chapter 14 intro... Lawrence Vienn is a tuckerization of Larry Niven._ [http://dennisetaylor.org/about/](http://dennisetaylor.org/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not really Vinge/Niven style, but Weir's new one _Artemis_ was a fun read. Also, Kim Stanley Robinson's _New York 2140_ was a lighthearted and somewhat optimistic take on humans who have coped with the inevitability of climate change.

<comment><USER7> Lighthearted, but cynical all the same. Excellent read, _2140_ ; I highly recommend it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ninefox Gambit / Raven Strategem were great, my favorite military sci-fi since Old Man's War.

<comment><USER9> The Red Trilogy is very good military sci-fi as well. I may have accidentally consumed the entire thing in a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Terra Ignota series (Too Like the Lightning / Seven Surrenders, and Will to Battle which came out last year).

Not only is it very different in tone/style from most traditional SF I've read, it also doesn't restrict itself to just tech/physical science - <USER2> explores social and political science what-ifs too.

I'd be hard pressed to name any other book I've read in the last year (or more) that's had me pause so often just to think on the ideas presented.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely loved this book, though I thought the best parts of it were the influx of ideas and worldbuilding in the first 3/4ths of Too Like the Lightning. The last quarter seemed to rush to tie together the threads laid down and I felt that carried over into Seven Surrenders.

Of course I think my approach to reading it also changed as I was eagerly awaiting that resolution. Haven't picked up Will to Battle yet, but very excited for it.

<comment><USER12> I felt that Will to Battle improved over the middle book, although I liked all three regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dichronauts by Greg Egan (adventures in non-Euclidean space)

Provenance by Ann Leckie (space opera)

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (similar themes to Anathem)

<comment><USER7> > Provenance by Ann Leckie

I really _really_ wanted to like this, but I just couldn't. Not my style unfortunately, but everyone keeps suggesting it so it's likely me that's the problem.

<comment><USER13> I liked how it drilled deep into themes that were important to the cultures in the story, which were very human cultures but not any specific Earth cultures. It was a glimpse into a small part of a large, coherent world.

But you have to like the characters or you can't get anywhere. People have described Stephen Baxter novels in similar ways, but I can't stand any of the characters.

<comment><USER14> That's interesting, I love Baxter's works and characters but finishing Ancillary's first book took me months and was painful. I liked the universe and the themes so I ended up reading the wikipedia summaries of the rest of the serie.

<comment><USER14> It just came to my mind that I like the manifold trilogy way more than the xelee cycle though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley had some crazy ideas, but lacked some depth I was hoping for.

Nine Fox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee was also pretty good—had a rough start but ended well.

Collapsing Empire by Scalzi was quite solid and well paced.

Of books not released in 2017, I read The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi—it probably had the most 'new' sci-fi ideas out of the books I read this year, which made it both a bit of a challenge and interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't know about year of release, but these are sci-fi books I enjoyed reading this year...

The book of strange new things (Michel Faber). This isn't typical sci-fi, it's hard to describe. It's quite slow paced. I can't really talk about it without spoiling it. I really felt impacted by it though, I think the book has a deeper philosophy that isn't really mentioned but requires thinking about the meaning. I thoroughly recommended it if you are willing to be thoughtful about a book and not just after laser and space battles. Another book by the same author (under the skin) is also good, and has been turned into a very weird film with Scarlet Johansson.

Other good more conventional sci-fi stuff...

Extracted series (R.R. Haywood) Not alone (Craig a. Falconer) Themys files series (sylvain neuvel) We are legion series (Dennis E. Taylor)

</comment><comment><USER17> weird question - is there any scifi around finance ? Cryptocurrency, etc. I feel it is weird that almost every piece of tech has had a scifi runway leading to it (VR, AI, robots, clean energy, etc)... but not finance.

Maybe I'm missing something

<comment><USER18> It's not exactly crypto currency as we know it, but Charles Stross's "Neptune's Brood"[0] spends a lot of time discussing the challenges of interstellar finance.

——-

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15985402-neptune-s- brood](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15985402-neptune-s-brood)

<comment><USER9> Definitely the geekiest finance/sci-fi book out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not really 2017, but _Iron Gold_ comes out in four days.

It's the follow up to the _Red Rising_ series, a Roman dystopian on Mars type story, which I highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER20> I didn't think a question like this would get any attention on HN let alone hit the front page! :)

 _Collapsing Empire_ by John Scalzi was one of my favourites last year

</comment><comment><USER21> Not sure whether you're asking for scifi published in 2017 or scifi we enjoyed in 2017.

Here is the scifi I enjoyed in 2017 (via audible)

\- We are Legion (bob) trilogy About AI, space and Von Neumann machines [http://dennisetaylor.org/legion/](http://dennisetaylor.org/legion/)

\- Ready Player One About life later in this century. Lots of VR and references to nostalgia from the 80s and beyond

<comment><USER22> Yeah, both these books are very fun, with enough hard science to be believable, but still very accessible. My only disappointment with the Bob books was that they ended.

"Ready Player One" was full of naked eighties nostalgia fan service, but that suits me just fine. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Wil Wheaton (speaking of eighties nostalgia...), and he's a great reader who brought real enthusiasm to his reading. Given that Spielberg is at the helm, the movie should be awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Dark Matter" by Blake Crouch is an excellent read that has a lot of twists and turns. It's quite dark in places.

"We Are Legion" by Dennis Taylor is a very light hearted and easy to read.

"The Collapsing Empire" by John Scalzi is a space opera that I quite enjoyed.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm reading "Surface Details" by Iain M Banks, love the Culture series !

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/107855](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/107855)

[https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science- fiction-...](https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science-fiction- books-2017)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fantasy, but you're missing out if you don't read City of Stairs. Great thriller.

</comment><comment><USER26> Iphuck 10 by Victor Pelevin, about AI detective working in the art industry

</comment><comment><USER27> I was expecting movies and shows... How about those though?

</comment><comment><USER28> If these count, I enjoyed:

\- The Expanse (season 2)

\- Sense8 (season 2)

\- Alien Covenant

<comment><USER29> Well, The Expanse books certainly count and there's a bunch of them!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_\(novel_series\))</comment></comment>


How I made over $2 million with this blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/02/11/howIMadeOver2MillionWithTh.html <comment><USER2> In my opinion, he made over 2 million dollars because he owned the name weblogs.com, which Verisign bought for 2.3 million.

I don't think it has anything to do with his weblog. It has to do with the success of Blogger, and after that, blogging in general. If I had never maintained a blog, but owned the name weblogs.com, I would be 2.3 million dollars richer right now too. I seriously doubt that Verisign wanted weblogs.com because of their pingback system, seeing that it was becoming less and less relevant as Technorati and other similar sites grew.

But I do agree with his main point that his blog made money, and Dan Lyons is wrong.

<comment><USER3> He did not simply "own the name weblogs.com". Weblogs.com was the first service that could be pinged to say your weblog has been updated, which he implemented first in his company's environment, then in PHP (IIRC). It then showed a list of all updated weblogs. This worked pretty well before the spammers showed up.

It wasn't just a name sell, it was a service sell.

(That may not sound like a very difficult service, but there were scaling issues as time went on. And... at the time that it sold, $2 million wasn't much money, either.)

<comment><USER2> I already addressed your point in my original comment.

I believe that Verisign bought weblogs.com mainly because they wanted the name, not because of the service. The site was already losing traffic and becoming irrelevant when he sold it, due to the increasing number of much more useful related services such as Technorati. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Technorati had a valuation of over 12 million dollars _one year_ before Verisign bought weblogs.com for 2.3 million.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I admit I missed that last sentence.

However, I think your contention that they didn't want the service is wrong, since they are still running it. Swing on over to <http://www.weblogs.com> and see for yourself.

You may think it was a dumb decision on their part. (I do. Weblogs.com did its thing back when the weblog world numbered in the hundreds or few thousands, but even pre-Twitter it was pretty obviously increasingly worthless at the time it was sold. Even if the tech side scaled, the social side did not.) But clearly they did want it, and still do want it enough to continue running it. (Though I wouldn't be surprised it gets shut down any day now...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I made $2 million from a typewriter! All I had to do was use it to write a best selling novel and pitch it to the right publisher!

While he might be correct by saying he made it "with this blog," that entirely misses the point.

<comment><USER3> Since that _is_ his point, I daresay _you_ missed it.

"Blogs don't make money. But people with blogs can."

<comment><USER5> He probably would have made as much money even if he didn't blog about himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what Dan Lyons was thinking with his initial column. He's obviously a smart guy. He knows the blog landed him a book deal, his new job at Newsweek, and internet notoriety. He knows there is money to be made through and around blogging, so I'm inclined to think it was an intentional publicity bait, which is working amazingly well.

Otherwise, I am constantly amazed by how dense people are about the value of internet traffic. Like just having a ton of visits is the only thing the matters. Visitor intent is just as powerful a factor in the equation.

</comment><comment><USER7> I call anecdotal evidence. Not everyone can have one of the first blogs on the web and be in the top 100 most trafficked blogs. Also, attributing the success of a startup on a blog is a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER6> Everyone CAN start a blog and use it to market their business. If that is the only marketing channel, attributing the success of the business to it is not that big of a stretch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's be clear: Anyone who has a domain name like weblogs.com to sell, even with zero content, is going to make quite a bit of money. They are scarce commodities, and that has nothing to do with blogging. I hardly see how it's fair to include that in the total. If I registered movies.com years ago, and had a blog about movies today, it would be a bit silly to attribute the millions I would get from selling movies.com to my blog.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want to learn about a real blogger making actual money from his blog (and not related software/consulting sales), head on over to JohnChow.com.

He turned a few front page Digg stories into a blogging success story and clears a healthy 6 figures each year now.

<comment><USER6> John Chow's blog is such a joke. It exists to scam newbies. Shouldn't you be busy making money online?

<comment><USER9> How does he scam newbies? By offering advice in how to make money with their own blog/site? How is that different than the "do as we do" blog posts from 37 Signals?

Oh and I am, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have made Millions from this chair, wearing this hat. I sat on this chair and a made million writing kickass applications.

what a streeeeeeetch!!

</comment><comment><USER11> So all you need to do is have two extremely valuable .com domains and your a hit. Pretty sure this is something most people already knew.

</comment><comment><USER12> Dave Winer has made over $2M with his shitty software and pointless blog? I'm either inspired (if THAT guy can do it, so can I) or I want to kill myself.

Edit: oh wait, nevermind. he made the money because he owned weblogs.com and sold it to Verisign.</comment>


The Death of Hong Kong (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995/06/26/203948/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Whoops! Kind of got that one wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean? I thought it was spot on.

<comment><USER2> HK is prospering

<comment><AUTHOR> Hong Kong's GDP might be rising, but most of its people's income has been steadily decreasing since 1997.

In 1997 a university graduate earns $10000-$20000 per month. In 2011, a university graduate still earns only $10000-$20000 per month. After inflation it is a net decrease.

Why? Hong Kong has monopolies with no anti-monopoly laws. Buses, Trains, Electricity, Supermarkets - All monopolies or duopolies. (There are several bus companies all with their own local monopoly regions).

The Chief Executive of Hong Kong is, for all practical purposes, appointed by the Chinese government due to its influence in Hong Kong politics. The Chief Executive writes polices with China's interest over Hong Kong interest. In any other country you would call that treason, but since Hong Kong is part of China...

The largest political party in Hong Kong is almost directly funded by the Chinese Government and it votes in favour of every bill the government proposes.

The minimum wage law of $28 HKD ~= $7 USD per hour was instituted only last year.

This might seem like Hong Kong was fully in support of a vibrant capital market but consider this: during the early 2000's recessions (remember SARS), Hong Kong refused to budge their fixed exchange rate with the US so that China can use Hong Kong's fixed currency as a buffer. China's currency wasn't internationally traded then, and so to get its currency fixed with the US, the only way was using the Hong Kong dollar as an intermediary, at Hong Kong's people's expense.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Perhaps I've got a little too much bias from just seeing Finance over there surviving better than Finance over here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Strong Jobs Report: 271,000 Jobs Added in October, Unemployment Rate Down to 5% - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2015/11/06/strong-jobs-report-271000-jobs-added-in-october-unemployment-rate-down-to-5 <comment><USER2> The most surprising thing about this report is in the age breakdown for October ([http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm](http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm)), where the age group that accounted for virtually all total job gains was workers aged 55 and over.

Workers over 55 added some 378K jobs in the past month, representing virtually the entire increase in payrolls.

Meanwhile, workers aged 25-54 actually declined by 35,000, with males in this age group tumbling by 119,000.</comment>


Ask HN: How to achieve reporting from the RDF data stored in HBASE? - <AUTHOR>

We have an application where we are storing all information as RDF triples in HBase. Now we need to do data analysis and make reports out of it. The current approach is, we are extracting a part of data according to the need of reporting using map reduce and dump that data to a .tsv file and use that file for reporting. But the problem with this approach is :
1. The extracts run for a long time as it needs to traverse through all customers in HBase and give out put for reporting. As a result, for single requirement , we need to wait for a long time. Though the performance can be made better using a good hardware configuration. Still it takes ~10 hrs to pass through all data. We do have Time constraint.
2. Sometimes, the data is so huge that, we can't use MS excel for creating charts. So we use shell script to divide the data, but we need some tool to handle this huge data to create charts
3. Now the final objective is to show the reports or to create an interactive dashboard (containing filters with charts)
Guys, Can you please suggest any solution for above problems? <comment><USER2> How many triples?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think, it depends on customers in database, currently, it is 2.7M customers.

<comment><USER2> If you are under 10,000 triples per customer, you are using the wrong technology stack.

Either use RDF and SPARQL and leverage your graph potential or use relational on HBASE, the current solution does not seem to work for you.

On the graphing side, learn to use R. It will serve you a lot better than trying to make graphs with excel.

27 billion triples can easily be worked with using e.g. Virtuoso 7.2 on commodity hardware. e.g. 256gb RAM+ 2Tb of consumer SSDs.

Your current setup does not leverage either the strengths of RDF or of HBASE. Moving of HBASE and onto a SPARQL/RDF store will be less work and I expect to have a higher ROI.

Remember SPARQL stores have improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years so the home grown HBASE solution is no longer state of the art.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your Insight. I will surely keep it in mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happens to datacenter's servers once outdated? - <AUTHOR> With an evergrowing cloud of datacenters, constantly updated offers with better and cheaper servers, what does actually happen when those servers eventually end up being replaced?<p>Dumped as garbage? Shipped to poor countries? Recycled? Sold? (Like we could buy custom servers like Google or facebook have). Just curious :) <comment><USER2> A lot of them get bought by liquidators who clean them up and list them on ebay. Search for "server" and you'll find lots of listings like "Supermicro 1U-Intel Quad Core 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 2x160GB" where there are hundreds of a given configuration available.

<comment><USER3> I once purchased a lot of 20x dual-Xeon (1st gen) DELL servers from a liquidator on eBay. They were extremely cheap. The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive because that's what made financial sense due to the shipping weight.

They were fun to play around with and it was definitely an experience. However, having them around became old quickly and flipping them was much more difficult than I had originally thought. Luckily I ended up breaking even, even after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.

<comment><USER4> > The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive

> ... after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.

Heh, and the cycle continues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once spoke with the director of one of the largest research data centers in Germany, and I asked him exactly that. He said that most of the hardware would get scrapped as there is no market for it since the required infrastructure (racks, cooling units and power supplies as far as I understood) is so specific that there's very little use for the devices outside their original environment. That was for pretty specialized hardware of course, so it might be different for data centers that are built using more off-the-shelf components.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are companies that specialise in reselling them. Several jobs ago my company bought most of its server hardware used from North Bay Networks, which as I understood it got its inventory when places like Stanford and Pixar did large hardware refreshes

</comment><comment><USER7> Hetzner provider in Germany offers "auction" servers for good price: they are customized and/or outdated servers that customers cancelled so they can rent them for an extended period of time.</comment>


Commit Message Generator - <AUTHOR> http://whatthecommit.com/

<comment><USER2> For the lazy...

[https://github.com/ngerakines/commitment/blob/master/commit_...](https://github.com/ngerakines/commitment/blob/master/commit_messages.txt)

</comment><comment><USER3> I set this in my .profile file a while ago:

      alias gca='git add -A; git commit -a -m "`curl -s http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt`"'

<comment><USER4> Dear lord this is a bad idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is funny. But the reason that this is funny is because people actually say these things in commit messages. I mean, "updates" is a commonly used commit message for a colleague I work with. It makes me want to cry.

<comment><USER6> They sound nothing like the commit messages I've ever seen. I suppose I haven't seen much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For your ~/.gitconfig:

      wtc = !git commit -m \"$(curl -s http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt)\"

<comment><USER8> what should happen? does it need to go in a specific "section" of the .gitconfig?

<comment><USER7> Yes, i forgot, it has to go into the [alias] section of .gitconfig.

It create a commit with a random message from whatthecommit.com; nothing you would push to your public repository; i use it in a script to backup some stuff in a git repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For your ~/.profile (or whatever): curl --connect-timeout 1 <http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt>

<comment><USER10> Why a connect timeout? And why such a short one?

<comment><USER9> So that your ~/.profile loading doesn't hang when your network does. Nothing more frustrating then wanting to get something done quickly in the shell and having it stall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else ever use "WIP" for work in progress? :)

<comment><USER12> Yes: <https://github.com/bartman/git-wip>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> use <http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt> to pull just the text for a commit message.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very funny, may just check this out for some inspiration every once in a while. :)

<comment><USER15> Almost as funny as <https://twitter.com/gitlost> [NSFW: language] which uses GitHub's timeline feed to find git commit messages with profanity in them. I wrote it in the same spirit as Commit Logs From Last Night although CLFLN seems to use a data source with quite a bit of delay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love it! May I ask how these are generated?

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't really call it a "generator"; it uses a static list: [https://github.com/ngerakines/commitment/blob/master/commit_...](https://github.com/ngerakines/commitment/blob/master/commit_messages.txt)</comment></comment>


A deadly, drug-resistant fungus has swept the globe–here's how it spreads - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/deadly-drug-resistant-fungus-drips-off-its-victims-to-spread-to-others/ <comment><USER2> Hydrogen peroxide works against this. Put it in a spray bottle and it will wipe out any mold/mildew.

[https://www.healio.com/infectious-disease/nosocomial- infecti...](https://www.healio.com/infectious-disease/nosocomial- infections/news/in-the- journals/%7B7feffa3e-65a6-427f-b6a5-52ece03de82b%7D/sporicidal-hydrogen- peroxide-disinfectants-effective-against-multidrug-resistant-c-auris)</comment>


US dropped ball on Navy railgun development–now China is picking it up - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/photos-show-china-preparing-to-test-naval-railgun/ <comment><USER2> Oh no, we've got a railgun gap!

<comment><USER3> At least it's not a mine-shaft gap!</comment></comment>


RainLoop Webmail - Free, modern & fast web-based email client - <AUTHOR> http://rainloop.net/

<comment><USER2> It would be good to be able to edit the To: field without having to clear it entirely and start over. Furthermore, pressing Tab after entering an e-mail address in the To: field causes it to be cleared.

Also, the bubble number indicator to the right of the Drafts folder seems to fall down on to the line below.

Iceweasel (like Firefox) 23, Debian Linux.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, tons of bugs.....</comment></comment>


Genetically modified salmons approved by the FDA - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23035-approval-for-genemodified-salmon-spawns-controversy.html <comment><USER2> As someone who doesn't care at all about eating genetically modified foods, I expect the argument over labeling will break out soon. To fire the first shot: I really wish they'd label genetically modified foods. It seems a small courtesy for those who do have concerns. And those who don't? Well, we don't care. That's the point.

<comment><USER3> You are rational. Many people are not. Labelling a food as "genetically modified" is the same to them as labelling it as "radioactive" or "contains excrement".

I'm not sure if labelling food as genetically modified is a useful warning, or if it would be the same as saying "wifi used in this building". WIFI isn't harmful, and eventually it's going to be everywhere and not avoidable. Yet you still have people who claim that electronic smog causes all sorts of things.

I'm happy to eat these things. I'm gently worried about releasing organisms into the wild with "exogenes" (or whatever they're called). Evolution is amazing and powerful and wonderful. And human intervention in eco-systems isn't filled with particularly great examples - a long list of invasive species comes to mind.

<comment><USER4> How many buildings in California do you regularly come across with the "This building contains chemicals known in the State of California to cause cancer" or something to that effect? They are everywhere. It doesn't stop 99% of people from entering these buildings to work or live in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Other animals bred to have fast-growing qualities typically suffer incredibly painful problems supporting their unnatural weight. When are people going to realize that:

A) just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

B) animals are not playthings put on Earth for us to do whatever we want with.

<comment><USER6> We can eventually fix the pain thing if that's an issue.

And Christianity takes an opposing view, meaning that this attitude is deeply ingrained in western culture. (Which I happen to agree with.[0])

"01:001:026 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." - King James Bible

Source: <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30/pg30.txt>

[0]: The attitude, on this particular issue.

<comment><USER3> Let's avoid the vegetarian arguments for the moment, because they are usually more heat than light.

Are you saying that we can do whatever we like to animals?

Or that we can do whatever we like to animals so long as it benefits humans?

Or that we can do whatever we like so long as the benefit is significant?

Or what?

<comment><USER6> Okay.

>Are you saying that we can do whatever we like to animals?

Technically they can't stop us. But that's probably not the answer you're looking for.

Inflicting unnecessary harm on semi-sentient life forms that feel pain is probably immoral. So while we _can_ do whatever we want, certain things are not _moral_ to do.

> Or that we can do whatever we like to animals so long as it benefits humans?

Right now current conservation efforts have the irreplaceable property of extinct animals as an axiom. This is, for the moment, true. So we have to measure decisions in something akin to utils. Killing off the zebra to cure somebodies headache probably isn't a smart trade.

At the same time we need to be cautious, when we start playing large games with the ecosystem, we incur the risk of large losses. (See: Just about every invasive species introduced as a direct result of human intervention.) Right now one of the large reasons for saving species from extinction is biodiversity. The less biodiversity in the ecosystem, the higher the chance of a key species being wiped out by disease or aggressive predation and collapsing the whole system. (See: Pollinating insects.)

Right now the benefit to humans of saving as many species as possible from invisible deaths by our machinations is a net positive. In the future, it may make sense to "upgrade" organisms to give fitness for a particular purpose. This process may involve organisms being out-competed to extinction by GMOs.

> Or that we can do whatever we like so long as the benefit is significant?

Well right now current meat processing procedures induce great pain to the animals involved. This is an externalized cost that does not show up in consumer prices. Meaning that even though the morally optimal solution would be something like naturally grown animals on a large pasture, the evolutionarily optimal solution ends up being animal death camps.

There are efforts to _grow_ meats independent of their traditional hosts through bioengineering, but these efforts have not taken off yet. If successful, they could save millions of animal lives, at the potential cost of the majority of the species. (Or even all of it.) Is that worth it? Is it selfish for humans to "obsolete" an animal it no longer finds useful? We did this to horses.

We need to be careful about "benefit". The Soviets drained the Aral Sea in a large irrigation project. [0] This of course resulted in the destruction of the surrounding ecosystem, and is now apparently leading to health problems for the people who live there locally. Was that worth it?

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformation_of_Nature)

tl;dr: Currently the only way to satisfy our demand for meat is to slaughter millions of animals. Because of market pressures, these animals end up dying painfully, or even living painfully. This is not an morally optimal situation and I feel that certain aspects could be improved, with potentially disastrous consequences for the species involved.

<comment><USER5> "Semi-sentient"? "Smart trade"?

This attitude toward animals is just sad. We're talking about other beings with emotions and desires. I wish scientists could GMO humans into not being so arrogant toward other species. That's a genetic experiment I could get behind.

<comment><USER6> I use the former term to clarify that I don't ascribe human levels of consciousness to animals, do you?

As for the latter, since you brought it up:

The thing about stuff like "How many Zebras are worth a headache." is that if you think about it enough, you end up at questions like "How many zebras are worth a human?" and then "Are all human lives equal?". When trying to answer such questions things get fuzzy and icky and hard to answer satisfactorily. Then theres versions of those questions where you ask if the answer changes if it's _your_ life being weighed.

Even though it's intuitively obvious that somebodies fleeting minor pain is not worth the cost of losing an entire species of large mammal, talking about "fair trades" with sentient creatures gets weird and frustrating very quickly.[0]

[0]: I personally like the phrase "Infinite Hair" to describe situations like this. (ftp://ftp.trailing- edge.com/pub/rsx11freewarev2/rsx81b/374001/jargon.txt)

<comment><USER5> No, I do not feel the need to differentiate between the varying consciousness of animals in a discussion such as this. I feel they are owed the basic right to life, freedom from suffering, and an equal right to that which they have an interest in, such as raising their young. For every qualification you could find to rationalize treating animals poorly, aside from the species label we have applied to them, the same qualifications can be found in certain people. That's why it gets fuzzy and icky to start calculating "smart trades" that compromise the rights of some for the good of others.

You should check out Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I'm not saying I agree with everything he supports, but he makes a bullet proof argument supporting the fact that speciesism is just like any other discrimination, and relies on the same logic as racism, sexism and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMe...](http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMeetingMaterials/VeterinaryMedicineAdvisoryCommittee/UCM224760.pdf)

"The potential hazards addressed in this EA center on the likelihood and consequences of AquAdvantage Salmon escaping, becoming established in the environment, and spreading to other areas. These hazards must be addressed for the production of eyed-eggs, grow-out to market size, and disposal (i.e., of fish & fish wastes)."

and

"As discussed in §126.96.36.199, the estimated escape rate of salmon from sea cages is about 1%. Sea cages, or net pens, have a direct connection with the aquatic environment."

1% of 50.000-90.000 fish in sea cage it's not something negligible, the first direct impact might be against the non-GE Atlantic salmon (salmo salar). Especially that salmon eats salmon eggs and so the dominant specie might become the GE one.

You might say, oh it's fine it's not touching the diversity of Salmon, it's just replacing the Atlantic salmon with another one. Wait, they took some coding sequence from the pacific salmon (and especially from the oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and added the "anti freezing" protein from zoarces americanus. So this "subspecie" got an interesting level of properties to find its place in the atlantic and/or in the pacific (where the diversity of salmons (Oncorhynchus) is much higher) region. Those risks are without any spreading of the genetic modification (assuming that triploid induction is effective with a probability of 1, another point where the scientific literature is lowering down the probability of effectiveness).

I suppose those risks are not really considered by the FDA as critical because the F is for Food in FDA. So the risk of changing the whole profile of wild salmon with such "GE" salmon is not negligible.

<comment><USER8> > As a precaution, the fish are all female and contain three copies of each > chromosome rather than two, rendering them sterile.

They won't replace atlantic salmon

<comment><AUTHOR> "But the sterilization process is not perfect; up to 5% of treated salmon could still reproduce."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i've stopped eating salmon a while back, the way theyre farmed is nothing short of disgusting. I think a deathrate of 20% is considered good in those tanks.

But seriously who wants to eat animals that live on corn? for a subtle introduction on where the us meat comes from i suggest <http://www.eatinganimals.com/>

<comment><USER10> Everyone should rethink their meat consumption. First, if you read nutrition books, you realize that in the long term, it's not healthy. It's much better to eat vegetables. Secondly, you can get all the nutrients and vitamins you need from whole foods. Thirdly, it can be cheap. A can of chickpeas is around $1 and it really fills you up for many hours. I'm not saying everyone should be vegetarian. But if everyone was 70 % vegetarian things would be very different.

<comment><USER11> >>First, if you read nutrition books, you realize that in the long term, it's not healthy. It's much better to eat vegetables.

As someone who is eyeball-deep in nutrition science, I demand a credible citation.

<comment><USER12> Read the books by Joel Fuhrman, Eat to Live being his most famous one, [http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Live-Amazing-Nutrient-Rich- Sustain...](http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Live-Amazing-Nutrient-Rich- Sustained/dp/0316206644/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356857742&sr=1-1&keywords=eat+to+live)

He's not against eating meat, but portions should be very low (5-10% of calories from animal products, no more, and this is a veeery small piece of meat). A (near-)vegan diet with B12- and DHA-supplements is the healthiest (DHA can be derived from algae instead of fish oil - the fish get it from algae too). An objection may be: but eating pills isn't natural. Well, eating GMO-fish surely isn't natural either.

A website with a lot of little video's about the same nutrition principles can be found here: <http://nutritionfacts.org/>

<comment><USER13> If you say, "5-10% of your diet should be meat" you will find your audiences much more receptive than if you say "You shouldn't eat meat". In my case this is because I don't trust extremist _anything_ , particularly when it comes to food.

If the former is your belief and not the latter, please open that way.

<comment><USER12> I was reflecting the message of Fuhrman MD. He's not saying 5-10% should be, but COULD be meat or animal products (including eggs, dairy, etc). 0% is also fine or even better. He allows this percentage because some people find it too restrictive to be vegetarian or vegan. So optimally you should keep it as low as possible, but there isn't much lost if you still keep it around 5%. Most people don't realize one egg is already that amount. You'd have to eat vegan the rest of the day to stay within limits. Animal products can be used as condiments to flavor your food, not as a substantial part of your diet. If you want to have a look at the scientific data, read his book(s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Upon further research, here are a few things that caught my attention:

#1) There was a bit of Congress lobbying to get it approved.

#2) There is a 5% chance that these fishes could actually become fertile.

#3) These fishes have an extra chromosome and a novel protein not found in any other salmons.

<comment><USER14> Could you share your sources? (I'm genuinely interested vs. trying to be a dick)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dan barber's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Barber>

TED talk might be relevant to this discussion ;-]

[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> There are legitimate concerns surrounding genetically modified foods. Some potential problems include the creation of monocultures that permit rapid and more complete devastation from disease, selective pressure that creates superior pests and predators (positive feedback toward creating monocultures), negative ecological network effects, overuse of pesticides, and reliance on commercial seed (you think software patents cause problems...). Food safety is one, but it's a given for crops intended for human consumption.

That said, the real problem is fear from people who do not understand the science. We've been modifying what we eat for thousands of years. Selective breeding has allowed us to feed today's world. Development of short-stalk, high-yield, disease resistant wheat by Norman Borlaug in the 1950s secured a food supply for Mexico and India. His cultivars are now credited with saving more than a billion lives. Where selective breeding got us to where we are today, genetic engineering will carry us into the future. We need higher yields per acre to support a growing population. That means industrialized farming and cultivars that support industrial methods. So-called "Roundup- ready" varieties of plants allow mass spraying of herbicides over fields, and let desirable plants crow without competition from weeds (the plants have been made resistant to the herbicide). Corn engineered to carry the "Bt" gene for a bacterial endotoxin produces its own insecticide. In each case the modification allows for a higher yield per acre. Some may say that selective breeding is different than recombinant methods, which is true. Introducing exogenous DNA into an organism is different than crossing two parent organisms. The introduction of new DNA or new alleles does occur in nature however, via viral insertion or mutation. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of our own DNA is the result of viral insertions. Plants and salmon are effected by viruses too. We are only accelerating evolution down particular paths (albeit perhaps down very unlikely paths).

So genetic modification is not inherently harmful, and it can confer wonderfully advantageous benefits. Baseless fear is unwarranted, but cautious concern is justified. When having debates or reporting on GM foods it is important that we discuss both the benefits of GMO foods along with the concerns I mentioned above. It is prudent that any new organism be fully studied and understood before it is deployed in the outside world, and at a large scale. Environmental impact needs to be understood. In the US, GMO foods must clear many regulatory hurdles before being approved. Among these are complete characterization of the genomically integrated transgene(s) and demonstration that the transgene(s) remains stable over multiple generations. Apparently these and other criteria have been met to the satisfaction of the reviewers examining the farmed salmon. Here is the environmental impact study provided to the FDA by the salmon company:

[http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMe...](http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMeetingMaterials/VeterinaryMedicineAdvisoryCommittee/UCM224760.pdf)

Even though I support genetic engineering of foods, I am against labeling of GMO foods as currently proposed because I think _a simple statement is inadequate_. Saying "GMO food" says nothing about the modification, and only serves to incite fear. In a time of rapid whole genome sequencing, I want to be able to scan a QR code on a package and get a link to the GenBank entry for the food organism in question, along with the impact studies and a plainly worded overview. I want to see notes for which insertions, deletions, or other changes were made. I want to see the DNA diff on the genomic source code. Public food should be open source.

A few years ago I had lunch with Richard Stallman (a fun story itself), and wanted to get his take on gene patents and "closed source" organisms. While he expressed an understandable disapproval of corporate monopolies on crops and biopharmaceuticals, he did not seem to have a strong desire for Freedom in genetically engineered products. I found that surprising. He thought the barrier to entry was too high for people to make their own genetic changes as they might make changes to software. I think we need to consider that genetic engineering is only going to get easier.

From some cursory reading it looks like the salmon in question in this article has been modified with a promoter (kind of like a compiler flag to enable production of a gene product) from the pout fish, and a subsequent growth hormone gene from a different salmon species. It grows faster, is more aggressive, and is sterile. It seems that the aquaculture companies interested in using the fish intend to keep it isolated from the outside environment, but even in the event of a release the fish would merely eat prey. They would ultimately die. Since they are sterile, the likelihood is low that they would be able to outcompete unmodified variants in their single generation. It seems they are safe all around.

If anyone is curious, the inserted gene construct is known as opAFP-GHc2, and its CDS source is available:

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/56691717>

<comment><USER10> Thank you for this information. And your statement "Public food should be open source". That's something worth discussing as a society. Food is so important... What do you think about Genetic Engineering for Humans. Is that also the future? We can cut medical costs for everyone by engineering humans to be immune to many known diseases. And better stuff.

<comment><USER16> Gene therapy is inevitable and is the future. Performing genetic engineering on new human offspring is different, and is a debate perhaps best left to ethicists.</comment></comment></comment>


PBS Series – "Networld" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnA3WS5iYN0 <comment><AUTHOR> >With the help of experts in network theory and precedents from history, Ferguson argues that the printing press had similar consequences for 16th-and 17th-century Europe as the personal computer and the Internet have for the world since the 20th century, leading to polarization and the dissemination of fake news.

Episode 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMisW1JKjp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMisW1JKjp0) Episode 3: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYlBnmxMZcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYlBnmxMZcQ)</comment>