Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government - <AUTHOR> https://whoaremyrepresentatives.org/ <comment><USER2> Actually, this title doesn't do the service justice -- it yields detail _clear down to local offices_ and gives a detail '+' link for each to get details like contact information.

For example, this is what is returned for a given, random Sunnyvale, CA address; the lone change I would suggest is to have the county and then city offices listed _last_ to maintain a sequence of decreasing granularity. Note that Sunnyvale is an example of at-large city council representation, so _all_ are listed. _Very nicely done!_

Barack Obama President of the United States

Joseph R. Biden Vice-President of the United States

Michael M. Honda United States House of Representatives CA-17

Dianne Feinstein United States Senate

Barbara Boxer United States Senate

Edmund G. Brown Jr. Governor

Gavin Newsom Lieutenant Governor

Laurie Smith Sheriff

Lawrence E. Stone Assessor

Jeffrey Rosen District Attorney

Gustav Larsson City Council Member Seat 1

Glenn Hendricks City Council Member Seat 2

David Whittum City Council Member Seat 4

Pat Meyering City Council Member Seat 5

Jim Davis City Council Member Seat 6

Tara Martin-Milius City Council Member Seat 7

Jim Griffith Mayor and City Council Member Seat 3

John Chiang State Treasurer

Kamala D. Harris Attorney General

Betty T. Yee State Controller

Alex Padilla Secretary of State

Dave Jones Insurance Commissioner

Tom Torlakson State Superintendent of Public Instruction

<comment><USER3> > _it yields detail clear down to local offices_

It has city councils, but it doesn't have any local districts. In Sunnyvale, you are also being represented on at least the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District[1], the El Camino Health Care District[2], and the Santa Clara Valley Water District[3]. If you are curious how I figured this out, I went to the Santa Clara County Local Agency Formation website, which has an interactive mapping tool[4].

[1] [http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election- information](http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information)

[2] [https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance](https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance)

[3] [http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx](http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx)

[4] [http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps](http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps)

<comment><USER4> Why do so much work and post on HN instead of sending them a quick mail?

<comment><USER5> To be fair, chances are the website makers are going to go through every single Hacker news comment anyway.

<comment><USER6> We've been lurking...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To everyone posting here:

I am a creator of this service. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email firstname.lastname@example.com!

We're extremely encouraged by all the positive feedback here, and we're glad to provide a service that you all found helpful.

<comment><USER7> This is awesome. Are you looking for engineers/volunteers?

Also, don't listen to all these feature requests and get scope creep. The only additional thing I'd love to see is even more granular levels of officials, but I know how difficult/nonexistent the data is there.

<comment><USER8> Agree with not getting involved in feature creep. There are hundreds of failed civic tech projects, mostly because they tried to do too much. Users do want "positions" or "issues" etc. but those are really hard to find / build good data for. That's the next level!

epoch_100: Stick to making an awesome data source and interface to solve the one problem you've picked :)

In the UK mySociety does similar things, their WriteToThem services gives a drill-down on the politicians for a given postcode. You'd probably be really interested in their [http://www.everypolitician.org/](http://www.everypolitician.org/) project, which is trying to do this for the entire planet -- but generally working from the top down.

I'm involved with [https://democracyclub.org.uk/](https://democracyclub.org.uk/), which works particularly on developing really good election data. epoch_100, reach out to one of us if you want to chat :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The feature I've been looking for but can't seem to find is a calendar view of when your elected officials are up for election.

Virginia for example holds their major state elections the year after Presidential elections. Local elections come up at seemingly random times. I vote absentee and remember coming home for a visit and my parents asking me to vote in some small election that was being held in the middle of summer.

Being able to add all of the offices to my calendar, ideally with important deadlines like when you can apply for absentee, vote early, and when you have to have your ballot in by would be amazing.

<comment><USER10> I am not sure why this page isn't loading but I think this use to be something close to what your talking about

[https://openstates.org/](https://openstates.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got my list and was pleased to see things like Auditor and Coroner, but why no state senator or state representative?

There's also no judicial branch to be found, which may not matter much for the Federal Supreme Court, because they're appointed, but just about every jurisdiction I fall under, State Supreme, State Appeals, Local Criminal, Local family, has an elected judge.

Judges tend to be a major source of ballot fatigue, because nobody knows who they are. You could argue that's a good thing, because then only informed voters are selecting them, but you could also argue that it's a bad thing, because only the self-interested are voting for them.

<comment><USER12> Coroner is an elected position where you live?

At any rate, I did get my state senator and mayor, but no city council rep.

Around here judges are not elected, but we do vote to remove or retain judges. Generally every year there will be one or two that someone is campaigning to have removed.

<comment><USER11> >Coroner is an elected position where you live?

Sure is. I heard an anecdote through a common friend that a past coroner, who wasn't personally political, was running for office.

My friend, a Republican, asked why the coroner was running as a Democrat. The coroner replied, "Because this is Trumbull County and I want to be coroner."

Anywho, it's often an uncontested race, as it was in 2016: [http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf](http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This website believes the Auditor-Controller for Santa Barbara County is Robert Geis, but he retired last March and was replaced by Theodore A. Fallati. I also wouldn't say that it is fair to say that this is "everyone": it is missing all of the local special districts (such as the Goleta Water District and the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District) that I would argue are much more important to my life than the person who is currently the "Treasurer-Tax Collector-Public Admin." (someone I believe I have never actually met, despite having been extremely active in local politics for years and having run to be a County Supervisor, even now being elected to the board of a new district which will come into existence in March 2017).

<comment><USER13> Congratulations on the win. What was the most difficult thing about breaking into politics? Did you have a career beforehand? Thank you for your time and service.

<comment><USER3> Here is a talk I gave at a conference, 360|interesect (which focuses on what technologists do in their spare time "while away from the keyboard"), on some of my motivations; this was before I started actually running for offices, though.

[https://vimeo.com/126618332](https://vimeo.com/126618332)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like an awesome service. Unfortunately, I'm seeing:

Error 403 Daily Limit Exceeded. The quota will be reset at midnight Pacific Time (PT). You may monitor your quota usage and adjust limits in the API Console: [https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quo...](https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quotas?project=324870654357)

<comment><USER6> We reached out to Google, and they increased our quota. Try now!

<comment><USER15> A good opportunity for you to include a "donate now" button when the service is down :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd like to see this expanded to show the full text, the representative's summary, and constituent comments for the bills, codes, policies, docket, whatever they are actually going to be voting on.

Then, show how they voted.

<comment><USER8> > constituent comments for the bills

In my experience, sites that do this sort of thing usually fail. They're ghost towns, and no-one cares what an unrepresentative sample of internet people think about bills.

I'm not based in the US, but I think the other points are covered by sites like [https://www.govtrack.us/](https://www.govtrack.us/). Open Congress was another, but was shut down when the Sunlight Foundation went a bit haywire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like this API does a lot of the heavy lifting for this: [https://developers.google.com/civic- information/docs/v2/](https://developers.google.com/civic- information/docs/v2/)

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's one of our primary data sources. We're working on leaving it, however, because we're also Google-phobes.

<comment><USER18> That, and you've exceed the request limit and it's only 10am cst

<comment><USER6> It's an honor. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really useful, love the idea. There may be some data troubles though, I looked up myself and found that the Twitter link for Senator Maria Cantwell goes to a porn account, not her actual profile. Yikes!

<comment><USER20> Today you have learned something new about your Senator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why does it ask for your address? Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list. Are they harvesting the address data for some reason?

<comment><USER6> A sysadmin of Politiwatch here (non-profit that made the site). We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious.

Regardless, we ask for the address as well as zip because in many areas, a ZIP is not sufficient to gather detailed data, as an official may represent one part of a ZIP code and not another.

Politiwatch, the non-profit that made WhoAreMyRepresentatives.org ([https://politiwatch.org](https://politiwatch.org)), is purely public benefit. We're trying to promote government transparency and political fluency. Nothing nefarious going on here. You'll have to take my word for it, though. If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address.

<comment><USER22> > We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the > request. We're super privacy conscious.

That's not the whole truth. While you may be deleting the submitted form values, your site uses a third-party tracking service which collects a range of visitor data[0] which is stored by that third party. Third-party tracking is useful and mainstream, but you should have a privacy policy and disclose the tracking in that policy.

On a more positive note, your site has a solid A+ for HTTPS configuration on SSL Labs[1], so that's great to see. The only change I would make is to switch server_tokens to 'off'[2] so you aren't leaking the Nginx version number (but this is admittedly just a minor bit of security through obscurity).

[0][https://clicky.com/terms](https://clicky.com/terms)

[1][https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepresentatives.org)

[2][http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...](http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#server_tokens)

<comment><USER6> You clearly did your research.

We'll put up a cookie notification soon.

Also, we configured our analytics to not store the HTTP parameters 'address' and 'zip' (where the address is encoded), so I'm not lying when I say the addresses are "nuked."

That said, we'll implement everything you have mentioned as soon as we feel its safe to be pushing out changes... the traffic right now is high and we don't want to mess anything up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool service. Beware that the Wikipedia links may direct to different people with the same name, particularly for local offices. For example, my Assessor links to a British wartime codebreaker and my Surveyor links to a Kiwi rugby star.

</comment><comment><USER24> Potentially very useful but it had incorrect names for the county level officials in my county. There does not seem to be any way to send in corrections.

</comment><comment><USER25> Feature Request: Add a picture of the representative when you use + to drill down. It's nice to attach a face to a name.

<comment><USER6> Already implemented for most high-level representatives ;)

Check Obama for an example.

<comment><USER25> Great! I was only looking at the local state reps when I tested with my address.

Crowd sourcing them from select users could be a fast method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would be nice if sites like this started taking into account Tribal governments. Otherwise, nice and simple website.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you like whoaremyrepresentatives, we would love feedback on [Act On This]([https://www.actonthis.org/](https://www.actonthis.org/)) as well.

We don't go down to as local of a level yet, but are more focused on giving information about specific actions you can take related to issues you care about.

While the current list of issues comes from us, we're on-boarding a couple of non-profits so they can use the tool to help organize volunteers at a state and local level.

</comment><comment><USER28> Fantastic service. Should it then link to their position all the top issues, like for, against, or refuses to commit?

By the way, my address has 30 people, all the same color.

<comment><USER6> That would be an interesting continuation of the site... we will look into it.

And as for all your reps being the same color, funny how democracy works out like that...

<comment><USER29> I'd say also deep linking into followthemoney.org would help more thoroughly explore a politician's alignment on issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Impressive. It even had my Registry of Deeds. Although it did list some people from other districts. I'm from New Hampshire and it showed all our Executive Council even the ones not in my district.[1]

[1] In New Hampshire if the Governor is the Chairman of the Board the executive council is like the directors on the board.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you guys have all this information, I would love to see a breakdown by subject, for instance, all the elected positions that have something to do with managing elections, and their next election date (so I know who to donate money to if I want to maximize health of elections nationwide).

</comment><comment><USER32> The site could use geolocation (server and/or client side) to prepopulate users' location for a zero-click user experience.

The site could also specify a numeric input type for the zip code field so mobile browsers will display the numeric keypad instead of the alphabetic keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm one of the millions of Americans living overseas. Who represents us?

<comment><USER34> Depends on where you're registered to vote:

[https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...](https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal- matters/benefits/voting.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's the source of the data once an address is submitted? I tried to do a similar project during a hackathon and all of the APIs I found were either dead or insufficient.

<comment><USER36> One API for this is Google's Civic Information API:

[https://developers.google.com/civic- information/](https://developers.google.com/civic-information/)

The API has a representativeInfoQuery to list your elected representatives, and a voterInfoQuery for current election information.

Details and examples are here:

[https://developers.google.com/civic- information/docs/using_a...](https://developers.google.com/civic- information/docs/using_api)

And this page discusses the quality and limitations of the data:

[https://developers.google.com/civic- information/docs/data_gu...](https://developers.google.com/civic- information/docs/data_guidelines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not everyone, doesn't show my mayor or city council.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wanted to find out who my representatives were to discuss the state of internet connectivity in my area. This made the research easy. :)

</comment><comment><USER39> This would be really useful for other countries. since some of the info is hard to find.

</comment><comment><USER40> It would be nice to be able to expand the list view of this to print to a PDF.

</comment><comment><USER41> Severely inaccurate results for me. Gave me reps for CT but I live in MA.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER42> Maybe you were like me and assumed that the "address" input just meant street address, since there's a separate zip input? I did that (#### lawrence st) and then it interpreted my street address to be in a different state. Instead you need to put in your address including city and state. I'm not actually sure what the zip code input is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Brought to you by the left-wing preachy makers of BibleOrQuran

</comment><comment><USER15> this should be an official .gov website

</comment><comment><USER44> Funny. The results keep coming back empty for me.

</comment><comment><USER45> Site is down.

<comment><USER6> ...and site is back up. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER47> As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.

<comment><USER48> If you consider citizenship to be "no benefit" (you can still vote, collect Social Security, etc. overseas), you could always renounce your citizenship.

<comment><USER47> Social Security is not a "benefit". It is getting money back that I have paid in to the system.

And as for voting, why? I have no representative to vote for.

<comment><USER34> If you're registered to vote in the US, you have representatives to vote for.

[https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...](https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal- matters/benefits/voting.html)

If you honestly see no benefit of your US citizenship, or the costs outweigh the benefits, it sounds like you should change your citizenship status, perhaps to the country you're a resident in, or maybe move back to the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm guessing the title was intended to have s/and out/and find out/ ?

<comment><USER50> I was kind of enjoying 'out' as the verb, but you're probably right.

(Submitted title was 'Enter your address and out everyone who represents you in government'.)

<comment><USER49> Indeed, I was musing on the question of "outing" politicians, but while interesting I don't think it was what was intended. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's important to note that this is US only.

<comment><USER52> It's funny how it's always American who "forget" to mention that something is scoped to their country. I kind of always felt that given that their country is so vast, they must feel like there is nothing more out there, or at least it's not worth mentioning. I've found many, many American businesses trying to sell their product via ads or other kind of marketing, but "forgetting" to mention that they are US-only. I'm not trying to attack American people or something, it's just a personal (and probably very biased) observation that I've had.

<comment><USER53> i work for a large US corporation, and also did in my last job (i'm in the UK) .... it seems to be a general thing to forget the US is not the only place people live in the world ... the majority of memo's we get spammed with are US centric and only applicable there. It seems to be a mind set in general thats pervasive in the staes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> LOL, yeah right they "represent" you. You wouldn't need that site if they did.

</comment><comment><USER55> Data is stale, My uncle Ronnie was killed three years ago, and they still have him listed.

/b

</comment><comment><USER56> I really don't understand this.

Is the point so that I can tweet or mail letters to my elected officials?

Is tweeting at officials supposed to help my station in life? Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously. I suppose it could be taken seriously but that would actually scare me more.

I always believed that if you want to make a difference than vote with your wallet and I don't mean to donate money to politicians. I mean to make purchases from companies you respect.

<comment><USER57> If you have a problem like "the social security administration has been giving me the run-around and I can't get someone to actually look at my case", then your US Representative can in fact be super helpful. Unlike legislation, it is an opportunity for them to unambiguously help one of their constituents. Depending on the number of family/friends you tell about it, they can buy themselves 1-10 votes with probably just a phone call.

Source: multiple anecdotes from acquaintances and threads on /r/legaladvice

<comment><USER58> Legislators typically have staff for whom constituent service is a full-time job, so I figure they should help me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> A technical tour de force, but the premise is flawed. "I" have no representatives. "We" have representatives as a group. The mob who rules by force of numbers; all strictly democratically acting.

Right off the top, the president, VP, both senators, federal and state representative, governor, and lieutenant governor; every one of them is 100% useless to me personally, because not a single one of them shares even one tiny insignificant view that is important to me. Sure, hey, that's the breaks, but let's not pretend they represent me.

<comment><USER59> The knee-jerk intolerant censors are out in force today, eh?</comment></comment>


Red = Happy? Orange = Creative? Blue = Fun? ...Color Associations Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://www.colourlovers.com/business/blog/2010/10/26/color-of-the-year-2010-by-the-people

<comment><USER2> While interesting, these conclusions require much more in-depth analysis over multiple years to be of much real value.

Colourlovers.com is pushing this as a way of finding out what color clothes people are going to buy, but do the results of this survey correspond with the colors people choose in their clothing? Do these colors vary significantly from year to year? What are the mean values and standard deviations for various popular hues across international borders? Sure, the US is red, Canada is yellow, and Australia is orange, but by how much?

You could do a lot of interesting things with this data...does anyone know if they've released it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are open to sharing the data.

I wasn't saying that the data directly is useful for people looking to plan fashion lines a year from now... I was simply saying that the old model of forecasting far off becomes harder to do when mass customization allows for people to have more options.

<comment><USER2> Cool! That's very generous of you.

I didn't mean to say that that's exactly what you implied, I simply meant to suggest that the postulation might have a flaw, even if it is an interesting one. Either way, I'm glad to have found your site! As someone who has difficulty with color, I'll be checking it out for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In terms of color, I would say myspace created the association blue == social (eg. [http://web.archive.org/web/20050104004746/http://myspace.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050104004746/http://myspace.com/) ). Thus I would even argue that facebook wouldnt have become the stellar success it is today, if its main theme was, for example, green.

From a programmers perspective choosing the right colors for your product might seem like a mundane task. but I think it is a key factor when it comes to popularity - just because the human perception relies so much on colors. Just ask yourself; would you buy a red car? What would happen if facebook changed the "facebook blue" from #3B5998 to #3B59CC?

<comment><AUTHOR> Facebook is blue not so much because of emulating Myspace... but because Zuckerberg is Red/Green colorblind... so that was the obvious choice for him.

And Blue has been a strong color online and in the business world for a long time... Think IMB "Big Blue." Again, there are social reasons that could affect this... but there is also the fact that tech has mostly been a male dominated space and a large number of males are red/green colorblind.

And the best example of how funny the social connections are with color. Can you imagine driving a pink car? Wearing a pink suit? Sounds girly right? You'd never do that.

But it wasn't that long ago that the gender association of those colors switched. It was an old advertisement for from the 30s or so, that showed that pink was the great new color for little girls. To that point pink was for boys and blue for girls. (Because Red is a strong aggressive color and blue is a soft mellow one... and pink is just a lighter version of red.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where are the negative color associations? What color was used for fear in 2010 etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't specifically exclude negative words... But I'm sure we could dig in and look for specific negative words like Anger, Fear, Hate, etc. and see what colors are associated with those words...

Good idea for a larger color association specific post.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: is ec2 mishandling your requests right now? - <AUTHOR>

Pretty much one out of every two requests to our site at hotpotato.com is being redirected to another site called yourtango.com. This behavior started about fifteen minutes ago so far as we can tell, and from poking around I see that both of us fall within the same Amazon IP block (174.129.*).
Is anyone else experiencing behavior like this? The AWS status blog shows no issues, but I'm waiting to hear back from support.
This is really stressful. <comment><USER2> Have you checked your DNS several dozen times? One out of every two sounds like what happens when someone accidentally sets an A record with a slightly different IP. Do not ask me how I know this. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, DNS is legit. If we make requests by IP we get the same behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FWIW, I have an EC2 instance in the 174.129/16 block and I didn't see any unusual traffic into that instance over the past 30 minutes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> .... aaaaaand it just stopped happening.</comment>


Please Disable Your Ad Blocker - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/dIDYScf

<comment><USER2> One of the sites I visit that is most strident about disabling your ad blocker is an anime site where they seem to make the advertising worse every day up to the point where page load time is like 45 seconds.</comment>


Inside the Open Compute Project Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/inside-the-open-compute-project-server/10150144796738920

<comment><USER2> What would be the price tag for the construction of one of these datacenters? Also, how much more expensive (in operating costs) is a, say, 1.1 PUE datacenter compared to a 1.07 PUE?</comment>


Exploit custom codecs to write inline C in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/georgek42/inlinec <comment><USER2> Wait... looking at this, doesn't this mean that by deliberately misusing the `codec` module, meta programming at compile-time (somewhat like Lisp macros) is possible in Python?

By using a custom parser, people are able to add custom syntax in python (which is... undoubtedly unpythonic) with just a decorator(or a magic comment) on front. I can't wait to start abusing this... :-)

Edit: Looks like a pattern matching syntax that hooks in pampy would be my first hacking project :-)

        # coding: patmatch
        import patmatch

        input = [1, 2, 3]
        patmatch input:
            case [1, 2, x]:
                print(f"{x} is matched!") #=> 3 is matched!

        def fibonacci(n):
            patmatch n:
                case 1: return 1
                case 2: return 1
                case _: return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely :) I "discovered" this when researching implementing a new language on top of python. The decorator is completely unnecessary, so you can have a complete language with custom features built entirely on top of the python interpreter.

<comment><USER3> I've been toying with the idea of implementing some sort of DSL on top of python but wouldn't really know where to start.

Would you have any pointers (heh) given the discovery you made?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the `#coding:` approach is promising. You have to fit your parsing/transpilation into a pretty small time budget (which is a fun challenge on its own) to keep the startup time hit negligible. The source code gets reparsed serval times in certain cases, e.g. when printing a stack trace, so its a good idea to have some sort of caching mechanism.

As far as parsing goes, if you want to stick with python I've had good success with pyparsing [1], otherwise I have a strong preference to do language- related things in OCaml with menhir [2]. I've toyed with wrapping the Python parser in an OCaml library with decent success [3]. But, of course, unless you're optimizing for fun, it's probably a good idea to stick with Python.

Another, weirder, approach is creating a language that happens to be able to be parsed by the same grammar as python, then using a decorator (or similar) to get the source code or the ast to reparse and transpile. As an example you could have something like `a <\- b` be the syntax for an actor model message receive dsl (which is valid python).

[1] [https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing](https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing) [2] [http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/menhir/](http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/menhir/) [3] [https://github.com/georgek42/pyparser](https://github.com/georgek42/pyparser)

<comment><USER3> Thanks a mil for the tips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote a similar piece of code called MagicCodec back in 2008, including a zhpy codec(Chinese Python) and a Lua codec, which translates Lua source code to Python. (Blog content in Mandarin Chinese, with sample code [http://weijr- note.blogspot.com/2008/02/python-magiccodec-01....](http://weijr- note.blogspot.com/2008/02/python-magiccodec-01.html)) There was a time that I am slightly interested in Chinese Python for education purpose. Another interesting approach is using ctypes to replace keywords in CPython implementation, [http://weijr- note.blogspot.com/2011/06/python-32-keyword.htm...](http://weijr- note.blogspot.com/2011/06/python-32-keyword.html) (Also a blog post in Mandarin Chinese with sample code, which is also in Mandarin Chinese)

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh never heard of the # codec declaration

relies on [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/) it seems (this is from 2001, maybe there's more recent)

<comment><USER6> I envy you py3 kids...

encoding is a huge problem in py2

<comment><USER7> > encoding is a huge problem in py2°

Yes...exactly! Good thing that it's dead now, every meaningful library has either been updated or replaced and nobody is using it anymore, right? Like Windows 7! /s

Seriously tho, what's keeping you from updating? Genuinely curious at this point...

<comment><USER6> > what's keeping you from updating? Genuinely curious at this point...

My boss doesn't pay the upgrade bills. Only adding new features are billed. Sad.

And there are thousands of real-time users on the system and their task can not be interrupted, also if there is any py2 and py3 mismatch, the outcomes would be quite costy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting feature abuse. Perl's had various Inline modules for some time, but via a deliberate feature. [https://www.perl.com/pub/2001/02/inline.html/](https://www.perl.com/pub/2001/02/inline.html/)

<comment><USER9> Indeed it is. Guido himself maintained a project called Pyxl3 [1] for a while (forked from one at Dropbox during his tenure there) that abused this codec feature to implement something similar to JSX within Python source.

[1] [https://github.com/gvanrossum/pyxl3](https://github.com/gvanrossum/pyxl3)

<comment><USER10> Kinda sad when you think that CL could implement this feature in a pretty simple macro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Python syntax can be heavily and easily manipulated via the ast module. An example of this is hylang [https://github.com/hylang/hy](https://github.com/hylang/hy)

</comment><comment><USER12> This has got to be the least-pythonic thing I've ever seen.

<comment><USER13> I read it and immediately thought "Hey, I remember doing this in Perl in the late '90s or early 2000s!" \- very nostalgic...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have also used this ability to make a dsl with [https://noseofyeti.readthedocs.io](https://noseofyeti.readthedocs.io) (rspec style "describe", "it" for writing python tests).

It's a cool technique, but quite a lot of effort and can break a bunch of tooling (getting my codec to work with black for example was... fun)

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess one could also use a lightweight compiler like TCC and write a python module with it. That's a good idea for a side project.

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://github.com/metatooling/syntactic](https://github.com/metatooling/syntactic)

is a framework for creating custom Python syntax with the codec trick.

</comment><comment><USER17> Guess I'm adding Python to my resume. Nice work

</comment><comment><USER18> nice job

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


Go 1.2 - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=87dea3f5ebe7 <comment><USER2> I am a heavy user of Go, I use it in my job and for side projects as well, for years now.

The lack of generics in Go takes away most of the fun from coding after a couple of month. Despite what is being said, interfaces do not lessen the pain.

With a better type system, taking ides from Haskell (ADT, generics done well, ability to implement interfaces for a type outside of its package etc) Go could be the perfect "dirty Haskell" for me, but now it is just a meh language with a half assed implementation.

That being said, it is still a much better choice then a lot of overcomplicated languages out there.

EDIT:

The biggest practical problem with not having generics is the fact you do not have access to list (slice in Go) manipulation functions. This means you have to implement them yourself, on the fly, for the given type when you need it. This does increase the time it takes to implement something, but also can introduce a lot of bugs as well - you can't rely on (almost guaranteedly) bug free implementations of existing functions.

Of course this runs much deeper than just the list type, but on day-to-day basis I feel this to be the biggest pain. But the rabbit hole is deep: we could get into how the multiple returns values are just a really inconvenient (not composable) workaround of not having a generic tuple type...

<comment><USER3> Generics have their own problems: [http://research.swtch.com/generic](http://research.swtch.com/generic)

<comment><USER4> As many comments point out, he neglects the .NET approach to generics, which avoids most of the drawbacks of C++'s approach and Java's.

<comment><USER5> Do you know it does this ? I've heard this before and I'm not sure how C# can do this.

<comment><USER6> In C#...

At compile, there's one version of a generic method (say List<T>.Add). Compilation isn't slowed down like in C++.

At runtime, a generic method is compiled (on demand) into unique versions for each T encountered if T is a ValueType (int, double, etc. including user defined ValueTypes). This avoids boxing, like in Java.

Also at runtime, for all T's that are reference types a single common version is used with implicit casting as in Java.

C#'s draw back is that there is a small cost incurred on the first use of a generic method, and then an additional cost for each new ValueType used (if any). In practice this doesn't ever seem to be an issue, but it's there.

See [http://stackoverflow.com/q/5342345/80572](http://stackoverflow.com/q/5342345/80572) and [http://www.artima.com/intv/generics.html](http://www.artima.com/intv/generics.html) (which is linked from the former).

<comment><USER7> That sounds like a variation on rsc's 3rd approach (but with runtime code generation instead of boxing) with the same drawback: slower execution. It also makes certain kinds of debugging harder (how do you map a PC that's pointing to generated code? what if the code generation is the thing going wrong?).

C# on CLR is a VM approach, whereas Go compiles to native code. Concepts that are easy in the first (e.g. runtime code generation) often don't map particularly nicely to the second.

<comment><USER6> Why would you expect execution to be slower? If you invoke List<T>.Add(T) where T = int you end up running the same machine code that would have been generated if instead you had a method List.Add(int). There is a cost paid to generated that specific method, but it's on the first invocation. I'd expect it to be much faster than boxing, because you can elide a bunch of a allocations and generate tighter code since you have additional typing information at code gen time.

I suppose debugging could go sideways in theory, but it doesn't happen in practice on .NET and I doubt the go team couldn't figure out how to make it work.

It's worth noting that .NET never interprets bytecode, it always converts a method into machine code before execution. Go has already had dynamic code generation as part of it's implementation (I don't know if it's still around in 1.2), so it's hardly like it can't do the same thing .NET is.

<comment><USER8> Okay, then how does AOT works with C# templates? Really how? Do you have to pre-declare some known types ahead? (Or could it be that the AOT compiler scans all possible variants (doable since it's static language))?

<comment><USER6> AOT is a Mono extension to .NET, there are some cases it doesn't work and generics can cause some of them. See: [http://www.mono- project.com/AOT](http://www.mono-project.com/AOT) for more details

For .NET proper, new machine code is generated at runtime. I believe (but do not know for sure, offhand) that it basically takes the IL definition of the generic method, slots the now known type into it, and JITs it to get the machine code it needs. I do know that there are couple bits of IL that are meant to make it possible to write the same code to deal with both reference and value types, which is probably related.

Ngen ([http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/6t9t5wcf(v=vs.110).a...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/6t9t5wcf\(v=vs.110\).aspx)) let's you transforms assemblies into machine code up front, while still being .NET proper. However, if it _can 't_ find a use of generics with concrete types found at runtime (ie. you generate a List<int> via reflection) you'll still load up and use the JIT (see some discussion here: [http://stackoverflow.com/q/16647568/80572](http://stackoverflow.com/q/16647568/80572)).

I don't use AOT or Ngen regularly, so the particulars may be a little off in my explanations. But that's the gist of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a long quote by Rob Pike, which whether you agree with the points he makes or not, explains why Go does not have generics.

"Early in the rollout of Go I was told by someone that he could not imagine working in a language without generic types. As I have reported elsewhere, I found that an odd remark. To be fair he was probably saying in his own way that he really liked what the STL does for him in C++. For the purpose of argument, though, let's take his claim at face value. What it says is that he finds writing containers like lists of ints and maps of strings an unbearable burden. I find that an odd claim. I spend very little of my programming time struggling with those issues, even in languages without generic types. But more important, what it says is that types are the way to lift that burden. Types. Not polymorphic functions or language primitives or helpers of other kinds, but types. That's the detail that sticks with me. Programmers who come to Go from C++ and Java miss the idea of programming with types, particularly inheritance and subclassing and all that. Perhaps I'm a philistine about types but I've never found that model particularly expressive. My late friend Alain Fournier once told me that he considered the lowest form of academic work to be taxonomy. And you know what? Type hierarchies are just taxonomy. You need to decide what piece goes in what box, every type's parent, whether A inherits from B or B from A. Is a sortable array an array that sorts or a sorter represented by an array? If you believe that types address all design issues you must make that decision. I believe that's a preposterous way to think about programming. What matters isn't the ancestor relations between things but what they can do for you."

<comment> kung-fu-master From this message I understood that the Go is a language only for him and not for others developers.

<comment><USER10> You're right, kinda. It's been obvious from the start that this is a bell labs venture so to speak. I love the language, and assume the likes of Pike, Thompson, and Cox to know enough to know better. Community driven languages suck, so I leave it to those much more experienced than me to make these decisions, and I'm ok with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're used to running from source using this:

         hg pull
         hg update release

It does not yet return 1.2.

You'll need to use:

         hg pull
         hg update release-branch.go1.2

And then build.

The OP link goes to the commit showing this branch being finalised.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the release has not happened yet. That commit is just the penultimate step.

<comment><USER13> This release is out on 1/12/13 it's still meant to have a major bug. This isn't actually a release...

<comment><USER12> What bug is that?

<comment><USER13> Beg your pardon, jumped the gun myself there. Misread a comment on the IRC channel: "unless there's some massive bug, I doubt we'll see the tip of the tree change"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Changes can be found here: [http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.2](http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.2)

<comment><USER15> I was wondering when we'll get three-index slices

<comment><USER16> From the text: "It is impossible to use this new slice value to access the _last three elements_ of the original array"

Shouldn't this rather be: "It is impossible to use this new slice value to access the _last element_ of the original array"

<comment><USER17> It looks like the third number specifies an _index_ , not a _length_.

      var array [10]int
      slice = array[2:4:7]

> its capacity is now only 5 elements (7-2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People using lots of goroutines should note the change of minimal stack from 4KB to 8KB.

"Updating: The increased minimum stack size may cause programs with many goroutines to use more memory. There is no workaround, but plans for future releases include new stack management technology that should address the problem better."

This is a runtime/debug call to restrict the max size of stack. Somehow I feel like there should be one to set the min size too…

</comment><comment><USER13> Not an actual release, the VERSION file changed on a non-main branch.. Stop jumping the gun.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice, congratulations on the release.

I'd really like to see some progress on generics / parametric types. I'm starting to get the impression that it will never happen.

<comment><USER20> It looks like 1) generics are not very well aligned with the main design goals of Go and 2) it would take a very well thought out design to align them so, if that's possible at all.

From the FAQ: _" Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it. Meanwhile, Go's built-in maps and slices, plus the ability to use the empty interface to construct containers (with explicit unboxing) mean in many cases it is possible to write code that does what generics would enable, if less smoothly.

This remains an open issue."_

<comment><USER21> > the ability to use the empty interface to construct containers (with > explicit unboxing)

I'm not versed in Go, but does that mean something similar to (Java-style) Object[] and explicit casting of each value you get out of the list?

<comment><USER19> Go has so called _type assertions_ , an example:

[http://play.golang.org/p/L5hprjhqN_](http://play.golang.org/p/L5hprjhqN_)

In this example, one function probes the underlying type by using _t.(type)_ , and the other one uses a _type assertion_ by doing a _val, ok := t.(int)_ \- The _type assertion_ will return the value of the integer and true if _t_ happens to be an integer (a Go function can return multiple values)

If you pass an object as an "empty interface{}" you can test the underlying type.

edit: Note that you can only use a type assertion with an interface! So, this fails: [http://play.golang.org/p/0BtSWfE3f2](http://play.golang.org/p/0BtSWfE3f2) but this doesn't: [http://play.golang.org/p/tZB4Jivp3z](http://play.golang.org/p/tZB4Jivp3z)

<comment><USER21> Is this purely evaluated at runtime or does Go annotates types with its static analysis and restricts the interface in some ways? IOW are _default_ and _else_ cases made optional by Go's static analysis, which would help Go throw its arms up at compile time if an unexpected type is passed?

<comment><USER19> I think it's purely evaluated at run-time because you can do this:

[http://play.golang.org/p/Mtg8A5SzdS](http://play.golang.org/p/Mtg8A5SzdS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are there any plans to self-host the Go compiler in Go itself? Rust is self- hosted in Rust (originally bootstrapped by a Rust compiler written in OCaml). I've found a couple Go compilers written in Go that bind to LLVM backends, but they are just prototypes.

The Go developers make a big deal about compilation speed. Wouldn't Go's goroutines have some interesting possibilities for parallelizing compilation?

<comment><USER23> Self hosting is mentioned in the FAQ: [http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_compiler_technology_is_used_t...](http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_compiler_technology_is_used_to_build_the_compilers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _> The scheduler is invoked occasionally upon entry to a function_ [from [http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.2](http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.2)]

Does this mean that every function call has to do a check and possibly an (atomic?) increment of some variable?

<comment><USER12> No. It reuses the check that was already being done for stack growth.

<comment><USER24> So the answer is "yes but nothing more than what happens in 1.1" to the check, but no to the increment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Go 1.2 is not yet released.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any Go jobs over there?

<comment><USER27> I do offer Go jobs. But in Paris, France :)

<comment><USER28> Do you have a contact email? Not for me but maybe some of my twitter followers could be interested. Thanks!

<comment><USER27> My email should be easy to find :) jb@ videolan.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> tomaszkubacki: You have been hellbanned.

</comment><comment><USER30> Has anyone combined Go and angular.js to build something? How were your results?

<comment><USER31> The two are rather separate. The only way I can see combining them is if there is extensive server side template-ing. But angular.js kind of discourages that. So you can use go to build a RESTful server and then use angular.js on the front end. But that sort of de-couples the system to the point where it doesn't make sense to talk about an advantage of a combination of both.

<comment><USER32> Having myself written such a site ([http://www.goread.io/](http://www.goread.io/)), I concur. Having go on the backend didn't provide any benefits with an angular frontend over another language. I just think they excel at their respective purposes - that's why I chose them.</comment></comment></comment>


Which houseplants should you buy to purify air? None of them - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/houseplants-dont-purify-indoor-air/#close <comment><USER2> > "I would hate to see say a low-income family who's concerned about air > [quality] review their options and say 'I could either buy a $400 air > cleaner, or I could go out and buy a $30 plant,'" says Gall. "That plant is > not going to improve their air quality—full stop. It just won't."

The real question is, why does the air cleaner, which is usually just a fan blowing through an activated charcoal filter, cost $400 in the first place? There's a market to disrupt, surely.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't - prices I've seen are more like $200 US for the base level Philips air purifier in a retail store, and there are brands with even cheaper offerings. I see one on Amazon for $135 USD.

Of course, that's still not $30, especially when you add in the cost of replacement filters, but it's much better than the $400 quoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK but since we now have tech like CRISPR why can't we have house plants that do?

<comment><USER5> Because a houseplant is small and indoor air is replaced every 80 mins on average, they do purify air just not enough to make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "How do houseplants clean the air? A 1989 NASA study explains exactly how plants remove toxins from air by trapping them in their leaves, soil, and roots, and which houseplants clean air the best.

The study was designed to test air purification systems for the space station."

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

</comment><comment><USER5> The paper hypotheses an indoor living wall with air being circulated though the plants may be effective at purifying air. I think they could look at an algae co2 capture system to see if that could reduce VOCs.

<comment><USER7> Though whether or not that introduces more by way of pollens and molds than it filters out is a fair question.</comment></comment>


Why You're Going to See Ads by Tobacco Companies Admitting That Smoking Kills - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2017/11/27/16705004/tobacco-ads-smoking-kills <comment><USER2> Because it's the truth?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and after quite a delay and on network television and newspaper, not digital / social media. Their legal patience has paid off for least impact on audience?

"After 11 years of appeals and delays, a federal court has finally forced tobacco companies Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA to run a year-long advertising campaign in which they will admit that they tried to make cigarettes more addictive and that smoking kills more people than die from murder, HIV/AIDS, suicide, car crashes, drug overdoses, and alcohol combined, among other messages."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are irrelevant degrees at all useful? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen discussions on HN before on the question of "is a degree neccesary for career advancement", and given I'm happy with where I am at age 20, without a degree, I'm of the opinion that while a degree might help, it certainly isn't always a requirement.
However I would like to go to University (I left school at sixteen as I was bored and wanted to sink my teeth into something more useful), and am looking at working towards a place at Oxford starting September 2012.
Here's the thing: the subject I would really like to study is Music, rather than one of the many degrees that is actually related to where I currently work and where I hope my career will lead me (CS/Business/Marketing/etc).
Can anyone give me any thoughts on how you would feel if you were looking to hire someone in that kind of area, and they held a Music Degree from Oxford? Obviously I understand that it wouldn't be AS useful as a relevant degree, but would it at least serve as a demonstration that I'm not completely dim, that I know how to apply myself, and that I can achieve what I set out to?
Thanks, Corin <comment><USER3> Degrees are for signaling. If you want to signal that you're as smart as a typical CS or Business student, pick a program they would drop out of (Math instead of CS, Economics instead of Business). If you just pick music, it's not a strong indicator of your skills.

I used to work as a recruiter, and the candidate for whom I got the most interview requests _ever_ had a triple-major: music, physics, and math. You don't have to go that far, but if you can minor in math at a minimum, it's a good idea.

<comment><USER4> This made me smile a little bit; I majored in Math because I thought CS would be too easy.

<comment><USER5> I was a math major too, but no way would I consider CS to be too easy.

<comment><USER4> Note the past tense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you love music and like the degree structure go for it. You'll be able to do plenty of things with your time and talents that will look good if applying to marketing or business jobs. Have you ever tried to organise rehearsals or land gigs? It takes a lot of work.

And if someone won't employ you because you didn't do management courses or some other silly criteria, trust me you don't want to work there.

The other way round is fine too. I know plenty of seriously accomplished musicians (at an Other university) who were chemists, mathematicians, historians, you name it. The orchestras and ensembles are of an extremely high standard - you won't be short of opportunities.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't organised any musical events (though do have a lot of experience in music that I won't go into) - though for the company I work for I've organised two events which saw 40k-75k paying visitors through the doors over 4/5 days, and also done freelance event work for companies ranging from small 1-2 person projects up to a couple of (very small) events organised by News Corp, so I do have experience in that area.

As much as I love music, I don't want a career in that area, not any more, just looking to do the degree as something I've wanted to do since I was 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Music is a good major. You get exercise in creativity, abstract thinking, and problem-solving. Music requires discipline and practice, the latter in particular being something that programmers and IT people sometimes forget about. The actual act of performing and its associated pressures are generally not encountered in Csci and Math.

But music is definitely NOT a replacement for either. After discrete math, linear algebra, and algorithms, advanced music theory felt like elementary arithmetic. I've never taken any music theory class that was as mentally demanding as compiler design (although with music there is a lot of room to seek greater challenges on your own).

I don't know about business or marketing. But if you do go music I would definitely try and cherry-pick some good classes from those other majors.

</comment><comment><USER8> The hard part will be getting past resume screens and other less sophisticated filters. If I picked up a resume and it was 80% about music, I'd probably skip over it, but if it was 80% relevant and had music, then I'd think it was interesting and read it more carefully.

It will also be vital for you to have a persuasive cover letter.

Finally, when it comes down to it, you have to have the required technical skills -- so take some CS classes, and perhaps find interesting ways to combine the two.

<comment><USER9> I'd assume that you would look at it a bit differently if you were in the music business though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Got for it - if you have the drive to get into Oxford and through the degree then, to be honest, I suspect the exact content of the course isn't that important. (I know very successful people who did degrees at Oxford in classics).

Actually, I personally would look on someone who does a music degree rather positively as it is the kind of course that only someone who has a passion for the subject is likely to do, rather than doing something purely for the career/earning prospects.

<comment><USER11> >I know very successful people who did degrees at Oxford in classics

Isn't that like half of the UK cabinet for the last few hundred years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I double majored in the two most irrelevant degrees, philosophy and mathematics. The main skill this has imparted upon me is superhuman-like bullshit detection. While useful, this has proven to be rather depressing, as bullshit is in no short supply.

If I could do it over again, I would have majored in music.

<comment><USER13> I would not classify mathematics as irrelevant. Math serves as the foundation for all of science and engineering. I would bet that most CS and Engineering grad students (and industry professionals) wish they had a stronger mathematics background ... even those with strong mathematics backgrounds ;-)

<comment><USER14> Can't talk about Engineers, but as a professional programmer of 9 years with many years of undergraduate and graduate (M.Sc) Mathematics education, I must say I rarely/never use any of the math I've learned (at least not something I wouldn't have learned as an undergrad CS major) at work.

I have heard your argument very often though, it seems about as popular as the one that states painters benefit from knowledge of Chemistry[1] ;)

[1] [http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#...](http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#6)

<comment><USER15> As a former automotive engineer, I can say I didn't use my math much either. In fact engineering in my experience was mostly project management, the degree just gave you the background to work with everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Real answer: Follow your passion. If music moves you, go for it.

Discussion: About whether or not it "helps your career", I think the counter- argument would be not so much that it doesn't help, but the opportunity cost of your time/money. What _else_ could you be doing over that time.

In other words, compare "Music vs What Else I Could Do", and not Music vs Nothing

<comment><AUTHOR> I currently have a job that keeps me mentally stimulated, interested and learning new skills on a daily basis, and I would be able to continue (either part time or, if I were to chose a relatively easy degree at a different university then possibly even full time, as a friend of mine is currently doing in Birmingham).

I'd love to get a degree in Music, but balancing that fact with the amount of time it uses up I'm on the fence, so really the reason for asking the question was to see how far over the fence people would push me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Music is far from an irrelevant degree; it actually requires surprisingly sophisticated mathematics, and you emerge with a genuine skill.

Irrelevant degrees are things like 'asian studies' or 'art history', where you learn how to criticize _without_ learning to create.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've hired a lot of programmers, and a music degree from Oxford is something I'd view as a plus, provided you could demonstrate that you also have the necessary technical skills.

Personally, I was a philosophy major.

<comment><USER18> _Personally, I was a philosophy major._

As was I, along with Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Physics.

Philosophy was by far my most important and relevant major. It taught me how to think and express myself logically and to identify specious reasoning - <USER2> things which are invaluable in life.

In fact, I know of at least one Philosophy major that Apple hired as an iPhone engineer.

They should really teach Philosophy in high school - it's a much better way to learn to read and write than English class, and the payoff is you learn to think for yourself and not simply quote authors like Shakespeare.

<comment><USER19> Out of curiosity, where can you have four different majors? (We didn't have official "majors" at all where I went to uni, but I always thought they were something of which you only had one or two.)

If you're studying four subjects in your final year, how do you go into any depth in them?

<comment><USER18> I was on the 8-year plan...

I love learning, and couldn't decide on a single major. First I was planning on CS / Math, but wound up taking a physics course, asking the right questions, and the professor hired me to do research for him and put me on the honors track. As long as I was matriculated as a physics major, I had a scholarship and a pay check waiting. I also happened to love it. Because my University didn't allow more than two courses to overlap between majors, I wound up taking enough math courses to otherwise have majored in it, but it didn't count.

In my senior year, I took philosophy to satisfy a writing requirement. It was analytical philosophy. Logic and reason was valued above all. We discussed the problem of other minds, philosophy of religion, and a broad array of other things I had always pondered. In fact, I thought I must have been the only kid in kindergarten wondering how I could be certain that my parents were actually conscious beings and not just bags of molecules. How could I know for _certain_ that they had a mind and consciousness in the same way that I did? When I found out that you could get paid to think about these things and teach people how to think, I was hooked. I decided to double major, and spent an extra year filling all of the requirements.

After graduating (the first time) I spent 6 months working at a local bookstore, deciding what track I wanted my life to take. I could teach high school physics, I could get a PhD in physics (though I was getting tired of seeing divs, grads, and curls every time I closed my eyes). I could become a philosophy PhD and later professor, which sounded like a dream job, but was difficult in practice to obtain.

Then it occurred to me that I didn't know much about biology and my own body. I would be stuck with it for the rest of my life, so I thought maybe I'd go to medical school. The problem was two-fold. I didn't meet the pre-requisite coursework for applying, and my grades were not competitive (I never handed-in homework. I studied things for their own sake and not for the grades.)

After watching a few UC Berkeley lectures on chemistry and biology, I decided I loved biology. I returned to my University to get a degree in some form of biology. I wanted to learn it very well, get great grades, and I chose the hardest sub-discipline with the fewest students: molecular biology and biochemistry.

I was amazed to discover that when I actually tried and cared, I was at the top of every class. I graduated again, with a 4.0 and applied to medical school.

Amazingly, even with these credentials, a large body of research, and a very competitive MCAT score I was still only accepted to a few schools.

I wound up getting into a combined MD/PhD program, which was an additional 3 years over regular medical school, but allowed me to conduct research. It also came with full tuition and a stipend.

I'm now in my third year and doing research at the NIH. I have five more years until I graduate for the final time.

In retrospect, I could have forgone almost all of college and just audited the courses that interested me. In fact, I believe that college is of only marginal value to most people. Most of the skill set I acquired I learned in high school, on my own, with books and computers.

Without college, however, I would never have gotten into medical school. It is definitely necessary for some things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I studied the course linked to below at University of Sussex, which is a combination of Computer Science, AI and classical Music.

[http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/courses/music- informatics/overvie...](http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/courses/music- informatics/overview.php)

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a Bachelors degree in Geography. I work at a university doing systems programming for a research group in electrical systems and security. I have been published more than once. I will be doing some fun research this year about big data. The only thing my degree content has been used for so far is one time when I was talking to a GIS company about some work related displays, I spoke the language correctly.

The most important role my degree has played: I was able to get a "College degree required" job. The importance of this cannot be understated. Many places will not consider you without the piece of paper, whether it is related or not is much less important. The paper itself signifies the ability to get through 4 years of doing something.

</comment><comment><USER22> An irrelevant degree takes some years that you could invest into a working experience, and more importantly, it delays maturity. But it can give you a valuable knowledge (of course, if you earn grades for real things, not for imitating some nonsense). This is hard to learn in everyday life.

I program in Python and earlier was a DB developer, but have an economics masters degree. The most useful thing of this degree was maths and games theory that surprisingly comes to conclusions on things like morale, honesty and dignity, and shows that they're not relative as the classic economics implies.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've already got four years of (in my opinion quality) working experience, and to be honest I think that most of the overall life-lessons that a music degree could teach me I already have - the biggest reason I want to do it is learning more about the subject, than using it as a way to improve myself in other areas.

(I asked HN more to see if it would give the impression of having improved my other areas, than if it would)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The thing to be cognizant of, I think, is that CS/Business/Marketing at a University are already disconnected from the business world somewhat. The problems they solve are already more abstract and academic (in a good sense). So people are already negotiating the realities of business v. the academic analogs, etc. Music, on top of it all, is perhaps the most abstract field in the humanities (philosophy has systems of ideas, literature has words, the visual arts have images but music has predominantly...sounds?). That's not to say Oxford or any good university wouldn't provide you with invaluable habits and attitudes about learning for the rest of your life. But if you think about it as an investment, apart from what hiring managers will think, you're potentially exposing yourself to a pretty heavy load of abstraction. However, as long as you're aware of it, you can balance it with other things (organizing gigs as mentioned is a good idea), or do them later (or even while you're there -- sit in on CS lectures, read the books on your own, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER24> I would think it depends a lot on what you want to do after obtaining your degree. If you want to work for the Government, go for it. Federal, State and Local governments do not care what kind of degree you have, as long as you have one.

If you want to work in the private sector, I would suppose that all depends on your target company. Some HR people see a degree as an accomplishment and do not worry themselves much about the specifics of your degree. Some, however, feel that you simply must have a relevant degree to understand your job even though you will learn almost all of your job duties on-site.

I am 31 and started college about 2 months ago. I work for the state Board of Education and a degree = pay raise. I administer several large Windows domains, do basic hardware/software tech, and plan/integrate networks. The state does not care if I have a degree in computers or gymnastics. I get the same pay raise regardless. They don't care if it is Ivy league or University of Phoenix (which I am doing by the way.)

</comment><comment><USER25> For CS: Firms generally look for CS or a related degree (Maths, elec eng, etc.) - although if you can prove you can program (open source projects, etc.) they may well be flexible. Typically for most degrees you can do a few "open units" in other subjects, so if you did some in CS that would help as well.

For Business/Marketing: Specific degree is less important, although some firms prefer degrees with mathematical content. Again having relevant extra- curricular activities or internships are much more important if your degree is in an different subject.

It's worth noting that most people (~60%) go on to careers completely unrelated to their degree so don't worry too much about it.

Feel free to email me if you want more advice, I used to run a non-profit that did analysis on degree -> career paths in the UK so I'm pretty familiar with the area.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm confident I can gain experience for any area I might want to go into in the future - where I am currently, mainly focussing on marketing with an slight techy twist, I've created expensive advertising campaigns for companies like Dell, AMD and PC World, having had no experience prior to this job, plus on the side I've played a big part in various events, and management of 20 or so servers/websites.

Basically the last few years I've been doing my best to build up experience in as many of the areas that interest me as possible, partly because I love what I'm doing and partly because I want my CV to be non-restricting to any future path I might want to take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I double majored in English and philosophy because that was what I wanted to study and the kind of school I wanted to go to. I didn't expect it to help me get a job, and sure enough it didn't. I ended up doing a mix of non- programming employment and moonlighting as a consultant for several years until I had enough skill, discipline, and network to become a full-time consultant a couple years ago--which was when life kicked my family off a cliff and called, "Hope you figured out that flying thing!"

Thankfully, I've been flying since then. So if you habitually choose your life based on what you think is best not easiest, and you have some reasonably well founded confidence that you can make it work out regardless, study whatever you want to study. Just don't expect anyone to give you credit for it until sometime after you don't need their regard.

</comment><comment><USER27> First off, I don't think the lack of a degree brands at all someone as dense or slow. Also, depending on the degree and school it's received from, the holder's persistence and/or determination can be generally deduced.

However, I would not choose to hire someone who didn't have a clue about the general area the job offer was on, regardless of what the job specifically required. I would rather try and judge her suitability from a personal interview, instead of a few lines on her resume. For technical tasks, you don't have to be a CS grad to solve them. For research and development, I'd value a formal background on CS more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly didn't mean to imply that people without a degree are dense or slow, some of the brightest people I know never got a degree.

My point was more than the percentage of people with degrees who might be considered "dense and slow" is going to be significantly lower than of people without education, and I would imagine the difference is further highlighted when the degree is from a university like Oxford.

I'd never suggest that person A who went to Oxford is smarter than person B who went to a less-popular university, or none at all, without knowing more about both people, I just think as an overall it works out that way (you don't have to get a degree to be clever, you do have to be [reasonably] clever to get a degree)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's Oxford. Any decent business should recognise the intelligence and workload necessary to get a degree there.

edit: Of course, it's always best to do a relevant course, but it won't be the end of the world.

</comment><comment><USER29> At most Universities you can do a double major. If you know what you want early on, this usually won't add much length to the time it takes to get your degree.

If the double major doesn't work out, consider minoring in Music. My real passion is history, so I did a major in Computer Science and a minor in History.

</comment><comment><USER30> Degrees are like checkpoints in life.

While not required (at least at good companies that look for talented people rather than degrees), they serve as a nice launching board (and as a negotiating point for salary).

If you are passionate, then school is a great idea to get a breadth level exposure to the field.

</comment><comment><USER31> study what you like, not what anonymous recruiters and employers will have presumably wanted you to study. i have a degree in CS (which is what i wanted to study) but do wish i had a music minor or at least had some time to take some real music courses in college.

when looking at hundreds of resumes for prospective hires, i don't think i once looked at the school or degree somebody had. i barely looked at the resume at all; past experience is nice to thumb through but conversation with the candidate was the only real way to tell if they know what they're doing.

as for getting past anonymous HR resume scans, don't worry about it. nobody can really get past those anyway. your best bet is and always will be inside referrals.

</comment><comment><USER32> Just remember tbe opportunity cost of _not_ doing a relevant degree with those four years. I graduated a few years ago with English Literature but I'm kicking myself for not doing CS. I'd be so much more comfortable right now if I had.

</comment><comment><USER33> For computing I'd definitely be interested in somebody with a music degree-- music is said to have a strong correlation with programming ability.

Of business and marketing I know nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER34> an irrelevant degree will not hurt you. an irrelevant degree only has the potential to help you, although whether or not it will actually "help" will vary from job to job, HR person to HR person, etc..

</comment><comment><USER35> Mind you don't get "Oxbridge syndrome"... Oops, too late.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm very aware that there are plenty of non-Oxbridge universities in the UK (and elsewhere of course) that are of a high quality, my reasons for wanting to go to Oxford specifically aren't (entirely) because of the name it's made for itself.

\- Most of my ancestors on my mother's side went to Oxford or Cambridge, so feels roughly inherited (no university on my Dad's side)

\- I've lived in Oxford all my life, and a.) love this city and b.) have grown a sort of irrelevant pride for it (kind of a more localised patriotism)

\- I've very close personal ties with two colleges here at Oxford, one of which is the one I'd like to attend

\- I happen to know a few professors at Oxford (all in Music, as it happens), one of which is the director of music at the college I'd like to attend

The fact that "Oxford" on a CV traditionally looks better than some other universities is just an added benefit, I'm not someone who would chose it purely for that reason.

<comment><USER35> Indeed. There is practically no difference between the quality of any of the Russell Group universities. But only Oxbridge graduates feel the need to mention their college within 2 minutes of you meeting them.

<comment><AUTHOR> May be true for some oxbridge students, but not all (and not me if I do end up doing it)

<comment><USER35> You haven't even been there yet! And you already have.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would have mentioned it had my university of choice not been Oxford though...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Republic Wireless routes through AWS East - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitplumber.net/2011/11/republic-wireless-service-and-lg-optimus-review/

<comment><USER2> Makes me happy. If you want to change something like handheld wireless voice communication then take every advantage you can. AWS is a big one, in that you don't have to manage your own data centers, the underlining hardware gets continually upgraded, and you will realize the improve performance without doing your own hardware cycles. They can focus their effort on improving their product. If this is a hit, then they will be forced to improve AWS latency, or find innovated ways to make their product better. I don't think they _should_ put that effort into building out their own end points.

Who says AWS cannot manage these large virtual end points. There are already have several AWS West, AWS East, EU, Asia, etc. We might see a time where they are closer to you. Maybe even a perring agreement away ;) Exciting times.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very excited to be a Republic Wireless customer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any chance we could get a review? I'm interested too but only if the service actually works. The fact that it redials instead of auto re-negotiates isn't exactly inspiring.

<comment><USER3> My usage has been mostly positive. My only two complaints so far:

* The wifi dialer thing conflicts with google voice (GV will override and dial over the cell network).

* I'd like a faster phone.

Given the overwhelming demand, I'm pretty happy to have left my ATT at home since my new phone came in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a great idea, I can't wait to try it.

Hopefully one of the big carriers doesn't kill ^h^h^h^h acquire them.</comment>


Daily WTF: ITAPPMONROBOT - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx <comment><USER2> A great story - I even felt a bit of compassion for the poor old serverbot sitting in the corner when it was neglected and no longer needed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice idea, but a pity that they couldn't just buy an intelligent power switch that was IP addressable. That's how I manage the worst case scenario for my servers.

<comment><USER4> "Budget Freeze", remember?

Embrace your constraints :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should make an indie film out of this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a client whose background process crashes once or twice a month (thank you Windows). The management dashboard checks a data base and includes a warning message if the process hasn't run in the past hour. Since "someone" checks the dashboard every 5 minutes or so anyway, action can be taken to restart the background process.

But what if, for some reason, no one checks the management dashboard for hours? I was recently asked if there was a better way. "You have 2 options, either (a) upgrade to Unix and reboot once a year whether you need to or not, or (b) run a background process to see if the background process is still running." We're not spending any money on (a), so I guess it's (b).

Now I need a PHB dashboard for "someone" to check every 5 minutes to see if the background process that checks the background process is still running.

<comment><USER7> Reboot once a year!? Who has time for that! I've got a few redhat boxes that just celebrated 900 days!

<comment><USER8> Doesn't that worry you a bit? I remember amazon having trouble re starting machines that had been up for several years. I think they ran into several problems. Boot sector demagnetization was one. I think they had problems with drives that could spin, but failed in such a way they couldn't start spinning.

Really, you should _consider_ power cycling every 90 days or so, just to make sure you can restart. at least use several different brands of HD in your raid arrays.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that is good advice. I'd do it if I cared at all about what was on them. They're just part of the "long tail" of hardware, long migrated off of. Now we just let them run for the novelty of saying, "look its been up for YEARS!" One does a webcam of the server room.

As a side note, every single production server we now use is a vmware instance... how do you count uptime there as it gets passed around various physical machines?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ad-hoc robotics! :-D</comment>


Canada's Telecom Market is Rigged, says Wind Mobile backer Naguib Sawiris - <AUTHOR> http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Wind-Billionaire-Backer-Rips-Rigged-Canadian-Market-117095?nocomment=1

<comment><USER3> By way of comparison, I'm living in Melbourne, Australia, and pay $55/month for the Nexus S w/ unlimited calls within Australia (including to other mobile phones), unlimited texts (IIRC) and 500 MB of data. That's for a one-year plan w/ Vodafone, and I didn't pay anything up-front for the phone. Needless to say I'm looking forward to upgrading to the Galaxy Nexus soon. :) My wife has the the same phone and same plan for two years and pays $45/month.

The Australian mobile phone market is very competitive, and it has a number of foreign players (e.g., Optus, Vodafone, Virgin). Australian fixed-line telecommunications are much less competitive due to the legacy stranglehold of the former government monopoly, Telstra.

IMO Canadians are far too complacent about government sanctioned monopolies or oligopolies (e.g., car insurance in BC, alcohol sales are provincial government monopolies, dairy product quotas, wheat board monopoly) that means they pay more for less choice, supposedly for their own good, when in reality it just enriches an old-boys network of politically well-connected players and condemns the protected industries to being being unable to compete internationally.

FWIW I'm Canadian.

<comment><USER4> The typical Canadian will irrationally defend any policy that differs from the equivalent policy in America, because the typical Canadian's sense of national identity is 10% hockey and 90% 'we're different from the Americans'.

We're never going to deregulate and allow a little free-market competition to lower prices as long as these proposals can be criticized as 'Americanization' or 'the American way'. It's not complacency that ties Canadians to our goofy oligopolies, it's our own misguided nationalism.

<comment><USER5> This is so laughably wrong as to be absurd. Your explanation for Canadian telecom entrenchment and protectionism is that it's anti-American? Canada and its provinces have imported America's love of faux-competition in media, telecom, electricity, non-health insurance, and other areas nearly whole hog.

Anti-Americanism also runs contrary to Canada's: plans to imprison more of its population; paying extra for ill-performing military hardware; treating its First Nations like shit; increasing gap between rich and poor; busting of unions; beating the hell out of protestors; resisting all meaningful measures against climate change; and fighting pointless wars.

Canada could use some of this "we're different from the Americans" attitude that you claim pervades the nation. Sadly, I don't see much evidence of it in any of several areas of society, especially the telecom industry.

<comment><USER4> I'll agree that the current federal government is a bit of an aberration compared to past Liberal and Conservative governments, but playing up differences from the Americans to justify political policies (good or bad - <USER2> suppose that depends on your personal politics) has been a big part of Canadian political life since Trudeau's first term in the late '60s.

Whether Canada is actually all that different from America or whether 'different from America' is just used as a cynical political tool is another question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never understood why in many western industrialized countries telecommunications has not been regulated the same as sewage, roads, electricity, etc. It is a vital piece of infrastructure in the 21st century and it should be the responsibility of the government to manage such infrastructure.

<comment><USER7> we used to have that, and while the service of providing roads, electricity, or sewerage hasn't changed much in the last 100 years, telecommunications certainly has. while networks might lend themselves to natural monopolies, government sponsored telecommunications monopolies couldn't keep up with the pace of innovation these days and as a result consumers would be left paying high rates for antiquated service.

<comment><USER8> This is going to sound like trolling, but compared to the European mobile telecoms services, you in the US _are_ paying high rates for an antiquated service (specifically, non-GSM use is still common, everyday data speeds are slower, dropouts are higher, call quality is lower).

Judicious government investment into telecoms infrastructure in certain European countries has led to fast, cheap and stable communications. Government investment doesn't always equate to bad; if it's bad it means that particular government body did a bad job in that particular case, that's all.

<comment><USER9> I don't think there has been significant government _investment_ in mobile telecoms in Europe (citation requested if I'm wrong).

There is much higher levels of competition, enforced by government regulation though.

<comment><USER10> There has not been significant investment into _mobile_ , there was regulation that forced carriers to cover even the areas that would otherwise prove unprofitable, if they wanted the frequencies that is.

And mobile network is also heavily dependant on landlines, which were built by government owned telcos.

<comment><USER11> Just to add nuance: mobile _was_ heavily dependant on landlines. In my experience, not any more.

Recently began (2009) a national gigabit to the mast rollout project in a medium-sized European country which is almost complete now.

This didn't use a legacy copper investment (or even legacy fiber, not that there was a lot of that).

<comment><USER10> I didn't know that. Thank you for clarifying - this project would be probably taking place in Finland?

However 20 years ago the ubiquity of state sponsored infrastructure is what enabled fast and competitive coverage of Europe with mobile telecommunications.

It's just an example of how what our US colleagues would call "socialsim" can provide better results than "free market".

There is a point I just realized. Whenever there is a state sponsored monopoly in Europe - it is forced to provide a service to all, even if it means loss in some cases. However whenever there is a state sponsored monopoly in US it just removes competition, while internally the organization still sticks to the "profit first" doctrine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I doubt anyone who has ever had to deal with one of the big 3 in Canada (Rogers, Telus, or Bell) would argue against this point. Canadians really need to push for an open system that allows foreign competition to enter the marketplace. Until we do, the status quo is simply going to continue to press the advantage they have at the expense of the Canadian consumers.

<comment><USER13> I would love to have an idea of what we CAN do.

This is the one thing in my life where I can't vote with my wallet. I only really have three viable choices for wireless right now: Rogers, Bell, and Telus.

<comment><USER14> Have you tried one of the small guys struggling to compete against the big 3? Mobilicity, Wind or Public Mobile. I am with Mobilicity and pay $35 for unlimited everything (one of the amzing early plans they had.. you can still get he same for $40 or so) and that includes data, global text messaging and North American long distance.A couple of caveats are that plans are metro-area limited so if you go out of any of their zones (Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary...) you are roaming at about 25 cents per minute and if you need fast data forget it (highest I get is about 3Mbit/s). Some changes are coming though so all of us with the little carriers are kinda unsure what's going to happen - Mobilicity's CEO was just fired, CRTC declared that the small guys have to bid for the same LTE spectrum along with the big 3 (which is what the main Wind investor in the article above is complaining about).

<comment><USER13> I really wanted to go with Wind when they came out, but none of the new providers would let me use an iPhone on their system, which meant that they were instantly out of the running.

Sounds silly I know, but I want to keep using the phone I'm using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have cell service with Bell Aliant (eastern Canada) and my data is horrible!

My phone a Samsung Galaxy SII on Bell's HSPA+ network which from what I understand can be anywhere from 21Mbps to 42Mbps but my phone is only capable of a max of 21Mbps. I don't expect to get 21Mbps or even 15Mbps but most days it's 0.3 or 1Mbps maybe 5Mbps to 9Mbps on a good day. Outright lies or incompetence or both to say such a thing and not have anywhere near what they promise.

Bell's excuse is the network is busy with other users but I test it at all hours of the day and each day and weekend but it's never consistent. They advertise "HSPA+ 21Mbps" but make excuse after excuse once you're a customer that you'll never ever see that.

I complained to the CRTC Donna Shewfelt Client Services wrote back to me gave me a case number 'CRTC Case ID: 548491' but then "The telecommunications industry has established an independent consumer agency, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS)"

and

"Given the concerns you have raised, we believe this complaint is more properly within the scope of the CCTS and have forwarded your complaint to them."

That was September 22 of this year (2011) and not one reply since then from any of them.

</comment><comment><USER7> new zealanders have a rough go with their telecommunications as well. I recall seeing the vodafone CEO on the news saying they made 3-4x as much profit in new zealand as anywhere else (per customer probably). The only competion was the ex-public telecom.

canadians don't have it quite so bad as the new zealanders, but they get a worse deal than the americans for sure.

<comment><USER16> Canada has BY FAR the most expensive cell phone rates in the world. New Zealand is 19th according to this list. See:

[http://www.mobilemag.com/2010/08/27/canadians-have-the- most-...](http://www.mobilemag.com/2010/08/27/canadians-have-the-most- expensive-cell-phone-bills-in-the-world/)

That graph doesn't even give justice to the true cost. Canada plans are almost always regional, so to call another city, even one nearby is a long distance call. VOIP phones are also rare because numbers are restricted, Skype and Google Phone do not exist here.

Canada's telecom industry can accurately be described as a mafia-style public cartel.

<comment><USER7> I wonder why Skype In (Skype Online Number) - where people call a POTS number and get your skype account, isn't available in canada.

What is stopping everyone from making calls from mobile phones over data networks? surely skype is available for iphone and android?

<comment><USER17> Data costs in canada are even higher than voice costs!

skype is only available on some androids and charges calls against your voice minutes.

<comment><USER7> I had a t-mobile blackberry flip phone in the USA that could make calls over wifi. when it was connected to an access point I could turn off the carrier connection and just use the wifi, but it did still use my minutes and the quality was not good.

Does anyone know if a SIP soft phone app like X-lite and a smartphone that can use a wifi connection to so that at least outgoing calls could be made over data without long distance charges or ridiculous data rates?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure if this is what you're asking about, but the Nokia business- oreinted phones E-series come with SIP capabilites natively (or one can use a third party client). I've used it on my E73.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This definitely sucks for Canada. The Telco's and the antiquated regulation that protects them are big gatekeepers to progress and innovation. How do we break out of this deadlock?

<comment><USER6> One has to fix the prime example of regulatory capture that is the CRTC. This can be achieved by either changing the current management or drafting more legislation.

<comment><USER20> IIRC, there are only a few commissioners who don't come from Canada's media/telco industries. i.e. the commission is mostly populated by insiders from the industries that the CRTC purports to oversee and regulate. Fox, henhouse, etc.

<http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/about/commissioners.htm>

<comment><USER6> The question that I always have is, how can we find people who have the knowledge to regulate the telco industry but who have not worked in the telco industry in a large capacity before?

<comment><USER21> Research in Motion employees, other electronics companies. How about just business people? People who've worked for foreign cell/telecom companies who want to move back to Canada. IT experts who've worked with the infrastructure. Lawyers in the industry who work for private law firms (biased, but less so probably).

There are plenty of people who would be a better choice than someone who's worked for an incumbent player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's almost as terrible as the car insurance market in BC:

<http://ihateicbc.com/icbcs-dirty-little-secret.html>

BC only has one car insurance provider so they're free to set the prices as they see fit. They even try and pretend that they're doing it to help keep prices low as competition would only raise the prices for everyone (yes, they really said this).

<comment><USER17> They did it because they made motor insurance mandatory and it would be unfair to force someone to have something that the market didn't have to provide.

In europe it's essentially impossible for anyone under 21 to get insurance ( without tricks like being listed on parent's cover ) even though the law says you can drive at 17. Typical rates for liability-only on a 17 year old are $10K/year

Imagine living in a rural part of BC where work and shopping is 20 miles away and the insurance companies all charge $10K for drivers under 21.

Yes it's unfair that as a middle age driver I pay 2-3x as much as I would in europe in order to cover a west vancouver millionaire's kid in a ferrari. But it's also unfair that I'm paying for elementary schools for someone else's kid or subsidizing somebody else's cancer treatment.

<comment><USER23> Hold the phone, motor vehicle insurance isn't mandatory in the US?

<comment><USER24> No. It's mandatory for residents of most individual states, but (for example) New Hampshire does not require it of its residents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It keeps competitors out. Many governments do this. Keeps jobs and profits local, for the most part.

<comment><USER26> For the most part, maybe. Tell that to the Bell customers who deal with Indian call centres when they need tech support. I know I did, years back (haven't dealt with Bell in a while).

<comment><USER27> Heh, I know the guy who piloted that way back. He still gets royalties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is meant to be a legitimate question, not sarcasm: Are there any countries where telecom is not "rigged"? That is, places where an entrepreneur could enter the market and the incumbents by and large would play "fair"?

</comment><comment><USER29> That is indeed Canada. Try and get DSL or cable internet here too. It's terrible. Bad service, bad price.

<comment><USER30> Can you give me some concrete examples of this? I have a lecturer at university who constantly harps on about "canada doing it right" with broadband access and I've always had the feeling that he has no idea what he's talking about. I'd love to go head-to-head with him next year over the topic.

This guy: <http://www.politicalscience.com.au/> <http://www.politicalscience.com.au/p/my-media.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In other news - bears discovered to shit in the woods and pope a catholic shock discovery.

</comment><comment><USER31> #define regulatedMarket marketRiggedForEstablishedPlayers

<comment><USER17> Even worse in canada - all incoming firms have to be Canadian owned and financed. Try raising the money for a nation wide set of phone masts if you aren't allowed overseas investors</comment></comment>